This year I was the one who insisted that we "wild out." Nina wanted to go to a few friend parties and call it a night, but I was thinking, Come on, City. Let me push my limits a bit. Specifically, I wanted to try to go to the Rubulad party in Bushwick, a three-venue affair that promised live music by some bands I'd sort of heard of, plus attractions that, you know, seemed pretty okay: a puppet show, acrobats, a "magical RV." Rubulad has occupied a position of awed prestige in my imaginings, on account of Nina characterizing herself as a frequent attendee around the time we started dating. She'd drop some casual mention, like, hey I saw Jonathan Ames smoking crack with Terry Richardson... you know, at Rubulad. Well, I have to do this, too, I thought, if only to make myself feel more like a guy who's seen a thing or two.
We spent the afternoon with Evan, whose birthday is New Year's Eve. I'd bought him a bottle of Jeppson's Malort for Christmas. I saw it sitting on the window sill as we entered his Grand St. apartment, the filmy gray afternoon sunlight revealing a few sips missing. Evan wanted us to watch a YouTube video demo of this piece of software called Artemis, which is one of those things that makes you feel a little sad because it nails an idea or a feeling you'd been grasping at unsuccessfully. I wanted be the one to make this thing exist, you think, maybe. Whatever, it's a Star Trek game. We took him out for lunch at Champs, which was very nice except that it looked a lot like somebody had spat a generous loogie onto the seat of the booth before we sat down. Why would someone do that? I thought, like an old person. I had a sandwich. We left Evan at Bushwick Country Club with Fili the bartender, after drinking a round of Old Crow specials and attempting to reverse engineer the countertop photo hunt game, and returned to Gowanus to make ourselves ready.
Our destination was Cypress Ave., but our first stop was on Garfield St., where we crashed Mark and Lisa's party, which Lisa explained they were conducting in the Russian mode -- which meant it was okay for us to show up unannounced, eat their food, and depart. Her parents confirmed this, pouring us paper cup after cup of easy-to-swallow vodka to show that they meant what they said. They had tubs and tubs of pickled mushrooms and eggplant hye from Elza Fancy Food, the actual name of which, Lisa explained, is printed on the menu in Russian as "At Your Mother-In-Law's." Mark was cooking, too; the kitchen was filled with the smell of brisket. We looked at some of their vacation photos, poses with animals and water. Mark pitched us, drunkenly, on joining the Food Co-op. I will never do that, I think, but I have been wrong before.
After that, we took the train to City Hall where we visited Nani at his soon-to-be-vacated apartment, in the building with a goddamn fireplace in its lobby. As he often does, he had a wide array of booze and mixers available, and he'd ordered a gargantuan thing of crudités. He made me a Singapore Sling, which pretty much knocked me on my ass. We all watched the ball drop in his living room, the college folk and his friends from Long Island and his lawyer friends, firing champagne poppers at the flat-screen TV. Nani's gonna be in Paris this year, and in an effort to lighten his suitcases, he was giving away a subset of his possessions, The Mad Men Guide To... etc. The taxidermied squirrel on his bookshelf was
1 AM, onwards to East Williamsburg. The first of the three venues was a nameless storefront on Cypress and Starr St., a low-slung building with a sparsely furnished interior. There was a plywood bar and a small stage with a number of folding chairs arrayed in front of it. A freckly woman with muscular arms sat on a stool and strummed a guitar. The party had obviously moved on, but the room was still half full, with several people gathered near a rickety, wrought-iron staircase descending into the floor. We nudged them out of the way and went down. It was weird down there, babies: The basement was laid out in Mission Revival style -- or at least, it looked a bit like the Mos Eisley Cantina. There was a long chamber with a very low ceiling and a small bar at one end, lit with candles and pink fairy lights. It opened onto a couple of attached rooms where a few people were sipping beers out of plastic cups. We stepped into one of these rooms and realized that the floor had been entirely papered over with tin foil. A girl sitting on a stool in the corner hissed, "It's ice. You're skating." We crossed the floor in our best pantomime of skating. At the far end, there was a low doorway into a dark kind of grotto. There was nothing there except for a damp smell and a dirty newspaper. Another reveler skated across the "ice," stuck his head in, and left. Should we try to find the next place? we wondered. Like the kids might do, we turned to Twitter for advice. A DJ had tweeted, perhaps intentionally, the location of the second party.
We struck out for 135 Thames, passing house parties and reggaeton raves. Upon arrival, though -- riding up on, say, 2 AM -- we discovered that the venue was closed. If it had ever been a venue. On the outside, it looked like a wholesaler's garage, with a painting contractor on the second floor. We nosed around the adjacent buildings for a while before admitting defeat and trudging back to Cypress in the cold. ...Where they told us at the basement bar that the second venue had been shut down by the police, but did give us the
By 3 AM, Zardoz was winding down; Zed had found the metaphysical cipher in the library of Arthur Frayn, and we were getting pretty danced out. We left the warehouse and walked down Starr St. to St. Nicholas, scanning the chilly horizon for a taxi or car service car. By 3:30 we decided it was fruitless, and got back on the L at Jefferson Ave. I had to pee, and the further we got, the more sure I got that I wouldn't make it all the way to 14th St. much less all the way back down to Gowanus. I made the case to Nina for disembarking at Bedford Ave. and ducking into a bar. She acquiesced, but my timing was terribly wrong: It was now past "last call," and The Abbey, whose pot I'd hoped to piss in, was closed. And the bodega on Driggs wouldn't let me use their bathroom. Likewise Eden, a gross restaurant right outside the train station, the unctuous waiter telling me it was for customers only but did I know that they were still selling chicken tacos for $9? Never have I been so grateful to that gross pizza place between N 7th and 8th, where they could not care less who was doing what in their bathroom. The place was packed with party people -- orders of magnitude worse than on a Friday or Saturday night -- and the guy on line behind me came stumbling into the bathroom with his eyes closed. But I was free! I bought Nina, who was feeling justifiably put out, a conciliatory slice, and we ate amidst the drunks (who were so drunk they were slumping out of their seats and onto the floor) and the girls who were complaining that they hadn't done anything good yet.
We got home before the dreaded blue o'clock -- but not much before -- and we quick-changed from our party clothes into our jammies. When I opened the fridge to decant a pre-fizzed SodaStream bottle, the little light in the back popped its death-flash. The next morning, I clogged the toilet and had to plunge it for a solid forty minutes to get it working again.
Renewal.
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