Christmas offers a lot of opportunities for debauchery, from indiscrete meetings under the mistletoe to accidentally hooking up with someone from IT after the office holiday party. Going home for the holidays can become a long stretch of time in the suburbs with nothing to do but randomly run into some old friends from high school at the local good times bar, buy a round of jager bombs, and suddenly wind up sleeping with the gawky Goth girl from History class in your old bedroom. Christmas is one of the few times of the year where two consenting adults can still wind up shushing each other in bed for fear someone's parents will hear.
When I left home for college my parents moved to a Southern California. I grew up in Fresno, a tacky central valley city where shiny new pick-up trucks were a status symbol. The city was once a loose blot of agricultural sprawl populated by hard-handed grape farmers and Mexican migrant workers. While I was growing up in the 80's and early 90's the cheap cost of land and the cozy relationship between contractors and city councilmen contributed to a construction boom that saw tract houses and strip malls mushroom. There was an uneasy balance between the earnest old time farmers, the gawdy noveau riche contracters, and the slickster real estate agents with sterling silver bracelets that kept everything moving forward.
Everyone in my high school rallied behind the same idea that Fresno sucked and they couldn't wait to get out. LA and San Francisco were the two urban dreamscapes that most kids in my class dreamed of escaping to after graduation. There weren't many kids who talked about staying in the central valley, getting an office job, marrying, and settling down a few miles from their parents. No one wants to talk about settling down in high school. No one's willing to admit that one day they'll have to cut their losses and make a deal, trading freedom and ambition for stability and familiarity.
I don't know anyone in Fresno anymore, and I don't get to go back there for the holidays. When I come home for Christmas it's to a strange new suburb, where everyone is always a stranger. There's no one to go out with and nowhere to go out to. One year I went to the bar at a T.G.I. Friday's with my brother. It was crowded with people eating fried breading and drinking Bud Light. It was the socio-sexual equivalent of being in 10th grade gym class.
Christmas at home has been a historically abstinent time for me, but New Years Eve is where I have, lately, been confronted with a lot of those old high school-age issues of where to go with someone you're hooking up with, and how to be quasi-discrete. Over the last five years I've been in a different city for New Year's, usually sleeping on someone's couch or sharing a hotel room with some friends. Hooking up with someone can become a bit of a logistical challenge. How do you invite someone back to your friend's apartment to have sex on the couch while four other people are passed out on the living room floor? How do you separate from a group of friends in a strange city and follow a relative stranger back to their house (or the parents' house) without worrying about how to get back home again?
I was in Austin last year and spent hours making out with a woman in a dance club that I had gone to with a big group of friends. Closing time neared and we wandered to the parking lot where her car was. She seemed pretty insistent about me not coming back to her place (because she had a live-in boyfriend, I later learned). The only other options for us to continue down the carnal path we'd embarked on was in her car in a parking lot under a freeway overpass, or on the aforementioned living room couch with an audience of passed out revelers. We could have gotten a 2AM hotel room too, but those simple and obvious ideas are sometimes the hardest to come by in the cold night, hanging on to a strange new body in a foreign city.
A few years earlier I was on a remote island in Madagascar with a big group of friends for New Years. We rented a diesel generator from one of the locals and hooked it up to a sound system in an empty hut and threw ourselves an improvised party. I was sharing a tiny bungalow with five other people so, again, intimate space was not a freely available commodity. After dancing for a few hours I broke off with a woman and walked down to the beach. Actually, I carried her down while she straddled my hips like an overgrown papoose. There was a bright moon out and we started kissing in the surf.
Soon our scant tropical wear was bunched up in thoughtless crumples, pushed down off our hips. It was perfectly romantic to be naked on a beach under the moon, but after two hours I became vaguely aware that it was getting really cold and my fingers were pruning. Every gentle wave that lapped up onto our bodies was drawing away body heat, and a breeze had picked up, making it even colder. Neither of us had our own rooms. It was time to go somewhere else, but there was nowhere else to go. We inched up the beach a little further out of the surf and returned to the metaphysical ringing of New Year's bells with each other's bodies.
An hour later I looked up and saw a couple of Malagasy men had pulled up a log at the line where the palm trees and undergrowth gave way to the beach. They were quietly watching us.
I tried to shoo them away but they were security guards for the bungalows where we were staying and they weren't moving. We tried to carry on ignoring our audience but this was the last straw. The sky had started brightening in the east and the cold wetness had sunk into my bones. I suddenly felt tired and we decided it was time to retreat to our separate bungalows.
This year I'll be in Seattle doing more couch surfing with another big and randy group of friends. I have no idea who I'll be kissing at midnight on New Year's Eve; probably no one, save the merri-go-round of anemic pecks from the small friends I'll be with. Maybe that's the better way of doing it. Or maybe I'll get lost up in the tinsel and champagne and wind up with some strange accountant in a park, my pants around my ankles and snow falling down all around. Normally, darling, I wouldn't do this kind of thing.
Previous Posts:
Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date
Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson
Love Machine: Using Your Words, or I Like Pap
Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction
Sex Machine: Listening to the Neighbors Have Sex
Date Night: In Which I Try To Believe In Aliens
Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines Redux
Love Machine: Loyal as a Dog
Date Machine: Rate My Politics
High School Machine: Ten-Year Reunion Fantasies
Date Machine: Setting Up Your Friends
Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings Redux
Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN
Date Machine: 5 Things I'm Thankful For
Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings
Love Machine: What Work Is
Sex Machine: Sleeping Naked
Love Machine: Breaking Up in a Text Message
Date Night: The F U Date
Sex Machine: Shave My Bush
Love Machine: Taking A Break From Dating
Date Machine: The Celebrity You Most Resemble
Sex Machine: I Kissed A Boy
Crying In Public: Some Corner in Brooklyn