My winter break at the end of December is full of debauchery. On Christmas Eve, I spend all day with Emma because Tyler is going off into the suburbs with family and she has to work tomorrow. Aja drops off some giant batches of fridge-cleaner chicken soup, and Tyler, Emma, and I all share a platter of Costco sushi (freshly bought) before Tyler takes the train off west. We do not feel like cleaning, and we do feel like celebrating something, so we go share a blunt, a couple of glasses of Hard Eggnog and head to a new Izikaya in Wicker Park to have dinner with one of Emma’s friends. The entire block smells like the mouth-watering charcoal they’re using in the back. We order: karaage, chicken fried rice, charcoal-grilled chicken ramen, pork belly okonomiyaki, several skewers of meat, and the saltiness is making me really want a giant glass of Sapporo, so I order one. Every bite of food feels like a boxing glove to the head and it makes me entire body squirm with pleasure. When we’re crawling to the end of our meal, Emma points out that if you become oversalinated, your fingers swell up and I start staring at my hands and screaming. I have never noticed it before and now I can’t not notice it.
***
I’m invited to an intimate Feast of 7 fishes on Christmas, five queers in a co-op down in Hyde Park, and lots and lots of food. Avery and I are overdressed, but that quickly becomes a non-issue as the courses go on. The hors d'oeuvres are out on the table when we arrive, shrimp cocktail and calamari and summer sausages - the last one is apparently a nod to our Midwestern setting. There’s also caviar, local caviar. Apparently there are sturgeon that live in the Illinois river, and apparently there is a fishmonger who harvests their eggs and sells caviar severely undermarket. We’re already three fishes in before the first course.
At some point between the Clams Casino via Hong Kong and the Mongolian Wedding Sea Bass, we’ve already consumed 8 different kinds of seafood and there are two more courses, not including dessert. At this point, Avery and I have shed multiple layers of our elaborate Christmas outfits - my tights are off and I am freeballing under my miniskirt – Avery has taken off her glamorous transparent tulle skirt and her tights, our jewelry is loose on the table. We are also several dirty martinis deep and several French 75’s deep. The last time I had a French 75, I had a hangover that dovetailed into a flu that knocked me out for a week and a half straight. This time, though, no hangover. We are also drinking these drinks across, like, 6 hours, and are grounded by so much food so I actually don’t feel that drunk. I swear!
Like any good dinner, we grow increasingly manic and the party is starting to feel more like a blurry montage. Clams Casino, and a discussion of AI machine learning and unionizing, miso marinated salmon, and a sword fight on the benefits of polar plunging in Lake Michigan, the trans and trans adjacent people at the table threaten Martin that if his waist gets any smaller/sluttier from jumping into the ice cold lake twice a day, we’re going to strangle him and/or ban him from any future get togethers. We devour a plate of gochujang honey shrimp and I am drunk on dopamine and party energy and also, drunk-drunk and I keep saying sardonic choice instead of sartorial choice. The amount of food we’re eating feels, frankly, grotesque. Not physically, but emotionally. It’s actually a cute amount of food to eat - perhaps we didn’t need to eat 9 courses of small fish dishes, but I am so glad we are and I am sorry that not everyone can eat like this but I am eating like this now and I am going to fucking enjoy it.
After the lobster mac and cheese, we are 11 fishes deep and we go outside for a sobering slap of cold air and for cigarettes and marijuana to get sparked up - except for Avery, who is just happy to stand in this dank alley with the rest of us. On the way down, I slipped on the rain slicked stairs because I’m wearing fucking platform crocs and, as I mentioned before, am drunk. My skirt slips up, but I miraculously do not kick all of my friends over like bowling pins and I’m only left with a minor bruise on my hip and on my ego. Everyone laughs, but everyone says they did not see my balls or hole. Thank god.
After cigarettes, our gracious host brings out ice cream taiyaki and swedish fish - technically fishes 12 and 13 if you want to count them. We start reading everyone’s tarot, Martin and our host Sam are bickering about the power (or lack thereof) that academia has to affect change in the world. We are tired. Avery and I call a cab back home to our side of town and crash.
***
I spend 56 hours straight at Emma & Tyler’s house mostly playing video games and watching self-proclaimed rednecks drive several vehicles (tractors, buses, 98 Miatas, Barbie Jeeps) in several locations. When Tyler picked me up at around 5pm the day after Christmas, I hadn’t eaten all day. I was still digesting the 11-13 fishes from yesterday, but now I was hungry again, so we pick up some burgers. Nothing like a Culver’s Deluxe and a concrete mixer to settle the stomach. After this, though, our meals do not feel particularly hedonistic. Emma & Tyler are health-conscious jocks, mostly adhering to a sort of balanced diet. I eat oatmeal for breakfast while they have giant bowls of chia seed pudding and yogurt, spinach egg-white omelets. Still, this much leisure with no work is making my bones feel like jelly, and I am in too much of a December haze to exercise. My blood has turned into Poppi probiotic soda and my mind is only concerned with what I’m doing in Baldur’s Gate and cheering on Tyler while he conquers the demi-gods of Elden Ring.
***
On the Friday before New Year’s, Martin invites me back down to the south side to test out an electric skillet they won at White Elephant with a hot pot lunch. I get down there early and have tamales and donuts for breakfast with a lover before diving headfirst into Martin’s tomato broth and a veritable feast of vegetables (and thinly sliced meat, but I swear it’s mostly vegetables). We throw ingredients endlessly into the bubbling cauldron and pick at it for two hours until we cannot take it anymore. I lubricate my appetite with half a bottle of soju and a giant glass of cava that Martin is trying to get rid of before their flight back home to his family for the rest of the year. I am full, full, full of liquid.
Our party of lazy femme gays is dragged by our hairy knuckles to the last Retreat at Currency Exchange Cafe - there are plenty of exceptionally hot people here, but I am so bedraggled by my week of debauchery and the music is extremely loud so that any conversation is forced into the 5 millimeters between one’s ear and another’s mouth. Someone from our party orders wings and pancakes and I, of course, partake, taking several crunchy bites of wings and washing it down with a mini pancake. Apparently, the dolls standing around at the center of the party are attracting attention and several dudes are staring us down in ways that are slightly too unnerving to feel sexy, and someone is handing us napkins and glasses of water. Do we look helpless or something? Someone who seems important grabs me by my shoulder and tells me I am beautiful.
After a brave 35 or 45 minutes of being a trooper I announce that I am leaving. Sam graciously offers to drive me all the way back up to the north side but first we have to stop by a gas station, and I cannot resist the below market King Size of Reese’s Sticks ($1.65???) and Sam drinks a $2.50 can of Red Bull. The pump is dripping petrol at an excruciatingly slow rate - so slow, that other customers are yelling at the 4 employees working at the same time about it. We wait for 15 minutes and only $10 of gas has been pumped. Sam concludes that this is clearly a money laundering scheme.
***
By morning, I think to myself, I’ve had enough of this debauchery. Enough party, enough gluttony. I will clean my house, I will ring in the new year a good girl. Aja texts me at around 4:30pm asking me if we should find a place to have fries, ceasar salads, chocolate cake, and martinis. Yes, of course we should.
The list of suggested places begin with Gibson’s, an upscale steakhouse downtown before we quickly decide that is the wrong vibe - we cannot muster the energy to perform the level of hotness that a steakhouse requires of us. Plus we are broke, what the fuck are we thinking? We have both been laying on the floor all day, feeling weird in our separate apartments, crying periodically. Gibson’s is not it. We each throw out a couple of options: taverns and restaurants on the West Side — before finally deciding to hit up a 24-hour diner in my neighborhood. They have caesar salad on the menu, they’ll obviously have fries, it’s a diner. No martini, though, so on the way there I acquire a bottle of gin and and a bottle of vermouth. I accidentally picked a bougie liquor store where the cheapest bottle of gin is imported from Japan and $39. I am about to run out of the store when the owner corners me and begins a lively conversation, asks me about what I want and need and is so nice. I feel pressured into buying it. I mean, I guess, it’s not that much more expensive than a bottle of Beefeater right? Right?
I duck into Aja’s car outside the diner and pour our Japanese gin and dry vermouth into my Owala filled with ice (could your Stanley cup do THIS?!) Aja gives me her jar of olives that I promptly pour in and I shake together a giant batch of dirty martini that tastes fucking delicious. The regret I feel for being pressured into buying a $40 dollar bottle of Japanese gin is washed away by one of the best martinis I’ve ever had.
Aja and I commiserate about our weird moods and catch up. We are soulmates, but we have not seen each other in 9 days or more (too long!) and both of our bad moods are being washed away, by the gin, by the diner, by our friendship. Our original meal plan is bolstered by the irresistible addition of mozzarella sticks and marinara sauce, as well as surprise slices of garlic bread that come with our salad. We devour our meal and the waitress brings out two slices of double chocolate cake and this was such a good idea. We both take swigs from my Owala at the center of the table, talking increasingly louder about our sex lives, our masturbation schedules, our depression, our mania, Aja’s period (she is deciding to stop having.) We linger for so long at this diner (and shouldn’t you loiter in a 24 hour diner?) that the shift changes over and our original waitress dommes us into closing out the receipt on the table that’s been waiting for us to address it.
When we walk out, I realize that this diner is not loud and jovial, its just our booth, and that maybe, everyone in this place was listening to us. Forced to listen to us, I mean. The dirty look from one of the waitress confirms it for me.
***
My new year’s eve party is canceled, honestly to my relief. I am officially, OFFICIALLY, tired of partying. I take a short walk around the neighborhood while it snows. I pick a small red berry from a tree and eat it. It’s sweet and tart, a cross between a blueberry and a green grape, the inside is mostly hard seed. Filipino superstition says you should eat round foods on new year’s eve for good fortune. Hope this counts.
A couple hours before midnight, I get into the bathtub with a couple tangerines and a red candle. The peels are filling the air with a psychedelic oily, citric smell and the candle flickers bright, then dark, then bright. I chant out loud, calling in sex and love and the spell I read off of tells me that if I feel called to masturbate, I should. I do feel called.
I go to bed before midnight, a couple of early fireworks going off in the distance.