How to Murder Your Life

by Cat Marnell

  My parents were quiet in the car to the airport, but I couldn’t escape the voices in my head. You failure. You disaster. You disgusting girl. The self-loathing was like a radio station between my ears. Loser. You mess. Over time, I’d learn to turn the volume down on SHAME FM, but I could never totally shut it off.

  As for saying good-bye to Boston, well . . . When the plane took off, I stared out the window as the city got smaller and smaller for the last time. I never could spell “Massachusetts” anyway.

  * * *

  The only thing worse than getting abortions is reading about abortions. Am I wrong? Please skip ahead if you are squeamish. Life-murdering can get rather gory, you know.

  My mother took me to a clinic in DC soon after we returned. She filled out her parental consent forms while I sat in the waiting room. It was jam-packed with girls and their partners because the doctor was running late. He was driving in from Philadelphia. It was hot outside. I killed time at a thrift store in the shopping center parking lot.

  A few hours later, it was my turn. I put my legs into the stirrups. The doctor injected my cervix with a numbing agent, but I was awake the entire time. My mom had declined the anesthesia that puts you under—she just didn’t know better. Huge mistake. (Always ask to be put to sleep before an abortion—then it’s over in the blink of an eye.) It was brutally painful. More than pain, it felt like . . . torture. I was splayed out there on this table just . . . vibrating—all guh-guh-guh-guh-guh from the sheer force of the vacuum machine. Remember the scene in The Princess Bride when the mustachioed bandit guy is getting pumped full of water—is that what’s happening to him?—and his whole body is thrashing and shaking and straining? And it’s almost unbearable to watch? That’s how I see me in this memory of my life. I also saw what was coming out of me, since there was a tank that was covered by a paper cone with a slit in it, and the paper cone was off-­kilter. I saw it all.

  Then it was done. I sat in the recovery room with the little cookies they give you. I was crying and crying. Loud. I mean, uncontrollably crying. I couldn’t believe what I had just been through. I was in shock. Still shaking. It was like the machine was still in there, shaking me from the inside out. The procedure had been so awful. So violent. It looked like murder. It felt like murder. I’m not saying that in any kind of political way. I’m just telling you how it felt.

  My crying was starting to freak out the other girls. A nurse went out and found my mom. She came in and sat down next to me.

  “Shh,” my mom said, patting me awkwardly on the back like she was trying to burp me. Awkward as fuck. She didn’t know what to do. I was still doubled over when we finally walked out to the parking lot. We got in the hot car and just sat there for a few minutes. I guess my mom was waiting for me to calm down, but I was still sobbing all crazy-­like right in the passenger seat. Finally, my mom couldn’t take it anymore. She got out and made a call on her cell phone. Then she got behind the wheel.

  My parents’ house was empty when we got there. It was about one o’clock on a weekday. By then, I’d stopped crying. I went right to bed. When I woke up, it was dark out. I could smell the blood. There was a paper bag on the nightstand. I opened it. It was a little orange plastic bottle with just a few pills inside. I read the label: Xanax. The prescribing doctor was my dad.

  Chapter Five

  I’D THOUGHT THAT THE WHOLE second-trimester abortion thing had been the cherry on top of the most catastrophic adolescence of all time, but it turns out that honor belonged to the letter Bard college sent informing me that I was no longer enrolled as a freshman in the fall. Not only had I been expelled from high school six weeks before graduation, I’d been kicked out of college before I even got there. Oops.

  It was awkward around the house, to say the least. I kept waiting for my dad to lose it, but he never did. Instead, he didn’t speak to me or acknowledge me—and that was even worse.

  So anywhere was better than at home. Every morning, I was relieved to take the Metro to Emerson Prep in Dupont Circle. It was barely a school—more like a bunch of classrooms in a town house. The place was sort of a joke. Kids smoked weed on the front steps; no one cared. Emerson offered a pay-per-credit program (it’s where I’d ultimately earn my diploma); accordingly, it was full of wealthy derelicts who’d been booted from St. Albans and Georgetown Day.

  I fit right in—literally. Four hours into my first day at Emerson, I was squished in the backseat of an Audi at the Connecticut Avenue Burger King drive-through, smoking weed and listening to Big L. Giggling on a lap. You know me. That was lunch. After school, everyone went to the O Street Mansion to drink. Have you ever been? It’s one of my favorite places in DC. It’s, like, three town houses combined, and full of secret passages and hidden stairwells and walls that open into other rooms—like in a murder mystery movie! And there’s a log cabin duplex on top, and all these other themed rooms; every item in the place is for sale, even the toilet paper. Rosa Parks lived there. Anyway, there’s a pool out back in the garden, and that’s where we partied that first day. I took shots and fell into the pool in the back garden à la Brian Jones (and not in a cool way).

  I woke up on a leather sofa in a basement recording studio next to a boy drinking an Amstel Light.

  “You were rolling around on the ground!” he told me. I’d heard that one before. “In the bushes!” He’d pulled me out of the pool and put me in the back of his car. And that’s the romantic story of how I met my summer boyfriend, Oscar.

  I spent the next two months careening around in Oscar’s dad’s BMW sedan with my eyes closed, empty Corona bottles clinking at my feet. Praying not to die! Everyone on the DC private school party circuit drove drunk. Everyone! Oscar was tight with a top-ranking Politician’s Kid. The three of us would cruise around Northwest in his Oldsmobile and park under a streetlight. The Secret Service would park right behind us. Then Oscar and Politician’s Kid would sit there for an hour, cracking can after can of beer as they talked. When Politician’s Kid started the engine an hour later, the operatives wouldn’t swoop in and try to take the keys or anything. (They’d confiscate a disposable camera at a house party, though—lickety-split.)

  Yup. Those Sidwell Friends kids were wild, man. Girls with tanned abs and Tiffany charm necklaces were always vomiting into koi ponds and things; Destiny’s Child’s “Jumpin’ Jumpin’ ” was always playing at the house parties. One night we were smoking weed in a kid’s backyard in Northwest and two men in camouflage leapt out from behind trees—with fucking machine guns! They were protecting Elián González, the little Cuban boy who floated into the United States on an inner tube. Remember him? He was in government custody in the house with a backyard adjacent to this kid’s. DC stuff.

  I was still only seventeen, but my dad didn’t care what I did anymore. He couldn’t even look at me. Half the time I didn’t even sleep at home. That August, Oscar took me to the Hamptons for the first time. We went shark fishing and snorted heroin off old issues of Robb Report. The glamorous surroundings worked like drugs: they made me forget how ugly I felt on the inside. Yes, I’d devastated my family. Yes, I’d murdered that baby. Yes, I’d totally fucked up my future. But wasn’t it lovely here off Amagansett? Didn’t I look fly in my Calvin Klein bikini, smoking Camel Lights? The boys caught a shark and cut it open at the belly. The blood spilled out all over the deck.

  * * *

  With my eighteenth birthday approaching, there was only one thing to do: figure out a way to move to New York City. That’s when I started auditioning for acting schools in Manhattan. I got in; the ever-generous dad agreed to pay for it. And I was on my way.

  Mimi drove me and my stuff up from DC in her red Honda van to my first-ever place in the city: a room in a boardinghouse—since torn down—on West Forty-First Street. It was one block from Times Square and practically on top of Port Authority bus station. If you require further visuals, Google the paparazzi photos of Jennifer Lopez�
�s bat-faced boy toy Casper Smart emerging from an Eighth Avenue peep show. That was my block!

  For eight hundred dollars a month, I had a bunk bed with a desk underneath, three Korean roommates, and a fantastic view of the Tex-Mex restaurant Chevy’s, where tourists devoured delicious mesquite-grilled tacos before taking in Mary Poppins the musical. I sat at that window for hours, looking out at my crazy new world. I’d never felt more at peace in my entire life. Finally, I was home.

  It was September 2000. Coldplay’s “Yellow” was on the radio; the George Bush–Al Gore presidential race was popping off, and I started acting school. Acting school! Oh, Lord. I thought it would be fun, but it so wasn’t for me. A typical assignment would be re-creating our morning routines, right? Every day, I’d watch an aspiring actor arrange black wooden boxes to look like his bedroom. He’d “make” the box bed with sheets he’d brought from home. Then he’d lie down and “sleep” for a long time. I am talking like fifteen full minutes.

  Finally, the actor would be jerked “awake” by an imaginary alarm clock. Everyone would shift in their seats, like, “All right, time for some action!” But then the actor would hit his imaginary snooze button—and go back to fake-sleep again. For ten more minutes! And we’d all just sit there watching this in silence.

  Well, in almost silence. Crunch. Crunch. That would be moi, surreptitiously nibbling on a dose of my new medication, Adderall. Generic name: amphetamine salts! (I’d switched from Ritalin. Adderall—some kids called it Gladderall—was more fun.)

  Then it would be time for two hours of voice classes, where I learned the phonetic alphabet and studied anatomical diagrams of the tongue.

  “Toy boat,” I’d stand there saying. “Toy boat toy boat toy boat toy boat toy boat. Minimal animal. Red leather yellow leather. Red leather yellow leather. Unique New York. Unique New York.”

  Then we’d go to movement class, where we studied the Alexander Technique: walking with purpose, “freezing” in place, flopping down and folding at the waist to “sway like a willow tree in the breeze.”

  “Relax your neck, Cat,” the instructor would say when I lifted my head to peep at the clock.

  The acting school kids all hung out together after class at a spot on Park Avenue South called Desmond’s Tavern. There was beer on tap, live Jethro Tull cover bands, and a laid-back dive-bar vibe; being there for more than twenty minutes made me suicidal. This was Manhattan, for Chrissakes! I wanted to go to the hot clubs, like I had with Alistair and Greta T.! But I didn’t know where to find that scene, and you couldn’t just look it up in Time Out New York. (Believe me, I tried.)

  So I explored my new city alone every night instead. If Ritalin had made me focus, my new shit got me high, honey (especially when I took two pills at a time). It was like I was in a video game or something! Suddenly I could travel vast distances—through rain, snow, anything—and never get fatigued. I just kept walking and walking and walking, listening to BT and dodging rats and smoking cigs and walking and whoops! Was it three thirty in the morning already? I’d always wind up somewhere weird at the end of these excursions, like on the Bowery in front of a fifteen-foot bronze statue of Confucius. I’d cab it back to West Forty-First Street and take a sleeping pill from the box of samples my mom sent me. Classes didn’t start until two o’clock every day, so I could stay conked out until noon. After school, I’d go night walking all over again. And this is how I got to know “Unique New York.”

  * * *

  Only a real weirdo would stay living across the street from Port Authority, of course, so in the spring of 2001 I moved thirty blocks downtown to a loft on Broadway, just south of Union Square—right by the famous Strand Book Store. I was renting a room from a professional ­storyteller—a friend of Mimi’s friend. The place was decorated all gypsy-­boho with Indian cotton fabrics. It was a real, old-school Manhattan loft: strange, creaky, and cavernous, with eighteen-foot ceilings.

  The storyteller had twenty-nine thousand rules, and two cats. I wasn’t allowed to have people over; I was supposed to let the cats into my bedroom whenever they wanted. And they always wanted! Those cats were extremely bossy. And though the loft was huge, I wasn’t allowed in most of it. I was only supposed to go in my room, which was built into the middle of the space and had no windows, and the skinny bathroom, where a cockroach the size of a Pepperidge Farm Milano was always perched on the exposed pipe over the shower. It was my first encounter with that particular breed of New Yorker. I’d look up and scream like Janet Leigh in Psycho every time I saw him! I was always racing out of there with shampoo suds still in my hair.

  My first year of acting school had ended in May, so I was off for a few months, waiting to hear if I’d been accepted into a second year. The storyteller was always away on her . . . storytelling tours, I guess, and I was too shy to hang with her cool, super-nice adopted son Ishmael, who had a room down the hall when he was home from Oberlin. He was a DJ, always messing with his turntables. Years later, he’d write the bestseller A Long Way Gone, which is about his time as a child soldier in the Sierra Leone armed forces. Yeah, you should probably be reading that memoir instead of this one.

  It was an extra-lonely summer. The prescriptions kept arriving in the mail, though—my mom’s handwriting was on the envelopes, and my dad’s name was on the labels on the little bottles. I took longer and longer walks, and I went to tanning beds and lay there with Wink-Ease on and wondered when I’d ever have another boyfriend. I bought a little television with a built-in VCR and four channels, and I watched ABC 7 Eyewitness News and Conan. I did hundreds of sit-ups on the floor each night. The cats watched from under the bed with their shiny little eyes.

  I was flat-out depressed by the Fourth of July. It was a bad, bad day. I desperately wanted to go to FDR Drive and watch the fireworks, but I didn’t have anyone to go with; I couldn’t go watch them alone, I thought, because people would know I was a loser. I babysat—as I often did—in the West Village all day. I kept checking my phone, hoping someone from acting school would hit me up about a barbecue or something. No one did. Why would they? I never called anyone. My primary relationship was with pills.

  When my job ended that evening, I walked home along West Eleventh Street alone. It was drizzling, and everyone was whooping and running through the streets to get to the big show over on the East River. I didn’t think I’d ever felt so low. By the time I got back to Broadway and bought a chocolate soft-serve ice cream cone with rainbow sprinkles from the truck parked outside the Strand, I was practically crying. And all because I didn’t have friends on the Fourth of July. Being young is so funny, isn’t it?

  The fireworks started just as I reached the door to my building. Pop pop pop. I could still hear them as I climbed the steep stairs to the storyteller’s loft. My ice cream was melting all over the place. I slurped the mess from my hand as I unlocked the apartment door. No one was home.

  I went into my little bedroom and turned on the TV. Pop pop. I switched it off right away. Seeing the fireworks bursting all glittery on the little screen just made me feel worse. I sat on my bed and finished my cone.

  Now what?

  The silence felt very heavy.

  Then I did something I’d never done before. I went into the bathroom, knelt at the toilet, wiggled my fingers around in the back of my throat, and made myself sick. It didn’t taste bad at all! I was surprised. The ice cream came up cold and sweet, just like it had gone down. The sprinkles were intact in the bowl.

  I stood and washed my hands at the sink.

  That was easy, I thought. My eyes were teary in the mirror. I could feel the cockroach watching me.

  * * *

  I turned nineteen on September 10, 2001. The next morning was 9/11, and of course, I was living downtown, just a few blocks below the police barricades at Fourteenth Street (I showed a piece of mail as proof of address to get past every day). It all stays with you for life: the missing post
ers, the bitter air, the ashes, the chaos. I will spare you fifteen pages of rambling recollections and just say . . . I love you, New York! Now please forgive me in advance for diving right back into my sleazy story line.

  My second year at the acting school started in September 2001. I don’t remember much about the first term. But in January, I began a stage makeup course that I really liked. I learned to make fake track marks! You apply some tacky glue—it’s almost like rubber cement—into the crease of your arm until it gets sort of blistery looking, and then you pat some red and yellow eye shadow on top if you want them to look all infected and raw and oozy. You can also make faux meth scabs this way. Cold sores. Whatever you want! Or, if you want an ex-junkie look, you can use purple shadow, and that makes the glue-lumps look like gnarled old scars. I did it all! I also pocketed loads of Ben Nye: I mean, if it’s a pretty, natural stain you’re after, there’s nothing better than a little stage blood dabbed just so on the lips.

  I was still unhappy with my social life. I didn’t hang out with people much: mainly I just took Adderall and shopped. But then something major happened.

  It was spring 2002—near the end of my second and final year at the acting school. Okay, so do you watch Louie? You know how in the opening sequence Louis CK eats his pizza slice, and then he goes into that subterranean club? That’s the Comedy Cellar, a stand-up club in Greenwich Village, and it’s legendary—if you come to New York, you gotta go. In April, I went with three girls from my acting school. We got sloshed on sangria; then, after the show, we flirted with two of the comedians. Back then, Godfrey was best known as “the 7UP guy” (he’s also whom Ben Stiller turns into when he goes undercover as a black guy in Zoolander) and Ardie Fuqua was just wonderful, affable Ardie (who, sadly, was in the news as I wrote this book because he was in that terrible bus accident with Tracy Morgan—though he’s okay now). Both guys had crazy-positive energy and fantastic teeth. I lovv-vve them, truly—still!