by Jeanne Darst
“Queen Ida was out last night,” he’d say at breakfast.
“Oh yeah?” I’d say, not looking up from my cereal.
“Yeah. She was a total pain in the ass. She was drooling and eating a chicken wing in bed. And then she thought she was gonna barf. I had to run and get a bucket.”
“I’m sure she just didn’t eat enough, that’s why she got so drunk.”
My friends and I took to calling Jed “Grandpa.” On a trip to San Francisco we bought him a key chain that said “Grandpa” on it. One weekend we went to California for a wedding and he forbade me to drink the whole weekend. It was honestly the worst weekend of my life.
IT WAS GETTING TOUGH to fit writing into my schedule. Between the drinking and the hangovers, there was just barely enough time to squeeze in sex with my ex-boyfriend and then running around trying to find the perfect turtleneck to wear in April without Jed suspecting I had a hickey underneath. I hated myself. I hated that I lied to someone I really loved. I hated that I wanted better sex than we were capable of having together. I thought if I was a better person I would be okay with mediocre sex. I thought only selfish people insist on fantastic sex all the time. I also thought that creative people must have mind-blowing sex. This was just what they did. Constantly. Sex and art are made from the same source material—insanity. They need hot, hot sex constantly or they become normal, noncreative people. Mostly, though, I couldn’t get the writer ex-boyfriend out of my mind. Okay, he was a fitness writer, but he’d gone to Columbia’s MFA writing program, briefly, and he was published. And I now lived two blocks from him. And he dedicated his book to me. A book about how to achieve great abs, but it was a bestseller. He was a gay icon, a straight icon, every guy wanted to be Alex. Or at least they wanted to be his stomach. The cover was a giant close-up shot of his sweaty six-pack abs. The dedication read “To Jeanne Darst, for almost killing me but in the end making me stronger.” Okay, it wasn’t the Great American Novel dedicated to me, but it was the bible of the midsection. How was I to know the second-printing inscription would read “To Natalie Mayer, for almost killing me but in the end making me stronger.” I should have known. It’s a terrible sign, Nietzsche-paraphrasing, a woman should never ignore this.
Back when we were dating he told me his father was a confidence man and that he worked for his dad selling fake concert tickets over the phone out of hotel rooms in Arizona during summers off from college. Alex was so broke it was ridiculous. For my birthday he gave me a package that consisted of: three library books (was I supposed to return these, or would he?), some hangers, an orange, and a shirt I had left at his house. You better believe the sex was incredible.
I thought, I’m just a terrible person. I have this terrific, kind guy who can give me everything in life and all I want is to screw the abs guy? I was supposed to want marriage and financial stability and a good guy and kids. Other people seemed to be desperate for these things. But I wanted hot sex and the chance to be a writer. And I didn’t want to have to lie to get these things.
I told Jed I needed to live on my own, and while we didn’t break up, I did move to a dinky place with one window and a sloped floor in the East Village. I did it with money he lent me. In other words I said, “I’m moving out” and “Can you pay for it,” in the same breath. No wonder I hated myself.
AT MY NEW PLACE there was a particular album that was making me insane. My neighbor always blared it around four p.m., which is how I deduced he was a bartender. Restaurant and bar shifts start at four-thirty or five p.m. And if they’re getting home at six a.m. like he did, they’re bartenders, not waitstaff. People who work in restaurants and bars often crank some music as they’re getting dressed for work to get them “up” for the long shift. He chose Donna Summer’s “Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain.” Real name: “MacArthur Park,” one of the all-time worst—terrible lyrics, terrible melody—and he played it every day around four p.m., a time I liked to nap. He wasn’t the only noise problem in my building on East Fifth Street in the Village—I wore earplugs to sleep every night—but he was the most dependable. I could hear him on the telephone, could hear him quite loudly if I put a glass against the uneven tenement wall. I never caught actual words, just blathery blather. No one ever came over to his house. Who was this guy?
I was partying a lot with a Scottish woman with whom I worked at Le Gamin. Her daughter lived with the grandmother somewhere upstate because she was unable to care for her. When we were working together we did loads of coke and drank rum during shifts; she was friends with all kinds of models and rockers and actors, maybe she was their dealer, she definitely had a lot of secrets, and she’d get drunk and blather on about her daughter and how much she missed her and then she’d snort up a bag of coke and suggest, “Let’s go for a dance at that place on Ludlow Street.” It was weird partying with a mother who was unable to take care of her young daughter. I was now the age my mother was when she’d had me, and I felt I was in some kind of cycle that I didn’t understand but knew was not good.
I blacked out all the time. I streaked through Tribeca. I thought if I married someone with the kind of money where no one has to work, I might become my mom. This would start with having babies when I barely knew how to take care of myself, and it would go on with drinking with a bunch of babies, and it would continue with not writing, which would make me feel like I hadn’t done what I wanted to do. The worst feeling I had as a kid was the feeling that my mother was willing to miss my life for a drink, that she wouldn’t stop for me, no matter how much it hurt me, no matter how much I talked to her and worried about her. And I never wanted to make anyone feel like that.
My sober boyfriend was beginning to resemble a giant mirror reflecting back to me my drinking problem. This mirror talked, too.
“I don’t know whether you’re an alcoholic but you definitely have a drinking problem,” he said, in the elevator after the streaking.
“Okay, baby,” I said. Anything to end the conversation.
Later at the bar I’d tell my friends about my troubles with Grandpa.
“His sobriety is getting so bad, you guys.”
“You don’t have to put up with that shit, Jeanne,” they’d say.
“I know,” I’d say. “I know.”
WHEN I QUIT MY JOB at Le Gamin, I lived off of the change that Grandpa threw in this enormous jar in his bedroom. I’d go over when he wasn’t home and hit up the jar. I’d wake up and think, What do I need to eat today? Okay, back up, back up: a pack of cigarettes first and foremost, then a coffee, a bagel, maybe a few bucks for a burrito later. The idea of shopping for food for tomorrow was insane to me. Tomorrow? Who knows what’s going to happen tomorrow.
One afternoon I had been trying to nap to the tune of “. . . and I’ll never find that recipe again! Oh no!” when I decided I was going to break into the bartender’s apartment. I didn’t test-market the idea. I just ran with it. The windows in my apartment were odd—sometimes they seemed locked but they weren’t. I figured my neighbor’s windows might have the same quirk. I got out on my balcony, facing the tenement buildings of East Fourth Street and smoked a cigarette, surveying the scene. Would there be any witnesses? I saw no one on any balconies or in any windows and decided to go for it. I threw my cigarette to the ground and scooted over to his window. I sat for a moment to establish that this was my window and then I reached back and pulled on the bottom of the window. It indeed had the same quirk of unlockability that mine had. I pulled it up really hard and then fell backward through the window, landing on the floor. I was in.
I got up off the floor and looked around. There was just enough light not to need to turn anything on. The head of his bed was up against the window, whereas mine was against the wall. Interesting. Hadn’t thought of that furniture arrangement. There was a long table coming out of the wall at the kitchen with a miniature Christmas tree on it. No ornaments but the lights were on. The place was fairly unremarkable. An old Chorus Line poster that was in keeping
with the Donna Summer thing. He was perhaps a theater major. The difference between the idea of breaking into someone’s apartment and the feeling of actually being in an apartment you have illegally entered is immediate. I was in the middle of a crime, a fairly big one, and it was intense but not enjoyable. I wanted to get my business done and get out. What was my business? I saw his wallet on his nightstand. Interesting that he went to work without his wallet. I had lost so many purses, replaced so many driver’s licenses and identification after drinking that I now left all ID at home when I went out, too. He had about fifty bucks in his wallet, which I left undisturbed even though I could have used it. I wasn’t here to steal anything. I pulled out the driver’s license. He was an okay-looking guy, very average, dark blond hair, dark brown eyes, twenty-eight. Footsteps in the outside hallway made me shove the license back in the wallet. I dropped it on the nightstand and ran into the bathroom and got in the shower. The person passed the apartment. It wasn’t him. Jesus Christ, I thought. I really need to find a hobby.
The reason I had quit my waitressing job at Le Gamin was that I was starting to lose my mind on people, get in terrible fights with customers, and I thought if I don’t get out of this work, “the life” as my father called waitressing, I’ll be doing it forever. I had been waitressing for so long it was the only way I knew how to pay my bills. Acting work was not happening. Who knew if I’d ever write anything decent once I actually acknowledged that writing was an act wherein a physical product was produced and not an art of discourse in the vein of the ancient Greeks. From watching my dad I knew how easy it would be for me to become someone who wasn’t actually finishing anything. I knew I could either get out (stay out, I should say) or go further in.
Jed was all second-act stuff. He’d kicked heroin, he had money, what was there to figure out? He would have liked to work in film, get bigger theater roles, but these didn’t seem to happen for him. He was a wonderful actor, a natural, and this may have been the only pebble in his otherwise clear path of life. It seemed like fighting for something, getting in there and competing, was something he would never even think of doing. Not that it was beneath him, just that it felt disingenuous, given his circumstances. I was terrified of going into this kind of state—a state where to actually want anything seemed insincere, a state of wealth where you needed to always appear grateful, helpful, never desirous. I didn’t want to be someone’s grateful wife. I didn’t want to be a baguette in some asshole’s downtown, Ph.D.-fueled, jack-off nonprofit extravaganza. I was probably going to leave the best friend I had ever had.
I got out of the shower and went back into the main room. I didn’t take the album. I didn’t even think of finding the Donna Summer album and removing it so that he could no longer play it. I just wanted to do one small thing that let him know he was not alone, that there were other people around him. I walked over to the Christmas tree and slid it from the wall to the very end of the table. That should do it. That should let him know he might be drinking too much, he needs to get out more, he should lock his window, he should be more considerate with the ’70s disco, he might be losing it. I opened the front door and quickly jumped out, shut his door, opened my own, and went inside to take a nice, peaceful nap.
A ROOM WITH A POO
WHEN JED AND I broke up after five years, I needed to find somewhere affordable to live, so I opted for my sister Katharine and her new husband Henry’s couch. I fancy myself a darned good houseguest but after a season or two they got that pained look on their faces. Then they busted me having phone sex on said couch with an actor in Chicago I had done a play with and they asked me to leave. I said farewell to the newlyweds and headed off on my own. I needed to get writing and I couldn’t do it with all these leaseholders and apartment owners crowding me. I found something on their street two blocks down. It wasn’t exactly an apartment, but then, what was the strict definition of apartment anyway? Some people might insist on amenities like a bathroom, but isn’t the expression “Location, location, location”? I’ve never once heard “bathroom, bathroom, bathroom” when the cognoscenti discuss New York real estate.
Mike and Nicola, the owners, were theater people. I had met them in Austin, Texas, at RAT (Regional Alternative Theater, or Raggedy-Ass Theater) Fest, where theater-makers from all over the country convened to share info on hijacking billboards, how to sharpen stage pencils at your temp job, this kind of thing. When I talked to them about moving into two rooms on the third floor of their brownstone, they informed me that there was a Puerto Rican family who lived on the second floor and part of the third. The two sisters had lived there for forty years and as the new owners Mike and Nicola had no interest in displacing the elderly. As far as Mike and Nicola were concerned, the two sisters were more than welcome to die in their building. These two women shared their place with a fiftyish son and a stoner nineteen-year-old grandson (who, shortly after I moved out, accidentally shot himself in the face in his room, approximately ten feet from where I’d been living). Mike and Nicola were far too Brechtian to clear out the top floors of their home and make more than the two hundred bucks a month they were likely charging the two sisters.
I learned that before buying the brownstone they had spent their time in a tepee in a shantytown at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge. The tepee was made of United States government mailbags sewed together by Nicola. They built a spit outside where they would roast lambs and things. They siphoned electricity off a lamppost on the bridge and refused to talk to journalists who came by, as that would put them back where they started, on the plane of franchised, connected artmakers. After about two years, Mike and Nicola felt close, very fucking close, to closing the gap between them and us, you and me, him and her, but then in 1993 the city put an end to the shantytown, razing all of the structures on “the hill.”
It was an exciting time for me. I was twenty-eight, and after a rigorous credit check (Mike: “Can you afford four hundred a month?” Me: “I’m sure going to try, Mike”), I got my first very nearly what you would call an apartment. On my own that is. No cosigners, no boyfriends, no sisters. I had two rooms and a sink in a closet. Virginia Woolf would have creamed in her pants. The main room was about twelve feet by twelve. It had two windows that were pretty well rotted through, and wood plank floors, which, with a single weekend of sandblasting, would have been irresistible. Against one wall there was an ancient white stove that looked like it belonged in some old rapist’s house in New Hampshire. And then a fridge next to that. This was the kitchen, just a fridge and a stove plunked into a room. There were no cabinets, no counters. If I had to do any fancy culinary moves like slice a tomato, I would put a plate on the stovetop and do it that way. I put a mirror over the sink in the closet. This is where I brushed my teeth, washed my face and peed in the middle of the night when I didn’t feel up to using the bathroom in the hall. This is also where I washed my dishes. Outside my door was a roof ladder on which the two old Puerto Rican sisters liked to dry their wigs on hangers after they washed them. I never knew why they chose this spot, right outside my front door, as the place to hang their drying wigs, but this was it and there was no way I could broach this conversation, en español or English. Jimmy’s door was about ten feet from mine, directly across from my bedroom door. Ignacio (or Nacho, as he was called) and the old aunts were really nice, but Jimmy I wasn’t so sure about. It wasn’t just the fact that he was in one of the most diabolical demographics known to man, the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old male, it wasn’t just the fact that he was a pothead, one of my least favorite addicts. (Potheads being generally lazier and less quick than other addicts. I preferred alcoholics. Alcoholics were charming, snappy dressers, good conversationalists, witty, cynical and a pretty ambitious crowd. Alcoholics were people . . . like me. Heroin addicts displayed tons of derring-do, venturing into abandoned buildings and finding the vein juste, and speed freaks seemed awfully likable, they liked to dance and stay up all night, they patronized the arts, liked to have tons and t
ons of sex.) It was that Jimmy seemed slightly untrustworthy, which is not a quality you want when sharing a toilet with someone. He was a little slow, like a pubescent Puerto Rican Stanley Kowalski, particularly the way he ordered women around. He had a habit of opening his door around eleven at night and yelling down the stairs, “Abuela, chocolatay.” A few minutes later his aged grandmother would make her way up the stairs to his door where she would say his name and he would open the door and take the hot chocolate from her and close the door abruptly, never saying thank you. This really got on my nerves, that a nineteen-year-old couldn’t make his own hot chocolate.
In the middle of the main room there was a long, light blue couch I had gotten at the Salvation Army. Alongside it was an old mahogany end table that looked like it might have been stolen off a Coachlight Dinner Theater production of Arsenic and Old Lace. The couch faced a TV atop a white cube between the two windows.
Next to the couch was my desk, where I sat Stegosaurus, my aged Mac, one of those models that had a huge rear and took up your whole desk.