It all started the night before New Year's Eve. Chris, his brother, and I went into Manhattan to stay with our friend Ben, a film student at NYU whose senior project involves a high school principal who can't control his erections. Our plan was to sleep at his place and spend the entirety of NYE and some if not all of Friday in the city. Thanks to Ben's flatmate's boyfriend's K snorting hippie friends from Long Island, though, that sleep part didn't really happen, not even by 7 the next morning, when they woke up and started all over again with no reduction of volume despite Chris asking if the "assholes in the kitchen would kindly shut the fuck up." Chris has a real talent for endearing himself to people. Snow started to fall and Chris and his brother skipped town, citing an inability to make it through the day on so little sleep. Left to my own devices I made it into Brooklyn, stomping the streets like I wasn't the only white boy in Woodhaven wearing the beautiful handmade English shoes I found in my dad's closet, trying repeatedly to get in touch with an old friend who is, like many capital-I Interesting people, capital-F Flaky. Model in Motion Becca had just gotten back from hiking the Himalayas and lived in Brooklyn so I thought, why not? I called her up and met her at her third-story Bushwick flat that overlooked the J train and had an earthquake every fifteen minutes or so. Her friend Liz from D.C. was visiting so we shot the shit and started to drink from a bottle of cherry vodka, until we ran out of juice and they kicked me out to put on fake eyelashes and sequined dresses for the "black tie" party they were attending in Williamsburg. On the way back to Ben's, I picked up a liter of Jack Daniels, because somehow I knew I would need it. My instincts are good. Shortly after I got to his East Village apartment, a group of guys from our high school showed up, one of whom had taken it upon himself to invite fifty people to Ben's tiny two bedroom flat for the "New Year's of the century," to quote the Facebook event - which also appointed him and this South African basket case named Mandy who dropped out of our high school to live alone in New York as the party's hosts. Ben, ever ingratiating, let it slide, even when this guy, a white trash fool named Gunnar who used to go sledding with me as a kid and now goes by his MC name Major Gunnz, asked if he could stay behind when we went on a liquor run so he could "set up the party." Ben said sure, ok, whatever, and mumbled inventory on the way to the elevator of what possessions he wouldn't really miss if Gunnar pawned them in his absence. When we returned Gunnar subjected us to a lecture on giving the ladies (not the bitches, mind you, not even the women, no, the ladies) the "red carpet treatment" because they were our "gold." Ten minutes later I approached the first two ladies to arrive with drinks because everyone else was ignoring them. Ten minutes after that I bounced to go uptown, for a party I knew about through Chris's friend Eike, a German graduate student he met in Berlin who was studying in rural Alabama but spending the week in New York. It was being held in an observatory on the Columbia campus by a group of astronomy doctorates, and it sounded like the best place to be at midnight, wouldn't you agree? On my way I stopped at a bar designed to look like a phone booth called, appropriately, Telephone, to borrow money from my twin sister that I never ended up using. My ex-girlfriend Julie happened to be there having just broken up with ANOTHER boyfriend, so I shared a cigarette with her and headed out, and it was probably a good idea to leave, because I heard afterward that she wouldn't stop bringing me up in conversation that night. Getting to a train on the west side would have taken me two transfers so to save time I took the 5 uptown and crossed the island, booking it through brownstones and sleet and endless refrains of feliz año nuevo so I could make it by midnight. I got to the cross-streets Eike provided and couldn't find anything looking even remotely like an observatory so I pulled out my phone to call him because he needed to come let me in anyway and watched, in slow motion, as my phone slipped out of my gloved hand, flipped through the air for about three minutes, and hit the ground, dead on impact. My New Year happened on the southbound 1 sitting with teenage girls from Connecticut and swigging whiskey miserably as French tourists passed through the train shaking everyone's hand. It was better than having spent it at Ben's, though, where, as I soon learned, fifteen of Mandy's girlfriends turned out to be nine Leftöver Crack leftovers who after getting told to leave started smashing bottles over my friends' heads, hospitalizing four of them and leaving bloodstains leading from the sofa across the wall and into the elevator. The three preppy black guys passed-out in the living room, one of them face down in the carpet, meant this party was dead, so I finished my bottle and tried to get in touch with Becca who was now barhopping through Alphabet City. The delirious two hours that followed saw me fading in and out of coherent thought, losing my orientation every few blocks, falling in and out of phone contact and stumbling on black ice like a fat ballerina thanks to the pussy carnage taking place in my dad's shoes. Around five-thirty I gave up, found a bodega willing to sell me a tallboy, and set out for the midtown McDonald's (now a McCafé) where Elise and her friends (sans Julie) ended their night. The welcome peace of the 7:15 back to New Brunswick was rudely interrupted by a large black man trying to pick a fight with someone, anyone, presumably after having a night not too different from mine. The car was filled with prim college kids from central Jersey unwilling to suffer any fools gladly, and his exit at Newark-Penn Station was met with applause, but not until he had reached over my sister to ask me what I thought was so funny and jab a finger in my eye. Really? In my eye? Since when did NJ Transit become West Side Story? At home I pushed past my parents with barely an acknowledgment and slept until 2:30, at which point I found two missed calls and seven rather alarming text messages from Becca. Apparently, her friend refused to climb into a Yellow Cab with her because she thought it was "too sketchy." Typical out-of-town paranoia, perhaps, except that after speeding off without Liz, the cabbie refused to bring Becca home, stopping at his East Brooklyn apartment instead, where she fell asleep on his couch and forced him to take her home at 9. Nothing else happened, Becca assures me, and I really hope that's the truth. We reconvened at Chris's house outside of Princeton that night where our friend Alex, on leave from the military duty he chose over his life as Montgomery Township's #1 source of psychedelic mushrooms, was halfway through a fifth of absinthe before driving us to a trendy tap room in Princeton. Chris objected to being told to leave ten minutes after last call, provoking the bartender to call him a "wiseass douchebag" before forcing us out. In a last ditch effort to salvage the New Year after running into one too many assholes, we all got fat sandwiches. You see, in New Jersey, we have something called a fat sandwich, which is a sub packed with any variety of artery-clogging goodness, e.g. French fries, chicken tenders, mozzarella sticks, creamy hot sauce, or all of the above. A hoagie on crack. As soon as I woke up that day, I drove twenty minutes to get one, and now I was having another, and it was everything I needed and more, proving once again that in a world bereft with the iniquities of selfish hedonists misguided loners and a merciless God who turns mortal affairs into his own private Punch and Judy show, there's something to be said for doing like an American and embracing heart failure and type II diabetes like it's your last day on planet fucking Earth.
