by Cat Marnell
When I woke up it was dark outside. My BlackBerry had frozen. (They were always doing that, right? The worst.)
It was eight o’clock on Thanksgiving.
“NO!” I screamed.
I restarted the phone and all of the messages flooded in. My sister had sat at the restaurant, crying and crying. Then she finally had gone home. I found all this out from my mother—because Emily wasn’t talking to me. I’d called my sister over and over and left a dozen messages. No response.
“How could you do that, Caitlin?” my mom said. She sounded disgusted—and my mom never sounded like she cared about anything. This was really bad. I felt sick.
I was sitting on the floor in the dark with my head in my hands when Marco called. He wasn’t with his family, either.
“I’m sorry, Cat,” he said, after I tearfully recounted what I’d done. “At least you and I can hang out.”
“Do you want to get dinner?” I sniffed. “I’ll pay.”
We had turkey and pumpkin pie at 7A, and then walked through Tompkins Square Park. It was practically empty—well, but for the scuttly night-rats. I held Marco’s arm.
“What are we going to do now?” I asked, though I knew the answer. I was already looking for an ATM.
We squirreled away in Marco’s apartment and snorted tiny piles of off-white heroin all night. His roommates were away. I sat on the bed in a nest of clothes and sketchbooks with my eyelids at half-mast. The smack was nice.
“Thank God I have you,” I murmured at one point, reaching out in slow motion. Marco took my hand and kissed it.
“I love you, Cat,” he said.
“I love you,” I said. Then I nodded off again.
* * *
After the Thanksgiving fiasco, my dad had guessed that I was back on drugs. He never sent me a check again. But it was cool. As associate beauty editor, my new salary was forty-six thousand. Now I could pay my own rent, and that felt really good. I mean, the timing of my promotion had been sort of perfect.
I’d been killer at managing Jean’s professional life, but now that I was an editor with lots of freedom and work obligations outside of 4 Times Square, how would I manage my own? If you’ve been reading this book, I think you know the answer, but back then I was in serious denial. Sure, I had problems . . . but this was what I’d worked so hard for, right? The trips! The glamour! The perks! Surely I wouldn’t fuck everything up now.
I was about to find out. My first press trip was right in the beginning of the Christmas season, and it was a doozy. Procter & Gamble—“the largest advertiser in the world,” per WWD—owned the beauty licenses for Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana, and they were flying editors to Rome and then Milan to fete launches from both brands. Eva Chen was going. The beauty director of Vogue, Sarah Brown, was, too. So was Elle’s beauty director, Emily Dougherty. And so on.
Representing Lucky: one Cat Marnell.
I’d be out of the office a full week.
“Are you excited?” Simone asked.
“Yes!” I said. It was Monday, and I was leaving on Friday. I’d already gone to Tokio 7 and blown two hundred dollars on a velvet Gucci baby-doll dress with floaty chiffon sleeves to wear to the Gucci party.
I spent the next few nights dressing up in the mirror, my suitcase open on the floor.
On Thursday morning, I was at my desk reading TMZ and eating a high-protein Condé cafeteria breakfast even though I hardly had an appetite. My Addy was kicking in, you know, and—
“Dude!” Cristina cried. She’d just arrived. “What are you doing here?! Why aren’t you at the airport?”
I swallowed my bite of turkey sausage and sort of blinked at her a few times.
“Huh?” I said.
“You’re supposed to be flying to Rome today!”
“What?” I said. “I am?!”
“Yes!”
I thought about this.
“But today . . .” I said, “is Thursday!”
“Yes!” Cristina said. “Today is Thursday! Your flight is today!”
“Really?!” I said.
“YES!” Cristina said. And this is what it is like working with a pillhead.
I raced home. Sure enough, a black Lincoln Town Car was waiting outside of 29 Seventh Avenue South. I tapped frantically on the window.
“I’ll be down in fifteen!” I shouted. Yeah, right.
Upstairs, I completely fell apart. I couldn’t find matching shoes; I couldn’t put outfits together. Worst of all, I couldn’t find my Xanax or my Ambien. I shook out the sheets; I dug through the piles. Finally, I left without them. Have you ever heard the thing about pillheads—that if you really want to see their addictions, just take their pills away? Yeah, this was gonna be bad.
* * *
JFK was an inferno of holiday travelers, and once I got there I had no idea where to go or what to do. I didn’t even know what airline I was flying. I sat down on my suitcase and took out my BlackBerry, but I couldn’t access my Condé e-mail from it. I called Cristina repeatedly, but she wasn’t answering. I was going to miss my flight. I was going to be in such deep trouble. I can’t do this. I can’t handle this. I couldn’t go to Italy. It was all too much.
Finally I got Cristina. By then, Jean was in the office.
“Dude,” she whispered—protecting me, as usual. The senior beauty editor was the associate’s immediate supervisor, so I reported to Cristina now, not to Jean. I’d only just been promoted and I’d already exploited her kindness and put her in a fucked-up position like seven different times. “Calm down. You can do this.”
Cristina had gone over to my computer and found my itinerary. When JGJ stepped away, she called me back and told me to run to the Delta first-class counter.
“You’re not going to make it,” the agent told me. No surprise there.
But now what? I wove back into the throngs and sat on my suitcase again. I took my third Adderall of the day. Whatever was next, I wanted to be high for it.
“Dude,” Cristina said when I broke the news. “Okay. I’m calling PR.”
Twenty minutes later, I had another flight—Air Italia, coach. Of course I made that one. The plane was nuts—even worse than the airport—with demented babies, canoodling teens, and a garrulous Italian pilot babbling on the intercom. I didn’t sleep the whole nine hours; when we landed, I was un disastro. Thank God for town cars. I practically fell into mine.
I felt better when I got to the Hotel Eden, though. It sat atop a hill, and the view from my suite was just glorious. I had time before the Gucci party, so I decided to go for a stroll. I’d never been to Rome. It’s a rather walkable city—especially if one is on Vyvanse—and so I had a nice time navigating the winding streets in the rain. Plus, there was great shopping—rosaries everywhere! I had to bring a few back to Marco. I stopped at a Bancomat machine by the Fontana di Trevi to take out some cash. Tra la la. It was lovely to be in Europe; I hadn’t been there since high school, and gee, look at those pigeons—
INSUFFICIENT FUNDS, YOU SPOILED IDIOT DRUG ADDICT FUCKING RETARD LOSER BRAT, the Bancomat screamed at me. GO THROW YOURSELF IN THE RIVER.
No, no, no.
I checked my balance: negative eighteen hundred dollars.
“FUCK!” I shrieked at the pigeons. How was this possible? My head spun like a slot machine, remembering the shopping spree before Dawn’s wedding, cash I’d laid out for Dr. X., cash I’d given Marco to buy drugs—and, of course, my sixteen-hundred-dollar rent check. So much for self-sufficiency.
I was going to be traveling for a week. What was I going to do? I couldn’t call my parents. Those days were over.
There was only one person I could think of.
“Darlin’?” Mimi accepted the collect call. She was living in Charlottesville, near the University of Virginia. “Caty? Is it really you?” I hadn’t spoken to her in over a year.
“Mimi!” I wailed into a pay-phone receiver. “Mimi, I need your help. I’m all the way over in Europe, I am all alone and I have no money! I am negative two thousand dollars in the bank!” I started crying. “I’m at a pay phone in the middle of Rome. All by myself!” Liar. “I don’t know what to do. I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO!”
“I’ll go to the bank right now!” Mimi said.
“Thank you,” I wept. “I love you so much.” Asshole.
Mimi really did rush right out: she wired me three thousand dollars within the hour. I’d frightened my eighty-one-year-old grandmother to—well, not quite to death. But surely a little closer to it.
* * *
Gucci headquarters was in a gargantuan sixteenth-century palazzo just across the river Tiber from the fabulous Castel Sant’Angelo. If that sentence sounds like it was lifted directly from the Internet, well—bingo. I barely remember anything about this party. That’s how out to lunch I was. At one point I felt so wobbly that I had to lean against a big pillar! I also remember an awkward chat with Gucci’s foxy blond creative director, Frida Giannini; she didn’t seem to particularly speak English and at that point I barely did either.
Next up was a sit-down dinner. The editors at my table were from the best magazines from all over the world. A healthier me would have been on cloud nine, but I just wanted to crawl into one of the chic bottles of bubbly Italian mineral water on the table and drown.
The American editors returned to the Hotel Eden and said our good nights. When we got to the hotel I was so drunk that I thought maybe I’d actually sleep—especially since I hadn’t on the flight from New York—but instead I just lay awake feeling agitated, clammy, and anxious. I’d left my sleeping pills and Xanax behind, remember? So now I had “rebound insomnia,” which was ninety thousand times worse than the insomnia I had in the first place. I couldn’t have dozed off for a million dollars. I took baths and did deep-breathing exercises in bed. Nothing worked.
By three in the morning, I was freaking out—screaming inside. I wasn’t used to being so uncomfortable and helpless. In New York, I would have been at the twenty-four-hour Rite Aid, buying Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Pop-Tarts, and Powerade.
Then I did something that I absolutely should not have done: picked up the phone and ordered binge foods—expensive binge foods—from room service. This wasn’t specifically forbidden or anything, but . . . you just don’t do that on a press trip. Especially on a press trip with a major advertiser! I was representing Jean and Lucky, Procter & Gamble were paying for the room, and the publicists would see the bill when we checked out. I’d already missed my first-class flight; ordering a bunch of room service was just . . . a bad look. I knew all this. But I ordered pizza, tiramisu, and a pastry basket anyway. I was hoping to spike my blood sugar and then come crashing down and into sleep—an old “trick” of mine.
Yeah, right. After I binged and purged, I picked up the phone again—I was in a half-hypnotized state, truly—and ordered room service again: a cheese and charcuterie plate, a basket of bread, another tiramisu. Another order came up on another rolling tray. I threw all that up, too. By then it was six in the morning and all of the alcohol had worn off. I took two Vyvanse and started packing up my stuff. We were all going to the airport together and flying to Milan. At nine, I met the other editors in the lobby. The publicists were at the front desk, checking out. I wanted to disappear. But no one looked at me funny; no one said anything. At least, not to my face.
* * *
The Hotel Principe di Savoia was magnificent, but I blew that Popsicle stand the second we checked in and hit the streets. It was hailing in Milan. While the other beauty editors had afternoon tea, I slogged through the icy-cold rain, looking for lit-up green crosses. There were—I knew—farmacias everywhere: elegant little shops you had to be buzzed into, not big drugstores like in the States. It didn’t take long to find one. I stood and rang the doorbell outside. I was wearing leather Goldsign jeans, Nike Dunk Lows, and a soaking-wet white fox fur coat. It was freezing. Why weren’t they letting me in?
BZZZZZ. Finally! I burst inside. I looked for something like Tylenol PM or NyQuil, but didn’t see it. I went to the counter. There were two people working in the pharmacy.
“I need medicine for sleep, medicina,” I said. “Please.”
The farmacistas stared at me.
“For sleep, for sleep.” I made a pillow with my hands like a little Hallmark Store angel. “Please. Sleeping pills. Tranquilizers.”
“Americano?” the woman said rather . . . snidely.
“Si,” I said. I mean, what did that have to do with anything?
The male pharmacist gave me the ol’ Italian stink eye, but the woman came down from behind the counter. She led me to a wall of herbal sleep supplements. Everything was in cute packaging, like beauty products.
“Thees,” she said. “Melatonia.”
“Oh, um, grazie,” I said. Yeah, that wasn’t gonna cut it.
“Okay?” the pharmacist said.
I pointed behind the counter.
“Do you have Valium?” I said. Wasn’t Valium over the counter in some parts of the world? Maybe not. “Or cough syrup?” Then, as an afterthought, I fake-coughed: Cough.
“No,” she said coldly.
Fine. Stupid Europe! I grabbed every incarnation of shitty melatonia in the joint—tablets, gel caps, powders in capsules—and brought it all up to the register. God knows how much I paid. It didn’t matter. I knew none of it was gonna work.
* * *
The next night, at the Dolce & Gabbana party, I got a smooch on both cheeks from either Dolce or Gabbana—I do not know which one, but he was very tan and smelled predictably fantastic. It was another glittering cocktail reception. I sipped white wine. There was more to drink at the sit-down dinner, which felt more like a wedding reception. It was a huge party—so many guests! The dining room was decadent and dazzling—no overhead lighting, just ten thousand candles, and exotic flowers spilled on every table. This time I actually knew someone at mine: Eva Chen—the Eva Chen—was seated next to me.
I actually had something to talk to her about. Charlotte had attended Eva’s wedding over the summer and had shown me the photos when she visited me at Silver Hill.
“Congratulations on getting married!” I said. I was a little toasted. “Charlotte showed me the pictures over the summer . . .”
“Oh, she did?” Eva said. She was still the beauty director at Teen Vogue. I’d never forgotten how kind she was when I interviewed there. Which may explain—along with my usual excuse, sleep deprivation—what happened next.
“Yes,” I said. “When—when—” Don’t. “When she visited me . . . in rehab!”
Then I started blubbering—right there at the table, into my glam risotto.
“Cat,” Eva said, putting her fork down. She reached out and touched my shaking arm. “Are you okay?”
“It’s a g-g-g-ood thing you d-d-didn’t h-h-hire me,” I wept. “I’m a d-d-drug addict.” I told her everything: about forgetting my downers at home, the room service I’d ordered, how Jean didn’t know I’d relapsed, and how I’d stepped into Dawn’s job.
“It’s okay.” Eva Chen patted my back. She probably couldn’t even understand what I was saying, I was crying so hard. At least it was so fashionably dark in that dining room that no one was watching us. “Shhh.”
As the first course arrived, I went into the bathroom and cleaned the eyeliner from my cheeks. I was such a freak show. Thank God Eva was so nice.
I gorged on melatonin that night. I probably took thirty herbal pills. They did nothing except make me feel sick. I lay in the dark in my suite at the Principe di Savoia, waiting for sleep. I would have swallowed arsenic if someone had promised that it would put me under for at least a few hours—that’s how bad prolonged insomnia feels. But eventually I gave up: on sleeping, on self-control, on my car
eer, on myself. I gave up on all of it. I just fucking gave up.
This time I got prosecco—a whole bottle—plus pastries, cheese plates, pizza, and tiramisu. The bill would be . . . God, I don’t know. A hundred and fifty euros? Two hundred? I couldn’t stop. I knew that I should quit my job when I got back to New York. And I was so fucked up that I didn’t care. I was wearing a purple silk slip and I kept taking it off to vomit in the marble bathroom. When I’d emptied my stomach of the first giant room service order, I called and ordered it again. It was so sick.
The bathroom was the size of a New York studio apartment. At some point—I guess I’d gotten really drunk—I finally passed out in there. When I opened my eyes again, I was on the marble floor by the toilet in my underwear. I knew I’d slept for a few hours. Thank you, God.
I got up and put on a robe. Then I went to the window in the bedroom and peeked out the heavy hotel room curtains. Was it light out? Not yet. The sky was dark purple. Then it slowly turned into light gray. I sat there watching for a long time. I heard the Italian birds wake up.
I’m never going to be okay, I thought.
* * *
The trip had been such a disaster, but at least it was almost over. I was a wreck. I was wearing a baseball cap; my face was crazy swollen. We took cars to the airport. Then the editors waited together in the first-class terminal. I felt so uncomfortable sitting there that I got up and went to the gift shop and bought a bunch of toiletries. Then I returned to the group and . . . talked about them.
“Italy has the prettiest cotton balls!” I said shakily. “They look like cotton candy!”
A few women smiled—but just a few. I wanted to disappear.
Finally, it was time to board. I was the last person in our group to get on the plane. The cushy, gray leather seats in the first-class cabin were arranged in pairs—and the only vacant single was next to the beauty director of Vogue.