Famous People #27: boys take shots
Kaitlyn: It’s funny that when you’re a child you have to have an excuse to throw a party (e.g. birthday, covenant with Christ) and when you’re an adult you have to have an excuse to throw a party (e.g. new lease, covenant with Christ), but in between you have a window of time where people expect you to throw parties for no reason because otherwise you’re just wasting your youth and being insensitive towards everyone else.
In college I loved house parties thrown by boys because they helped me construct an image of myself as someone who should not be at a house party thrown by a boy. I would usually wear something ugly, have two beers and wait for someone to say something I could throw a fit about, then leave. Or, as I told Frankie over Martha Stewart’s “grilled” pork and pineapple tacos on Saturday night, drink half a bottle of peach-flavored vodka and throw up at the feet of the rich fraternity social chair I dated for one month. He visited me at the mall food court on Thanksgiving break, and a week before Christmas I realized he’d been wearing tank tops under his pea coat the entire time I’d known him. I actually don’t remember how we stopped dating. It definitely wasn’t a conversation, maybe just something we both forgot we had been doing — like jogging, or quarter-carding for the recycling club. Anyway, he was one of maybe four people on the whole campus who had a not-insignificant number of reviews on his Lulu page, and so was just off-brand enough for me that it seemed like a funny thing to do, otherwise we wouldn’t have hung out at all. He made his own wine and served it through a tap he had installed in his mini-fridge.
I hadn’t seen Broadcast News yet!
Now that I’m older, house parties are the best thing that can happen. It’s like someone’s parents are out of town but in this case the “parents” are New York City, which would prefer you to spend $60 in the course of an hour at any bar. Being invited to a house party in New York is like being invited to a snow day party in Texas — everyone’s so over the fucking moon about a basic luxury (probably not even a luxury if you took a Family Feud poll of random Americans), you can’t help but find them endearing.
On Saturday, Seiya threw a house party in Bed-Stuy, at the townhouse he lives in with his brother I’ve never met and some other guy I’ve met twice, the first time after he’d had half a bottle of tequila and the second time after what seemed like a lot of coke. Not that I’ve ever done coke — no one has ever offered me any! — but I’ve seen enough of the range of male behavior to know who’s on drugs, okay?
There was no reason for the party. The reason for the party was that everyone had enough money to bring tequila, and some people had Strokes t-shirts they weren’t embarrassed to wear. Frankie spent four and a half minutes picking out limes at the bodega; he really is a wonder.
We got there early and played an Israeli card game that Seiya learned at a wedding, and I kept losing. We drank champagne out of coffee mugs, and Seiya said “Yo, I hate hosting,” at least 470 times. Honestly I didn’t believe him when he was saying this — Seiya is the type of person whose feelings seem very hard to hurt, based on the number of times I’ve counted the Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace books in his living room out loud to him without receiving any defensive reaction, and based on the way he sometimes winds up kissing total strangers on the ear. But minutes after the party started, I watched him climb off of his porch onto an awning to pick up a stray Solo cup and conceded he might actually have at least one anxiety.
Eventually lots of people showed up, most of whom I didn’t know, and mostly boys drinking tequila. Frankie’s phone was synched to the sound system the entire time, and I think it’s really very sweet that there didn’t need to be a conversation amongst the boys about this being the way it would be. They are very supportive of each other! I had no say, really, over how many shots they each did. Katie and her high school friend came, and Tamar too, in a burnt orange cotton sports bra. She wasn’t drinking, but I was, so when she told me she’d read a previous edition of Famous People I said “Did you really feel that way?” When she left, I missed her.
Ashley took the bus from her new apartment and showed up wearing a leather collar with a clementine-sized hoop on it. We sat outside and drank tequila, and she told me she didn’t totally understand everyone’s accents. She meant the boys’ shared mannerisms. They all say “mad” instead of “very,” and some other things, like “yo” as punctuation and, at times, this sort of pseudo-MTV-host voice. I said I was pretty sure it started as a bit, and is mostly still a bit, but sometimes not. You know how once you start doing a Twitter joke format, you can’t stop? Like that.
Frankie’s old roommate asked for everyone’s birth times so she could figure out their rising signs. She told me she wanted to go dancing in Bushwick and I tried to look at her like she was crazy, but honestly she’s too beautiful and I couldn’t pull it off. She said she wanted her apartment to smell like herself (and no one else), and I almost cried at that display of casual self-possession and obviously perfectly finessed personal hygiene. When she left, I missed her. I think I still miss her now. Ashley and Katie sat on the couch and I sat on the floor next to them and took the phone and played Britney Spears and Avril Lavigne for them, respectively. I played “Bad Liar” for myself. Frankie played Charli XCX, and we fought a little bit about “Lucky.” He seemed to not remember that I played it at his kitchen table in Greenpoint in February, but then he said he did and I got over it. He’s got a great memory, which I hope I remember if I ever feel like lying to him. Ashley called a car and told me everyone was “wasted,” which I actually hadn’t picked up on. We decided to leave before I could have a chance to start missing her, which would have been unbearable.
On our way out, someone switched the stereo to a rock song I didn’t recognize. I said “When someone starts playing guitar boy music, it’s time for me to leave,” but I was already down the steps and no one was listening. This is my evidence that I have grown as a person since 2013!
I read recently that college kids mix Pedialyte directly with vodka now, to “detox and retox” in the same gulp. The only reason that disturbs me is that Pedialyte is eight dollars a bottle. The other reason that disturbs me is that I used to mix tequila with Gatorade and thought I was personally dreaming something up.