How to Murder Your Life

by Cat Marnell

  But of course, I couldn’t. It was Christmas Eve and they had things to do.

  “I guess I should go,” I finally said, and stood up from the sofa.

  “Okay, honey,” Jane said in her warm way. Charlotte raced over to say good-bye. She looked like she had on YSL Rouge Volupté no. 17—­­a bright coral—but upon closer inspection, I realized it was Nacho Cheese Doritos powder.

  She ran away. I’d zipped up my LaROK parka and was almost out the door when I remembered something.

  “Could you give this to Courtney?” I pulled a roll of Kiki de Montparnasse bondage tape out of one of my shopping bags. “It’s just a silly gift . . . because she likes lingerie . . .”

  Jane looked up from her phone.

  “Why don’t you bring it to her yourself?” she said. “She’s over there now.”

  “Uhhh . . .” I was holding the elevator door. “You mean . . . go without you? Alone?”

  “Sure,” Jane said. “I’m texting with her right now. I’ll let her know to expect you.”

  “Uh,” I said. “Are you sure?”

  Charlotte ran out of her bedroom, screaming and hooting: “DON’T GO, CAT! DON’T GO DON’T GO DON’T GO DON’T GO! DON’T GO!”

  “Just go on over, honey,” Jane shouted, restraining her monkey. The elevator door finally closed.

  Well.

  I went down to the street and hailed a cab and took it to Courtney’s house. I got out on Hudson Street and went to Starbucks and got myself a venti coffee misto. I carried it up to Courtney’s house, climbed the steps, and knocked on the door. Hershey opened it, and I stepped into the foyer. Courtney was sitting right there cross-legged at her altar with her eyes closed.

  She opened one eye when she heard me come in—and stopped chanting when she spied my coffee.

  “Is that for me?” Courtney Love said.

  I nodded. I mean, I hadn’t taken a sip or anything.

  As I handed her the cup, I read the tattoo on her upper arm:

  LET IT BLEED

  I hadn’t noticed it before.

  Courtney resumed chanting, and Hershey led me upstairs. The sitting room was full of downtown girls in all black. They were talking and doing their makeup in little mirrors. They looked at me curiously.

  There was a little tree glowing with gold fairy lights in the corner. I put my gift under it. Then I wasn’t sure what to do, so I sat on a couch and didn’t talk. What was I doing there? I didn’t know, but wow. I closed my eyes and tried to send the halo of white light over the tree to young Caitlin Marnell—like a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future.

  Half an hour later, Courtney came up. It was time for her and her friends to go to the Waverly Inn for dinner. I didn’t want it to seem like I was trying to get invited or anything, so I slipped downstairs and said good-bye to Hershey as everyone was putting on their coats. And then I was back outside, on the cobblestone street.

  It was very beautiful in the West Village: everyone had trees in the windows. As I walked along, I suddenly felt overcome. I started to cry. It had all been worth it, hadn’t it—all of the things I’d gone through to get to this point, and not having a family I was close to to spend holidays with? This was better than being normal, wasn’t it? I’d been through such dark times, but look at me now! I remembered being eighteen on the Fourth of July, walking on this same street in the Village and hearing the fireworks and not having any friends, and going home to vomit up my ice cream cone. I’d come so far since then. I had a ton of cool new friends, I worked for Jane Pratt, New York magazine wanted to write an article on me (more on that in a second), and I’d just gone to Courtney Love’s house on Christmas Eve!

  I kept walking east, past all of the Christmas trees in the windows. I took an Adderall or two.

  But . . . if everything in my life was so good, why did I still feel so bad inside? Why did I always feel so lonely? Would it ever end?

  I kept sniffling. My friends texted me; I ignored my phone.

  When I got home to Alphabet City, I called my favorite dealer, Amazing Andy. He came down from Spanish Harlem and offered me everything he had for two hundred dollars. It was all pills: Oxycontin and ecstasy.

  “Ugh,” I said, and bought it all anyway.

  Then I switched off my phone and holed up for six days. Ecstasy and Oxycontin decidedly do not mix; I mixed them anyway. On Christmas Day, I called Jean Godfrey-June, but I was crying so hard and she sounded so alarmed that I had to hang up. I didn’t go out with my cool new friends for the New Year.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  BY JANUARY, I WAS RIDIN’ for a fall as Mimi’s granddaddy used to say: I’d been getting too high, and now it was time for a long, nasty, deep low. Addiction is rather cyclic, you know. I let my prescriptions run out and hid in my apartment ordering from the Devil’s website: Seamless. Do you know what that is? It’s like Amazon 1-Click ordering, except you get French toast and cheesesteaks instead of books. Then you eat everything in bed and stay there all day watching TMZ Live on a loop on your laptop, fishing in the plastic delivery bags for any butter squares or ketchup packets you might have missed. Fine, maybe that’s just me.

  The depression lasted five weeks. Sometimes I’d post to xoJane. Sometimes not. When the gloom finally cleared—it always does—and I finally felt like leaving the house again, none of my clothes fit. Fucking skinny jeans! They are really contributing to this Adderall culture, I swear. Anyway, that was it for me. I went uptown to Dr. X. and walked out with a veritable stack of prescriptions. It was time to play The Biggest Loser—Cat Marnell style: zero exercise, triple amphetamine.

  On Saturday, February 11, 2012, I was slouched in a chair waiting for my man (the night pharmacist) to fix me up at my favorite drugstore, the twenty-four-hour place on the Lower East Side, when I read that Whitney Houston had died in the bathtub at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. I was gutted. I’m telling you, I was such a fan of Whitney that I once crawled under a food cart after the Gay Pride Parade to snatch a fan that said “I’m a Fan of Whitney” on it! Back at home, I ate speed, fanned myself with the aforementioned fan, and wrote my first serious, long-form piece about addiction. It was called “On the Death of Whitney Houston: Why I Won’t Ever Shut Up About My Drug Use.”

  “When Whitney died, I wasn’t surprised: women are using drugs all around you, and I’m one of them,” the dek, or subheadline, read. “Now why aren’t I allowed to talk about them again?” I was speaking not only to the xoJane commenters who kept kvetching about how often I referenced narcotics in my stories, but also to women’s media and to the world at large. Social stigmatization of crackheads and all that. It was a strong essay, and after it posted on Monday, the feedback was incredible. Gawker even ran an item titled “Jane Pratt’s Resident Angel Dust Aficionado Wrote the Best Piece on Whitney Houston’s Death.” That was a huge compliment from such a scary website—I am very grateful to the writer Danny Gold—and it did big things for my career. A major publishing house even reached out to talk to me about writing a book!

  This positive attention reinvigorated my ambition—briefly. My top concern was still losing weight. I don’t think I ate for a month! Instead, I guzzled bottle after bottle of something called the Ritual Cleanse that Julie ordered for me. Have you tried it? It’s about seventy-five thousand bottles of expensive juice, and you sort of feel like you’re drinking gazpacho, and if you take Vyvanse with it you actually stick to the diet. That’s a tip. I mean, you’re not even allowed to have a macchiato; the big treat is the mealy cashew sludge and you sort of gag it down, you know, but it’s all worth it, because if you do it fifteen days in a row, your legs absolutely start to look like arms. That’s what happened for me!

  After a few weeks of cleansing, I was a bit woozy, of course—I practically passed out at the Wu-Tang show at Milk Studios during Fashion Week! But so what? Oh, and I guess I was also acting a tad . . . batty.


  “I want a month’s worth of holy water!” I barked at Julie over the phone. “To wash my face with!”

  “Uh—” Click.

  I started wearing my sunglasses indoors, and I bleached my hair platinum blond—that is, Zoe Weipert at Bumble did—and I couldn’t stop listening to “Walk Like an Egyptian” on my headphones.

  I also felt like returning to work—full throttle! After a six-week absence, I stormed off the Say elevator at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon in February clutching an iced Americano with half-and-half from Eataly, ready to whip my beauty section into—goddammit!—I still didn’t know the code. Why was this place locked down like the fucking Pentagon? I banged on the doors until someone let me in.

  Then I commenced storming over to the xoJane area.

  “What are you doing here?” Julie said.

  “I work here!” I snapped. There was a pile of unopened boxes on the floor next to my desk. “Would it kill you to open these once in a while?”

  “Good to have you back, Cat,” Madeline the editorial assistant said.

  But she was just being polite: it was not good to have me back. When you don’t eat, you always pay the price, and so does everyone around you.

  “I’m the beauty director.” I berated the entire staff when I found Emily McCombs had “made under” the porn star Belladonna—“without telling me.” (I’d actually ignored a month of e-mail correspondence about the shoot.) “I pick the Makeunder subjects! I do the shoots!”

  “But you weren’t here!” Emily said. “You’re never here! You don’t even answer your phone!”

  “I’m nocturnal!” I screeched. “A lot of people are! Half of Saudi Arabia is because it’s so hot outside!”

  “This isn’t Saudi Arabia!” Emily said.

  “A porn star?” I spat. (Belladonna is fabulous, by the way—I was just being vicious and hadn’t yet heard of her.) “They’d never shoot a porn star at Condé Nast!”

  “This isn’t Condé Nast!” Emily said for the zillionth time.

  The more weight I lost, the more awful I acted. I didn’t whine to Jane behind closed doors anymore. Now I’d throw a rude fit right there in the staff meeting when I hated a pitch for a slide show. I knew I was being hurtful—I could see it in my coworkers’ eyes—but I couldn’t contain the stabby rage I felt inside. Or maybe those were hunger pains.

  “This isn’t fashion forward! This isn’t trendsetting! This isn’t anything!” I’d get hysterical. “It’s Internet garbage!”

  After a few weeks of this, Emily McCombs and I were barely speaking. Even though we shared an office. It was tense. Finally, one night, we started arguing about how I didn’t want to contribute to something called “Say Something Nice Day.”

  “It’s a dumb idea,” I said. “I hate it!”

  “Why do you always have to be so . . . mean?” Emily said.

  This escalated into a screaming match so violent that we closed the office door to have it out. I felt high and wild as I eviscerated my colleague. By the end, Emily was crying, and I felt so disgusted that I was dizzy! Or maybe that was my low blood sugar.

  I had to get out of there. I grabbed my jacket and opened the door. The assistants were sitting at their MacBooks, their eyes as wide as little owls’.

  “What are you looking at?” I snarled. “Mind your own business!” But of course, I was making my toxicity everyone else’s business, all of the time.

  * * *

  By March, I was in terrible shape—mentally, psychologically, physically, spiritually. But I fit into my size 25 Imitation of Christ jeans—and I was attracting attention to the site. As I mentioned, a reporter from New York magazine had been hitting me up for an interview. Now a writer from the New York Times wanted to talk, too. It had all started after my Whitney Houston piece.

  I forwarded all the requests to Jane and started leveraging for money, honey. Then I sweetened the pot with traffic-generating stunts like snorting a huge line of Napoleon Perdis jasmine bath salts off a mirror at the office—a joke on “bath salts” the drug, then trending worldwide—while my delighted boss filmed me on her iPhone. A week later, Say gave me a twenty-thousand-dollar raise. Lean in, bitches!

  After dark, I was back in the clubs. I don’t want to go into it, but let me just say that if you ever find yourself at a table at Le Baron with Lindsay Lohan and the Yahoo girl—you know, the one they call “the lesbian Don Juan”?—do not give the male model sitting next to you a puff of your e-cigarette! LL will be up in your grill in two seconds flat, all flashing eyes and floating hair like the demon in “Kubla Khan,” demanding you leave before she personally has your “disrespectful” ass thrown out onto Mulberry Street by security—and you will obey, because that hot bitch owns the night. I’m not saying it happened to me, just . . . FYI.

  Let’s just say, I had a rough night. I was trying to sleep it off the next morning, but a Say Media number kept calling my cell.

  “Auuugghh,” I finally answered.

  “There’s a reporter from the New York Times here,” Madeline whispered. She sounded very anxious. “She’s been waiting for half an hour!” The interview had been scheduled for ten o’clock. I’d forgotten. The interview was about “female confessional bloggers” or something; I wasn’t too thrilled about that, either.

  “I’ll be there in a few,” I muttered. Then I fell asleep again.

  I showed up at Say at eleven forty-five wearing my Pete Doherty FUCK FOREVER T-shirt.

  “I’m so sorry,” I . . . tried to coo. Instead I sort of croaked.

  “No problem.” The reporter grimaced. I took her into the office I shared with Emily. Ooh, I was so cranky and out of it! I couldn’t even turn on the charisma (and that never happens). Madeline brought me a coffee. I gave terrible answers. I looked for the piece later, but it never ran.

  Oh well. I had more pressing concerns—like getting skinnier! I had Julie arrange for me to get a complimentary fat-freezing treatment at a plastic surgeon’s office on the Upper East Side. CoolSculpting! Let me tell you all about it. You sit there for hours as a machine freezes your belly fat and your . . . flanks, I guess the nurse called them; then the fat cells die, and you pee them all out later. And you can’t cough; if you do it’s just agony; the machine is already gripping your body, you know, and when you cough it grabs your skin harder; that’s when you wail, believe me. I kept beeping for a nurse to come in and hand me my pills and my phone. I was heading to Los Angeles the next week to shoot MTV’s The Hills’ Audrina Patridge for Makeunder, and I had very important calls to make.

  “I want to shoot Audrina by a Dumpster, do you hear me?” I ranted on speakerphone to the staff meeting. I was wearing Stella McCartney tortoiseshell sunnies that made me look like a giant bug. “Tell her people!”

  “Are you sure you can handle this by yourself?” Jane said.

  “Of course I can!” I answered. I was particularly looking forward to staying at the Chateau Marmont—the greatest party hotel in the world—and hitting the Hollywood clubs. “Who do you think I am?” The treatment ended and I lurched out onto Park Avenue with a frozen section of fat like a stick of butter over my abs.

  The day before the trip, I found out that fucking Julie was being sent along to babysit (an experience she has since compared—incidentally—to the Jonah Hill–Russell Brand movie Get Him to the Greek).

  “WHAT?” I screamed.

  “Don’t be mad,” Julie said. I hung up on her. I wanted to kill Julie! Then Jane. How dare they treat me like a child? I sulked and sucked on strawberry-flavored Klonopin wafers the whole flight to LA.

  Once we landed and got into a taxi, I got another surprise. We weren’t staying at the Chateau Marmont, or anywhere near the Sunset Strip. Instead, we were booked at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica, one of the most luxe, picturesque hotels in the world. It’s the place to party—if you�
��re Diane Keaton.

  “WHAT?” I screamed when Julie told the driver our destination.

  When we arrived, the pop singer P!nk was in the Shutters lobby, bouncing a baby on her knee as she gave an interview. Couples rode by outside on the hotel’s signature Kate Spade bicycles, rekindling their marriages. It was a complete nightmare. Julie and I had adjoining rooms with views of the glittery Pacific Ocean, but I was barely speaking to my traitorous assistant.

  “Look how beautiful it is.” She came to my windows and opened the . . . shutters.

  “SHUT THEM!” I screeched, paging through the room service menu. “There’s not even champagne here, Julie! It’s just fucking prosecco!” I charged a bottle to Say anyway and sprawled out on the bed in Ray-Ban Wayfarers and a bathrobe, listening to Julie interview Carmen Electra on speakerphone. Carmen said she used to slather her body in butter and lie out in a cornfield to tan. Could this possibly be a real memory? I was really out of it. The next day we shot Audrina at Pier 59 with two baby braids hanging in her face, à la The Face–era Kate Moss. There were a bunch of waste-management-themed murals outside the studio, so I got my Dumpster shot after all.

  * * *

  By April, I looked like Nicole Richie when she had that mysterious wasting disease—that is, incredible! I was as abusive, entitled, and openly intoxicated at the office as ever, but Jane and Say kept on letting me get away with it. Until one day, they didn’t.

  Two weeks after I returned from LA, I e-mailed in “dope sick” to work. You know how it is: some graffiti kid leaves piles of skag on your coffee table and the next thing you know you’re high and listening to the Contagion soundtrack in your underpants for six straight hours. I’d offered to pop by Oscar Blandi Salon in the morning to meet a reader who had won a hair makeover, but . . .