I woke up in a closet.

Last night, Scott was scheduled to bartend at a Triple Canopy event in Bushwick.  Two friends of ours were supposed to tag along with us so that I’d have people to stand around and look cool with while Scott was opening bottles for rowdy literary enthusiasts.  Right before we were going to leave, Gray called and said he didn’t really want to go out and couldn’t get a hold of our friend Jared.  I decided in advance that I would go into the party with a good attitude about standing around in a crowd of people I didn’t know after drinking a couple of beers.  I have to say, I was pretty excited for the party.  I even took time to pick out a nice outfit and make my hair look cute.

It’s hard to tell from these shitty photobooth shots, but I totally decided to experiment with bobby pins and buns.

When we got into the party space, I didn’t panic with fear about appearing to be one of those people that shows up to social events alone and doesn’t even  bother to interact with other people.  I figured I wouldn’t think too much about the way people were looking at me, so I took my place against a wall and let the party unfold around me.

Part of the party unfolding, however, was a barrage of pick-up lines, awkward attempts at conversations, and glares from predators across the room.  Of course, of the many syndromes that are associated with partying (including lunch-table syndrome — usually of the lady’s sewing circle variety) Gazelle syndrome is the most prevalent in shy girls that stand up against walls and drink beer alone, occasionally wandering onto the dance floor to relieve the leg cramps from shifting weight from left foot to right foot and so on.

The effect of drinking beer on the severity not only of attracting remarks and advances but also, for the person making the remarks/advances, whose ego is undoubtedly inflated with confidence, is strong.  After scurrying away from the crowd to tell Scott about how awkward I felt out there, I decided that I would buy a pack of cigarettes to keep myself on the street where the fresh air and space is.  I called a friend to talk about the uncomfortable situation at a party, he was at home watching television.  I hung about and pulled another cigarette out of the pack and leaned against a wall to watch the people on the street.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a really happy looking guy wandering around the sidewalk near me.*

By the time I registered that the happy guy I noticed in my periphery was standing next to me against the wall, I had been staring at him for a solid 5 seconds, and he introduced himself with a name that I can’t remember right now.  I think that the conversation he started avoided the usual pick-up lines, but jumped right into a conversation about the music playing inside and the crowd on the street.  He asked if I wanted to go inside, and I said yes.  I turned on my speed walk and went back to my standing spot in the crowd.  I’d lost the predator.  But no more than ten minutes later, a be-spectacled man with experiencing a problem with his cell phone and his lost friends leaned down to me and asked where all the people he could meet at the party were.  “Over there,” I said while pointing to an orgy of people standing around.  “Hmm, maybe you’re right,” he said.  “Probably,” I said.  Realizing that I was a brick wall, he walked away feeling only what I can imagine is some variety of emasculation related to shame from lack of aggressiveness.

Number 3, a new be-spectacled man approached me and said “You wore those dancing shoes for a reason, lets see you out there on the dance floor.”  First of all, the comment struck me as something that an estranged uncle might say to a table of awkward teenagers at his kid’s wedding.  Second, I started to feel really embarrassed about being a target for such cheesy nonsense.  “I’m waiting for the right moment.” I said, then I leaned back to the wall and pretended to look over people’s heads like I was waiting for someone to meet me.

The fourth suitor of the night, a red haired guy in flannel that looked shockingly similar to a staff member at the Library, approached me and asked me, “What do you think of all this?”

“I think everyone in this room is trying to figure out their purpose in life, and they’re thinking about how they’re only distracting themselves from such a philosophical question by going to a party to get drunk.”

“Geeze, that’s intense.”  He proceeded to tell me he was an architect from Western Massachusetts and that he lived in the area.  He started to get cozy talking about himself, and when I tried to employ my people-searching technique, he only went on.

“Yeah, I came out tonight because my boyfriend is bartending.” I made this statement almost out of thin air, and it took him no more than 10 seconds to walk away.  “Boo-yah!” I thought.  Moments later, Happy Guy spotted me and waded through the crowd.

“Hey, I lost you on the way back in.”

“Yeah, this crowd is pretty insane.”  At this point, I had taken off my jacket, and I was swaying around and jumping from one foot to the other in a series of movements that I refer to as my dancing style.  He started pumping his arms in the air and shaking his hips as he went on to tell me he was a lawyer, that he enjoyed riding his bike in Brooklyn, and that he was thirty years old.  “Oh cool, I just turned twenty!”  My barometer for the effectiveness of the age statement is usually pretty dull, but assuming he was a lawyer, I knew he wouldn’t be into younger chicks compared with some of the other Lolita intern fetishistas at the party.  “Well, nice meeting you,” he said as he shimmied into another mass of people.

I went on to dance by myself and randomly join in on other groups of people dancing.  Jesus, what a dork I was.  Eventually I made it to the front of the crowd where the dj’s tables were, and noticed that I had been dancing with a particularly drunk boy that looked like he was probably 17 or 18 years old.  One of his hands clutched his shoulder, the other a tall boy of Coors — all the while, his eyeballs appeared to be fluttering into the back of his head as he made a series of movements towards me that made me feel like he was trying to trap me in a corner.

Weary of my inability to make friends with girls at parties** and tired of the game of experimenting with which shutdowns for pick-up lines are most effective, I walked over to the bar area to hang out with Scott for the rest of the night.  And, because some people had stepped outside, I ended up helping Scott take money and orders from customers.  I don’t remember how annoying and in the way I must have been to the people running the bar area.  All of the fast-paced movement of beering the party-goers made me so tired that I apparently blacked out.  I remember very little from the end of the party, leaving it, or apparently trying to smoke a J on the way back to the subway, but I do remember getting off at Fresh Pond Road and putting planting my legs hips-length apart with my hands holding onto a stairway wall so that I could barf all of the sparks and PBR that had been festering in my dear little stomach.

Then, this morning I woke up on my couch at 11 a.m.  Fully clothed — but with my boots off!– I walked into the bedroom.  “What the fuck?”I said.  Scott explained, “I tried to carry you into bed, but we only made it to the end table when you said to leave you alone and let you sleep.”  I think that I unconsciously (heh) give myself a handful of nights per year in which I feel uncomfortable and awkward in the beginning of the party, but by the end, I’m too drunk or I’ve passed out, so therefore I cannot care about others’ perception of my sloppy drunkenness.  And so, the epic tale of a not so lonely loner at a party.

*You know those really uncomfortable moments that so many New Yorkers experience when they’re walking down the street on any given day, and someone you think you might recognize or think has an interesting face comes into view and, rather than make the average glance at the person in passing, you get a hold of them four or five steps before you’re going to pass them, and they notice that you’ve been staring at them, you realize that you were staring at them, and the look that they give you jut tells you that one or both parties feels incredibly uncomfortable about the interaction that just took place — as it confuses both parties about why the staring was going on in the first place, and there’s the thrill of OMG are there consequences for my having stared at this stranger for more than the typically alotted 2 seconds?  Yes.  There are.

**If you don’t go to a party with other girls, you’re considered a loner, and the girls that came with another group of girlfriends are afraid of the explanation for why you’re at a party by yourself — and, geeze, you might be a really cool person, someone that out-cools any of them.