Party of One (12 page)

We showed up at one another's apartment parties that were impenetrably crowded if more than nine people showed up. We made runs to Key Food for Top Ramen together. If we were not at work we were together in one configuration or another, but mostly all six. We went to Pedro's on Ninety-second, with the frayed college pennants lining the walls. In wintertime, we sat by the fire at Dorrian's, the place where the Preppie Murderer met his Murder Galpal, playing euchre and drinking ourselves warm. In the summertime, we'd rollerblade around Central Park and meet in the Sheep Meadow to divide up the Sunday
New York Times
and buy the Budweiser tallboys the hustlers sold out of garbage bags for one dollar.

When our direct deposits showed up in our accounts and we were flush, we'd walk down to J.G. Melon for burgers. We largely skipped movies, because they ate into our happy hour budgets, but we managed to see
Pulp Fiction
at the Angelica, with the N/R line rumbling beneath our seats at the crucial adrenaline-shot scene. We wore Brooks Brothers shirts or Ann Taylor sweater sets with heavy, thick-soled boots, and we thought about getting our eyebrows pierced, but we never did.

We chose our clubhouse: The Gaf, a tiny place on Eighty-third with a good jukebox, which is to say a CD jukebox with Oasis's
Definitely Maybe
and the first G. Love and Special Sauce, and space for no more than fifteen people. We developed crushes on bartenders up and down First Avenue. (Louise malapropped the perfect word for this, while trying to say
bartender
and
boyfriend
at the same time:
barfriender.
) We met at brunch and acquired appetites for Bloody Marys and pieced together our Saturday nights over eggs Benedict and let our waitresses sit down with us for a moment because they were inevitably as hungover as we were.

We were, as Des'ree commanded, bad and bold and wiser. We were young New Yorkers. We went to one another's restaurants—all of us except Louise, who worked on Wall Street, had second jobs at restaurants, because we were all entry-level and the rent, even then, was too damn high—and we comped one another's meals. Aimee picked up the weekend breakfast shift at the Barking Dog up on Third; I served schnitzel to New York's German community at the Yorkville Inn on Second.

I had never waited tables before, but I fabricated a long résumé of restaurant work because I needed the money. I was twice as inept a waiter as I was an ad guy; I would bring you the wrong thing always, and you would never get water or salt, but I knew how to make conversation, so I held on for a few months. And then one night, I showed a young couple to their table and handed them their menus, which were made of paper, over a lit candle. His survived, but hers caught the flame and began to smolder on the upper right corner. I said, with the practiced calm of a young advertising person who doesn't want anyone to know he has no idea what he's doing: “Pardon me, ma'am, your menu is on fire,” and I took it back, stamped it out, and got her a new one. My manager watched this with wide eyes and I nodded at her, and at the end of my shift I silently turned in my apron and that was that.

At any time of the day or night, I could tell you where the other five of these people were. We were in constant contact, which in 1994 required effort. We had no cell phones or e-mail or Instant Messager; we could not text one another; and as Julie's behavior toward Heather B. in the first episode of
The Real World
so memorably demonstrated, beepers were mostly for drug dealers. Keeping tabs on one another meant calling and leaving messages on one another's answering machines, which, if you had an upscale model, would allow you to check your messages remotely from your desk or a phone booth, with a four-digit security code. There were no emojis or even emoticons; if you wanted to wink at someone you had to actually wink
right at them in real life,
which is a thing we can all agree is gross. We were forced to interact in real life. And because we didn't know any better, we loved it.

It was good that I was rarely alone, because I did stupid things when I was alone. Once, after a work happy hour that turned into a legitimate barhop in the West Village, I got up, did the Irish goodbye, and began my long journey home: West Village to the Upper East Side, a three-trainer, exhausting under the best of circumstances. I hopped on the 1 to Forty-second, took the shuttle to Grand Central, and got on the northbound 6 headed for Eighty-sixth and Lexington. At Seventy-seventh, the train pulled into the station and the doors swung open, and then it just stayed there for a while, like New York trains are known to do. The train had stopped due to congestion ahead, or something of that nature; I'd have to walk the last ten or so blocks. I got out of the train to do that, just as an idea slunk through the fog of my brain: What if I
don't
walk home on the street? The tunnel is right there,
what if I go through it on foot?

What if I walk through a subway tunnel at 3 a.m.? (That's how stupid I was in my twenties: I didn't have a ready answer for the question
What if I walk through a subway tunnel at 3 a.m.?
)

There was a narrow walkway the same height of the subway platform, and it ran as far up as I could see, so I took it. I walked until the light from the Seventy-seventh Street platform faded away and it was pitch dark, and then I kept walking. Somehow it kept getting darker. I was alone at 3:00 a.m. in a subway tunnel. I walked until I couldn't even see a pinhole of light in front of or behind me. I was so scared I passed scared and came back around to calm, the way you get when you skydive. Except unlike skydiving, you can actually really die when you're alone in a dark subway tunnel, and it would be a much more difficult death to explain to your parents.

For reasons I cannot explain, exploring felt like the thing to do. I came upon a stairway and walked a few steps down it, and then I heard skittering. Not the skittering of rodent feet; sadly, by this time I was able to identify that noise. No, this was
people
skittering. This was the noise of
tunnel people.
These were CHUDs or drug addicts or CHUDs who were addicted to a drug that is derived from human flesh. These people might kill me, or eat me alive, or pull me down to become their mother. Whichever, respectfully: no thanks. I ran back up to walkway level and broke into a dead sprint toward Eighty-sixth.

By this time, the train had started running again. The conductor was at the front, at the controls, and his headlight fell right on me. I turned around and stuck out a thumb. Like: Can you
believe
what I'm doing right now? He could not believe what I was doing right then. He put his hands out to either side of his head, the international sign for
What. The. Fuck?,
and stared at me, stupefied, as he passed. I ran all the way to the Eighty-sixth Street station and onto the platform, sprinting up the stairs past the police and the station agent, and all the way home. On the way, I passed the Yorkville Inn, where I had waited tables and acquired a fairly solid reputation as an idiot. A few of my coworkers were there, and my body was flush with adrenaline; I wanted to tell them what I'd done. My old coworker Eamonn looked at me and said: “David. Go to the bathroom.” I said I didn't have to go to the bathroom, I had to tell them a story. He said:
“David. Go to the bathroom.”
So I did, and I looked at myself in the mirror. I was covered head to toe in subway tunnel soot. I was in blackface. I was a
mess.

I told the rest of my gang that story over brunch the next day, slightly proud of myself. A few hours later Aimee called me and said: “We talked about your story for a while after you left, and we all agreed it was the dumbest thing we've ever heard a human being do.” I couldn't argue.

This is the moment when I had the conscious thought, for the first time in my life: “Maybe I shouldn't
actively try to kill myself
anymore.”

It was Louise who ended up giving me the second half of the wake-up call I needed. We were talking about what she looked for in a boyfriend, and her first and least-flexible requirement was that he love what he does for a living. It startled me. “Really?”

“Yes, of course. It's what you spend most of your life doing, so it should be a thing you're in love with.”

It's a simple, undeniable truth, and I can't believe I didn't hear someone say it out loud until I was well into my twenties. Though it was never said to me this way explicitly, I'd come to regard work as a thing that must be endured, a pain in the neck, a thing you
affer up t'Are Lard.
We even treat business and pleasure as separate travel categories, as though they can't be the same thing. As though to be a man in full, it was my responsibility to put on a necktie, disappear for ten hours a day, and then come home and not talk much about it, just as my father had, just as his father had.

“Do”—I was stunned by this new concept—“do
you
love what you do?”

“Of course I do. I can't wait to go to work in the morning.” It was like finding out one of your closest friends can levitate, or is Mormon. My world was shaken. I was suddenly self-conscious about the idea that I didn't love what I did, and I wasn't particularly good at it besides. And I was a little hurt because I kind of assumed she spent her whole workday counting the minutes until we could all be together again, the way I did.

Louise saved my life with one offhand comment. You do that to one another when you're twenty-five.

In a separate conversation, Louise gave me another life lesson: if your office has one of those massive toilet paper rolls in the stalls, and if you can work a fingernail or a coin into the center screw of the dispenser, you can take the cover off and turn the roll into a kind of pillow for an early-afternoon nap. “Just put your forehead right on it. You can get a good fifteen minutes that way, and sometimes that's all you need.”

I put the second lesson to work right away. The first one took a few years to digest.

*
He brought me to his office one Saturday afternoon, just to show me what the Internet was. He directed me to “Yahoo!,” and said: “Search for anything. I bet there's a website for it.” I searched for
Small Wonder.
There were eight websites devoted to
Small Wonder
reminiscence
,
memorabilia, and fan fiction. There was never a time when the Internet wasn't ridiculous.

Man, I miss the 1990s. I mean, I'm very happy now, but I'm also exhausted and sore and furious at everyone who disagrees with me even a little bit about anything, and I find myself pining for a simpler time. Nineties nostalgia is at a fever pitch at the moment, and while we're naturally a little misty-eyed for things that happened twenty years ago, I think it's about more than that. I think we left something there, something we can't get back. Here are a few of those things.