Life of the Party

I can be a real drag at a party.  A serious Debbie downer.  I feel bad about this.  But I’ve realized, it’s how I have fun.

Take last weekend, for instance.  I was at a classic DC shin-dig, the kind of party that takes place in an enormous, slightly worn row house, shared by 5 or 6 people, only one of whom you are friends with.  And you are never quite sure who the other 5 roommates are.  There are too many bicycles in the foyer and there’s a grill going out back, a little too close to the wooden porch.  There’s beer in every conceivable crevice of the fridge, between, behind, and on top of all the food of six individuals who can’t seem to get on the same schedule - the 3 gallons of milk, the 2 large and 3 small bottles of juice, a door full of half drunk bottles of white wine, and the stacks and stacks of tupperware and take-out containers, and one onion on a plate.  The party is crammed with people, expats and hipsters and lawyers and teachers, everyone smiling, everyone dancing to techno, always old-vaguely-euro-techno in the dining room where the thrift store table has been shoved against one wall.

You get the idea.  We’ve all been to those parties.  Mt. Pleasant.  Columbia Heights. Adams Morgan.

And, despite me being a downer, I genuinely enjoy these parties.  I was making my way to the back yard, drinking a Bud Light, when a person I vaguely know (perhaps he lives there?) stopped to offer me a shot of herb-based spirits from his homeland (somewhere between the Baltic and the Levant?), the kind that smells vaguely familiar, like a flower or a rarely used spice, but always tastes like gasoline. (Always cheap American beer, and always exotic liquor at these parties.  Why is that?)

“My friend!” he says.  “My friend!  Have a shot of [unpronounceable liquor name]!”  And by shot he means a swig from the bottle.  I oblige, and as I give the bottle back to him, I say “you know, this is all bullshit, all this getting along and happiness and shit.  We’re all going to get old, not be able to clean ourselves, and die alone in nursing homes drooling on ourselves and the last realization that will break through our debilitating dementia just before we expire is that our own children don’t really love us any more.”  

To which he shot back, a twinkle in his eye, “my friend, have another shot!”  So I did.  And then I said “A hundred years ago we would have been sworn enemies, or at least afraid of each other and never have shared a bottle of [unpronounceable liquor name].  And in another hundred years it will be the same.  This, this party, is just a blip, a aberration in the steady march of human history.  How can we enjoy ourselves knowing it is merely a fleeting moment of respite in the otherwise murderous story of humanity’s unrelenting butchery and  bloodletting?”

He didn’t hear the end of my statement since he had walked away, still smiling, toward the Euro-techno. Those Estonian-Lebanese-Croats!  So happy-go-lucky!

The rest of the evening passes in much the same way.  I disillusion a young woman just starting a teaching job by telling her she’ll be burned out in 3 years, 5 years max, and won’t make a difference anyway.  I tell someone who is relating a story about a recent back packing trip to Romania that one can never really know a culture except ones own, and only then just enough to despise it.  I tell a pair of extremely drunk women on the lumpy couch, one who is crying hysterically and the other who is laughing hysterically - you get it, pointing to the crying woman, and you don’t get it, pointing to the other.

So you see, I’m not the life of the party.  Whether it’s my Catholic upbringing or that I’m simply a neurotic, any time I’m starting to have fun, I’m reminded of that other shoe, the one that will inevitably drop and ruin everything.

I have no idea why people still invite me to parties.  I assume I am some sort of curiosity, a psychological elephant-man like character that makes a party complete.  Maybe I AM the life of the party.

Oddly enough, this brings great joy to my life, knowing that I add something to a gathering, so that when I got home that night, I thought, boy, that was fun!  What a great party!  What a great bunch of people!  I can’t wait to go to another party!  And I know they can’t wait for me to come, too!  The gallons of cheap American beer might have something to do with it.