The Folly of the "Socialite"

Being about as sociable as a fifteen year old girl trapped in the sex pest wing of a high security prison, I spend half my days failing miserably to conduct an appropriate conversation with my acquaintances; and the other half reliving those conversations with my infinitely more witty and charming hindsight – so that next time I may be more prepared for the undeniably horrific experience of mindlessly filling the deadly silence with inane pleasantries and observations so base they’d make a darts commentator cringe.

Being the young, hip, round-about-town guy that I so obviously am though, my popularity occasionally sores so high as to be a guest at the Holy Grail of ‘The Socialite’: the fabled house party. And so it was that I found myself at this Mecca of ‘The Socialite’ last Saturday nigh;, brimming with the stupid optimism of a boy pounded with American house party propaganda ever since ‘American Pie’; gushing with the confidence that only hours of grinding conversation analysis can give to a person; and ruthlessly plastered into something resembling oblivion by the reckless mass consumption of the local shop’s finest, cheapest, white cider. I was primed for this orgy of conversational hell, fully accepting my fate as a shy 9 years old boy stuck in a 20 year old's body (shyness is only socially acceptable until a certain age, then one day you apparently become rude and aloof instead). I was going to socialize like no one has ever socialized before, damning the potential, and likely, outcome of a red face and badly thought out excuse to leave. I’m young, and this is my time.

After having spent the first couple of hours hidden in one of the upstairs bedrooms, drinking steadily and speaking to no one except the people I came with, my group split into to two camps: that of ‘The Socialites’, and that of me. I was perfectly happy and content staying in this bedroom, making fun of it’s absent occupant due to the sheerly staggering amounts of his hair products, body spray, and mirrors; and simply drinking with people that I already knew I liked, and that I absolutely did not have to comment on it being a ‘nice house’ to, simply to spew noise into the void. But the other camp and their alien ways had intrigues me as of late, and so I decided, with the utmost dedication, to join them in their tour of this house.

My advice to anyone who decides to do the same would be this: do not do it with girls – they will betray you. No sooner had we entered the densely over-populated kitchen than boys swooped in, stealing my friends and leaving me trawling through the house party alone with the echoes of giggling ringing through my ears like a shell-shocked WW1 veteran. I once again found myself upstairs in the room, this time uncomfortably smoking weed with some anti-Islamic Germans, and recoiling with horror as one of my British peers decided it would be hilarious to bring up the holocaust, ‘as a joke’. After laughing myself into a deranged fit at the astounding wit and subtlety of my fellow British representative, one of the boys who stole my friends downstairs strutted into the room, girl in arm, with the arrogance of a man who knows he’s about to get laid, and who knows that everyone else knows it too. He decided to lay claim to his room (‘so you’re the boy who owns two sets of hair slaughterers then…’), and to let us know that in about half an hour he is ‘going to need it’.

Not that, apparently, it made any difference to him as to whether or not he had guests from throughout Europe situated there; as he proceeded to explicitly grope his female companion in front of us all, only taking time out to alleviate my all too pressing concerns and tell me that he thought I was ‘cool’, and that he was only joking with me before (as to what this ‘before’ is I’ll never know, but I think I can safely assume that some of the giggling his female friend was erupting, like a chimp attached to a strangely arousing electric current, was at my expense).

I mean Jesus. Fucking. Christ. This is a man who owns not one, but two, sets of hair strengtheners; has a table that screams ‘I have too much time, money and body odour on my hands’; and yet not only has he managed to get a girl into his room, more desperate to evacuate people than he is (by a seemingly long, long way) – but he actually makes it his concern to leave the girl to her own devices so that he can talk to me in cryptic terms about my ‘regrets’ and how he, ‘Lord Of All That Is Straightened, Shampooed and Conditioned’, would forgive me for my amorphous indiscretions, which he, as the Overlord of Justice at this party, seems to have afflicted me with, if only I would give him a lighter.

Well, I didn’t have one (that I wanted to give him), which enraged this vehicle of backed up sperm tremedously, and I quickly realized that it may be a good time to leave my fellow anti-socials, lest I enrage this drunken, horny, fool anymore and lose valuable ‘man points’ by losing miserably in a fight to a humping, preening, maniac, hell bent on shagging his lady-lover in front of us all us all as society crumbles around him; with all sense of discretion and decency being eroded by the toxic fumes of designer hair spray and expensive aftershave. I left his room in as much of a nonchalant fashion as I could muster, and made my way back downstairs. But, his being the only room in the house where smoking was permitted, I had to spend the rest of the night outside, in the garden, feeling bitter. And it was cold. Really quite cold. The bastard.