How to Murder Your Life

by Cat Marnell

  “EMILY!” I moaned from my fetal position. “EM-I-LLY!”

  “SHE’S AWAKE!” Everyone started freaking out—and banging harder than ever. BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!

  “CAITLIN!” Emily was shouting.

  “EMM-I-LLLY!” I wailed. “EMM-I-LLLY! HELP MEEE! I’m scared of the police!”

  “I’m right here!” Emily shouted. “I’M RIGHT HERE.”

  My sister pleaded with me through the door for twenty-five minutes. GRRZZZZZZZZ. BANG BANG BANG. The commotion wouldn’t stop. Finally—and after a few false starts—I reached for the bottom lock. Click. Then I flipped the top lock. Click—

  BOOM! A mob barged in and snatched me up by my ankles and my elbows. I was four feet in the air before I could even try to slump back onto the ground! It was like an episode of Lockup: Raw. Don’t worry, I handled the whole thing like a lady.

  “FUCK YOU,” I spat, and thrashed at the cops and paramedics as I twisted around in the air. “LEMME GO!” I kicked one of them. They were struggling to strap me onto a gurney. “GET OFF ME!”

  “RELAX, MA’AM!” the cops were shouting at me. “RELAX!”

  I was being wheeled into the elevator when I spotted my sister. Her face was practically purple; she was crying so hard.

  “EMILY!” I howled. She started crying harder. “EMILY! EMILY! HELP ME! EMILY!” I started thrashing around again. Two female cops were trying to hold me down. My slip was coming off. “FUCK YOU! GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME! NO! NO! EMILY! HELP ME, EMILY!” My sister was crying even harder now. They rolled me onto the elevator. “LEMME GO. FUCK YOU!” I was still struggling. “EM-IL-YYYY!” I screamed for her the whole ride. “EM-IL-YYY!”

  Ping. The elevator opened into the lobby. The paramedics rolled me out onto East Second Street. Fire trucks and police cars were everywhere: they’d closed the whole block off. The people gathered outside stared as I was put in the back of the ambulance. Suddenly, I was very tired.

  “Where am I going?” I murmured to the EMT. Then I passed out.

  I woke up the next day—for real—on a stretcher in the hallway of a psych ward. I was clammy all over, and my skin smelled bitter. I guess Xanax was coming out of my pores. I was starving, so I begged some chocolate puddings off a nurse and wolfed down three in a row. Then it was time to get out of there.

  I called my sister at her PR firm.

  “I’m in Bellevue,” I greeted her. “Long story. Can you come sign me out?”

  “I’m busy,” she said.

  “Busy?” I said. “I’m in the hospital!” She didn’t say anything. “Do you have any idea what I’ve been through in the past twenty-four hours?”

  Emily hung up.

  What’s her problem? I thought.

  But my sister came through. An hour later, I was following her out into the bright Murray Hill sunshine. She was silent as she hailed a taxi. I tried to climb into the backseat after her, but Emily slammed the door shut.

  “Wait!” I cried. “I don’t have any money!”

  The cab drove away.

  It was a long walk to Alphabet City—especially in that see-through leopard-print getup and no bra. Guys in trucks kept honking at me, and I was so thirsty. I felt pretty sick from all those pills, too. I was mad at Emily. Why was she being such a bitch? It wasn’t until I got home and stood in my hallway again that I remembered my big sister had been there the day before, screaming and screaming. Trying to save my life.

  * * *

  Marco was circling again. I could feel it. I hadn’t seen him since Payne Whitney, but he still had a key to the building—on my neon-yellow lanyard. Some nights I jerked upright in bed, convinced I heard him at my apartment door, fiddling with the lock. One day I noticed his signature in spray paint on a wall on Avenue B—right by my house. Had it always been there? A few days later, I spotted another autograph on a lamppost on my block. I felt sick—and vulnerable. It had been a mistake to steal his clothes. I was always on edge.

  It was just a few weeks after I’d landed in Bellevue, and I wasn’t sure I could handle another showdown with my ex–best friend. So when the DJ from LA—the guy who’d followed me home from that coke party, remember?—told me he was returning to New York and asked if he could crash for a few weeks, I said yes. Marco preyed on girls and wimpy gay guys (sorry, Trevor) but feared grown straight men.

  The DJ from LA arrived at four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon.

  “Why aren’t you at work?” he said. The last time he’d been in town, I’d gotten up every weekday morning and left him behind in my bed.

  “Oh,” I said. “I quit my job.” I could tell he wasn’t pleased to learn that I’d be around.

  The DJ from LA was nice enough for the first few days. He and his friend Soupy even called Marco from my phone.

  “I’m staying here now!” he barked. “And if you come around, we’ll fucking kill you!”

  “Yeah!” Soupy snarled. “We’ll kill you!” As far as I know, it worked. I didn’t see Marco again for years.

  But I had a new jerk on my hands. After a week or so, the DJ from LA started acting really awful.

  The DJ from LA was in a dark place, too—a downtown-­nightclubs and after-hours schedule. He wanted the apartment to be like a cave. So I climbed up on my radiator with a mouthful of thumbtacks and pinned up sheets and beach blankets like blackout curtains.

  “Left,” he directed me. He didn’t want a single sliver of light. “Down.” Then I stacked books and magazines on the windowsill to cover any holes. We left it like that for weeks. I couldn’t ever tell what time it was. But since I was only getting out of bed to take baths, I didn’t mind.

  He’d get in from the clubs at eight in the morning and watch the video for “Estranged” on my laptop, on the sofa in the dark, coming down on coke.

  “Alone . . .” Axl Rose would whisper through the blackness. The DJ from LA would crack open a can of beer. Sometimes he’d do bumps. All I could see was the red cherry of his cigarette. He smoked constantly, even with those sealed windows. I never said anything.

  “How was your night?” I asked one morning when he came in at eight o’clock. I was always awake when he got home—and it irritated him.

  He pretended not to hear me, even though we were in a studio, and sat down on the sofa.

  “Hello?” I said.

  He stared straight ahead.

  “Okay . . .”

  “I may be staying here, but I don’t want to talk to you,” he finally snapped. “We’re not friends. Got it?”

  But no matter how terrible the DJ from LA was, I let him stay. That’s how low my self-esteem was when I was twenty-seven and a half.

  I was zonked, anyway. My mom had given me cash to see a psychiatrist after the overdose, and I had a half dozen pill bottles on my bedside table again. Late at night, I’d take my sedative and sleeping pill and Seroquel, and the DJ from LA would watch from the sofa. He liked when I was stoned. Half an hour later, when my eyelids got droopy and I started acting all wonky, he’d come over from the sofa. He was mean during sex, too. I’m no prude; believe me, I can get down with a lot of stuff. This was not a good time. But I kept doing it. And when he pulled out his thirty-five-millimeter camera and took XXX pictures with flash, I let him. I was out to the ball game, as the song goes—too gone to care if I ever came back.

  * * *

  Weeks went by. One day I was wearing a white T-shirt from a Los Angeles company called Fucking Awesome. The letters were black, and there was a noose hanging from one of them.

  HOW TO MURDER YOUR LIFE, it read.

  The DJ from LA did a double take.

  “Where did you get that shirt?” he said—like he was accusing me of something.

  “eBay,” I replied.

  “But I used to have that shirt,” he said.

  “So what?” I was confused. He lo
oked disgusted.

  This would be the most pleasant conversation we had all day. The DJ from LA and I were getting into horrible fights. He’d say such ugly things! So I stopped having sex with him. He tolerated this for about a week. Then he started . . . just trying to take sex from me. One afternoon I tried to sit down on the sofa next to him and watch Christiane F. David Bowie was on-screen singing “Station to Station” when the DJ from LA reached over, grabbed the back of my head, and pushed it into his lap! I hadn’t noticed him take his dick out.

  “Hey!” I cried. “Stop!”

  “Suck it,” he was saying. “Suck it!” It was five o’clock in the afternoon! He wouldn’t let my head up.

  “NO!” I yelled. Now he was tearing at my clothes. He grabbed my arms and held them behind me. “Fuck you!” I struggled to get away from him. “GET OFF ME!”

  “You know you like it.” He was still trying to pull my sweatpants down.

  “LET ME GO!” I screamed. I was still fighting to break free. “I’M SERIOUS! THIS IS RAPE!” He kept laughing. Finally I escaped his grip. I beelined to my bathroom and locked myself inside. I’d played sexy games before. That wasn’t what this was. I got in the shower and stayed there for twenty minutes, shaking. Then I got dressed in the clothes I’d just taken off.

  “I need you to go,” I said. “I need you to get your stuff and leave my keys”—I’d given him a set, of course—“and go. I don’t want to see you ever again.”

  The DJ from LA smirked.

  “Whatever,” he said. He grabbed his duffel bag and handed over the keys. “It’s fucking depressing here, anyway.”

  A few days later, I was soaking—half sleeping, really—in a bath at five in the morning when . . . BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

  I opened my eyes to darkness. The candle I’d lit had gone out, and the water was cool. I turned the faucet to get hot water. Then I got out of the tub and wrapped my dirty Bambi towel around my body.

  “Hello?” I mumbled into the intercom.

  “It’s me.” The DJ from LA was very drunk.

  “You can’t come up here,” I slurred. “I’m through with you.”

  I stumbled back into the dark bathroom and into the tub. The hot water was still running. I slid down and submerged my head. I closed my eyes.

  BZZZZZZZZZ. BZZZZZZZZZZ.

  I came up for air.

  This time I went to the intercom naked.

  “I SAID NO!” I screamed into the speaker, holding down the talk button. My body felt like rubber. “GO AWAY!”

  Then I wobbled back to the slippery, dark tub and sat down hard. Splash.

  BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. He was leaning on it.

  I got out of the bath again.

  BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

  My life was on repeat, like Marco’s Eyes Wide Shut DVD. I knew the man outside was bad. I buzzed the bad man back up.

  * * *

  Then it was June, and suddenly the DJ from LA was around less, anyway. I wouldn’t see him for days at a time, and when he was there, he ignored me and slept on the sofa. I guessed that he’d found another girl to torture.

  Good riddance! I needed to focus on my new freelancing career, anyway. After the Bellevue fiasco, suicide was officially off the table—which meant I had to make some money. I’d reached out to someone I knew at Self beauty and had been assigned four items: on the “gray” makeup trend, high-tech eyelash serums, and . . . well, I forget the other two. But it wasn’t anything too tough. The pay was twenty-eight hundred dollars! Geez! I felt hopeful for the first time since I quit Lucky. Maybe I could make this drug-addict-who-works-from-home thing happen after all.

  I had four weeks. I spent the entire month high and only started writing three days before everything was due. Then I sat at my desk for days, abusing speed with forty open windows on my desktop. Same old me.

  Stormy shades are storming the runway, I wrote. No, that wasn’t any good. Storm-cloud colors. Concrete-colored manicures . . . My mind was mush. Why couldn’t I think of things that were gray? Smoke. I was so burned out. Ash. River stones. My face was swollen from not sleeping. I pressed it down with my fingers. Gray goose. My nose was running; my eyes were watering. Gray mice.

  I’d been up seventy-two hours straight when I finally turned in the stories. Not only were they days late, they were awful. Self had asked for expert advice and quotes from research labs about the latest beauty technology. I hadn’t delivered any of that; plus, the sentences were choppy and screwy and weird from my incessant cutting and pasting. It was “Secret Ingredient: Goat’s Milk” all over again.

  I couldn’t deal with it anymore. I just wanted to be unconscious. I went to bed with my Xanax and Ambien bottles under my pillow. I barely moved for three days. Every time I woke up, I knew I should check my e-mail to get feedback and edits from Self. But I didn’t want to. So I’d take another pill, and things would go back to black again.

  And then I had company.

  I woke up and the DJ from LA was on top of me. He hadn’t been home since the previous week. And now he was inside of me.

  “Don’t,” I mumbled. I tried to push him off. My mouth felt like it couldn’t talk—like the thing that happens in bad dreams. “Stop!”

  The DJ from LA thrust a few more times. I tried to push him off.

  “Get off me!” I said. “Stop!”

  Then he came inside of me. I started to cry. He pulled out and rolled over. My shorts were still down around my ankles. I couldn’t believe what had just happened. I lay in the dark on the bed, sniffling and shaking. The DJ from LA pretended to sleep.

  * * *

  I kicked him out of my house for good the next day. He left without a fight. Then I stayed in bed another few weeks. It was beautiful outside, but I hardly ever went out. I just lay there reading celebrity gossip on the Internet and sleeping with the air-conditioning on.

  Eventually I just knew I was pregnant. Was it from that encounter? I wasn’t sure. It didn’t matter. The test I peed on was a formality: it was positive as a proton. I booked an abortion. It was for ten days later.

  I lay in bed for ten days.

  Then I got up and went to my appointment. It was at one of the clinics hidden around Madison Square Park. I changed out of my white Daisy Duke shorts and McQ by Alexander McQueen rib cage baby tee and into a gown.

  “Do you want to go under?” the nurse asked me. You bet, lady.

  It was over in a snap. I woke up surrounded by other girls coming out of anesthesia. But only I was strapped to a stretcher.

  “You were screaming and thrashing around,” the doctor said.

  The nurses took me out of my restraints. I went into the bathroom. My hands trembled as I applied my lipstick.

  I didn’t have anyone to take me home, so they just let me go. I walked out onto the street and put my headphones on. It’s Britney, bitch. It was a gorgeous early evening. I’d been in the abortion clinic for hours and hours. The sky was turning pink over Union Square. I pulled a thirty-milligram Adderall out of my pocket and crunched it between my teeth. Ahh. Then I put a piece of Trident pink bubble gum in my mouth. Britney and I sauntered down Park Avenue South. I knew there was a blood streak on the waistband of my white cutoff shorts but I didn’t care.

  Chapter Twenty

  SELF NEVER ASSIGNED ME ANYTHING again. So much for my hot freelancing career. I was broke as a joke. An eviction notice for nonpayment of rent got taped to my door not long after my abortion. I pulled it down so the neighbors wouldn’t see. Then I called my mother.

  “I can’t help you anymore,” she said. (I think it should go without saying that she was paying my Sprint bill.)

  There was only one other person I could think of.

  “Hell-oo?” Mimi answered. I hadn’t heard her singsong voice since I’d called from Italy.

  “It’s Caitlin,” I said.


  There was a long pause.

  “Caitlin Marnell?” my grandmother goofed.

  At the time, Mimi was living in one of several town houses she owned near UVA. I took a seven-hour bus down to Charlottesville and arrived in the middle of the night. Mimi was out cold with the TV blaring. I went to bed but couldn’t sleep, so at dawn, I got up and poked around. Her living room was the same as it always was: full of crystal balls, family Bibles, mother-of-pearl opera glasses, arrowheads, and Civil War bullets. Treasure everywhere.

  And photographs in frames. I picked one up and stared at the little kid with dark brown hair: Caitlin.

  You’re in for it, I told her.

  I wandered into the dining room and over to an antique bureau. The top drawer was full of my cringe-inducing first clips from Nylon (“This powder compact pops open like the trunk of a sleek Italian sports car”), a (humiliating) page from Glamour where I’d “outrageously” curled my eyelashes in high-end boutique windows, my first Lucky business card. There were even two Beauty Queen Magazines from 1991—and a familiar issue of Vogue from 1997. I’d forgotten all about my Courtney Love letter to Anna Wintour.

  I was still poring over everything when Mimi came in wearing one of her signature kimonos. We hugged for a long time.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  My granny did not much care for cooking, so we hit the Villa for grits and fruit salad. I showed her my eviction notice and the ambulance bills right there in the booth.

  “I didn’t mean for this to happen,” I said. “I really, really wanted to be successful.” I started to cry. “I really wanted it. I really tried.”

  “I know you did, sugah,” Mimi said. She put her hand on mine. She knew all about my drug problems. “I know.”

  “Can you help me?” I said.

  “Let me think about it,” she said.

  Mimi’s life coach and financial advisor, Vanessa, lived across the street, so she went over there after breakfast. They returned together two hours later and told me their decision. Mimi would support me until I got back on my feet. Until then, I’d live in Charlottesville half the time, working for her—and meeting with Vanessa four times a week for therapy and career counseling.