Banned From NYU Dinner Parties

a personal essay based on true events.

We met the poorly dressed nepo baby of Forever 21 outside the glazed entry doors of the Stern School of Business. The future home of overpriced luxury retailers and Barron Trump. My videographer Frank met the nepo baby at a Casey Neistat Q&A panel in SoHo. If you were alive during the 2016 YouTube vlog era, you understand how jarring it was for me to write that sentence. To this day, the nepo baby’s legal name remains a mystery because of how afraid he was of me treating him differently. Frank only found out about his dad’s wealth through discovering a hoarder pile of those gaudy yellow retail bags that he would use as impromptu poop bags to pick up his artificially selected dog’s shit. No one with a private driver shops at Forever 21 that much. Frank got paid $600 a week to pet sit the crusty little white dog that was blind in its left eye so the nepo baby could go on “business trips” to Asia as a 19-year-old with a Louis Vuitton patterned suitcase. For the sake of the Oxford English Dictionary’s reputation, let us not overuse the cheugy ‘nepo baby’ term (i hate that i wrote that). Instead, let’s name the misunderstood millionaire’s son Bags. Frank was weird about having a rich friend and said to never ask Bags for free clothes. I think I can survive without a mini dress that has the Cheetos logo printed on it.

Bags said to meet him outside the glass exterior building at exactly 6 o’clock and to look like we go to NYU, whatever that means. “You have to have a student ID to get pass the metal detectors, so just follow my lead.” As the guard starts searching through my oversized tote from Urban Outfitters that’s filled with pink rolling papers and expired liquid blush, Bags starts speaking in Mandarin to a security officer. The fake cop was overweight and found pleasure in using his abuse of power to help us get inside, although we could outrun him. After getting away with our white-collar crime, Bags escorted us to the marble floor elevator entrance like it was his own penthouse. On our ride up to the fifth floor, a girl that had the nose job of an oil tycoon’s family portrait took up half the space with her crocodile leather Birkin. She probably felt insecure about being rejected from Yale and could see right through me. I sensed her red bottoms judging my out of style Doc Martens. She knew by my lip color that I couldn’t afford Ubers. I realized that wherever she was going, was also the destination of where Bags was taking us. I wanted to escape before security could catch on that I had to work a shitty retail job on 5th avenue so I could afford a family size bag of jalapeño chips from the bodega. We had no choice but to swiftly exit the elevator doors as we abruptly found ourselves in a sea amongst jewish students wearing Cartier bracelets that were gathering for a celebration of Rosh Hashanah. We didn’t go to NYU and we weren’t Jewish. Instead, we were undereducated and highly problematic.

“Surprise!” Bags said with a facetious tone. He was officially a trust fund troll that wanted to crash a private Jewish event for fun. I wondered if he had a kink for embarrassing his poor friends or if this was his idea of a social experiment. Either way, I had to find the nearest subway station and share a seat with a disease carrying rat before it was too late. All I wanted was to be around people that didn’t have an Equinox membership. It was dangerous to breath the same air. We were afraid to touch any of the food, although I should’ve stolen some bread like an Italian Aladdin. I looked around the room and took in the atmosphere of proud culture and humbled elitists. Suddenly, I could spot with my peripheral vision a 6’ 2” fake blonde with an abnormally small shoe size. There’s no fucking way Karlie Kloss is double dipping from the appetizers table right now. Her arms were the size of the toothpicks holding the eggplant dishes together. Apparently, she had resigned from her Victoria’s Secret career of making women starve themselves to become a fake student at NYU. Fake as in the school had created a nonexistent major for her so she could attend. Apparently her white feminist passion was learning how to code and converting to Judaism. She swapped her A-list title for an A+ report card while cosplaying as an intellectual purchasing colorful school supplies that she would end up never using.

Frank saw the rumored closeted lesbian dating Taylor Swift as the perfect filming opportunity. We had been working on my comedy reel that year and were itching for a scandalous cameo opportunity. We were content monsters behaving like Jake Paul if he went to art school. I was embarrassed about our intentions and completely unaware that it was about to get so much worse. I took out my cracked iPhone 6 with a battery power that only lasted for 35 minutes to start filming a video of myself with Karlie in the background. I tried to make it look like I was just taking a photo of myself so it seemed less obvious than a forward camera view (idiot). It only takes her 4 seconds to catch on that she’s being filmed. It was like she had a microchip implanted in her wrinkle free skin that could pick up on any cellular device within a 30 mile radius. Her anger can be felt through my iCloud storage as I was about to get publicly humiliated for being a female Perez Hilton. She marched over to our table and looked at me with disgust like she wanted to hit me, but had to hold back in honor of a sacred holiday. “Delete that RIGHT NOW.” (okay, fair). I couldn’t believe she was talking to me. She’s really angry, but she’s talking to me! “I love you so much!” I say in hopeless desperation as I try to make up for my behavior. Yet, she’s unamused by my classless act of admiration. Now, everyone was staring at us with appalled eyebrow expressions like we just tarnished NYU’s legacy - including crocodile Birkin girl.

We escorted ourselves out before the fake cop was ordered to. “You can’t be a fangirl, that’s something financial aid students do.” Bags was red in the face and mortified to be seen with us at this point. “At NYU, you have to play it cool and let the memory of their presence be enough for you.” I’m sorry, I didn’t know that we were in a production of The Prince and The Pauper right now. I try to think of a comeback that would embarrass him, but they all sound like compliments. “Sorry my dad doesn’t control the economy!” I sound insane while he’s unthreatened by my weak verbal abuse skillset. Frank quickly sees the sociopolitical war happening amongst us and tries to use a peace offering as modern currency. “Look, Shayne was just excited. It’s a rookie mistake - we’ve all made them before.” Bags had enough. “My father doesn’t let me make mistakes.” That was our middle class cue to go! As we tried to run away as fast as we could, the metal detectors went off - causing us to slow down our escape. I got caught trying to steal a gold dessert fork that had the NYU logo engraved on it. The guard confiscated my souvenir and told me I wasn’t allowed to attend university events. I’ll gain back their trust one day. We waved goodbye to the fake cop wondering what foreign words were exchanged that helped us get inside. Bags probably told him that we hadn’t eaten in days. I kept the video despite my Vogue model death threat. To this day, I worry that toothpick arm Karlie will use her coding powers to hack into my phone and delete it herself. I think she’s too busy having dinners with the Kushners* to wonder where I am now.

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a blog written by an oddly sexy lab rat.