by Cat Marnell
“AUGHH!” I clutched Beth. Beth clutched me! “AUUGH!”
Ugh, I am going to puke all over my MacBook Air just remembering all this! And not even on purpose, to lose weight.
Mouse shit was on my i-D magazines. They were on my Dazed & Confused and Self Service magazines. I had bulletin boards propped up against the wall, and there was mouse shit along the top edges of those. Excrement was on the bookshelves, the kitchen counters, and the cable box. The coffee table!
I’d never seen anything like it. I was sure an army of mice had invaded my apartment! The exterminator who came that evening didn’t think so.
“Nah,” he told us. “It was probably just one. Looks like he was trying to find his way out of here.”
The exterminator found holes all over the apartment—but then he wouldn’t cover them up! He said he was going to put out traps and leave poison everywhere, but that was it.
“Please fill the holes, sir,” I begged. I was curled up in a ball on a windowsill.
“She’s really phobic,” Beth said.
“You have to let it eat the poison first,” the exterminator said. “Then it gets thirsty and goes to look for—”
“FILL THEM!” I screamed. “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND!” I got my way. I usually do.
Beth slept over that night, but she couldn’t stay forever. The next day at work, I was weepy and demented: all I could talk about was the Mouse, the Mouse, the Mouse.
* * *
It was the Christmas season at Condé Nast once more, but I wasn’t exactly in the holiday spirit.
“You need to hire another person and get in there NOW!” I sat in my cubicle and screamed—at management, at exterminators, at my mother, at the incompetent Ricky. I ignored the gift bags pouring in. “This one isn’t working! No, the poison isn’t working. NOTHING is working!”
The halls at 112 First Avenue, Apt. 5B, were decked with boughs of arsenic! Or whatever they use to exterminate these days. There were hunks of turquoise poison in all of my closets; Ricky poured bright orange powder poison piles in all the corners—like anthills. There were traps: snap traps, glue traps, an electronic trap that I’d read about on Martha Stewart’s website. Oh, and mouse turds. I found fresh ones every time I looked after work. Also: greasy smudges along the bottom of the wall—the exterminator had taught me to look for those.
“Get a cat!” Jean kept telling me. But I was strung out like a strand of Christmas lights 24/7. I couldn’t have a pet. Wouldn’t that have been wrong? Beth brought her parents’ chunky calico in from Jersey instead. Lucy had just one ear, and a bad attitude. Absolutely permanent stink eye. And she was no mouser. Beth took Lucy home after a few days, and I was all alone.
If deadlines sent me into meltdown mode, the Mouse sent me into a downward spiral. I went right off the rails. I was convinced that I saw him constantly, darting behind a bookshelf or something. Who knows what was real and what wasn’t?
“AAAAUUUUGGGGGGHHHH!” I screamed every ten minutes, jumping practically to the ceiling. I was like Spider-Man! (Fine, not really.)
I came to sense that the Mouse was always there. Either I’d sealed him in, like the exterminator warned me, or—as I came to suspect later—he’d nudged his way out from underneath my kitchen sink and the cupboard door had closed behind him, so he could never get back home ever again. Either way, the Mouse was as trapped in my shitty, Adderall-shambolic life as I was.
I hated being at the apartment. When I was, I had a Dustbuster minivacuum at my side at all times. Every time I thought I heard or saw the Mouse, I switched it on and let it roar while I pounded my feet on the floor. I’d be wearing knee-high Fryes: my mouse-stompin’ boots. And I turned my bed into a fort! I bought four big box fans at Kmart and arranged them on the floor around my bed, facing outward. They were loud—it sounded like an airplane taking off—but I hoped the din and wind would keep the Mouse away. But still, I couldn’t sleep. I was too afraid. I came home from work and found new mouse . . . evidence every day—sometimes on the bed.
“Get a cat!” Jean said again.
I had another idea.
“I need sedatives,” I told Dr. C.
“Why don’t you try watching Ratatouille?” he suggested.
“The cartoon?” I was trying not to scream. “The kids’ movie?!”
“My grandson and I loved it!” Dr. C. chuckled.
“Please,” I begged. “Tranquilizers!”
Dr. C. prescribed Seroquel, an antipsychotic, and Xanax bars—those are two milligrams each. I took so many of the latter that I might as well have put them in a Pez dispenser. Combining the two medications knocked me out like a punch to the head and kept me blacked out for hours with my boots on, all the lights burning, and the Dustbuster tucked under my arm. But suddenly getting up in the morning was so hard. My bed felt like a wad of gum.
I don’t want to go to work, I’d think as my alarms went off . . . and off . . . and off. I could barely lift my head or open my eyes. I just want to sleep. Addiction versus ambition: it starts small.
* * *
Sometimes I couldn’t conk out no matter how many downers I took, so I’d just stay awake taking three Adderall at a time, vigilant, like a soldier in Vietnam on Dexedrine looking for Charlie. Things would get weird fast: I started wearing one of those flashlight headbands, and crawling around. Since the stupid exterminators couldn’t figure out where this mouse was coming in, I would! I stuffed steel wool into the tiniest, skinniest crevices. Everyone said mice had flexible spines, right? If I could slide a butter knife into an opening, it had to be sealed. Years later, I heard a story on TMZ Live about Lamar Odom (another life-murderer) doing this sort of thing—during a crack binge!
I was just possessed. But nothing worked. One such night, I was on hands and knees, cleaning my closet floor. I got up to wring out the rag in the bathroom sink, and when I got back, there was fresh mouse shit right there—on the wet patch I’d just wiped down!
I think we all know what happened next.
“AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGHHHHH!” I grabbed my purse and hurtled out of the apartment, down five flights of stairs and out onto First Avenue in knee-high stompin’ boots and crusty white Proactiv sulfur acne mask spots dotting my face, but I didn’t care. I was mental. I flagged a cab and dove into the backseat, but I didn’t know what to tell the driver. My sister—who had moved to New York to work in PR and totally had her life together, unlike me—was out of town. Who could I call? I scrolled through my phone. I had psychiatrists; I had coke dealers; I had fuck boys. Why didn’t I have any friends?
There was only one place to go.
“Forty-Second and Broadway,” I said.
Jean’s office was just as I’d left it. It was three in the morning. I took the gifts off the love seat and placed them on the ground. Then I tried to get comfortable. Times Square was flashing outside, so I pulled a Pucci beach towel over my head. Then—finally—the downers in my system put me under.
A cleaning lady came in at eight fifteen. I jerked awake.
“Sorry,” she said, and quickly shut the door. Omigod. I’d been so blotto that I hadn’t even set an alarm! I changed into fresh clothes and applied makeup in the beauty closet. Then I began my day.
I never told anyone that I’d slept in Jean’s office. It was too dark, too weird. Embarrassing.
* * *
It was the worst winter of my life—even worse than the cheating-Nicky-pregnancy winter (and that was saying something). In January, I moved out for a month to sublet a West Village bachelor pad—an “extermination vacation,” if you will. But my nerves were so shot I might as well have been at home.
“NO!” I shrieked every time this dude’s old-timey heater piped up. “AHHH!” Then I’d bolt down to Washington Street in tears just like I did at home.
On February 1, I returned to First Avenue. The mouse was still there, but not f
or long. On Valentine’s Day, I was fussing with a heavy wooden drawer a previous tenant had built—poorly—into the bottom of a closet. The stupid thing was always going off the tracks. I gave up and dropped the drawer on the floor. Then I sat down in the tub for a bath.
I was midshampoo when I heard it.
EEEEEEE-EEEE-EEEE-EEEE! This was earsplitting—and coming from the closet. High-pitched, distressed cries! EEE! EEE! EEEEE!
“AHHHHH!” I joined him. “AHHHHHH!”
After a few minutes, the noises stopped.
I called Ricky, who ran over to confirm what I suspected: the Mouse had been hiding in the closet—and I’d crushed him with the drawer and killed him! I couldn’t believe it. The Mouse was dead; Ricky removed the body. The nightmare was over. Wasn’t it?
* * *
Spring came—and a special anniversary. It had been ten years since my dad left that first bottle of Ritalin on my desk in boarding school. I’d been on prescription stimulants for exactly a decade. How were things going?
“AUUUGGHHHHHH!” This would be me reacting to a garbage bag shifting and settling, as they sometimes do. That would be all I needed to run out the door without a bra on or my purse and go to Lit Lounge on Second Avenue. I’d sit at the bar watching girls dancing to “Bizarre Love Triangle,” and Erik Foss, the owner, would give me free vodka-grapefruits until I was juiced enough to return home.
Were there still mice in my apartment? No. But by this time, I was so heavily drug dependent, traumatized, and bonkers that it didn’t matter. The imaginary ones had infested my mind.
I was still high and paranoid, staying up all night looking for things. And the more I looked for things, the more . . . creatures I saw. Like translucent spiders—imagine a Lucite daddy longlegs—creeping across the shag of my bath mat. They were so strange looking that they didn’t even frighten me. They couldn’t be real.
I reached out and touched them. The spiders vanished.
Everything was coming alive. Another night I stared at a fur coat until it twitched.
You haven’t slept for two days, I kept telling myself. My Kmart floor fans roared like the subway.
But then it twitched again!
“DIE!” I screamed, and flung a book or a shoe at it. “AAAUUUGH!” Then I flew downstairs and walked the East Village until sunrise, listening to the Stones on my headphones.
The less I slept, the more emotionally and psychologically disorganized I became. But no matter how muddled I was, my doctor-shopping game was always on point. I had two prescribing psychiatrists; their scripts had to go to different pharmacies. There were two big ones in Times Square: Duane Reade on Broadway, and the new Walgreens right across the street. I also had two interns: Jenna and Ramona. We called them the Twinterns. Perfect! Jenna was my Walgreens girl. Ramona’s beat was Duane Reade.
“What would happen if I took these to Walgreens?” Ramona asked once.
“I’d go to jail,” I said darkly. Her eyes widened.
“Really?”
“No!” I said. “I’m not doing anything illegal! You just gotta protect ya neck, you know?” The Twinterns nodded. They were learning so much.
One day I took off my baseball cap in front of them. Yes, I was wearing baseball caps to Condé Nast. I’m telling you, I was fucking tired!
“Whoa,” Ramona said. “You have dreadlocks!”
Did I? I reached up and touched my hair. Oh, wow.
I hadn’t brushed it in . . . well . . . hmm.
* * *
“Just . . . how could you have let it get like this, Caitlin?” my sister asked.
We were at her apartment on East Twenty-Third Street.
“Stress,” I whimpered. Right.
Emily didn’t recognize that I had major drug problems yet—even as I sat weeping on her Crate and Barrel sofa, a severely underweight pillhead mess with zombie affect and dirty feet, my hair tangled up in knots of emotional disease and serious self-neglect. No one in my family did. No one in my life did.
I, of course, understood what had happened to my hair. Tranquilizers! And the antipsychotics and sleeping pills I mixed with them. Oh, and amphetamines.
I was hooked on it all—and in much, much deeper than I ever had been before. The horrible winter with the mouse had made my drug problem much worse. I was exhausted all of the time, particularly in the mornings. I moved through my getting-ready-for-work routine like I was underwater. I was too tired to stand in the shower and wash and condition my long, highlighted-blond hair. Half the time I got light-headed and saw black spots and had to turn the hot-water faucet off and sit down.
So for months—since the mouse winter—I’d been washing my hair sitting down in the bathtub. I had a lot of hair and I didn’t rinse very well; I’d pour cups of water over myself, or, more often, just dip my head back in the water, baptism style, to get the suds out. Then I’d wrap a dirty towel around my head, slather on depuffing face treatments—when you get $145 Sisley Eye Contour Masks for free, you might as well use them—and slap on self-tan like a vampire who wanted to walk among the living undetected. Which, of course, I basically was doing.
But I didn’t comb my hair out after I washed it. I was too tired. And forget blow-drying! That’s exhausting work when you aren’t a drug addict. I’d just twist it up into a bun, throw on a Helmut Lang dress, and take a thirteen-dollar cab to Times Square. (I was too tired to take the subway.) Fast-forward a few months and there I was, in the beauty closet with the interns. Feeling my new dreadlocks.
I should have started taking care of my hair better right away, but I didn’t. I let the dreadlocks turn into dense knots. A few weeks later, they were the size of fists.
“Try the Philip B. detangler,” Cristina said.
“How about the L’Oréal Paris spray for little kids?” Dawn suggested.
“Call them in,” Jean instructed me. But I never did. I was too—can you guess?—tired.
Weeks went by. The snarls got worse—and my job performance along with them. Jean never asked me outright what was wrong with me, and I never told her. But more and more, I was putting my boss in the uncomfortable position of having to be concerned about her assistant, instead of vice versa. I came in strung out every morning and spread my poison around. Everybody got a taste. I talked—and talked and talked and talked—about my problems.
“Can rats climb up the sides of buildings?” I’d interrupt a Hair Guide discussion. Lately I’d been watching something move back and forth and up and down—like a video game—on the screens outside my fifth-floor windows. I was sure they were rats. I cannot tell you how terrified I was of this. Every time my brain latched onto the possibility, I couldn’t stop seeing it.
“I’m not sure,” Jean would say flatly.
“I don’t think so, dude,” Cristina would say. Dawn would look at her nail beds.
Then it would be time for everyone to try to help me with the knots.
“Go see [so-and-so] at [this-or-that salon] today,” Jean would say for the fiftieth time. “Call PR and get an appointment.” I’d nod, but I was too embarrassed to call a publicist and explain the situation, much less walk into Frédéric Fekkai with a nest on my head. Also, I was too tired.
More time passed. My hair got worse, but instead of stressing about it now, I ignored it the way I ignored everything that I didn’t want to deal with. I wore the knots twisted into one big knot on the top of my head, and I stopped asking for advice about them. Problem solved!
“How’s your hair?” Jean asked one day. I guess she thought it was better.
“Oh,” I said. “Fantastic!” Haha! I took my hair down from the megabun, and it sort of flopped onto my neck in three thick sections. It had been all the way to my elbows; now it barely grazed my shoulders.
“Oh, no!” Jean cried.
“You know what?” I said. “I just decided, it’s j
ust hair.”
“Oh, no!”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“Did you try the Philip B.?” she said. “Or the L’Oréal?”
“No . . .”
“None of them?” Jean said. She was incredulous.
“No,” I whimpered. “I didn’t try any of them. I didn’t call in anything.”
“But why not?!” Jean cried out.
“I don’t know.”
“Cat,” she said. “You must do something about your hair. Do you understand? You must make that appointment.”
“’Kay.”
“I’m not going to tell you again!” Jean said. She looked extremely angry (and also: extremely dewy).
I went to Butterfly Studio in the Flatiron District later that week. We’d just featured the owner of the salon, Kattia, in Lucky, so I knew they’d be kind to me. It was late evening. An assistant brought me a flute of champagne while the stylist felt around in the knots with her fingers. I could tell by the look on her face that it wasn’t good.
“I’ve been growing my hair out for six years,” I said. “I can’t cut it!”
“How did this happen?” the stylist asked.
“I haven’t been taking very good care of myself,” I whispered.
Kattia came over and conferred quietly with the stylist. Then she squeezed my shoulder and locked eyes with me in the mirror.
“They’re going to have to cut them out,” she said.
“I know,” I said numbly. I felt so ashamed—and like everyone in the salon was looking at me.
God, I was beat.
“Give me one sec,” I said. I took my handbag into the bathroom and fished out an Adderall. I looked at myself in the mirror. Ugly. I was sort of tipsy. Idiot. Stupid girl.
I went back out and sat down. The stylist went to work. Soon enough, tears were rolling down my smock. Old Waterworks Marnell. You know me.