The other day I was invited to a party at a pub with very young people. I didn’t like the place very much, but I accepted the invitation knowing that the host was a good friend of mine and believing that I would be surrounded by beautiful people. The place was full of guys. There were guys everywhere. The only two women were behind the bar serving drinks — probably with anti-rape spray in their back pockets. There were more guys than in the urologist’s waiting room. More guys than at the Episcopal Conference. More guys than at a Maria Sharapova tennis match. Naturally, I looked for a way to get out of there, even through the air conditioning duct in the bathroom, but my attempts failed because, in my experience, when everyone is drunk, everyone loves the idea of having a writer around. So they didn’t let me leave until well into the wee hours of the morning (warning to the younger ones: this excuse doesn’t work on Mom).
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At least they bought me drinks. Conversations were choppy and confused. Some kids were too young and went to the bathroom too much, and then with eyes like dart boards asked disconnected questions about my trade. I guess these are people who never had to go through the ordeal of having a junkie friend asking you for money every day. If they keep playing roulette, they’ll end up hitting the jackpot. The drug thing is always three generations: The first one dies, the second one sees it and gets scared, and the third one forgets about it and goes back to taking them. A painful cycle that, time and time again, doesn’t say too much about the best-informed generation in history. (READ MORE from Itxu Díaz: The Left’s Stages of Grief Over the Iowa Caucuses)
And then there was a group of intellectuals. I know this because they were drinking gin and tonic out of balloon glasses and using adjectives correctly when speaking. They were discussing immigration policy, and I thought it was an extraordinary time to go toward the opposite end of the bar. Half of my job consists of performing postmortems on soulless politicians, and it’s the last thing I want to do in my spare time for free.
I returned to the loudest group. Since the only way to get along with drunks is to be drunk, I started drinking rum at the speed of light so that in the end, the one who started lysergic conversations and left them halfway to nowhere was me. It wasn’t revenge, just a plan.
I think I smoked a pack in a couple of hours. Every cigarette was a perfect excuse to get out the door of the bar and get some air, so I didn’t stop faking the urge to smoke all night. I was very surprised to see at the door that in the street, girls were passing by. Girls! Good God, women! For an instant, amid that sea of testosterone, I became convinced that they had become extinct like the dinosaurs.
The party music sounded like dropping a bunch of thumbtacks into a chicken coop. It wasn’t bad. It was worse. It was an embarrassment to Western culture. It was, for sure, illegal. It was the kind of music that makes you believe in the death penalty once more. (READ MORE from Itxu Díaz: Two Years Without the Audacity and Laughter of P.J. O’Rourke)
Times are changing. Again. I asked a very young guy why they throw parties without girls, and his answer left me terrified. Because they “annoy.” Everything men need, say relationally or sexually, they have at the click of a button. They talk for hours and hours with girls, but only on WhatsApp or similar apps. Meeting face-to-face seems too “invasive” to them. I guess we are at the end of time, the end of the human species. It was nice while it lasted.
I talked to one of the waitresses. As drunks, once we grasp a topic, we don’t let go of it, so I asked her why there were no chicks. Her answer left me even more confused: “Because it’s cold.” It turns out that young girls don’t go out if it’s cold. “So what do they do?” I asked. “They watch Netflix,” she told me. “Netflix? And they play with their cats, right?” I apostrophized, trying to be ironic. “Exactly. Netflix and cats,” she nodded, sketching a serene smile, with the look of someone who is saying the most logical thing in the world.
By the end of the party, I was so depressed that I had sobered up. We were going home. It wasn’t late, but young people now go to bed very early. I guess they go to the gym in the morning, or to the supermarket to buy tofu or something like that. I said goodbye to my friend and as I turned the corner, heading home, I passed by one of those discos where we were once happy, back in the Pleistocene. I hadn’t been there for years. I went in. Surprise! It was full of boys and girls of my generation, dancing and having fun. Extraordinary music was playing. I stayed until closing time. I had to get even for what I had seen earlier at the party with the kids and the zombies.
I told everyone at the disco about the horrible experience, and they said in response, “That’s because you’re getting older.” A blonde, blue-eyed girl who was among some acquaintances said to me, “At least write it down!” So here I am, writing it down, but only because she was so pretty. Besides, writing it down is the way some of us journalists managed to change common drunkenness into something as laudable as fieldwork.
Translated by Joel Dalmau.
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