How to Murder Your Life

by Cat Marnell

  “Perfect!” I said.

  “You’re going to have to work really hard with me.” Vanessa wagged her finger. That afternoon we put a check in the mail for the nine thousand dollars in back rent I owed. God bless grandmothers.

  * * *

  Mimi and I got into our routine right away. I’d get up every morning at approximately eight fifteen to sunshine streaming in through the window and birds being all cheepy outside in the garden. Then I’d scamper into Mimi’s room to watch television. Little Jasper, Mimi’s cockapoo, would be curled up at her feet like a black-and-white croissant. He’d wake up when I came in and stretch his front legs and wiggle around, saying hello. I’d sit on the floor and sneak a peek or two to make sure my grandma was breathing. I know that’s morbid, but . . . octogenarians are sort of like junkies, you know? You can never be too confident that they’re going to make it through the night.

  Mimi always opened her eyes eventually. Phew.

  “Morning, darlin’, ” she’d say sleepily. “Can you take out the baby?” Yes, ma’am. I’d put Jasper on his leash and stick on a pair of UGG boots, which Mimi was wearing back before all the girls in Bonnie Fuller–era US Weekly (I guess that’s nothing to brag about). Jasper had to stop and sniff at absolutely every single plant, but I didn’t mind. It was always mountain-air fresh and lush outside in the mornings—dewy, dewy, dewy, as JGJ would say.

  Then I’d come back to set the table and make breakfast. We each had an earthenware mug full of piping-hot Nescafé Clásico instant coffee, half a grapefruit from Kroger’s, and some lovely oatmeal cooked just the way Mimi liked it—with plenty of salt, and served on a plate, not in a bowl. Mimi would put a dollop of Greek yogurt on top of every­thing.

  “Dr. Oz eats Greek yogurt every morning,” Mimi would declare—­every morning. I’d be reading the Charlottesville paper, which was full of murdered girls.

  “Did you take your pills, Mimi?” I’d ask. She’d take out her sheet cake–size plastic grid full of meds. I’d already taken it upon myself to Google every pill in there, just in case someone was trying to poison my grandmother or something. I mean, elder abuse is very serious.

  And then it was time to work! The house Mimi wanted to sell was stuffed like a turkey full of boxes, and it was my job to clean the place out. Mimi saved everything, which I thought was wonderful (my mother would disagree). It was all wrapped in newspaper from the midnineties.

  “Ooooh,” I’d say to Jasper as I unwrapped a cantaloupe-size glittery geode or something.

  Mimi did not like me to throw anything away without her permission, but a lot of that stuff just had to go. I’d secretly lug massive trash bags to the Dumpsters until noon. Then it was time for lunch! We’d hop into Mimi’s red Honda van. It had “MEMS” vanity plates because “MEEMS”—my brother’s nickname for her—was taken.

  “We’ll have three tacos, and one senior tea,” Mimi would say into the drive-through intercom at Taco Bell. That iced sweet tea was complimentary for customers over sixty-five and heaven help the newbie at the register who didn’t know it. Sometimes we’d park by the UVA athletic fields and eat our tacos. Jasper was allowed exactly one taco.

  Then it was time to run errands, though sometimes we would get a teensy bit sidetracked.

  “Oh, please!” I’d cry when we passed the ASPCA. “Please, Mimi!”

  “Oh . . .” Mimi would say. “Well, all right.” Then she’d make a sharp left, and we’d look at the kittens and the puppies. Otherwise, we’d park outside of Rite Aid and I’d run in and pick up her prescriptions, something I was very good at. Or we’d visit Martha Jefferson Hospital, where a doctor would check on Mimi’s . . . I don’t know what it was, exactly. You know! Her heart thingy. It was a strange bulge that had been . . . implanted in her chest, as though by aliens.

  When we got home, I’d go across the street to Vanessa’s house and talk about why I had failed at my “dream career” as a Condé Nast beauty editor.

  “Drugs,” I always said. She wouldn’t accept that answer. She really believed there was a science to career happiness. She gave me tons of homework: personality assessments, career quizzes. It was all very serious.

  Back at Mimi’s, it would be cocktail hour! She’d pour gin into her Ensure shake or something. While she mixed her signature “martinis,” I’d light candles and heat up two Lean Cuisines and announce that dinner was served.

  “This meat loaf is delicious!” Mimi would say. “Are you telling me you made this in the microwave?” She’d be a little drunk. After dinner we’d sit and talk. Mimi would be on the sofa, sipping an O’Doul’s nonalcoholic beer spiked with Smirnoff. I’d be at her feet on the apricot carpet, with photos spread all around.

  “Tell me about my mom’s anorexia,” I’d say, leaning my head on Mimi’s knee.

  “Oh, it was so terrible . . .” Mimi would say. She’d reach down and rub my neck. “We got a call from her college. She weighed eighty-five pounds . . .” Eventually she’d doze off, and I’d lead her to her bed. Then I’d go downstairs and take a bath and read John Updike’s S. Maybe try on an old wedding dress.

  * * *

  I worked very hard with Vanessa, who was a highly practical, organized, and money-minded life coach. She had very little interest in my addiction; she just wanted to understand how much I spent every month on drugs. She made me print out six months’ worth of bank statements.

  “Are you out of your mind?” she said when we added up my withdrawals from sketchy Avenue C ATMs. But she didn’t judge. She just took everything into consideration as she worked on a budget.

  One night Vanessa came over to Mimi’s house all excited. She told me she’d tallied my results from a big test that I’d taken over several days.

  “You’re off-the-charts creative!” she crowed, showing me a pie chart she’d printed out. “Look! Now, according to studies, if you satisfy the creative part of your brain, it will lead to . . .” And so on. I tuned out, because I am also off-the-charts ADD.

  “I’ve always known Caitlin was creative,” Mimi said, taking a slurp of her martini.

  “Now we’re going to figure out a way for you to make money!” Vanessa beamed.

  “Great!” I said. I thought the whole thing was insane. Mimi wobbled over and posted the pie chart on her refrigerator with a big magnet, like it was an acceptance letter to Harvard.

  Charlottesville was like rehab. The longer I was there, the better I felt. I started jogging alongside grad students and doing laps in the tiny housing community pool—or trying, anyway. Jesus, swimming was hard! I was out of breath so fast. Must have been all that freebasing with Marco.

  After a month, I was lean, tan, glowy, and drug free. I was full of energy. I even had a fresh head of highlights from a salon at the Barracks Road Shopping Center. I decided I could handle going home for a while.

  “I’ll be back in two weeks.” I gave Mimi a smooch. She gave me some cash. Swag! I mean, now I could afford Adderall again.

  * * *

  On the train back to New York, I thought about my new, megaimportant goal: a social life. Some friends. I didn’t have a job and I was feeling healthy after all that time at Mimi’s. There was no reason for me not to go out. I had to push myself to get out there. No more isolating! Recluses get weak, as Jenny Holzer said. At home in my apartment, I pulled on a see-through white mesh slip dress by Patrizia Pepe that brought out my Blue Ridge Mountain tan and decided to hit the town that very night. Carpe diem, right?

  And I knew just who to call. SAME—aka Jacuzzi Chris, aka MACHINE, aka Mr. Menthol—went out six nights a week. I met up with him and Alden in a warehouse-cum-club on Bond Street. SAME was dressed in head-to-toe Newport cigarettes–brand gear and was even more handsome than when I’d met him at Alex’s side almost ten years ago. I danced with his friend, a beefcake in his lavender Polo shirt. He looked like an NFL player, but he was actually a famous graf
fiti writer, REMO. I met OJ, aka SLUTLUST, and another graffiti writer, SHAUN RFC, and the artist duo Mint and Serf (aka the Mirf). Afterward everyone went to a Ludlow Street rooftop. I was in a fantastic mood—talking and talking to my new friends. I bounced over to SAME, who was off to the side, watching everyone as he sipped a forty.

  “I’m having so much fun!” I told him.

  “Good.” The sun was rising. The night was almost over.

  Suddenly, I felt a little desperate.

  “SAME?” I said. “Can I go out with you guys again soon? It’s been a really rough time for me.” I got a little weepy, if you must know. “I’ve been through . . . a lot . . . I don’t have a career anymore—”

  “I got you,” SAME interrupted, not so much to comfort me as to shut me up (weakness makes SAME sick). When he put his arm around me, he was so tall that I was literally taken under his wing.

  And just like that, my life changed. I started partying with SAME’s crowd all the time. Marco had played at graffiti, but these guys were the real deal: born and raised New Yorkers with funny nicknames—their “tags” (sorry, I know I sound extremely corny)—who’d been arrested approximately one million times each. A unit of the NYPD called the Vandal Squad was even after SAME, which I thought was terribly exciting even if SAME decidedly did not. I loved trailing along as these guys prowled the streets. They were so physical and graceful and fantastic doing their big fill-ins. And they could climb fire escapes like monkeys! They’d skulk away from their crime scenes with paint on their hands like blood on a murderer’s. Sometimes I even got to be the lookout when they peed in phone booths.

  “We can go back to mine,” I’d offer when everyone spilled out of the clubs at four twenty in the morning. Back at 252 East Second Street, we’d do coke on the roof for hours. The graffiti writers would discuss their strange politics—who had beef, who was sitting in the Tombs. When the seasons changed and it started getting cold, I moved the after-hours indoors to my studio. It was a rough crowd, but anyone SAME told me to let up, I let up. My kitchen sink would clog with cigarette butts; I was always on my knees with paper towels, mopping up beer; party girls took their purses to the bathroom and stole every eye shadow compact with a Chanel logo on it—but I didn’t care. You know me. Derelicts, DJs, and dealers slept on my floor and in my bathtub, and when we all woke up the next day I’d go out and buy everyone empanadas and the Post.

  I continued to split my time: two weeks in Alphabet City, two weeks recuperating in Charlottesville. Back in the city, I hardly ever got a chance to isolate anymore. BZZZZZ. People would come by even on nights we didn’t go out. They’d dump their plastic deli bags full of clanky spray-paint cans by the door and settle on my sofa with appalling forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor. I’d be sitting in bed collaging or something.

  “So,” I’d say. “What’s the hot gossip? What’s the 4-1-1?” We’d dish and laugh for hours. As the months passed, many of my new party friendships turned into real friendships—authentic, drama-free ones—that I cherish to this day.

  * * *

  But no matter how stimulated I was by my new life, I couldn’t get over the one I’d left behind. One night I popped into the deli next to Lit to buy cigarettes and saw, for the first time, an issue of Lucky I hadn’t worked on. My stomach flipped: it was like running into an ex on the street too soon after a breakup. I scanned the unfamiliar cover lines. Lucky had just . . . gone on without me. It looked good, too.

  I avoided newsstands after that. Magazines had been the love of my life, but now I wanted to pretend they didn’t exist. I also stopped reading the media columns in WWD and The Daily Front Row; I stopped checking Mediabistro and Ed2010 Whisper Jobs. What was the point? I was an addict; I was unemployable. I didn’t want to know what was going on in publishing anymore. Thank God for my new buddies, who thought a Takashi Murakami–designed POP magazine with Britney Spears on the cover was just another thing to write on.

  Winter arrived. Graffiti writers live for blizzards, blackouts—any disaster that means empty, unpatrolled streets—and watching them vandalize the city in the snow was so much fun. Plus, running around in scribbly, sticker-covered boy-world was a terrific distraction from the fact that I’d flunked out of my world—girl-world. I’d spent the past three and a half years with Jean, Cristina, Simone, Ray, and Kim. Now the only woman I talked to was the NA chairwoman. Not long after the Charlotte Ronson show, I’d figured out that “Lesley” was Lesley Arfin, the Vice columnist (“Ask Barf”) and author of Dear Diary, a memoir I’d read several times. In it, Vice sends her to rehab at Betty Ford for heroin addiction. I’d never heard of anyone who worked in magazines and identified as an addict before I read that book.

  I’d admired Lesley forever without actually knowing her (she was even an editor in chief for a while, at Missbehave magazine), and the universe had thrown her into my path—twice! I’d wondered if I would ever encounter her again after that crazy “lightning crash” moment at Fashion Week. And then it happened once more. One night, on yet another rooftop, I was talking to SAME, and he mentioned his ex, Lesley. They’d just broken up.

  “Lesley who?” I knew the answer before it even came out of his mouth.

  SAME gave me her number, which I’d lost. I’d hit her up, and now she and I were in touch all the time. We became friends. We talked on the phone, we talked on the computer. I gave her advice about SAME and the breakup, and she helped me with my drug problems.

  Why am I telling you all this? Because it was Lesley Arfin who, in January 2011, sent me a link to a New York Observer story titled “Jane Pratt and Tavi Gevinson Now Hiring for Your Dream Job.” I was still avoiding media news—so I didn’t see that people were freaking out about the return of the legendary editor in chief of Sassy and Jane, who had mysteriously left her namesake title in September 2005 and hadn’t been heard from since. Well, until now, at least. Jane Pratt was back! And she was launching a website. It was a big deal.

  Once, I would have been excited. I’d followed Jane Pratt my whole life. But in the wake of my flopped career, I just felt stabby pangs in my stomach as I skimmed the headline. I mean, I didn’t get to have a “dream job” anymore.

  A few weeks later, Lesley called. Her friend Amy Kellner was leaving Vice to be managing editor of JanePratt.com.

  “Do you want me to tell her about you?” Lesley said. “They’re going to need a beauty editor.”

  I laughed bitterly.

  “I can’t work for Jane Pratt,” I said. “I can’t work for anyone. I can’t even freelance.” I told her about the Self stories I’d screwed up. “I’m sick.”

  “You can’t think that way,” Lesley said. “You should at least try.” But I didn’t want to.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Vanessa wanted me to do something creative, even if it didn’t make any money. One night that winter, I had an idea. It came to me at the nightclub Kenmare, where I’d been watching party girls apply black eyeliner and check their noses for coke residue in the bathroom. I’d shared mirror space, drugs, and Trident gum with chicks like this for half my life . . .

  “Why couldn’t I share beauty advice with them?” I brainstormed out loud to Vanessa at our next session in Charlottesville. “Like . . . ‘edgy’ beauty advice for girls who stay up all night and sleep all day?”

  “Would you like doing that work?” Vanessa said.

  “Omigod, yes!” I said. “But I’d have to do it online. Magazine beauty is all goody-two-shoes!”

  “Then you’re onto something,” Vanessa said. We decided I’d start my very own website. I even had a name: BEAUTYSHAMBLES—after Pete Doherty’s band Babyshambles.

  Now I just had to become a master of technology. Mimi drove me to Barnes & Noble and sat in the car while I charged Blogging for Fame & Fortune, Blogging for Dummies, and The Idiot’s Guide to Blogging on her MasterCard. But reading the books back in Mimi’s basement just made m
e feel worse. I’d never heard of WordPress or anything. Once I bought a domain name, what would I do with it? It was very frustrating.

  I spent months “working” on that stupid site! Meaning I wrote down story ideas in notebooks and let my grandma keep paying for my life.

  “You’ll figure it out, sugar,” Mimi said, handing over another check for ten thousand dollars. She was three SlimFast-and-Beefeaters in, watching protesters get tear-gassed in Cairo on CNN. “What is this program?”

  Weeks passed. One night, I was sitting in Mimi’s basement in my usual nest of blogging manuals, wanting to weave a noose out of my own hair extensions and hang myself when I happened to scroll through Twitter on my BlackBerry. That’s when I saw the Tweet from Lesley’s friend Amy Kellner that would change my life.

  “We’re looking for a health writer for janepratt.com—but so far all of the applicants have been too . . . healthy. Does anyone know of an unhealthy health writer?”

  It was like it had been written exactly for me! I wasn’t healthy. And beauty and health were always tied together in the magazines. I had experience. Should I apply?

  But then the negative self-talk began: You’re an addict. You can’t handle it.

  Right.

  I put my BlackBerry down—on top of one of the open blogging books I knew I’d never understand. Ugh. I thought of how the universe had sent me Lesley Arfin in that lightning-strike moment at Fashion Week.

  You have to try, Lesley said in my head.

  Fuck it. I then opened my computer, typed and typed and typed, and finally, at dawn, e-mailed Amy my résumé and a long list of “unhealthy” story ideas. Then I crashed.