I showed up late to the party. I drank two beers quickly to make up for the lost time as I talked to Lauren about her new apartment and how lovely it is. She just moved in with her boyfriend to his fancy flat in Westwood. It’s a “successful” flat, because she is a successful filmmaker. The housewarming party is complete with fancy beers and fancy spreads of exotic meat that I want to eat even though I would never admit how much I still want to eat meat.
And then she excused herself as some friend of hers (but not of mine) greets her, and I begin to talk to her boss, some middle-aged guy who’s cooler than I was at nineteen (he has this slick suit and his hair is gray in the right way). And then all of a sudden, half-way through telling him some story of questionable appropriateness I realize I’m drunk and that I’m being an idiot, and I quickly try to change the topic to “e-books are so popular now, I remember when the Kindle just came out” but he’s already a step ahead of me and he holds a finger up and says,
“Excuse me, I’ll be right back,” and he smiles like,
“Oh God just get me away from this fucking guy,” and as soon as I registered that polite smile I just sat down in the chair under me, and right now I’m staring out at the party going on around me, and now I am thinking about:
How I’m the drunk one at a party full of actual adults who don’t drink to
“socialize,” now they drink to “network,”
How I’m the one who’s not an adult yet, while my friends are all functioning members of society, and
How I’m still in grad school, and that’s probably why my only frame of reference is an apartment party in Evanston circa 2010, and,
How some of my friends are making five- to six-figure incomes already, and I write my dissertation between shifts at the ESL night classes, and about
How my dissertation is shit, and I know it’s shit, I just have to publish something and get my Ph.D., and did I really think I was going to be like Chomsky or Pinker anyway, I mean who was I kidding?
And now Lauren’s boss emerges from the kitchen, he has a glass of water in his hand (this guy just wears gray hair like it’s a fashion statement, it’s really unbelievable), and he comes over to me, and he says:
“Hey, Nick, was it? I was talking to Lauren–” (He’s so cool, he has these mannerisms that are like, “you’re my best friend, but I recognize that you look up to me and that you’re a little jealous of me too”). “She said you two did improv together back in the day. Is that true? She says you were pretty good.”
I guess I nod or something.
“Do you want to audition for this movie?” He laughs a little bit, kind of at himself, “It’s funny, I know this is weird, it’s just–I imagined one of the characters to look and act a lot like you. Kind of–” He stops as he realizes that the next thing out of his mouth would offend me.
“Here, just take my card.”