Mannerless Children Who Won’t Share Their Drugs

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

We were sort of embarrassed about bringing the fancy beer. Scratch that. I was embarrassed. I had a nagging feeling that we should bring something awful, Natural Light maybe, so the children wouldn’t think we were so terribly bourgeois. But no, Paul insisted on something more grown-up, more imported, less shitty and hipster. And the Stella Artois, our beloved Belgian yuppie brew—well, the Stella was on sale.

And so we went back to the party—my little brother’s party for his girlfriend’s birthday, at the chic dump of an art space where she’s moved in with him, that’s how much she loves him so. And rather than lugging our 12er around, we stuck it in a closet, so the children could steal it. It’s a party! Beer, like information, wants to be free!

I was properly enthralled with the opening act, DJ SlutFuck, who played awesome mixes about periods and tampons before shifting into awful Norwegian-metal-style-Monster Grinding of Death. Beside us, an adorable girl of five-foot-nothing bopped back and forth, actually dancing, as if DJ SlutFuck were playing actual music. This party was fun! And I got misty (again) on my Long Beach City days, when I was young and sassy and most people liked me. In those days, we went to parties where we stayed out past 10! And people lived in groovy art spaces, like the Space, or Bong Leach, outside of which one fine New Year’s Eve my dear friend Skeith got roughed up by some pigs who wanted to know exactly why we—three young white people, as they explained, explicitly, over and over again—were in an area bounded by “the blacks” to one side and “the Mexicans” to the other. We didn’t want to rat out the illegal venue to whose afterparty we were on our way, and so Skeithy ended up cuffed on the hood of my car while the shorter of the pigs made time with my homegirl Arrissia; I’m pretty sure they discussed the finer points of Dickens. Eventually, when two or three dozen other youngs made their way by us, it became clear we were not there to do shady business, and the coppers, with great sadness, were somewhat forced to let us go.

A small time after we got back from our beer run, we found my brother’s former roommate, Rudy, hiding in the attic. Hey, this party was weird! But then my brother’s girlfriend’s hot mom came, with giant boxes of snacks, and so we were glad we had stuck around. It was so nice to meet her! As well as the little five-foot-nothing recent college grad we chatted up on the sidewalk! She is considering a sojourn in grad school for either an MBA or a master’s in public policy and public health! I think she should do that! Indeed! And then we talked to the most delightful young man, in one of those Max-from-Where the Wild Things Are animal caps (of course, and again), and he was really kind of stupid, nattering pretentiously about how this particular venue, where John and his nice girlfriend now live, had saved the young man’s life by reopening, and how before that he’d been forced to hang out at this underground place in Hollywood, and how it was very exclusive and had been written up in The New York Times, and there was something else annoying, I forget, as one tends to when one’s gotten a contact high.

And here’s the thing, children: If you are at a party, and you are holding, and you do not want to share with the other partygoers, you have to go and hide somewhere while you do your drugs. Even if you’re not at a party—let’s say you’re at a concert, or a club! The gracious, civilized way to behave is to pass it cheerfully to the left hand side. Don’t worry. It will come your way again! Instead, one kid stubbed out his joint when I joined the circle; another, a few minutes later, offered to sell me some. You want to sell me marijuana at a party? Get out!

No, I mean it. Leave the party at once.

Eventually, a comedian started, as they are so wont to do. He was wearing weird running shoes with individual toes, and he had big Jewy hair, and his performance came with a prerecorded laugh track—it was really very meta!—and he was disturbingly intense, at least in his feral and sort of upped-out body language. I never did hear a word he said—the children never did shut up.

Soon after that was when we hit the road—it was so very terribly loud, and 10 p.m. was nigh. We had had a lovely time, and when we found our last eight beers had disappeared from the closet, we didn’t mind a whit! Before we got gone, I told my brother he had to turn the music down. We’d noticed—oh, poor people, I’m so sorry you live there—that there were actually occupied units above the space, but everyone (at least everyone at the party) denied that the decibels were a problem; nobody in this neighborhood would ever call the cops, claimed they, and the four crack dealers lining the other side of the street probably attested to that. So did they listen to me? Does anyone ever?

The next night, my little brother let some high school girl throw her birthday there, and she invited 2,000 people on Facebook. The children lit a fire on the roof, and when the cops came, the bad roof children threw water on them. (For all I know, Rudy was still in the attic.) When my brother called to shriek panickedly about it, he stopped for a moment to drolly mention that he’d found our beers behind a chair. One of the children had taken them, and then hidden them away for his own rotten self. Instead of just drinking it, which we’d never have minded, he hid our beers from us, for him, while charging people to smoke his pot. (I have conflated those who stole our beer with all of the people who wouldn’t smoke me out, because, like Gypsies, these rotten children are all the same.)

What little faith I had in your generation—all those polls that claim you do charity work and public service? Right—has been irretrievably and utterly dashed. These feral, thieving children have no manners at all.

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