New Years Déjà vu

Things were spinning dangerously out of control. Surely I had gone too far this time. Even in the midst of the moment I recognized an absence of discipline in my behavior, my speech, my movement, and my actions. There were people everywhere. Who were these people? Loud music bellowed out of speakers at the far wall near windows over looking Second Avenue. The deafenening sounds reverberated off the walls and condensed around my head making me even dizzier as I navigated through tightly knit cliques dispersed around the apartment. I recognized a group of girls huddled around the couches at the East wall of the apartment. Why did they look so familiar? They seemed intent on ignoring or dismissing me as I approached. The whiskey swashed violently around the bottle of Jim Beam I carried at my side like a harbinger of reckless misbehavior. I was dumb to all around me as I continued toward them when a memory struck me like a blow to the head. It was from earlier in the evening…I think. I recognized the vague scene in my mind as I stood conversing with them earlier. Then I remembered something going horribly wrong, loud, angry yelling in my direction. It came back to me in a sickening flash.

“Beth! Her name is Beth! Stop calling her Liz you fucking idiot!”

I had spent the entire night calling that girl the wrong name in front of all her friends. My actions were even more inexcusable given the fact that I met her over a year ago and partied with her countless times since then.

My view shifted from blurry recollections back to the present and I awkwardly changed direction to avoid walking into fiery pack of livid females. My mind was elsewhere anyways. Where were the friends that accompanied me here? This scene was all borderline familiar to me. I had seen these people before in one drunken night or another. My friends though had come with me from Jersey and were strangers to this crowd. How were they faring? I spotted one, comfortably standing with a group of my friends holding what I assumed to be some sort of vodka cocktail in a red plastic cup. I scanned the apartment for the other and he wasn’t hard to find.

His glazed over eyes seemed to stare at everyone at once. He wore some sort of jacket/sweatshirt contraption that he adorned despite the heat of the densely populated living room. All the while his short, spiked hair remained remarkably unaltered by any of his imaginative dance moves. In the fifteen seconds I stood observing him he passed through four different girls, rotating his attention from one to the other while he showered them in his masculine wiles half removing his jacket/sweatshirt and shifting it provocatively from side to side. Regretfully, it seemed the only person taking this dance seriously was himself.

Things were growing worse I thought. We had already lost one man to the cruel consequences of drink as he sat unconscious on the couch right at the center of this high energy gathering. My attempts to wake him proved futile and so he sat out this New Years drunk and unconscious while some tearful mess explained her life’s problems to him not quite comprehending that his sighs of approval were in fact just snores of slumber.

People continued giving me questionable looks when they noticed the gleaming glass bottle of Jim Beam firmly entrenched in my grip. My liberal swigs of the bronze liquor sent sickening shivers down their spines. They feared the actions I might take, and probably even more so the actions of my digestive system. I assured them I had done this before not knowing how else to comfort these strange beings around me. Even those I was friends with began to lose their shape. The booze filled my head with nonsense and my eyes with mist and at that point I stopped recognizing anyone.

2009 had already arrived it seemed. How long had I been living in this new year unaware of its arrival? The bathroom seemed to me the most logical place to look for answers. Four girls occupied the line to the restroom. I remember speaking to the one nearest me. What I said is beyond my powers of recollection; I only remember understanding a common loss of reality in both of us. Perhaps it was this joint absence of sense that brought us together in a sloppy mouth embrace. Whatever it was, I’m hopeful the concentrated whiskey on my breath killed any and all possible oral diseases that could have passed from one mouth to the other. As I walked away I looked down at my bottle. Where had all of it gone? Perhaps only a tenth of the whiskey remained, my mouth and stomach now a scorching host to the bourbon that had once resided in that bottle.

I then heard banging on the bathroom door and turned just in time to see my flamboyantly dancing friend emerge along side another female attendee of the party. He seemed confused and aimless as he staggered towards me. My other friend met us there; him being the only voice still on the side of reason. He gently ushered us to gather our coats recognizing the dangers of remaining here any longer when the booze had so clearly led us astray. So this was 2009, an aimless drunken foray into vaguely familiar scenes and ill advised hook ups. Even while obliterated I could feel the striking sense of déjà vu hovering above me as we stumbled back to my apartment and passed out for the first time of 2009.