Party.

On reflection, it’s odd how many times I have tried to fit in at these sort of parties. I should really have come to the conclusion that I don’t fit in. I just don’t. I’d use the phrase “square peg, round hole” to describe how much I don’t fit in at these parties if it didn’t have those ridiculous sexual connotations attached to it, so I’ll have to use another kind of analogy. Imagine I’m a grain of salt in some water, and the other people at the party are the water, and we all get put into one of those water purifiers you’ve seen on TV and on your friends’ kitchen sides. Now this water purifier is the party, or the rite of passage, or another dubious adolescent social normality. The water flows right through it and comes out probably cooler and maybe nicer and definitely looking better at the other end. The salt, however, gets stuck in the filter and has to be scrubbed or fished out of it, and just becomes something that was holding the water back from being the best it could be. Actually, fuck the metaphor;
forget about it, the point is: what the fuck am I doing here?

Most people have two identities; the person they are in real life; when they’re whiling their life away at school or college or on a building site or in their office, and there’s the person that they are when they’re pissed up at a party. Suddenly everyone’s your fucking best mate, and you can’t understand for the life of you why they wouldn’t be in normal circumstances. Suddenly you find yourself sat a table drinking shots with people that you actually really don’t like, but are doing your very best to make them like you. Suddenly you’re smoking cigarettes that are making your mouth taste like ash and are burning your fingers. Suddenly you’ll sing out your feelings in a voice that you’d normally imprison in the shower. Suddenly you turn into an absolute pretentious wanker. I like to think that the people who don’t follow this rule are either the twats that are likely to participate in football violence, active racism, and regular paintballing, or the quiet, casually bullied guy who shows up at college one day with a shotgun.

I’m throwing up what’s starting to look my fucking stomach acid into an already pretty horrible looking toilet bowel in a horrible toilet with horrible people waiting outside in a horrible house in a horrible town. I’m drunk, of course I’m drunk, but not heroically drunk, it’s not like my drunkenness is an achievement like I thought it perhaps would be. Mainly because I’ve had three cans of actual, proper, respectable beer, and then I’ve just drunk from lemonade bottles someone said had vodka in them. I have been in this situation before, and I will be in it again, of course I will, because I’m a stupid desperate twat who wants to endear himself to others.
My eyes are watering like I’m crying, I’m wearing somebody else’s hoody, I have scrapes all down my legs and arms, my shoulder aches, my headphones are broken and I’m actually really vomiting as well, I mean I’m actually making quite a loud, involuntary noise with my throat while some imaginative colours are appearing in the toilet bowl. I know some people to who these injuries I’ve sustained would be like battle scars, 21’st century battle scars, to show everyone they’ve ventured outside the two DVD’s, some chocolate and a quiet night in with the girlfriend comfort zone that they think everyone else aspires to. I actually do aspire to that. Not the guys I’m imagining though, they’d drag their Stella stained wives to every party within drink driving range just to prove that they are still fucking living it.

I suppose I should offer some sort of flashback as to how these unfortunate things happened to me; I can only really remember bits of it, so this will have to be a particularly short and fractured flashback. First, my crying, well, I wish it was because I’d inhaled the smoke of some particularly potent burning leaves, but in reality I’m just very tired and the smoke from regular cigarettes makes my eyes sting. I’m wearing someone else’s hoody because a girl I previously trusted sat next to me and fell asleep, I can’t remember how long for, but she suddenly opened her eyes and straightened right up like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo and threw up her nightmares all over me, so I got up and walked quite fast somewhere, and then someone told me to come with them, and I ended up with no shirt or jacket, and putting this guy’s spare hoody on. Actually, I’m pretty annoyed about the shirt because I bought it just today… or yesterday… from h&m for a fiver. I hope the sick washes out. Next, one of the skinhead guys noticed that there was some duct tape on the side that was going to waste, so after taping half the houses hands and feet together, they taped my feet to a skateboard, promising to just push me about on the front, but they carried me through the house to the back, and sent me down the hill, so I had to cut my losses and veer into the curb, and obviously I hurt myself a lot. I can’t remember how I got off that pavement actually. Next thing I know I’m in the bathroom.

I finish throwing up that weird party food (and some substances I don’t think anyone’s ever eaten) her mum made, which seemed very out of place given that normal parties with normal party food don’t end up with chavs throwing bricks through the window and then getting chased off by a guy with two kitchen knives, and reach up for the toilet paper to wipe my mouth. Of course, I knock it right into the toilet water, so I have to rip all the wet side off and flush it away, and then I look in the mirror.

Of course, my eyes are red (with tiredness) and my hair has puffed out like it always threatens to; a helmet made of ewok fur. I wish I looked like the doomed romantic, but in reality my features have gained a certain tragicomic element to them, like the bullied clown with the sad face. I don’t belong here. Really don’t belong here. But fuck self discovery. I open the door.

Almost immediately this younger lad I recognise vaguely from a skatepark somewhere stumbles by me, down the stairs, onto the cold brick floor of the kitchen. He has a blue alcopop in one hand and a burnt out cigarette in the other. His eyes are completely glazed and red like mine, but this guy is way more fucked than I am. He manages to get to the end of the kitchen before leaning too far forward and headbutting the wall, causing everyone else in the room to burst out laughing, him to pretty much pass out on the floor, and one skinheaded leather jacketed tight trousered punk to throw yoghurt all over him, in keeping with the spirit of ’76. I bet the dickhead hasn’t even got Never Mind the Bollocks. At first the young kid jerks his arms behind his back in an attempt to stop the yoghurt attack, but as he realises he can’t reach, his arms fall limp and he stops moving. Everyone laughs, again.

By the way, we’re in the calm part of the night. The after-party, if you like. The bit after everything that was going to happen has happened, where everyone just sits down in the kitchen and living room, and maybe has a relaxing can, the bit where the music’s turned, if not off, then down a bit, and a few people have gone home, a few people have gone upstairs, and a few people are in the garden passed out. Boys and girls that were hopefully eyeing each other up just a few hours ago, having never spoken, are now either relaxing in each others arms, or are upstairs, about to stumble out the bathroom with smiles of contentment and/or relief. The lad that was screaming and crying while he was writhing about in the back garden and throwing beer around is now quiet in a corner, staring into his glass of water. We can feel reasonably confident that there isn’t going to be any more fights or freak outs or shock get togethers or tantrums or suicide attempts tonight, though I know a lot of the people here aren’t very content with that fact, and that is why there’s a boy unconscious on the floor covered in yoghurt.

I laugh with them, of course, and slide down the wall into what I hope looks like a debauchedly comfortable position. One of the skinheads in the kitchen notices me, and calls me a dickhead. I decide to take it in good, honest humour (which is probably what it is anyway, I’m generally well accepted by this community), and laugh, which makes me feel so pathetic I actually want to cry, so I do the next best thing and get my mp3 player out (I’ve saved the battery all night for this inevitable moment), and then realise, with a horrible pang of hopelessness, that I haven’t got any headphones.

“Has anyone got any headphones?” The thing I find most incredible about alcohol is that it brings your brain and your mouth together in harmony, so you say something as soon as the spark of thought appears in your brain. I’d be much more subtle about borrowing headphones usually. Well, the skinheads all say, in one way or another “not for you”, but one of the girls I came with, who must be feeling guilty about deserting me for some flat peak wearing fat dick, says “yeah” quietly and gets some cheap black ones out of her handbag and throws them me. Oddly, everybody in the room watches this exchange in a thoughtful, notable silence as if they’ve just come to realise something profound about me. If I actually said anything profound (not that I can or would), there would only be a short silence before I could expect a brick to be launched at my face.

Cheap black headphones are my favourite headphones, because they’re pretty good sound quality, not like cheap grey ones which have awful tinny sound quality, and because if you break them, which I’m likely to do, it doesn’t matter that much, because they only cost as much as an average days food does, not like glossy white headphones which are 20 quid a pop. While I’m talking for no reason about headphones, don’t you love the feeling when you’re listening to an amazing song with one headphone in, and then you put the other one in and it breaks through into another level of the song, and it’s like the pieces of the song have been reunited, and it just sounds so full and rich and incredible.

Everybody’s started talking about other stuff now, or started falling asleep, or generally just ignoring me, thank god, so I put my other headphone in, and Sigur Ros is playing, and it’s beautiful, and I try and drift as far and away from my cramped space in this strange kitchen as I possibly can.