Girl Walks Out of a Bar

by Lisa F. Smith

  One morning I had a nine o’clock appointment for my annual mammogram. Wanting to be as “healthy” as possible for the exam, I managed to lay off the coke that morning and had only a glass or so of red wine before I left. All I needed to do was stay steady until I could get home again and balance myself out with wine and coke for the rest of the day.

  Returning home from the appointment, I was in a celebratory mood. But as I unlocked my apartment door, I heard the buzz of television news. Mark’s here? What the fuck?

  He was sitting in the chair at my computer desk and swiveled toward me as if I were an office pal interrupting a dull day on the job. “Hey, what are you doing home?” Wait, is that accusation in his voice?

  “I told you, I had a doctor’s appointment. I had to stop back here for something I need for work,” I lied, already feeling the shaking and sweating as the timer ticked away the minutes until I would be desperate for another drink.

  He stood up and walked toward me. “You were drinking this morning.”

  I shut the apartment door and stood there, keys still in my hand. “No, I wasn’t. And I told you not to come over today. What are you doing here?”

  “There’s red wine splashed in the sink. It wasn’t there when you passed out last night.” He had caught me and I was livid.

  “Fuck you,” I said, giving him my best angry woman glare. I stomped into the kitchen, slammed my keys on the counter, and threw my bag on the floor. The deep, double-sided kitchen sink was white porcelain. A streak of dried red wine ran down one side like a blood trail and swirled in crimson circles around the drain. Turning on the faucet, I grabbed the spray attachment and went after the wine as if I were hosing a filthy car in a summer driveway.

  I walked back over to Mark and said, “There’s no wine in the sink and I wasn’t drinking this morning. Now get out and leave your keys.” I felt lightheaded, but I couldn’t tell if it was from anger, the need for a drink, or the awful truth of what I’d just done.

  “You’re crazy,” he answered, not leaving. “I talked to my friend’s mother about you. She’s been sober for twenty years. She says you’re an alcoholic and a drug addict. You’re cross-addicted and that’s way worse than just being one of those. She says if you don’t go to rehab, you’re going to die and that if you don’t admit it and get help I should get as far away from you as I can.”

  “Really? Your friend’s mother?” With my hands planted firmly on my hips, I barked at him like a furious school nun. That is, if the nun has the mouth of a Bronx barmaid on a night the Yankees lose to the Red Sox. “Who the fuck do you think you are, talking to people about me? And I’ve told you that I know what I’m doing. I know my goddamned limits. I don’t need fucking rehab. There’s nothing to rehab. If you think I’m going to spend the rest of my life never drinking again and going to meetings in shithole church basements to drink bad coffee and crybaby my problems to a bunch of losers you’re out of your fucking mind.”

  “If you won’t get help, I’m leaving, for real,” he said. His eyes were glassy with tears.

  “Fine. Nobody’s stopping you.” He gathered his school bag and the pillows he’d brought up from his apartment. Then he put on his sneakers, and I held the door open for him.

  “My keys,” I said, as he was leaving. He dropped them gently into my hand and walked out into the hallway. I said “goodbye,” slammed the door, and rushed into the kitchen to pour a double-sized glass of wine. Relief, I just needed some relief, even though I felt numb.

  14

  A few days after Mark’s dramatic exit, I sat on a couch at a small party in the Tribeca apartment of Devon’s friend Ethan. He was about my age and a successful physician with a wide circle of friends. He was short and fit with thick brown hair sculpted high on his head. As he greeted guests, he flashed big, genuine smiles and threw his head back with laughter that wiggled his rectangular glasses.

  Envy erupted in my stomach as I looked around. The art pieces on the walls were real, the kind made by human hands. The furniture was solid and sophisticated, and it not only was appropriate for the large open space, it complemented the art beautifully. Same with the rugs—neutral colors and patterns that picked up flecks of color from the walls. I slurped an expensive merlot that should have been sipped and felt waves of self-hatred. The difference between this apartment and my own made me feel like a grumpy child.

  The sound of a jazz album I couldn’t identify wafted through the dimly lit room. Why didn’t I know anything about jazz? Because irresponsible children don’t know anything about jazz.

  Devon, Jessica, Russell, Jerry, and David were all there, and we had gathered toward the end of the living room near the large windows overlooking the sparkling city lights. I was tired. So very tired.

  “Hey, did you see those pictures of Whitney Houston all messed up?” Devon asked. She wore all black, a fitted cashmere turtleneck, skinny pants with a fancy gold buckle on her belt, and tall riding boots.

  “That chick’s a mess!” Jerry said. “She should go to the tank. She can afford to go to any one she wants. I’d go to Clapton’s place in Antigua.” Jerry wore his weekend gear: expensive jeans, a tailored button down shirt, and brown leather loafers. He ground his half-smoked cigarette into an etched pewter ashtray that looked like an expensive Mexican artifact.

  I said, “I think I’m an alcoholic.”

  All five heads whipped toward me. “What are you talking about?” David said.

  “I don’t know, maybe not,” I wimped out.

  “Why would you say something like that?” Jessica asked, spreading hummus on a piece of toasted pita bread. Russell tightened his lips and raised his eyebrows. I could see that he was listening closely.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I drink a lot, more than I should. I overdo it,” I said. “You know that. You guys have all seen it.”

  “Yeah, but a lot of people sometimes drink too much when they go out,” David spoke in his lawyer voice. “If you were an alcoholic, you’d be messing up at work. Didn’t you just get a big raise?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Jessica tried to reason through it. “Maybe you’re a heavy drinker, but that’s different from being an alcoholic. I think of an alcoholic as someone who needs to drink to sort of ‘maintain,’ to get through the day.”

  Right then I could have offered them completely convincing evidence. Just an honest look at an hour-by-hour breakdown of a regular day in my life would have gotten me carted off to rehab. But I let them talk.

  “You shouldn’t say things like that,” Devon said. “You’re not an alcoholic.”

  “Yeah, I think you have this one wrong,” David added.

  Jerry just stared at his drink.

  Of course they had no idea. With our exhausting work schedules, we didn’t have time to get together very often. They weren’t around to see those nights after dinner parties when I went home and drank another bottle of wine. They certainly didn’t know that I’d become a morning drinker. But I kept my mouth shut and let my friends file the subject away in a folder labeled “Strange and Unfounded Party Outbursts.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “I’m probably just burned out from pushing it too hard.”

  The realization that the most important people in my life didn’t really know me filled me with loneliness. I was alone in a little boat floating way out on the open water, and the people on the shoreline were getting smaller and smaller.

  15

  It was 2:00 p.m. on the first Friday of April 2004, shortly after the party at Ethan’s, and I needed to place my drug order for the weekend. I shut the door to my office and dove under my desk to find my purse and grope around for my phone.

  There were new messages on my work email and voicemail, but they could wait. I popped three Altoids into my mouth, even though I had already chewed three pieces of gum on the way back from Kaju. Henry, I needed Henry.

  After punching in the digits for the drug dealer service, I stared at t
he phone, willing it to ring. Henry was as predictable as New York potholes in the spring, but I couldn’t relax until I got that callback.

  I kicked my red high heels into the pile of dress shoes under my desk. It looked like the shoe section on the last day of the Barney’s Warehouse sale under there, a bunch of expensive pumps, flats, and boots that I kept in the office so they wouldn’t be destroyed on bad weather commutes or caught in subway gratings on the street. But I tossed them around as carelessly as someone throwing strings of beads off a Mardi Gras float.

  Scanning my email and pretending to concentrate gave me something to do while the seconds ticked along. In under five minutes, my cell rang. Before speaking, I tried to wipe the Christmas Morning! look off my face as if that would help me to sound less desperate. Apparently I was uncomfortable with the idea of being judged when speaking to people who shoveled life-slaughtering drugs into the hands of trembling addicts. “Hi,” I answered.

  “Hi, who’s this?” It was the same woman who usually gave a callback. She sounded young and healthy and a lot like my administrative assistant who sat just outside my closed office door.

  “It’s Lisa on East 20th Street. How are you?”

  “Oh hey, Lisa. I’m good. How are you doing?”

  “Great. Glad it’s Friday,” I said.

  “I bet you are. It’ll be about an hour or two. That okay, hon?”

  “Sure. Great. 441 East 20th Street. Buzzer 192 in the lobby.” She would pass my message to Henry and he’d make the trip. He knew the address well, but I had to be sure there was no chance of confusion.

  “Got it,” she said. “Have a great weekend.”

  “You, too. Thanks so much!”

  As I started gathering the work I’d need to take home for the weekend, I wondered about the woman on the phone. What did she look like? How old was she? What was her life? I had no idea how the city’s drug trade worked, so every time we spoke I wanted to ask her how she got the job. Was she related to the higher-ups in whatever drug chain this was? Was it a New York mob family or an offshoot of a Colombian cartel? How did they know she wouldn’t turn them in? Did they threaten her kid? She didn’t sound as if she was under threat. It was probably a pretty good gig. The pay must have been decent, given the risks, and I bet she got all the drugs she could use. Then again, if you got tired of the gig, quitting probably wasn’t an option.

  With a big proposal for one of the world’s largest companies due the following week, I had a good excuse to shut myself in at home all weekend.

  “Marie,” I said to my assistant. She looked up at me and cocked her head. “I’m going to pack up my work for the weekend and head out. I’ll be on my phone if anyone needs me this afternoon.”

  “OK,” she said, spinning back to her work. Why didn’t I just say “I’m heading out”? I was going to be neck-deep in work all weekend; why did I feel the need to explain myself to a twenty-three-year-old administrative assistant?

  The trip home dragged, and once I was safely in my living room I paced like an expectant father in a 1960s waiting room—except that I carried an enormous glass of red wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. By four o’clock, Henry knocked on my door, and we zipped through our business in less than five minutes. Then I closed the door behind him and looked at the mirror that hung just to the right of the door frame. I realized what an important item that little mirror was in my life. Half the time it sat on my glass coffee table lined with rails of coke, and the other half it hung from the wall and offered my last important look before I walked out into the world. It was the kind of piece that fellow coke addicts would have acknowledged with a nod and a, “Hey, there’s a good mirror.”

  I crushed a small rock down to a snowy powder pile with the back of a spoon and then formed several lines with my American Express Gold Card. Holding one of several cut-down plastic straws that I kept with my other drug implements—the razors, the small glass vials with tiny spoons attached to the cap, the rolled up dollar bills for when I was out of straws—I leaned over the mirror on the coffee table. This was the moment I’d been focused on since my last hit eight hours ago. I wanted this bump as much as I’d ever wanted anything. I wanted it more than a promotion with a raise, a perfect boyfriend, or a winning Mega Millions ticket.

  One long inhale on one side of my nose followed by one long inhale on the other and I felt sharp, happy fireworks go off in my nasal passages. And then came the crackling and tingling in my bloodstream. My body shuddered. OH GOD, so much better.

  Back in balance, the world became a livable place. I took a long draw of wine, sat back, and lit a cigarette. At that moment my life was as good as it could get, and the weekend ahead would offer me the addict’s trifecta: justified isolation (I couldn’t be out and about when I had to work), nonstop using (to work that hard I needed the chemicals), and a legitimate reason for feigned resentment (“I hate that I have to work all weekend!”).

  Inside and locked up tight, I remained unshowered in a pair of men’s boxers and an old Northwestern sweatshirt for most of the weekend, except when I pulled on a pair of jeans to head out for minor errands. No errand was so short or simple that I didn’t first need the fortification of drink and drug. In time the whole thing became Pavlovian; whenever I began the routine of leaving the apartment—pull scraggly hair into a careless ponytail, check nose, find purse—my unconscious heard the ring of the bell and began to twitch for drugs and booze. I was like people who can stuff themselves to discomfort by eating every bit of a seven-course meal, but something tells them they still need chocolate.

  Despite what many would deem a fall into a slovenly existence, during these sequestrations I did try to keep my apartment feeling moderately respectable. The reek of cigarette smoke could easily overwhelm my apartment’s 850 square feet, so I lit candles, sprayed Lysol, and left windows open whenever possible. If I wanted the windows open, that meant pulling the curtains aside, which invited anyone with a pair of binoculars to see into my apartment, so I shifted the drug set up into the bedroom. That room remained in full darkness with curtains pulled. My big brass bed with the purple floral Donna Karan linens and piles of pillows became home to the ever-present mirror and all of its implements, a kind of mission control.

  My bedroom, living room, and kitchen sat side to side, so all weekend I traveled a well-worn path between the three that resembled the McDonald’s arches. My living room couch, set up with my laptop, was at the bottom center. An arc to the left led to booze in the kitchen and an arc to the right led to coke in the bedroom. I plodded between the three rooms over and over working, drinking, snorting, barely eating, drinking, working, snorting, sleeping, drinking, working, and snorting as night turned to day turned to night turned to day.

  Sometime between two and three that Monday morning, I shut the computer down and headed into the bedroom. I had cut off the coke a couple of hours earlier, hoping I’d get some kind of sleep before heading into the office. Then it hit—the depressing, awful crash of coming down and the dread of the approaching morning, a Monday no less. My heart beat with irregular thuds and my head felt piercing pressure, as if some angry masseuse was jamming her thumbs and fingernails into my temples. That perfect moment of Friday afternoon now felt like months ago.

  Then came the birds. They began their incessant high-pitched chirping outside my window at around 4:00 a.m. The sound always made me sick with all its chatter and scramble, all its purposeful busyness. Their miserable racket announced the onset of another awful day, and I hated them for it.

  Nothing unusual happened that weekend. There was no inciting event that led me to pull the alarm on my life. There was no drunken accident, no falling from the kitchen ladder or crashing through a glass tabletop to send me to an emergency room. There was no drugged dialing that left me to later wince in shame, no professional humiliations, no family explosion. No blackout followed by waking up next to a stranger.

  So maybe what was unusual about that weekend, what led m
e to finally launch the white flag is something that will forever remain an unknown to me. Had my unconscious been trying all along to scream, “Stop this! You’re going too far! You’re killing yourself!”? And on that Monday did one of those screams break through like a champagne cork blasting from the pressure and releasing a torrent behind it? Did some kind of spiritual guardian step in and stop me from pressing that elevator button that day?

  I don’t know what it was that turned me around to make all those phone calls, to walk through the rehab doors, to sign the documents that locked me in. But on that Monday morning an epiphany burst like an aneurism.

  part three.

  Your bottom is where you stop digging.

  16

  After Dr. Landry left my room at Gracie Square, I stared at the ceiling and waited for the nurses to lead me through the pre-Librium drill. The pain of withdrawal was God-awfully worse than anything I’d ever heard about. In movies, junkies often lie on metal cots in stark, cold rooms, sweating and shaking through a swift montage: “addict sweats … addict rolls over … addict shakes … addict thrashes … addict moans … and then addict peacefully sleeps and wakes up tired but somehow new.” But real-world withdrawal takes a lot longer and tortures the body in very specific ways.

  My starkest memory of this process was not the physical part, but the mental. Even though my head felt as if it had been slammed onto a bed of tiny nails that shot hundreds of stabbing pricks across my skull and neck, the only thing my mind could focus on was how badly I needed to drink. Pain. Need drink. Pain. Need drink. It was a continuous loop in my brain.