The year was 1980. I was one year old and deeply in love with Susan Lucci... Kiding. The year was 2003. Boston. A cold and dreary winter. A lonely winter. I had just moved there in January with a good friend of mine, Angela, and her friend from college, Laura. We knew noone and, therefore, had decided to give ourselves til Valentine's Day to make enough friends to have a real party, figuring we'd all probably be single then anyway.
We lived in a huge three bedroom apartment on Hancock Street in Porter Square. After several weeks of impoverished laying-around-and-drinking-a-lot, I got the lowest-paying job possible ($19,000/yr!) as a travel agent for STA Travel, answering phones at the National Reservation Center off of Boston Common. Angela found a job as a receptionist at a hair salon AND as a dogwalker, as well as an internship at a local film production company. Laura ended up in childcare.
We invited our new friends who lived across the street, the three nurses that lived upstairs, people from work, random people we met in bars, and friends from school who lived nearby (New Hampshire and New Jersey). We bought a ton of alcohol. I dusted off my favorite records. We were set for the best party in Porter Square history. But it didn't quite end up that way...
Around 11pm, after much pre-partying with my roommates, my girlfriend, and our old friends from school, I noticed that nobody had arrived. Whatever. Between 11 and midnight, maybe a dozen people wandered in, none of whom I knew. They were all friends of people we invited, not those people themselves, who never bothered to show up. The most notable of these friends-of-friends was "Adele's Friend."
Now, I know he was Adele's friend because he was wearing a large homemade button that identified him as such. He was about 5'5", Indian, and wore a Mr. Rogers-ish sweater vest and bowtie combo. Not sure who Adele was, and painfully aware that this guy was a loser, I hesitated to let him inside when I answered the door. Angela came over and said Adele was a girl she interned with, who wasn't here yet, and that we should let him in.
"Why not? We need SOME people here..."
About half an hour later, I sat on the couch in the record room, in the dark, listening to Daft Punk, drunk, chatting with my friend JJ. Out of nowhere, Adele's Friend (whose name I never got, by the way), perched on the edge of a papasan chair as if in some kind of posture contest, interrupted.
"Excuse me, but...you know I can do parlor tricks."
"What? Like what? Billiards? Darts?"
"Like that game where you go like this..."
He then pantomimed rapidly moving a knife between his fingertips.
"Oh, mumblypeg?" [note: I only knew this name because of a video game from my childhood, about pirates, called "Monkey Island"]
"Yeah."
“Well, let’s fucking see it!”
I led a curious entourage out of the record room, down a narrow hallway, and into the kitchen. Now, the kitchen was a totally different scene from the record room--fluorescent lights on full-tilt, people standing around wrapped in shawls, drinking Diet Coke, talking about the differences between cats and dogs and stupid things like that. We marched in there and took over.
I reached into a cupboard and grabbed the biggest knife I had--a large chef's knife that may as well have been a meat cleaver, and presented it to Adele's friend. The cat-and-dog librarian set audibly hushed at the brandishing of said knife and watched this new, dangerous scene raptly.
“Oh, no...I can just use a pen...I wouldn’t want to...scratch your table.”
“JJ--grab a phone book.”
JJ plopped the 4-inch-thick Boston yellowpages on the table and we all stood back to observe. Would he actually do it?
Whether he wanted to or not, Adele's Friend hefted the knife, set down his hand, spread out his fingers, and went to work. He moved the knife with impressive speed, fearlessly plunging it toward his fingers time and time again, increasingly faster, until he suddenly dropped the knife and hid his hand behind his back. I saw a telltale drop of blood on the tip of the blade. The show was over. Adele's Friend turned to me sheepishly.
"Do you have any bandages?"
"I don't think so."
"Duct tape?"
"In the toolbox in the pantry, if I have it..."
The crowd began to melt away, their bloodlust sated. I turned to head back to the record room when my roommate, Laura, who had been holding court in the kitchen, sipping wine, grabbed me by the collar, her face flushed, her mind reeling.
"What...just...happened?!"
"Nothing. He was playing mumblypeg and he cut himself. It's not bad, though, or he'd say something. He'll be fine."
"He stabbed himself?"
"No--I wouldn't use that word. I think he just cut his thumb."
Laura looked shell-shocked. She released her hold on me and seemed to lose herself in her imagination. Was she perhaps thinking back to the only warning our landlord had given us when we informed her of the party?
"Do whatever you want, as long as nobody gets stabbed."
She actually said that. Turns out, when she and her husband lived in the apartment, before they moved downstairs, they threw a huge party the night before sending their son off to the Navy. At some point, in a haze of alcohol, swords were pulled from the wall and somebody accidentally got stabbed, the paramedics came, the police came, people were caught pissing off the balcony and drinking underage...so, no stabbing. Please. Sorry, landlady!
I retreated to the record room, sat back on the couch, and resumed talking to JJ. There was still almost nobody at the party, and very few people there were drinking or having any fun. After a time, Adele’s Friend appeared in the doorway, his thumb and first two fingers duct-taped together in a huge bulbous mass. He tried to make it look natural that he was intentionally keeping the wound above his heart at all times, to lessen the flow of blood.
I watched as he struck awkward pose after awkward pose, acting as if everything was perfectly normal, as if we hadn’t all watched him slice his hand in the kitchen. I turned to the three nurses who lived upstairs, who were somehow all sitting in the papasan chair at the same time--not drinking, of course. Luckily, I guess, since I had to put one of them to work.
“I think one of you should check him out and see if he needs to go to the hospital.”
One of them took him into the bathroom for inspection, and we all eagerly awaited her diagnosis.
A couple minutes later, the examining nurse returned and plopped down in the papasan without saying a word.
“Well? Does he need to go to the hospital?”
“Oh yeah.”
Adele’s Friend returned, holding his injured hand high above his head and using the other to flip through the phone book, looking for ambulance phone numbers. Obviously, I felt sorry for him, but I also knew he’d be alright, just a bit ego-bruised and perhaps superficially scarred. So I didn't feel too bad for laughing when I realized he was looking for help in the very same phonebook he stabbed himself on, just fifteen minutes prior. Something seemed fitting about that.
He said goodnight, apologized for not being better at Mumblypeg, and disappeared. None of us ever saw him again.
By the next morning, when it was painfully clear how lame the party had been the night before, because it never got any better in the wee hours, I had totally forgotten about Adele’s Friend. Suddenly, the memory came flooding back to me and I laughed the hardest I’ve ever laughed in my entire life. Granted, I was stoned, but I found the idea that he went “from zero to hero,” in a matter of an hour, hilarious. He was the biggest loser at a party full of losers; yet because he stabbed himself, he was the only fond memory I would ever have from that party. He was kind of a hero to me--the man that saved Valentine's Day.
