Party Artifacts
June 22nd, 2008Updated*
We threw a party last night. Empty bottles are everywhere. I foolishly ate a bagel after 4 a.m. and now I feel like poop is trying to come out of my mouth.
But instead of writing about the party I’d like to share something that I found on the floor of my room this morning. It’s a large customer’s copy of a receipt for karaoke, one of the extra-wide older types. The only name on the receipt is Michael C. Fux, so I’m assuming it had belonged to him. It’s from Karaoke One 7 in the Flatiron. The funny part: the tab was $962. The tax alone was $160. The local and federal governments made $160 off of drunk twenty-somethings butchering “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and “Sledgehammer” and what have you.
Even weirder is the fact that it’s dated June 8, leading me to believe that Michael C. Fux carried this receipt in his jeans or backpack for 13 days, and then figured it’d be cool to drop it in some dude’s bedroom during a house party. Chances are people paid Mr. Fux for their share of the singing and booze, and he put the entire bill for the birthday or (terrible) bachelor party on his card. But still. Jesus.
I read somewhere that contemporary college-aged Americans, taken as a whole, are the most fortunate demographic in the history of the world. Not necessarily the happiest, but the most well off considering overall quality of life, upward mobility and health. Sure, there’s royalty, European aristocrats and Saudi oil brats, but they were/are such comparatively small, isolated groups.
When I first read this piece (or was it a radio program?) I was like, “Nuh, uh. I don’t believe this garbage.” With so many young people in debt and un- or underemployed, it was hard to take. But after finding a $962 receipt for karaoke in my room, I’m starting to come around.
Another artifact: there’s a sizable pool of broken green glass near the oven. It’s most likely from a Yuengling bottle. This is not so much an artifact as it is a mess.
And another one: there are four—count ‘em, four—unopened Dos Equis bottles in my bedroom, and for a second I considered drinking one this morning but I’m not gonna because throwing up on your laptop is no way to start a Sunday. There’s also a can of Coors Light, which I will put in the fridge presently and drink after I eat eggs and nap and clean up.
Last one: again, not really an artifact but still noteworthy: a black lady was in our apartment. We’d never had one here before because 97% of our friends are white and hardly any of them know any black people. We hadn’t been preventing black ladies from entering in the past; they had simply never wanted to. Until last night, that is. The story: a black hetero couple was on a Saturday night stroll on Bushwick Ave. I like to think they’d went on a date at Il Passatore, the ‘hood’s No. 1 date place. And while strolling passed Powers St., they saw the radical house party that had spilled out onto the sidewalk and thought, “Hey, these people seem alright. We’ll stick around and see what’s what.” They weren’t the only crashers but they were by far the coolest and most fashionable. Then the black lady had to use the bathroom, so she walked into our apartment and did a No. 1 in our toilet. She didn’t know it at the time, but she was making history.
*They weren’t crashers after all.
