What do steroid-confessor Mark McGwire and I have in common? Feel free to phrase your answer in the form of a cake.
Errr … ummm … Well, what I was going for was that we both share a birthday (today), but geez, way to be a buzzkill.
When I was growing up the most famous people I knew of who had the same birthday as me were President Jimmy Carter and Mr. Cunningham himself, Tom Bosley. Not terribly hip. Now, thanks to good old Wikipedia, I know that I also share a d.o.b. with beloved bearded comedian Zach Galifianakis as well as Cindy Margolis, pin-up queen of the Paleolithic internet. So … progress?
Random anecdote: when I was fresh out of college, I spent most of those first couple years living in a townhouse with multiple roommates, which meant my rent was ridiculously low, and (since most people’s major monthly expense is housing) my discretionary income was moderately high. I drank most of it, right alongside my roommates. This quickly evolved into event-based drinking (presumably, in hindsight, to keep ourselves from devolving into drinking every day for no particular reason) and at our collective peak we were having theme parties once a month (which, incidentally, had several side-benefits in addition to staving off the trappings of alcoholism – for example, we cleaned the house at least once a month, which is pretty good for 22-year-old boys).
The parties became a kind of self-perpetuating cycle where every month we tried to outdo the last month. Further reinforcing the whole schema we were projecting – “alcoholics drink alone, well-adjusted people drink at parties” – was our oft-spoken belief that the sheer size of the party was one measure of its relative success. It got to the point (once, but still, this really happened) where random people pulled up to our house and knocked on the door, simply because they had been driving around and had seen the neon party lights shining out of our living room windows and decided to see what was going on, and we welcomed these total strangers into our home and gave them booze. And never saw them again.
But we took their pictures! We took lots and lots of pictures at each party, which is common enough behavior but in our case there was a secondary agenda, which was documenting the size of these parties. So each roll (because yes, this was the 90’s, and I was still using my trusty analog 35mm camera) would consist mostly of medium-close-ups of two or three people, posed and smiling, but there would also be a fair number of wide shots taking in the entire living room and the crowd therein. After the film was developed my roommates and I would go through the prints and pick out the best dozen or so and tape them up to the living room wall, which over time became this huge collage of previous parties, which was in itself a big part of the whole cycle: have a party so we can add more pictures to the wall, and people who come to the parties see the wall and want to be on it, and even if it’s a relatively small party maybe they see we are capable of having bigger bashes and they resolve to come back for one of those, which could make the next party so huge we have to get pictures of it, etc. etc. etc.
The point (such as it is) is that it mattered to us that the parties be big and boisterous because that became a retroactive justification for having them in the first place (again, as opposed to just sitting around on a Friday night getting blasted while watching X-Files, and if other people show up for a tipple, cool). So we appreciated people making the choice and/or the effort to come out to our house (which, to be fair, was kind of in the sticks at the time, 12 years ago, though less so now) and we tried to make a legitimate effort ourselves to show our guests that we appreciated their presence.
So one month we were planning a Saturday night party and one of my roommates invited a girl he had gone to high school with, and her boyfriend, and she said she would try to come even though Sunday was her birthday and, logically, Saturday night would be the night to celebrate it if at all. So my roommate said he understood but, optimistically confident that the couple would show at our party, suggested that we get a birthday cake which we could bring out at midnight, a suggestion happily agreed to by all.
So the cake came home with the rest of the party comestibles and imbibables, and sat in the fridge, and the party got going and, lo, my roommate’s friend and her boyfriend did in fact come by, fashionably late but to their credit they came not just to swing by but to hang out and party, which was just as well because the debauchery was in full swing when they arrived and proceeded apace, and it was actually well after midnight when someone (it might have been me, but the details are a little fuzzy) remembered, “The CAKE!”
Whoever thought of it, I was definitely the one who lurched into action. We had also bought a squeeze-tube of chocolate decorator’s icing, so I stumbled into the kitchen and found the icing and removed the cake from the fridge and from its plastic box and uncapped the icing and closed one bourbon-bleary eye and wrote HAPPY BIRTHDAY across the top of the cake. And then my roommates and I proudly presented this to the birthday girl, and took some pictures of her and the cake, and dug in.
When we got the prints back of that night, it might have been the most entertaining post-party revelation of the entire span I spent in that particular living/social arrangement. Because whatever I had illegibly smeared on the cake, it was not HAPPY BIRTHDAY. The most generous reading we could give to the shaky icing-scratchings was HURFY BURBABLY, which is a phrase that immediately conveys so many ideas at once about being young and stupid but hospitable and goofily good-intentioned and so on that it was immediately added to our lexicon and still gets used to this day. In fact if a birthday goes by and no one wishes me a Hurfy Burbably it feels a bit off.
I’ve said this before, but it probably bears repeating: I do not long for a return to my wilder, slacker days. I look back on them fondly, because they were fun and funny, but they served their purpose at the time and I left them behind a long while back. I don’t regret much that I did back then, although there were a few unavoidable embarrassments along the way, but more importantly I have absolutely no regrets about consigning it all to the past. That was me growing up; now I (more or less) am grown up. That was me figuring out how to be happy; now I truly am happy. All that the past has to offer me now is some amusing stories to tell, which is exactly how it should be.
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