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time the weather hovered above the forties, I used it as an excuse to wear slides or flip-flops, my footwear of choice. In a perfect world, I really should have been shipwrecked with Christopher Atkins on the Blue Lagoon. I never would have gotten my period, like Brooke Shields, and I would have been wholly content to run around barefoot and tan while getting my brains boinked out.
    The restaurant was buzzing with Asians out celebrating their New Year, along with the usual mix of slow-moving old people and fat college kids in sweats.
    â€œWhat the hell is going on?” I asked once we got in line.
    The line for the buffet, which was set up in a massive U along three different walls, was backed up in a human traffic jam. I was in that fuzzy drunk place when you are just starting to feel the effects of huge quantities of alcohol on your body and mind—that lovely moment before anger, vomiting, and alcohol poisoning set in—when the lethal dosage is innocently manifesting itself as munchies.
    At the moment I was feeling the need for something greasy in my stomach, so I wound my arm free from my nursemaid and staggered a few big, unsteady steps forward in line.
    â€œExcuse me, ma’am,” I said to a dead woman propped up on a pillow in a motorized cart—the kind that has a TV tray up front to hold a dinner plate. “I need a crab rangoon, or I’m gonna pass out.”
    She frowned at me and revved her cart.
    â€œOooh, and I need some duck sauce. Can’t have a rangoon without duck sauce.”
    I ripped the packet of duck sauce with my front teeth, smiling at her the whole time, and began to squirt a dollop in the middle of the rangoon. But in doing so, an orange rivulet spurted onto my bare toes and oozed into my leather slides.
    â€œThese cost two hundred bucks,” I said to her, bending down in an immediate panic to clean them off.
    In my drunken haze—I had no distance perspective—I bent over and hit the dead woman’s cart. In her effort to make room for me, she put her cart in reverse, and all I heard, as I wiped clean my foot and slide, was the loud “BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!” of her motorized cart heading in reverse, and then what sounded like the
Titanic:
screams and dishes breaking.
    I stood up and turned to see that I had caused a Chinese chain reaction of terror, people lying on the floor amid broken glass and cashew chicken.
    â€œWay to go, Godzilla,” Gary whispered, sidling up next to me. But then, like any great dancer, Gary said, “Follow my lead.”
    â€œAre you okay, ma’am?” Gary asked the dead woman in the cart, who was now being assisted by one of her elderly companions. “You just seem so confused. Are you okay?”
    Gary said all of this very loudly and very dramatically, with faux force and sincerity, just like President Bush used to do when he talked about poor people.
    â€œWhat? What?” the old woman said. “What?”
    â€œIs everyone okay?” Gary asked. “She’s very sorry.”
    I shoved my crab rangoon in my mouth and gulped it down.
    â€œConsider this your payback,” Gary said. “Forever. Happy Chinese New Year, honey.”
    I was drunk. Very drunk. And at that moment his spontaneous gesture seemed way more romantic than any midnight kiss on New Year’s Eve could ever be.
    Gary quickly threw some cash on the table and raced toward the exit.
    But, ironically, just as we were leaving, the delivery tranny—returning to the restaurant to nab another to-go order—stopped us at the door. “I saw everything,” she said, grabbing me with her ill-manicured hand. “But you can buy my silence with a
big tip
.”
    â€œI’ll give you a big tip,” Gary said, fingering her nunchucks. “Clean up your eyebrows. They’re the window to the soul of a
real
woman.”
    My man, I realized, could never be bought again, be it New Year’s Eve or Chinese