How to Murder Your Life

by Cat Marnell

  Anyway. Ardie and Godfrey herded all of the sangria-swilling white girls—aka me and my three friends—into two taxis and told us they were taking us to the club! We got out on Lafayette Street, just around the corner from where Britney Spears allegedly kept an apartment above Tower Records. There was a line outside, but the doorman lifted the velvet rope for Ardie and Godfrey right away. I took one step inside and knew immediately that I’d found what I’d been looking for.

  Pangaea! That was the name of the club. I’d go on to be a regular there. It’s one of the best clubs I’ve ever frequented to this day. (If you are young, you have to move to New York and go to the clubs while you still have the energy! I have no regrets.) Everyone was always gorgeous, and the place was always packed. There were white squishy couches, masks all over the wall, and there were live drummers banging with the music. Every table, it seemed, had a big ice bucket with a champagne bottle on it, and if you were a teenage girl you could just sit down anywhere—there were tons of couches—and immediately be offered a glass or three. And a bump of coke! Men were always giving girls bumps from their little baggies, and the baggies were always lavender and pink and red. And underneath the DJ booth and behind heavy curtains, there was a whole hidden room just for—unofficially—doing coke. Chosen ones got to stay on the couches in there for after-hours. And there were always celebrities there—famous male models, famous magicians—hitting on all the bitches.

  That first night, I walked into the club and there was P. Diddy, who was still Puff Daddy back then, and he grabbed my arm and wanted me to sit with his table. It was so exciting; I mean, I was nineteen! I didn’t join him, though. I just kicked off my sandals and gyrated to “Hot in Herre” on a sofa elsewhere—though I might as well have been dancing on a cloud! Bliss, man. I hadn’t been that happy in a long time.

  I never wanted the night to end, but of course, it did. I walked home at four thirty in the morning, feeling throbby and exhilarated. I had to go back—not just to that club, but to that world. But how?

  Well. Lucky for me, going to nightclubs is very easy when you are teenage, blond, skinny, friendless, wired on stimulants, and quietly desperate. Anyone can do it! And the lower your self-esteem is, the more you put yourself out there. And eventually you become (vaguely) popular.

  Three nights later, I showed up at the Olive Branch—the restaurant above the Cellar—around midnight, doused in Michael by Michael Kors perfume, my cleavage shining like the top of the Chrysler Building with Revlon Skinlights Face Illuminator Powder. It was around midnight. Ardie was at a table with some other comics. I trotted over in my hot-pink stilettos.

  “Hey!” I tried to act cool. “Remember me?”

  “Hey!” Ardie stood up and gave me a hug. “What are you doing here?”

  “Just wanted to say hi,” I purred.

  “Who are you here with?” Ardie said. “Where are your friends?”

  “Oh,” I said. “I was just with them, but they went home. And I was nearby, so . . .”

  Later, I sat downstairs in the Comedy Cellar and watched Ardie do his set. When he was done, he gathered up the trashed white girls from the audience again—I guess Godfrey was out of town—and we piled into his SUV. This time, we went to Lot 61 over by the Hudson River, then to Suite 16 in Chelsea. I hit it off with the manager, Matt Strauss (hi, Matt!), and he and I sat with Nicky Hilton and her MTV VJ boyfriend Brian McFadden. Wow!

  I was hooked. I spent hours getting ready every night: shaving my whole body and blow-drying my hair. And putting together outfits! The whole thing was finding the tiniest, shortest skirts. I took dresses to a tailor to be hemmed until I started doing it myself at home—a timeless Adderall-tweaker tradition, unfortunately. I ruined so many dresses, just hacking them way too short with big orange-handled kitchen scissors and my hands shaking. Then I’d slather Body Shop Coconut Body Butter, spritz Banana Boat tanning oil on top of that, strap on my Gucci fanny pack, and hit the streets. I used to get into cabs and slide across the backseat; I was so greasy. Absolutely lubricated! But that’s how you keep your legs gleaming all night.

  I showed up at the Comedy Cellar five or six nights a week like this—dressed for the club. It was a crazy steez, but . . . I was crazy. I could not stay home. I was at the Cellar so often that I got to know Lisa Lampanelli, Judah Friedlander, Sherrod Small, Colin Quinn, Dave Attell, Tony Rock—all of the comedians who were there every night as well. They were all very nice to me (to my face), even though I was obviously a lonely weirdo. Dave Attell even kissed me once! Yeah, that was strange.

  Every night, Ardie took me to a different club after his set: Butter or Veruka or Groovejet or Sway or Spa or Lotus.

  After a few months, I started bypassing the Cellar and just going out on my own. I saw the same party people everywhere, every night. Everyone seemed as messy as I was, if not messier. This one guy everyone called Jesus was rumored to live in a unit in Chelsea Mini Storage! They were all nightcrawler vampires who raged until dawn and slept until dusk. This is terrible for the soul, but great for the skin—no sun damage, you know? So everyone looked good.

  I particularly hit it off with another smoky-eyed blond girl named Dara, who went out every night even though she was still in high school. She and her spiky-haired boyfriend, Ben, had just been profiled by Nancy Jo Sales in a Vanity Fair story called “Ben and Dara Are in Love (And Nothing Else Matters).” They had a crazy-dysfunctional, yayo-fueled relationship. They became . . . well, not my friends exactly, but something like that.

  I still didn’t have real friends, and I was very ashamed about this. Sometimes I got called out on it.

  “Why don’t I ever see you with anyone?” sneered Ben one night when I plunked down at his table at Flow. “Don’t you have any friends? Where are your friends?” He was being a jerk, but he had my number.

  * * *

  What do you give the blond teenage pillhead who has everything? Antibiotics! Ardie had always driven me home after our nights together—he was such a good big brother—but once I started going to the clubs without him, I really wound up sleeping around. You know how it is when you’re nineteen! Promoters are always taking their dicks out in the backseats of cabs and pulling you on their laps or biting your nipple through your wifebeater or something comparably unspeakable, and you feel very embarrassed that the taxi driver can see and hear but you let it keep happening anyway. Why? It’s all just part of being young in New York, I guess. No one was taking me home to make love to me, let’s put it that way.

  One particularly bad night I had sex with a stranger in the bathroom at Flow on Varick. It was a Sunday: “hip-hop night.” It went down right at four o’clock, when the club was clearing out; the lights were up. Security guards were banging on the stall door and it was humiliating; but this guy—I didn’t even know his name—had a grip on me in there, and I was totally naked. He’d told me he was a guitarist in a famous band. I wound up going home with him because . . . well, I guess because he told me to. The first thing I looked for when we got there were instruments. I saw none. Uh-oh.

  I had sex with Not-a-Guitarist on the butcher block in his kitchen anyway—that is, I did until I saw an eyeball in the crack of the door.

  “AHHHH!” I jumped off the counter. The creepy little peeper came into the kitchen with his dick out. He was like . . . a tiny man! Not a dwarf, just . . . small. Anyway, that’s not relevant to the story. The point is, he was masturbating furiously! And Not-a-Guitarist was naked, and I was naked, and I don’t know if they were trying to double-tag me or what, but I had to go. I looked around. Where were my clothes? Where was my phone?

  “You’re not leaving.” Not-a-Guitarist grabbed my arm. Like, hard. I had to pull it away and snatch my tube minidress and jacket and my shoes from the floor and flee this building—sprint down the stairs and everything. My phone was in my jacket pocket, but I’d totally left my gold Baby Phat purse with all my money and makeup
and my fake ID! So I didn’t have any money; I couldn’t take a cab. I walked home on the dark streets without any underwear on.

  But those were the bad guys. The good guys were good. My favorite was a really grungy cokehead Calvin Klein model named Michael. Gosh, I’m still in love with him! He had greasy brown hair that hung in his face and wore glasses and beat-up Marc Jacobs clothes. Oh, and he had just a perfect body. Perfect. God, Michael was so hot. And no matter how much blow he did back then, he always had this glowy, gold-flushed skin tone, like he went to tanning beds or was part Cherokee or something. And his cheekbones! Ugh. He had the best cheekbones—though you could barely see them underneath the aforementioned hair.

  I first met this divine creature at Ben’s duplex in the Village over a plate of jam! Yes, jam. That is Hamptons surfer-slang for cocaine. So Michael and I snorted the jam, and I had no idea he was this big-deal model. He looked like a hobo! The hobo and I left Ben’s at that presunrise time when the sky is just starting to change, and we walked around downtown until my stupid nose started absolutely dripping blood all over the white tank top I’d just borrowed from Dara. So then I went back to the hobo’s apartment on Ninth Street “to change” and stayed for four days.

  We were thick as thieves after that. I soon realized that Michael the Hobo was actually Male Model Michael, and that he was in the window of every store in town, wearing Calvin Klein. He was gorgeous. But he wasn’t modeling much anymore. This was because he had a serious drug problem. So did I, but I was only nineteen and really didn’t understand that yet. Male Model Michael was twenty-nine, and he did coke in the shower! Yes, I did it with him, but he brought it in there.

  “Let me really look at you,” he’d murmur after we’d both taken six bumps apiece. Then he’d start to scrub my makeup off. My face would be so numb that I couldn’t even feel the washcloth! Just like in that song by The Weeknd. Argh, it was so sexy. “Let me see how beautiful you are.” After we got out, he’d dress me in his clothes and we’d do more lines, and he’d read to me from his favorite book, The Prince of Tides, and then we’d do lines and he’d tell me all about how he and his male-model friends used to go down on one another, then we’d have sex again and order more coke and do more lines and talk about Bret Easton Ellis, and then we’d order more coke, and then we’d have sex again and then . . . well, you get the idea! He always called me “darlin’.” It was a really dreamy relationship.

  After our binges Male Model Michael would need days and days of space to isolate and sleep and be depressed. I didn’t understand that when I was nineteen, but of course I do now. Addiction: it’s rough.

  Male Model Michael would go on to sort of lose his mind and have to move out of the city and back in with his parents (who were—incidentally—honest-to-God rocket scientists). It’s sad that the drugs took him down. But of course, he might say the same thing about me.

  * * *

  That summer, I went to the club and met the guy who would alter the course of my life, and with whom I am still close to this day. Alex was twenty years old, tall, charismatic, and preppy, with dark hair and icy-blue eyes. He drank Dewar’s on the rocks and had grown up on the Upper East Side. His mom still lived on East Ninetieth Street, but Alex was always fighting with her. He only liked his little sister, who went to Chapin and was sort of wise beyond her years about Alex’s behavioral problems. It was all very Holden and Phoebe Caulfield.

  Alex’s chosen family were his friends, a crew of New Yorkers who went out five nights a week, wore Ralph Lauren Polo, and listened to Wu-Tang.

  There was Josh—whom everyone called the Fat Jew—who rocked gold chains and an Afro and lived in a Riverside Drive triplex; SAME, who’d steal thousand-dollar cashmere sweaters from rich girls’ dads’ closets just to spray-paint his tag on them; Sebastian, who looked like a hunky Disney villain with his muscles and white-blond curls; Alden, a white rapper who lived with his mom. And loads more!

  They were the coolest people I’d ever met, even if they weren’t the nicest. I wanted to be in their in crowd so badly that I’d overlook their oft-questionable behavior, like when I closed my tab at Bowery Bar and found that three hundred dollars’ worth of drinks had been charged to my credit card. Besides, I was falling in love! I stopped seeing Michael; I only wanted Alex. We’d go to Cafeteria after the clubs closed and share fourteen-dollar bowls of tomato soup. His family would be away in Sun Valley or Sag Harbor or somewhere, so we’d cab uptown and curl up in his mom’s clean Tempur-Pedic bed with the AC on blast. Half the time, Alex would have a fresh split lip or a black eye from fighting—blame the Dewar’s—so I’d lie there watching him toss and turn in his sleep, drunk-babbling and bleeding all over the pillowcases. The sun would rise through the blinds, and I’d feel so happy.

  It was hands-down the best summer of my life. Of course, nothing that good lasts. Alex and his friends were moving to San Francisco for a year in September. I knew it was coming, but still, when the day came, I cried for a week. I celebrated my twentieth birthday at Lotus with a gaggle of FIT coke sluts on September 10, but I was so depressed. I’d finally had a crew to go out with, and now everybody was gone.

  I was still feeling low as I began my sophomore year (my acting school credits had transferred) at Eugene Lang College on West Eleventh Street. It was a good program and I wanted to care, but no matter how much Adderall I took, I couldn’t focus. I thought of how motivated I’d been to make straight As just a few years ago. Had that really been me? Now I stared out the window every class, if I showed up at all. I didn’t make friends. I didn’t declare a major. I had no idea what I was interested in or what I was ever gonna do with my life besides party.

  Chapter Six

  HAVE YOU EVER SLEPT FIFTEEN hours and woken up looking like a trash can? Well, that was every late afternoon in the fall of 2002. I’d open my eyes in the dark. Nothing is more dismal! I’d moved to East Fifth Street, just around the corner from my favorite bar, Lit, where you could literally drink vodka-grapefruits in a cave. The first-floor railroad apartment that I shared with an alcoholic musician was just as grimy, with dry dog food all over the kitchen floor, but I was so strung out all of the time that I didn’t even notice.

  “I think I have seasonal affective disorder,” I cried to my mom. She ordered me a light box. It looked sort of like a wee microwave, and I’d wake up hungover and stare at it for half an hour.

  I was gorging on speed, but it wasn’t making me perky anymore. I’d get a manicure on Second Avenue and my hands would be shaking as the lady tried to paint the polish on. Plus, they’d be, like, blue; the blood wasn’t circulating right or something. And sometimes my chest would feel mad tight. But the worst amphetamine-abuse “side effect” was my short, ratty, uneven hair. I’d cut it myself—just hacked it off with the same orange kitchen scissors I’d used to shred all those dresses. My hair had been down to my elbows; now it was up by my ears, with feathery, too-thin Tonya Harding bangs. Oh, it was criminal what I did to myself! Adderall and scissors do not mix. You should only be allowed to have one or the other at home. Never both.

  Alex and I were still in love, but San Francisco was so far away. I started seeing Male Model Michael again—that is, as much as anyone could see Male Model Michael. He’d by then lost his apartment and was holed up at the premier Dewey decimal system–themed hotel in New York City (fine, there is only one): the Library on Madison Avenue. Each room had a theme. Michael’s was full of books on alchemy and black magic—Aleister Crowley and all that. The demonic arts. It was fitting, because he opened the door that first night looking like a fucking bat out of hell.

  “What did you do to your hair?” he greeted me.

  Michael wasn’t exactly looking photo shoot–fresh himself. He’d lost fifteen pounds and his fingernails were dirty. His hair was plastered down to his head, and his skin didn’t glow like he was part Cherokee anymore. He was wearing a tank top and I could smell his BO. There were empty w
ine bottles and room service trays all over the place. He’d clearly stopped letting the maids in. Credit and ID cards from Michael’s wallet were on a plate on the coffee table. Lavender drug baggies had been ripped open and licked clean. It was a total nightmare! I moved right in.

  I hid out with Michael at the Library for a while, coming and going. Every morning I’d put on the same dingy white velour Juicy Couture sweatsuit, grab complimentary coffee in the lobby, and taxi downtown for class. Then I’d come back. Michael barely ever left the suite. The hotel employees had started banging on the door; his parents were after him. He was maxing out their credit cards because he’d run out of cash, and he owed money to dealers. Things were really closing in on him. Once in a while we’d go to the Poetry Garden on the fourteenth floor and hook up next to a heating lamp, but eventually Michael became too paranoid for sex. It happens.

  My own life wasn’t any better in the East Village. If I was home, I was bingeing—in bed, and late into the night. After I purged, I’d take Ambien—sometimes this was the only way to make myself stop—and pass out surrounded by Cap’n Crunch boxes and pizza crusts and half-empty packages of Double Stuf Oreos. Garbage would be on the bed, on the sofa, and on the floor.

  One night not one, not two, but three mice—a gang—pushed through the crack of the French doors into my bedroom, then scattered.

  “AAAAAAUGHHHH,” I screamed. “AUGGGH!”

  Bulimia attracts mice: fact. My roommate helped me move my mattress to a loft space meant for storage. I was always banging my head on the ceiling, but at least it was ten feet off the ground. I spent Thanksgiving alone up there that year, hunched over a turkey dinner in a Styrofoam container from the Moonlight Diner on Second Avenue. When I was finished eating, I climbed down the ladder and threw up all of the stuffing and cranberry sauce and potatoes and gravy and pumpkin pie. It was an awful thing to do with holiday food.