Hear the door of his truck open and the weight of the truck shift as he gets in.
Hear the engine start up and the truck back out onto the road and drive away.
Feel the fear recede further.
Follow your sister as she slowly sits up and lifts the window shade to make sure he’s gone. See that he is gone. Watch as your sister turns and looks at you, half-scared, half-thrilled. Stare at her in frazzled silence. See her make a weird face that you can’t read, then hear your sister fart. Laugh in surprise. Hear the fart continue. Realize that it is not a short toot, but the longest, trumpety-est, most air-filled fart you’ve ever heard. Laugh harder. Almost die. Stare in amazement as it continues. Begin to scream-laugh. Watch as she begins to laugh. Listen as her fart begins to poot out along with her laughter. Go insane. Laugh so hard you feel like you’re going to stop breathing. Realize that nothing funnier has ever happened or will ever happen.
Continue to laugh for roughly three minutes after the fart ends. Fall back on the couch. Remember you made lemonade. Go to get some. Watch as your sister remembers she can take the recliner. Be glad to see it go. Walk back to the couch with your lemonade. Forget to leave a safety zone. Feel a jolt as your sister sticks her foot out to trip you. Catch yourself just in time to not fall or spill your lemonade. Scream bad swears at her. Watch her smile like the devil himself.
Sit down on the couch and spill the lemonade all over the front of your school uniform, which you are supposed to take off when you get home, but for some reason never do. Watch the lemonade pill up on the military-grade polyester plaid your uniform is made of. Pull the fancy blanket your mom lays on the back of the couch down and wipe the lemonade off.
Watch the cat walk into the room. Compete with your sister to see who can get it to come to them first. Win. Hear your sister say she hates that cat, anyway. Make eye contact with the cat as if to say, “What a sore loser.” Snuggle with the cat. Look over at your sister, who looks very alone on her recliner. Think, I’ve been there.
7:50–8:10 P.M.
Think about your homework in a distant, wistful way. Watch Entertainment Tonight knowing your parents wouldn’t want you to. Think about going into your sister’s room and figuring out a way to steal her Captain Crunch. Feel the throbbing welt on your cheek and the bruises on both shins. Let that pain mix in with the TV show you’re watching. Begin to hate Mary Hart.
Hate her.
See the long, white headlights of your mom’s Volvo pan across the now-black picture window. Hear the garage door go up, the engine go off, and the garage door go back down. Feel a tightness in your throat and a dim longing as the door to the garage swings open and your mom walks in. Watch as she surveys the living room and kitchen, then stares at you and your sister, exhausted. Hear her give the same speech she gives every night around this time:
“All I asked you to do this morning was clean up the living room before I got home, and you didn’t do it.”
Flash back to her telling you over breakfast how helpful it would be if you and your sister could tidy up before she gets home from work. Realize it’s the first time you’ve thought about that moment since it happened. Feel genuine shock at your selective amnesia.
Watch sadly as your mom walks into the kitchen and starts to pull out pots and pans to make dinner. Look over at your sister. Watch as she gives you a look of regret and shame. Follow her as she gets up and goes into the kitchen.
Hear her say, “Sorry, Mom.”
Yell over her, “Sorry, Mommy!”
Hear her yell over you, “I love you, Mom!”
Yell louder, “I love you more, Mom!”
Watch as your mom turns toward the two of you, coat still on, holding the can of lemonade powder. “Was someone eating this?”
Freeze.
Wonder how she can know these things. Anticipate more yelling. Watch as she sees your guilty face and begins to laugh. “Jesus. What have you two been up to?”
Fun & Easy Latchkey Recipes!
Toast
2 slices of Lombardi’s sourdough bread or equivalent
1 lb of butter
• Put two slices of toast in the toaster. Make sure it’s not set to burnt. Push the thing down.
• Wait for the toast to pop back up. Do not stick a fork into the toaster at any point. Even if your toast gets stuck. This is important. Don’t tell yourself you can do it because you’re special. Just don’t go down that road. It’ll end in tears.
• Get a paper towel so you don’t have to rinse a dish. Butter the toast on it. Really help yourself to that butter. Drown in it, rescue yourself, and then teach that butter a lesson about who’s in charge.
• Repeat.
Lemonade
1 can of lemonade powder
Tap water
• To hell with what the can says. Put as many scoops of that good, young lemonade powder into your mom’s Tupperware juice container as you see fit. Fill the rest up with tap water. Throw some ice cubes in if you’re in a hurry.
Biscuits
2¼ cup of Bisquick
⅔ cup of milk
• That’s it! Isn’t that crazy? Two ingredients! Mix those two together and boom! You’re halfway home.
• Preheat the oven for 10 minutes at 450 degrees. The oven is no game. Fear the oven. It will burn you. And it will burn your biscuits.
• Set a timer for 10 minutes for the preheat and then mix your dough. Glop it onto a cookie sheet and put that in the oven for 8–10 minutes.
• When you go to pull it back out, use two oven mitts and replay in your mind that Thanksgiving when your mom scalded her forearm on a hot oven rack and then had an oven rack tattoo for the next thirty years.
Send ’Em Back: Final Thoughts
KAREN: As you know, Georgia, many of the serial killers we’ve talked about sustained serious head injuries when they were children. Tell us about any head injuries you sustained in childhood or anytime afterward.
GEORGIA: Thankfully, I never had any head injuries as a kid, at least that I can recall, but I did have one seizure when I was like twelve. It was while I was sleeping in my top bunk, and my sister had the bottom bunk. She heard and felt me seizing out and ran into my mom’s room and yelled, “Mom, Georgia’s having a cow!” We were really into The Simpsons at the time. I came to in the hospital and still regret that I was unconscious for my first and hopefully only ambulance ride.
KAREN: What’s the thing—an event, a TV show, a friendship, anything—that you think fucked you up most as a kid?
GEORGIA: Oh, gosh, there are so many to choose from! On a personal level, the thing that really screwed me up was getting pantsed in the fifth grade in front of my entire class. I was in a fight with my then best friend, Kelly, and so during PE, she ran up behind me and yanked my skirt down around my ankles. I remember it vividly. It was like time stood still as I crouched down to pull my skirt back up while cowering to cover up my purple underpants. It seemed like it took forever to cover myself up, and all the kids were laughing hysterically at me. I really don’t think I got over the humiliation until I was an adult.
KAREN: If you could return children like they were shoes from Zappos, how many would you get, and what would you name them?
GEORGIA: I wish this were possible because I’m so on the fence about having kids. I would just want one nerdy kid that loved books and being quiet and didn’t need help with math homework. I’d name him Lewis, and he would be the sweetest kid.
art by Jenna Beddick
5
DON’T BE A FUCKING LUNATIC
KAREN: If you listen to the show, you know we’re not shy when it comes to talking about our checkered pasts with substance abuse. Not only is it a cathartic form of shame-purging, but there’s nothing like a humiliating drinking story to keep you grounded. We share these stories of glaring failure so that you can learn from our stupidity, save yourself some pain, and hopefully, be a
little less of a lunatic.
Karen’s Plan for When the Party’s Finally Over
Oh, sweet reader, of all the areas of life you will visit, this is one where I really know my stuff. I’ve thoroughly researched this topic vis-à-vis extensive field testing over roughly a thirty-five-year period. I’ve been being a lunatic for most of my life, just been being one all along, through and through. And although it’s had its high points, overall I can’t say it served me well. I taught myself at an early age that when things got scary, I had to run. So the second I got nervous or felt vulnerable, I filled the air with nervous blather, spent endless nights in crowded bars, repeatedly lied to myself that Long Island iced teas were the answer, cried freely while confessing my unrequited love to someone I didn’t know that well, and on and on. Not a lot of championship moments in my yearbook.
But instead of falling into an indefinite trauma pocket about it, I figure I’ll walk you through my life of DON’Ts in the hope that you can steer around the emotional sinkholes I’ve flung myself into. Being a lunatic can feel good in right-sized doses, as long as you know how deep the sinkhole goes and when to get back out.
How to Party
But first, a quick sidebar to all the unsupervised twelve-year-olds who got their hands on this book, thinking they’re going to see pictures of dead bodies and read a list of swears: Get out of here, dummy! This isn’t for your ears.
Oh, so you’ve decided to stay? OK, fine. But just know that by continuing to read, you’ve legally given up your right to sue if the entire concept of partying is ruined for you by the time you’re done with this chapter.
The first thing that should be realized and accepted when it comes to partying: for every problem it “solves,” it creates ten more. Yes, it’s fun and cool, and crazy things happen, but the thing about escaping is, at some point, you have to come back. If you leave the studio apartment of yourself for too long, all the emotional plants die. I know that’s a terrible metaphor. I’m still trying to get the twelve-year-olds to leave.
I was also going to say that partying doesn’t make you popular, but then I realized this is exactly the kind of ’80s social issue that’s simply no longer a thing. Kids These Days are all already popular—on the inside. That’s because many of us damaged kids of the ’70s, who were so ignored we were left to wander our neighborhoods alone for days, have created a reactive style of “do it however you want, Dylan, Mommy loves your very essence” parenting. In this specific school of child-rearing, there’s so much parental attention and approval, codependence is solved while the child is still in its third trimester (when they’re at their MOST codependent) and their intrinsic value is affirmed daily until they start preschool as blazing ego comets lighting up the sky. Let me be clear, I’m saying this is a good thing. It’s definitely way better than the free-range approach our ’70s parents took.
And besides having supreme, sometimes unfounded confidence, everything Kids These Days need to know can be accessed online in a five-step YouTube video or some think piece on Vice.com. Younger generations already know not to mix oxy and Seroquel. Many of them own small businesses. God, honestly, fuck off, teens!
I’m writing this chapter for the unsupervised kid. The one who never gets doted on. The one who gets left to her own devices and gets so good at creating coping mechanisms that she never learns to address or fix anything properly. And then suddenly, she realizes she’s a grown adult who can’t deal with anything. So she gets stuck in a cycle of trying, failing, and then turning to whatever helps her escape the shame of failure. If that goes on too long, the trying part stops and the cycle cuts straight to failing and escaping. When there’s no more comfort in the escaping, she’ll have to escape from the escapism. And that’s when she quits everything and gets super into yoga.
Fine, I’m writing this chapter for me and whoever else wants to not do what I just described.
How to Drink Yourself Out of Having Fun
If you love drinking because it feels like slowly slipping into a big, fun hot tub full of your funnest friends, you’re right. It definitely feels that way. To you. You’re floating along in the therapeutic waters of four beers before the big camp dance. Then “I Melt with You” comes on, and everyone goes crazy with teenaged feelings. You’re at the company Christmas party, sneaking shots in your cubicle with that web designer you assumed hated you. Now you realize he’s deeply in love with you. “I Melt with You” comes on. Your cubicle goes crazy with teenaged feelings. Warmth, weightlessness, relaxation. What is there not to love?
It’s just the thing about partying is that loss of control is one of the major fun factors, but the older you get, the less charming that loss of control reads to the rest of the room. You don’t really see it, since you’re all glassy-eyed and half-deaf from seven mai tais.
People will try to tell you: “Hey, you humiliated yourself at the Bake-Off and puked in my new Elantra.”
And you’ll be all: “Shut up, Barry. You’re such a drag.”
Because it’s very, very painful to admit that your party hot tub has turned freezing cold and people are getting out because you’ve begun to shit in the water. Painful and shameful. Better to attack good friends who care about you than admit you’re swimming in a toilet of your own making.
I remember telling a friend I couldn’t hang out with her anymore while she drank because it was just like being alone. Or did someone say that to me? Either way, ugh. That was the exact opposite of my drinking goals. I was just trying to get brave enough to invite others in. Sharing the experience once they got there should’ve been my priority, but at that point, I’d be so drunk I was off whispering secrets to a potted plant, which is uncomfortable for others. Other people’s happiness should affect and inform yours. Not in a codependent third-trimester way, but you should care if you’re ruining everyone else’s good time. Especially if you do that by shitting in your ten-person party Jacuzzi.
This is why they say you can’t make a person quit drinking. It has to be their idea. Because really, everyone who stops drinking knows they should’ve quit five years earlier, but just couldn’t let go of the idea that there was perfect fun around the next corner. (Fingers crossed they wouldn’t black out waiting for it to come and then punch it in the throat when it arrived, thinking it was a prowler.) YOU CAN’T HAVE FUN IN A BLACKOUT. It’s technically impossible, as the definition of fun is probably something like “enjoying an experience.” If there’s no you there, there’s no enjoyment being had.
Here’s a helpful drinking to-don’t list:
✓ Don’t get so drunk you make people carry your deadweight everywhere.
✓ Don’t get so drunk you talk super loud in chain restaurants and ruin a normal family’s dad’s birthday party.
✓ Don’t abandon yourself to the elements. Stick around so you know what’s actually happening. It takes discipline, but it’s better for you. And if it’s gotten to the point where you no longer have a choice, consider getting help. But …
✓ Don’t keep considering getting help while your life goes to shit, like your friend here.
✓ Don’t consider it right into the county hospital, like ol’ KK did.
That done, here’s your follow-up drinking to-do list:
✓ Take a risk in the other direction for once and get healthy.
How to Take Enough Speed to Have the Devil in You
One morning in 1996, when I’d been on speed for about six months, I got up and went for a walk after not sleeping most of the night. I was supposed to be at rehearsal for a sitcom I’d been cast in, but I didn’t want to go because I was paranoid thanks to the speed and was pretty sure I was going to die soon. I could tell the speed was affecting my heart rate and I only slept a couple of hours a night. Sometimes the only thing I ate was beer. It had all gotten very extreme. So instead of going to my hard-won, highly lucrative dream job, I chose to go for an early-morning walk around Los Feliz. At one point,
I walked by a kind of scary-looking homeless woman and said good morning, and she spat back, “Don’t good morning me. You got the devil in you, and I can see it.” And I LOST IT because she was right. I did have the devil in me. That devil came in the form of medical-grade prescription diet pills, and they were controlling my mind and killing my heart.
I went straight home and got back into bed, and when my agent called to ask why I wasn’t at rehearsal, I didn’t pick up the phone, and when I got fired for blowing off rehearsal, I also didn’t pick up the phone. And the great irony was I STARTED TAKING SPEED SO I COULD LOSE ENOUGH WEIGHT TO GET CAST ON TELEVISION. And so here was my life, working out exactly the way I wanted it to, and I blew it.
Because I couldn’t handle taking pharmaceutical-grade speed daily. Didn’t have the grit or the gumption. Didn’t have any kind of plan or mentor. Just figured it would work out fine.
No one briefed me on the intense paranoia I would feel about things like friends and phones and white vans parked on my street for more than three hours. No one warned me about the endless tide of rage waves that would sweep over me all day and night, making me almost impossible to be around. No one said, “Hey, this weird plan could give you permanent seizures!” I just kind of went for it.
Now, of course it’s humiliating to take a drug and let it ruin your professional life. But the other by-product of being a drunk and/or a drug addict1 is that you become terribly arrested in your emotional development. You spend all this time staggering around, singing Alison Moyet songs, and making yourself cry, meanwhile you’re not having relationships that teach you how to get better at having relationships. You have “relationships” that last maybe half a night and usually end in a blurry haze and leave a permanent bad feeling in the gut.
Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered Page 11