Anthropophagy for the Urban Hipster, Or, What to Do With Your Hands at Pretentious Parties

by Elissa Hunter

Rebecca can tell Mickey’s a douchebag from the moment he introduces himself. Not just because he goes by Mickey instead of Mike or Michael or even Mikey. He’s also wearing too much cologne and has an unfortunate soul patch that looks like a bunch of blond pubes glued to his chin. Normally, even in her most desperate of dry spells, Rebecca would have run as soon as she saw him coming. But here they are, at a holiday party in a too-small apartment in Brooklyn, and the couch by the window was the only place she could find to sit, and he sat down next to her and introduced himself just as she was starting in on a plate of snacks and a glass of wine, and she’s hungry, and her feet hurt after traipsing around getting the aforementioned wine and snacks because she decided to wear cute shoes, so she’s stuck with him until she finishes eating and can pretend she needs to pee. She chews her potato chips a little faster.

“So, how do you know Steve?” Mickey asks. Rebecca manages not to roll her eyes, knowing that “What do you do?” and “Where do you live?” will be the next two questions that follow, because that is the Holy Trinity of getting-to-know-you questions at a New York City party stocked with overly intellectual twentysomethings. And Mickey.

“We work together,” she says around bites of food. She and Steve work four cubicles apart at the Midtown location of a multinational accounting firm, which is just as exciting as it sounds. Rebecca usually sits at her desk, letting her eyes glaze over when reading an email for yet another meeting about yet another round of compliance training and fantasizing about murdering the perky HR director, and at one point Steve managed to pierce through her ennui long enough to get her personal email address. Several months and evites later, she ended up here, on a lumpy couch next to a window overlooking Prospect Park, nibbling on cheese cubes and drinking cheap Shiraz.

“That’s neat,” Mickey says. “We went to high school together in Jersey.” She nods and tries to think of a way to kill the conversation, since he doesn’t seem to acknowledge her scooting to the other side of the couch and cramming her face full of food as signals that she does not want to talk to him. She should just not care about hurting Mickey’s feelings and get up and walk away, but the wine is finally doing its job, and she’s feeling slightly more generous than she was five minutes ago.

She tries another tactic. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure thing; I’m all yours.” He smiles and runs his hand through his hair, which is thinning slightly but styled to hide it.

“If the world ended right now, and we all had to barricade ourselves in this room in order to survive, who would you eat first?” She rips into a slice of prosciutto on a cracker, feeling the stringy bits of fat get lodged in her teeth.

His smile falters for half a second. “That...that is an interesting question. Why do you ask?”

She shrugs. “Don’t you have an emergency end-of-the-world plan at the ready?”

“I guess not. Should I?” The smile becomes tighter and his eyes wander around the room, so she gives him about three minutes before he bounces and releases her from forced conversation.

She nods. “Oh yes. You never know when you’ll need to be prepared for those types of situations.”

“For the end of the world?”

“Yep.” She starts in on a tortilla chip dripping with salsa. She always forgets how famished drinking makes her.

“Does it count if I was a Boy Scout as a kid?” he asks. She sees it clearly in her mind: Mickey, age seven or eight, with chubby cheeks and knock knees, posing proudly for a picture while he received his merit badges.

“Sure,” she says. “As long as you remember your wilderness training.”

He grins and flashes a thumbs-up. “I was the first-aid guy at camp three years running.”

“Good to know. But you didn’t answer my question.” She drinks the rest of her wine, and as she puts her glass down, Mickey swoops in to grab it from her.

“I’ll go get you another drink,” he says, walking very fast toward the kitchen at the other end of the apartment. Rebecca sinks into the couch and looks around. The conversations around her are too far away to be anything more than one discordant buzz. Everyone fades into a blur of similar outfits and hairstyles and probably jobs and opinions. She doesn’t particularly want to talk to any of these people, especially about things that were bound to come up, like some gothwave neo-funk band she’s never heard of that only plays in abandoned warehouses in Canarsie. Conversation topics designed to make people feel smart and important despite spending all their money to live in a city with shitty weather and a pervasive urine odor.

And then there’s Mickey. She thinks she’s scared him off for good, and good riddance, she can finally enjoy the rest of her cheese squares, but then he comes back with two red Solo cups and hands one to her.

“Someone was making margaritas, so I got you one,” he says as he sits back down. She takes a sip. The margarita is horrible—too much tequila, not enough lime, in a way that reminds her of Spring Break in college—but it’s drinkable, and although she can hear her mother telling her not to take drinks from strange men, she figures that if Mickey were the type to roofie women, he wouldn’t do it at his friend’s holiday party with a million other people present.

He sits back into the couch, sinking in a way that gives him a double chin, which makes him oddly endearing.

“So, who would it be?” he asks.

She cocks her head and looks at him with raised eyebrows.

“The person you’d pick.” He nods his head to the rest of the living room, all the warm bodies dressed in their holiday finest.

“I shouldn’t go first; I’m the expert,” she says, hearing herself slur the words a little bit. “What about you?”

His eyes glide over the specimens in the room, devouring all the details displayed. After about thirty seconds, he turns back to her.

“That chick in the red sweater by the TV,” he whispers. Rebecca gives a quick glance over to the area he mentioned and spots who he’s talking about. The woman (not chick, Mickey) is slightly plump, with a perm and glasses straight from the ’80s.

“Not a bad choice, but not good, either,” she says.

“What? Why not? She’s, like, chunky and stuff; she’ll probably taste good.” He nods, convinced of the rightness of his answer as only a straight white man who hasn’t been told no very often can.

“Yeah, but look at her fingernails,” Rebecca says. They’re long acrylics, blood red and pointy with little Santa faces on them. “She’ll take your eyes out if you try anything. Plus, she’s wearing combat boots. She’ll give you a strong kick to the goolies and that’ll be the end of that.”

“The goolies?” Mickey repeats faintly. She gives him a small smile and takes another sip of margarita. The tequila is hitting her, and her stomach feels warm, and her face is flushed, and she’s actually enjoying this stupid party where she doesn’t know anyone and is stuck talking to a mouth-breathing Neanderthal. A delicious little shiver goes down her spine.

“Ok, so if Red Sweater over there isn’t a good candidate, then who is?” Mickey challenges.

Rebecca leans back and takes stock of the room, which is getting a little fuzzy at the edges. She looks over everyone at the party—the music critic loudly professing his opinion about Fleet Foxes, the guy with face tattoo, the girl dressed like a slutty elf—and then closes her eyes.

“You’re not gonna like it,” she says.

“Who?”

She opens her eyes, shoves herself up and looks him right in the eyes, probably a little too close.

“Steeeeeeeve,” she says, drawing out the name while poking Mickey in the chest. He winces and swats her hand away.

“Steve? Why?”

“Just look at him,” she says, gesturing where she’s pretty sure Steve was the last time she looked. “He’s, like, tiny, so he won’t overpower me, and he’s a little husky, so you get fatty meat, but not too much. And I’m pretty sure he’d be too nice to say anything, probably right up until he dies.” She sits back, sloshing her drink down the front of her dress. “So there.”

Mickey looks her like—well, like she’s talking about eating a mutual friend.

“Wow, okay,” he finally says. He puts his elbows on his knees and leans forward, lost in thought.

“Look, I’d feel bad about it, but sometimes you have to make tough choices.” She goes to drink her margarita and finds the cup empty. This won’t do! She pushes herself off the couch. “I’m going to get another drink. But first I’m gonna pee.”

The line to the bathroom is nonexistent, so Rebecca goes in and sits down on the toilet. She tries to close her eyes, but it makes her feel like she’s on a Tilt-a-Whirl. She leans forward and puts her head on her knees. She hears someone knocking on the front door. Another hunk of meat to add to the platter. Everything feels so far away.

When she’s finished, she marches toward the kitchen, swinging her arms like a militant majorette and trying to walk in a straight line, focusing on locating the source of the drinks. A guy (much too thin to eat, she thinks, he’d be all gristle and sinew) is standing next to the fridge holding a bottle of tequila and a jigger.

“Can I have one?” she asks. The guy shrugs and hands her the cup he had just poured the tequila into. “Thank you! You are a doll.” She pats his cheek, probably too hard.

She walks back to the living room, drinking fast. Mickey is where she left him, and she almost trips over him as she settles back down onto the couch. She takes another sip from her cup and shudders as the alcohol burns her esophagus.

“Are you okay?” Mickey asks. “You’ve had a lot to drink.”

“I...yam...fiiiine,” she says. Her tongue feels too large for her mouth. Her cup is empty but she tips it back anyway, licking the rim of the cup and smacking her lips. Mickey grabs her arm and drags her into the hallway.

“What are you doing?” she yells. She trips on an area rug, and only Mickey’s grip keeps her from eating the floor. Mickey steers her to the bedroom that’s been designated the coat room and shuts the door.

“I think I need to call a car to take you home,” he says. “You’re barely upright.”

“Mickey, are you trying to make a pass at me?” He ignores her and she flops onto the pile of coats on the bed. She has a sudden vision of herself burrowing down into the mountain of coats, never finding the bottom of the pile and the beginning of the bed, just the sour smell of wet wool enveloping her for eternity. Her shoes feel too heavy for her body, so she kicks them off, relief flooding every tendon. She wiggles her toes.

“Which coat is yours?” Mickey asks, digging through the pile. She hoists herself off the coats and stands next to him—Mickey with his soft body and his defenses down. Too trusting. All those years as a scout and he’s never been taught to watch his back.

“I was wrong,” she says into his left ear.

“Wrong about what?” He’s still focused on finding her coat, a gentleman to the last.

“About Steve,” she says, clinging to his arm. “He wouldn’t be my choice.”

She lifts up his arm and sinks her teeth into his bicep. Mickey howls and throws her to the floor, but not before she manages to taste buttery flesh. It’s better than any other meat. She licks her blood-stained teeth. Just as delicious as she expected.

“You bit me!” Mickey shrieks, looking at the oozing mark. “What the fuck, you psycho! I was trying to help you!” He runs out of the room and slams the door.

She finds her coat—red with a fluffy faux-fur collar—and puts it on after grabbing her shoes. Mickey is still screaming about her being a crazy bitch. This is why she hates parties. They always end with so much drama.

The bedroom window is one of those old pre-war pieces of crap that must have ten layers of off-white paint stuck to it, so it takes a good amount of effort to open it. She grabs the edges of the screen. It refuses to budge, so she lifts her foot and kicks. After three tries, the screen pops out and falls onto the sidewalk below.

She lifts her foot over the windowsill and looks down. It’s only about a ten-foot drop to the sidewalk, and she’s feeling drunk on alcohol and blood and the taste of Mickey in her mouth; she feels invincible. She tosses her shoes out and uses her arms to launch herself off the windowsill, landing flat on her ass. She stands up, brushes off the back of her dress, and picks up her shoes.

“That party sucked anyway,” she mumbles to herself, wiping blood off her mouth as she walks down the street. All that food, and she’s still starving.