How to Murder Your Life

by Cat Marnell

  When I woke up at noon, I had an e-mail from Amy: Jane Pratt wanted to meet me.

  “Mimi!” I catapulted upstairs. “MIMI!”

  That night, I was on a train back to New York.

  * * *

  Say Media headquarters were in a loft building in the Flatiron District—practically on top of the Museum of Sex, and right around the corner from Le Trapeze. The latter was a swingers club with two floors, food, drinks, couches, a large orgy room, and private locker rooms with showers. It smelled vaguely of sweat and tears, and the action was nonstop. Couples were upstairs! Couples were downstairs! If you saw a couple you liked, you could lie down next to them and start gently stroking the woman’s leg, arm, wherever, and—if she didn’t say no—go further and further until before you knew it, you were having sex with her.

  What?! Fine, those are not my memories; I have paraphrased a bunch of reviews from Yelp! I’ve never been to Le Trapeze. These “how I got my job” chapters are extremely fucking boring to write, you know. I’m just trying to keep it saucy for all of us.

  Anyway. Say Media—the place I am actually supposed to be telling you about—was right around the corner from Le Trapeze. The company was San Francisco–based and also owned a site called Dogster—the first social networking site for dogs. Oh, and Catster. That would be the first social networking site for cats. The New York office was okay looking and cheerful, with bright walls and . . . you know, I don’t really remember it too well. It had lots of conference rooms! I met with HR in a different one every time.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  In February 2011, I was running late for my first-ever JanePratt.com editorial meeting. A girl in a polka-dot blouse and Bettie Page bangs signed in after me; she was late, too. We got on the elevator together, then smiled as we reached for the same button.

  “Are you here for Jane?” she said. That was Emily McCombs. She told me she was there to write sex and relationships.

  “I’m supposed to be writing health,” I said as the elevator rose. “But I’m hoping I get to do beauty, too!”

  Emily McCombs and I rushed into this office—okay, actually, first we rushed to this glass door and we didn’t know the pass code; we had to wait to be beeped in. Then! We rushed into this office. An assistant escorted us to a conference room. The door was closed. Behind it—I knew—was the legend: the Anna Wintour of the alternative nineties, the woman who’d put Courtney and Kurt on the cover of Sassy; Adweek’s 2002 Editor of the Year, the publishing icon who may or may not have scissored with Drew Barrymore.

  The assistant swung open the door . . .

  “Welcome!” a shrimpy tween in a flannel shirt, a vest, and glasses said. She was about three feet tall with no makeup and blond hair that appeared to have been recently washed in the East River. Was that a Dora the Explorer backpack at her feet? I looked around the table. “Have a seat.”

  It was Jane Pratt. I blinked a few times.

  “Sorry . . . we’re late,” I said. I felt very disoriented. Jane didn’t look anything like an editor in chief was supposed to look!

  I got over it soon enough. Like most people who willfully dress like Keebler Elves, Jane seemed impish and full of mischief. No idea was too wild for her. She had a distinctive, cackling laugh; weird pitches delighted her. She told us how much she liked pranks—“inappropriate” stuff. The meeting was energetic and fun, and I took lots of notes. My ears pricked up when Jane mentioned bringing back “Makeunders”—Jane magazine’s signature beauty story. They were flattering, stripped-down portraits of typically high-maintenance celebrities, along with how-to beauty text. I’d read those stories every month for years. I even remembered how they’d been written and laid out and everything!

  I raised my hand tentatively.

  “I could be in charge of those.” Please please please please please. I really didn’t want to be stuck just writing health. “I did beauty shoots at Lucky . . . I’m good at them.”

  “Great.” Jane nodded. “Pitch me some people.” I was thrilled. This was gonna be just like working in print! I was already thinking of candidates to pitch when something else made me tune in again.

  “Vice has a guy drug writer,” Jane was saying. “I’d love to find a woman like that.”

  I looked around the room. No one was volunteering.

  Screw it. I’d already sunk my magazine career. What did I have to lose?

  I raised my hand again.

  “Uh,” I said. “I could write about drugs as well.”

  “Really?” Jane looked skeptical.

  “I’m . . . qualified,” I said.

  Everyone in the room giggled. Then we all started having sex with each other. No, just kidding.

  * * *

  SAME had a dust dealer that looked like a chola. Her name was Laura. She had two kids and lived in the projects downtown. The first time we met, she pulled up to East Second Street and we climbed inside her SUV. I sat in the back. SAME was groomed to kill with his perfect deep-dish side part haircut that his friend Chaz had given him on a bench in Hamilton Fish Park; I was full-on homicide-victim chic in a Tsubi minidress covered in laser-cut stab holes and fake bloodstains. It was March 2011.

  “This is my girl Cat,” SAME said. Laura nodded.

  “You want bags or dips?” Laura said.

  SAME glanced into the backseat. What did I know? I’d never smoked PCP.

  “One dip,” SAME said. Dips were twenty bucks. “Four bags.” Those were ten dollars each.

  Laura dipped a Newport into a little vial. The stuff seeped up the cigarette, tainting all of the tobacco. This was the “dip.” Then Laura gave us four ten-dollar baggies of brown flakes that had been drizzled with phencyclidine, then left out overnight to dry. I could smell the chemicals through the plastic.

  Back in my apartment, SAME split open a White Owl cigar and dumped out the guts. Then he rolled up the angel-dusted tobacco into a long, brown cigarette and lit up.

  “Ahh.” SAME pulled on it, then passed it to me.

  What does angel dust feel like? Well . . . my gosh. It is truly a . . . a transmogrifying experience, to borrow a word from Calvin and Hobbes. Your whole body inside feels like a fluffy baby chick or something, and your face gets very slack, so when you look in the mirror you get . . . disoriented, and you have extremely glassy eyes. It feels like you are in a science fiction movie, and that you could float up and away and be on a boat under the pink sky, and then you are on a boat and it is chugging along up the East River, and your friends are on the boat and they are talking to you. And then you are in Sardinia on a patio with flat stone panels, and you’re looking out at a vineyard and blue water beyond that, and then the patio falls out from under you. And you fall deeper and deeper into the earth, but it’s not the earth, exactly, it’s this series of . . . lofts built into the earth like underground tree houses, right, and another floor falls out from under you, and then you are on a different floor of the world, and you are starting to accept that things will never be the same. And there you are curled up in a nest, and that’s when you realize you’re in a forest—a jungle—and there are tigers and big cats hiding in the plants like in a Rousseau painting, and leopards are stalking you and you have to . . . sneak away, but vines are all wrapped up around you—you are twisted in vines—and you keep twisting and struggling, but you cannot break free! You can’t see through this curtain of jungle foliage hanging in your face either . . . and you are still twisting . . . Wait. What?

  And I came out from my psychotic break.

  “Cat,” someone was saying. “Cat!”

  “I can’t . . . see . . .” I rasped.

  “She’s bugging,” a different someone said.

  “That’s your hair.” SHAUN RFC—I recognized his voice now—reached out and pushed the curtain of dense jungle foliage out of my face.

  I sat up. I was in b
ed, twisted up not in jungle vines but in my dirty Kathy Ireland for Kmart sheets. My apartment was full of graffiti writers drinking Heinekens, and I hadn’t even heard any of them come in. SAME was totally channeling Terri Schiavo over on my busted Eames recliner, looking all comatose with his mouth wide open. Jesus! Now that’s what I called a drug.

  I started “getting dusted” all of the time. Well, at night, anyway. During the day I wrote stories for JanePratt.com: “I Spent Two Weeks in a Mental Institution, but I Left with Better Hair” was about the Davines NouNou Conditioner I’d brought to Payne Whitney; “The Art of Crack-tractiveness: How to Look and Feel Hot on No Sleep” was my Lucky morning grooming routine. “I have skipped more nights’ sleep than any beauty editor that has ever lived,” I wrote. “I used to be something of a party girl, you see.” Jane required us to use photos of ourselves in all of the stories, so I had fun staging those, or finding old ones. I could put random videos in my posts, too.

  But the very best part? I could talk about literally anything going on in my life—and in my voice, not magazine-speak. I hadn’t written that way since Alterna-Teen Retard! (R.I.P.) I still refused to call myself a “blogger,” but whatever I was doing, it was creative work, and I was enjoying it. Maybe Vanessa had been right after all.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  OOH, I JUST LOVE SOCIALITES—DON’T you? My first JanePratt.com Makeunder subject was Tinsley Mortimer, the girl-about-town known for her devotion to fuchsia Oscar de la Renta dresses (“I love a pouf,” she told me), platinum ringlets, and Barbie doll lipstick. We stripped her bare-faced, roughed up her hair with a little Bumble salt spray for that “just-fucked at Gibson Beach” je ne sais quoi, and shot that fox on the terrace of her Fur District loft wearing a vintage AC/DC shirt I’d lamely bought back in the day to “fit in” at Nylon. Her vaguely famous Chihuahua, Bambi—his name runs in bold on Page Six, you know—skittered into my ankles the whole shoot. Tinsley loved the pictures by Blossom Berkofsky, and Jane did, too.

  Days were for writing. Nights were for PCP and parties. I think my favorite was at the Gansevoort Hotel on Park Avenue South. SHAUN RFC and I arrived dusted at dawn. I was wearing Wayfarers and a tie-dye mini by Madonna Material Girl for Macy’s. We walked through the huge duplex suite with floor-to-ceiling windows that the Kardashians stayed in—you know, that time Kourtney and Kim took New York?—surveying the wild scene. It was all stunning black people in slinky clothes, but no one was dancing or anything. Everyone was lying around. They were in the beds together, and out on the terrace on chaise longues. They looked half-dead! And very attractive.

  Then I noticed something else. The coffee tables, the dining room table—all the flat surfaces—were covered in giant diamonds, or things cut to look like diamonds. Whatever they were, they were as big as grapefruits.

  Suddenly, it was very clear what was going on.

  “Shaun.” I clutched my friend’s arm. “This is . . . an Illuminati party.”

  “Shhh.” He led me over to the wall (I wasn’t walking particularly well, I must admit). We stood there for a few. That’s when CHRIS BROWN appeared right next to me. I nudged Shaun.

  “Chris Brown!” I mouthed. When I turned back around, Chris Brown was gone.

  “Let’s sit down,” Shaun said. He marched me to the living room, where the aforementioned sexy, glassy-eyed people were draped all over each other on the long sofas. I squished in between them.

  “Hey, guys!” I chattered. “Did you guys see Chris Brown? Do you mind if I sit here?”

  “Shh,” SHAUN RFC whispered. “That wasn’t Chris Brown. You’re bugging.” Gorgeous people stared at me. I stared at the coffee table covered in softball-size diamonds.

  “I am going to take one of these diamonds and put it in my bag!” I announced, and helped myself. They were so heavy! “Actually . . . I am taking two diamonds.” I shoved another prism into my silver D&G tote. “I AM TAKING THREE DIAMONDS!” SHAUN RFC marched me away again, but I mean, nobody really cared that I took their Illuminati diamonds. I still have them.

  Meanwhile, back in fascinating website-launch world, changes were afoot! For one, the site wasn’t going to be called JanePratt.com anymore. Since jane.com was taken, we were now . . . xoJane.com. Jane wasn’t thrilled; she thought it was too precious. I thought it was fine. It grew on all of us.

  The second change was that Tavi Gevinson cut ties with Say Media—and thus with xoJane—telling WWD she wanted “full control” of her debut website. Jane seemed chill about it. Back on Avenue C, SAME told me he was going to skin Tavi and wear her to Fashion Week. The PCP was making him . . . aggressive.

  The third change was that Amy Kellner quit! Her BFF Ryan McGinley had nabbed her a sexy photo editor job at the New York Times Magazine. Oh, I was so upset. And worried! I’d been trusting Amy’s Vice pedigree as I cranked out story after story and essentially tethered my career to a site I’d never seen. Now I wasn’t so sure what I was getting into. Emily, the sex and relationships writer, took Amy’s place as Jane’s second-in-command—the showrunner, if you will. I liked her, but she didn’t have a magazine background—only online.

  The fourth change, I didn’t see coming at all. I was chilling with Jane in her office. She was telling me how Emily was one of two Say Media official hires; I wasn’t really listening.

  “. . . and we’d like to bring you on staff in the other role.”

  I snapped out of my day-after dust fog.

  “Wait,” I said. “WHAT?”

  “We want to hire you and Emily,” Jane said, grinning. “Full-time.”

  Absolutely not. Full-time? It was a terrible idea. I was not going to put myself or anyone else through the whole “addict in the workplace” nightmare again. I was going to remain a contributing writer at xoJane, just as planned. I was not going to deal with Human Resources again. I was not going to set myself up to fail by attempting regular office hours when I knew I wanted to smoke PCP and party all summer. I was going to refuse right then and there—and save everyone a lot of trouble.

  Then again . . .

  “Would I get health insurance?”

  “Of course.”

  Take the job, my addiction hissed.

  I took the job.

  * * *

  Then it was almost launch, and I was nervous. Remember, I was a magazine-snob careerist. I may have hated myself, but I loved my print-only résumé, from the Vanity Fair fashion closet all the way up to Lucky. Was becoming a founding editor at a website the right move?

  I wasn’t sure, but there was no backing out now. WWD named me as beauty editor (a title I’d demanded from Jane); the Los Angeles Times ran a photograph of Emily, Jane, and me at Say. I wondered if Jean Godfrey-­June was seeing everything.

  Ultimately, though, my insecurities about online were assuaged by the fact that my new boss was the Jane Pratt—one of the Greatest of All Time, as Kanye would say. I wanted to know everything about her life, and I wanted to know yesterday.

  “Are you a Scientologist?” I asked the day I met her.

  “Oh, no,” Jane said. “But I do have a Scientology sauna in my apartment. In my daughter’s room. [Celebrity Friend] went in there when he was detoxing, and when he wiped the sweat off with a towel, it was all different colors . . . the dye from the pills, you know?” This was a typical Jane Pratt anecdote. She was a total weirdo!

  Jane and I had lots in common. Her parents had been Duke professors; my dad went to Duke. We’d both left Condé Nast during periods of terrible distress (yes, I know why she really left Jane—but that’s her story to tell). Jane had been a suicidal boarder at Phillips Academy in Massachusetts; I’d been a pregnant, self-destructive teen at Lawrence, twenty-eight miles and twenty-three years away. Jane was superclose to her grandmother, who lived in Charlottesville; I had Mimi in the same town. Crazy, right?

  And we both loved magazines. Paper ones! Jane only got short-
­tempered with me once in my time working with her: when I swiped an Australian fashion magazine from her office to take to the airport and she’d spied it in a photo on my social media.

  “That was mine,” she almost-yelled when I returned from Miami. “You had no right!” (This is true. Sorry, Jane.)

  What else? Jane’s wee daughter Charlotte had “celeb-spawn” playmates that you would recognize from People magazine. She and Jane regularly flew out for long weekends at Courteney Cox’s Malibu compound, where they’d barbecue with Jen and Justin, play tennis with Sia, and sing around the campfire with Ed Sheeran. Jane had the same publicist as Julia Roberts; Jane used the same makeup artist as Julia Roberts and Anna Wintour. Jane had dated at least one major talk show host, plus a very appealing male movie star. Jane wore Michael Stipe’s hand-me-down Dior Homme T-shirts to work. She had a two-bedroom loft in Tribeca, her own SiriusXM radio show, and expensive-looking Pilates Reformer abs. Her male assistants—all of whom, it seemed, had an X-rated Anderson Cooper story—popped umbrellas open over her head when it was drizzling à la Fonzworth Bentley and P. Diddy.

  Still, no matter how interesting Jane was . . .

  “You’re nothing like my old boss,” I’d tell her sometimes, glumly. Sometimes I even called Jane “Jean.”

  “I know, sweetie,” Jane would say. “Sorry.”

  * * *

  I obviously missed JGJ—and our close relationship—terribly. It didn’t help that talking to Jane Pratt about beauty was like putting your head in a fucking blender! I’m still recovering from the conversation we had about the eyelash-growing serum Latisse, which my new boss had recently given a try.

  “It was working,” Jane said. “But it made my eyes red, and so now it’s just sitting at home and I don’t know what to do with it.”

  “Throw it out,” I said.

  “I was going to,” Jane continued. “But it’s a very expensive prescription. So then I was wondering, should I give it to a bald man? Why don’t men use it for baldness?”