by Amy Dresner
On my way out, I’m caught by Mariana, the house manager.
“You look nice. Where are you off to?”
“Uhhh… coffee… with a friend,” I lie badly.
“Riiiiight… Just be back by curfew.”
I give her a thumbs-up.
I drive my bird shit- and leaf-covered VW Passat to the hotel. You can only valet there, the thieving motherfuckers. Driving up, I look down at the floor of the front seat. It’s covered in empty water bottles, Styrofoam Body Factory cups, and Yerba Mate cans. Classy.
I am walking through the lobby, all dolled up in my fur, when a guy walks by and says aloud, “This place is full of hookers tonight.” Oof. I thought I looked glamorous, like a seventies supermodel, but evidently I look like a seventies streetwalker.
Lucas, my Tinder date, told me to meet him in the Polo Lounge, but I make a brief pass through, see a lot of old rich men and underclad young girls, and I immediately exit. I feel anxious. What if he doesn’t think I’m as hot as my pictures? What if I don’t think he’s as hot as his pictures? Why am I doing this at all? Ugh.
I text him that I am “outside the Polo Lounge.” I’m sitting on a couch in the hallway, all wide-eyed and shaky.
He comes down and he is… gorgeous. Brown hair, blue eyes, square jaw. Totally out of my league. We go have a drink at the bar. Well, he has a drink, and I have a Diet Coke. I’m nervous, so I start spewing—jokes, my story, anything to amuse, impress, or deflect. He’s laughing. He’s surprisingly nice and down to earth for somebody who looks like they just stepped off a goddamn runway. Turns out he has a girlfriend in New York, but their relationship is “open” at the moment. Okay… but does she know that?
We go outside to have a quick smoke. We make fun of how creepy Tinder is, which is a way of saying, “I never do this” or “I’m different” or “You’re special.” It’s all bullshit, but it works to create some instant false intimacy. We share horror stories, stories of famous people we fucked, and then head up to his room.
“Do you mind if I smoke a little pot?” he asks.
“No, no… do your thing.”
He smokes a joint, turns on some music, lights the fireplace, and says, “Okay, let’s make out.” Pretty blunt, but we’re both here for the same thing. It’s more like a drug drop than a date.
We start fooling around on the rug in front of the fire.
“How do you stay so skinny?” he asks me as our clothes come off. “You work out a lot? Or just don’t eat?”
“Work out?” I stifle my laughter. “Um… no. Poverty and anxiety. It’s actually a pretty efficient weight-control system. And lanky Jew is my natural body type.”
“Nice…” he says as he goes down on me.
We move to the bed.
“Do you have a condom?” he asks.
“No, do you?”
“No… Fuck! Do you have anything… weird?” he presses.
“No. Do you?”
“No… and… I never raw dog, but…”
He pulls out a bottle of Rush and starts sniffing. (Rush is a liquid you inhale that gives you a head rush, thus its name. It’s more commonly known as “poppers,” and it’s big in the gay scene. I’ve never done it.) So by this point, he’s had a few drinks, some pot, and now some Rush. I, on the other hand, am stone-cold sober. I try my best to match his chemical-induced abandon. It seems unfair, like he’s cheating. I’d sure like to snort something to feel more at ease with the ill-advised idea of fucking a stranger without a condom. In the end, he does make up for that. The sex is great, and I make it back by curfew.
We try to hook up again before he leaves town, but our schedules don’t match up. Once he’s back in New York, we talk a few times, and, unsurprisingly, he ends up in rehab. I also learn that he and his girlfriend ended up “closing” their relationship so they were exclusive now. I’m no psychic, but I saw both of these events coming.
My father is in town from Ashland, Oregon. I meet him at an overpriced sushi restaurant on La Cienega that has paparazzi perched like vultures outside. Think West Elm with a lot of bamboo, koi ponds, and scantily dressed starlets.
I walk in and hug him.
“Hi, Ames… You smoking again?”
Damn, I’m not even sober nine months and he’s already on me about my smoking. One thing at a time, man.
“Yeah, I’m smoking. But I really wish I could have a drink.”
“Not funny.”
“Papa, listen to me,” I say to him. “Whatever I’m doing, dating pricks or smoking cigarettes, if I don’t have a needle in my arm, I’m a fucking success. Don’t you get it? If I lay my head on the pillow sober tonight, I’m a winner for that day.”
“I know you have to believe that in the program.” My dad is a cynic, not just about AA, about everything.
“Have to believe it? I know it. I’ve been dying to get high for the last two days! You think I’m home free because I have a few months? Wake up. People relapse at five years, fifteen years. They get high and they fucking die. So let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
My father is quiet. We stare at each other. My father looks concerned. I’m livid.
He takes a drink, wipes his mustache, and says, “Can I ask you a question? What is the difference between hope and expectations?”
“Hope is a feeling that things can change for the better. But expectations… well, when you have expectations, you are presuming that things will turn out a certain way, and you’re bound to be disappointed if they don’t.”
He nods and takes another sip of his wine. “Okay, so what do you need from me?” he asks.
“Compassion. And tolerance. Just try to operate from the premise that I am doing the very best that I can to be happy and productive; however from the outside it may look to you.”
“Do you have compassion for me? Can you imagine what it’s like being your father?”
“I can’t imagine. Heartbreaking and frustrating, I’m sure.”
He reaches across the table and grabs my hand. I start to cry.
“I’m doing the best I can, I swear. So, I’m still dating assholes. The latest has your dry wit and dismissiveness and the emotional coldness of my mom. It’s the perfect comfort food recipe from the combo plate of my parents.”
“That sounds clever, but it’s trite,” he says. “That’s theatre dialogue.”
“Whatever. What I’m trying to say is that I’m operating off old programming and it’s going to take some time to rewire everything. You just need to be patient.”
He signals to the waiter for another glass of Chardonnay.
He looks across the table at me. “We’ve been doing this a long time,” he says.
“What?” I asked.
“You at the bottom of the well,” he answers.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Trina calls regularly to see how things are going. She likes to remind me that “Community service is a privilege.” Well, lucky me, I’m off to be “privileged” for yet another day. Last night, I hard-boiled some eggs for my sack lunch. Cooked eggs sitting in a hot van for four hours should make me some friends.
Much to my relief, this morning at community service, I am finally put on the graffiti removal crew. This job consists of spraying some stinky yellow liquid on the pavement and giving it a scrub, and then the crew leader pulls out a pressure hose, lets loose a violent jet of water, and away go all the gang tags. The hose seems like the most fun part, but I guess if you aim that thing at somebody, it could take their skin off. Plus, the pressure alone could knock you on your ass. I gather they’ve had some problems in the past with crew members getting hurt and suing, so we are only allowed to spray the yellow stuff and scrub the sidewalk with long-handled metal broom brushes while the power washing is left to the supervisors. It’s boring work, but not exhausting.
The crew boss for graffiti removal is a tiny Guatemalan guy named Felipe. He doesn’t speak much English.
“You espeak Spanish?” he asks me.
>
“No. So you can totally talk shit about me, and I will never know.”
He smiles. He has no idea what I’m saying.
That morning, the graffiti removal crew is me, Felipe, and one other guy, an Asian kid. The Asian kid is short and stocky, with well-muscled arms and that swagger that tigers, gang members, and guys with big dicks all have. We ride together in this tiny truck with a water tank on the back. Every hour or so, we stop at a hydrant in a residential area and refill the water tank.
We are hosing down a bus stop. A woman with roller-set hair and eighties glasses is waiting for the bus. Suddenly, she comes up to me and says, pointing to the hose, “I have terrible allergies.”
“It’s just water, ma’am,” I reassure her.
“Oh, good.” She smiles and goes back to the bus stop.
Two minutes later, she comes back over, and as I prepare to answer another of her questions, she hands me a piece of candy. It’s that kind of weird good candy that only old ladies have; the stuff they’ve been eating for forty-odd years. Her steel blue eyes are magnified by her thick eyeglasses. They look serene and kind. She smiles as I take the candy from her hand. I smile back and let out a weird childlike “Yum. Thank you!” Did she give me candy because I reassured her that it was just water? Did I look hungry? Did she feel bad for me? Maybe she has a grandson in Rikers? I have no idea what the deal is, but it’s the little moments like these that are the surprise bonuses of all this court-ordered bullshit. I love these random connections with strangers. They are so rare in L.A., where you spend 98 percent of your time in your car, on your iPhone, screaming at shitty drivers, or drinking cold brew coffee and having a quiet existential crisis.
We stop for lunch at Burger King. It’s just the Asian kid and me. Felipe eats his lunch in the truck.
“How much time you get?” I ask him.
“Six months.”
“Six months?! Jesus. What’d you do?”
“Long story,” he says.
“I got time.” I smile.
“I’m a boxer, and I was at this club, and this dude comes up to me and picks a fight. I don’t even remember what it was about. We were both pretty drunk. He throws a punch at me and I defensively block him and punch him back. Well, I guess I hit him really hard, because he fell backward and hit his head on the corner of a table. Fucked him up real bad. He was in a coma for almost a year, during which time I was facing manslaughter charges and looking at major prison time. But then he woke up. And now he’s suing me for a million bucks… medical bills, emotional distress, damages… all of it.”
“Whoa. I’m sorry, man.”
“Yeah, it sucks.”
I could tell that this kid had told this story a million times to thirty other nosy community service laborers like me. But this kind of thing is always our first entry into conversation with each other: How much time did you get? What are you here for? It’s the one common bonding element among us. Reflecting on what this Asian kid told me, I remembered hearing that if you’re a trained boxer and you hit a civilian, you can be in big trouble. They can charge you with “assault with a deadly weapon” because your hands are really deadly weapons. I felt bad for him. He was just defending himself, and now because the other guy was drunk and a bad fighter and fell over and landed perfectly on the edge of a table, he was fucked.
And that’s really all it took to put my shitty situation into perspective. Suddenly I was the lucky one. My thirty days was a breeze! It’s like that modern take on the famous Persian proverb: “I cried that I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.” Well, I just met a guy who had no feet, and suddenly being barefoot was pretty fucking great.
I’ve pretty much lost everything: my home, my marriage, my sobriety, my sanity. I even lost most of my belongings. My ex was kind enough to put a few of my things into some garbage bags that Linda retrieved, but he donated the remainder of my stuff. The real kicker was that I also lost my health insurance. Gone were the Beverly Hills doctors with their designer waiting rooms, fresh-cut flowers, expensive art, and chichi clientele. As I had a pretty colorful mental health history and was well beneath the poverty line now, my psychiatrist suggested I apply for MediCal disability. And despite a twenty-year struggle with drug abuse, I was advised not to lead with or even mention my addiction.
Although addiction is considered a “disease” by most medical associations, it is not considered a disability. (Frankly, my drug use was equally, if not more, disabling than any of my other issues, but I don’t make the laws.) The MediCal bureaucrats initially refused me, but I appealed and won.
My experience with the MediCal system has not been that bad. Every test a doctor has ordered (from MRIs to EEGs to mammograms) and any specialist they have referred me to (neurologist, psychiatrist, gynecologist) has been approved. Granted, I have to drive forty-five minutes or more to an “urban” area (fuck it…I like taquerías), and I’m usually the only white or English-speaking patient in the clinic. The waiting rooms are small and cramped, with cheap, rickety furniture, linoleum floors, ancient fitness magazines, and dusty fake plants. And even with an appointment, you have to wait. It can be as little as thirty minutes or as long as two hours. Also every MediCal doctor—and I do mean every—tests you for HIV, so that’s obviously a big government concern.
My primary care doctor is Russian, and so is every single person who works in her office as well as every patient I’ve ever seen in her waiting room. Once, attempting to fit in, I said, “Well, I’m part Russian Jew, I look a little Russian, and I once dated a Russian electrician.” I smiled. Nobody was amused.
“You must to learn Russian,” the nurse told me. “Iz good!”
I wasn’t really paying attention, as I was mesmerized by her loud eighties abstract sweater, huge plastic earrings, and turquoise eye shadow.
My first MediCal gynecologist was pretty (like that should matter) and infinitely capable. Her waiting room was unremarkable, aside from the huge television blaring Spanish cartoons. There were a few questions on the medical intake questionnaire that I wasn’t used to: “Have you been physically abused?” and “Do you have a gun in the house?” I scribbled “no” to each as Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” played over the sound system. Bad musical choice.
My only real complaint has been with the psychiatrist I was referred to—also Russian. (Evidently, I’m in the Russian medical mafia.) The psychiatrist’s office was on the second floor of a shitty mini mall on the shitty end of Sunset. Every single sign or flyer in the office was in Russian. Smiling but uneasy, I sat down between a very old woman and a skinny lecherous-looking guy and immersed myself in my phone.
I have a new message on Facebook. It’s from that New York actor-comic Bradley who said Facebook told him he should poke me. What does Mr. Poke want now?
“Hey, Amy, I’ve been reading your articles. I really enjoy them. I actually have a question for you about mental illness, bipolarity specifically.”
I’ve got time to kill. Fuck it.
“Sure, Bradley. Hit me. I’m happy to help if I can.”
Bradley goes on to explain that he has a teenage daughter from a one-night stand and that the baby mama is bipolar and won’t stay on her meds. He’s concerned and doesn’t know how to help. There are also some financial issues regarding her health care and her unemployability.
It is not unusual for me to get strangers writing to me, confiding their problems or asking advice. In 2012, I was tapped by the then editor of the online addiction and recovery magazine The Fix to write a piece about sex and dating in AA. I’d like to think it was because I was funny and ballsy, but I’m sure my reputation as a program fuckbunny didn’t hurt, either. I hadn’t written for a magazine since my college days twenty years prior, but I wasn’t doing much apart from the occasional stand-up gig and chronically relapsing, so I jumped at the chance. This piece ended up being so well received and the editor was so impressed that I began regularly freelancing for them.
The majori
ty of my Fix pieces over the five-plus years I’ve been writing for them have been extremely personal and shamelessly confessional, chronicling my, well… everything. Was I exploiting myself? Maybe. Was I helping people know that they weren’t alone? Absolutely. When you write with relentless honesty, people feel as if they know you. They feel safe divulging things to you that they keep from even those closest to them. And it’s incredibly flattering when strangers consider you as trustworthy as any dark confessional.
So anyway, I answer Bradley as I would any reader who reached out for help, explaining that I’m no doctor, but I do know that it’s extremely common for people with bipolar disorder to go off their meds, either feeling that they don’t need them anymore or wanting their fun, super-energized mania back. I also suggest that his baby mama apply for disability, as it would help with medical costs, and she might even be eligible for disability benefits.
Just as I finish the message, Dr. Fedoseev (not her real name, which had even more vowels and was even less pronounceable) calls me into her office. She has orange-red hair, a white lab coat, and looks classically agonized in that old-school Soviet Union way.
“Tell me about your problem,” she demands in a thick accent.
“Well, I’ve had depression since I was nineteen and have been diagnosed with all sorts of mental illnesses, including borderline personality disorder and bipolarity. I’m also a recovering drug addict and alcoholic.”
“No, tell me your physical problem.”
“Uh… I have epilepsy from my methamphetamine abuse.”
“Why you think that?”
“That’s what the tests reveal: hyperactive lesions.”
“When you start with seizure?”
“Thirty-three.”
“When you start drink?”
“Nineteen.”
“When you stop drink?”
“The first time? Twenty-eight.”
“See… you not drink; you not have seizure.”