How to Murder Your Life

by Cat Marnell

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, I was in the backseat of a cab heading to East Twenty-Third Street. It was still raining.

  “Five F, please,” I said to the doorman. “Cat.” He gave me a funny look, but he made the call—then he nodded. I went up to the fifth floor and down the hall. Then I opened Trevor’s unlocked door.

  “Hey!” Trevor greeted me. He was sitting on his black leather sofa, rolling a joint on his Stanley Kubrick coffee table book. Marco was passed out with his boots on, lying on his back on the bed across the room. There was a giant black duffel bag—honestly, it was as big as me—right there in the foyer by my feet.

  “Is this Marco’s?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Trevor said. “Why?”

  Well. You know what I did! I scooped that bitch up by the straps and heaved it over my shoulders.

  “Hey!” Trevor yelled. “What are you doing?” I didn’t answer—I just sprinted right the hell out of there and all the way to the elevator. It took a minute to arrive—the longest minute ever.

  Trevor came running down the hall in his pajama bottoms and a dirty wifebeater.

  “You can’t do that!” he was yelling. “You’re stealing from my apartment—”

  “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME, TREVOR!” I screamed. “THIS DOESN’T INVOLVE YOU!” The elevator pinged open. I dragged the huge duffel bag into the elevator like a leopard pulling a carcass into a cave.

  “STOP!” Trevor was bugging. “I’LL CALL THE—” Lucky for him, the doors closed before he could get to me. I was ready to claw out his eyes! My heart was going a million miles a minute. (Sorry to keep using that same clichéd expression—but this is an amphetamine memoir.)

  It was pouring outside. I hustled to the curb and hailed a cab on Third Avenue. I hauled my cargo into the backseat and smooshed in along with it.

  “DRIVE!” I screamed—for the second time that evening—as I slammed the door shut. “ANYWHERE! A MAN IS AFTER ME!” The driver stepped on the gas.

  Trevor was calling my cell over and over. I ignored him and unzipped the bag. The first thing I saw was the Lanvin tote that Jean had given me. Marco knew it was my prized possession. That soulless piece of shit.

  I dug deeper. There was my Robert Wilson for Louis Vuitton neon-green-and-orange Vernis tote bag. There was my mom’s Fendi chinchilla baguette.

  I looked up and saw that we were on one of my favorite blocks in Soho.

  “This is good, sir!” I told the driver. He pulled over. I paid and tossed my stuff out onto the sidewalk. Then I sat in a doorway with everything, out of the rain, and got to work. There were plastic grocery bags in Marco’s duffel, and I filled them with my things—and anything of his that I wanted. Screw him, right?

  When I was through, the duffel was only half-full. I put it on my back and trudged up the street until I came to the back entrance of the Crosby Hotel, which has a big ledge and a sunken wall of shrubs and what I thought was a hidden Dumpster (it’s actually a handicapped elevator shaft).

  Only then did I finally answer one of Marco’s calls.

  “Cat!” he cried. “Thank God!” He was panicking. Nothing mattered to Marco more than his stuff. “Where are you? I’m not mad—”

  “FUCK YOU!” I shrieked. “HOW DOES IT FEEL, YOU FUCKING BITCH?! HOW DOES IT FEEL?!”

  “Where are you?” Marco was begging me. “Please. What are you doing with my stuff?”

  “I’M ON THE WEST SIDE HIGHWAY!” I screamed. “I JUST THREW YOUR STUFF INTO THE HUDSON RIVER!”

  “What?” Marco said. “No—”

  I hung up. Marco kept calling me. I didn’t answer. I just continued walking up Lafayette Street in the rain. The streets were empty. I gazed up at all of the nice, brightly lit apartments full of normal people cooking pork tenderloin or whatever normal people cook. Then I sat down on a stoop to light a cigarette. My hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t strike a match. And I just lost it. I started crying hysterically. What the hell was I doing? I couldn’t believe what I’d done over the past twenty-four hours. Was this really my life? I was as bad as Marco.

  He was still calling. I picked up.

  “YOUR STUFF IS IN THE GARBAGE BEHIND THE CROSBY HOTEL!” I yelled—but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. “THAT’S THE LAST NICE THING I’M EVER DOING FOR YOU.” I hung up on him once again. Then I looked at the sky for a long time.

  It was Friday night. I went home, had my locks changed, and went to sleep. On Monday, I called in sick to work. On Tuesday, I called in sick. On Wednesday, I was in such bad shape at work that the magazine contacted my family. Later that day, my dad drove four hours up from DC to talk me into going away for treatment again. On Thursday, I promised Jean that I was checking into a hospital. I was put on disability leave from Condé Nast. But I just went to bed at home instead. On Friday, Jean e-mailed me and called me, telling me that if I didn’t check in somewhere, she would have to fire me. On Friday evening, I got out of bed, gathered a bunch of beauty products into a plastic bag, and took a taxi to the mental hospital.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I ARRIVED AT PAYNE WHITNEY Psychiatric Clinic at New York-­Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center looking like I’d just walked in from sucking dick on Skid Row in black Minnetonkas, a shredded Misfits T-shirt, and neon-pink streaks in my ratty hair courtesy of a temporary color product (that all you blondes out there must try) called Streekers.

  “Put on one of these,” the nurse said, handing over a paper jumpsuit. She put my street clothes in the same kind of brown shopping bag they used in the Lucky fashion closet. She even confiscated my bra! (It was chilly on the unit, too.) Then I was released into the pen.

  Payne Whitney! The spacious, coed psych ward was on the sixth floor of the hospital. The women’s bedrooms were on one side, and the men’s were across the way. In between were sofas, chairs, coffee tables, and magazine racks—and, of course, the nurse’s station. The south side of the wing had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. You could see the Pepsi sign in Long Island City, and Silvercup Studios, where they filmed Sex and the City and 30 Rock. I particularly dug watching the Roosevelt Island tram go back and forth over the river like a theme park ride.

  “Blondie.” A little group of Latino guys heckled me the first day. I crossed my arms over my chest. Those dudes were just annoying, but the tall guy on the sofa gave me real predator vibes. He kept making eye contact with me—and his eyes were crazy—and looking me up and down. In the words of Cher Horowitz: “Ugh, as if!”

  I couldn’t sleep the first night without my pills, but for once my rebound insomnia was a blessing. I was lying in the dark wide awake at one in the morning when a large man slipped silently into my room with a white blanket wrapped around his head like a turban. I thought I was hallucinating again, but no. It was the scary guy—I’ll call him the Predator—right there in my hospital room. And he’d come for me when he thought I would be sleeping!

  “AHHHH!” I jumped out of bed and dashed past the Predator and into the common area. “HELP!” The night nurse came running. She hadn’t seen the Predator cross the dark corridor.

  The Predator was confined to his room after that. A staffer guarded his door 24/7. Still, I was so shook that I never slept with the lights off in my room again. Stupid men! Why were they all so horny?

  A few days later, I got a roommate. She had a thick Bronx accent, thicker old-school Coke-bottle glasses, and an anxiety disorder that made her tremble like a tuning fork. She liked that I kept the lights on; she was too nervous to sleep, anyway. I’d wake up at three in the morning and she’d be sawing at apples with a plastic knife on a paper-towel cutting board.

  “Did I wake you?” she’d say.

  “It’s okay,” I’d mumble.

  We shared a bathroom with a strange, weak shower that only ran for fifteen seconds at a time. You had to pr
ess a button over and over to keep the water going. (I don’t even know why. So you couldn’t . . . drown?!)

  “Sorry to bother you,” my roommate said on the fourth day. I was combing out my wet hair with one of those black plastic combs that grandpas use. “But did you just use something with chlorine in there?”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Chlorine,” she repeated. “I just can’t stand the smell of chlorine!”

  “Uh,” I said. “I washed my hair with shampoo.” (Davines NouNou, FYI.)

  “I guess your shampoo smells like chlorine,” my roommate said.

  “Yes.” I nodded. “I guess so.”

  The showers were so weak that the pink hardly washed out of my hair like it was supposed to. One day I was eating lunch when I noticed a nurse staring at me. She beckoned me over.

  “Ms. Marnell,” she said. “Have you been dipping your hair in your fruit juice?”

  This was a serious question.

  “Oh no!” I said. “It’s a beauty product! Called Streekers!” She was not feeling me. “I’m a beauty editor. At a fashion magazine.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” the nurse said.

  “There’s always a beauty moment,” Jean Godfrey-June used to say. And it’s really true—even in the mental hospital.

  * * *

  The best part of the day was . . . breakfast! It was brought up on a cart from the hospital cafeteria and handed out on trays.

  “Marnell,” an orderly would say, and I’d leap up like I was a contestant on The Price Is Right. I can still smell the fresh-baked hot bagels that came wrapped in foil. Mmm. I’d rip off pieces and dip them into a little plastic tub of Philadelphia cream cheese and just savor every bite. It was the best food I’d ever tasted (even though it wasn’t) because I was suddenly off my appetite suppressants.

  We ate in a little room with windows overlooking the East River.

  “Newwww YYYYYOOOOORKKKKK . . .” The radio—Z100 or something—was always on the boom box in there. That Jay Z/Alicia Keys song had just come out. It played every hour.

  I’d sit and watch the boats out of the dining room window for a while. Then I had ten hours to kill before bedtime. There wasn’t much to do. I hadn’t brought a book, but I found one of my faves, Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama, in the tiny library. I still have that copy today, stamped “PROPERTY OF PAYNE WHITNEY.” And there was this enormous black poodle that got walked around sometimes. It was extremely glamorous and fluffy and we all got to pet it: animal therapy. I’ve never truly connected with a poodle, though. Like . . . on an emotional level. Have you?

  I also watched the television mounted on the wall. It was all Animal Planet, all the time. I sat through hours and hours of big cats!

  “Solo cheetahs often live lives of solitary desperation . . .”

  The people watching was way better. Almost every day, a patient named Anne would interrupt our TV time when she lost it and got taken to seclusion.

  “This isn’t your hospital!” Anne—who was eight months pregnant—would screech at a nurse. “You don’t own it! You’re hired help!” Orderlies would surround her. “You need seclusion! Not me!”

  “Warthogs, too, are ferocious, and hardly ever on the menu . . .” the Animal Planet narrator droned on.

  A week into my stay, I made a friend. Her name was Veronica, and she had wrist-to-elbow self-mutilation scars: “punk jewelry,” as someone called them in a book I read once. Veronica looked twelve, but she was sixteen—and a mother! Her cute baby son was at home with her grandma in the Bronx. We’d drag a sofa to the wall of windows overlooking the East River. I told her about Marco and working in magazines, and she told me what it was like being a teen mom and also her thoughts on MTV’s Teen Mom.

  Veronica had been on the unit for months, so she was used to the pervy guys.

  “Get away, freak!” she’d snap every time one neared us. This cracked me up. Everything was suddenly very entertaining now that I had a girlfriend. Plus, she loaned me a sports bra.

  There was one dude whom we never sent away. His name was Donald. He was from Newark and addicted to smoking paint chips.

  “The doctors here keep asking me if I’m gonna go out and smoke paint chips again,” he told us. “I keep tellin’ ’em, ‘Nah.’ ’Cause they don’t make that shit like they used to!”

  Donald was always following Veronica and me around, trying to impress us with his stories.

  “I ate cat food once,” he announced one evening. We were sitting by the south-facing wall of windows with our legs propped up, watching the traffic jam on the FDR Drive.

  “Out of a can?” Veronica asked.

  “No, not out of a can!” Donald said indignantly. “From a box!”

  “Why?” Veronica said.

  “It’s cheap!” Donald said. “It’s $2.99 and you can get it from the corner store!”

  “It’s cat food!” I said.

  “It’s not like I eat it all of the time.” He was getting defensive. “Maybe once every six years or something.”

  “You’re insane,” Veronica said.

  “I tried dog food once, too,” Donald said. “But that stuff is salty. No wonder they’re barking all the time. They have high blood pressure!”

  “What are you talking about?” Veronica said. I couldn’t stop laughing. Then the three of us sat peacefully for a minute, watching the city get dark and electric. It was almost dinnertime.

  “It’s not expensive being a cat,” Donald said thoughtfully.

  * * *

  It was pretty cozy on that nice psych ward. I started getting up at six, before breakfast, just to pad down to the south windows and catch the sunrise. A cart came around every morning with new disposable underpants (stretchy mesh boy-shorts—so good), socks with rubbery antiskid traction pads, which I always wore inside out, and a two-piece teal paper jumpsuit for me, always.

  “You’re a flight risk.” My psychiatrist, Dr. M., would shake her head every time I asked for my street clothes. Most patients got them back after three days. “Your room is right by the door, and you’re a good talker. I see how you try to charm people.” Moi?

  I was allowed to go back to bed right after breakfast if I wanted to, and to read and nap all day. I caught up on so much sleep; it wasn’t like rehab, where I’d been expected to act like an accountable adult. Now if I sat down for an activity and it was boring, I could just wander off like a weirdo and no one would say anything.

  Yup! I decided that I could happily play Girl, Interrupted and stay a month or three. I’d claimed to be suicidal (and declined to mention my drug abuse) to get admitted. As far as everyone knew, I still was. Right?

  Wrong.

  “Do you want to die, Ms. Marnell?” Dr. M. greeted me one morning. Her usual posse was right on her heels. (Taylor Swift–like, Dr. M. often rolled with a squad—but of medical students, not Hadid sisters.)

  “Uh,” I said. I was on my bed reading Ebony’s “Black Cool” issue—the one with President Obama looking fierce in shades on the cover. “No?”

  “I have your drug test results.”

  “Oh?” I said. “Really?” Fuck. I’d forgotten about the urine sample I’d given in the ER.

  “You’re positive for opiates, amphetamine, cocaine, and benzodiazepines.” She double-checked the chart. “And marijuana.”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “That’s quite a cocktail,” Dr. M. said. “Why didn’t you tell me that you’re an addict?”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I’m depressed.”

  “I’m going to keep observing you,” Dr. M. said. “But I am diagnosing you with polysubstance addiction, and I want you to know that it is my intention to place you in a rehab facility as soon as possible.”

  “I’m not going to rehab,” I said with a smile.

  “That’s not up to you,” Dr. M. sa
id. Then she exited, her squad at her heels.

  A few days later, she was back.

  “I’ve been watching you,” Dr. M. said. “You’re not suicidal. You’re not even depressed.” I had been pretty chipper lately. Must have been all those naps.

  “Okay . . .” I said.

  “It’s time to get you out of here,” Dr. M. said.

  “You’re discharging me?” I said.

  “To an inpatient rehab,” she said. “And I’m recommending that you stay at least thirty days.”

  Well. I did not like that. Not when I’d just sworn up and down to Jean and Kim France that I was absolutely drug free.

  “Not gonna happen,” I said.

  “It’s not up to you,” Dr. M. said.

  “You don’t understand,” I protested. “I have to get back to work!”

  “I’m not going to discharge you unless it’s into rehab,” my doctor said.

  I thought fast.

  “I might consider going to outpatient,” I said.

  “I’m only discharging you to inpatient.”

  “This isn’t negotiable at all?” I said.

  “Nope,” Dr. M. said.

  Face-off, I thought.

  “Well, I guess I’ll be here forever then,” I said brattily. Dr. M. ignored this and turned brusquely on her heel—her signature exit—and was on her way.

  * * *

  Then it was Halloween, and there was a party. The psych ward social director propped a boom box up to the microphone in the nurse’s station. “Ghostbusters,” “Monster Mash,” and—less explicably—the Mortal Kombat theme played on repeat over the intercom system. Everyone scarfed down chocolate cupcakes with orange icing, and minibags of Doritos and candy corn from brown paper sacks with jack-o’-lantern faces cut out of them.