Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby Page 0,8

wear them out? I mean, who’s going to know. Okay, let’s be nakedly honest: I am wearing actual pajamas, not just real clothes I’ve fallen asleep in. I’m talking a nondescript pile of gauzy black fabrics that came from the sleepwear section at Kohl’s, worn outside of my house, where other people can see them. And not just to the grocery store—I mean I’ve worn them in meetings. During interviews. Onstage. These days, disgusting cozy clothes are my main sartorial vibe.

One Saturday night, in my early twenties, I was sitting alone on the floor in my room watching rom-coms on my combination television and VCR in the apartment I shared with my old roommate Joseph, who by that time was already knee-deep in his evening’s festivities, I’m sure, when our house phone rang. It was never for me, but I answered it anyway, and it was a girl whose friendship I maintained mostly because we liked to go dancing at the same Chicago clubs. And by “dance” I mean “drink a lot and sway.” I couldn’t tell you whether she liked horror movies or what kind of cell phone she had or if she was a vegetarian, but I knew that bitch liked a Grey Goose L’Orange with soda, no ice. It was after eleven when I brushed the crumbs off my sweatpants to get up and answer the phone, and if then was now, I would have had a hearty laugh at her proposition that I leave my warm apartment in the dead of night to meet her downtown in a dark warehouse with no chairs, but once upon a time I was fun, so I struggled into a tight pair of magenta polyester bell-bottoms and a shiny silver shirt (imagine this, I dare you), then took the bus (!) downtown, where I met her outside a club called Ontourage, spelled with an O because it was on Ontario Street. That’s the only thing you need to know to formulate an accurate mental picture of exactly what that place was like. Dudes with fresh fades wearing sunglasses at midnight accompanied gorgeous half-naked women on stilts past the bouncer, who was collecting twenty-dollar covers, and I was there dressed like I was about to shimmy down the Soul Train line. I paid the cover with a collection of crumpled bills I dug out of the couch cushions (I am not and have never been cute enough to have the charge dismissed) and was ushered into the cavernous club, where I made a beeline for the bar. I jammed myself between several men in silk, collared shirts (this place had a dress code, because it was all class, you see) and ordered a gin and tonic, which a young man wearing many chains over his T-shirt slithered over and paid for, unprompted. An hour later, he had purchased several more and per the terms of our unspoken nightlife contract was allowed to surreptitiously grind against my outer thigh in a far corner of the dance floor next to a speaker, while drunkenly slurring, “Let me see that ass,” into the side of my neck to the tune of “U Know What’s Up.” My neurotransmitters and synapses dulled by watered-down Tanqueray, I took him literally (omg) and proceeded to remove my pants in the middle of a fucking disco. I know that the mental image this creates is one in which I effortlessly slip a pair of silky trousers down my unstubbled legs and gracefully step out of them in one smooth motion, but nah—sweat and humidity (and possibly urine?) had given my pants an adhesive quality that required my tugging them over my thighs inch by constricting inch. At no point did anyone in close proximity grab my arm and ask just what the fuck I was doing, and my new boyfriend was clearly thrilled at the return he was getting on his investment (my stark white underpants glowing fluorescent under the neon lights). So when I was asked by security to leave the premises, I did so in a pair of Just My Size Cool Comfort? briefs, with my soaking-wet glue pants balled up in my hand.

But tonight, the waist of my loose-fitting yoga pants is so high that I can tuck my nipples into it, which I am doing.

6:55 p.m.: i’m not that late.

If my Lyft doesn’t get lost, and there’s no