There’s no elbow room in the small apartment—almost literally.
“Lars! Great party, man.” Some guy you sort of recognize claps you on the shoulder, but by the time he touches you, he’s not even looking at your face anymore. The crowd swallows him.
There are no paper hats or noisemakers. No fireworks. Just the keg, just red plastic Dixie cups in every hand, rolling on the floor, getting cracked and flattened by high top sneakers, motorcycle boots, pumps. Just Motorhead blaring from the stereo. Diamondhead. Gimmehead.
“Fucking great party, man.”
“Yeah, fucking wild, huh?” you yell back to whoever this guy is. It probably sounds like you mean it, too. Just beyond the guy you can see his girl trying to get a look at you over his shoulder. You must be somebody now, huh, people wanting to touch you, be near you, have you say meaningless shit to them.
“TEN!”
You turn around, your red plastic Dixie cup feeling like sweat against your fingers.
“NINE!”
“EIGHT!”
No confetti’s going to drop from this ceiling.
“SEVEN!”
“SIX!”
No one’s going to put “Auld Lang Syne” on the turntable.
“FIVE!”
“FOUR!”
Vaguely you acknowledge to yourself that you’re not yelling along with the rest of them.
“THREE!”
“TWO!”
You catch a glimpse of Kirk, his arm around a girl’s shoulders. He’s grinning as he shouts
“ONE!”
“HAPPY NEW YEAR!”
You watch him bend the girl back into a dip and kiss her, a showy kiss. You lift your gaze. There’s kissing everywhere, and if not kissing, hugging. Hooting and hollering. Someone gives your shoulder a quick squeeze. Yeah, yeah, happy new year. So long ’86. Nothing can get shittier than this year was.
You drink warm beer from your red plastic Dixie cup.
Nothing except having to live with shit you can’t go back and undo.
The rooms is full of laughing and kissing and cheering. Instead of confetti, red Dixie cups get thrown in the air. Not everyone throws an empty one.
You turn, and just as you do, James passes by, close, not so much as glancing your way. His upper arm knocks against your shoulder, hard. Hard enough to turn you sideways a little.
“Hey—” You reach out and grab his arm before he’s swallowed by the crowd.
He looks back. He looks like he’s having as grand a time as you.
“Come here. Hey. Happy new year, fucker.” You throw an arm up around his neck. It’s like hugging a tree—he stands there, stiff and awkward and unmoving, putting up with it because it’s one of those things you have to put up with in the world.
He smells like beer and Barbasol.
Stiffly he pats your back with a flat-open hand, the signal that, okay, the hug’s over, go on and let go of me now.
You sink down off your toes, taking your arm back. There’s a moment when you see his eyes and you know he sees yours. Shared misery. Then someone knocks into your back. Beer splashes up out of your cup onto your shirt, your arm, the floor.
“Fuck!” You switch the cup to your other hand and shake out the beer-wet one. “Motherfuck.”
When you look up, the crowd has swallowed James.
The rest of the night runs you down. You spend it on your feet. You give up somewhere around 3:00am on trying to get people to go the fuck home—you head for your bedroom instead and put its door between you and them.
You still have a red Dixie cup in your hand. You still have the light off. The moon shines through the window blinds onto the top of the bookshelf you meant to use as a make-shift dresser; it got stuffed with magazines, paperwork and cassette tapes instead. Phone numbers, baggage tags, 50-yen pieces with holes in their middles, a couple wadded Canadian dollars. You push a sweatshirt off the top of the bookshelf and set your red Dixie cup down. Step back and pull your t-shirt up over your head. Cool air from the open window—it must be in the low 40s out tonight—prickles your skin, but it’s good. On the other side of the bedroom door it’s too damned stuffy. Airless. All those people sucking the air up into their lungs, blowing stale air back out when they ran their mouths.
A sound like whispering secrets turns your head. The moonlight doesn’t reach your bed, but it lights the darkness in the room enough for you to make out that your bed has a hump on it.
Great. Just great.
You pad over. “Hey. Hey.” You lean over and give a shove at what you correctly guess is the upper side of an arm.
There’s a familiar groan, and then the hump’s other arm pulls a pillow up over its head.
“What the fuck are you doing in my room?” you ask James.
He mumbles thickly.
“Huh?” You’re popping the buttons on your fly, pushing your jeans down and off. You adjust your underwear, then snap the band. “Hey, I didn’t hear you. What’s wrong with your room?” You put a knee on the bed, a hand on his shoulder. Give him a nudge and he, groaning, spills half onto his back, his eyes squeezed closed, his forehead creased.
“mumble mumble puke in my bed.”
“You puked in your fucking bed?”
James’s upper lip curls. “No.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, eyes still closed, forehead still creased. “Some fucking asshole puked in my fucking bed.” He rubs his tongue against the roof of his mouth; it makes his chin move side to side. “Fucker,” he spits out sourly.
You smile at that. It’s probably the best you’ve felt all night.
“Just don’t hog the fucking blankets this time, okay?” you say as you climb into bed.
“Fuck, your feet are fucking blocks ice,” he says, jerking his shins away from your toes. “Keep ’em on your own fucking side of the bed.”
“Night,” you say and settle onto your side, facing the window.
James returns a sluggish “G’night”. The sheets whisper a few more secrets as he gets comfortable behind you.
Your arm is shoved under your pillow, cradling it against your cheek. “Happy new year,” you say.
“F’n’yea.”
After staring at the lines of the window blinds for half a minute, you close your eyes.
Behind you, James moves around a little.
Then there’s quiet. You watch the slats of the blinds again.
James is breathing like something’s sitting on his chest, the air going in and coming out slow and heavy.
The rest of the apartment is dull thumps and murmurs split with the occasional too-loud laugh. In the morning, you’ll probably find people passed out everywhere. Puke everywhere. Beer everywhere. Red plastic Dixie cups stuck to all of it. You close your eyes. The darkness behind your lids is soothing, but it makes time feel like steel tracks spooling away under a locomotive’s iron wheels.
Staring at the window blinds instead is like stopping the train and getting out to stand on the railroad ties.
You bring your upper arm under the blankets, where it’s warm. Your cheek is cool, too, from the open window, but it feels good.
Behind you, James shifts closer.
You feel him sleepily trying to figure out where to put his arm.
It winds up with its elbow behind your hip, forearm going up your side, hand loose in front of your shoulder.
It’s a small bed.
The warm air trapped between your back and his front feels good, the contrast between that and the chilly air against your cheek.
You watch the blinds, maybe a little glad about the puke in James’s bed. This is the closest you’ve felt to being connected to anything remotely real in months.
Behind you, James’s breath deepens.
You blink a few times, your eyes starting to sting.
James’s arm grows heavy.
Realizing with a jolt that your eyes have closed, you blink them open.
Unlike the sun, the moon doesn’t seem to walk a path through the room. The brightest point is still the top corner of your bookshelf with the red Dixie cup on it.
James sighs, an exhale that’s almost a “huhn”. His hand gets so heavy that gravity pulls it forward, dropping its knuckles against the sheet in front of you. Your ribs feel cool against his forearm.
“Do you think,” you ask, your voice not at all loud in the dark room, “it’s ever gonna be okay someday?”
With James asleep, you don’t expect an answer.
But his arm comes up and tightens against your chest.
You relax into the darkness behind your eyelids.
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