by Dan Peres
She would later tell me that her name was actually Mary, but that her unnaturally tanned modeling agent encouraged her to use Agnes—which was in fact her middle name—as it sounded less pedestrian.
There must have been some theory circulating in the modeling community that girls with uncommon names had an edge and booked more jobs than run-of-the-mill Susans, Beths, and Jennifers. And there may have been some truth to that. In my time at W I met a fair number of Laylas and Brees and Rileys. The same, interestingly, must have been true for male models. How else to explain the onslaught of Brocks and Holts and Palmers that made their way through the Details offices over the years? Porn stars and soap actors clearly subscribed to the same school of thought.
“I never tell anyone my real name,” she insisted, suggesting I was special—that we had somehow developed a level of trust, a bond, a connection—that was uncommon between call girl and client. She also explained that she had only just started with the escort agency, Elegant Affairs, a week before we met at the suggestion of her roommate and fellow model, Misty. She said she’d been on only one other “call” in that time to an enormous brownstone in the West Village, and all that guy wanted to do was smoke pot and look at her feet while listening to the J. Geils Band’s “Centerfold” over and over.
She was a spectacular liar. I liked that. Whatever her name was, I liked her immediately.
In the end, I didn’t call her Emma or Agnes or Mary. I didn’t call her anything and never had the occasion to introduce her to anyone despite spending a lot of time together. When I talked about her with Adam, we called her Chickpea—the result of one of my own inspired lies—though she never knew that.
Chickpea’s face was blurred in her photos on the Elegant Affairs website. She wasn’t interested in too many people knowing she was a prostitute—even an expensive one—just lonely guys like me with $1,000 to burn for an hour’s worth of what the site referred to as “no-strings-attached companionship.”
Just what I was looking for.
I needed to stay as far away from strings as possible. When there were strings—and there always seemed to be strings—I would have things all knotted up faster than a Boy Scout going for a merit badge.
No, I was done with strings—though it’s not as if I had a choice. After being back in New York for well over a year, I had pretty much become undatable. The Kavorka—that awesome and bewildering superpower that made my time in Paris so memorable—was long gone. If anything, I had the anti-Kavorka. I’m not sure there was a name for it, but I was like a glowing chunk of kryptonite that slowly sucked the life out of anyone bold enough to spend any real time with me.
Things didn’t quite turn out the way Adam and Tanner had hoped.
“Dude, you’re the editor in chief of a major magazine,” Tanner told me shortly after I got the Details job. “That’s a serious panty dropper. Buckle up, brother, this is going to be a fun ride.”
“I’ll take that ride with you,” said Adam. “I’m definitely becoming your permanent plus-one.”
It was hardly the bacchanal they were expecting. But then again, I was never really a bacchanal kind of guy. And I definitely wasn’t the sort of guy to lead the charge.
It didn’t really matter, though. All I cared about by this point were pills. Getting them. Taking them. Obsessively counting them. I could determine at a glance how many tablets were left in those opaque orange pill bottles the same way some people tried to guess the number of candy corn in a jar on Halloween. I had a margin of error of two or three. It was a gift.
I always needed to have an accurate count—to know how many highs I had left before I would run out. Counting had become a major preoccupation.
While I was busy pursuing my pharmaceutical ambitions, there wasn’t a whole lot of time for dating or hooking up or panty dropping. I did manage to stay in a relationship with my onetime plus-one, Caroline, for about ten months, though it was far from the “fun ride” Tanner predicted. This was more of a ten-car pileup on the freeway.
I’d met Caroline through one of the magazine’s music writers. He brought her along to one of the Details staff drink outings I would throw every now and then to boost morale and show people that I was engaged. I wasn’t, which I suspected was becoming obvious, but an open bar always seemed to help everyone forget.
At twenty-seven, Caroline was an A&R assistant at a small indie label, which had recently been snapped up by a global music conglomerate. From a distance you could easily mistake her for a child. She was tiny with short black hair that always looked like she had just gotten out of bed. She reminded me of a nineties-era Winona Ryder, with sharp features and pale porcelain skin and enormous glimmering eyes. And like Winona Ryder, there was something mischievous behind those dark eyes. I’d look at her one moment and see an elfin innocent with a boy’s haircut and a warm smile and the next moment there’d be an intense rocker chick who didn’t suffer fools gladly and may have had a switchblade in her purse. She had range.
We did a little bit of drinking and a lot of flirting at the Details party, which was in the darkened back room of a low-rent Irish pub not far from our midtown offices—the kind with the bar’s name flickering in neon in the front window and the slightly putrid smell of steamed cabbage thick in the air. There was a pool table and a broken jukebox. Everything was sticky.
The Details team drank hard and fast. I, on the other hand, did not. I was a purist and didn’t want to mess with my Vicodin high. I also happened to be a lightweight when it came to booze. Two drinks and the room was spinning. I generally stopped at one. Either way, I usually didn’t hang around these parties long enough to get drunk. This evening I stayed mainly because I was entertained by the verbal jousting with Caroline. I’d gotten used to people laughing at my bad jokes or nodding in agreement even when I said something stupid. Perks of being the boss. Caroline was having none of it. This definitely wasn’t a playful batting-of-the-eyelashes flirtation. It was more of a battle of wits—a kick-him-in-the-shins-on-the-playground sort of exchange. It had a real “I’m just doing this because I’m buzzed and bored” quality to it.
We left the party and shared a taxi downtown at around midnight. I was heading home to a pile of much-needed Vicodin and she was on her way to the first of several gigs that would have kept her out till around three a.m. (I really grew to hate the word gig.) She leaned over to kiss me before I got out of the cab at Fifth Avenue and 11th Street. Had she not, I definitely wouldn’t have, and it’s likely I never would have seen her again. The kiss was sloppy—as first kisses tend to be, especially after a few drinks. I could taste stale champagne. Caroline, I would soon find out, always asked for champagne—it didn’t matter if it was a dive bar, a friend’s apartment, or a cramped middle seat in coach.
“I love my bubbles,” she explained.
Caroline went out six nights a week. She was fiercely competitive and unapologetically ambitious. She loved meeting new people and hated cigarette smoke. We were total opposites.
We were a couple from that night on.
I should have known from the very beginning that things with Caroline were going to get messy. The first night she came to my apartment she was merciless about my taste in music. It was brutal.
“You’re kidding me with this Hootie & the Blowfish, right?” she said, flipping through one of the black nylon books where I kept my CDs. “Please tell me you’re fucking kidding.”
I knew I should have edited out some of the lamer stuff before she came over.
“That one was sent to me for free,” I said, lying.
“Indigo Girls. Melissa Etheridge,” she said, laughing. “What are you, a giant lesbian?”
“All right,” I said. “Wait a minute.”
“Holy Christ,” she yelled. “Rick Springfield? You’re definitely not getting laid tonight.”
“Really?” I said. “You’re going to sit there and tell me that ‘Jessie’s Girl’ isn’t a classic?”
And there it was. The
re are those who love “Jessie’s Girl” and those who don’t. It’s as simple as that. A mutual appreciation of won ton soup and Frasier reruns simply isn’t enough. It would always come back to “Jessie’s Girl.” We were together for close to a year, but she never let it go. She loved teasing me about it, particularly in front of her Radiohead-loving, alt-rock music industry friends.
Rick Springfield aside, it wasn’t all bad—at least not at first. We took a couple of great vacations, one to Barbados and another to Jamaica. She brought me home to meet her parents in suburban Atlanta, which was both eye-opening and ego-crushing.
“My dad pulled me aside just as we were leaving and told me he was really proud of me for not choosing a boyfriend based on his looks,” she said to me, cracking up as we walked through the airport.
Okay, so maybe I’d put on a little weight, but this was hard to take, especially coming from her dad, who had enough hair coming out of his nose to braid.
While I never let Caroline see me swallow even one Vicodin, the addiction had grown both far more intense than the relationship and a hell of a lot more important. It was easy to hide the pills from her. I kept them buried in my laptop case in the very back of my closet and I would take them when she wasn’t looking—fifteen at once with a quick sip of water. It was easy. Plus, despite being a couple, we were rarely together. She was out all the time for work, going to gigs and drinking what I can only imagine was bad champagne on the Lower East Side at places like the Mercury Lounge and Arlene’s Grocery. We spent the night together once or twice a week, at best. Still, it was harder to hide the effects of pills. That would have required our never seeing each other.
“What’s wrong with you?” she would ask with increasing frequency.
“I’m stressed,” I would say. Or “I’m tired.” Or “I don’t feel well.” Or—and this one really drove her nuts—“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, there’s nothing wrong?” she would demand, with equal parts anger and concern.
She may have been referring to the fact that I didn’t want to do anything—ever. I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t want to have sex.
“I’ve never had a boyfriend who didn’t want to fuck me,” she said one night, standing in front of me wearing nothing but a faded Brown University T-shirt she’d had since freshman year. “This is not normal. You are not normal.”
Normal.
There was that word. It had started to come up more and more. First from Caroline. Then from my mom—“It’s not normal for you to not return my call.” And eventually even in my own head—“Is it normal to wake up in the middle of the night and vomit and then go back to sleep like nothing happened?”
Normal had become something of a dirty word for me. I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to know what was normal and what wasn’t.
“Normal people don’t come to cocktail parties and stand in the corner,” Caroline said once. “These are my friends and you barely spoke.”
I figured I deserved a medal for even showing up in the first place. I rarely went out unless it was related to work, and then I was able to turn on the charm and make small talk. But when it was Caroline’s friends—or my friends or my family, for that matter—I found it harder to fake it. In the end, it was just easier to not spend time with anyone. There were no questions that way. No concerns. No drama. There was no one reminding me that maybe my behavior wasn’t normal.
My relationship with Caroline ultimately ended just as quickly as it had begun. She came over late one night to pick up a pair of shoes she’d left at my apartment. It was after midnight and I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom shuffling a deck of cards in front of the fireplace. The fire I’d started an hour earlier had died down but was still smoldering. The only light in the room was coming from the television, where I was watching a DVD on card magic, Learn 40 Ways to Secretly Force a Card.
“Pick a card,” I said when she walked in the room. “This is pretty cool.”
“I’m not picking a card,” she said. “I’m done.”
“Come on,” I said. “Just one time and the I’ll put them away.”
“Dan, I’m done,” she said. “Not with card tricks. With everything. I can’t do this anymore.”
I didn’t put up a fight. How could I? We talked for a few minutes before she hugged me and left, shoes in hand. There were no tears in her giant eyes, only relief—like a freed hostage.
I relit the fire and shuffled the cards.
Journey was playing on the stereo the first night Chickpea came over. I had considered putting on something moodier, like Al Green or Marvin Gaye, but that seemed cheesy and somewhat cliché. I was sure that call girls had heard enough “Sexual Healing” to last a lifetime. I figured I’d give her a break. Plus, I’d recently seen an episode of Behind the Music on Journey and was reminded that Raised on Radio was the first cassette I ever bought with my own money. It may not have been a career-defining album, but it did have a couple of hits. I was an unabashed Journey fan, something the editors of Details took great delight in. It seemed that making fun of my taste in music was a growing obsession for many.
It had been over a month since Caroline and I broke up. I had just returned from the 2001–2002 fall/winter European men’s fashion shows, with stops in Milan and Paris. I was really starting to love these trips—and not for the fashion forecasting. It was hard to get excited about shearling-lined bombers and gray flannel double-breasted suits. No, for me these trips were all about lodging. I loved the hotels. The room service. The terry cloth robes. The fact that I could luxuriate in an opiate fog in 900-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets at the Four Seasons in Milan and the Ritz in Paris. The highs always seemed just a little bit higher in a five-star hotel.
Spending $1,000 on a call girl was the furthest thing from my mind when I walked back into the Details’s 34th Street offices the first Monday after my semiannual European fashion adventure. We had just shipped the all-important March issue and I needed to make sure that things were moving smoothly with April and May. I may have been something of an absentee editor—even, on occasion, when I was in the office—but I managed to focus long enough to make sure we were building a strong magazine. It mattered to me that the mix of content was right, that the images were beautiful, that the design was forward thinking, that the stories and headlines were great. This had become something of a shaky high-wire act every month. I would make it across and then look back in amazement and wonder at how I had done it—at how I was still alive.
I was on my way to lunch when Steven, an eager junior editor with a slight lisp who sat directly outside of my fourth-floor office, grabbed me and pitched a story about wealthy men ordering ultra-expensive escorts over the internet.
“These women aren’t like the hooker Hugh Grant got busted with,” he said, going for an older but still useful reference. “They’re not streetwalkers. These are tens. Total beauties. Check it out.”
I leaned over the back of his chair as he brought up the Elegant Affairs website. There was a tuna sandwich on his desk. The smell made my stomach turn. There was a grid of photos on the site’s home page—Brady Bunch style—of women in evening gowns with their first names in bold black letters toward the bottom of each picture. Felicity. Harmony. Elle. Mia. Ebony. Emma. The whole thing reminded me of a fashion look book—catalogue-style photos of catalogue-style models, some with windblown hair courtesy, no doubt, of a blow-dryer being held just out of frame.
“Listen, I have to run,” I told Steven. “Why don’t you bring this up in next week’s pitch meeting.”
After work, I stopped by David Copperfield’s apartment to check out some newly restored turn-of-the-century penny arcade games that had just been delivered and he was eager to show me. David was in New York for a couple of days—he’d been spending a lot of time on the road and at the MGM in Vegas—and he’d turned the first floor of his home into a full-blown fun house with dozens of games from the 1900s, each mad
e of polished wood with weathered steel knobs and fixtures. We’d developed a real friendship over the course of the past year and would speak at least once a week and get together whenever he was back in New York.
I was excited to see the new penny arcade games, but I also had a present for him. When I was visiting my family in Baltimore for Thanksgiving, I found an old trick that my mother had stored in a large box in the attic with the rest of my magic stuff. It was called a Temple Screen and was made with three panels of cardboard, each around eighteen inches tall and about five inches across, which were held together with duct tape. The magician would stand the boards on a table propped up in the shape of a horseshoe and produce silk scarves from behind the screen. It was a classic. I’d also found my long black satin cape. I had forgotten I used to wear a cape when I did magic as a kid.
When I came down from the attic with the Temple Screen, I tried to throw the cape away.
“Don’t do that,” my mother said.
She was like the trash police. I once buried a candy wrapper in the very bottom of the trash can and she later called me into the kitchen to ask if I was the one who ate the Whatchamacallit.
“Why don’t you bring the cape back to New York?” she asked. “You might want to wear it if you ever do a magic show.”
“For the love of god, Mom. Leave the cape in the trash,” I pleaded.
David had once told me that the first magic trick he ever bought as a kid was a Temple Screen, but he returned it after seeing how cheaply made it was. I thought he might find it funny if I gave him mine. He was actually quite touched.
I stayed at David’s for about an hour. He was like a giant kid, excitedly explaining each of the arcade games before dropping a penny in and letting me play. After losing to him a couple of times in a horse-racing game that required me to crank a handle around clockwise as quickly as I could as the painted metal horse moved across the track, I had to go.
“Do you want to grab dinner?” he asked.