A Baltimore Love Thing

In college, the majority of my guy friends were in the same fraternity which had two so-called formal events each year. One was in the spring and was held at some squalid hotel downtown, and only the bringing of “real” dates was permitted. There was also a Christmas formal, and it was to this one that my friends regrettably invited me each year, not because they were dying for my company, but because they were too mortified to bring a “real” date whom they might actually have to try to impress. Story of my life. 

The Christmas event, however, is indeed a notoriously debaucherous disaster. On the eve of the formal, whose theme is Secret Santa, the dirty, decrepit fraternity basement is lined with folding chairs, tinsel is slung from the decaying rafters, and blinking lights are wrapped around the dented water heater and hissing furnace. The president of the fraternity dresses up as Santa and one by one invites up each brother to sit on his lap (way creepy) to present him with his gift: a bottle of their favorite alcohol, expertly wrapped in the likes of newspaper, old exams, or toilet paper. Each bro then chugs straight from the bottle and hands it over to whomever has been lucky enough to snag a seat in the front row. The bottle is passed around between brothers and their dates, each taking a swig from every bottle, as the event degenerates from Formal to Disaster super swiftly. When my mysophobic self originally heard about this tradition of germ appropriation, I almost heaved right then and there in front of the Chinese restaurant. (In fact, I even still get slightly queasy thinking about it. Ick.)

For my first time at this event, I went with one of my best friends, Sam, who had gloomily resigned himself to taking me as his date, since there was “no one else.”  “Ugh, I guess. Fine,” he’d grumbled after scrolling through his AIM buddy list, concluding I was his very last resort. I also had to pinky-swear I’d help drag him back home later on in the night and, most importantly, make sure he didn’t do anything “really stupid.” Such chivalry. And yet, I still gleefully said yes. 

My friend Kim also went to the formal that year as the date of our friend Bobby, a boy who was painfully and perfectly in love with her. The previous year, however, Sam and Kim had actually been ensnared in a drama-rama filled relationship, and had since sworn off each other, giving one another an unceasing dose of the Silent Treatment, despite the fact they shared the same group of friends: mine. They had recently started speaking to one another, but only so much as to say, “Please pass me a NattyBo,” and I, like the rest of my crew, was still terribly traumatized by the whole ordeal. Why are other people’s relationships always so much more of a pain than my own?

At the formal, Sam and I secured seats near the door, and Kim and Bobby sat on the opposite side of the room. Predictably, within the hour, everyone was incredibly drunkyfaced (I, less so, as I had wisely brought my own beers, hoping to avoid contracting both herpes and the bubonic plague). When the last boy heaved himself off Santa’s lap, the frat’s patented angsty boy music came on full blast, the chairs were cleared to reveal a concrete floor sopping with spilled liquor, and the half-broken strobe lights lit up. Ah, fraternities. How I miss them. (No. Seriously. I miss them.)

Everyone started to mingle and I immediately lost Sam in the crowd. I didn’t try very hard to find him, confident I could still manage to uphold my end of the bargain and keep him from being too stupid. Plus, I was sort of relieved to be rid of him, since I had spent the greater part of the evening listening to him whine and moan about some new girl who was mysteriously avoiding him after several seemingly “successful” dates (“But I just don’t get it!” he’d wailed close to half a dozen times). So I was behind the bar with Bobby when all of a sudden, from the middle of the crowd emerged Kim and Sam, dramatically clinging to each other, slow dancing to the loud music like they were at a high school prom. Before Bobby and I could even turn our heads to say “What?” to each other, our dates had shoved their tongues down one another’s throats and were sloppily groping each other in the middle of the dance floor. “Ew,” said Bobby, his voice small and sad and just so very pathetic. “I can’t watch,” he whispered. Then quite seriously: “Please, just shoot me.”

Unsupervised for only about three minutes, Sam had somehow managed to do perhaps the stupidest thing I could imagine by making a move on his ex-girlfriend and sworn enemy, something he and I had endlessly discussed him never. Doing. Again. Watching them fondle one another, revulsion plastered to both our faces, a grief-stricken Bobby whimpered next to me, blathering on about how he wanted to go home to bed and listen to Brian McKnight alone. Soon enough though, the dance floor began to clear, then WHACK! Kim and Sam fell flat on the basement floor. Bobby and I hurried over to make sure their heads hadn’t burst like soap bubbles, but instead we found them on the ground, covered in fraternity floor goo, and still making out, like nothing had happened except an ordinary change in planar positioning. “Let’s go,” I said, grabbing poor Bobby’s arm, dragging him away from the grisly crime scene. Those two could bleed out through their ears on that floor for all I cared. It’s not like I was a “real” date anyway.

We grabbed a shuttle to campus and, secretly happy to be back at my building, I scampered up the stairs to my floor and burst into the room of the boy whom I’d recently become infatuated with, only to find out that he had never returned home from the field hockey formal: he’d gone with the star of the team, a girl who bore a striking resemblance to Paul Giammati, and by all accounts of those present, had eagerly gone home with her. 

Ditched by both my best friend and my new guy all in one night? Talk about the holiday spirit. And so I did what always makes me feel better: I put on my Chanukah pajamas and went to bed. 

Happy Chrismukkah, Everyone!