I have never had a good New Year’s Eve. Has anyone? Has anyone ever rung in a new year full of genuine hope, looking impossibly attractive, at a party that is full of all the right people and none of the wrong ones, where you don’t get too drunk or eat an entire tray of cheese by yourself, but instead gather enough last-chance courage to confess your feelings to a long-simmering crush just in time to kiss them at midnight while everyone around you cheers and clinks champagne flutes? On second thought, my standards might be too high. I blame Billy Crystal, running through Manhattan traffic. No one does that. (Do they?)
Still, I think my string of New Year’s Eve fails is impressive. Until I was 19, I spent them with my parents, sandwiched in between them on my aunt’s suburban couch, watching Dick Clark with the volume down to a frequency that only whales could hear. Actually, scratch that--the year I was 17 my friend convinced me to go on a run around Prospect Park that ended right at midnight with fireworks. It was cold and I hated every minute of it, and then the next morning I found out my grandpa died.
As the clock ticked ominously down towards Y2K, I was at a retirement community in upstate New York, ringing in the century with my gay best friend whom I was not-so-secretly a little bit in love with. I’m not sure what my plan was, exactly--to seduce him while we drank cheap vodka mixed with Mountain Dew and tried on his sister’s old prom dresses? Whatever my intentions, I forgot about them after we got stoned enough to wonder if the world might actually end at midnight, at which point I crawled into one of the kitchen cabinets.
The next year, I followed my bon vivant college roommate to a party full of people I did not know, where I was offered--and accepted!--my first line of cocaine, which was as thin as a spider web since I had been deeply affected by the D.A.R.E seminars of my youth and did not want to overdose like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction (yes, I know, that was heroin--but she thought it was coke and she was a drug addict, so you tell me, what are my odds?). Anyway, I did not get high, and was trapped in a cab at midnight while trying and failing to find a better party.
As 2001 became 2002, the only year prior to meeting Jeff that I had a boyfriend when the ball dropped, I made my first love a disastrously inedible pasta, and then we had sex that was uncommonly bad enough that I still remember it as disappointing, twenty years later. The next morning, his car had been towed. The jury is still out as to which of these events led him to dump me that February.
Single and ready to mingle, on December 31, 2002 I was invited to my friend’s boyfriend’s Maine vacation house with all of his frat brothers. I’m sure I had not considered the sleeping arrangements--or, really, anything at all--prior to agreeing to this, but as it happened I ended up in a room with seven or eight very intoxicated men who felt comfortable in the pre-Me Too era loudly encouraging each other to try to make a move on me. While I was thankfully not molested, they did get into a fight over me that culminated in one of them throwing a mattress down the stairs.
New Year’s Eve 2003 came the closest to being ideal. At the time I was living with two wonderful roommates in Brooklyn, and we had a Friends-style brother apartment of three guys, one of whom I had a devastating crush on, of which he was--or pretended to be--completely unaware. We threw a party in our third-floor walkup, full of dancing and cheap booze and the kind of unadulterated mirth that you can only feel when you are in your early twenties and your parents still pay at least one of your utility bills. Pumped full of misguided When Harry Met Sally energy, I made it my party mission to confess my feelings to my crush, or at least kiss him at midnight under the guise of celebratory whimsy. Unfortunately, he chose that very night to tell me, affectionately, that I was the only female friend he had who he had no sexual feelings for. Then he hooked up in the bathroom with someone else while I chain-smoked my sorrows away. This remains my most exciting NYE to date.
Since then, especially since I had children, I’ve settled into a reluctant acceptance that there is nothing inherently fun or different about the turning of one year into the next. And now, of course, with COVID continuing to ravage the world, and each year bringing an ever more depressing forecast for the future of humanity (not to mention the planet), the magical thinking that I used to delight in--the sincere belief that a new year offered a chance to make everything suddenly change for the better--seems staggeringly naive.
I do still have hope. I can’t help it. My blood, for better or worse, hums with the facile promises of the romantic comedies, 90s action movies, and We Are the World concerts I grew up on--that change for the better is always possible, that we are one Hail Mary space expedition away from destroying that meteor headed straight for us, and that someone out there secretly loves you (has always loved you!) and is going to run and tell you as much as soon as they select just the right power ballad to pump themselves up for the run to the airport or ferry dock or party you’re standing alone at, sadly eating an entire block of Manchego and wondering how Auld Lang Syne became the official New Year’s song when Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ was right there.
Anyway, I guess my meandering point is that it’s OK to still feel hopeful, in spite of so many reasons not to, but it’s also OK to feel deep sadness at the changeover of this year, or any year, really. Our calendar system might be made up and meaningless, but it sets us up to expect a little bit of magic come January 1, which really is putting a lot of pressure on January, a month known mainly for its shockingly large credit card bills and Seasonal Affective Disorder. I think this year a more somber New Year’s Eve is fitting, given the circumstances. I might even climb in the kitchen cabinet again, who knows?
Looking back, that was a highlight.