My posting schedule this week has been a little cracked out. Don’t worry. I’m chalk full of excuses, the most pertinent and truthful of which is that this weekend I suffered several near death experiences, all in the same 10-hour period. Stressful? Yes. The chords in the back of my neck have only now (four days later) begun to relax into their normal position, and that’s only because in an act of desperation I used one of my roommate’s sun salutations yoga stress-reliever DVDs. Note: old men in instructional yoga videos are creepier than your average pedophile. What I gained in flexibility I lost in peace of mind.
So how was my life endangered repeatedly? Well. This past Labor Day Sunday night could perhaps be defined as the night to be in the Hamptons. There was P Diddy’s silly all-white extravaganza, there were six zillion ‘fashion week parties’ (whatever that means), there was the end of the summer fiesta at that club that starts with a ‘T’ that I can never remember, and then there was Rocco’s Sunflower children’s charity event and finale blowout at Pink South Hampton hosted by Buddha Bar. Now we all know I hate the Hamptons and that I haven’t ventured there since Memorial Day. But when I got a last minute invite for a ride to Long Island on Sunday morning, I succumbed to the idea. I decided I’d begin and end my summer in the Hamptons on the two hot holiday weekends that open and close the summer. What can I say? I like symmetry.
The adventure that ensued is still too raw for me to talk about fully. I haven’t really progressed to that funny ‘ha ha’ looking back in joyful retrospect stage of a situation that was at the time, dreadful. I’ll kick off by saying that I was in a car with seven people. Uh-huh. You do the math. We also had six cases of Veuve Clicqout in our car’s trunk, so everyone’s luggage was on their lap or at your feet. The fact that there was NO space was remedied by the fact that our happy jeep-bus of seven was drinking insanely expensive sake out of Starbucks paper cups. Our hosts also had some champagne on ice. There was also the distinct odor that several joints had been enjoyed in the vehicle before Bartok and I had even been picked up. And how many bottles of sake had already been consumed before our arrival remained a mystery.
Our designated driver was not drunk, per se. I think he was just a really bad driver in general and one of those people incapable of multitasking: i.e. every time he’d speak on his cell phone, send a text, or smoke a cigarette (which was about 90% of the voyage) we’d often drift into the opposite traffic lane, come close to rear ending someone, or miss turns. The car had a satellite navigation system, a function the driver thought was purely decorative, as we got lost several times. My favorite moments on this hellish journey had to be:
1. After pulling over for a pit stop, when everyone was piling back into the jeep, our driver took off with two of us still in the parking lot and one girl’s body half-in / half-out of the moving vehicle. She’s lucky to be alive.
2. When I saw the ‘Montauk to Hamptons’ exit sign over five times, each from a different direction.
3. When our driver pulled into a jail / concentration facility to ask a cop for directions. The moment we pulled into this sketchy parking lot, complete with a guard, a high fence, barbed-wire, and a big yellow sign that read “Correctional Facility” to turn around, I knew our driver was officially insane and that it might be time to start text messaging people my will.
With everyone acting as a backseat driver and me shrieking out directions and survival techniques like an opera singer on steroids, we ultimately arrived at SAG Harbor with a newfound appreciated for life. I then made it my personal project to get me and the people I cared about as far away as possible from the aforementioned driver. Me and my girl’s had a conference. Our driver and our host (by association) were clearly out of their minds. And our host is someone I know quite well. I don’t know if it was the glare of the full moon or his eighth glass of sake after two joints, but I no longer saw him as an entity to be trusted. And if this was the drive up, did we really want to stick around to see what kind of Hampton’s accommodation these whack-jobs had to offer? From that moment on, the night metamorphosized into a game of survivor. And I think girls alone in the Hamptons is a much more frightening prospect than girls alone on a deserted island.
I proposed we find a way to get to Rocco’s party at Pink in Southampton because at least at Pink we’d know half the club. The majority of our friends were there, so I game-planned that at Pink we could recount our story of woe to sympathetic ears and locate a friendly soul who’d take us in for the night. This meant scouting prospective transportation from SAG Harbor to Southampton in a nearby bar, since our hosts were preoccupied drinking the Veuve we brought with us out of paper bags on the street. Every time a police car passed us, I feared for my life.
Luckily, after much research and over an hour of conducting interviews of eligible bachelors with licenses and cars, we found gentlemen responsible enough to lend us a ride to Pink, where they were going anyway. Our now officially drunk driver from before a little too carelessly tossed me his car keys so we were all able to retrieve our luggage out of the large, crack-den on wheels that had transported us to the Hell which is the Hamptons.
I like having millions of cabs surrounding me like Christmas lights. I like the 24-hour subway system. I like being able to walk everywhere. You mix with the wrong crowd in the Hamptons and you are STUCK in all caps. There’s no escape, except for the one you create yourself. And me and my girls epitomized that Destiny’s Child song ‘Survivor’ last Sunday night as we bailed out of SAG Habor looking for safer territory.
We left our overnight stuff in an anonymous friend’s trunk and made it into Pink by two thirty am. Naturally, the place was a shit-show. Rocco stripped and danced and fell off the bar. And for three blissful hours, as sad as it may sound, I felt safe and at home in the company of my fellow douchey partygoers. And when Pink becomes a sanctuary you know you’re in a freaky, emergency-like situation.
My bliss was naturally cut short because at five thirty am I had to deal with where we all were going to crash. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say my stress level rose another thirty percent. We ended up all four of us in a bed trying to get some shut-eye at six in the morning. Sleeping was an impossible task since house music was playing in the adjacent living room at mega-watts and the majority of our companions were engaged in those never ending, coked-out, seven am in the morning discussions about the meaning of life that are more painful than nails on a chalk board to listen to if you aren’t also high. Needless to say, our crazy driver and negligent host had failed to provide us with any kind of dinner, so at this point we were more starving than your average child in Somalia. One of the owners of the house kindly offered us all that was in his fridge: some wheat bread. So we nibbled on that and drank water and realized we surviving off bread and water – literally. We were prisoners in a Hamptons jail.
The minute I saw the sun had fully risen, I knew it was safe to venture out of the shed/refugee camp where we’d spent the night. I gathered my girls and high-tailed it out of there, stepping over unconscious bodies on my way to the door.
We walked around a random, cute, Hamptons street before seeing our equivalent of a rescue helicopter – a Hamptons Jitney put-putting by at eight in the morning. We all waved our hands in desperation, and even though we were no where near a Jitney stop, the driver pulled over and let us in. I think he just took a look at our smeared make-up, haggard faces, luggage, and weary walk and knew this was a legitimate emergency. And once we were on the Jitney, I finally felt safe. Traumatized, but safe. And just like in any rescue aid vehicle, support started flowing in. The Jitney hostess gave us water (be blessed), muffins (nourishment!), and a New York Post (where we cautiously read reviews of the parties we attended from the night before).
I wanted to kiss the Manhattan sidewalk when I exited the bus onto 3rd avenue. I wanted God Bless America to start playing and to crescendo at the moment I’d dive into my own warm bed, huddled under my covers in the fetal position like a genocide survivor. And the Hamptons – well, until I’m married with a mansion in Montauk – I’m never going there again.
