How to Murder Your Life

by Cat Marnell

  * * *

  Alex came home for Christmas, and we spent a week in bed at the Hudson Hotel, doing coke and ordering room service. He even asked me to marry him—and got down on one knee with a diamond ring! I was thrilled. There was only one thing to do: drop out of college. What?! Getting engaged is very serious. I had to move to San Francisco to be with my fiancé.

  My dad was furious, of course. Not only did he cut me off financially, he stopped writing my Adderall prescriptions—which meant when I ran out of what I had, I’d be sans stimulants for the first time in five years.

  Whatever, I thought. I mean, I was a teensy bit worried, but I was in love with Alex and that was better than ADHD medication, right? Besides, right before I left, I found a trash bag full of drugs in Mimi’s guest room closet. The prescriptions belonged to her best friend’s daughter Sally, a bipolar hermit who received disability checks from the government. Sally lived across the street from my grandmother in her parents’ basement, where she chain-smoked and popped pills all day. I guess her mom had gotten fed up, confiscated them all, and brought them over to Mimi’s in the garbage bag for safekeeping.

  I’d known poor Sally my whole life. Still, when I found this stash, I robbed her blind. There were at least fifty bottles; about half were narcotics: benzos like Klonopin and Valium, and a few painkillers. That’s what I took—the “fun” stuff. I left the mood stabilizers and antidepressants.

  A few days later, I was on a plane heading to sunny, gorgeous Northern California! Life was about to be beautiful again. I could tell.

  * * *

  Someday I will write at length about the surreal half-year that I lived with Alex, SAME, the Fat Jew, Alden, and Sebastian in a Mission District minimansion—but we have a lot of life-murdering to get to. So for now, all you need to know is that after my Adderall ran out in February, I spent four months in bed. The crash was death! It felt like I had mono or something. I was so beat. I started taking the tranquilizers I’d stolen to get through it, and that made everything worse.

  Alex would come home from the clubs and find me facedown on our mattress. He’d drag me out and try to stand me up, but my legs were like jelly, and I’d fall to the floor of our bedroom.

  “Cat!” He’d slap me across the face. “CAT!”

  In June, the boys were evicted from the house on Guerrero Street (again, stories for another time) and we all flew back to New York. Alex and I found a one-bedroom sublet on Grand Street on the Lower East Side. I still wore my ring, but we never talked about getting married anymore. San Francisco had not been good for us. We got in vicious fights and went to bed angry all the time. One morning he woke me up by splashing a glass of ice water in my face—and not even to raise awareness for ALS or anything! Just to be a dick.

  Despite this, I was feeling so much better. The trash bag pills were all gone, I was all set to reenroll at Lang in September, and—most crucially—I was back on Adderall (my dad had relented when I told him I was going back to school). Now I needed a summer job.

  Leave it to Alex, who knew everyone, to hook it up. His friend Jessica was the daughter of the French socialite and Vanity Fair fashion director Anne McNally. Jessica got us a gig in the fashion closet. It paid eighty dollars a day, and it was easy work: steaming clothes, printing out messenger forms, wheeling the racks down to the messenger center. That sort of thing. It was laid-back—the radio was always on—and Alex and I took long lunches out in Bryant Park. On the way back to the closet, we’d pass the editor in chief, Graydon Carter, with his signature swoopy haircut and beautiful suits in the corridor. So cool!

  Vanity Fair was a Condé Nast publication. It was on the twelfth floor of the iconic publishing company’s headquarters in midtown Manhattan. I loved being at 4 Times Square. The lobby was cavernous and busy as a beehive, with a Hudson News stand stocked with exotic foreign fashion titles, electronic whooshing gates, a messenger center, and an army of security operatives. The famous elevators (I’m hardly the first to write about them) were packed with editors from the New Yorker, Vogue, Teen Vogue, Glamour, GQ, Details, Bon Appetit, Allure, Condé Nast Traveler, Domino, Wired, Self, House & Garden, and Architectural Digest, and I’d take great care to steer the wheels of my unwieldy, garment bag–laden carts away from all these people’s sexy toes.

  Alex got bored of the fashion closet after a month and stopped coming in with me, but I stayed on all summer. Being at Condé Nast made me feel as electric and neon as all of the billboards and flashing lights outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. It was better than a nightclub! I never wanted to leave.

  * * *

  In September 2003, I reenrolled at Eugene Lang College. The Vanity Fair gig was over, but I’d been bitten by the magazine bug. I just had to get a job at another one. But how?

  Then an opportunity fell in my lap. Alex had a friend named Heather. She showed up to my birthday at Suede on September 10 with a gift bag full of products: Dior bronzer, Too Faced mascara, Clarins eye cream . . .

  “I can’t accept all this!” I said, gladly accepting all of it.

  “It’s nothing.” Heather shrugged. “I get them free at my new job.” She told me she was an assistant at Nylon.

  “I love Nylon!” I said. I really did. Back then, it was the street-style Bible—full of photographs of baby-faced, Garbage Pail Kid–glam “It” girls (think Cory Kennedy—a future cover star) lurking by chain-link fences in Studio City vacant lots and coquettishly chewing on locks of their own stringy-on-purpose ombre peach-dyed hair. It was very young, very downtown, and—of course—very appealing to moi, age twenty-one.

  “Our beauty editor Charlotte needs an intern,” Heather said.

  “But I don’t know anything about beauty,” I said.

  “You’re a girl, aren’t you?” Heather said.

  A week later I was sitting on a bench at Nylon headquarters in Soho, clutching my résumé, waiting for the mysterious Charlotte. The office was a loft on West Broadway above the Patricia Field boutique. It was all very hip. Hole’s “Celebrity Skin” was playing on the stereo, and instead of desks, there were big wooden butcher blocks. A wrinkly dog was wandering around—I mean, a really wrinkly dog. It should be illegal for a dog to be that wrinkly! It was the kind that Patrick Bateman slices open in American Psycho. A shar-pei. Another one was . . . splayed out on the floor by the Xerox machine. Everyone was stepping over it to get to the bathroom.

  “Cat?” someone said. It was Charlotte. She was tall, with light blue eyes and lanky, white-blond hair. We went into the conference room and sat down. Surely I was gawking. When Charlotte crossed her long, bare legs, I glimpsed the bright red soles of her nude patent-leather pumps. I’d only seen shoes like that once before—in the Condé Nast building.

  I’d never met a beauty editor before, and I’d expected an ice queen with a perfect blowout, perfect nails, and perfect makeup. But Charlotte’s cream eye shadow looked like it’d been smeared on with her fingers, and her hair was in a messy topknot—with a lip liner stuck in the middle to hold it in place! And Charlotte wasn’t scary at all. She was bubbly and scattered, and she even talked like my favorite actress, Drew Barrymore. We liked each other right away. I got the internship.

  * * *

  The shar-peis, long since dead, belonged to the spiky-haired editor in chief, Marvin Scott Jarrett, and his wife, Jaclynn, who was also the publisher. She’d sweep in like she owned the place (which she basically did), wearing full-length fur coats. The couple had a loft full of sixties mod furniture a few blocks away, but it was being renovated. In the meantime, they were staying in a suite at the Tribeca Grand. It was Heather’s job to walk the dogs from the hotel to the office and back again. One time I saw them dragging her down West Broadway through the rain! The wind had turned her umbrella inside out. Still, I thought Heather had the greatest job ever. Being an assistant to an editor in chief at a fashion magazine meant access. Heather went to the best partie
s. She had half of downtown New York in her flip phone and a comp card at Bumble and bumble. What more could you want?

  Everybody was glamorous, but no one compared to Charlotte. Her parents were British, but she’d grown up on the Upper East Side and gone to Sacred Heart just like Paris Hilton. Now she lived in a loft duplex on Mercer Street. I loved going over there. The fridge was full of Moët & Chandon rosé, and rock-star girlfriend and groupie memoirs (Faithfull, I’m with the Band, etc.) were stacked everywhere. Her closet overflowed with vintage clothes; she was always draping me in sequined scarves and things. If I liked anything, Charlotte would try to give it to me. She was so generous.

  I’d never met anyone like her. Charlotte had a pedigree and a half, but she never talked about it. And I probably shouldn’t either. But omigod I have to. It’s so good. Her father had been the Rolling Stones’ tour manager in the seventies; he’d also booked the plane that crashed and killed Lynyrd Skynyrd. Her stepfather was Elia Kazan, the Academy Award–winning director of A Streetcar Named Desire. I found all this out—from other people—years after I met Charlotte. She was classy with a capital C! If I’d had that family tree, I’d never shut up about it. And I’d probably have a reality show.

  Charlotte was a mess in the most appealing way possible. She had no legitimate office supplies; instead, her desk was swamped with Bobbi Brown concealer compacts, Tocca roller-ball perfumes, Malin+Goetz peppermint shampoos, Santa Maria Novella baby perfumes for chic Italian toddlers, and L’Occitane almond oils, which my mentor liked to absentmindedly slather all over her lovely neck and arms. Her pencil cups were stuffed with eyeliner pencils and Lancôme Juicy Tubes. A Leaning Tower of Pisa–like stack of press releases teetered behind the computer monitor. Every beauty brand had a team of publicists trying to get their shit into the magazine, so the bags of products never stopped. Clunk. A messenger would plop ’em down three, four, five times a day. Charlotte couldn’t keep up.

  It’s a good thing her intern was on amphetamines, right? One morning when I had nothing to do—Char wasn’t in yet—I popped two Addys and went to town. I threw away old coffee cups from Café Café on Greene Street and aligned all of the papers and taxi receipts and Labello lip balms and Claus Porto hand soaps and Oliver Peoples sunglasses and random gift certificates to the Culinary Institute.

  My “supervisor” finally fluttered into the office in a cloud of Narciso Rodriguez for Her fragrance oil and a silk polka-dot Agnès B. baby doll dress. It was noon, but no one cared. Everybody loved Charlotte.

  She was thrilled with her new workspace.

  “Omigodddd,” she gasped. “Babe, this is amazing.” From then on, she always asked me to “do . . . that magic thing you do to my desk.” She was sweet as a sugar scrub—easy to please.

  * * *

  Not everyone was so nice.

  “CAN YOU NOT HOVER OVER MY FUCKING DESK?” roared the fashion director—who sat next to Charlotte—one day. She was even louder than the new Kelly Osbourne single cranking on the office sound system. Everyone turned and stared. Oh, I just wanted to melt down like a Diptyque candle and die! Charlotte still talks about it.

  Internships: they are full of awkward moments, and uncomfortable initiation rituals! For example: Charlotte used to leave me lists of products to “call in” for stories. Like:

  Biologique Recherche P50

  Yves Saint Laurent Touche Éclat

  Givenchy Le Prisme Yeux Quatuor—smoky?

  Kérastase Bain Satin leave-in

  Chantecaille blush in Emotion

  Easy enough, right? No. I didn’t know how to pronounce anything—and I didn’t use e-mail at Nylon, just the phone on Charlotte’s desk. So everyone in the office could hear me screw up.

  “PR,” someone would answer.

  “Hi, um, this is Cat from Nylon,” I’d mumble. “Can I speak to someone from . . . yevs . . . saint lorent?”

  Pause.

  “You can talk to me about YSL,” the publicist would say.

  “I need to call in a . . . tush-ayee-clat.”

  “A what?”

  KILL ME, I’d think.

  “A . . . touchy clay?” I’d say, eyeing the mean fashion editor one butcher block over. The office was dead quiet.

  “What?” the publicist would say. “I can’t understand you.”

  “I’ll spell it,” I’d whisper desperately.

  “Can you put it in an e-mail?”

  “Actually—” I’d start.

  Click.

  It was brutal. Years later, when I had my own cute beauty interns, I wrote out anything tricky for them on Post-its. (SHU UEMURA = SHOO-YOO-MORA.)

  My first fashion week, in February 2004, was even worse. Charlotte had asked me to go backstage at Proenza Schouler and ask the models about their must-have beauty products. I’d never heard of this Proenza woman, but I was amped to report to the white tents in Bryant Park. Fun!

  Backstage was loud and crowded with publicists on headsets, stylists, photographers, garment racks, and a craft services table loaded with crudités and chicken skewers. Models were slouched in rows of directors’ chairs, reading or staring off into the void. They were chic and intimidating with their spaghetti legs and blank eyes.

  I approached my first victim, clutching a pen and notepad like an old-timey reporter. She was in street clothes—a destroyed T-shirt and black leather skinny jeans—and getting her hair done by a female stylist.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Hi, I’m writing a story for Nylon. Would you mind answering some questions for the magazine?”

  The model stared at me.

  “Okay,” she finally said.

  “Oh, fantastic,” I said. “Uh, okay, so I was wondering . . . what beauty products do you use in your . . . your regular life? Or something you can’t live without when you travel?”

  “You’re in my way,” the hairstylist said sharply.

  “Sorry.” I stepped back. “Like, is there a makeup item you like?” Silence. “Or a hair product, or a skin-care product . . . ?”

  The model sighed.

  “I like . . . the blue cleanser . . . you know . . . ” she said. She had an Eastern European accent. “For taking my makeup off.”

  “Oh, great!” I babbled, scribbling madly. “Blue . . . cleanser . . . for . . . taking . . . makeup . . . off. Got it! Do you remember the brand?”

  “No.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.” I stood there for a moment. “Was it, like, ­Kiehl’s, or—”

  “Still in my way!” The stylist got in front of me again.

  “Um. Was it like a blue gel, or just in a blue bottle, or—”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s okay!” The model turned toward the mirror. We were clearly done.

  Except . . . oh no.

  “Uh.” I cleared my throat. “I’m so sorry. But could I get your name?”

  The stylist shook her head. The model narrowed her eyes.

  “Sashjakjadha Rakdfnfsbuipi,” the model said.

  Fuck.

  “One more time?” I squeaked.

  The model repeated her name.

  “Could you spell that?” I said. “I am sorry. I am so sorry.”

  The stylist lost it.

  “GET OUT OF HERE!” she screamed. Neighboring stylists and models looked up. I skedaddled, all right—right out of the tents.

  * * *

  Pretty bad, don’t you think? But my first-ever beauty event was worse. It was a sit-down dinner for the launch of a high fashion house’s signature fragrance. Charlotte sent me in her place at the last minute.

  “This isn’t really an event for interns,” the publicist huffed. But she led me to a seat anyway. The dinner was in an industrial loft space in the Flatiron District. The white walls matched the “white notes” (whatever that meant)
in the fragrance, as well as the sleek, minimalist white bottle. There were white candles, white napkins, and white orchids at every table. Even the marketing people were white! No, I’m just kidding. (Sort of.)

  I sat down shyly in Charlotte’s chair and snuck peeks at the place cards on either side of me: Vogue and Elle. Whoa. Beauty editor equivalents of high rollers! This dinner party was gonna be off the heezy. I couldn’t wait.

  I was right: it was so much fun. No, I am lying. Nobody spoke to me the entire four-course ordeal! Not one word. The hours dragged by. So I just kept tossing back (white) wine. How the hell did people get through dinner parties? It was the first time I ever sat alongside industry ballers at a fancy table and tried to will a plate of gnocchi to turn into cocaine—but it certainly wouldn’t be my last.

  * * *

  I stayed at Nylon a full year. On my twenty-second birthday, on September 10, Jessica and Anne McNally—the Vanity Fair fashion director—took me and Alex to the Cartier Mansion on Fifth Avenue. It was a New York Fashion Week party for the “It” boy designer Zac Posen. There was a crazy-long line of people trying to get in, but the publicists practically fell all over themselves to open the velvet rope for our group. Then we waited by the door as Anne hit the red carpet and posed for the throng of paparazzi. She looked ravishing with her thick bangs, black jersey dress, and hefty jeweled necklace. Jessica was so lucky.

  We went inside the Cartier Mansion. Right away, a waiter in a tuxedo walked by and handed me a glass of champagne off a silver tray. Hooray! I was midswig when Puff Daddy (him again!) bumped into me, truly; he’s lucky I didn’t spill on him. Right behind him was a shrimpy, coked-up-looking movie actor—I guess I won’t name him—who sort of hounded me all night, even though I was with Alex. He tried to follow me into the bathroom! And he kept grabbing my arm and ordering me to go to Bungalow with him, and making Lothario eyes at me from across the room. Alex saw this, and—because he and I happened to get separated that night—he and the Fat Jew still to this day say I slept with the movie star. So I’d like to state once and for all that I did not have sex with him!