“Fine,” I say. “Whatever.”
He lets me off at a beach bar, and I drink Sex on the Beaches like a fucking tourist and smoke Camel Lights, watching the tanned, swaying women dance with the old Hawaiian-shirted men who stare lustfully into their blank, drunken eyes. I try my hand at flirting with a group of businessmen, but the sadness and alienation in my affect blinds like a “stay away” flashlight.
“You’re weird,” one guy says.
“You have no idea,” I reply. “Buy me a Long Island iced tea.”
“No,” he says.
“Whatever,” I say. “I’m leaving. This place sucks.”
I keep my promise to the giver of my last hitched ride, find a cab, and ask the driver to take me to the best nearby restaurant. He drops me off at a local Olive Garden. I sit there by myself, reordering more breadsticks and swallowing whole my lasagna until I feel nothing else inside. I am full to the point of throwing up, but I order the cheesecake, too. Feeling physically uncomfortable and bursting from my jeans, I head back to the hotel, where I sink into the Jacuzzi alone, admiring my increasing waistline in my bikini and sinking underwater.
Numbness. That is a much better feeling than depression.
This vacation is no better than fucking Dodge itself. I don’t know how to have fun without chaos or self-loathing. The most enjoyable part so far has been hitching rides from strangers, knowing I could be murdered.
It made me feel alive, like there was a possible dangerous end.
chapter four
The Gossip Girl
2006
Back in New York, during another one of my binge-and-starve cycles, I go to a party—again at the Magician—with a few comedy writer friends of friends, and find myself talking to a bearded comedy TV producer whom I stand next to as a girl comes up to us with a giant black eye. She says nothing about it, and when she finally leaves, the producer comments on it.
“Well, that was the fucking elephant in the room,” he says.
“Maybe that’s the new thing,” I say. “Chick punching.”
He laughs. Dark.
Cut to three or four or fifteen Stolichnaya and sodas later: Everything blurs into black and gray until I am back at his place getting fucked. The sheets are so crisp and downy. I remember that.
The next morning, I take my cue that he has no desire to ever see me again—he is extremely cold and quiet—and I leave to meet up with a friend of mine whom I offered to show around the Post newsroom.
I am still a little drunk from the night before, and as I take her around to point out the old newspaper covers on the wall (“look, it’s ‘Headless Body in Topless Bar’ ”), everything still seems to sparkle with the go-go-go energy of alcohol and sexual attraction and keeping up with the comedy writer boys. I’ve managed to compartmentalize the morning rejection.
But when my friend leaves to go back to work, I go to the empty bathroom and look at myself in the mirror. What even happened to me? What is happening to me? I feel sick. I lean over the toilet and try to make myself throw up. I can’t, but I do manage to shoot the blood vessels out around my eyes through my half-assed bulimia.
Then I sit on the toilet experiencing a feeling worse than ill. It’s like I can sense something foul and sick rotting in my body. Squatting down on the bathroom floor, I reach into myself and discover it: a disgusting bloody-stringed tampon lodged deep inside. Revolted, I extract it carefully.
Since I don’t remember the sex, I suppose it makes sense. How could I remember I was wearing a tampon? The producer guy had fucked it all the way inside me. I was that drunk.
Vile. Finally, I am sick.
I retch all over the Post bathroom and realize right then and there that I need to turn this ship around. For what it’s worth, I make a promise to God that I will not have sex until I am in a serious relationship again. I just can’t keep doing this.
For years, I will wonder who exactly this bearded comedy guy was that bleak night. I don’t blame the man or even think he did anything wrong. It’s not like that.
There’s a psychological phenomenon called “repetition compulsion theory,” where you keep subconsciously re-creating a traumatic event in your life—for me, getting blackout drunk and having sex—trying to somehow gain control over that which initially wounded you. Animals do this, too. It is the most primitive of reactions. One psychiatrist explained it to me as an attempt to master the original wound with a similar experience. But all it really ends up doing is cementing the trauma until it is part of you.
AFTER THE TAMPON exorcism at the office that day, I return to my computer and google “New York therapists” and make a few calls until I find a woman who takes my insurance. I make an appointment, and two short weeks later I am in to see a female therapist in her dimly lit West Village apartment.
The therapist is in her fifties, with long gray hair, and she is as tall as I am, which is unusual.
“So, I’ve been having these alcoholic blackouts,” I tell her.
“How many?” she asks.
“Four, five,” I say. “A lot, I guess. I mean, everyone drinks in New York. That’s just how it is.”
“Okay,” she says. “Well, why don’t we start with your family history . . .”
So begins my least favorite part of therapy. The “tell me your story” part. I don’t want to sing for my psychological supper. But I do, as I always do with therapists, so many hopes and expectations placed on this stranger who you are paying to care about you for fifty minutes.
Here is my therapist elevator speech, boiled down.
“I shouldn’t exist,” I begin, ever dramatic, like I’m doing a performance at the Moth.
The fact that I do, I explain, feels like an unforgiving miracle at
