A decade ago, I was a wee lad just entering the age where you throw social gatherings in order to injest massive amounts of alcohol. As one might expect of a group of very-early-20s gentlemen, we were not the most tidy individuals on the face of the planet.
Put plainly, we were filthy. We were men made beast. We made gargantuan messes and perhaps maybe got around to cleaning it up sometime midweek, when the scent of the overfilled ashtrays and spilled stale beer got too much to deal with or avoid.
Remember the scenes from Animal House where the young pledges approached the house and it was a filthy hellhole of a place? Trucks parked in the front yard, windows broken out, bottles all over the lawn. When you’re in high school and you see that, you want to recreate it. And as it turns out, it’s far easier than you would think to take a house and trash it. Destruction is simple, often uncreative, and widespread. If you meet a young man who is proud of his level of debauchery, please try to teach him that he is not original, not an individual, and nothing special at all.
Anyways, that was us.
We thought we were the coolest things in the county, we were walking messes of long hair and bad tattoos and we were proud of the tires left on the porch, of the couches on the sidewalk, and the Olds Cutlass in the backyard. Every Sunday we would recap our debauchery from the night before, figure out what needed to be fixed and what could be left to rot, what graffiti was new and who put the holes in the walls.
That went on for about 3 years.
You may be wondering when the hell we will get to the You’re Effing Old portion of this hunk of blithering. Well, all of this is in order to say that: The three-decade-old version of myself took place in a Small Social Gathering thrown at our place on Saturday night. And the changes couldn’t be more drastic.
For starters, there was food. There was someone wandering around offering guests bacon wrapped dates, sliders on toast, bacon-wrapped jalapenos filled with cream cheese, and other various sundries. (That person was me.) In a previous life, there would be food only if someone ordered pizza or burritos in a drunken haze, or if someone stopped by Wendy’s on the trip over.
Secondly, there were spirits. There was a small bar set up with juices, mixers, fresh cut fruit and even a cocktail guide in the event that guests wanted to poke through it and try to create something new. I looked at the table and thought to myself, “This is how adults throw parties.” In a previous life, there would be a keg of PBR and if you don’t like it, you dealt with it. After paying over your $5 for a cup. Maybe someone put some Hooch (remember that stuff?) in the fridge that you could liberate. Or steal for your girlfriend.
And now we get to the crux of the You’re Effing Old portion of your week. Most of the Small Social Gatherings in a previous life ended with the gentlemen of the house crashing where they fell, collapsing in a heap of overserved jerkface to arise in the morning wondering how many cigarettes they smoked and if there’s anything still in the keg. At this most recent Small Social Gathering…
We cleaned up.
I put away glasses. I did dishes so we wouldn’t be chipping spinach/artichoke dip out of Pyrex in the morning. Plates were cleaned, trash was disposed of. Chairs were put back in place. And all the while, I was trying to figure out who this new person was, and what they’d done with the scumbag that used-to-be.
In the morning, when we arose to face another day, we did so without having to pick empty beer cans off the floor. We did so without having to clear the vomit out of the ashtrays. And we did so without festering piles of food product gathering flies. It was amazing. It was foreign to me, but it was amazing.
It was another “you’re growing up” moments, when you have a few minutes to spend being tidy as opposed to crashing where you stood. It was adult, and no matter how foreign it was, I could still recognize it for what it was. It was acknowledgement that even formerly filthy, worthless people can come a long way, baby.
Waking up in the morning to clean tables, an empty sink and no lingering scent of spilled liquor was nothing short of magical. Try it some time. With no obligations of de-filthing hanging over my head, no chores of cleaning up or mopping or sweeping or anything, it was practically like having had hired help in to take care of everything. And that hired help was me, in a slightly different state of mind, taking care of everything when it needed to get done.
And it was good.
I’m not saying that I’ll always be this fastidious in the future when we have a couple dozen of our closest friends over. But for one morning, it was equal parts pride and reflection on an era that’s long since gone, and rightfully so. I’m surprised we didn’t turn on CBS Sunday Morning to solidify these finds, but there’s always next time. Until then, I’ll be harassing kids to get off my lawn and taking pictures of the cat.