Party Girl

by Anna David

  “Well, I drink,” I say. “But just the regular amount. Or I would more drink to come down a little if I was too wired from coke. But I definitely don’t have a drinking problem. I don’t even like alcohol.”

  The blonde girl nods at me like she understands. Maybe she’s in my situation, a person with a drug problem stuck in this room of people obsessed with calling themselves alcoholics.

  “If that’s the case,” Tommy says, “I suggest you take some time—say, a year or two—off of drinking and see if you miss it.”

  My mouth threatens to fall open, but I try to appear blasé as I assess whether or not Tommy is joking. “A year or two?” I ask with a slight smile.

  “Sure,” he says, folding his arms. “If you can take a couple years off of drinking and not miss it, then I would say you’re probably not an alcoholic.” He smiles at me, and for the first time it occurs to me that Tommy may be an asshole dressed up like a nice guy. But I don’t want to give these people any more ammunition against me than they already have.

  “Actually,” I say with a smile. “I was planning to stop with the coke—stop with drugs of all kinds, no problem—and cut down significantly on my drinking. In fact, I heard about a program…I think it’s called a ‘drinking cessation’ program.” I’d heard about this from someone who went there when his family was trying to get him to go to rehab. “Do you know about it?”

  The entire room bursts into laughter and I feel myself blushing while also trying to pretend like I know what’s funny. The guy had told me that it was a program you went to when you weren’t an alcoholic but maybe drank too much or didn’t trust yourself not to do drugs when you drank, and I was assuming that the people at Pledges would know all about joining. When everyone continues to laugh—Blondie, who I’d thought was on my side, included—I start to get pissed.

  “What’s so fucking funny?” I find myself snapping, alarming myself with the snideness of my tone.

  Everyone stops laughing and Tommy glances at the hot guy in the corner. “Justin, you want to tell Amelia what’s so funny?”

  The hot guy, Justin, smiles and looks even cuter than he did when he was laughing. He catches my eye from across the room. “Amelia,” he says, and I have an involuntary shudder at such a hot guy saying my name and looking me in the eye, even under these depressing circumstances. “That program doesn’t exist anymore.”

  Tommy looks at Justin and asks, “And why is that?”

  “The woman who started it got wasted and killed a kid in her car a few months ago,” Justin says. “The program has since been disbanded.”

  “And that’s funny?” I say, hoping to shame everyone in the room.

  “No, it’s not,” Justin says. “What’s funny is that when I got here, I asked the exact same question.”

  “So did I,” Blondie pipes up.

  “Good for you,” I say, not sure why they think any of this would be amusing or interesting to me. “But my point is that while I’ve acted addictively with drugs, I’m not an alcoholic.” Everyone is silent and I wonder if they’ve finally come around to actually understanding this extremely simple point I’m trying to make.

  “Would you be at least willing to consider the fact that alcoholics and drug addicts are the same thing?” Tommy asks. He’s looking at me so kindly that I almost want to acquiesce even though I know he’s wrong.

  “But they’re not the same thing,” I explain.

  “I realize you feel that way,” he says. “And that’s why I’m asking if you’d be willing to just consider the fact that they might be.”

  I look around at all of them, noticing several people I hadn’t even seen before and an inordinate number of tattoos. Was one of the prerequisites for Pledges a certain amount of permanent ink on various body appendages? Despite their general seediness and ridiculous optimism in the light of where they were currently seated, at this particular moment I find it strangely almost impossible to continue to hate all of them. And besides, I think, Tommy isn’t asking for so much.

  “Fine,” I say. “I’m willing to consider that.” The group bursts into applause, like I’ve just performed a vignette, and I stifle the urge to tell them to stop clapping and get a life. Tommy stands up and walks over to me, leaning down to give me a hug.

  “Welcome to Pledges, Amelia,” he says, pulling me close to him. And for reasons thoroughly unclear to me, I burst into tears. Everyone in the room breaks into another round of applause.

  Later that afternoon, I’m crying again. And I can’t seem to stop. I’m in my room, looking around at my shabby surroundings, and sobbing. The gay guy, Peter, pokes his head in.

  “You okay?” he asks. Why the hell do people ask that when the answer is so clearly no?

  I shake my head and keep crying.

  He makes a sympathetic face. “Why are you crying?” he asks, and I look up at him incredulously.

  “Why am I crying?” I ask. “My question is, why aren’t you? We’re in fucking rehab.”

  Peter blinks and smiles like he’s never experienced a sad emotion in his life. He’s probably thrilled to be here because he gets to room with other men, I think. I feel thoroughly positive that Peter hasn’t gone through a fraction of what I have and resent his put-together outfit and confused-looking head tilt more than I can even express.

  “Please,” I say to him, “just leave me alone.”

  He shuffles off and my tears eventually subside enough for me to go back to reading through the Pledges book that Tommy gave me after group. After a while, though, I mostly listen to the people out on the smoking patio. I’d hung around everyone after group and tried to feel comfortable while a girl talked about robbing people at ATMs to get money for heroin and a guy regaled the group with stories of popping “benzos” and other things I’d never heard of. A completely freaky-looking guy with about fifty pierces in his ear joked and laughed with the best of them. I can’t even fit into a group that clearly accepts everyone, I thought as I watched Justin pat Multi-Pierced Guy on the back.

  So I went to my room to try to start reading this book but when I cracked it open and saw all this stuff about how you stay sober by following steps that involve always looking for your part in whatever resentment you have, I thought, What the fuck does that have to do with being sober?

  And that’s when the tears started. Now that they’ve stopped and I can actually concentrate on this book again, I find myself far more interested in eavesdropping. They all seem to be in complete denial over why they’re here, I decide, as I listen to them lighting cigarettes and cracking jokes. They’re not coworkers on an office break or college students blowing off steam. They’re at the end of the line. It doesn’t get any lower than rehab. What is wrong with these people that they’re not more depressed by their circumstances?

  I don’t want to start crying again—I’d actually planned to keep it together because I’ve been told that my roommate is going to be checking in any minute and I’m counting on her being some kind of a saving grace—so I just keep listening to them while trying to read the damn book. I’ve already decided that my roommate will be cute and normal and we’ll smoke and eat candy and plan extravagantly creative good-bye parties for each other like people always do in movies about rehab.

  I’m wavering between these my-roommate-will-save-me fantasies and thinking that checking in here was a horrific mistake as I listen to everyone laugh and read about how I’m going to have to go and apologize to everyone I’ve ever harmed. I’m nothing like these annoyingly cheerful freaks, I think, and decide I should probably call Mom and explain this to her. I’m thinking about this when Kimberly, the no-nonsense front desk lady, walks in to the dank, depressing room.

  “Knock knock,” she says, even though she’s already inside. In drug rehab, this probably counts as a joke. “I’m here to go through your bags.”

  Joel had warned me about this. He’d told me that Kimberly would come and search my belongings for smuggled-in coke and pills. How desperat
e did people have to be, I wonder, to sneak drugs into rehab? Kimberly grabs my pink hobo purse from the floor and pulls my BlackBerry out.

  “You won’t be needing this,” she smiled, as she tucks the BlackBerry into her pocket. Even though I vaguely recall someone telling me this would happen, I can’t help but feel horribly violated, and positive that Kimberly is getting some sadistic pleasure out of taking away my connection to the outside world. And then she continues to go through my bag until she lands on a bottle of Listerine.

  “Oh, no way, Jose,” she says while cradling it, sounding excited.

  “You encourage bad breath?” I snap.

  “Oh, that’s funny,” she says, not sounding remotely amused. “There’s alcohol in there.”

  And then I snap. “Jesus Christ. I’m not going to drink Listerine for the fucking alcohol,” I say.

  Kimberly clearly doesn’t feel it’s necessary to respond, for she simply slides the bottle of mouthwash into her other pocket and looks at me the way one might a serial killer.

  “You ready for your UA?” she asks.

  I just look at her, not interested in explaining that I have no idea what she’s asking me.

  “Your test?” she says.

  I continue to stare at her blankly.

  “Urine analysis,” she finally says, then adds, “You have to pee in a cup.”

  She turns and starts walking out of the room and I get up and follow her. It probably should have occurred to me, but of course I hadn’t even considered the fact that they were going to be constantly testing me to see if I was taking drugs. While I can’t imagine who the hell would take drugs while they’re in rehab, after getting a look at Joel and some of the other residents, I’m beginning to gather an answer. I follow Kimberly to the front office, where she picks a clear plastic cup from inside her desk and hands it to me. At this point, I know what to do—I have been to the gyno, after all.

  “Okay, be right back,” I say and start toward the bathroom.

  “Ha ha,” Kimberly says, immediately on my tail. “As if.” And that’s when I realize this bitch is planning to come into the bathroom with me. Jesus! What the hell does she think, that I’m high but storing some “good” pee in my side pocket that I plan to put in the cup if she doesn’t log my every move?

  We go into the bathroom and as I pull down my pants, I think that it’s a good thing I don’t have issues about being naked in front of people or I’d really be in trouble. I flip the toilet seat up and am about to sit down when I realize that thousands of skanky, drug-addicted asses have surely been here before me and, based on what I’ve gathered so far about the Pledges hygiene policy, the remnants of those experiences surely still remain. In public toilets, I never have the patience to bother with those toilet covers—I simply squat an inch or so above. But am I going to be able to squat and pee in a cup with a humorless, suspicious wench watching me?

  I tell myself to ignore her, then just squat and hold the cup under my stream, grateful that I’m not having performance anxiety. I fill the cup, place it on the counter, finish peeing, and start washing my hands. Kimberly stands there, gazing at my cup of pee.

  “It’s all yours,” I say, gesturing toward the cup.

  She walks over, picks it up, and gazes at it with wonder. “Amelia,” she says, “you really ought to think about drinking more water.”

  “Why?” I ask as I think about how much I want to smack her.

  “Healthy pee,” she says, “should be almost clear.” We both look at mine, which is basically orange.

  “Great,” I say. “Thanks for the tip. Can I go now?”

  She nods and sashays out of the room. As I follow her out, I wonder if she’s going to write down the color of my pee in my file.

  I yearn for my BlackBerry so that I can call someone. Of course, I could wait in line for the pay phone that Rich—an eighteen-year-old kid from Boulder, Colorado—has been dominating since I got here. Asking twenty adults to share one pay phone is ridiculously inhumane, but then again, so is silently accusing a nonalcoholic of packing contraband mouthwash for a secret buzz or acting like she’ll probably cheat on a fricking pee test. Even if Rich, the Colorado kid, does ever get off the phone, I know that I don’t feel like talking to Mom or, in fact, anyone. I have no credibility anymore, so my announcing that these people are all psychotic wouldn’t mean anything to anyone. It occurs to me for not the first time that I really don’t have any friends. And for once, this thought doesn’t make me cry. Maybe I’m just all out of tears at this point.

  I’m sitting in the breakfast room the next morning, thoroughly exhausted, when Tommy greets me with a huge smile and says that sometime today I have to go see Dr. Thistle, the resident doctor at Pledges, for a checkup. The girl who was supposed to have been my roommate clearly came to her senses and decided to forgo rehab, so last night I slept alone in my creepy room. Of course, “sleep” is a pretty optimistic description of what I’d been doing. Staring at the ceiling, getting up occasionally to smoke and trying to read the Pledges book in order to bore me into slumber more accurately describes last night’s nocturnal activities.

  Here at breakfast, everyone’s chattering but I can’t think of anything to say until my third cup of coffee, when I ask the tan blonde, Robin, what she does for a living. She tells me that she’d been a model, once stripped down to her G-string on Howard Stern, and continues to go on sharing anecdotes about her life. I get the distinct sensation that she considers rehab another stop on her party tour—like, summer in the Hamptons, winter in Aspen, spring in Culver City—and I envy her relaxed attitude. Was there something wrong with me for thinking rehab was such a horrible place to be?

  When we’re done eating, Robin walks me over to Dr. Thistle’s office and tells me she’ll see me later in group. It’s beginning to dawn on me that group happens constantly, like every moment we’re not eating or sleeping or cleaning our dishes. So far, no one’s mentioned a word about the pool or equine therapy.

  Dr. Thistle—or “Doc” as everyone around Pledges calls him—nods and takes notes as I tell him about all the coke I’ve done but when I explain my situation with Ambien, he starts shaking his head and looking disapproving.

  “Up to five pills a night?” he asks, dumbfounded. This was a guy who listened to people come in and talk about shooting vats of drugs up their ass and doing eight balls in five-minute spans, if what people had been sharing during and after group was any indication, so I don’t know why he had to be so judgmental about me taking a few sleeping pills.

  “Look, I wasn’t taking them for fun,” I say. “I was taking them because I suffer from insomnia.”

  “I understand,” he says. “And when did you stop taking them?”

  “The other day,” I say. “When I got out of the hospital, I decided to go cold turkey.”

  Doc shakes his head. “That wasn’t smart. You should have told them how many you were taking when you were in the hospital so they could have detoxed you off of them with an IV. You could have had a seizure.”

  I don’t think anything sets me off more than being told I’ve done something stupid—so I have to stifle an urge to start wringing Doc’s neck. No one in the hospital asked me how much of anything I took and it certainly didn’t cross my mind to offer it up. “Well, clearly I did not have a seizure, Doctor, so I guess we can conclude that I survived despite my stupidity,” I say.

  “It’s going to be a while before you’ll be able to sleep through the night,” he says. This guy needs to be given a serious lecture about glass half-full versus glass half-empty logic, but I’m too desperate to get away from him to be the one to do it.

  14

  I’m trying to focus on reading the Pledges book when Tommy pokes his head in my room.

  “Just wanted to see how you’re adjusting,” he says, cheerful as ever.

  “Oh, great,” I say. Even in this ridiculously downtrodden state, I seem to care about what my drug counselor thinks of me so I don’t want hi
m to know how scared and miserable I feel. I try to smile. “Everyone’s really nice,” I add, even though it’s a bald-faced lie.

  Tommy just looks at me. “Why don’t you and I take a walk?” he asks.

  A walk, like anything else right now, sounds absolutely unappealing, but what are my options? To sit here and think about how much I must have fucked up my life to be ensconced in this place with a bunch of losers?

  “Can I smoke?” I find myself asking.

  “Absolutely,” he says, as he helps me to my feet. “In fact, I encourage you to.”

  I grab my Camel Lights and my lighter, slide on a pair of flipflops and follow Tommy outside as he picks up a pebble that was sitting on a picnic table covered with ashtrays and starts walking down the Pledges entryway toward the street.

  “I’m going to say something and I don’t want you to be offended by it,” Tommy says as he tosses the pebble onto the ground and leads me onto a busy street lined with thrift stores and fast-food places. It’s my first time seeing civilization since I checked in a few days ago, and it seems shocking that the real world has actually only been a few hundred feet away.

  “Shoot,” I say, lighting up what has to be my eighty-seventh cigarette of the day. I had to imagine that getting offended was probably going to be the nicest thing that would happen to me today, now that my life was shaping up to be a series of depressing incidents brightened only by Camel Lights and the occasional brownie. Besides, I like Tommy.

  “You strike me as pretty much spiritually dead,” Tommy says as he leads me across the street. He looks at me sadly while squinting his eyes, as if my face were the sun and he’s not wearing sunglasses.

  I’d expected him to tell me he thought I seemed really depressed or like I wasn’t fitting in or that I’d clearly let myself go physically but this didn’t seem particularly offensive. I wasn’t, in fact, even sure what he meant.

  “Spiritually dead?” I ask, exhaling smoke. “Well, I’m not religious. And,” I add with a smile, “I’m not remotely offended.”