But once I open that dark Pandora’s Refrigerator Box, I can’t seem to close it.
The Divorce Diet had been something I could follow and contain like an inner pain that you starve and deprive, but when I begin to fill it up with one little bite of ice cream—just like with drinking—I can’t seem to stop. So many late nights, I come home and raid the lesbians’ refrigerator, sampling cereal and jars of olives, until I finally visit the twenty-four-hour bodega in the wee early-morning hours, loading up on cookies and candy, stuffing them in my face until I feel satisfied to the point of pain and disgusted with myself to the point of incapacitation. Sometimes, I even chronicle the wreckage in my diary: “6 mozzarella sticks, 1 diet cola, 1 16 oz. Tasti D-Lite with 2 toppings, 3 bowls of Lucky Charms, 1 pint of Chunky Monkey.” Looking at it now, it makes me want to puke all over again.
No one at work seems to “get” my pitch for this story: “The only person who knows the darkest secrets of your soul is the bodega guy at three in the morning.”
The next day, like clockwork, I wake up after a binge a few pounds heavier and vow that even though I don’t want to be anorexic, I don’t want to go back to my nearly two-hundred-pound weight from when I was married. So I pledge not to eat at all.
But everything changes when nighttime comes around, and, with nothing in my stomach for the last eight hours, I get hammered—and the binge-eating cycle resumes.
Anything to blunt out what I am feeling: fear, uncertainty, self-hatred, and not feeling like I have anyone there for me who cares.
By the time April arrives, I am so unmoored that one afternoon, without planning to, I log onto a travel agency site and book a last-minute trip to Florida.
I have no one to see. I just know, as Dr. Tom advises me after my last update, “You need to get the fuck out of Dodge.”
So I do—appropriately enough, right after writing my “reconciliation vacation” piece, which I finally get into the paper after DJ AM and Nicole Richie take a trip together that I can use as a launching point for the story. I have no real purpose attached to the trip, but Fort Lauderdale is a place on a map. I know that.
When I arrive, I hail a cab and ask to go to the coral-beachy hotel I booked as part of my weekend package. But the cabdriver gets lost—really lost—and after he finally gets sick of trying to find the hotel, he just drops me off on a street corner somewhere. Not quite sure what to do, and having ruled another cab out of the equation, I decide to hitch a ride from a couple twenty-something guys driving a beat-up red Chevy who make room for me to sit on the lap of the tattooed skinny one in the passenger seat.
“Nice car,” I say.
“Thanks,” the one in the passenger seat says, blasting Ol’ Dirty Bastard on the stereo. “It’s all we’ve got.”
“So, what’s your story?” I ask. Because this is something I know how to do. Interview.
They tell me about getting off of meth and starting a new life for themselves, and I stare dazed out the window. We pass a sleazy nail salon, a happy-ending place, and a shop with a sign that says U WILL STOP SMOKING.
I ask them if I can bum a Newport. I hate being told what to do.
When I finally arrive at my hotel, I lay out my notes for my never-ending hopelessly doomed rom-com treatment of “How He Blew It” and turn on the TV. I know I should be so grateful for all these opportunities coming my way, but all I want is something real. And I don’t know how to give that to myself.
So I head outside and realize that while I never considered hitching as an adult before, since I’ve just done it, why not try again? Some red-faced guy with frosted tips on his hair picks me up and looks at me strangely. I tell him to take me where the action is.
“Yeah, I’ll do it,” he says, with a look of concern it seems he is not used to giving strangers, “if you promise to never hitch a ride again.”
“Fine,” I say. “Whatever.”
He lets me off at a beach bar, and I drink Sex on the Beaches like a fucking tourist and smoke Camel Lights, watching the tanned, swaying women dance with the old Hawaiian-shirted men who stare lustfully into their blank, drunken eyes. I try my hand at flirting with a group of businessmen, but the sadness and alienation in my affect blinds like a “stay away” flashlight.
“You’re weird,” one guy says.
“You have no idea,” I reply. “Buy me a Long Island iced tea.”
“No,” he says.
“Whatever,” I say. “I’m leaving. This place sucks.”
I keep my promise to the giver of my last hitched ride, find a cab, and ask the driver to take me to the best nearby restaurant. He drops me off at a local Olive Garden. I sit there by myself, reordering more breadsticks and swallowing whole my lasagna until I feel nothing else inside. I am full to the point of throwing up, but I order the cheesecake, too. Feeling physically uncomfortable and bursting from my jeans, I head back to the hotel, where I sink into the Jacuzzi alone, admiring my increasing waistline in my bikini and sinking underwater.
Numbness. That is a much better feeling than depression.
This vacation is no better than fucking Dodge itself. I don’t know how to have fun without chaos or self-loathing. The most enjoyable part so far has been hitching rides from strangers, knowing I could be murdered.
It made me feel alive, like there was a possible dangerous end.
chapter four
* * *
The Gossip Girl
2006
Back in New York, during another one of my binge-and-starve cycles, I go to a party—again at the Magician—with a few comedy writer friends of friends, and find myself talking to a bearded comedy TV producer whom I stand next to as a girl comes up to us with a giant black eye. She says nothing about it, and when she finally leaves, the producer comments on it.
“Well, that was the fucking elephant in the room,” he says.
“Maybe that’s the new thing,” I say. “Chick punching.”
He laughs. Dark.
Cut to three or four or fifteen Stolichnaya and sodas later: Everything blurs into black and gray until I am back at his place getting fucked. The sheets are so crisp and downy. I remember that.
The next morning, I take my cue that he has no desire to ever see me again—he is extremely cold and quiet—and I leave to meet up with a friend of mine whom I offered to show around the Post newsroom.
I am still a little drunk from the night before, and as I take her around to point out the old newspaper covers on the wall (“look, it’s ‘Headless Body in Topless Bar’ ”), everything still seems to sparkle with the go-go-go energy of alcohol and sexual attraction and keeping up with the comedy writer boys. I’ve managed to compartmentalize the morning rejection.
But when my friend leaves to go back to work, I go to the empty bathroom and look at myself in the mirror. What even happened to me? What is happening to me? I feel sick. I lean over the toilet and try to make myself throw up. I can’t, but I do manage to shoot the blood vessels out around my eyes through my half-assed bulimia.
Then I sit on the toilet experiencing a feeling worse than ill. It’s like I can sense something foul and sick rotting in my body. Squatting down on the bathroom floor, I reach into myself and discover it: a disgusting bloody-stringed tampon lodged deep inside. Revolted, I extract it carefully.
Since I don’t remember the sex, I suppose it makes sense. How could I remember I was wearing a tampon? The producer guy had fucked it all the way inside me. I was that drunk.
Vile. Finally, I am sick.
I retch all over the Post bathroom and realize right then and there that I need to turn this ship around. For what it’s worth, I make a promise to God that I will not have sex until I am in a serious relationship again. I just can’t keep doing this.
For years, I will wonder who exactly this bearded comedy guy was that bleak night. I don’t blame the man or even think he did anything wrong. It’s not like that.
There’s a psychological phenomenon called “repetition c
ompulsion theory,” where you keep subconsciously re-creating a traumatic event in your life—for me, getting blackout drunk and having sex—trying to somehow gain control over that which initially wounded you. Animals do this, too. It is the most primitive of reactions. One psychiatrist explained it to me as an attempt to master the original wound with a similar experience. But all it really ends up doing is cementing the trauma until it is part of you.
* * *
AFTER THE TAMPON exorcism at the office that day, I return to my computer and google “New York therapists” and make a few calls until I find a woman who takes my insurance. I make an appointment, and two short weeks later I am in to see a female therapist in her dimly lit West Village apartment.
The therapist is in her fifties, with long gray hair, and she is as tall as I am, which is unusual.
“So, I’ve been having these alcoholic blackouts,” I tell her.
“How many?” she asks.
“Four, five,” I say. “A lot, I guess. I mean, everyone drinks in New York. That’s just how it is.”
“Okay,” she says. “Well, why don’t we start with your family history . . .”
So begins my least favorite part of therapy. The “tell me your story” part. I don’t want to sing for my psychological supper. But I do, as I always do with therapists, so many hopes and expectations placed on this stranger who you are paying to care about you for fifty minutes.
Here is my therapist elevator speech, boiled down.
“I shouldn’t exist,” I begin, ever dramatic, like I’m doing a performance at the Moth.
The fact that I do, I explain, feels like an unforgiving miracle at times, whispering in my ear: Don’t be average. Don’t be normal. Don’t give up.
“My dad never gave up,” I continue. “Because my dad is a hero.”
Then I get to the good part.
“Let me tell you about my dad,” I say, because I think relaying all the historical details will explain me, or make it all add up.
On June 15, 1968, after three weeks in the bush as a marine and an NFG (New Fucking Guy) in Vietnam, my twenty-one-year-old father had his world blown apart when he caught two AK-47 rounds in battle near Khe Sanh. The bullets went through my father’s right eye and the right corner of his mouth, forcing bone and fragments into the prefrontal area of his cerebral cortex, leaving his nose hanging in front of his mouth, his left eye dangling out of its orbit, and his right eye obliterated.
The other men in my father’s unit were instructed not to go back for him. “Stadtmiller’s dead,” they were told. “Move on.” But one fellow marine ignored those orders: Al Fielder, a black man from the South who’d taken a liking to this privileged white college boy, and he searched until he found my father, who was praying at the bottom of a hill, head in his hands, saying, “Please let me die, please let me die, please let me die.”
Because my father was too big to carry, Al instead screamed at him to get him to safety, “You call yourself a fucking marine? You call yourself a man? You fucking pussy! You’re pathetic.” The verbal assault worked. My father crawled up the hill to the waiting helicopter nearby and was flown to the closest medical ship. No one expected my dad to survive the night, let alone the thirteen hours of surgery required to save him.
“Over his lifetime, he’s had more than one hundred and fifty operations,” I tell the therapist as she listens raptly.
What remains of my father is less than 5 percent vision, a patchwork of scars across his sewn-together flesh, a nose built with bone from his left hip, and an unpredictable brain injury that manifests in wild swings of temper.
“I just can’t fucking take it!” my father would yell throughout my life. “I just can’t fucking take it!”
Sometimes, I think about the speech that Al gave my father as he lay dying on the hill and the aftereffects of the war on my childhood. I would hide under the covers as a kid, rocking myself, praying, “Please let me be, please let me be, please let me be,” as my dad would erupt in one of his erratic house-shaking furies.
My dad gave me a master class in how to alienate people—and how to reel them back in. He didn’t just have “no filter.” He had no filter, no sight, and no inhibitions, all these having been ripped out with a surgical hacksaw.
From birth, I absorbed how the world reacted to him and how he lashed out in return.
“There was always a scene,” I tell my therapist. “I always defended him. Life always went on.”
“Childhood by fire,” she observes. “Why don’t you tell me about your mother. Did she meet your dad after or before he was shot?”
“After,” I say, somewhat bitter over the therapist’s predictability. That’s the first thing people always want to know.
Then I go on.
“Actually, you know,” I tell her, “my dad did a lot of the caretaking when I was young. Because my mom was mentally indisposed.”
“Mentally indisposed?” the therapist asks. “How?”
“Obsessive-compulsive disorder,” I say. “And depression.”
Diagnosed in her young adult life, my mom’s OCD manifested in her scrubbing her hands with dish soap for ten minutes at a time under the sink faucet, afraid to touch things because she might get infected.
It is no small miracle that my mom nursed me until I was two and a half years old, considering there were a few awful times when she was worried her dirty baby might be too contaminated, and she could not hold me at all.
Sometimes she warned my older sister and me that she needed to be left alone so she could “go crazy” at the kitchen sink. My mom would then make a loud noise, guttural, like a monster, growling, “SCHHHHHHHHH,” as she washed her hands, scrubbing them furiously until they were pink and raw and clean.
“What was the noise she made?” the therapist asks.
“I don’t want to repeat it,” I say. “That’s nobody’s business.”
My mother’s particular brand of OCD expressed itself in extremes. So either all of the underwear in the house was ironed and folded or nothing had been cleaned for weeks.
My blind dad took care of my obsessive-compulsive mom, and my older sister took care of me. When we fought, we were sent to the back of the house, where my mom told us to “work it out.”
My sister did exactly that, kicking me in the crotch and punching me in the stomach until I was good and sorry.
When my mom took me to a psychiatrist as a child, I did a mental dead man’s float in the shrink’s shabby beige office. I knew loyalty and secret keeping. And I feared that if I acknowledged just one drop of the pain and fear and anger I felt, my whole world would come collapsing down.
“I tried to protect my family,” I tell her, “because somebody had to protect somebody in my family, but a lot of times I failed. Especially my father.”
“How so?” she asks.
“Let’s see . . .” I begin.
There was the time my dad was swinging me around in the expanses of our living room as I cried out in glee, and he cut it too close—it all happened so fast. My head smashed into the U-shaped corner of the sharp archway, which just barely missed my right eye, and the blood came pouring out. Later, in the emergency room, stitches being sewn near my eyebrow, my father hysterical and upset, I told him I was sorry, it was my fault, I didn’t warn him fast enough.
“But it wasn’t your fault,” the therapist says.
“It didn’t feel that way as a kid,” I say.
I would do anything to prevent my dad from getting upset. Because with one false move, I could sense it coming: An anger explosion would come raining down on everyone. A string of curse words, yelling, throwing, mewling, sometimes a fist through the wall, culminating with one final come-to-Jesus howling-at-the-moon proclamation, his catchphrase if you will: “GODDAMMIT, I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT!”
It wasn’t until years later, during a stray neuroscience course, when I was toying with becoming a teacher, that I learned that what I’d always thought was his “pers
onality” was partially a function of damage done to the prefrontal lobe when he was shot. I read the story—as anyone who has ever taken a neuroscience class has—about Phineas Gage, the railroad foreman who suffered an iron bar through the skull. The man’s personality completely transformed after the injury, with him becoming “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity . . . impatient of restraint or advice when it conflict[ed] with his desires . . . obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of operation which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned . . .”
You get the idea. Welcome to my childhood.
My mom, on the other hand, offered her own case study in brain science.
Because of her OCD, she often became preoccupied with whether things were “infected” with shit. So giving baths was pretty much out. Because we had tympanostomy tubes in our ears as kids, we weren’t supposed to get them wet, so my dad used a wooden board that he would take turns laying my sister and me on in the bathtub to shampoo our hair.
The older we got, the weirder it got. At eleven and eight, respectively, my sister and I were too old to be running around naked in the house, and my parents definitely shouldn’t have been naked themselves, but there they were. Doors were always open, and we could see as my dad changed in front of us. My mom, meanwhile, would be in her threadbare white underpants, trying to figure out what clothes she could stand to wear. I look back at pictures of this time, and I see my sister and me posing with our towels open by the pool making kissy faces. It looks like we’re getting groomed to be sold into sexual slavery.
Of course, we were just the children of naïve hippies. Nothing more.
“But it sounds like it was a hypersexualized household,” the therapist says.
“I just don’t want to criticize my parents,” I say. “I love my parents—so much.”
Then I am quiet. Then I am crass. Crasser than my father even. Crasser than even ol’ iron-in-the-skull Phineas Gage.
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