The Death of the Party
The party ended long before I left.
I was never cool enough to do cocaine.
In retrospect, it seems utterly wild that in all my years of drinking, in all the nights closing down bars, all the afterparties, all the nights out until 4 a.m., the nights where I saw the sun rise before heading home, not once did anyone offer me cocaine. Not one line, not one bump, not one crumb. All those nights, and I didn’t know that my crush in college was an addict until after he went to rehab. That one of my closest friends had a somewhat serious coke problem for a year or three. That my boyfriend who lived in another city was doing coke at parties on the weekends I wasn’t visiting (and maybe some weekends when I was).
And in retrospect, it made sense — how else did everyone stay up until 4 a.m. drinking without help from something else? But I never needed help — alcohol was a high enough. I naively assumed everyone else was like me.
We all drank this much. No one had a problem, it’s not like we were doing cocaine! These glittery nights of excess every weekend were normal — it’s what everyone did. There was always another party.
And for a time, there was. Until it all ended.
Now, looking back, it’s still hard to know when precisely the party died.
It was like one of those nights when you’re having so much fun that you don’t notice you’re one of the last people left in the house and the hosts are trying to kick you out so they can go to bed but even though the lights are bright and the music has been turned off, you keep talking and keep flirting and keep drinking because you’re young and everything is still new and fun and magical and full of possibility and it will never not be this way. Then at some point you look around and the hosts finally gave up and went to bed and the keg kicked long ago and there’s no more liquor floating around and your pack of Camel Lights is empty — you really smoked that much tonight? And the guy you like went home because you were making a drunken fool of yourself, and you look in the mirror and your mascara is smudged down your cheeks — not in a sexy way, but like you’ve been crying. And maybe you have been crying, because the guy left, and you thought this was the night he’d finally kiss you. And your friends are long gone and you finally stumble home in the predawn darkness wondering how it all went wrong. When you wake up the next day — well, the same day, just in the afternoon, so it might as well be the next day — your friends don’t want to meet for brunch to discuss the night before, because somehow they aren’t as hungover as you and don’t need a pitcher of mimosas to feel better. So you think, okay, next weekend will be different. You’ll leave the party early, you won’t drink as much, this time you’ll get the guy.
You never do.
In my late 20s, I left the swingin’ parties of Athens to work for my hometown paper. It was a shitty job but fun — writing a crazy number of stories each week for a weekly community news section that wasn’t part of the newsroom. We were technically under advertising, so the paper’s editor-in-chief never took me seriously, even though I kept writing stories that scooped the Metro desk. Despite my workload, I earned far less than the daily’s staff writers. But it was 2005 and the economy was great and I had credit cards with massive limits and very low interest, so I still went out like I had all the money in the world. Drinks were cheap then, and that was all that mattered.
There was one bar where we hung out the most. It was a pool hall, though I never played. (I preferred darts, although I was terrible at them.) I started going to the bar because my coworkers did — it wasn’t a place I had hung out before; my go-to bars in town were weirder. But somehow this became the place to go for the months I settled into town — months of trying to make friends with my colleagues, of rounds of shots with the sports desk, whom you could always count on to close down the bar since they never got off work before 11 or 12.
I wasn’t at the bar every night — I wasn’t even drinking every night then. But I was there enough that I’d walk in and Tommy — he was always the bartender any given night — would pour my drink before I even got up to the bar. Vodka soda lemon, because calories or fewer hangovers or something factually inaccurate like that. I hadn’t become a wine snob yet. Sometimes I’d alternate the vodka with plain soda and lemon, pretending not to drink so much, never imagining that would be my only drink order in later years.
I was so lonely then, though I never would have named that as my problem. I thought the problem was that my boyfriend — the man I thought for sure I would marry — had broken up with me a few months earlier. All I needed were new friends and a new guy and everything would finally work out before I turned 30. I’d find the right person, I’d get married, my finances would magically improve. I’d be an adult.
I thought my new coworkers would be an instant friend group. For a few weeks, they were, and then I realized the girls didn’t actually like me and the single boys only wanted to fuck me, not to be my friend. The cliquiness stung, but what else could I do?
But at the bar there were other people I knew. It was my hometown, after all. I wasn’t the only person who had moved back. One group in particular was there frequently — a group of guys slightly younger than me, most of whom had grown up in my neighborhood and gone to the same schools. They were my sister’s age, give or take a year or two — boys I never would have thought twice about when growing up, because I never had any interest in younger boys in high school. But now those gawky adolescents were in their mid-20s, and two or three of the guys seemed interesting, potential boyfriend material even.
Now I think part of the appeal — beyond the fact that I was incredibly lonely — was a perceived ability to rewrite the narrative about myself. I had never been popular growing up and never felt like I fit into my wealthy community. I didn’t have the ease in moving through the world that comes with generations of WASP privilege, and I was more comfortable with my head stuck in a book than on a tennis court. I had never dated a single person at my high school, much less anyone in my neighborhood. And this group — these were the cool kids, the rich kids, the handsome kids, not the smartass misfits I had been friends with in high school. (Friends whom I still loved dearly but who had not moved back, with one exception.) And so what if they weren’t the cool kids in my own grade? They would do.
There was one night I thought it might all work out. I was invited to an afterparty at the house of this guy notorious for throwing the wildest parties in high school. I had never been to one of his parties — never invited, never knew enough to crash, and my parents were too strict to let me go anyway. But this night, a decade after high school, I went. This night I was a part. There were people in a hot tub. It was light when I got home. A guy even asked me out.
That fling only lasted a few dates, though we stayed friends for longer. Still, I never became a part of the group as a whole. I was occasionally invited to things. I went to parties and stood around and felt uncomfortable and drank too much. The guy on whom I had the biggest crush paid me no attention.
I was the thinnest I’d been since 8th grade, taking hot yoga and pilates, wearing the same silk halter tops, strappy stilettos and bootcut James jeans as the rest of the women in their crowd. But I was still me. Still the same unpopular awkward weirdo at heart. Still a budding alcoholic. Still a vat of need that no amount of male attention could fill.
Eventually I started dating someone in Atlanta, and I spent half my weekends at bars down there. A new restaurant opened a block from the paper, and I started drinking mid-priced wine there instead of well vodka at the pool hall, because it seemed more grown-up. I slowly gave up once more on ever fitting in at home.
A week ago I went to the funeral of one of those guys from the pool hall. We were never truly friends; I was always closer to his sister. But he had been in my life since he was a toddler, a small child in preschool with my sister. I remember hijinks from elementary school, from church. He was a “handful” in the parlance of adults; more accurately someone with an irrepressible spirit. A person who could make the room laugh. Ultimately, during those years in the aughts, the life of the party.
He was a DJ then. A fun one, not a tedious techno bro. I remember dancing my ass off in a teal Rebecca Taylor dress and 5-inch silver Kate Spade platform heels at one Christmas party he DJ’d in 2006 and feeling like everything in the world was mine for the taking — the boys, the booze, the jobs, the pretty expensive clothes that would always look good on my perfect body that I still hated for not being thin enough. We ended the night at an afterparty down the street in someone’s loft/office, which for some reason had a giant swing inside. And we swung back and forth, these dramatic arcs up and down, laughing and laughing, and nothing could have felt better than the swoosh of my stomach, the champagne coursing through my bloodstream. Even tripping on those silver heels walking back to my boyfriend’s car, ripping my fishnets and bloodying my knee — even fighting with my boyfriend over staying out so late with people he didn’t know because he lived in Atlanta — nothing could have made that night more magical than it was.
At some point the bloody knees start catching up with you.
When I first got sober, I thought a lot about when the alcohol turned on me, when things stopped being fun, wondering why I didn’t quit drinking then. That next year was the start of the turn, as the wine slowly started to become a necessity instead of an instrument of fun. Not long after that party, I moved away to one of a series of five cities I’d live in over the next decade, and I lost touch with that whole crowd beyond the occasional social media posts. I stopped closing down bars and started drinking at home. I quit smoking, and when I came home to visit, hanging out in a smoky pool hall seemed unappealing. Besides, no one I knew was there anymore. Everyone had moved on.
I think that even for people who don’t spend their 20s in bars and clubs, your 30s are still a time of significant adjustments, of shifting priorities and friendships. People have kids. People focus more seriously on their careers. People buy homes and have responsibilities and ostensibly grow up. If you go out to meet friends, it’s for happy hour or dinner, not at 10 p.m. An afterparty? Ludicrous. Even most people who did party a little too much in their 20s can tone it back down. You might have a couple of beers on a Saturday watching football, a margarita out with your girlfriends. You’ll wake up with a hangover after splitting a bottle of wine, wondering how you ever used to drink like you did back then.
I am not most people. Neither was the DJ. Neither were so many others, with no rhyme or reason to those we’ve lost and those who are somehow still alive. None of it is fair. None of it makes any sense. The universe is a cold and unforgiving emptiness.
The last time I remember being at a party with him was in 2008 — a New Year’s party. I’m not sure that was actually the last time I saw him DJ, and it surely wasn’t the last time we were drinking in the same place. But that night was the first time I had felt a part of in months.
I was back in town for a few weeks before moving to Mississippi. That year had been rough — trying to get over the end of the relationship in Atlanta, losing friends who chose my ex over me, making new friends, trying on new careers, being laid off even from my waitressing job. Yet, at the end of the year, it felt like hope. Obama, of course. A new job in a new town. And one last party, just like all the old ones.
That was the last time, I think, that I danced like that. That everything was fun and light and joyful. That I felt pretty and young and not sad instead, sad for everything I’d lost, everything I’d continue to lose in the years to come. I was 31, and I still thought I could change my narrative. He DJed, and I danced and danced. I wrote after that night, “I drank exactly the perfect amount (so that I was drunk but not wasted and completely worthless the next day) and spent far too much money. I danced all night to a good mix of hip-hop and MIA, MGMT and other initialed bands until my shoe broke. … For the first time in a long time, I was completely fine about not getting a New Year’s kiss.”
I thought of that moment as I saw his family place his ashes in the ground last week, surrounded by so many of his friends, so many people I still picture as kids running around the playground with my sister. I saw the crushes from long ago who never liked me back — married now, and, I hope, happy. I saw the parents I grew up with who seemed so impossibly adult when I was a child and now, I realize, were so much younger than I am now. I saw the unfairness of being at the funeral of someone you babysat, someone you taught, someone who shouldn’t have died at 44. And I thought how stark the silence was as we stood outside — no song, no hymn, no instrument in sight. But what can you play to cover up the sound of so many hearts breaking?
I don’t miss much about drinking. Sometimes I feel the absence of pairing the perfect wine with a meal, sometimes I wish for just one glass of bourbon to sip slowly as I read. The cravings pass, and no momentary pleasure would be worth what would follow if I poured anything. I can live with that.
But sometimes I find myself yearning for those nights, those parties, more than anything. The slinky silk dresses, the extreme eyeliner with no wrinkles to mess it up, the sparkly clips in my hair, the high heels I can never wear again without serious injury. The dancing and the laughing and the flirting and the feeling so high, like nothing could ever bring you down, like you were flying. And those nights ended so long ago, so much sooner than my drinking did, but sometimes I still think there must be a way to get back there, to feel it all that way again.
What I’m missing, I must keep reminding myself, is not the cheap champagne, not the whiskey cold on ice. Not the sour PBR, not the watery gin and tonics, not the overly oaked boxed red wine that you finally pour at 1 a.m. because it’s the only thing left to drink. No, what I’m missing is my youth. What’s vanished isn’t the fun alcohol used to provide, it’s the brightness of life before the world beat us down. Before we started dying.
It’s funny how for years you drink because you’re so alive, and then, when the party ends, you keep drinking so you won’t have to think about death, even though it’s killing you, and you want to die every day.
And by you, I mean me.
I don’t know why one day I finally decided I didn’t want to die anymore. I don’t know how long this feeling will last, and I don’t take it for granted. If I make it another two weeks, 2023 will be the first calendar year I haven’t consumed alcohol since adolescence. January will be 18 months sober. I haven’t written about it because there’s not much to say — alcohol consumed my life until there wasn’t much life left, and now I have one again. It feels good, truly.
A few days ago, an old friend randomly messaged me with a picture from that era. He had no clue I had been remembering those years, but there I was — thin as a rail, wearing an orange silk camisole with beaded trim, those James jeans, an ivory bedazzled cardigan. I’m talking with my hands, half perched on a kitchen stool next to a friend. The picture is blurry, but I’m clearly drunk. Empty cans of Steel Reserve and Sparks line the counter, a few bottles of High Life and one champagne bottle beside them. A New Year’s party? Someone’s birthday? The details are lost to time.
And that’s all left now of those days, when we had fun like we never will, never can again. Blurry memories. A few photos. Scar tissue from all the bloody knees.
It’s better than nothing.
“Because if memory exists outside of the flesh it won't be memory because it won't know what it remembers so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be. Yes, he thought, between grief and nothing I will take grief.”1
William Faulkner, The Wild Palms. Of course, Faulkner famously paraphrased these classic lines in his interview with The Paris Review in 1956:
“FAULKNER: My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
INTERVIEWER: Bourbon, you mean?
FAULKNER: No, I ain’t that particular. Between Scotch and nothing, I’ll take Scotch.”
You are a brave and honest and insightful woman, Cari Wade Gervin. Thank you.
Beautiful piece, Cari