Party Girl

by Anna David

  Finally—I think on a Thursday but it could actually be a Friday—I get fed up with myself. I glance at my laptop, which is on my bookshelf lying on top of my Hollywood biographies, then walk over and get it out.

  Even though I’ve read only a few scripts and don’t really have any idea what I’m doing, I just start writing. I already have Final Draft software on my computer so the dialogue I’m coming up with looks so much like an actual script that I’m instantly motivated. I start crafting a character named Melinda who’s misunderstood and unappreciated and fired from her magazine job. I smoke and do lines and write and think that if I keep going and don’t go to sleep for the next week or so, I could have my script completed and dropped off at Holly’s office in under a month. I have this vague notion that I should probably plan out an actual story but decide that it’s better to just go with the flow and see where it takes me. I can imagine my quote in Variety about it. I started typing and the story just flew out of me, I would say in the article that would detail the bidding war that had ensued over my script.

  And there’s no denying the fact that I am flowing. I’m on page fifteen when I hear my next-door neighbor leave for work the next day and when I take my midday break to go to Holly’s, I’ve written almost thirty pages of what I’m convinced is snappy, smart dialogue. Why, I wonder, doesn’t every Hollywood screenwriter just use coke as a way to expedite the writing process? As I place the coke-covered framed picture on the top shelf of my closet so that my cats can’t knock it over while I’m gone, I wonder if maybe they all, in fact, do.

  After walking Tiger and depositing him back in his cage, I decide that I’m not only going to write my script in a month but also paint that damn closet. Back home, I pull the paint and brush out and just start slopping the stuff on the front of the closet. Too late, I realize that I probably should have taken my clothes out before I started painting and also remember that you’re supposed to lay tape around the area you’re painting so that you end up with a straight line. Ah, well. After removing most of the clothes and tossing them into piles on the ground, I decide that I like painting—something about dipping the brush in this mess and then using that to change the way the closet door looks is quite soothing. And I’ve always loved the smell of the stuff.

  I’m obsessing over the paw prints that one of my cats has tracked through the unpainted bottom part of my closet when the phone rings. Because of the clothing piles all around, I have to toss the paint brush into the can and then dart through the piles like an army recruit on a training course before I can even glance at caller ID and decide if I feel like answering. I see that it’s Karen from Holly’s office and get the phone just in time.

  “Hello!” I all but sing into the receiver, realizing too late that my hands are covered in gray paint, which is now decorating what used to be a pink phone. I’ve done more coke than I ever could have imagined was possible in the last couple of weeks but the only impact this seems to have had on my job with Holly is that I’ve stopped picking up Tiger’s shit. The residents of Carthay Circle, I’ve decided, can sully their shoes in it every day for all I care. But I’ve been almost obsessively checking in with Karen, reporting on completely fantastical interactions Tiger has allegedly been having with a neighborhood basset hound, chatting about how adorable the animal is and just generally trying to sound the way I think a brilliant, soon-to-be famous screenwriter should. Part of my act involves never letting on that I have caller ID and thus making her believe that I always answer the phone like I’m as cheerful as a midwestern schoolteacher.

  “Amelia?” she says. “I have Holly for you.”

  I can’t believe it. My first interaction with the woman who’s become sort of larger-than-life—with her dog cages and assistants who hire assistants and barf-colored tract house—in my mind.

  “This is Holly Min,” she says, and for a second I’m confused. Am I calling her or is she calling me? Everything has seemed so surreal lately, like it’s all coated in a thin layer of gray paint, that I keep finding myself confused like this.

  “Hi, Holly,” I say with exaggerated cheer. “It’s great to finally hear your voice.”

  “Oh, you, too,” she says. “Listen, do you have a minute to talk?”

  This is what I’ve been waiting for—the conversation where we discuss how I shouldn’t be doing her errands and picking up her dog’s shit but, in fact, writing screenplays that she can produce or, at the very least, having coffee or drinks or lunch with her. Yet the timing of this seems strange, since she couldn’t possibly be aware of how special I am yet.

  “I understand from Karen that I’m paying you $10 an hour to walk Tiger,” she says.

  “Yes.” This is not how I expect the conversation to start but I hide it well.

  “And are you walking Tiger for a full hour?”

  “Well, no.” I know as soon as it’s out of my mouth that this is the wrong answer. Why the hell am I afflicted with this ridiculous instinct to tell the truth at the most inconvenient times?

  “That’s what I wanted to discuss,” she says. “I was thinking…if I’m paying you $10 an hour to walk him and you’re, say, only walking him for twenty minutes, then you’re being paid for forty minutes of time that you’re not earning.”

  My right nostril runs and I wipe it. “But you live twenty minutes from me, so even if I walk him for only twenty minutes, it still takes me an hour.” I don’t want to be argumentative with my mentor/ producer/savior but I’m also dimly aware of the fact that I don’t like where this seems to be going.

  “I get what you’re saying,” she says, rather condescendingly. “But—well, you know that I work at Imagine, right? And I get paid to work here. But Imagine doesn’t pay me for the time it takes me to get to work and home. Are we understanding each other?”

  “Um…I think?”

  “Good,” she says. “Karen has been telling me how great you are so I’d hate to lose you over something like this. So, how’s this? You get $10 an hour, starting from when you report to work. If you only walk him for twenty minutes, you get a third of that. We’ll be working on the honor system, of course.”

  Glancing around my bedroom at the clothes in piles; the only partially painted closet; the gray paint spilled on the floor; and my shaking, half-gray hand with its bloody cuticles clutching the phone, I find myself nodding. “Sure, Holly,” I say, feeling like I’m about to hang up the phone and never speak to her, Karen, or the fucking dog ever again. “That’s fine.”

  I hang up and toss the phone across the room, where it lands in the middle of the paint can, splattering more gray everywhere.

  Dusk. I’ve always hated the word, and the time of day. They say that people get depressed at the time of day that they were born but I was born at 9 A.M. and usually feel okay around then, if I happen to be up. It’s the evening hours—where the day isn’t quite over and the night hasn’t quite begun—that kill me.

  Even though I seem to have lost whatever powers of estimation I may have once had, I’m guessing that it’s been a few hours since Holly and I spoke and I’ve moved to the living room, where I seem to be unable to move. I’ve had to pee for at least an hour, but either my appendages have lost their ability to follow through on directions from my brain or the messages are getting lost in the translation because I just continue to sit there. I’ve been steadily doing coke for God knows how long and not moving.

  I’m wired to the gills, I think, borrowing the expression from this militant lesbian I overheard one night and feeling good about it, the way I always do whenever I manage to hear a figure of speech and then use it as my own. And then I think, What the hell does that even mean? Fish have gills. Am I so high that I think I’m a fish? Or am I so high that I’ve grown gills? I think about this as I do more coke and don’t pee.

  At a certain point, I realize I’m shivering and have the distinct sensation that it didn’t just start. Is it possible to get hypothermia inside a heated Los Angeles apartment? I shake my vi
al onto the CD case in front of me. Fucking hell, I think. I can’t be out. I don’t want grams and grams more—just a few good lines to get me over this shaky, immobilizing state I’m in.

  And then I come up with a new plan. I manage to stand up—it’s not so difficult once I convince myself that my very survival is dependent on it—shuffle to my bathroom, open my medicine cabinet, and swallow five Ambien before I can freak myself out with thoughts of what combinations of cocaine and sleeping pills can do to people. Total unconsciousness is my only desire. Not for the rest of my life, mind you—just until I can feel a little better. I drink a bottle of Arrowhead to make sure the sleeping pills flow as far into my system as they possibly can, lie down on my bed, and wait to feel exhausted. Nothing happens so I go back to the living room, light a cigarette, and wait some more. Ambien is usually amazingly sharp in its ability to knock me from complete consciousness into serious REM—while not as drastic as an anesthetic, a close second—and I always revel in that split second where I slip from life to a place that’s temporarily problem free.

  But this time, the Ambien does nothing. It seems, if anything, to make me more alert. I’ve been taking a lot of it lately, more than I’m prescribed, but my doctor is so clueless about how bad my insomnia is that he actually tells me to cut the pills into quarters when they don’t even do a damn thing unless you swallow at least two or three of them. Lately, though, two or three hadn’t been guaranteeing sleep the way four or five did. I never bothered to explain this to the doctor—he would surely just launch into a lecture about how I need to be more careful—so I usually just tell him I’ve been traveling and lost the rest of the bottle on my trip when I need refills early.

  After about twenty minutes, or maybe two hours, I realize that my body simply isn’t going to be coaxed into anything akin to sleep. I seem to have perfectly regained the use of my limbs, however, and as I stomp into the kitchen to get out my last pack of Camel Lights from the carton I bought last week, I decide I want to be around people. The idea is both radical and terrifying, and when I discover that the carton is actually empty and I already smoked the last cigarette from what I thought was my second-to-last pack, I feel even more convinced that companionship will be my salvation.

  I decide to walk to Barney’s Beanery, this bar down the street that was built in like the 1920s and looks it. When I get there, I make my way directly to the bar, where I ask for an Amstel Light, a shot of tequila, and a pack of Camel Lights. I’m so eager for the tequila that I don’t even wait for the goateed bartender to deposit salt and a wedge of lemon: I just shoot it down and chase it with a long gulp of beer. And then I scan around the bar, noticing a table filled with these big, brawny guys wearing USC shirts and hats. My eyes dart around furtively, first to the other side of the bar, then to the people gathered around the karaoke microphone, then to a group of girls making their way in through the back door. Eventually, I leave the safe perch I have at the bar and, deciding that the most practical move for me right now is to look around for someone who has coke, start walking from table to table.

  I go up to the USC table; tap a tall, kind of pale guy on the shoulder; and ask him if we met through Gus. I know we didn’t but I can’t think of anything else to say and I need something.

  He shakes his head but smiles. “Is Gus your boyfriend?”

  Now it’s my turn to shake my head and smile. “I don’t have a boyfriend,” I say.

  The guy introduces himself as Simon and asks if I want to sit down.

  “Why not,” I say, as he moves over. “My friends aren’t here yet.” Technically, I think, I’m not lying. None of my so-called friends are here.

  Once I slide in, Simon’s friend returns with shots of Goldschlager and I expertly bullshit them about how Goldschlager actually contains specks of gold from the days of the California gold rush. It’s something I remember some guy telling me in a bar in San Francisco when I was too drunk to tell him that I thought he was full of it. But Simon and his friends—a Josh, a Todd, and, I think, two Johns—seem to buy it and next thing I know, I’m chatting reasonably comfortably with them and we’re all exchanging anecdotes about getting busted for drinking in high school.

  As I finish up a story about getting drunk before performing in Hair my junior year, Simon returns from the bathroom, leans over, and whispers in my ear. And I know before he opens his mouth exactly what he’s going to say. I swear, I’m better than any drug-sniffing trained dog when it comes to zeroing in on the nearest users in the vicinity.

  “I left a few rails for my friend on top of the windowsill over the first stall in the men’s bathroom,” Simon says as he winks at me. “Why don’t you take them?”

  Simon’s being so generous that I decide I can absolutely forgive his terrible Guess jeans and cheesy wink. I nod and slide out of the booth silently.

  I’ve used men’s bathrooms about three thousand times in my life—all those times they’re empty when the women’s one is full—so I know how to just stroll in there as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. The bald guy peeing in the urinal doesn’t seem to have as much experience with this as I do, however, so he looks at me in shock, but I shrug, whisper, “The women’s line was too long,” lock myself in the first stall, see the lines on the sill above, and wait for him to leave. As soon as he’s gone, I take out a rolled-up bill, stand up on the toilet, and inhale the lines. Instant relief, or at least something like it.

  Once I’m back at the table, though, something strange starts happening to me: I sort of lose the ability to speak. One second I’m fine and the next I can’t seem to form words. It sort of reminds me of how I didn’t feel like I could move earlier, but this seems more alarming because there are other people around, people who will be expecting me to behave normally. Luckily, Simon doesn’t seem to notice. He’s telling stories and his friends are laughing and I want to laugh, too, but I feel nauseous and overwhelmed and like my head is maybe caving in on itself, though I’m not really even sure what that means. My head pounds and I want to lie down, even though I don’t really feel tired.

  “I don’t feel well,” I manage to get out.

  Simon nods, as if this is par for the course. “Falling into a K-hole?” he asks, conversationally.

  “A K-hole?” I ask. I picture a donut hole.

  One of Simon’s friends overhears and yells, “So that’s what happened to the Special K you were supposed to leave me!”

  I look from Simon to his friend and, though very little seems clear at this point, I’m able to make a crucial and horrifying connection.

  “Special K?” I ask, and Simon and his friends all look like they’re laughing but the volume of the universe seems to have been put on mute because I can’t hear anything anymore. Even in this state, I know what Special K is—ketamine, a horse tranquilizer.

  “But—” I start to try to tell Simon that he’d told me the line was a line of coke but then I can’t remember if he said that or if that’s just what I had assumed or hoped. Simon and his friends continue to talk, and I can’t believe how a part of the world they seem, and how far away.

  “Outside for air,” I say and Simon nods. Part of me is offended that he doesn’t offer to come with me, but mostly I’m just relieved. I just need to sit down outside, have the wind blow on me, and feel better, I tell myself as I weave through the crowd and outside. An enormous trash bin sits under a street lamp near the middle of the parking lot and I decide that it looks like the perfect place to sit and relax.

  Part of me knows that I must be pretty out of it to be in such a disgusting place and not really care. The trash doesn’t even seem to smell that terrible, which is weird because usually the stench from this back bin is noticeable from the street. I greedily suck in gulps of air, wondering why I don’t feel any better. Then I lie down and close my eyes.

  At some point, a Mexican guy, one of the valet parkers, starts trying to shake me awake. My eyes flutter open and I realize that a dirty brown jacket rests over m
e like a blanket.

  “Hospital?” he asks, and I shake my head. It seems like a pretty ridiculous question to me, but when he starts pushing me up to a sitting position, I notice that I’ve thrown up all around me. Humiliated, I try to sit up, but my legs feel paralyzed.

  “Two thirty A.M.,” the guy says after muttering a whole bunch of other things I don’t understand, and when I look past him, I see there are a few other Mexican guys gazing at me like I’m some kind of a circus freak. And suddenly I feel very clear, recalling that I did Simon’s line at around ten, a lot of time has passed, and that’s not good. I’m also clear on the fact that I’d very much like to go home but I know that moving right now is out of the question.

  “I’m fine,” I manage to say, as I lie back down again, this time in the direction away from my vomit. I decide to take a nap.

  12

  I’ve always heard about how people come to and have no idea where they are, but the minute I open my eyes—before I even look down at my depressing gown or glance at the sterile environment—I know that I’m in a hospital. Call it anti-amnesia: I had the misfortune of remembering with perfect clarity doing Simon’s line, feeling paralyzed, learning that it was Special K, and taking that impromptu nap beside the Barney’s Beanery parking lot Dumpster. I want to be surprised, and feel motivated to jump out of bed and demand that someone explain my whereabouts, but I just don’t feel like bothering. Something about this absolutely shocking turn of events feels thoroughly unsurprising.

  My overwhelming feeling is one of disappointment. Why, oh why, hadn’t the mixture of coke and Ambien and alcohol and K conspired to kill me? Why hadn’t I been one of the lucky ones who got taken away accidentally, who never had to live on in people’s memories as a “suicide” but who was relieved of all her problems just as instantaneously as one? I know that these are incredibly depressing thoughts to be having and I want to cry over them, but I feel like that, too, probably wouldn’t be worth the effort.