Don't Believe the Hype

By Mark Leyner

I don't get it. To sit around in a tuxedo and plastic lei, a conical hat affixed to your head with an elastic chin strap, washing down fish eggs with carbonated white wine, as some glorified Bar Mitzvah band plays Public Enemy's Don't Believe the Hype, has always seemed to me a pretty lame way to spend the night.

Yet we remain perennially susceptible to New Year's Eve's specious allure, annually convinced that next year's shebang may somehow be different. And when it comes to the pathos of impossible expectations, there's never been anything like this: New Year's Eve Y2K. The millennium, baby! The expectations for this year's gala are pathologically high. An apocalyptically giddy time is expected to be had. We seem to be demanding nothing less than a cosmic collision of the dimensional trajectories of time and space in which, for one amazing instant, the entire universe becomes an unimaginably immense T.G.I. Friday's franchise.

Some of the more rococo NYE-Y2K fetes I've seen advertised suggest a collaborative extravaganza mounted by Donald Trump and Emperor Bokassa:

Imagine Versailles...20,000 leagues under the sea!

Ring in the millennial New Year as you plumb the 11,275-meter-deep Mariana Trench in the opulently appointed luxury submarine The Jubilee 2000!

Lainie Kazan and Iggy Pop will serenade you with Auld Lang Syne as you and yours suck the last dregs from your jeroboam of Roederer Cristal and giant tube worms and deep-sea shrimp (tres joli!) caper about the volcanic sulfide chimneys outside your stateroom's bay windows!

There are signs, though, that the occasion may be collapsing, or at least sagging, under the weight of its own hyperbole. Many of New York City's trendiest eateries have decided to opt out entirely. Gramercy Tavern, Balthazar, Vong and Tabla, for instance, will all close for NYE-Y2K. And according to a poll conducted by National Family Opinion Research, a majority of Americans are planning to spend this New Year's Eve with their family at home.

I chalk some of this up to the Baby-Sitter Problem. Think about it. What kind of maladjusted, alienated, socially phobic loser would be available to baby-sit on the millennial New Year's Eve? Would you leave your kids with a misanthropic freak who can't scrounge up a date or a party invite on the biggest New Year's Eve of all time?

So maybe just sitting home and watching TV isn't such a bad idea. Perhaps we should leave this NYE-Y2K to panels of reveling pundits discussing whether they're having fun yet. Or how about tuning in to some Extreme Reveling? Jon Krakauer Presents: America's Most Dangerous Galas. Experience, from the safety of your own La-Z-Boy, just how dangerous an unfurled noisemaker can be in a violent windstorm at 75[degrees] below zero.

For those who chafe at purely vicarious New Year's Eve thrills, may I suggest giving birth? We're talking first baby of the millennium! If you're not due but are somewhere in the ballpark of viability, get a C-section. It shows a hell of a lot of moxie to be lying split open on an operating table on a night when the hospital's monitoring equipment will probably shut down thanks to the Y2K computer crash, while you're at the mercy of a skeleton crew of probationary interns who are so low in the hospital pecking order that they're working the millennial New Year's Eve shift.

But if the rest of us want to salvage this upcoming New Year's Eve from a monumental letdown, we need to recognize its true ritualistic function. New Year's Eve--and nye-y2k beyond any other--is not a celebration of the future. It's an elegy for the past. As I sit here, on the brink of the fin de millennium, I'm already misty-eyed with nostalgia. I'll miss the 20th century. I really liked it. I liked the abstract art, the 12-tone music, the absurdist theater, the austere furniture, the Manichaean bipolar geopolitics. And so, given my longing for an irretrievable past, I think insularity and exile are the ambient notes to strive for this year, as opposed to your mindless, self-annulling, Leni Riefenstahl-style euphoria. Here's my provisional itinerary:

9 p.m.-11:44 p.m. Drink Scotch and watch several Jean-Luc Godard films from his unwatchable Maoist period.

11:45 p.m.-11:48 p.m. Read Su Tung-po poem New Year's Eve: Spending the Night Outside Chang-chou City (1073). "No one here speaks my dialect: I long for home... I thank the flickering torch that doesn't refuse/ to keep me company on a lonely boat through the night."

11:49 p.m.-12:01 a.m. Lie down on my bed, close my eyes and imagine Times Square, desolate save for Vladimir and Estragon, the stammering tramps of Waiting for Godot...waiting for the millennium that never comes. And the famous ball--by dint of Zeno's paradox--falls but never reaches its destination. It's an infinitely deferred climax, a perpetually peaking party, an existential rave.

Would it be too modernist of me--too retro--to wish that for just this one fleeting moment between millenniums, Samuel Beckett could be my Dick Clark?