The Brooklyn Labor Day Party of 2004 was not my idea. It’s actually quite repetitive to mention that it wasn’t my idea, since none of the Brooklyn parties were my idea. I was dead against each and every one of them.
Against the trips to Costco, where we spent hundreds of dollars for the privilege of attempting to wrestle bulk containers of tortilla chips out of the pale, bony fingers of the Hassid wives who had laid claim to the unleavened bread section of the store.
Against the Friendster invites passed along to maybe fifteen of Bootsy’s friends, all three of my friends and all five hundred and sixty three of Crazy Ho’s friends.
Against Crazy Ho printing out invitations and passing them out to the people hanging out on the stoops of the neighboring areas. Indiscriminately to seven foot tall, 400 pound black guys with “Thugz 4 Life” tattooed on their inner lips, to 18 year old Puerto Rican transvestites, oddly dressed in outfits eerily similar to the one Crazy Ho would be wearing herself, smelly Hasid's who would cross the street to avoid being handed the invitation from the hand of a woman who was not their wife, and then cat call her from across the street, assorted hipsters hanging out at the BQE Bar or the local Laundromat where they were making sure their trucker hats were perfectly laundered, to the Soprano wannabes playing poker on the astro turf lawn of their social club.
I was against all of it. Especially the Put me in Labor Day Party. Aside from the name, I was actually expected to wear underwear or a bikini to host this cast of characters in my own home. Why did I agree to this obvious disaster you ask? Well, for one, you couldn't really say no to Crazy Ho without risking being suffocated in your sleep, two, her argument was that my bedroom looked like the Wall St. chapter of an AA meeting 6 nights out of 7 anyway so it wasn't like I could pretend I didn't like to party and three, it was summer and I was unemployed. What else was I really going to do with my time?
Labor Day that year fell right after my triumphant return from Europe. I was crazy about talking to EVERYBODY since I had basically been restricted to speaking to my family and Alabaster for a month straight... meaning that unless I wanted to talk about food, Prada or how hot our bellboys ass was... I was silent.
As a result, I had invited maybe a dozen potential hookups that I had met since Id been back in the US, plus an old hook up from before I had left. Put Me in Labor may have been a perfect theme for that party in fact, despite my total lack of desire to be there.
The Put Me in Labor Day party also marked the premier of the massive sand pit we had created in our back yard. We had taken it upon ourselves upon moving in to fill the 8 by 8 backyard area with sand, a barbecue pit and tiki torches, much to the chagrin of our conservative Italian neighbors who favored the far more subtle plastic saint collection for their yards. When we created it it looked pretty decent, but by the end of the Labor Day party it looked more like Jones Beach... filled with cigarette butts and used condoms and smelling faintly but unmistakably of urine.
To be honest, I remember very little of the party itself. Perhaps it’s because it was so very long ago.... or perhaps it was that entire bottle of Malibu I downed before the first guest arrived. What I do remember seems pretty consistent with what Brooklyn parties usually entailed....
Crazy Ho’s underaged sister and a gaggle of her friends showed up and finished the first keg almost entirely on their own, after which the surviving member of Nada Surf (you remember them, yes? One hit wonders from the late nineties?) showed up. They were in their 40’s by then and apparently had been reduced to showing up at and party where drunken underage girls were assembled en mass.
Due to the fact that I was wearing underwear and nothing else, I had so much to drink, smoke and snort that by the time my guests arrived I was in perfect shape to vomit on their shoes.
I was sexiled from my own bedroom by my future roommate Teeny, who used it to hook up with some hot foreigner, as is her way.
My friend Gabby decided it would be in her best interest to go down on some total stranger in our second floor stairwell.... that was the day our upstairs neighbor decided to move out. (In our defense, when we moved in, she did say to us “the last girls who lived her were crack heads, so anything you guys do short of smoking crack will be an improvement”... and we knew a challenge when we heard one).
Sometime around three in the morning the cops showed up, and knowing that we had an apartment full of illegal drugs, underage girls we were plying with liquor, a bowl full of roofies punch and Im pretty sure a ring set up for midget wrestling, I decided to go out and talk to them. I have NO idea what it was I said, but I do know that it ended with one of them coming inside and doing a shot of tequila off of me.
Alabaster deciding he was “just drunk enough” to drive home, then stopping at the stop sign at the end of our block for an hour waiting for it to turn green.
Waking up on the couch the next morning next to some guy from Texas who was now wearing my underwear.
In retrospect, it was actually a pretty awesome party. My liver has almost completely recovered from it, too! And you’ll be happy to know, no one was actually “put in labor” at our Labor Day party.... although to be fair that may have had something to do with our Post Labor Day Scrambled Eggs and Emergency Contraception Brunch the following Tuesday.
