We drove in his truck to what I assumed to be his home, but as we went through the side gate, I saw it was an empty model home: generic marble in the kitchen, dustless fixtures. This was something I did a lot back in Seal Beach—we broke into empty houses, threw parties where we knew a family would be out of town, hopped fences for swimming pools. In California my old friends were thinning out—some were pregnant, some were in juvenile detention centers, two boys in my grade had died. I remember feeling comforted to be back with a “public school” kid when I was with Blake. Not for the criminal element exactly, but because here was someone whose life had limits like my own. He had to work through high school. Someone who didn’t just talk about whether to hit their vacation home in Breck or Vail when the powder came.
The other thing about Blake: he was smart. He was the only person I knew in Colorado who had also read Nietzsche. And he didn’t like Kerouac, which made us both pariahs in high school. We chatted about college, which we both believed to be a scam, although he had these “crazy test scores” that meant he could go “just about” anywhere he wanted. I had pretty surprising test scores myself, considering I had taken Vicodin a half hour before my SATs. As we talked, he rolled a joint and put a line of white powder on top of it. I didn’t ask, I still don’t know.
Fifteen minutes later I was on the floor, paralyzed. Blake was talking me through it, but he was above water, and I was under it. I remember flashes of fear feeling like faraway lightning, muted. The fear wasn’t about being sexually threatened by Blake. I think now—though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time—that I knew Blake was gay. The fear—if I could have accessed it—was that I had taken a lot of drugs at that point, and this was one I couldn’t stay ahead of. He took me back to my dad’s truck and drove me home. He graciously pulled over and patted my back while I puked. He got me up the stairs to my bedroom, where I remembered, belatedly, that I had work. You have to call, I said thickly. I’m lost. I remember saying that over and over again. The world was strange, a map I couldn’t read anymore. It was at that moment, when he had deposited me safely on the carpet in my bedroom and handed me the cordless phone, that he bolted.
I didn’t call work. I called my father at work. Repeatedly, because he didn’t pick up the first time. I’m sick, I said. I have to go to the hospital. He told me that he was in the middle of a busy day, that if what I said was true to call an ambulance. He was impatient. I got embarrassed and told him I was fine. I don’t know how time passed, or whether it did, but I was in the same spot on the carpet, holding the phone, when he got home after dark.
It turns out the man who owned the gas station, Mr. Glass Eye, hired Blake for a reason. He was good at drugs. They ran them out of the back room where they kept the Cubans. Weed, pills, cocaine. And it turns out that Mr. Glass Eye, and even Blake eventually, had been supplying my father with ever-increasing amounts of crystal meth for years.
* * *
Living with my father in Colorado meant no curfew. No real supervision. It meant a tongue piercing at sixteen, all I had to do was make out with the piercer for a minute. It meant a pedophilic old man at the liquor store who would let me buy booze if I let him listen to me pee. It meant driving my aunt’s Volvo wasted, a friend puking out the window, streaking the car, thus christening it “Old Pukey” forevermore. It meant that my private school friends didn’t know about ecstasy, but I taught them very quickly. It meant raves in the mountains, in the fields, in warehouses in Denver. It meant a thirty-five-hour-a-week job at a café, one that left me red-eyed for school the next day. It meant going through bottles of NyQuil every week, before transitioning to Ambien.
Private school was like day care: I talked back to the dean, the headmaster, took long lunches and went to tanning beds. I laughed off math class though it meant—as a senior—I was taking class with freshmen. It meant mountain houses, Jacuzzis, ski weekends in Vail or Aspen or Telluride, where I learned to yield to wealth. It meant driving the back roads, so fucked up on real, tarry opium, I had my forehead resting on the steering wheel. And it meant pills of every shape, size, and color.
My father’s interest in me was spotty. He traveled half the month for work and insisted I take care of myself. He also insisted—to anyone who questioned his method—that I was fucked up because of my overbearing, controlling mother, and I had to be treated as an adult. If teachers, or friends’ parents, called with concerns, the story was that I was deeply “troubled” and not to be believed. In that way, everything in the house was a secret, which I had to keep if I wanted all this appalling freedom.
I called him by his first name, cursed freely, had boys—and once a man eight years my senior—sleep over. I crashed a car. When I asked him about the drug use that hung over my childhood, the one my aunt told me about at the Katella Deli, he shrugged it off. He told me my mother, aunt, and he drove around LA with a “silver spoon,” which I didn’t completely understand or believe (the thought of my aunt doing drugs makes me laugh out loud and is completely untrue). The silver spoon? A coke spoon, he explained, an artifact of the seventies, way over my head.
I had even less supervision after my aunt Wendy moved out of his house, a separation I never received an explanation about, though I assumed it must have been my fault.
I bought my own tampons, shampoo, Chinese takeout for dinner. I didn’t have to ask if I wanted my own gin and tonic after I made his. When I complained of cramps, he shook his head, not wanting to hear more, and gave me a pill. I remember one night in particular because it was winter, and I was on the screened porch with a space heater, watching—yet again—The Sound of Music. I remember it because I had the writerly thought that when the pill hit me, warm butter was being poured over my shoulders, and I stopped shivering. Eventually I didn’t have to ask for his Vicodin, Percocet, OxyContin, Ambien, Valium, or the marijuana he kept in his hiking boot.
I never once thought he was an addict. Maybe an alcoholic, but that judgment is relative to the people you spend time with. From him I inherited the belief that it was pedestrian to have one’s consumption render one out of control. He was too capable. We threw gorgeous parties at our friend’s lake, where my father built bonfires the size of buildings. He showed up to most of my half brother’s sports games. He insisted—emphatically—that I never sit down to eat at the table without lighting the candles in Baccarat crystal candleholders, even if I was eating a burrito wrapped in foil, alone. When he was home from his professional traveling, we sat in front of the fireplace together, him reading the paper or Men’s Fitness, me reading Camus. It wasn’t so hard, bonding with him against my mother, wanting to believe that he had been out here the whole time, waiting for me to escape her. I believed that after he’d ignored me for almost my entire life, this was the way it should have been all along.
Washington, D.C.
With margaritas in Styrofoam cups the Monster and I walked in a park where every tree was budding, or already showing cherry blossoms, and he asked, Would you rather have the Love or the Life?
It was our first spring. With him, I practiced stoicism so unnatural it bent me in half. All to avoid his looking at me and thinking, She’s hysterical. I wanted him to admire how different I was from other women, those who would crack under the stress of the situation. Those poor women who wrote love stories and wore their feelings like lace.
Inwardly, a tornado funneled into my stomach. Already I woke in the mornings dry heaving, then throwing up the slices of apple, the cheese plates, the oysters, the banquet of my success, waiting for him to text, waiting for his next visit. Holding perfectly still so he could find me whenever he wanted to. Then I fell into bed at midnight, mind frayed, drugging myself to sleep.
But when he asked me that, I sipped hard through my straw, reminded myself that life was short and I was already close to death, smiled, and whispered in his ear, I want both.
His was a rare brand of cynicism that only allowed room for one
feeling at a time. That’s why he loved lists, categorizing, ranking, statistics. People like that can compartmentalize like no others, and maybe even enjoy keeping everything separate. I got the Love. His wife got the Life. He could live like that. Maybe he thought it was better that way. He didn’t seem to hear me, so I said again, I thought we were talking about both.
* * *
I had a flight to catch, and he wouldn’t let me go. We finished lunch at a restaurant near his temporary office, and instead of going back to work he followed me to the bathroom, waited right outside the door. He had packed me a bag of snacks for the plane: carrot sticks and hummus, cheese crisps. I was touched.
His touches were heavy, the small of my back as I went up the stairs, his looks were heavy, wanting to hold me in place. Rare was the time that we parted from each other without panic that it would be the last time. (Will you come back? he asked. Or from me: Tell me the day you are leaving and I will come. An infinite loop.)
Always the threat that I would have had enough. We—strangely—never thought that he might end things with me. Over and over I said, If you want to stay married, stop coming for me. It’s simple. Yes, he might never leave her, but he would never stop pursuing me, believing that we had a future. I think he hoped that if he waited long enough, it would take care of itself. I can’t do it unless I know you’re there, he said. I’m right here, I said, texting him from a different city. No, he said, I need you here. I thought he was treading water when he said this. It didn’t occur to me that he was really saying, I don’t trust you.
He trailed my suitcase to the sidewalk, the day turning grizzled during our lunch. Did he notice things like that? I loved to talk about the weather, I always needed to exclaim about the heat, the flakes of snow. You’re so affected by things, he said, and I didn’t know if he meant it kindly. All I meant was that seasons were changing, and I was still with him. The passage of time was supposed to add up to something better. We were still doing this.
It got so gray, I said, eyes up the street, ostensibly searching for a cab but also navigating our private world and the public one.
Yes, it’s gray, he said, like I was a child.
It’s going to rain, I said, the air is thick with it. Sigh. Spring.
Maybe you should stay, he said.
Maybe you should leave, I said. A cab in the distance. I shot my hand up out of instinct, then brought it down out of fear, then put it up again, with force.
We hugged. That part of town was too central for kissing, and we liked that, didn’t we? We liked the way the unsaid alerted our bodies, how our desire overcast the days.
Maybe, someday, soon, I said, which is how I always left him. He followed me into the cab, sat next to me. I looked at the driver, scared. What are you doing? Don’t you have to be back at work?
He shut the door. Told the driver to go to the airport and I started laughing. He put his arm around me. I crawled into his lap. It started to pour rain, a gray smear on the windows. It took us two hours to get to the airport.
Two extra unsupervised hours: tell me you’ve ever been happier.
* * *
I dream about his wife constantly. Sometimes he’s there, but more often the two of us are alone.
The Monster wasn’t supposed to be married. There was never any prospect I would be a long-term mistress, that we were European, or independently minded people. We were the great loves of each other’s lives. It’s hard to remember that I wasn’t looking for this, because that means he drew me into this to hurt me. Regardless, the punitive nature feels correct, every hurt deserved.
I long for his wife. Sometimes I hate her, or pity her, but mostly my longing is for contact. Forgiveness. One night in a dream she corners me at a wedding. She has a small bandage on her face in this dream, and when I spy her in the crowd, I am filled with pity at the sight of the bandage. She says, What happened with you and my husband, all those years ago?
In the dream, I want to reach for her, fix her bandage, offer her some lipstick. In the dream, I am exhausted, should be put to bed. I want to say, We have so much in common, don’t we? I think back—in the dream—to this affair, which—in the dream—has passed—and I tell her the truth: Nothing actually happened. It was a lot of talk, but I swear to you, nothing happened.
In the dream I feel peace about the affair. I’m grateful to her for taking the burden of loving him. Upon waking that relief is spread over me like a weighted blanket, I can’t move. For a second, it’s finally over.
* * *
One day the Monster says, Your pills worry me. My face burns like I’ve been slapped.
I’ll come out of it, I say. I always do.
It doesn’t seem to occur to him that my “pills” and I have arrived at this point in no small part due to the fucking roller coaster he’s put me on. Another winter morning in the canyon, threads of ice in the corners of my window, I wake up alone, check the weather in New York, and realize it’s been months since I had a night’s sleep that wasn’t benzodiazepine-assisted.
Like most people alive, I’m interested in presence. In escaping the feeling of time, an infinite substance loaned to us in shockingly finite amounts. Time, to me, is synonymous with death. Presence cures time. I’m present when in a stage of love called limerence: hyper-alert, the world hallucinatory, my limbs jumping as if they had been asleep for years. I am my best, most observant self. I’m present when I orgasm. I become thoughtless, language-less, if only for a moment or two. I’ve achieved, only a few times, a drowsy buzz while meditating that falls into this category as well.
But the quickest way to get there is drugs, with which I have an understandably complicated relationship. As a child, I was terrified by them, ever since my aunt took me to that fateful Katella Deli dinner and explained that cocaine was the reason I didn’t have a father. I was never scared of dying from drugs. Instead my fear was that if I did drugs, I would hurt the people I loved.
I’m also blessed with an extremely sensitive stomach. I’m not physically built for drugs or any binge behavior. I was an anxious child, anxious teenager, anxious adult. Pot was the first thing available, but it was too heady. I didn’t know how to drink either. I gagged constantly. The first time I pounded a beer, I threw up. I still can’t take a shot, or I’ll vomit on the bar. The first time I took a drag of a cigarette, I threw up. Every time I took a pill of ecstasy—and I’ve taken plenty—I threw up right before my pupils blew out and my eyeballs started shaking like loose marbles. Every time I waited for acid to hit, I threw up. The first time I snorted opioids I vomited—the most pleasurable vomiting of my life—for four hours.
It’s not just the first time. This remains true. And yet, I’ve persisted, right on the edge. I’m attracted to my limits, but I never had the desire to transcend them. And while I am not painting a picture of health, neither am I painting a picture of someone who lusts after high-risk behavior. And while I do linger close to an edge that experience tells me can be catastrophic, nothing I imbibe, from a beer to a vitamin, is thoughtless. Still this habit of needing help sleeping reminds me of two times in my life I’ve identified a problem.
When I got to New York City in 2006, cocaine fixed my drinking problem (my “problem” being not being able to drink for long stretches). One drink, one bump, and so on, and I could keep up after-hours with the chefs and sommeliers I worshipped. I loved not getting drunk. I loved being articulate, startling myself with insight. I started buying my own, and then I was nearly always in possession of a bag.
And then during the last year of my marriage, my ex-husband and I drank like the professionals we purported to be. We had one day off from work together a week. Negronis—plural—accompanied our oyster happy hour at four p.m. Then a bottle of white wine, then a bottle of red. Often a third bottle was opened. Then I sipped oloroso sherry as we wound down for bed, and he finished every single night with a glass, or
glasses, of bourbon. This, for us, was a quiet day. When our marriage dissolved—for seemingly unrelated reasons, though I couldn’t have asked for a clearer symptom that we were in trouble—I was left with my tolerance, but no drinking buddy. I couldn’t stop. I started to keep a diary of my intake. What followed was a year where I didn’t go a single day without a drink. Occasionally it would be just one. Very occasionally. I would look at myself in the mirror and think, This doesn’t end well.
Xanax, generally, is perfect for me. When I stopped being able to fly without sweating, crying, and (you guessed it) throwing up, I got a prescription. I still had to break up the pills into tiny doses (I am a small person), but even a quarter of .5 milligrams helped me achieve real sleep. It didn’t erase my anxiety, but absorbed it, like an extra barrier, like carrying within me the prescribed Buddhist “pause” between action and reaction. But Xanax isn’t “fun.” I can’t drink with it or I’ll pass out. Recreationally, it’s great for vacuuming and watching reruns of Sex and the City. And it was fine for panic attacks, the real ones, which I’ve weathered since I was a child, which have begun in earnest again now. When I drive back from my mother’s, my wrists seize up, fingertips numb. I bang them against the steering wheel to get the feeling back.
In the past, I just stopped. The mania ran its course. I didn’t have to pray. The first time I went a week without alcohol it was nearly accidental. I couldn’t stop laughing about it. But here in Laurel Canyon, I feel that these broken bits of pills are buffering me from some more serious crisis, like it’s one of the last stakes keeping me in place. I don’t know. For so long I’ve been fighting my way toward what I imagine is light, but I’m beginning to wonder what’s on the other side of this.
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