Ode to an Inside Joke

How an inside joke with Alex Dobrenko turned into a hot little orb of love

Next week I will be publishing a personal update about solo parenting a newborn and toddler, dropping balls everywhere, and feeling for just a moment like Mother Earth. But for now, please enjoy this short piece about my fifteen-year friendship with

Alex Dobrenko`

. It’s been paywalled for over a year, and I’m excited to share it with all of you now.

Little Rae and Alex, pre-joke

Once, fifteen years ago, I asked a stupid question. I was on board a ferry boat, a rising college senior, red-cheeked from a day at the beach. A group of friends lounged on the deck, high on the sweet, auspicious air of early summer, bare arms slung over shoulders. The late afternoon sun glanced off the waves and projected sparkles. Everything was wide and inviting ahead.

I wanted to know the plans for the night, so I turned to my friend Alex and said,

“So are you guys, like, partying later?”

The syntax and word choice were odd. I was a serious student, the type of person who would use the word “syntax.” Alex, with an inborn instinct for comedy, mined some hilarity from my dumb question. He turned to the group and yelled,

“Hey, everyone, are we, like, partying later? Anyone, like, partying?”

The small group giggled and repeated my badly composed question—Anyone, like, partying later? I blushed a happy pink, the butt of the joke but also the queen of the joke. I’m a fiend for this kind of fond teasing. This kind of love.

So? That would usually be the end of it. A silly, frivolous joke. Barely a joke, really.

But that year this phrase became a habit—Are you, like, partying later? If Alex and I encountered any discussion of nighttime plans, any mention of events on campus, indeed any use of the word “later,” he turned to me and said, Are we, like, partying? Later? The phrasing evolved—later, are we gonna, like, party?—and became truncated—later, wanna like…? Eventually the entire joke was contained in just a glance my way and a single word: party?

Other people began to reference the joke. I found myself in random groups talking about the coming weekend, and someone would turn to me and say,

“So, later, are you, like, heading somewhere with people imbibing alcohol?”

Oh, this insignificant, unsophisticated, artless, middling joke that we couldn’t stop telling.

*

Five years later we were twenty-five, and a group of these friends reunited at a concert. Dusk was falling and the stage lights were coming up, and for a moment everyone left behind the trials of early adulthood and became free: wearing cutoff shorts, covered in mud, stripes painted on our cheeks. A band dressed as aliens took the stage, and the crowd started thumping, bellowing the lyrics, shutting our eyes against the strobe lights, waving our hands in the deepening night. Someone grabbed my arm through the mayhem and yelled,

“Hey!”

I was tossing my long hair wildly and stomping on the muddy earth. I paused just long enough to hear a friend shout:

“Are we, like, finally partying?”

I’ve observed an inside joke before, tried to sort out its mechanics. I’ve seen it on a first date, when it is flimsy glue to connect us for a moment. I’ve seen how it works as a badge of having been there, “I was included!” woven into the retelling. I’ve seen how it helps define us and them, like a line in the sand washed away and redrawn, washed away and redrawn. But I’ve rarely seen an inside joke like this one, laid brick by brick, year after year, like a fortress.

*

Ten years later we were thirty, scattered across the country, involved in partnerships and health struggles and consumed in our careers. We were still texting each other, “later? party?” Our husbands and wives and new friends told the joke. I still loved this stupid thing, more than ever.

That day on the ferry we picked out that random moment, put a stake in it, tied to it a flimsy string, and proceeded to carry that thread through everything that followed: through lazy senior spring and sickening goodbyes and moves across the country, through 3 a.m. New York City streets and dancing on tables and getting kissed by strangers, through bad diagnoses and breakups and our low backs beginning to ache, through red-hot early love and crimson later love, through the days we thought we wouldn’t amount to much and the days we felt like queens, through our pursuits of mastery, through failure after failure, through endless weary turns of the earth on her axis. We carried it through the whole immense decade of our twenties, a third of our lives.

We didn’t toss it aside, we wove it thicker, recruited other people to carry it with us, avoided the severing blade of time against all odds. What ever possessed us to go to such lengths for this rudimentary, immature, basic, unworldly, terrible joke?

*

It has been fifteen years now, and the joke has evolved to suit our mid-thirties. The party is now, we remind each other. As in: the party is, in fact, not later. As in: the party has been, in fact, happening all along. For example, we’re at the playground with our babies and feeling tired from endless daycare-induced colds, and the air is too hot and sticky, but the babies are shrieking with joy on the swings, and someone says, the party is now. Always with a shrug, like, whodda thunkit? All those years we were mistaken about the timing of the party.

Recently, Alex showed up at a gathering and surprised us with his new tattoo: a stylized party hat, his personal reminder about when the party is. Our joke, set in dark ink in the skin of his abdomen, forever.

This joke, my god. It is now a hot little orb of love. It has been forged by many hands, transformed by the alchemy of our friendships, fired in the kiln of time, willed into permanence through our bizarre devotion. This joke, not so stupid after all.

*

I imagine the joke told at my fiftieth birthday, at my eightieth birthday, by my children. At my funeral I imagine someone hobbles up to the podium with a cane and turns toward the guests, hands shaking, to deliver a short eulogy:

“At last she is, like, partying.”

I have spent thousands of hours in offices toiling in pursuit of a certain kind of success. And yet it will be my greatest achievement if my epitaph reads:

Later Finally Came.

This essay was originally published in Ghost City Review.

✍️ Tell me…

1. Do you have inside jokes with the people in your life? I want to hear about them!

2. What’s the longest-running inside joke you’ve had?

3. Inside jokes as mantras… idk what do we think?