April Fool’s Night (Part 1)
On April Fool’s night of 2017, I was seized by an intense urge to go out drinking. It came to me, as all good ideas do, in the shower while micromanaging the hot and cold levers for the optimal temperature.
“Yes, Alek,” I said to myself beneath the scalding water, “this is truly a night for revelry.”
Let me pause here and say how rare it is for me to actually wish explicitly for a night of revelry. Though not as infrequent or predictable as a cicada’s lifecycle, my emergences into the world are just as noisy and public.
So! When I do actually feel a natural Inclination to Party, I like to act on it because I have no idea when it will happen again. And this wasn’t on a Tuesday after breakfast — no, this was on a Saturday at 8pm, so the situation was normal enough that I should have had no trouble gathering a squad or at least a partner-in-crime.
Or so I thought.
7:46 pm
I began with friends I had texted in the past 24 hours. These were the most likely to agree since we had communicated recently. Perhaps they, too, had been possessed by an Inclination to Party? I would have to text them, casually and without desperation.
Me: “yooooo, what are you up to tonite?”
Most Of My Friends: “heyyyyy I’m out of town or am already doing something or would literally rather sit in my bed than hang out with you!”
Me: “cooooool!”
Let me pause here to say that “yo” and its longer variation “yooooo” are not words I’ve ever said out loud. Nor would I misspell “tonight” out loud. But the real point here is that Texting Alek is a very cool guy, as shown by his choice of vernacular, but he almost never makes it out, instead sending me as an understudy.
And like all people who go to plays to see a certain performer but receive the understudy version instead, there is inevitably sadness and all-around disappointment at seeing me appear at an event if you’ve been primed for Texting Alek. But I still say the lines and sing the songs, and people go home having enjoyed the play immensely but with a bad taste in their mouths, and they just know the whole thing could have been A+ if only it was the real deal and not a crummy understudy.
Each friend I texted gave a different reason than the last: as if they were all in one room colluding so they wouldn’t have to tell The Truth: that they were all in one room hanging out without me.
I imagined people from every one of my social circles, drinking whiskey sours at a sophisticated house party. For some reason, the “Deep Ocean” episode of Planet Earth was playing in the background, lending academic, thoughtful overtones to the whole experience I was missing.
But! I shook these phantasms from my head and resumed my fevered texting, scraping the bottom of my social barrel for people who really had no reason to drink with me:
The roommate of a cousin’s friend I had met at a house party? Sure. The best friend of my sister’s boyfriend? Why not. Even my enemies grew attractive behind the goggles of isolation and madness.
My consternation grew with each reason my friends gave, and I knew I was cursed — that I wasn’t meant to go out that evening. Something didn’t want me on the streets. Perhaps a guardian angel was protecting me from a fatal accident? No, my friends just sucked.
At the height of my despair, it would have been easy to slump under the covers like a defeated gladiator, except alive. Actually, I don’t think gladiators had covers on their beds, if they even had beds.
Even my analogies sucked!
I don’t remember how I rallied. But a deep, dark core of my being was enraged at being denied my party time, and I decided “To hell with literally everyone I know in San Francisco! I’m going out alone! No one can stop me! But I wish someone would! Because then I could hang out with them!”
As soon as I made this announcement to myself, I Googled “is going out alone appropriate?”. Google didn’t know for sure but was pretty confident it wasn’t explicitly illegal, adding that I would probably have a decent time if I just kept my expectations low.
“Good,” I said to my empty studio apartment. “I can do that.”
And then I flipped on an inspirational mix of retrofuturistic tunes: Sunset Blood, an original soundtrack for an imaginary movie made in the 80s, lovingly crafted by an artist called “Starcadian”. Go listen to it, it’s great.
As I put in my contacts and changed into my best and bluest chambray shirt, I made sure to synchronize my motions with the music, as if I was in a montage. This ended up being difficult because I discovered that it takes longer than the length of a montage to prepare yourself for a night out by yourself. So I had to restart the montage halfway-through to time everything correctly. As I dressed, I sent more texts to all my contacts to ensure they knew I was going out alone — nothing like planting a bit of guilt for the future!
But eventually I was ready. And I strolled out of my apartment with confidence, locked the door firmly behind me, hopped down the steps, dodged the man urinating at the gate of my complex and swung myself into the streets, gulping in the fresh air of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district.
What a night to be alive!
Read the next part.
