The Party's Over, The CD's Skippin'

Either the final meal of my adolescence was cow tongue tacos with onion and cilantro at two in the morning or it was home-made braised pork butt, collared greens, baked beans, and dill, cheddar cornbread at eight p.m. And the final party of my adolescence included either twelve beers, four cigarettes, one wood-tipped Swisher Sweet, a funky couch, and a moldy blanket or two six-dollar beers, two glasses of 18-year-old Scotch, my bed, and the smell of my girlfriend’s hair. And either I was wasted or I was sober. And either I told adolescence to die or I grasped at it. Either way, at twenty-five my last bit of adolescence vanished. I guess that makes me a man.

This final stripping of teenageness surprised me, mostly because I thought it had already happened. I entered adulthood several years ago – graduating from college, struggling with debt, working a real job, eventually moving in with my girlfriend – and I was the vanguard among my friends. One went to graduate school, postponing real life. Another ran away from a diagnosed psychotic girlfriend, never did deal cards professionally in Vegas, and then moved toward adulthood by training to become a firefighter and EMT. A third head-faked at the idea, engaging some girl two months after returning from his mission then calling it off. I didn’t look down on them. They let me shuffle into manhood while keeping a finger on the wall of childhood, and no one, including me, could call me out.

It’s a popular role. This Peter Pan syndrome is now so celebrated in America (see: every Judd Apatow movie, or don’t) that Hemingway’s adolescent-men, those Americans mocked by somehow more mature Europeans, seem almost hyper-masculine. I was a man acting, and believing, like I didn’t enjoy playing a boy’s game. The problem was my friends were finishing the game and I couldn’t keep my hand on the wall and stretch any farther.

The first sign of dissonance came a year ago when my friend got engaged for real. Three months after meeting her, they married, their families demanding offspring before congratulating them. Three months later, they were expecting. It was big, I wasn’t alone in adulthood anymore, but it didn’t foster any realizations. It was later, about the time his son was born, that two things clarified my dilemma: One, I learned my best friend, the grad student, was being flown to Montana for a job interview; two, I was outside the age group swine flu was killing. Before this, I was comfortably a twenty-something. Then that virus newly divided the world. There where those it liked to kill – infants to twenty-five-year-olds – and those it didn’t – the rest of us. Mortality-wise, my girlfriend was grouped with the newborn and I was with my grandparents. That’s hard to take when your drinking buddy is moving three big, western states away.

I had these things on my mind the first night of the last two nights of my adolescence.

By the time I reached Corvallis, Oregon State University’s home, the Beavers had lost, again, and I was the only sober person in town. The house two of my friends rented resembled the frat in Animal House, but crappier. No outlets worked on the main floor, so extension cords snaked downstairs and around the floor, connecting to TVs, computers, game consoles, stereos, but not the fridge, which belched a hellish stench whenever a new partygoer looked for beer. The party matched: the sticky kitchen floor; the vodka shots; being told water’s for pussies; that same guy puking in the kitchen sink then saying second wind, baby, second wind, as the host unstopped the drain; the near brawls; the distillation of every college house party I’d ever staggered through. I was in the party but apart from it, watching from corners, looking down.

Somehow the house cleared of everyone but me and my two friends, and we salvaged the night with tongue tacos from the nearby taqueria. Driving home to my girlfriend late the next morning felt like an escape from the house, from college past, from a younger, drunker, louder, dumber, me. I felt so much older, in that way a college student visiting his old high school does. It felt good.

My friend got the job, so a month later my girlfriend and I hosted a party. An adult party. A party with great food. A snottily select party. A throw-up free party. I can remember all of it, and it was great, sort of. This was the last time my best friend and I would hang out for a long time, and, because most of my post-high school friends were his friends at his college, it might be the last time I would hang out with the whole group, so I didn’t want a dinner party. I wanted a wake. I wanted to get smashed, tell old stories in old ways, crank up the punk rock and sing a blubbering chorus of “Pints of Guinness Make You Stronger,” the saddest song ever recorded.

We did none of that. We stayed up late, we had good, bond-building conversations, we realized this wasn’t a last-ever party. But when I went to bed I felt like a neutered dog or, even better, like the last drop of adolescence had been wrung from me. It hurt.

I wanted it back. Even though I’d kissed it off a month earlier, I wanted that boorish, unfettered self back. At least, I wanted access to him, to don that costume at the right times. I didn’t, and I don’t, want to re-become that person. The getup is funny for about five hours. Any longer and you look ridiculous.

Why the hold then? Why the nostalgia when I can quantify how much better life is now? Even as I type I run through the yearning-to-mockery cycle over and over. Remember the greatness of your study abroad? Yeah, the drunkest year of your life. College was fun, especially living with inconsiderate jerks and eating rice every day. This is growing up, I get that, and growing up is really just a series of funerals for your former selves. This is the self that just doesn’t die as easily. It’s as annoying and brash and indestructible and selfish as a teenager, as the kid I was.