A friend and I were discussing the logistics of a camping trip yesterday. We decided that our friends who are married with a child would join us in a staggered fashion. Night one, the husband joins us; wife looks after the baby. Night two, the hungover husband looks after the baby, wife joins us. Day three, just the baby.
I forget how old the baby is because he isn’t quite at that point where everyone uses years to describe his age; he is still just a collection of months: 16 months, 18 months, 252 months, who knows. He is older than one, less than two. He can walk, he can say certain things. He is old enough to party. When my friend first suggested that the baby come party on the camping trip I thought it would be pretty fantastic. The baby is a pretty cool guy, not just baby cool, regular cool. He owns a drum set and has this wingback chair that is size appropriate. I know plenty of people in their 20s who don’t even have those things and probably never will. Also, being a baby, he doesn’t get caught up on annoying things, like pretending he knows anything about politics or making Arcade Fire and Bruce Springsteen comparisons.
But as I thought about it more, I began to reconsider. The number one thing that came to mind was a former friend, or rather acquaintance who I hated but spent unlimited amounts of time with, shaken out of his puny mind on mushrooms sobbing uncontrollably underneath a parked van in Las Vegas. The reason I thought of this was because this person looked like a baby. He also looked like the Pillsbury Dough Boy, who looks like a baby. He had a bottomless appetite for all things: food, general consumer goods, and substances both illicit and licit.
When he was high his attention span flew out the window, like so much pot smoke blown through dryer sheets in an effort to mask the scent from his parents. He could not do anything for more than 3 minutes before becoming momentarily enamored with something else. Some of these things included, Furbies, playing minesweeper, or leaving whatever was going on to take a shower.
When he was drunk he was obnoxious; he adopted a machismo that thankfully was absent from every other moment of his life. An ability to put away beers was central to this machismo. He pounded them down like a modern day John Henry, waging a war against some invisible steam-powered beer drinking machine. After one night of carousing, in which he varnished a stranger’s porch with his insides, he passed out by a dumpster in a parking lot where he laid his weary head down for the night.
Once, after having inhaled a snowball of uppers he sprinted circles around a VFW hall where some terrible, but undeserving, band was doing the best they could to maintain their composure. He managed to channel every scene in which Daffy Duck acrobatically avoids Elmer Fudd’s gunfire. In this instance the gunfire was dignity. Admittedly, this was funny to watch. Imagine the Pillsbury Doughboy doing his best Baryshnikov in a room full of aghast strangers. It was funny. For the first five minutes. For whatever reason, when on uppers his focus became singular and unbreakable. This newfound steel resolve always honed in on something comparable to whooping and pirouetting.
When he was on halucigens; see blubbering under a van in Las Vegas.
This got me thinking to other people. People who didn't even look like babies or cherubic food spokesthings. Buff shirtless idiots held up by ottomans, telling girls that they just met how they would make good mothers. Once well dressed girls, now drunkenly teetering into Ms. Havisham territory, demanding privileged treatment as a result of their high levels of attractiveness. Anyone talking about Ayn Rand for even half a second. Adults committed all of these offenses when partying. I once left a club with a girl on the basis that we were both Portuguese. I am only half Portuguese. Certainly babies would be a thousand times worse. Or would they?
In the sober light of day, I would never have even gone to the club that I later left due to my half heritage. The man with a sharpshooter’s eye for motherhood; he went to med school. The people who talk about Ayn Rand, well, they usually have the common decency to keep it under their hats. So does partying make people total idiots? Or does it just invert things? There were more than a few people in my periphery who were branded with unwanted nicknames as a result of their inebriated incontinence. My logic is this: Babies + Sobriety = pooping their pants. Adults + Partying = Pooping their pants. Ergo: Babies + Partying = Not pooping their pants. If I remember my sophomore year logic, that is a modus ponens.
This brings me back to my original thought. Partying with a baby. It would be awesome. As my friend imagined it, that baby at hand is “kind of like a Senator.” He would be just like a senator, and not a present day senator. A senator from the 1920s, a consummate sharp dresser who is a bit corrupt, but not in arms dealing or anything, just kickbacks because he has grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle. We imagined that he would just sit by the fire, smoking a Cuban, a few fingers of double barrel in some crystal; taking it all in. He could rock a heavy buzz, and it would even him out, he wouldn't need to overcompensate.
By the time anyone gets around to actually to partying, they have been bombarded with depictions of how you are supposed to act. Babies don’t know that when you party you are supposed to act like a complete douchebag. They’ve never seen Jersey Shore, no one’s friend’s brother ever talked about doing body shots during spring break, they’ve never carried someone out of an Applebee's wearing a 21st birthday tiara. They would get buzzed and think “this is totally awesome.” Babies don’t need a lot. Have you ever seen one open a gift? They don’t even need the gift, just the wrapping paper.
So, for this upcoming camping trip, it will be me, a few bottles of Johnny Walker Black, and a bunch of infants. Maybe a copy of Gooddnight Moon too.
It’s going to be a good time.
