“Can I use the bathroom?” I ask, trying to make him forget all the weird shit I’ve just said. I go into his bathroom, look at the chipped toilet cover, and think to myself, This is David Cross’s toilet seat. He’s just like us. I splash water onto my face and try to will myself to stop saying stupid things.
I am literally the worst starfucker ever. I am a self-cock-blocking one by virtue of the insanity coming out of my mouth. I return to his living room. I sit on the couch. I keep to my pledge of silence.
“Hey, it’s getting late,” he says, and it is—it’s nearly six in the morning.
“Okay,” I say. “Do you want my number?”
He replies, with a distinctive question mark in his voice: “Sure?”
I jot my still-773 digits down on the back of my business card and leave it on his coffee table.
Then I stumble in as dignified a manner as I can muster out of his place, beeline straight to a bodega that is open, get a pint of double-fudge ice cream, and eat the entire thing on the cab ride home.
So begins a pattern. My deeply destructive binge-and-fast cycle. Since my period is so erratic, I finally go to yet another doctor, who tells me plainly what is wrong.
“You’re anorexic,” he says. He is not amused by my recounting of the Divorce Diet.
I deal with his diagnosis by getting wasted and sloppy drunk during the evening, then telling myself that eating a ton of food is actually good for me.
But once I open that dark Pandora’s Refrigerator Box, I can’t seem to close it.
The Divorce Diet had been something I could follow and contain like an inner pain that you starve and deprive, but when I begin to fill it up with one little bite of ice cream—just like with drinking—I can’t seem to stop. So many late nights, I come home and raid the lesbians’ refrigerator, sampling cereal and jars of olives, until I finally visit the twenty-four-hour bodega in the wee early-morning hours, loading up on cookies and candy, stuffing them in my face until I feel satisfied to the point of pain and disgusted with myself to the point of incapacitation. Sometimes, I even chronicle the wreckage in my diary: “6 mozzarella sticks, 1 diet cola, 1 16 oz. Tasti D-Lite with 2 toppings, 3 bowls of Lucky Charms, 1 pint of Chunky Monkey.” Looking at it now, it makes me want to puke all over again.
No one at work seems to “get” my pitch for this story: “The only person who knows the darkest secrets of your soul is the bodega guy at three in the morning.”
The next day, like clockwork, I wake up after a binge a few pounds heavier and vow that even though I don’t want to be anorexic, I don’t want to go back to my nearly two-hundred-pound weight from when I was married. So I pledge not to eat at all.
But everything changes when nighttime comes around, and, with nothing in my stomach for the last eight hours, I get hammered—and the binge-eating cycle resumes.
Anything to blunt out what I am feeling: fear, uncertainty, self-hatred, and not feeling like I have anyone there for me who cares.
By the time April arrives, I am so unmoored that one afternoon, without planning to, I log onto a travel agency site and book a last-minute trip to Florida.
I have no one to see. I just know, as Dr. Tom advises me after my last update, “You need to get the fuck out of Dodge.”
So I do—appropriately enough, right after writing my “reconciliation vacation” piece, which I finally get into the paper after DJ AM and Nicole Richie take a trip together that I can use as a launching point for the story. I have no real purpose attached to the trip, but Fort Lauderdale is a place on a map. I know that.
When I arrive, I hail a cab and ask to go to the coral-beachy hotel I booked as part of my weekend package. But the cabdriver gets lost—really lost—and after he finally gets sick of trying to find the hotel, he just drops me off on a street corner somewhere. Not quite sure what to do, and having ruled another cab out of the equation, I decide to hitch a ride from a couple twenty-something guys driving a beat-up red Chevy who make room for me to sit on the lap of the tattooed skinny one in the passenger seat.
“Nice car,” I say.
“Thanks,” the one in the passenger seat says, blasting Ol’ Dirty Bastard on the stereo. “It’s all we’ve got.”
“So, what’s your story?” I ask. Because this is something I know how to do. Interview.
They tell me about getting off of meth and starting a new life for themselves, and I stare dazed out the window. We pass a sleazy nail salon, a happy-ending place, and a shop with a sign that says U WILL STOP SMOKING.
I ask them if I can bum a Newport. I hate being told what to do.
When I finally arrive at my hotel, I lay out my notes for my never-ending hopelessly doomed rom-com treatment of “How He Blew It” and turn on the TV. I know I should be so grateful for all these opportunities coming my way, but all I want is something real. And I don’t know how to give that to myself.
So I head outside and realize that while I never considered hitching as an adult before, since I’ve just done it, why not try again? Some red-faced guy with frosted tips on his hair picks me up and looks at me strangely. I tell him to take me where the action is.
“Yeah, I’ll do it,” he says, with a look of concern it seems he is not used to giving strangers, “if you promise to never hitch a ride
