by Cat Marnell
“It’s a ‘Moonbeam Cream’!” I’d declare of a wet n wild illuminator in another. “It makes your skin luminous like when you take a romantic night walk!”
“You’re so good at this,” Jean would say. I’d grin at her. We were very in sync—and I’d only been her assistant a few months.
I was lousy at one thing, though: hitting deadlines. And when you work at a magazine, you can’t be bad at hitting deadlines. It slows down everyone else. There was an entire department—production—to remind me of this. These people paced the corridors with their clipboards, nudging us along. It made me nervous.
Concentrate, I’d think after one of them popped by to check on something I was working on. Then I’d take another dose of ADHD medication.
The main beauty section of Lucky was called Beauty Spy. These were eight or nine pages of smaller items (about two hundred words each) that ran “front of the book” in every issue. Once a month, we’d kick the interns out of the beauty closet and gather around the large countertop where we’d been accumulating new products all month. Cristina would show JGJ “a wee owl, made of soap”; Dawn would show her black-brown eye shadow and a black-gold nail polish and declare that “off-black” was officially trending; I’d present a trio of fluorescent lip balms named after iconic New York City nightclubs. JGJ would roll her eyes at half our dumb-ass pitches but throw them into bags to be shot anyway, and then I’d lug everything back to my desk, type up the list, alert the production department, and take the bags up to the digital photo studio on the eighth floor.
Then it was writing time. Cristina would divide the items—the little stories—between me, Dawn, and herself. The idea was to get Beauty Spy to Jean for her edits before the corresponding images came back from the digital studio a few days later. This way, the text and the photos could be laid out together by the art department right away. The pressure was on! Which meant I would start shutting down.
My poor coworkers. We always handed in Beauty Spy as one big document, so when my work was late, their work was late. Dawn would finish first on deadline day; Cristina would be next. I was always last—that is, if I finished at all.
“Marnell,” Cristina would come over and say. I’d be at my computer fussing over five sentences on a lip balm like I was drafting the Constitution. “Dude. Can I take an item or two off your hands? I don’t mind. We just have to get this in on time.”
“I got this,” I’d swear. “I’m almost done!” When she left the cubicle, I’d sneak another Adderall.
Jean edited Beauty Spy by hand, on paper, in the car back to Nyack or on the way in the next morning, and half the time she’d leave for the day without anything to work on. The entire magazine’s production would be slowed down. And it would be all my fault.
“I’m so sorry,” I’d say every month. Then I’d still not finish until late the next day.
Dawn and Cristina never ratted me out, though, so Jean never knew I was her weakest link. Instead, she praised me. Jean valued good writing above all else, and she thought I was talented. She told me all of the time!
One morning, Jean came in and told me that she’d seen Felicia at a luncheon.
“Thank you so much for passing Cat along!” JGJ had said to Felicia. “I’m so thrilled to have her. She’s such a good writer!”
“Cat can write?” Felicia had supposedly answered.
Hearing that anecdote skyrocketed me straight to cloud nine. Of course, JGJ didn’t know that I full-on Zero Dark Thirty–tortured myself and everyone around me to procure the work that pleased her so—and I wasn’t about to tell her.
* * *
Seeing my words in Lucky ruled. Every time a new issue hit my desk, I’d page through it, slap Post-its on the items I’d written, and send it to my Mimi along with some Estée Lauder lipsticks or something. There were no bylines in the Beauty Spy section, though. And I was dying for a byline! I’d only get one if Jean decided I could handle a larger writing assignment on top of my regular duties. Assistants didn’t usually get this privilege in the first year, though. I know, I know: millennial bloggers are all, huh? But the print world was hierarchical and particular like that in my day. I don’t know if it still is.
Finally, my moment arrived! I was assigned a one-page story called “Secret Ingredient: Goat’s Milk.” My byline would run at the end of the text. I had to call in ten products that had goat’s milk in them, write a caption for each, and draft a simple paragraph about the curative properties of this unusual “secret ingredient.” No prob.
Flash-forward to the day it was due. I’d labored over the story all week. I’d cut and pasted information about goat’s milk into a Word document; I’d played with paraphrasing every day. But all I had to show for my effort were sentence fragments. This was supposed to be the story that proved to Jean and my coworkers that I could take on more juicy assignments. I had to get it together.
I was taking double Adderall—so why couldn’t I concentrate? Everything I put down was gibberish. I had an online thesaurus open; I was arranging and rearranging the few half sentences I had. But then it all stopped making sense. So I erased it all.
By three o’clock, I’d rewritten the short paragraph—sort of. I was so cranked that you could have called me an old-timey car and sold me to Jay Leno. Clammy, too.
Cristina came over to my desk.
“You okay, Marnell?” she said—very quietly. JGJ was right there in her office.
“Fine,” I rasped.
“Do you want me to help?” she said. “It’s no trouble.”
“I got it.”
Five o’clock came, horribly and too soon. Everyone was trying to help me. Jean had even been answering her own phone.
My boss approached, holding her jacket and her Hermès handbag.
FUCK! I screamed inside.
“Err, do you . . . have ‘Secret Ingredient’?” She was very nice about it.
“No,” I said, and handed her a car reservation number on a Post-it. “I’m so . . .” I couldn’t say “I’m sorry,” because JGJ hated “I’m sorry.” “I’m still working.” As soon as she was out of sight, I put my head in my hands. I’d blown it again. But at least I had bought some time.
By seven, the office was clearing out, and I was “hyperfocused” and lockjawed.
“Dude.” Cristina stopped on her way out. She looked worried. “Take a break.”
“I’m fine . . .” I’d just taken another thirty-milligram Adderall. I was sure I could get the story done that evening.
Instead, the . . . disorientation got worse and worse. Hours passed: I was surprised every time I checked the clock. At ten o’clock, I was the only person on the sixth floor, and I was sitting in the dark. The lights had flickered off to save power as they always did at night. Usually I jumped around in the hallway to activate the motion sensors—this would light up the beauty department for a while—but that night I stayed locked into my chair. The housekeeping staff came by, and they vacuumed and emptied the trash cans around me. I didn’t greet them like I usually did.
It was eleven o’clock. My underarms were wet, and my forehead was greasy. I was still fussing, obsessing. Rewriting, editing. Then it was midnight. Then it was one, then two. At three o’clock, the jumble on the screen was more incoherent than ever. I realized I was going to be there the entire night.
I took another Adderall. I probably took an Adderall every hour. At dawn, my eyes and face hurt; my hands were blue; I was shaking. I was very, very high and wearing the same clothes I’d worn the day before.
At nine thirty, when everyone started trickling in, I grabbed a floaty Phillip Lim dress I had in a shopping bag under my desk and changed in the beauty closet. My hair got caught in the zipper as I pulled it over my head. That’s when I started weeping.
By the time Jean arrived ten minutes later—our editor in chief at her side—I was back in my cha
ir. Now I was full-on bawling. Loud!
“Are you all right?!” Jean asked.
“I’m just finishing ‘Secret Ingredient.’ ” KF and JGJ looked confused—concerned, too—but they let me be.
I’d never cried at the office before, but now I couldn’t stop. The tears and snot dripped on the keyboard as I continued “working” on this story. Wretched, guttural sobs kept bursting out of my body. SOB. The fashion girls across the way had long since stopped talking among each other. SOB! I was weirding everybody out. SOB!
Finally Jean could take no more. She pulled me to her office and slid the door shut.
“What is wrong?” she said.
“I cah—cah—cah—cahhn—cahn-can’t do it,” I said. “The go—go—goat’s milk story!”
“That’s why you’re upset?” Jean said. “Just bring me what you have!”
“I cah—cah—cah—”
“Print out what you have,” JGJ repeated. “Go wash your face first.”
I went to the ladies’ room with some Mustela Facial Cleansing Cloths and GO SMiLE mouthwash from the beauty closet. My mouth tasted awful. I looked like a monster in the mirror.
Idiot. I hated myself. Fucking retard.
I almost lost it all over again when I printed out my two single-spaced pages of unintelligible nonsense, but I took a breath and brought them into Jean’s office anyway. She was waiting.
“I . . . I—” I started.
“Let me see,” Jean said, holding her hand out for the papers. I gave them to her.
“I did the product captions,” I sniffled. “But I’m stuck on the paragraph.”
“Great,” Jean said. She went in with one of her blue pens right away. I settled in across from her and watched.
I’d been working on “Secret Ingredient: Goat’s Milk” for over twenty-four straight hours. Do you want to know how long JGJ worked on it?
Two minutes.
She figured out the entire story in two minutes.
“Here,” she said, and handed the papers to me.
I took the papers and looked at them. She’d completed my sentences and pieced everything together. This is the paragraph I’d lost my mind writing:
Secret Ingredient: GOAT’S MILK
Milk—or more accurately, the proteins, minerals, and lactic acids it’s made of—has been used as a gentle exfoliant (and a powerful moisturizer) since Cleopatra’s famous baths. And goat’s milk does the stuff from cows one better: it contains lots more nutrients, and its smaller proteins absorb more quickly into skin. Soothing for both psoriasis and eczema, it hydrates and subtly glorifies all skin types.
—Cat Marnell
That’s it. That’s all I had to fucking do!
Drugs: they are wild.
“Secret Ingredient: Goat’s Milk” was bad—the lowest point of my career so far. Little did I know, though: the lows were about to get much lower. And all because of a mouse.
Chapter Ten
OH, GOD. THE MOUSE. THE mouse! The Mouse. I am so scared typing those words. What if I summon him—like the Slender Man?! But I have to keep going.
Rodents. I hate them! I hate their filthy, hairless tails. I hate the squeaks you hear before you see them—motherfuckers are loud—I hate the rustling in the trash bags piled in the street. I can’t even Google “mouse”! I do not go into Petco.
In New York, the rats are foot-longs—like Subway sandwiches! You see them absolutely everywhere at night. Some blocks are worse than others. I know that shit so well I could draw you a map. I’ve leapt off the sidewalk and into oncoming traffic to avoid rats, and if the dope doesn’t get me, I will probably die that way. Anything would be better than what happened three years ago. I was walking home at dusk and stepped on one—right on the back. Crunch. It screamed; I screamed (there will be loads of screaming in this chapter). I was wearing Topshop ballet flats that were so thin, they barely counted as shoes—and I could feel the bend of that creature’s spine! (I think rats have spines. Again—not Googling it.) When I got home, I called everyone in my BlackBerry in absolute hysterics! My friend SHAUN RFC told me to soak my foot in hot water diluted with bleach. He called it the East Harlem pedicure.
New York, New York, the city of dreams. No, it is vile! Out on the streets, rats run this town à la Rihanna and Jay-Z; the mice here are far more insidious. They invade your apartment, and so they invade your life. You’re up late cracker-jacked on ADHD medication and zing—out of the corner of your eye you see a black flash dart under your refrigerator. Then your entire world turns upside down for three years. At least, that is what happened to me.
I’d been at Lucky nearly a year when I decided to ditch the Upper East Side and move downtown. Away from Alex and my bulimia circuit and my Dr. Feelgoods. I wanted to be in the East Village, my favorite Manhattan neighborhood. The second apartment I saw was an alcove studio at 112 First Avenue between Fifth and Sixth Streets. I liked that it was near St. Mark’s Place, the former punk rock mecca, and Tompkins Square Park, which filled up with cute teen runaways in the summer. The creaky, dark, small building was above a strange Polish restaurant and a porny video shop; there was also a McDonald’s and a combination Dunkin’ Donuts/Baskin Robbins on the block. The setup screamed “mice.” But of course I screamed “impulse control problems.”
“I’ll take it!” I exclaimed. It reminded me of a treehouse. I loved the weird shelves built into corners and the wood-paneled walls. There were three closets, which was crazy for four hundred square feet. And I liked that the treetops were right outside my windows. It was special to have a green view in downtown New York! The branches danced right up the glass. It reminded me of my dorm room junior year at boarding school.
I moved in over Labor Day weekend. It was a walk-up; my new place was on the fifth floor. The blue-carpeted stairwell reeked of . . . what was that, exactly—the sticky sweetness mixed with the garbage smell? The broker had said that the trash room was in the basement. Okay.
I settled in and got straight to work tacking up my favorite Madonna by Steven Klein for W tear sheets, Sonic Youth Dirty LPs, and Thomas Ruff Nudes I’d torn from Christie’s contemporary auction catalogs I bought at the Strand. I created the same cocoon I always did.
So why did I feel uneasy? My new place felt . . . different at night. BANG! BANG! BANG! The leafy tree branches I loved during the day weren’t so whimsical when it was dark outside—when they were rapping at my windows like some sort of demented sex predator! Jesus.
But it was something else. I sensed I wasn’t alone. I have the least appealing superpower ever: rodent intuition. I feel them before I see them. And as the weather grew colder, and the apartment grew darker—I knew. I just knew. I think I could hear them in the walls. It was only a matter of time.
I felt so creeped out up there that I kept inviting a girl I knew from acting school, Beth, to crash on the nights she did bottle service at a club nearby. That way, she wouldn’t have to drive back to her family’s place in Jersey at five in the morning. And I wouldn’t have to be alone. Beth half moved in for a while, but after one trip downstairs to do laundry, she refused to ever go down there with me again. I didn’t blame her. The basement was terrifying: full of trash cans and shadows. Plus, there was a sort of . . . mechanical arm that beat the side of the furnace every thirty seconds—like something the one-armed drummer from Def Leppard might use to beat a snare! Thump thump thump. And what were those . . . large pellet things on the floor? I couldn’t be down there for more than a minute before I raced upstairs. I started throwing my garbage away on the street.
I cornered the superintendent, Ricky, which was a complete waste of time. He was, like, twenty years old, with three kids under five at home—and he had two other buildings, and he was a first-time super. He was always misplacing his big key ring and running around looking overwhelmed. He didn’t have a poker face, either.
Ricky winced.
“Nah,” he said.
“How about mice?” I asked. “Has anyone ever had a mouse in my apartment?”
Ricky grimaced again. I was doomed.
What could I do? I’d just moved in; I’d paid a broker. I couldn’t move again. All I could do, I decided, was never—ever—bring food into the apartment. No snacks, no groceries. I at that point did not own a single plate and weighed approximately fourteen pounds, so I was fine. I even stopped bingeing! My fear of mice was more powerful than my eating disorder. Hooray.
* * *
They tell you not to bring your “devices” into a spa treatment, and now I knew why. Over Thanksgiving weekend in 2007, I was “facedown, ass up”—like the 2 Live Crew song—on a massage table at JGJ’s favorite spa on earth, Ten Thousand Waves in Santa Fe, when I got the text.
Girl, it read. I have really bad news. Beth had broken the only rule and brought pizza into the apartment. She’d left the Lil Frankie’s box on the floor. Then I picked up your yoga mat—Stella McCartney for Adidas, if you were wondering—and a mouse ran out.
I ended my first-ever massage right then and there. Ten Thousand Waves was ruined! I didn’t even go into the famous outdoor hot tubs with all the naked hippies.
I thought of nothing else until I arrived back in New York. Beth had fled for Jersey, but she met me in front of the building so I wouldn’t have to go in alone. We climbed the stairs, opened the door, and . . . oh, I couldn’t believe what we found! If you, too, are musophobic, brace yourself. No—anesthetize yourself. Slap on a Fentanyl patch! I sure wish I had one.
Ready? Okay.
Every single surface was covered with . . . with mouse droppings. I can’t even believe I am writing these words in my book; I am so grossed out. Mouse shit! Little black pellets. They were on my bed. They were on my pillows. They were in my bathroom, on the bath mat, on my bathroom scale, on the tiles. They were on every windowsill. They were on the sofa. They were on the floor in all three closets.