Shitshow - Day 99: Pathogue to New York City, NY

Today I just hung around Patchogue doing nothing of note until it was time to take the train back to Manhattan for the penthouse party. The part itself is succinctly described in the title of this post. I almost don't want to write about it, but it seems unfair to withhold details now.

I considered buying a black collared shirt from K-mart. This was the after-party for a fashion show, though, and I decided that dressing up would be futile on my budget. I did try to at least smell alright, but it ultimately didn't matter. By the time we arrived the formerly beautiful three-or-more-story 5th Avenue penthouse, it had been transformed into an absolute wreck with sticky floors, broken furniture, and no remaining alcohol. The elevator kept vomiting out fresh loads of aspiring party-goers who would repeat the same cycle: fight through the crowd of aspiring ex-party-goers, discover that coming here was a mistake, and then join the mob to fight their way out again while cursing whoever told them to come here.

Conversation was almost impossible and the novelty of the situation wore out quickly, both for me as a relative peasant failing to masquerade and for my host who quickly lost interest once he realized that nobody was excited about the scraggly-bearded vagrant he scraped out of the gutter. He couldn't brag about me without yelling directly into someone's ear, so after trying that a couple times to no avail, he left me to fend for myself. Bewildered and alone, I wandered off to survey the chaos.

The sizable and increasingly irritable crowd all agreed to respect the space around a red-carpet-style photo op near the elevator. Nobody dared cross the gap between the professional lighting and a backdrop with some designer's logo tiled across it. This void established a pressure gradient that spat me out into this sacred space through no action of my own, blinking stupidly at the lights. After a moment, a tiny model appropriated me as arm candy and I tried to look... some kind of way while a stranger used my new friend's phone to collect, I assumed, photographic evidence of how terrible the event was. After a few shots, she managed to communicate that she had lost track of her friends and was basically terrified by the whole ordeal. She hoped I could clear her a path to the elevator.

I did as requested. I learned she was 19 and Australian, but she didn't know the guy who brought me here -- dumb question, in retrospect. I didn't have the chance to pry much more than that before she found a ride. I have to say that I really enjoyed being identified as a safe person when I figured most people there expected me to ask for spare change.

Only now am I realizing that I will never get to see the photos she took. I hardly took any photos, but I feel like I should at least provide some evidence of how my bike ride ended with an abysmal 5th Avenue penthouse party, so here's a funky art piece and picture from the street afterward. I assumed this was a light fixture that was turned off to encourage people to leave, but I really have no idea.