by Cat Marnell
I missed speed. I felt very out of it. One day I forgot I was running a bath and the tub overflowed. The water spread out into Emily’s foyer and closet. It wasn’t the kind of flood you mopped up with towels. Her super brought up a special “wet vacuum.”
“I’m so sorry,” I told Emily over the din.
“It’s okay.” But it wasn’t. The parquet tiles popped up as they dried out. Then her floor had little peaks, like a mountain range.
Hurricane Cat had to go. I looked on Craigslist and found a room for rent. It was on the lower level of a three-bedroom, two-bathroom duplex in the West Village, a picturesque neighborhood famous for its tree-lined cobblestone streets and gay bars. The old me never would have considered living there. It was very different from my beloved East Village. Where were the teen runaways? The only cuties nodding off on Christopher Street were French bulldog puppies in the pet-store windows. Was there even a methadone clinic? People lined up for cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery instead.
It wasn’t exactly my scene. But I was Healthy Cat now—or at least I was pretending to be. I hit up Dave, who was moving out of the West Village duplex. He invited me over for an “interview.”
“Do you party?” Dave asked. “Because that’s the one thing that you can’t really do here . . . drugs.” He lowered his voice. “I mean, I like a little coke now and then, but Becky doesn’t approve of that stuff at all.”
“I don’t do drugs,” I said. We were standing in the empty bedroom. It was huge and shaped like a pentagon. Craig and Becky—the other roommates—lived on the second floor. They worked in finance and were never home, Dave said. It showed. There were black leather sofas in the living room but no television; the kitchen looked untouched. The terrace was covered in pigeon mess, and the issues of Forbes magazine stacked on the toilet tank were two years old.
“I’ll take it!” I said. Whatever.
Moving day was October first. It was time to face the music—that is, my life.
* * *
My new building, 29 Seventh Avenue South, was in a strange industrial pocket of downtown near the Holland Tunnel. When you crossed Houston Street, Seventh Avenue turned into Varick—a scary-at-night strip of West Soho lined with warehouses and the odd nightclub. It was also home to the storage-unit facility where my mom had put my things.
Oh, God. Manhattan Mini Storage! I am getting the shivers just thinking about it! When I see it in my mind’s eye, I hear a wolf howl, and a bat flies across a green moon. And there’s all this creepy horror music. It was only a few blocks from my new apartment. The first night I went, I arrived at nine o’clock, an hour before closing. You entered through the garage. I hadn’t taken one step in the place before a monster rat crossed my path. It scurried over to the loading dock, where the moving trucks were parked. I wanted to leave right then and there, but instead I got my key card from the front desk.
The fourth floor was completely silent. It looked like a haunted, abandoned psych ward or something—white on white, aisle after aisle of doors! There were barely any lights on. The only lights flickered along with me as I walked—motion detectors. (Or a poltergeist. Who knows?) Finally, I found my unit. The door was huge. And I really, really did not want to open it.
Maybe it won’t be that bad, I thought. Right.
I took a deep breath and unlocked the door. Creaaakkk. And there it was: the mouse apartment. Crammed up to the ceiling in trash bags and boxes.
I can’t handle this, I thought immediately.
. . . without Adderall. My addiction finished the thought for me.
But it was just a thought. Teflon mind. Nothing sticks. I closed my eyes and let it pass by me like a cloud in the sky, just like I learned at Silver Hill. Then I shook my head for a second. Then I got to work.
Needless to say, the reality of my prerehab life in the mouse apartment was way scarier than any storage facility could ever be. I went through bin after bin of junk: glass stems, an orange Hermès box full of drug baggies. My mom hadn’t even thrown out all of the empty pill bottles I’d been hoarding in the crisper drawers of my refrigerator. There were shredded T-shirts and stained dresses. Had I not noticed how dirty my clothes were? Had I worn them in this condition to work? Everything reeked of stale cigarette smoke and the fragrance diffusers I’d used to cover up the dead-things-in-the-wall smell.
To my mom’s credit, every magazine was there—crates and crates of them. And all of my papers! I’d begged my mother to save those, too. There were papers, papers, and more papers. I’d been such a tweaker—like a hamster. My entire apartment had been wallpapered. It had looked so shamefully crazy toward the end that I hadn’t let anyone up.
Well, except for Marco.
I suppose it’s time to introduce you to him, isn’t it?
* * *
One morning in late spring—this was postmouse, prerehab—I was in Tompkins Square Park chewing Bubble Yum and lugging around dirty shopping bags full of Gavin McInnes–era Vice magazines I’d bought off Craigslist.
“Cat?”
I turned. The kid who’d said my name was tall and great-looking, with spiky white-blond hair. He was wearing a shredded T-shirt spotted with what looked like bloodstains.
“Marco!” I said.
I hadn’t seen him since I lived on the Upper East Side. We weren’t close friends or anything: back then, we’d merely had a mutually beneficial “business” relationship of sorts.
Can you spot me 15 Addys until I see my shrink on Monday? I’d text him once every few months or so.
Come through, he’d write back. Marco was an Adderall habitué, too; he was also deep into benzos. Neither of us took our medications as prescribed, and our respective supplies always got too low, too soon—though usually not at the same time. Marco and I would have each other’s back.
I’d swing by. Marco lived across the park with his girlfriend, Sylvia, who was lanky, pale, and half-dead looking. He had studied sculpture. He was an RISD dropout, and talented, and he now worked in every medium. Sometimes he showed me his crazy sketches of girls with sharp weapons in their asses and ball gags in their mouths. We’d talk a little and he’d spot me the fifteen pills to get through the week. As soon as I got my next script, I’d pay him back. Then when Marco was inevitably short himself a week or two later, I’d spot him until his next doctor’s appointment. We never screwed each other over. Pillhead honor code.
We’d continued this arrangement for years. Then I’d moved downtown and forgotten that Marco existed—and here he was, in Tompkins Square Park. He and Sylvia had broken up, he told me.
“Some shit went down.” He shrugged. “Where are you living these days?”
“Around the corner,” I said. “But I don’t bring anyone up there. It’s too crazy.”
“Oh, come on,” Marco said.
Fuck it, I thought. I was lonely.
I took him home and up to the fifth floor.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” I said.
We stepped inside. The whole place was wallpapered. Probably half of the clothing I owned was on the floor. Artforum, and vintage Hustler and Lui magazines spilled out of the oven. Art books were all over the bed. There were nightclub matchbooks and coke bags everywhere, and Make Up For Ever glitter pots and La Prairie sunscreen and on and on. Plastic rosaries were dangling in all the doorways to keep mice away. False eyelashes that I’d pulled off and tossed aside danced in the corner (I still kept the mouse fans on—just in case) like spiders. The seashells I used as ashtrays overflowed with lipstick-stained Marlboro Ultra Lights butts.
Marco’s jaw dropped.
“This is amazing!”
“What?!” I said.
“You’re so creative!” Marco marveled as he walked around, taking it all in. “Cat! I had no idea!”
“No I’m not.” I laughed. “I’m just messy.” And yet . . . through Marco’s
eyes, I saw all of the things I hated about myself differently for the first time. We stayed up all night, talking and talking. It was as easy to be with him as it was to be alone. Maybe it was all the prescription speed we were both on, but it was also what happens when you find a true friend.
At dawn, he showed me how his “breakup” had made it into the newspapers: he had broken into Sylvia’s building.
“Hilarious!” I said.
* * *
We started hanging out all the time. He lived near me, deep in the Lower East Side, where the subways didn’t run. It was a foul block, but perfect for Marco. He shared a terrifying lair with five or six other people. The kitchen and bathroom were exceedingly unclean, and his bedroom was cramped and crazy: full of meticulously organized collections of glassine heroin bags (we both kept them for the stamps), pills, sketchbooks, filthy designer clothes, and an expensive Apple laptop computer on which he obsessively chronicled his life. We’d sit in there stoned on morphine pills that Marco’s Section 8 friends had stolen from their grandmas. Marco didn’t have a heroin connect right then, he told me, but he was working on one.
“Amazing,” I said. I’d always loved the dope game. I’d give him my parents’ money to go out and buy us crack.
Marco never had a cent, and his fingernails were black. I never felt tired when I was with him, no matter how little we’d slept. He was the only other person I’d ever met who would stay up multiple nights in a row collaging his walls, then pass out in a bed piled with paper scraps and garbage. I did it every weekend! And now I had someone to do it with.
After a day of working in Times Square and riding the elevator with Lauren Santo Domingo–types or God knows who, I would come home to my apartment, where he was doing my drugs, looking through all my drawers, waiting for me.
“You have the greatest stuff!” he’d tell me.
“Thanks!” I’d say, then join him on the floor. “What are you looking at?” We’d drink warm Veuve Clicquot that a lovely Herbal Essences PR rep had sent and look through my Richard Kern and Juergen Teller books. I’d give him Smashbox eyeliner to put on like Keith Richards. Then Marco would take pictures of himself. He rarely took any of me. But what did I need photos of myself for?
I started rediscovering the city with my new buddy. We took walks through downtown all night long, passing a bottle of red Gatorade spiked with Ketel One back and forth. Marco would scribble his signature on walls with a drippy Krink marker and look at his reflection in all the windows. Sometimes we bought pink rubber balls from the deli—the kind kids played handball with—and we’d bounce those as we walked and walked and talked and talked and walked . . .
“At Sally Hershberger Downtown there’s a Bert Stern Marilyn with the X, you see, that she did herself with a marker, and she was so drunk in the photos that Bert Stern thought he could have sex with her . . . and there’s a Warhol Edie,” I would tell him. Bounce, bounce, bounce. “From a screen test. And there’s the Jane Fonda mug shot, and she’s got this perfect mullet and she’s holding up her fist . . .”
Oh, Marco and I taught each other so much! He told me you could buy syringes as easy as 1-2-3 just by asking for them all la-di-da at the pharmacy counter. I told him about my favorite drugstores that were twenty-four-hour. He showed me how to smoke weed out of a glass stem by stuffing it with steel wool as a filter, and he taught me about Pete Doherty (I will always be indebted to him for this) and Babyshambles and the Libertines, and he played me Guns N’ Roses Live at the Ritz.
Marco told me stories, too. He starred in all of them.
“One time I went in there . . .” he said, pointing at the restaurant Lucky Strike. “And went up to the bar and demanded a Pellegrino.” He cackled. “And they just gave it to me!” He was arrogant and flamboyant with his punky haircut he’d given himself, and his shredded jeans. He was exceptionally tall, like an NBA player.
One night when we were strolling through Chelsea, he stopped in his tracks.
“I can’t walk here,” he said. “It’s Sylvia’s block.”
“Okay . . .” I said. She had a restraining order against him. I didn’t think anything of it.
Marco was always doing funny stuff. One day at four in the morning, he sort of grabbed my chin and said, “Open your mouth.” I did, like a baby bird. “Swallow.”
It was an ecstasy pill—not Adderall!
“Marco!” I should have thrown it up. Instead, I laughed. I started rolling just as the sun was rising. I went to work, grinding my teeth in the cab. I was supposed to film a beauty tutorial video for luckymag.com that day called LUCKY How-To: Mastering the Face-Framing Braid. I sat cross-legged on the floor and tried to practice for the video, but . . . I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t French braid my hair. I was too high.
“Dude!” Cristina said when I told her. Charlotte—who was now a freelancer at Lucky—sat for the video shoot instead.
Oh. I was so happy to have a friend! I talked about Marco all the time. I showed Jean a picture on my desktop computer.
“Isn’t he good-looking?” I said.
“Hmm.” Marco was leering in the photo. His chest was bare.
“This is his shirt!” I was wearing a striped polo. “Dior Homme Hedi Slimane!”
“You need to be careful,” Jean said.
“I really love you, Cat,” Marco said one night. He was watching me apply my new favorite lipstick—YSL Rouge Volupté no. 17—in a compact. “I’m serious.”
“I love you, too!” I said. Then I gave him an oversize Swarovski black-crystal snake ring that looked like it was slithering up his finger. The first time I got a nosebleed in front of him he took my face in his hands and sucked the blood out of my nostrils. I shrieked and struggled and tried to pull away.
“We’re really family now,” he said when he’d finished. I laughed for three days. It would be almost two years before I understood what I was really dealing with. That was Marco.
* * *
And now it was October, and Marco was calling all of the time, wanting to catch up and check out my new place. I hadn’t seen him since before I left for rehab.
“You can’t come over yet,” I told him on the phone. “I’m still getting to know my roommates.” He was too wild. Also, I didn’t need him leading me into temptation. I was Cat 2.0, remember? Well, sort of.
“I’ll have a margarita,” I told the waiter at a packed Mexican restaurant on Jane Street. I was at dinner with my new roommate, Becky, who was blond, cute, and from Chicago. We talked about guys and about our jobs; I told her nothing about my past. I felt so healthy sitting there eating an enchilada with a girlfriend! So when Becky ordered a drink, I didn’t hesitate to order one, too. This is how normal people live, I thought, swirling my straw in the glass. Then I took my first sip of alcohol in over two months, and it didn’t feel like a “relapse” at all.
By ten o’clock, I was sloshed after just a few drinks. Shitfaced! That was unusual for me. It was probably because my tolerance was low after rehab, but back then, I blamed this on being pill free. When I took Adderall, I figured—as I stumbled home—I could down vodka all night and still be bright-eyed at four in the morning when the clubs closed! But without it, I was a messy drunk. That wasn’t going to do.
On the evening of October sixth, my magazine celebrated the publication of The Lucky Guide to Mastering Any Style at the Bowery Hotel. Like many of my coworkers, I was even in the book (not by choice), wearing a French ingenue–meets–rock ’n’ roll getup: a boatneck striped top and Daryl K rubber leggings. Yes, rubber leggings.
My book party outfit was much better. I borrowed a violet silk slip dress from the fashion closet. The editorial assistants had been allowed to duck out of work early and go downtown together, before the bosses. When we arrived at the hotel, the fete had barely started. There was an open bar. Two of them! I went to the one in the back, where no one would be able to s
ee me before I saw them, and started drinking.
By eight o’clock, the party was bumping. I saw everyone arrive: JGJ walked in with Kim and Andrea Linett, Lucky’s creative director (it was she who had styled me in the rubber pants). Charlotte was there, since she’d written the book. Charlotte’s mom was there. I’d never met her. Gee, didn’t they look—
“MISS!” Suddenly someone was upon me—whipping my back and head! “YOU’RE ON FIRE! YOU’RE ON FIRE!”
“WHAT?” I shrieked, twisting to see. “AAAAUGH!”
My hair was on fire! And a bartender was beating me with a dishrag. Then, just as fast, it was out. Oh my God.
I looked around wildly. Jean Godfrey-June and Kim France hadn’t seen. They were all on the other side of the room! No one had seen, actually. I’d been behind a potted tree.
“Ugh,” girls were saying now. “It smells like burnt hair!”
“Are you all right?” The bartender caught my elbow.
“Yes.” I nodded—but then I stumbled a bit.
Oh boy. It was time to go home. I walked right out of the party without saying good-bye to anyone, hailed a taxi, and slid into the backseat.
“Seventh Avenue South and Bedford,” I told the driver. Then I put my head in my hands. How drunk must I have been, to lean my hair back into an . . . an open flame—and then to not notice until a bartender started slapping me with a towel?
We were heading across town on West Third Street.
This never would have happened if you were still on speed, a flea in my ear whispered.
The cab pulled up to my building.
“You know what?” I said. “Can you take me a little further down? Varick and Vandam. The Manhattan Mini Storage.”
It was past nine. The facility closed at ten. I went up to my floor and opened my storage unit.
I had been careful to only pull out a few boxes at a time on previous visits. But tonight I went in hard; I filled the hallway. The man downstairs kept making “last call” announcements over the intercom, but I didn’t care. At five minutes to ten, I found what I was looking for: a Marc Jacobs silver sleeping bag, rolled up and stuffed into a silver pouch. And inside that, stuffed down at the bottom: one bottle of amphetamine salts, thirty milligrams, almost full to the top, and one bottle of Adderall XR—time-release speed. I’d stashed them before I left for rehab—while my father was asleep on the couch.