It’s Never Too Late to Have a Housewarming Party

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Lizzie: Despite having done it eight times in the past 10 years, I can’t recommend moving. Sure, it’s a good opportunity to imagine a few alternate lives and get rid of your dissolving socks, but it’s also an almost unbearable undertaking that involves reckoning with your accumulation of stuff, tussling with formerly hidden dust clumps, and swallowing expletives and tears when brokers you’ve never even seen pretend they need $8K just for telling you the code to a lock box.

Sometimes you hear stories about people who don’t move. Good deal, guilty landlord, flying under the radar of a massively bloated management company so that they never raise or even collect your rent—the classics. This past weekend, Kaitlyn and I were invited to a very belated housewarming party celebrating the enviably steady living situation of two such people: Jake and Lori, who have lived in the same rent-stabilized Crown Heights apartment for 10 years.

Kaitlyn: Jake and Lori are local celebrities who put “Kill v. Maim” on the Spotify playlist at their perfect wedding in 2019. Despite never having been to their apartment prior to the event we are recapping today, I have told countless people about it over the years. It’s an urban legend except it’s real.

In advance of the party, Jake sent out an email invitation promising “drinks/games/no prizes,” and I set about my usual fretting. The housewarming theme seemed to call for something domestic and substantial, so I went to my pile of random church cookbooks. The one I’d picked up in North Carolina last year had lots of interesting options I’d never been so bold as to try, such as a “Ritz Cracker cake,” which had only six ingredients, including 25 Ritz Crackers, and a “dump cake,” which proposed the incredible innovation of ignoring the list of liquids called for on the back of a box of yellow-cake mix and instead swapping in a can of cherry-pie filling. Unable to decide, I picked up some random stuff at the store, including a heavy, peppermint-scented candle—if all else failed, this seemed an appropriate “housewarming” gesture.

Lizzie: After Kaitlyn texted me that she had decided to make a “Coca-Cola cake,” I immediately abandoned my plan of “only bringing chips,” because I’m easily swayed by the power of suggestion and a feeling of inadequacy. Still, I promised myself I wouldn’t go to the grocery store again. So I made what I knew I could make without leaving my apartment: brownies. For reasons unknown to me, I have a stock of three containers of cocoa powder and several varieties of semisweet and bittersweet chocolate. After I finished making the brownies, I immediately thought that one 8-by-8 pan of brownies wouldn’t be enough. If we assume 30 party attendees, only about half of them would get a brownie at this rate. It was almost worse than bringing nothing! Matt told me that not everyone would eat a brownie, and I said, “That’s what I’m worried about!” We put the tiny pile on a green plastic plate and walked to Jake’s.

On the way there, we stopped at a wine store and Matt got a bottle of amaro. This raised the question of whether it was reasonable to expect your host to have ice prepared and freely available to you. Putting your beer in someone else’s fridge? Sure. But a person’s freezer is an intimate space. Can you just go in and look for ice without asking? I asked Matt what he would do if he opened Jake and Lori’s freezer and there was something untoward in there—like a head. (For the record, Jake and Lori are some of the loveliest people I know and I want to make it clear that this question was merely an interesting thought experiment that would provide the basis for nearly all of my conversations later in the night; it is not an idea based in reality, or in Jake’s refrigerator.) Matt told me that if this happened to him, the head thing, he would just leave the party without me, and then text me, “Had to go, head in freezer.”

Kaitlyn: Mere minutes after bragging to Lizzie about my plans, my afternoon devolved into one of unbridled cake chaos. The Coca-Cola cake, which contained Coca-Cola and mini-marshmallows, was meant to be a sheet cake, but because I find sheet cakes visually offensive I had tried to make it into a circular layer cake—it was not structurally sound and I burned myself quite badly while trying to deal with this issue. It was trashed. I tried the yellow-cake-and-pie-filling concoction next, which went about how you would expect. Like Lizzie, I could not go to the store again. So I flipped through my books until I landed on something called a “feather cake,” which is simple, sponge-y, and seasoned with nutmeg. I topped it with melted margarine and shredded coconut. Fine!

On the walk to the party, Nathan and I ran into Mariya and she immediately began filming us. To her Instagram followers, I explained nervously, “It’s a feather cake.” She didn’t ask questions. She looked like a magazine cover; she was wearing a white tennis outfit and a long, cherry-red blazer with gold buttons. She was going to another party where the theme was “wear something you haven’t worn,” and she asked us to stay at Jake and Lori’s “all night long” so that she could come find us after she’d had enough of the first event.

When we arrived at the apartment, we cooed at the walls and floors. Here it was, finally. The first thing we did was examine the “wishing tree” (houseplant) that Jake and Lori had put out so that people could tie notes to its branches and pray for better outcomes regarding their leases, landlords, and superintendents. Minutes later, one of Jake and Lori’s friends arrived carrying a chocolate cake on top of which she had piped the blueprint of the apartment.

Lizzie: Jake and Lori’s apartment was impeccably on theme, not least of all because their apartment was the theme. In each room, there were photos taped to the walls that had been taken in that very same room at some point during the past 10 years. I loved it! Standing there, I felt like the Ghost of Christmas Past (except cooler and younger), silently spying on replayed moments in someone else’s history. Every song on the playlist had come out 10 years ago.

The theme was so spot-on, in fact, that we started to wonder if it was all too good to be true. What if Jake hasn’t actually lived here for 10 years? What if the real family who lives here was to walk in and see us all method-acting the celebration of a milestone that never existed? I think this came up because Kaitlyn spotted some kind of anachronism in a photo.

Kaitlyn: I don’t recall but I think I might have made this accusation baselessly, out of irritation. I had been thrilled by the view out of Jake and Lori’s living-room window, which was straight into the backyards of a bunch of other buildings. When I asked Jake if he and Lori had ever had “a Rear Window situation,” he responded, “Oh, BIG time,” and a chill ran down my spine. “Really?” I gasped. I was just trying to be silly and make a reference. “What happened?” Then he said there’s this cat in one of the yards who seems to have a specific routine. You can see how I became furious.

This was also around the time that I pointed meanly at a stockpile of Multi Grain Cheerios on top of the kitchen cabinets, demanding to know who the hell needs so many Multi Grain Cheerios. There were five boxes, all apparently family-size. “That is worse than a head in the freezer,” Nathan said. I agreed. Russell was like, “Are we … you know …?” and I didn’t know. Then he said, “Are we in the newsletter right now?”

Drinks in hand, we moved back to the living room and sat down on the floor in front of the air conditioner. We hoped to motivate all of the partygoers to sink down to our eye level, but we didn’t succeed, and every time I laughed I bumped the back of my head on a standing person’s butt.

Lizzie: Speaking of butts, one standing man kept grabbing his girlfriend’s directly in my line of vision. I tried to focus on the task at hand: stimulating conversation. Before I knew it, perhaps not unexpectedly, I was embroiled in a heated discussion with Russell, Matt, and Nathan about what to do if you do happen to find a head in your host’s freezer. You may have heard this one already, but I’m just relaying the facts. Again, I’m not in the business of collecting evidence here, and again, to my knowledge no crime has been committed, but Russell was fully prepared to cover for Jake and his freezer head, and perhaps even get involved in a more hands-on kind of way. This led to several tangents, like Russell doing “I lost my hand! I lost my bride!” (from Moonstruck), I think as an example of the inevitability of human suffering, and telling us about his idea for a movie called Bear Witness, in which a bear witnesses a crime and must learn to communicate with humans in order to convey what he knows. Unfortunately, this title seems to already be claimed by Disney, and you know they don’t like to share.

Kaitlyn: I missed a bunch of this, as Lizzie and I were separated for a while due to a classic party situation: I was refilling my drink and chatting with Jake when Mariya and Megan burst through the door, redirecting our attention. Suddenly we were all in a second location, Jake and Lori’s bedroom, trying to get a glimpse of the cat, Pretzel, hiding under the bed. Mariya asked me if she could have my shirt and she asked Jake whether she could have all of the art in the apartment. Then she insisted on knowing how much Jake and Lori pay in rent, as well as how much they paid when they moved to New York a decade ago. If my math is correct, the difference was $150. I’ll be adding that to the information I pass around!

Anyway, I made my way back to the living-room floor just in time for some riveting stuff.

Lizzie: The night ended with several competing discussions about the concept of a human centipede, as first brought to light by the 2009 movie, The Human Centipede. I hate to bring up food now, but some food for thought: If a crazed doctor brings you to his lab, and shows you a human centipede that he’s been working on, how much worse do things start to feel for you if you find out that every member of the human centipede has your first name?

Kaitlyn: They would have to be wearing name tags, yes, we know. Or maybe they would all be recognizable, Russell suggested. His most terrifying centipede would be Russell Crowe, Russell Brand, Russell Wilson, etc. To my knowledge, there are no famous people named Kaitlyn.

Russell was really in the mood to entertain. He was “holding court,” as they say. He repeated his Moonstruck bit for me and I told him I felt that the more powerful monologue in Moonstruck was the one that goes “I don’t care if I burn in hell. I don’t care if you burn in hell.” Obviously. He was like, “I don’t remember that at all.” He also recapped the freezer-head conversation that I’d missed, and gave me a moving explanation for his position that he had presumably already rehearsed on everyone else: Russell trusts Jake and that’s part of who Russell is. If Russell were to come across a human head in Jake’s freezer, would that cause an instant, fundamental change in Russell? He didn’t see how it could.

Then he paused. He might feel differently if it were a woman’s head in the freezer. I admonished him for this. “Don’t you think it’s sexist to presume that a woman couldn’t do anything that would warrant being murdered by Jake?” I asked. Lori nodded solemnly. Russell didn’t answer this question but said he would also feel differently if it were two heads sewn together at the neck. (I’m picturing a sort of CatDog of heads.) From this, we got back to The Human Centipede.

When the conversation is this circular and disgusting, it is time to call it a night. We got ready to go and I snapped a photo of a photo of Lori’s copy of The Power Broker, which was taped to the wall in the entryway. Then I took a photo of two photos of Lori sitting all curled up in the kitchen window, which were taped up next to the actual kitchen window. That photo (mine, of hers) could easily go viral if posted to Tumblr.

Lizzie: Jake and Lori gave me a photo of Pretzel to take home as a little souvenir. In it, he’s trying to play with an iPhone, but he’s not very good at it, because he’s a cat. On the walk home, we saw about a dozen rats, doing whatever it is rats do without iPhones. “Goodnight little ones,” I whispered. “Enjoy it now, because the next 10 years will fly by and you never know when you’re gonna find a head in a freezer!”

Kaitlyn: Okay, Liz!

We also passed the site of the dearly departed bar Butter & Scotch, which we used to go to with Jake and Lori sometimes. Jake would always order the drink that came with a shot glass of Cheerios on the side. It just goes to show … everything is significant and worth noticing, but especially everything about Lori and Jake.