The Girl I am afraid of at Soho House
Against new friends, social climbing, and the drunk b*tch in the bathroom
The drunk girl in the bathroom has become sentient. The drunk girl in the bathroom is an opportunity for self-branding. The drunk girl in the bathroom is requesting to follow you on Instagram.
I went to an entertainment industry house party in Silver Lake where I was four years older than everyone. A kid told me he was Ellen Degeneres’ assistant before he told me his name and nobody has heard of the company where I work.
My boyfriend drinks and compliments everybody generously, which is only nice when you don’t hear him do it to anybody else. He did it to a girl in a baby doll corset top, who was attached to Ellen Degeneres’ assistant’s arm, and then he moved on quickly to a less attractive woman in earshot.
The baby doll corset girl immediately clocked it as disingenuous, and turned to me to say that “that guy is so fucking annoying. I hate people like that. He says that to every girl.” and I said, “that’s my boyfriend!” and then she said, “no he is NOT!” and this went back and forth until he came over and kissed me on the cheek.
Baby doll corset asked me if I was a member at Soho House. I said no, to her apparent disbelief. She asked me if I wanted to hang out with her at the pool at Soho House – she could get me in easily – and I said when! And she said Saturday! And I said I can’t! I’m shomer shabbat! And guess what she said? “No you are NOT!”
I was drunk enough to give her my phone so she could follow herself from my Instagram. To my chagrin she also popped a Google Calendar invite to her birthday party (on a Friday night, no less) as well. She had a lot of confidence for somebody who insulted my boyfriend in front of me, but LA is a difficult place to make friends when you don’t believe in God.
The DMs began immediately after the party, and I pretended to be too hungover to read them until 6pm the next day. She reminded me of her birthday party (why would you want somebody you barely know at your birthday party?) and I reminded her about the 25 hours in which Hashem ceased creating.
She began appearing like a ghost in the background of pictures posted by mutual friends after I blocked her on everything. I made my boyfriend block her too. Still, when we have been invited as guests for dinners at Soho House, I’m afraid of seeing her. There’s something gutsy about a girl who will tell you to your face that she doesn’t like your boyfriend and then persist in trying to hang out.
It happened again in a cocktail bar downtown. We were in a booth with a friend, her new boyfriend, and three of his close friends. Otherwise, total strangers, and we were drinking and rolling on MDMA. A girl was born in the same place and time as me. She said she dated lots of Jewish guys. She told me she was hot and rich, and she knew she’d meet someone on her level. She and her friend lived in WeHo. They followed us on Instagram and we never saw them again. Eventually I blocked them too.
At a winery in Malibu we were seated beside a table of Fashion Nova-dressed people having a birthday party. They were outnumbered gay men to women. We made the mistake of tasting too much wine in the hot sun, neglected our water intake, and found ourselves to be piss drunk. A woman from the other table kept saying, “I’m literally from the South Side of Chicago!” to everyone she spoke to. She turned to us. Our eye contact lingered too long, and we were smiling because of the wine. She descended.
“Guess how old I am!” she said. She looked anywhere between 37 and 45. She was Italian, judging by her cornicello pendant, and there’s nothing else I can say about her appearance that wouldn’t sound classist.
We smiled and said “28!” and she said “NO!!!!!!!! I’M FORTY ONE!!!!!” and we looked astonished! Her friend came over and sat on the arm of my chair.
“How old do you think I am?” Her lash extensions pulled her eyes almost closed so that she squinted. Her face looked relaxed and drunk. “I’m 45.” We maintained our astonishment.
The Chicago Italiana continued: “I have 3 degrees and a PhD.” We said wow! That is so impressive! She invited us to their condo to party with them. We said no. Her friend chimed in: “If you weren’t gay I would eat you alive,” she said – to my boyfriend! And then he excused himself to pee.
Both of the women sat in his vacant chair. “I actually have a son from when I was a teenager and he’s in the Marines,” the 45-year-old said, very seriously.
“And she has a 15 year old with autism!” the other one said.
“Four kids in total.”
I said wow – are you serious? That’s amazing. How do you handle that? Are you from here? When did you move here? How do you find it? Is it a safe place to raise a kid?
She had an answer for everything. The 41-year-old got up and walked to another group of people (“Guess how old I am!”) and the 45-year-old told me about the children’s’ library programs in her neighbourhood. Sometimes you just need to party it up. I asked how she knew the people from the birthday party and she said she didn’t really but didn’t clarify. My boyfriend came back and she asked for our instagrams. 41 ordered them a bottle of rose. Their party was suddenly leaving.
How lonely must it be to float drunkenly from occasion to occasion pursuing friendships with people you don’t care.
I can’t tell if they’re earnestly looking to connect on some level or if exchanging Instagram accounts is a weirdly intrusive formality. If it’s the former I suspect it isn’t working.
I watch gay men my age (almost thirty and beyond) fall into a lifestyle that takes the partying I did in my early 20s but adds money, ketamine, and anabolic steroids. They build their entire lives around circuit parties and raves, Pride, the gym, cruises, summers in Fire Island and Nantucket.
A gay Jewish friend is dating a non-Jew for the first time. They met at Fire Island. He is renegotiating a lifetime of Shabbat observance to accommodate this new person. The new guy is friendly, to be sure, and fun to drink with.
“What do you guys actually have in common?” I ask. What do you do together besides fuck and party?
“We have similar values,” he says. The values are being gay in a major city on a high income. Seeing them interact at a Saturday lunch feels like a weirdly vulnerable intrusion in somebody else’s personal struggle with their religious identity. He asked him to participate in one Shabbat, but the new guy is frustrated that he’s missing a pool party in West Hollywood. He later concedes that if they lived together he would “let” the Jewish one put mezuzahs around the house.
Earlier that summer, in the same house, an assembly of gay Jewish men are sitting in two rooms. The shomer people in one, the secular people in the other. The secular people have turned on Spotify and the shomer people have wondered aloud if we should bentch and bounce.
After bentching I tried engaging in small talk with one of the guys from the other room. I say, “I think I used to follow you on Twitter,” and the look on his face tells me he interprets this as a jab. After a group of people leave, he tells the room he thought they were creepy and everybody laughs. I left shortly after.
When I was younger I was convinced I was a socially anxious introvert because every party that involved meeting new people left me feeling depleted and hollow. Meeting new people in any other circumstance – work, school, through friends – never made me feel that way. So I stopped meeting people at parties and started ignoring them instead.
People in LA have a reputation for being shallow. I see where that comes from at a comfortable distance. How adults in new cities make friends is a mystery to me, kind of. At the very least, having a Friday night meal keeps me tethered to a group of people who need each other for something more consistent. Maybe the secret to successful adult friendships is to admit from the get-go that we need each other.