house wreck fest 1999
Another in a series of stories from when I was 20 years old, in celebration of the upcoming 10th anniversary of my 20th birthday.
I sometimes wonder if things would have gone differently if it wasn’t for THE PARTY. P’s 20th birthday happened to fall during a long weekend where my grandma decided to go out of town and leave me in the house, mostly because I was twenty and also because I had to work all weekend.
We didn’t have a small house by any means. Three bedrooms, two baths, den, living room, all sitting on about two acres of land, with no direct next door neighbors. Pretty much a party pad if you wanted to have a party. And we did. Because, P was turning 20 and his parents were going through a divorce and it was ruining a lot of things for P and because at the time P was one of my closest friends.
The party took place after a couple of shows downtown, so everyone was going to come over later. My friend R got there early to help me set up and move anything breakable into a closed off room. My friend Audrey brought her turntables and set them up in the kitchen. M did some bbq-ing in the backyard and there was enough booze to choke several elephants. Everyone who showed up kept bringing more. I’d go to open the fridge and cans of beer would go everywhere.
For all of that though, the party was pretty calm. I didn’t really have housewrecker friends by any means and for the most part everyone stayed outside. The only rules were: 1- don’t break anything. 2- don’t drive if you’re too drunk and 3- no one answers the phone but myself or R, who my family knew was staying with me. Simple enough right?
There are always complications with any party. A girl friend of mine getting too drunk and wanting to hook up with me. A few uninvited guests. BBQ fire. An overflown toilet…
Then there was the minor drama. I had been very casually dating a kid from my journalism class who couldn’t get it through his head that I wasn’t his girlfriend and that I had been trying to distance myself from him every since I found out he was still talking to his crazy ex girlfriend. I was just trying to make it through the last week or so of our class together before I dumped him flat out, but he wasn’t getting the hint at all. I really did not want him at the party just because he was kind of a goober to be honest. So we told him the party was at M’s house.
This worked out really well when he drove by my house and saw like fifty cars in my driveway. Whoops. M and R ran interference and I hid in the back bedroom with my other friend K talking out some drama we supposedly had and the guy from my class walked all over my house looking for me and yelling and acting really mad.
“I thought she said the party was at your house bro,” he says to M
“This is my house dude.” M says looking bored.
Eventually the guy left and I got to come out of the bedroom. But he wasn’t the only party crasher we had that night. There was another band in town that I was friends with. Their act included a lot of breaking fruit on stage and wearing John Waters looking costumes. They were all invited but one of their “circle” showed up too. At first it was cool. The guy brought beer and was generally pretty quiet. And then he was too quiet.
We found him in my bathroom first. He’d sort of wet the rug and said he came into the bathroom to get some water. I wasn’t really listening because I was trying to get him into the backyard, since he was kinda all pee covered. He went out back finally and then all of a sudden BOLTED for the backfence and started hurling violently over the fence. We were all confused, P especially since he’d been in another room when we brought Pee Dude outside.
“Yeah dude, I don’t know he said he just drank a glass of water in the bathroom, now he’s puking.” I open another beer and sit down on the backsteps.
“Bathroom? Which bathroom?” P looks frantic and it’s at this point I realize he’s wearing his glasses, which he wasn’t wearing earlier.
“The front bathroom.”
“That wasn’t water.” P says and sits down.
“Wait, what?”
“The dude fucking drank my contact lenses. I left my case at home so I put them in a glass in the bathroom. ON THE TOP OF THE TOILET ORGANIZER! He had to climb up to get them. Fuck.”
“So wait, that guy drank your contact lenses?” I was laughing so hard I was pretty sure beer was going to straight up come out of my nose. P didn’t really see the humor, but there wasn’t much to be done at this point. I’m still pretty sure stomach acid isn’t so great for contact lenses, I don’t care what kind they are.
The party began to break up a little after that and I assigned beds and couches to my friends who were sleeping over. In the morning we all pitched in and cleaned up the house, putting everything back the way we found it, pretty sure I wasn’t going to get caught. I actually did get “ratted out,” by my shithead cousin, but my grandma didn’t even care, the house was cleaner than when she left.
The party though, is the point where I can see that group of friends I had at nineteen starting to come apart, blending into the group of friends I would find after turning twenty and splintering completely. It wasn’t all American Pie or anything, but so many different threads of the same story came out over the course of that night and so many things happened in the quiet afterwards, the drunken talks in darkened bedrooms waiting for the sun to come up, they are what changed everything a few months later.
