THE ANARCHIST NEW YEAR’S
EVE PARTY
It was going to be a lonely New
Year’s Eve for Duke. Jill had to visit her mom in the hospital -- and Duke
hadn’t planned ahead. He usually spent New Year’s Eve in a neighborhood bar
with Jill, getting totally ripped. In fact, last year he managed to get them
thrown out of three different places. Before midnight .
Duke rolled a joint and left their
apartment in a bad mood. He headed towards his favorite bar on Avenue A -- only
to find it closed. Boarded up by the city.
“Fucking shit,” he muttered, his
words forming clouds in the cold air. “What am I gonna do now?”
He circled the block a couple of
times trying to figure out where to go. He finally went inside a bookstore on
St. Mark’s Place to get warm. A bulletin board cluttered with flyers caught his
eye. Looking through them he came across a small card inviting everyone to an
Anarchist New Year’s Eve Party. It sounded pretty strange. But there would
probably be free booze. So Duke decided to check it out. He ripped the
announcement off the wall and stuffed it in his pocket.
It took him awhile to find a
building to match the address on the torn card. It was past Avenue C on a block
where most of the tenements were either abandoned or destroyed by fire. Piles
of charred bricks only partially covered by snow lined the broken sidewalks.
I wonder if anarchists do drugs,
Duke thought. He banged on the door. Someone opened it and told him to come in.
Inside was like another world. A
bunch of people clustered around a kerosene heater were arguing loudly. One guy
kept jabbing everyone in the chest with his index finger to emphasize what he
was saying, but they seemed to be having a good time. Duke edged past them and
sat down on the floor next to a sagging sofa. He wanted to take his time and
ease into this one.
A dude on the sofa turned to him
and said, “Hi, my name is Vern. I’m an anarchist and a survivalist. I’m going
to make it through the next war. I’ve got this concussion-proof watch with a
built-in compass, and I’ve got an escape route out of the city all mapped out.
I won’t get trapped here like a dumb hippie.”
“Good for you,” Duke said. He
mentally tried to calculate how much coke the watch would buy.
A woman sitting next to Vern leaned
over and told Duke her name was Vikki and that she’d come to the party with
this guy and, really, he wasn’t much fun and, hey, she had this cute little
tattoo of a butterfly on the inside of her thigh and would he be interested in
joining her in the next room for a closer look?
“Sure,” Duke said. “Are you an
anarchist, too?”
“Of course,” Vikki replied. “Isn’t
everyone?”
***
Hours later, trying to find the
door, Duke stumbled over a body surrounded by empty bottles. It was Vern,
passed out on the floor.
Duke bent over him and slipped the
watch off his wrist.
“Thanks, buddy,” he said softly,
putting it in his pocket. “Happy New Year.”
Ron Kolm is a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin and the
editor of the Evergreen Review. He is the author of The Plastic Factory (fiction),
and Divine Comedy and Suburban Ambush (poems). Ron’s papers were purchased by
the New York University
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