Addiction seemed to be playing a game with me, upping the stakes and waiting to see if I’d fold. I needed to drink a bottle of wine to get the buzz that used to come from one glass. I had to become quicker and cleverer with my lies. How did I get this bruise on my arm? An honest answer would have been “I have no idea. I probably fell out of a cab.” But like lightning I could launch, “Stupid subway door was closing just as I was getting out.” Why didn’t I show up at your wedding shower? “I was just going to call you! You won’t believe this. I got food poisoning—ended up in the freaking ER.”
Then there were the “out of sight” transgressions. Nobody knew that I had stopped contributing to my 401(k) because I fully expected to be dead by forty. No one would have guessed that I never got manicures anymore because no matter how much I drank I couldn’t keep my hands from shaking. And I had to work harder to convince myself that the paranoia didn’t mean I was going crazy. I lived in constant fear of being found out, and that made me more and more reclusive. The less time spent with people, the less chance of being discovered. But snorting cocaine alone on my couch also made me feel like a degenerate. Thanks to addiction I was desperate to be alone and I dreaded being alone.
My brother’s first child was born on a rainy Wednesday in July 2003. When my mother called at 3:00 p.m., I was at home working on a proposal and doing lines of cocaine off of my favorite mirror. I switched the call to speaker and picked at what I hoped was just ground-in cigarette ash on the navy blue cotton slipcover. Then I opened a new pack of cigarettes.
“Wait, you’re not making sense,” my mom said. “If you’re not in the office, why can’t you just get in a car now and leave for the hospital before rush hour? The bridge is going to be murder after four o’clock.” I was silent, distracted by the stain on the slipcover. “For chrissake, Lisa, your brother had a baby! What are you doing that could be more important?” You really don’t want to know what I’m doing, I thought. I picked up the razor and scraped perfect little white powder rows on the glass.
I took a deep breath. “I told you, I’m working! I stayed home so I could concentrate on this pitch without the phone ringing all day. I’ll get in a car as soon as I get this out. I promise.” The part about the pitch was true. The implication that it needed to be done that day was a lie.
“All right, do what you want,” she said. “I’ll see you whenever you get here.” I pictured her shaking her head while trying to figure out how to end a call on the cell phone. I made sure the call had disconnected and then screamed, “Get a clue! I don’t give a shit!”
My family had already been at the hospital for hours—all of them right there since my sister-in-law Andrea had gone into labor. Why was I dragging? Was I jealous of my brother’s happy marriage and new kid? Was I upset to be pushing forty without any love prospects? The real answer was that because I didn’t have to show up in the office, all I wanted to do was be alone, drink, and do coke. Nothing was more important, not even the birth of my niece. That was how my brain now worked. It wasn’t my brother’s happiness that I resented. It was being lured away from drugs.
It stinks in here, I suddenly thought, sniffing under my bare arm. Did I shower yesterday? Probably not. I’d been alternating between cold shaking and sweating for the past forty-eight hours so I was gamey. Where did I put those scented candles?
I grabbed the straw to do another line. OK, two. But I had to be careful, I was running low. Sitting back, I watched my right knee bounce up and down uncontrollably and felt my pulse thunder. I didn’t dare check my heart rate. A loud buzzing sound thrummed through my head. Why do they even care if I’m there? It’s not like the baby is going anywhere.
The phone rang again. I jumped. It was my brother. I coughed, took a deep breath, and sat up straight before answering. “Yo, Big Daddy! How’s it going?”
“Good,” he answered. “When are you getting out here?” Great. Mom had put him up to calling. I’d become a family project.
“Soon, soon. I’m just finishing up here. I’m about to call the car service. I can’t wait to see you guys!”
There was no way to put off seeing the baby. Then I’d be the sister who didn’t care. Any normal woman would be excited to become an aunt for the first time. She’d be speeding to the hospital, already having ordered a monogrammed silver bracelet and a handmade baby blanket. Not Auntie Lisa. I sat right there on the couch wondering if any small baggies of coke might have fallen behind my dresser.
My entire body was trembling, a low-grade, insistent rumbling as if someone had dropped a quarter into a vibrating couch. Henry hadn’t called me back yet about when he could get here with more coke, so I resorted to calling his cell phone and leaving a message. This direct contact was a breach of the drug service’s protocol, so I violated it only in emergencies. I would have called him directly more often if it wouldn’t have gotten Henry in trouble, or worse, gotten me blacklisted from my best drug connection.
The thought of going without booze while crashing from a two-day bender was terrifying. I pictured myself huddled in some hospital corner drenched in sweat and catching vomit in my open hands. Maybe the hospital cafeteria sold wine? If they did, I could say I was having a drink to celebrate. “Anyone else want one?” I could ask. Or even better, I could pick up a bottle of champagne on my way out of the city to celebrate. Excellent idea! But then I’d have to share it with all those people and I’d get barely a full glass. Bring two bottles? Three?
I padded barefoot into the kitchen and emptied the last of the double bottle of Yellow Tail cabernet into my juice glass. In a ritual held over from college, I hummed “Taps,” as the glass bottle clanked among its fellow dead soldiers in a plastic bucket at the bottom of my kitchen pantry. I had to be careful about throwing them away. Recycling items in my building were to be left next to the elevators on Mondays and Thursdays. That meant that everyone on the floor could see what was being tossed, so I dumped my empties on different floors each week.
Damn, it’s so much easier to stay stocked up with wine than coke, I thought as I willed Henry to call me. The guys at Stuyvesant Square Liquors loved me. They were always right there with a case of double bottles shortly after I called, and in return I tipped the delivery people well. I also tried to tidy myself up before they arrived. I’d wipe off smeared makeup and pull my unkempt hair into a ponytail. There was usually no time to do much about my outfits, so I’d just try to find a clean t-shirt and boxer shorts. Maybe they’d think I’d been busy cleaning. I’d throw strewn clothes into my bedroom and clear away evidence of smoking or drinking from the view of someone standing at the front door. Then I’d take a deep breath and plaster a fake smile before opening the door. But around that time I had developed a weird, sporadic twitch in my right eye. The delivery guy might have thought I was winking at him. God knows who else thought I was flirting. It was just another reason not to leave my apartment.
Back on the couch, I lit another cigarette. I pictured my brother about to let me hold his newborn, and I realized that my extended hands looked as if they belonged to someone who had just witnessed a murder. There was just no stopping the tremors. He’d be appalled, wouldn’t he?
Wait, why didn’t I tell my family that I have a cold? They never would have let me near the newborn. I used a work excuse—rookie mistake. I was slipping, losing my ability to stay one step ahead. A year or even a few months ago, I would have answered the phone coughing.
Shit, I thought. I have to do this. I crawled onto my bed and called the office car service, giving myself an hour. Standing up to go to the bathroom gave me a massive head rush, so I braced myself against the door frame. The fluorescent light reflected the yellow bathroom walls, increasing the pallor of my already hideous yellowing skin. Jesus, my face looks like an old religious scroll. Do I have jaundice? My eyes were bloodshot and my eyelids puffy enough to be popped.
As I stretched back out on the bed, my slow-motion brain assessed the bruises scattered across my legs. They w
ere yellow, green, and purple. I poked at them, noting which ones appeared to be healing, which were new, and which ones could be linked to a memory. A few had come from banging my legs against the glass coffee table, which I did regularly getting up and down from the couch. Sliding the coffee table farther away would have solved the problem, but then it would have been more difficult for me to lean over for coke, so I just kept adding bruises. I had read that alcoholics bruise easily because their livers don’t function properly. Huh. Interesting. Where did I leave that wine glass?
While for most people showering was relaxing, for me the shower was a place of discomfort and even lurking danger. The spray felt like piercing pellets of sleet against my skin. And I had to be careful to never let my eyes close for long because I could easily lose balance and fall over. And the rhythm of the falling water, the smell of soap, the texture of shampoo—everything seemed to be trying to nauseate me. I tilted the spray straight down and crouched into the tub, grabbing the sides to steady my way down to sit. The water sprayed my head and ran down my face and back. I scrunched myself as far forward as I could, put my head between my knees, and readied myself for what often came next—the heaving followed by vomiting liquid followed by more heaving. God, I’m so sick, I thought.
Post-shower, my hands and feet always swelled up, red and throbbing. I made a mental note to research whether that was also an alcoholic thing. After another huge glass of wine, my heart rate seemed to slow down. I grabbed a few Tums from the giant plastic bottle I kept on the dresser, trying to pick through for the cherry ones. They were the least disgusting.
What did I need to wear? Something nice? No, everyone would be exhausted and casual. Jeans and a sweater would be fine, but they couldn’t be in bad shape. Even though this was going to be all about the baby, my mother would inspect me anyway.
I never opened my bedroom curtains, even on beautiful days, so I always dressed in semidarkness. Sometimes the result was that midway through the day, I’d realize that my shirt was stained or my sweater had a few bad pulls in it. It didn’t really matter to me, but I worried that people at work would notice. “Why can’t she keep her clothes clean or replace that worn out sweater?” I imagined them asking each other. “She makes money. It’s called a dry cleaner, for God’s sake.” My mother, however, would happily comment on my clothes. “What is that? A ketchup stain? Lovey, I know that’s one of your favorite sweaters, but it’s time for it to go. Really. Don’t even give it to Goodwill. It’s too late.” I took a pair of dark jeans and a black sweater into the light of the living room for inspection. What a pain in my ass.
I pulled my hair into a ponytail, and before attempting to put on makeup, I wrapped a couple ice cubes in paper towels and pressed them to my eyelids as I lay across my bed. My heart beat hard every time I stopped moving. Was this going to be the day I fell over from a massive cocaine-induced heart attack? That would ruin my niece’s birthday.
Heavy makeup seemed like a good idea for the trip to New Jersey. By the time I was through painting over the battered landscape of my bare face, I thought I looked decent, definitely not my best but better than most of the people I saw getting arrested on Cops, so that was something. At this point in my life, my standards had shifted. Just an hour earlier I looked like the kind of drug hag the Feds drag from the door of a trailer as she screams that she doesn’t know anything about the meth lab inside.
By the time I got myself dressed and made up, it was about four twenty. I had ten minutes before the car would be downstairs. Before I put away all my drug gear, I used a razor blade to load what remained of the coke into a brown glass bullet, a small container that could hold up to a gram. Unfortunately, there was nowhere near that much in it when I twisted the cap shut. My bag, I needed to sort out my bag. It was an oversized burgundy leather piece that I carried everywhere. It had multiple compartments that could be zipped, concealing their contents from prying eyes. Holding it between my knees, I sifted through it to make sure that nothing incriminating was visible. I loaded one side pouch with my cigarettes and the coke bullet, took a deep breath, and stood up to leave. On the way out, I looked at myself in the mirror by the front door. “I hate you,” I said to my reflection. It was a sure sign that I was starting to crash when my usual, “fuck you,” degenerated to “I hate you.”
The Lincoln Town Car sat waiting, engine running, with a white plastic sign in the window that read the car number and my name. The driver flipped open the locks and I climbed into the back seat. I always loved the feeling of sliding across those Town Car leather seats and breathing in the myriad of scents—cherry-pine car freshener, stale cigarette smoke, lingering perfume, and whatever deli sandwich the driver had just eaten.
We would cross the George Washington Bridge and could be at Hackensack Hospital in half an hour. The driver was heavyset, and under his black blazer he wore a white shirt that pulled at the buttons and exposed his undershirt. His head was huge and was topped with a swarm of Albert Einstein hair. “You have voucher or gold card?” he asked in a thick Russian accent. He had turned his head to face me from the front seat, but his thick, sausage fingers still gripped the steering wheel.
“Gold card,” I answered. My nose had started to run, so I pulled out a tissue to blot my upper lip as I handed him the card.
“OK. Thank you. Traffic very bad. Rain, accidents. Traffic very bad,” he warned.
The crash from my binge started hitting hard, and I slid down into the back seat, suddenly exhausted. Could I do a bump of coke from the bullet if I sunk down low enough back here? No, I can’t do that. This is the office’s car service. I can’t be that stupid. These drivers are like cabbies, they see everything.
Fifteen seconds later I didn’t care. I needed a bump. Once we got onto the FDR Drive, the highway noise would be louder. I dropped my bag to the floor where the driver couldn’t see. Then I blew my nose to clear it and to accustom the driver to hearing my nasal sounds. Fishing the bullet out of the side pocket, I set it up, sticking my head halfway into my bag to take the hit. No impact. So I took another. Shit, I was really running out of blow.
The driver wasn’t kidding about the traffic. Before we even approached the 63rd Street exit, we were all but stopped. I slouched on the passenger side with my head resting in the corner of the back seat, tissue held under my nose. I watched the raindrops form patterns on the window. They would pool and pull each other down in streaks, slowing as they joined each other and then speeding up as they approached the next drop. I felt like tracing their paths with my finger, but I couldn’t be bothered to lift my hand. There was something comforting about the way the drops settled at the bottom of that downward path. Rest, I thought, they got to rest at the end.
The cars were packed tightly enough for me to stare out the window at the driver of the silver luxury car in the lane to our right. He looked like a businessman on his nightly commute home, wearing a zombie-like expression as he stared ahead. What was on his mind? Had he been drinking today? Probably. He must have had a chance during lunch at least. If someone had an opportunity to drink, why wouldn’t they?
The tiny gusts of coke hadn’t really helped, and the post-binge crash seemed to be pulling my blood down my body and into my swollen feet. Was I going to puke again? Riding in the back of cars always made me a little sick, but the stop-and-go of the traffic that afternoon brought the nausea on in record time. Why did these drivers always have to hit the gas and then slam on the brakes? Moving around might help, I thought, so I pulled my compact mirror out of my bag to check my nose, just for something to do. It was running pretty steadily, but it had also become red from my aggressive wiping. I really looked as if I had a cold, and I chastised myself again for not thinking of the illness excuse fast enough. Even worse, thanks to the extreme dehydration of a long binge that had turned me into a sponge, my foundation and blush were soaking into my skin. My pores looked like mini manhole covers and the carsickness had turned me ghost-light green.
I sudd
enly realized that this plan was ridiculous. Only another drug addict would think I looked passable. What would happen when I arrived at the hospital? A nurse or security guard would see me shuffling up to the front desk and immediately announce, “The emergency room entrance is around the corner.” “No, no,” I’d say, with fake enthusiasm and a smile, trying to open my half-shut eyes. “I’m here to visit the maternity ward! My brother’s wife just had a baby!” The joy in my voice would so excite the person at reception that they’d overlook the fact that I was the color of an unripe banana with a dripping red nose.
Just distract yourself, I thought. You have to show up for this baby thing. Traffic continued to slog, and my brain became crowded with visions of drug and alcohol offenses that I had committed against my family. I thought of Saturday mornings when I would drink vodka sodas at the dive bar in the Port Authority Bus Terminal before catching the 8:10 ShortLine bus to visit my parents. The bartender was great, mostly because he made no eye contact. It was the same with the bar patrons at that hour. We had a mutual understanding that only true alcoholics would be in a skeevy bar before eight in the morning. There also were the times I did lines of coke off the top of the guest bathroom toilet at my parents’ house. They never picked up on it, but why would I expect them to? They had no children smarmy enough to do such a thing.
What if I dashed into the hospital and quickly said that I was exhausted and was probably coming down with something? That might earn me a quick in and out—and points for the effort. The car driver seemed cool; maybe he would even wait and run me back into the city if I could get my family to kick me out of the room fast enough.
My head was throbbing with the chatter of ten thoughts bashing into three imagined conversations, and then it happened. A buzz coming from the floor of the car sent me lunging for my bag. Please, please, please, God. Let it be Henry! Grabbing the phone as if grasping for a life preserver, I read the number on the screen. “YES, YES, YES!” I shouted. The driver gave me a quick glance over his shoulder and then turned back to the snarled traffic, unfazed.
Girl Walks Out of a Bar Page 13