What are YOU doing on New Year’s Eve?
New Year’s could produce anxiety if you were out and about and dating around, with no special one.
Holy smoke!
What am I doing tonight?
For most of my adult life, New Year’s Eve was a night of promise, or terror, or deceit.
You had to have something to do, or someplace to go. If you had nowhere to go, you bore the Scarlet L of Loser.
My worst New Year’s Eve?
A tossup.
When I was 15 a few kids from the South Bronx took the IRT to Times Square to watch the ball descend to ignite 1957.
Compared to today, there was no security at all. Order was maintained by New York’s finest on horseback. Nothing beats a horse for crowd control.
We got there around 11:30 and got within visual distance of the ball, about three blocks away.
It wasn’t too cold and the throng wasn’t too drunk. Yet.
We didn’t have paper hats or noise makers, other than our throats.
We screamed and cheered and whistled and then it was over. Welcome, 1957.
We hung for a while, then back to the subway.
When the train started, a small river of vomit swished to the rear of the car. When it slowed to pull into a station, the pinkish brown semi-liquid swished toward the front of the car.
The river was the result of the passengers who got drunk and let loose on the IRT.
It smelled bad, and it looked bad. Me and my friends laughed it off.
My second-worse New Year’s Eve was in the late ‘70s. I was in between wives and girl friends and my best friend Jim scrounged up a couple of girls to greet the New Year in his swanky apartment in the Society Hill Towers, overlooking the Delaware River.
Could it be a special New Year’s Eve if it didn’t start with a bang?
We had dinner on Chestnut Street and got back to his place for drinks and . . . .
Jim didn’t have my Jack Daniels, but he did have a bottle of Southern Comfort, Janice Joplin’s favorite booze.
It tasted sweet and I drank too much.
I didn’t get drunk, but I had a very inopportune attack of what felt like pancreatitis shortly before the witching hour of midnight. It came on fast, just as my date and I were getting busy, if you know what I mean.
The pain was severe, and I cried out in pain.
Jim came over to ask what was wrong. I explained what was happening and he suggested I go to the hospital.
“Do you know who’s on duty New Year’s Eve?” I squealed.
No dice.
I retreated, alone, to the bedroom to fight off the pain. Mercifully, I fell asleep. When I awoke, Jim was having a beer about 2 a.m.
“Where are the girls?” I asked.
“They got pissed off and left,” Jim said. “They thought you were faking it.”
“What?”
Jim shrugged.
——
New Year’s could produce anxiety if you were out and about and dating around, with no special one.
If you asked someone out, that immediately elevated her status.
Anyone you did not invite intuitively knew she was not No. 1. (If that mattered. It did not always matter.)
To keep things humming with the ones you didn’t ask out, that required deceit, and I’m not going to go into that. Let’s just say I didn’t drape myself in glory.
—-
For a time there, when I was a leading columnist in the city, a lot of invites came my way, from regular people and from some of Philly’s “celebrity class.”
One year I hit three or four parties, doling myself out like I was a very expensive perfume.
Honest, it wasn’t that much fun.
When married, we often went to neighbors, or threw a party of our own.
For about a decade, when I was a Mummer, New Year's Eve wasn’t a problem. I’d be hanging out in the clubhouse of the King Kazoo comic club, rehearsing our performance with my friends. We marched with the Landi mother club.
In the past decade or so, I would go see the fireworks over the Delaware, with the woman who would become my wife.
And tonight? We will watch it on TV and not feel like we are missing a thing. Losers? No such thing.
Wishing you a fun and safe New Year’s Eve.
