Party Crashers

or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Small Talk

I used to think I’d grown weary of parties. It must’ve been late in sophomore year in college when I was at yet another dorm party, full of mostly the same people I’d see at these things, when I turned to my friend as we were both lounging around on a futon and said, “These things aren’t fun anymore.”

There was a time in internet history when it became fashionable to trash small talk. I think it was in concert with when it became cool to self-identity with being an introvert. The MBTI is bullshit, but at least it’s fun bullshit. Unlike the Enneagram, which is too self-helpy. Why does every personality type sound like a superhero? Why isn’t there one that’s The Loser?

I also used to think I hated small talk. No, I wanted to have deep and meaningful discussions about life and philosophy and art. But what I eventually realized is that I hated small talk with people I knew relatively well. There’s just the difficulty of being able to ask them the basic biographical questions because you already know those people. The thrill of getting to know someone totally new, as well as any sense of emboldened pride that you had the assertiveness to approach them, has long dissipated. And worst of all, it’s a sign that this person isn’t really interested in getting any closer with you.

On the other hand, small talk with strangers at parties is a lot of fun. You’re total blank slates to each other. You’re in no danger of embarrassingly repeating the same tried-and-tested anecdote that has a proven track record of eliciting at least a semi-amused reaction. If you tell a joke that doesn’t land or otherwise make a fool out of yourself, chances are you won’t ever see that person again. Reset mode and move on. Or if you do end up connecting, you just made a new acquaintance and maybe a friend (and maybe even something more).

Of course, parties can also be insufferable (there’s a reason that the “Guy in corner of party” meme is so popular). If you want to read a funny depiction of party dynamics, try Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. It’s been many years since I’ve read the novel and I would’ve gladly used this piece as an excuse to re-read if it weren’t for the fact that the book is nearly 200,000 words and I’d rather publish this sooner rather than later. But the gist of the novel is that it’s a satirical anthropological study of New York City’s elite society in the 1980s. Its ambitious protagonist, Sherman McCoy, trades bonds on Wall Street by day and gets into hit-and-runs by night. His victim is a young black man, which worsens the high racial tensions and makes him the most hated man in the city.

In the chapter entitled “The Masque of the Red Death,” Sherman and his wife Judy head to a fancy dinner party hosted by the Bavardages. There, Sherman observes that all the guests are arranged in clusters, like “conversational bouquets.” Sherman and Judy seek to join these bouquets, lest they suffer the humiliation of being an “abject, incompetent social failure.”

In his bouquet, Sherman joins a sycophantic crowd that’s hanging onto every word of an opera singer named Bobby Shaflett as he tells the story of when he met the cruiserweight champion, Sam Assinore, on a flight. Sherman is desperate to make a conversational contribution to establish his presence, but he’s both flummoxed by and resentful of how Shaflett (whom he describes as a “giant fairy with a hillbilly accent”) commands attention:

The point of the entire story seemed to be that the only two people in the first-class section of the airliner who hadn’t known who both these celebrities were… were Shaflett and Assinore themselves! Haw haw haw haw haw haw haw haw—hee hee hee hee hee hee hee—and—aha!—a conversational nugget about Assassin Sam Assinore popped into Sherman’s brain. Oscar Suder—Oscar Suder!—he winced at the memory but pressed on—Oscar Suder was part of a syndicate of Midwestern investors who backed Assinore and controlled his finances. A nugget! A conversational nugget! A means of entry into this party cluster!

As soon as the laughter had receded, Sherman said to Bobby Shaflett, “Did you know that Assinore’s contract, and his ermine coat, for all I know, is owned by a syndicate of businessmen in Ohio, mostly from Cleveland and Columbus?”

The Golden Hillbilly looked at him as if he were a panhandler.

As unsympathetic a character as Sherman is, it’s hard not to feel for him here. Who among us hasn’t experienced a social pratfall like that?

Sherman’s troubles multiply when he sees that his mistress is also at this party, and that Judy is conversing with his mistress’ husband. Being a man of virtue, Sherman joins the bouquet to snip her away, in case his mistress’ geriatric husband accidentally blabs too many suspicious details. But by forming a twosome, this leaves them in a faux pas de deux, and tragically, they do not make their great escape:

“Well—you two! What are you trying to cook up!” Hack hack hack hack hack hack hack hack. For a moment, before she could get her fireproof grin back onto her face, Judy looked stricken. Not only had she ended up in a minimal cluster with her husband, but New York’s reigning hostess, this month’s ringmistress of the century, had spotted them and felt compelled to make this ambulance run to save them from social ignominy.

There’s something darkly reassuring to see these self-described Masters of the Universe behaving as shallowly and insecurely as high schoolers at their first boy/girl party.

Also for this piece, I re-read the opening scene of the very first draft of my first novel, which begins with a party scene. I finished this draft in 2012, a couple of years after I’d graduated from college. So I had a lot of thoughts to vent about the typical parties I’d gone to during my four years of undergrad.

The opening scene has my protagonist, Stephen, initially refusing to attend his own house party as a one-man protest against shallow party culture, until he caves into loneliness and heads down the stairs to join in. But with bitterness.

It was such a warm stroll down memory lane as I revisited paragraphs like this:

Or maybe this time, it’d be different, unlike like all those previous times it was supposed to be different. At some point, he thought that he should’ve been finally able to ignore the fact that every single person at these parties looked like drowning souls who looked to pull themselves out of the eddies in the crowd by finding someone to talk to, though talk might’ve been the wrong word. They weren’t so much talking as breathlessly resuscitating each other through the air that came out of their lungs, percolated off their tongues and teeth in order to form grammatically coherent phrases that could pass for conversation. Should both of them stop, then their symbiotic bond would be broken and they’d be thrown back into the sea, in danger of sinking to the absolute bottom: being the solitary, quiet person at the party.

When I first read The Bonfire of the Vanities, I was pleasantly surprised at how its “conversational bouquets” shared the same disdainful sentiment as the above. Part of me did worry a little that people would criticize me for rehashing Wolfe if this novel were to be published, but that proved to be too ambitious a concern.

I have a good memory for names and faces, so I often found myself in the awkward and slightly humiliating position of remembering people more often than vice versa:

It hadn’t been fun for a long time now. The endless flow of introductions and reintroductions, of feigned remembrances and forgettances, had settled into a festering pool of small talk and aborted friendships. And it was into this fetid pond that so many willingly dove, becoming those drowning souls that Stephen couldn’t help but see no matter how hard he tried to enjoy himself.

Stephen ends up getting drunk, which leads him to go around the party and, instead of small talking, saying whatever rudely honest thing is on his mind (more than just a few times, I received a critique that went something like, “This main character is a real prick for no good reason and I greatly dislike him”).

Ultimately, whatever sense of superiority I’d developed over these types of parties was more of a defense mechanism against feeling unappreciated. Towards the end of the scene, after having somehow avoided getting into a brawl for his jerk behavior, Stephen retreats back up to his room:

It wasn’t their fault that they didn’t need him as much as he needed them. Everyone here had had their 5.7 drinks per weekend, 3.1 relationships over the course of four years, and 2.3 drunken hookups that resulted in intercourse (once for the thrills, and once for the regrets). It wasn’t their fault that they already felt loved and appreciated enough that they didn’t need such things from their college friends. But while it may not have been their fault, Stephen still felt that he had the right to be disappointed, bitter, and angry.

I have to reach back to my college days to discuss the last time (until more recently) that I went to parties. I bounced around a bit in my 20s, from a couple of years in Korea (a much-needed mostly solitary period), a few years in Philly in law school (where I never took much interest in the social scene), then moving to NYC (where my social life consisted of small pockets of disparate friend groups, as well as dating). My so-called party career has been bifurcated, with peaks in my late teens/early 20s and now, my mid-30s. I’m not sure how common this is.

I say I like parties now, but it’s also not quite the same situation. As you get older, you either become less invested in having others love you, or perhaps better yet, you find those people and don’t feel like you need to meet them in mass drunken events. So each interaction carries much less weight and you can enjoy talking about whatever. A lot of times, others are just happy to have someone to chat with for a little while and being able to give them that joy (or relief) is, in and of itself, enjoyable.

There’s a lot of talk about how it’s so difficult to make friends as an adult once you leave a school setting where you’re surrounded by similarly aged and like-minded people. Weirdly, I’ve never felt that to be true. I’m guessing it was because I was more needy, thin-skinned, and self-conscious when I was younger, so it kind of feels like I’m getting to run now without ankle weights on.

Just a few days ago, a younger friend of mine—a recent college graduate—told me a regretful story, of how he’d matched on a dating app with a woman while traveling. Unfortunately, the timing hadn’t worked out and they both left the country without having met up. And though they’d exchanged social media contacts, he eventually unfollowed her, thinking he would never cross paths with her. But then, astoundingly, he saw her again, in another city. They even made eye contact! But he felt too awkward for having unfollowed her and didn’t approach her. I shook my head and told him that was such a young man’s move. I, of course, probably would’ve done the same thing at his age.

Years ago, when I first came to NYC, there was a reading series I went to several times before eventually realizing it wasn’t quite my scene. Being new to the city and not knowing many people here, I went to these readings solo. It must’ve been maybe my second or third time there when I saw someone nearby who seemed, like me, to be there alone. After several do-or-die countdowns happened in my head, I finally broke the ice with her (with what opener, I’ve completely forgotten… Maybe it was as dumb as “Hey, nice beer.”). We exchanged numbers and over the next couple of years, we’d occasionally hang out. She doesn’t live in NYC anymore, but through her, I got to meet several people with whom I’ve become good friends. It’s funny to think I never would’ve met them had I done nothing that night, thinking, ‘Nah, I shouldn’t say anything. She’ll think I’m a creep.’ It does make me a bit sad though to think of all the people I missed out on meeting because of all those times that I did do nothing.

Anyway, it’s summer now! Party season. Go out there and have fun.