Restless Nights: Dressing up a drunkard doesn’t make her desirable

Walking up the stoop, I avoided looking too hard or too poignantly at the slightly speckled trash can as memories of the night before mingled with oozing weeks of truncated sleep and a lingering semi-flu of bleary readings and twice-snoozed alarms. I ended, hours later, rolling around on some bedroom floor listening to Shackleton, too drunk to think, while someone shouted “Where the weed at? Roll that shit up!” and pointed to a half-empty Ziploc bag.

Inside now, my friends were choosing the music, and we danced loudly in the middle of the room as the other early birds flapped about the bar. “I’m loving this!” Gabby told the empty dance floor, and my hand agreed by cracking a snare as my foot kicked the drums.

Slowly the party filled up, a catholic mix of bards and sages whom I mostly didn’t recognize, but here and there was someone to whom I would wave, because the music was too loud to talk. “Out in the streets!” went the speakers and I squealed with anticipation, getting into the groove and hooking into the tune, lost inside the vocals, delaying, overlapping, an unresolved two minutes of nothing even matters.

The tension was broken by an ugly shriek—“What did you come as?”—and my mind whipped back to the room. The girl gave me a look that said she was used to being thought attractive and as she grabbed my shoulders she expected me to think the same. I was taken by surprise, a little distant, half-listening to where I wanted to be, mumbled at her vain questions, looked embarrassed over her shoulder.

I tried to push her away and said that she’d need to give me a bit of room to enjoy this song, but she kept saying she couldn’t hear me so I said instead that I didn’t like her humping my leg. Bitten, she stepped away, pulled out her phone, and said that she didn’t know where her friends were. She needn’t have gone away at that point, but she did.

Downstairs with a cigarette, sitting in a comfy chair, I met Ben, who had dropped out of school to join the Navy. “I don’t want to look back in 20 years’ time and regret not having done it.”

“It’s going to be a life changer,” I said, and he nodded.

“If you never change, you never know.”

The costumes were tiring to look at, too much and too obvious. We looked across the room to some pushed-up superhero breasts and laughed. Choose between that, I suggested, and a discreet French girl with a long dress and low-cut back, looking over her shoulder with a half smile. Too much, too much. Who were these breasts?

As if by divine cue, somebody was reaching behind me into a jacket pocket and, blocking my sight, framed a glimpse of a pretty midriff on a girl just over there. I knew in a second that she had more to hide than to show. I chatted more with Ben, and the girl sat on the other side of him, throwing sly looks while I tried to catch her eye and say, Hello, but it was too loud and too many drunken thoughts were flying around in the brag and chatter.

“Every Australian I have ever met has been stupid drunk,” she said to me a minute later and it made me all the more glad that I was smartly sober. She had asked for a cigarette that I’d like to think she didn’t really want, and now we were talking. “Robin Hood,” she said about the bow slung across my shoulder, and I nodded happily. She’d forgotten to bring her slutty Catgirl costume and I still laughed even though I’d heard the joke before.

We had to leave, they said, and I kept her in the corner of my eye so she wouldn’t go off home before I could get her number. I talked quietly with a friend who is from France and he said that his accent hadn’t gotten him anywhere that night. But “Fuck eet!” he said. He wanted to find someone who liked him for who he was, and he had a thick French accent! Someone yelled his name, and he turned, dropping the pumpkin with which he’d been playing.

It bounced on the ground and cracked, squashing the carved face into the ground and flecking it with dirt. I was ready to go home by then, and even though I set it back on the step, the pumpkin looked silly now, and I wondered whether it had looked silly before as well.

Kemble Walker is a Columbia College sophomore, majoring in music and German. Restless Nights runs alternate Fridays.