Fauxanuary: Road Trip!

I spent the day today in my new reading chair, you know, reading. I told my friend Lowell that I think that having the reading chair will mean that I doomscroll less, read more and he said “so it’s your mental wellness chair?”

[arianagrande]RIGHT![/arianagrande]

In 1992, in the wee hours of our annual Christmas party, someone, probably Lynn, said “you know what we should do? We should go to New York for New Year’s!”

And the next day, I’m sure someone said, you know, are we really going to do that?

Yes. Yes, Virginia, we are.

I think there were seven of us, two cars. We left late at night, and drove straight through, getting into Manhattan around breakfast time on the 31st. No one had really slept, but we were young, so we immediately dropped off our luggage at our friend Wally’s impossibly-small apartment (where the SEVEN of us were staying) and went to do…things. We played on swings and climbed on rocks in Central Park, we went to FAO Schwartz. We might have done a little sightseeing. Honestly, it was 30+ years ago. Time is all fuzzy at the edges.

I know that we went out for some tasty Mexican food for dinner (I had the Molé) and then back to Wally’s for drinks before we took off for Time’s Square. It was a long walk and we were already four or five (maybe six, if I’m being honest) sheets to the wind, and this led us to my absolute favorite part of the trip.

See, I really, really had to pee. Like really. And I saw a cop, and I went up to him and said “I’m sure that you hear this all the time, but I really, really need to pee. And this delightful man, New York’s finest, said—

“It’s New York. Pee where you want.”

I looked at him rather imploringly, using these abnormally-big blue eyes for all they were worth, and he finally relented and suggested a…well, in retrospect, I’m not sure what it was. It wasn’t a bar, really, or a restaurant. Or a diner. Or a coffee shop. It was on the second floor, and there were many earnest young people having very earnest conversations there. My friend Chris had walked over with me, to keep me safe, and while I was in the loo, he apparently ran a small con on the earnest young people because as we headed back down the stairs, I heard one of them say—

“Can you believe that guy’s a PRIEST?”

Chris was SO NOT a priest.

We finally made it to where the action was, and were herded into a pen that was sort of roped off. The entire area was a series of these pens, likely to keep things from getting out of control. But get out of control they still managed to do, as a fight broke out one pen over.

We had been talking to one of the cops working security, and he looked at my friend Steve—who is honestly the last person who would jump a rope to insert himself into someone else’s fight—but he looked at him and said “DON’T you fucking move!” before going off to contain the skirmish. Steve responded in a very Steve way: “I am a fucking tree.”

Except he wasn’t, and he did move because my brother did not like the look of that fight. Most of us had been attacked in the street back in Pittsburgh about two months prior, and I guess Lee was feeling a little flashbacky, so he started yelling at us to run, like we were in ‘Nam or something. So, we all grabbed hands and took off running and did not stop till we got back to Wally’s. We made it to the roof of his building just in time to watch the ball drop in the distance, drinking cheap champagne out of a bottle and giving each other sloppy, drunk hugs.

And then we all collapsed. We were young, but we had been up for 36 hours at that point, and had drank probably our total blood volume in cheap vodka and cheaper bubbly, and so we slept, lined up on Wally’s floor, all seven of us in the living room.

And in the morning, the eight of us had breakfast, and drive home.

But wait? I thought there were seven? Yeah, Wally’s roommate and his girlfriend broke up, so we brought the girl back to Pittsburgh with us.

Life in our twenties was weird.

But it was a trip for the ages.