I’m not much of a partyer these days. On most nights, I listen to public radio and yell at my upstairs neighbor to turn down her goddamn music and stop talking to her goddamn friends so loud. (As you can imagine, I’m very popular.) I occasionally eat meals outside of my house and go to book readings and talks where I’m the youngest person in the audience by about 70 years, but I rarely go out anymore. It’s just not my thing; my thing is staying home with my girlfriend and my soft pants. But one night last winter, an old friend was in town, and so I decided to leave my girlfriend and my soft pants and meet my old pal at Pony, a gay bar on Capitol Hill. Maybe I would even get a drink. Wild.
Now, my old friend—let’s call her “Rya”—actually is wild. And when we met, I was wild, too: I drank, I smoked, I broke local, state, and federal laws on a regular basis, and I got in so many boozy accidents that I have two fake teeth and a scar that looks like Adolf Hitler on my shoulder. I also burned down a porch. That’s just how life was in my 20s: unpredictable, well-lubricated, and, from the glimpses of memory I still possess, pretty fucking fun. A special highlight of this time was when I was a go-go dancer in a rock ‘n’ roll band. I have about as much natural rhythm as Ted Cruz, but at the time I was in possession of the one quality required to go-go dance in a band called Shit Horse: no shame. For three—or was it four?—years, I jumped around on many a stage wearing tighty-whities, a horse-head mask, and flesh-toned pasties so it looked like I’d had my nipples surgically removed. These days, the only shows I go to are seated.
