Party Girl

by Anna David

  We move to the living room, where Jeremy gets out a photo album and starts pointing out pictures of him with Al Pacino, his mom, his brother, and what looks like all the current and former Lakers Girls. And it all feels very sophisticated—the wine drinking, the multimillion-dollar mansion, the photos all gathered in green leather binders. If I were at Adam’s, I think, we’d probably be drinking out of cans and sitting on his futon couch.

  “My God,” Jeremy says, as I sip from my wine and examine a photo album page dedicated to a film festival, complete with pictures of Jeremy with indie darlings like Aaron Eckhart and Catherine Keener. “I can’t believe you thought you were an alcoholic—I mean, you’re barely sipping your wine.”

  “I know,” I say, glowing with this latest revelation to add to my arsenal of information about what a good decision it was to drink. I take another small, delicate sip to emphasize the point.

  I walk outside to smoke and Jeremy joins me a minute later, bringing a freshly opened bottle of wine which seems weird, seeing as there’s no way we could have possibly finished the first, but he’s telling me some story about how when he was an assistant at ICM, he had to take his boss’s dog’s stool sample to the vet, and I’m so riveted by the concept of such a demeaning job that I forget to even ask about the bottle.

  We continue to drink the wine and I blow smoke rings and talk—about my life, my column, my feelings on various and sundry topics—and Jeremy mostly listens, piping in occasionally or laughing. It’s starting to feel a little like a performance I’m giving and he’s watching but neither of us seems to mind. I forgot how theatrical I can get when I drink, I think, as I spontaneously decide to recite dialogue from Grease, which I saw about 199 times during my formative years and thus can recite verbatim, complete with Australian accent for Sandy and New York accent for Danny.

  Later, we’re in the living room and it occurs to me that I might be buzzed because Jeremy seems to be holding my hand while I’m talking, and I don’t seem to be snatching it back. When he leans in to kiss me, I get the distinct whiff of bacteria breath, and this—not the fact that he’s about to kiss me—is what makes me wake up and push him slightly to the side while I straighten my skirt.

  I think it’s around the time when I light my first indoor cigarette—he’s given me free rein to smoke wherever I want to now—that I see Jeremy reach into his pocket and pull his hand out with his fingers folded over as they clasp something.

  “I don’t feel bad about giving you the wine,” he says, and I think that this seems like an oddly serious comment to be making at this point, seeing as we’ve mutually decided I’m not and have never been an alcoholic. “But I do feel a little bad about the Ecstasy.”

  I look at him, confused, thinking for one brief, horrifically wonderful second that he’s dosed the wine with Ex and I’ve thus just done drugs without it having been my fault, when I glance into his previously clasped hand and spy a slew of small white pills gathered there. Is that Ecstasy? I’ve done it a bunch of times, but I’ve usually been so drunk or wired by that point that I don’t really remember what it looks like.

  “Well, my problem was with drugs,” I say, regretfully. “I mean, I was addicted to coke, and that’s a drug. So doing a drug is out of the question, right?”

  I’m not sure if I’m asking a rhetorical question but it doesn’t really matter because by the time the sentence is out of my mouth, I’ve already grabbed a pill and gulped it down with the wine. I look at him as he swallows one himself, and want to feel guilty for having just taken a step down the proverbial rabbit hole, but that age-old I-just-took-drugs feeling kicks in and I feel only excited, like I’m about to take a trip where my head will leave me alone for a little while. And then I think, Well, since I’ve already taken one and clearly blown this whole sobriety thing, I may as well take another one. If I’m going to go out, why not go all out?

  So I swallow another pill and light another cigarette and wait for that feeling of deliriousness to start rushing over me. “I don’t feel anything,” I say to Jeremy as he puts U2 on the CD player.

  He looks at me. “You’re sweating bullets,” he says. “Trust me, you’re feeling something.”

  I feel my forehead and notice that it is uncharacteristically moist but I don’t do drugs to sweat, I do them to feel good, and since when does sweating mean I must be feeling good? At my senior prom in high school, my boyfriend and I took Ecstasy and didn’t tell the other couples sharing the limo because we thought they would judge it. But trying to hide the high I was feeling over dinner took its toll on me, and my trip turned decidedly negative. When we got to the after-party and the two other couples found out what we’d done, they spontaneously decided they wanted to do Ecstasy, too—and they all had an amazing time. I remember sitting on a couch trying to figure out why exactly I couldn’t seem to communicate with anyone while watching one of the girls, who’d never touched drugs before, jumping up and down and shrieking, “I feel like I’m dancing on a cloud! This is the best I’ve ever felt in my life!”

  I watch Jeremy open another bottle of wine, feeling convinced that his Ecstasy sucks. “Can I see those pills again?” I ask.

  Jeremy smiles and pulls another one from his pocket. “Open up,” he says, and even though the act seems overly intimate, almost invasive, I want the pill too much to care. My jaw falls down, he pops a pill in my mouth, and I take another swig of wine.

  Pretty soon after that I feel extremely animated so I start scrounging around his CD cabinet looking for music that I can dance to. But when Jeremy mentions that he has a sauna, that seems so thoroughly interesting that I immediately insist on seeing it. This house is like an amusement park, I think as I bound up the stairs after him, realizing that the thought doesn’t make much sense and wondering why I’m so excited about a sauna when I grew up with one.

  Turns out I don’t so much want to take a sauna as just see it, and once I’ve seen it, my mind has moved on to something else. A cigarette! Another glass of wine! Maybe a drink-drink? Maybe we should go out? My brain leaps from one possibility to another, attempting to land on the perfect plan of action that will keep my high alive. And then I think of Adam and what a crazy liar he must think I am and the thought feels so sad and overwhelming that it seems like it might take over my entire body and mind.

  “I think I’d like to take another,” I say to Jeremy as we leave the bathroom with the sauna.

  “I don’t know.” He looks slightly concerned. “This is pretty strong stuff and you’ve had a lot already.” I can read his face perfectly: Girl says she’s sober, then goes off the wagon and now appears to be going on some drug binge, which will probably end with a 911 call.

  “Look, I can handle my drugs—trust me,” I say, and hold out my hand. It feels uncomfortable to be having to ask someone for drugs. When I did coke, I was almost always the provider.

  “Let’s split one,” Jeremy finally says, and he breaks a pill in half. As we go down to the kitchen for more wine, it occurs to me that I don’t really like him at all, and I don’t even mean romantically. As I swallow my half of the pill, I wonder why I’m even spending time with someone I wouldn’t want to talk to for ten minutes at a party, and that’s when it occurs to me that this entire night may well have been a massive mistake.

  After a few more cigarettes, I realize I’m a little tired so I lie down on one of his overstuffed velvet couches. “I think your Ecstasy kind of sucks,” I say, as I tuck one of his Oriental rug–covered pillows under my neck.

  “Trust me, this is the best shit in town,” Jeremy says, pulling a pillow of his own from the other side of the couch under his neck and mimicking my position. “My guy is the go-to guy for everyone who works on the Fox lot.”

  I guess I close my eyes for a while because when I open them, I feel groggy and confused. At first I don’t remember where I am and in the second where I do, I feel even more confused—especially when I realize that Jeremy’s lips are on mine and we’re kissing.
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  “Oh, God,” I say, pushing him away and sitting up. He smiles at me and I notice that his pupils are enormous. He trails a finger on my leg and even though I hate it when people do that and I’m fairly convinced he’s taking complete advantage of me, I still feel bad when I move my leg away. When I gaze around the room and see empty wine glasses filled with cigarette butts, CDs scattered all over the floor and my favorite Theory jacket crumpled in a heap by the deck door, I’m suddenly overwhelmed with a nearly paralyzing emptiness that I haven’t felt in over six and a half months.

  “I should probably go,” I say, walking over to my jacket and picking it off the ground. “What time is it?”

  Jeremy glances at his silver Rolex. “Three thirty,” he says. “Come on—don’t even think about going home. I can’t drive in this condition.”

  “I’ll call a cab then,” I say, like it’s the most normal thought in the world, even though I can’t actually remember the last time I called one. Do we even have cabs in L.A.?

  “You’re being silly,” he says, standing up and walking over to me. “You should just stay here.”

  Now, I don’t know if it’s the fact that his pupils are making him somehow resemble what I think the devil might look like or if I just need to get as far away from this experience as quickly as possible but I reach for my bag, pull out my BlackBerry, dial information, and ask for Yellow Cab. Every city surely has a Yellow Cab?

  “Amelia,” Jeremy says, as—Eureka—the operator connects me. “You can stay in one of the guest rooms. We don’t have to do anything.”

  Something about the way he says that utterly convinces me that I won’t be left alone no matter what room I’m in. I don’t know if the drugs are making me paranoid or if I’m having some kind of clairvoyant vision but I don’t have any interest in finding out. “What’s your address?” I ask and he reluctantly says it. I repeat it to the Yellow Cab receptionist and hang up, feeling like this is the smartest move I’ve made in hours.

  And then Jeremy suddenly seems overwhelmed with concern—or at least paranoia. Or perhaps disappointment that he shelled out almost his entire supply of E and several expensive bottles of wine and isn’t even going to get laid for his efforts. “Look, I feel sort of bad about all this,” he says, following me outside, where I pick up a nearly empty pack of Camel Lights I’d left on his patio table.

  “Don’t,” I say, but my voice is cold. Now that I’ve decided I’m done, I want him out of my face. “I make my own decisions. There’s nothing to feel bad about.”

  He hands me one of my plastic 7-Eleven lighters. “You know, I don’t think this is anything we need to tell people about,” he says, and I feel like I can suddenly read his paranoia, which is telling him that a Variety story on the hotshot movie producer who coaxed a sex columnist out of her sobriety with drugs could be imminent.

  I nod just as I see the taxi pull up outside.

  “Bye,” he says, pulling me in and giving me a kiss on the cheek, like this has been a perfectly lovely and appropriate evening. “I’ll call you.”

  I start walking toward his front door, realizing that I seem to be having some trouble walking without falling. I want to say, “Please don’t,” but I don’t have the balls. When I get to the door, I turn around to look at him one last time. “You should probably get a new drug dealer,” I say, and then I leave.

  29

  When I come to at about three in the afternoon, I expect to be borderline suicidal, but I actually feel strangely calm. I sit up in bed, knocking a sleeping cat—who’d been meowing with unabashed vigor a few hours earlier but had clearly given up and decided to catnap it on my shoulder—onto the floor. Last night is incredibly clear in my mind: saw Adam, felt rejected, relapsed. I’ve fucked everything up, I think, as I reach for a cigarette. Why the hell am I not hysterical about it?

  Deciding not to smoke, I get out of bed and wander into the kitchen, where I have some toast. While my head doesn’t seem to be reeling as much from the experience as I’d think it would, my stomach is convulsing in what feels like somersault after somersault.

  As I force toast down, I remember how Tommy used to say that a relapse starts long before you take a drink. When did mine start—when Justin told me he was using? When I climbed into the life-size champagne glass? When I faked doing a vodka shot? I guess there’s no way of knowing. Then a thought pops into my head: Clearly, I can’t drink without doing drugs. Somehow this feels like an immense relief because now I don’t have to wonder. In rehab, people kept calling alcohol the “gateway” drug because as soon as they drank, the gate for doing drugs would open. But since I tended to do coke first and drink later, I hadn’t had many alcohol gateway experiences.

  Looking back over the night and realizing, with bizarrely amazing recollection, that I’d easily consumed a couple of bottles of wine myself, I start to wonder if maybe there’s something to this concept of my being an alcoholic, too. Riding back in the cab earlier this morning, I’d toyed with the idea of not telling anyone about my little Ecstasy and alcohol escapade, thinking that I’d just keep going to Pledges and still celebrate a year’s sobriety in six months. Apparently, people do that—they go out and don’t tell anyone and smile about how well their sobriety’s going—but they usually end up relapsing in a far bigger way as a result.

  I realize that if I leave the house without showering or even brushing my hair, I can make the Pledges afternoon meeting. I probably look like death but since going to a meeting can help me escape that, at least for the time being, I allow necessity to trump vanity. Making progress already, I think as I slide a bra on under the wife beater I slept in and step out the door.

  “My name is Amelia and I’m an alcoholic,” I say, expecting the people in the room to all swivel their heads in unison over the fact that I’ve finally surrendered to using the word “alcoholic” over “addict,” but everyone just does the smiley Hi-Amelia thing.

  “I relapsed last night,” I say, and I see the whisperings that start up whenever anyone mentions the word “relapse.” When Vera drank, I remember leaning over to Justin and saying, “I could see this one coming from a mile away,” so I feel like I deserve whatever it is anyone’s saying. I realize my heart is beating incredibly fast, which seems strange to me, since I’ve shared a lot in this room and haven’t felt nervous talking in front of the group since my first day of rehab. “I didn’t really believe you guys when you said that being an alcoholic and a drug addict were the same thing,” I say and I notice a couple of people nodding with compassion. “So last night, after being blown off by the guy I like, I decided to go have a glass of wine with the guy I don’t like.” Several people laugh and, while I’m surprised that anyone could find humor in my fuck-up, at the same time it makes me feel like I belong. I’ve definitely shared things here that I’ve known were funny, and felt completely validated by the laughter it’s gotten, but I haven’t ever really talked about anything sad or wrong or that makes me feel bad. In fact, I’ve heard people laughing at other people’s hardships around here and wondered how things like having been suicidal or institutionalized could be so uproarious to other people—let alone to the person sharing, who always seems to join in the hilarity. But somehow, now that I’m the one talking, it makes sense: what I’m saying is illogical and basically crazy. And for some reason, in this room filled with people bobbing their heads and laughing, that seems okay. “Three and a half hits of E later, I realized I’d made a horrible mistake,” I finish and most of the room guffaws. I break into a smile—I can’t help it. “So I guess…I don’t know…I guess that’s it. I don’t know. And you guys seem to.” Everyone claps.

  As the sharing in the room continues, people pat me on the back and women start writing down their numbers and passing them to me on pieces of scrap paper. As I tuck the phone numbers into my purse, I realize that I’d completely stopped reaching out to people here. When I was in rehab, I bonded like crazy with Justin and Robin and Vera and Peter and Joel and everyone e
lse. But these days, with Justin and Robin both long gone, Vera always relapsing, and Peter and Joel only hitting the meetings every now and then, I’ve stopped. I now see that from the day I moved out of Pledges, I’ve essentially been acting like I was cured. Rachel always told me not to show up at meetings right when they started or leave right when they ended but I hadn’t really listened. Looking around the room, I realize that I don’t really know any of the other alumni sitting there—some of their faces are familiar and I know a few of their names, but I’ve tended more to look at them as audience members during my funny or profound shares than people I might befriend.

  When the meeting ends, I decide to stand in line to thank the main speaker, something Rachel has always suggested but I’ve never done. It always seems so much like waiting in a receiving line at a wedding, where you’re only going to be able to say something the person before you already did. I’m probably just thinking about myself too much floats through my head as I wait in line.

  I tell the woman—who looks like your average Valley housewife but had shared about her heroin addiction, multiple marriages, and former life in porn—how grateful I am to have heard her, and she gives me a hug. I feel tears stinging my eyes as we embrace and, while the tears aren’t, of course, surprising, the reason for them is: they’re tears of comfort and relief, not the more familiar ones of self-pity.

  Different people come up to me as I make my way out of the room and I realize, with shock, that it’s twenty minutes after the meeting ended and I’m still here. As I’m hugging this girl with nine months of sobriety who tells me she “related to every word I said,” I see someone I hadn’t even realized until this moment was in the meeting, and my heart starts racing like an IV of cocaine has been injected straight into it.