by Amy Dresner
“I hate you.”
The next day I call my sponsor, Jay, to complain.
“Well, honey,” he says, “when you allow what somebody gives to be enough, it makes it safe for them to risk giving more. Does that make sense?”
“Yes.”
“And—then again—they might be stingy fuckers, and that’s all you get.”
“Come on!”
“Just remember, sweetheart, this guy is your choice. He’s not your enemy; he’s your choice. So if you don’t like it—”
“Choose somebody else!” we say in unison.
A few weeks later, Bradley is heading off to Las Vegas to do a few nights in a club there. He asks me to come with him.
“Vegas makes me depressed,” he says, “so it would be nice to have you there.”
Depressed? Vegas makes me sick. I mean, I literally get sick every time I go. The last time was in November of 2011. I was married to Clay and popping OxyContin like Pez. It was my birthday, and I decided to have some expensive red wine as a chaser. Bad, bad move. I spent the next three days in the hotel room violently puking. I never saw the light of day.
But here was a chance to have another Vegas experience—a “relapse redo,” if you will—and to celebrate my three years of sobriety in, of all places, Sin City. I’d had a pretty bad cold the two weeks prior, but it had mostly cleared up, so I figured, why not? If I was going to test the strength of my sobriety, a week in Vegas would be the time and place to do it.
However, when I hit the desert with its sundry of allergens and the smoke-filled casinos with their glacial air-conditioning, I am instantly sicker than ever.
Bradley comes into the bathroom while I’m sitting in the hot bath. I am propped up on cold and allergy medicine, hair bunched on the top of my head, snot running down my face.
“Aren’t you glad you brought me?” I joke feebly.
“Oh, babe… you look so cute.” He leans over and kisses me. “I gotta go do my show. I might have a drink with the guys after. I’ll let you know, okay?”
“Okay, baby. Go kill it.”
I take some more cold medicine and fall asleep. I wake up to feel him slide into bed, wrapping his body around me.
“Ohh… my little wire mesh. You’re so tiny.”
“What time is it?” I mumble.
“Eleven thirty.”
“I thought you were going to have a drink with the dudes.”
“I told them I couldn’t. My girl is sick. I need to get back.”
I sleepily kiss the hand that’s holding mine.
“You’re the best.” I smile.
He kisses my bare shoulder and holds me tighter.
“For somebody who didn’t want a relationship, you’re pretty domesticated,” I continue.
“Don’t tell the guys. I will kill every part of you to death,” he whispers in my ear.
Bradley, who has a ridiculously lean and muscular body, is trying to slim down for his next role playing a famous Russian ballet dancer off-Broadway. To give himself that sinewy physique, he is on a strict diet of meat and meat with a side of meat. His caveman diet is taking a toll on him.
“I feel hollow inside all the time,” he says, as we walk down the Vegas strip.
“Welcome to early sobriety, bitch!” I say, giving him a playful push.
I know the feeling. All too well. That gnawing. That sense of never being satiated. Ugh. I was about a month off nicotine, and I was having that feeling myself. It didn’t help that I had recently cut out peanuts, wheat, dairy, soy, sugar, corn, and anything else derived from joy in my diet so that I might wrangle my adult cystic acne.
I had become exactly the person I’d hated—the chick who used to smoke meth made with Drano, but now staunchly refused to eat gluten. For addicts, it is ironically easier to go from one extreme to another—reckless abandon to monklike asceticism; debauchery to chastity. Moderation does not come easily to us.
It’s day two, and I’m sicker than ever. But Bradley is headlining, and I want to see him dazzle on stage, so I dose myself with cold medication and, with a handful of Kleenex, drag myself out of the room.
I sidle into the VIP booth he arranged for me and order a seltzer water like an octogenarian. Most of his act is about being single or staying single. Like “don’t let a girl take over your Netflix queue and suck out all your hopes and dreams” and “an anagram for ‘relationship’ is ‘I sit on her lap.’” And “married men live longer ’cause fun shit kills you,” blah, blah, blah.
Bradley says to the audience, “Why would anybody get married? It has less than a fifty percent chance of success. It’s casino odds. Granted, we’re in Vegas, but would you sit down at a blackjack table if the minimum bet was half your shit?”
The crowd laughs, and I feel my heart break a little bit.
“So, yeah, I’m single. But it doesn’t mean I’m a scumbag.” He points to a cute girl in the front row. “Room three oh three…’sup?”
The motherfucker uses the actual room number.
My chest starts to tighten, and I will myself not to cry. I actually punch myself in the arm in an attempt to stuff the hurt back into a box.
After his set, he comes up to me. “Hey, what did you think?”
“You were great,” I say coldly.
He knows right away.
“Uh-oh… what’s wrong?”
“All your jokes are about the glories of singlehood and how much marriage sucks. Well, they hurt my feelings. Imagine if I was still doing stand-up and I was like ‘who wants one dick forever when you can have a different dick every day of the week? You with me, ladies?!’”
“I can’t change five years’ worth of material on a dime. Also, when I said, ‘I’m single,’ I winked at you. I was looking right at you!”
“Well, that was stupid, because I can’t see far away. I need Lasik, remember?”
Tears start rolling down my cheeks. Goddammit.
“Amy, yes, I am freaked out about marriage. I’ve told you that. But we could still be together forever and never get married. What’s wrong with that idea?”
This quells my insecurity for a moment.
However, as the night goes on, his bits keep randomly resurfacing in my brain and pissing me off.
“Fifty percent of your shit?! You don’t have any shit, Bradley. I’m letting you stay with me at my place for free, you mooch.”
“Solid point.” He smiles at me. It annoys me that he doesn’t take things personally, and it really annoys me that his smile always disarms me. I punch his shoulder.
“That all you got?” he says. “Hit me as hard as you want; just don’t hurt your hand.”
I rear back and swing as hard as I can.
“Hey, that wasn’t bad!” He laughs.
I shrug but my hand is on fire.
After the show we go to the casino bar and meet some of Bradley’s pals—people he’s known for as long as he’s been coming to Vegas. I’d never met these people before, but two of his female friends instantly see that I am deathly ill.
“You should have a hot toddy,” one of them offers innocently.
“Yeah I’m not drinking,” I say.
“Why? Are you on antibiotics?”
“No. I just don’t like getting arrested,” I tell her.
Neither woman laughs. Two minutes later, I am introduced to their husbands, Lieutenant Whatever and Sergeant Somebody of the Las Vegas Police Department. Perfect.
There are two young male comics, Gino and Phil, in town opening for Bradley at his shows. They have never been to Vegas before, and woohoo, are they excited! I suggest we take them to Fremont Street, where the Strip used to be. The locals now call it “Old Vegas.” Last time I’d gone to Fremont, it was a bit like the “Thriller” video—zombies staggering around, looking for booze, luck, and, quite possibly, Michael Jackson. This time, it still had some of that old-school apocalyptic charm, but it has become much more trendy, with a slew of cool new bars and packs of hipsters and
millennials milling around.
I notice the… umm…“bunny nose” on one of our young friends and whisper to Bradley, “Phil’s on coke.”
“How can you tell?” he asks. What the fuck? Was this guy born in a yurt?
Moments later, Phil buoyantly offers, “We have drugs!”
“No shit,” I say, laughing.
We take them to the Gold Nugget or some other shithole, and Gino and Phil are having the time of their lives—smoking, drinking for free, and loving the “character” of vintage Vegas. I, on the other hand, am distracted by the smell—years of spilled booze, stale cigarettes, and sadness. What I mostly notice are the gnarly old alcoholics staring blankly at slot machines—emaciated, chain-smoking, as if they’ve been there for decades.
Bradley’s young friends don’t notice or don’t care. They have the high and the optimism of the newly indoctrinated—coked up, on a winning streak, chatting up girls on Tinder and Bumble. If there is any doubt whether or not they are picking up on the heavy stench of desperation, at one point Gino literally shouts, “Oh, my God, this is the most fun I’ve ever had!”
I am happy they’re happy. But I really just want to take a hot bath and go to sleep. Is it because I am sick? Old? Sober? Yeah, probably all three. But I am a good sport. I don’t complain. I feel like I need to be “on”—be the clown, the center of attention. But the truth is, I don’t have the energy. It then occurs to me that I can just be. Be the quiet girlfriend. So that’s what I do. And, incredibly, nobody seems disappointed.
At one point in our crawl, we hit a karaoke bar. Karaoke could possibly be my least favorite thing in the entire world. It’s definitely up there with pearl earrings, country music, and velvet anything. I keep looking at my phone: 11:55 p.m… .11:58. In two minutes, I’ll have three years sober. Three fucking years!
Just as it becomes my sober birthday, Gino cluelessly pulls out a big Ziploc bag of blow, sticks his finger in it, and stuffs it up his nose. He crowns his subtle move with a jerky paranoid look around. Fucking rookies.
I haven’t seen blow since I used to shoot it. Jesus. Maybe eight or nine years ago?
“Gino, where’s your paraphernalia?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“Like a bullet or a straw? Unless you have a nice long Chinese wizard fingernail or a tiny spoon pendant.”
“I rarely do blow.”
“Well, your makeshift gear is killing me, man. Give me a pen.” And with that, I fashion them a proper snorting utensil.
“You’ve done a lot of drugs, huh?” Gino asks.
“Yeah, I used to shoot coke.”
“You can make coke into a liquid?”
“You can make anything into a liquid if you add water, dude.”
The next morning, I call my mom and thank her for never giving up on me. Then I call my dad and boast, “I’m three years sober!”
“I’ll drink to that,” he says.
“Cheap Chardonnay on ice, right? Go crazy.”
“You know it. How’s Vegas?”
“A very ironic place to celebrate sobriety.”
“I bet.”
“Papa, are you ashamed of me?” I ask him. “When you talk to your friends, do you ever feel ashamed?”
“My friends wish they had a kid as unbreakable as you, Ames.”
“Thanks.” I smile, tears forming.
“Have a great day. You deserve it,” he says.
I hang up, and I climb on top of Bradley, putting my face weirdly close to his. “Baaaaaaby!”
“Oh, here it is, the yearning,” he says.
That’s what he calls the voracious, insatiable hole that we junkies have inside. He refers to “the yearning” like it’s a living animal trapped inside me, constantly pacing in its cage, ravenous for food, sex, or attention.
“Nooo… it’s not the yearning. I just want to say thank you for accepting me and allowing me the space to be somebody new. Because you’ve done that, I’ve been able to be somebody new with you.”
As I say it, I marvel at how much I really have changed, and how I now have the love I’ve been looking so long and hard for. I begin to cry.
“Babe, don’t cry. You’re gonna make your eyelash extensions fall off.”
I laugh and wipe away my tears.
“Don’t worry, I’ll still love you if they do,” he says.
“You love me?”
“Of course, I do, silly.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough.”
—Stephen King
Here’s a list of people who believed in me, and for them I am eternally grateful. If you enjoyed this book, you should be grateful, too:
My publisher, Hachette Book Group, who thought my story was worth telling.
My former editor, Stacy Creamer, who originally fell in love with and bought this manuscript.
My current editor, Michelle Howry, who elucidated some of my biggest writing flaws and made this a much better book, as well as the rest of my dream team: Elisa Rivlin, Amanda Kain, Lauren Hummel, Melanie Gold, and Becky Maines.
My super-duper bionic agent, Peter Steinberg, who is the best agent I’ve ever had. (Granted, he’s the only agent I’ve ever had, but I still know he’s the best.)
My friend Amber Tozer, who changed my life by passing on some of my writing samples to her agent.
My editor at The Fix, William Georgiades, who always gives me the freedom to be my obnoxious, irreverent self.
My father, who told me to “shut the fuck up and write, Ames.”
My mother, who told me to take my B-complex so that I would have the energy to write.
My sponsor, Jay Westbrook, who helped me become the type of sober woman I only dreamed of.
My bestie, Marni, who adopted my cat, Fatman, when I got committed and never ever got mad that I threw up in her car.
The manager of my sober living, Anouska, who loved me like a sister and idiotically trusted me with her child.
My lesbian friend, Tammy, who taught me how men and relationships work.
My breathwork guy, Nathaniel Dust, who’s seen me cry more than a decade’s worth of therapists and boyfriends combined.
My boss, Amy Alkon, whose dogged work ethic has inspired me and who lets me call her asshole and ho-bag and still pays me.
All my roommates in sober living and treatment who, God love ’em, put up with my inhuman snoring and constant vaping.
And finally, my friend Jeremy: because she called 911 when I slit my wrists, you just read a memoir and not a biography.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AMY DRESNER lives in West Hollywood, California. She’s still sober and she still writes for The Fix.
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