“I thought you were sober,” I say, my palms sweating and my heart racing.
I love getting high. I love getting high. I love getting high. That’s all I can think.
“So, you’re sober-sober?” he asks. I didn’t know there was any other kind.
I observe as he laughs so much more easily at the show we’re watching. I miss feeling like that.
“I wish you could see it like I’m seeing it,” he says, taking another drag off the pipe.
I leave his skyline-view loft and head back to the Post, shaken up a bit.
This is the most I’ve ever been tempted by drugs since getting sober.
Maybe I should get high with him? Maybe it doesn’t count? I think about the last time I decided marijuana was okay, which spiraled into me in a sex club, snorting cocaine off a stranger’s breast for the delight of a crowd.
But maybe this time it would be different? I like this guy so much.
I want to belong. I want him to like me.
I can’t stop obsessing about it, so I write up a list of all the men I’ve slept with over my lifetime—and next to each I write “drunk” or “high.” Every single one.
It’s the biggest revelation I’ve ever had. My addiction is inextricably linked to my entire sexual history—starting from the moment I lost my virginity. I’ve been re-creating it ever since.
In a move I’ll never be able to quite explain—except that I think I am trying to save myself from falling into drugs and drinking again—I email the entire list of men to Jackson.
As much as sending it is pure kryptonite and renders me forever unwifeable in this guy’s eyes, I’m operating in pure survival mode now.
I won’t go back to who I once was.
I refuse to. Even if it means never finding love again.
I STOP DATING almost entirely and decide to focus solely on my career. It seems to pay off—and the synchronicity between what I’m reporting and what happens in my personal life blows me away.
When I’m assigned a big story on Courtney Love in the Post, not too long after, I run into her at a Cinema Society party downtown, and she starts chatting me up like a long-lost friend.
I sit and listen to Courtney talk at me for thirty minutes nonstop about a romantic entanglement she’s currently in the middle of. She details the guy’s reactions and goes off on hundreds of associated tangents.
“. . . and then I had a dream about this big penis that was like a shark . . .” Courtney says midway through, and I don’t know what comes over me, but for some reason, I feel like I can be brutally honest with this woman, whom I have been fascinated by since I was a teenager.
“You need to shut the fuck up,” I say when she finally takes a breath. “You must drive men nuts.”
Some kind of a fire lights up in her eyes—and she smiles, like she sees me for the first time. “You need a ride home?” she asks. Before Courtney’s town car drops me off, she scrawls several phone numbers and her email address in my reporter’s notebook.
Several nights thereafter, Courtney invites me over to her house in the Village, and we talk until seven in the morning. Giant amethyst crystals are everywhere, and as I chain-smoke with her, I convince myself that perhaps these “healing” crystals are taking away the toxic qualities of cigarettes. Everything with her is a whirlwind—an intoxicating mix of highbrow and lowbrow conversational crack—like if Page Six and every other gossip column in the world were put into a blender along with Socrates and Proust.
Her assistants bring us fresh mango juice and cookies. Her daily schedule is taped on the mirror. Couture gowns are draped everywhere. On the floor is a giant white sheet with various bits of information scribbled everywhere along with to-do lists and pictures of crying girls she sketches at will.
Everything with Courtney is a nonstop stream of names and conquests and mind games.
Being friends with her is a trip. At her house, we play with her dollhouses, watch old movies about Marilyn Monroe, and root through her insane $10 million collection of clothes. Other times, she’ll send me on wild-goose chases throughout the city, telling me to meet her at the SGI Buddhist institute in Union Square; then the location changes again. It’s like a shit test of the ultimate proportions.
“Do you want a coffee?” Courtney asks me late one night.
“No thanks,” I say, and as the words come out of my mouth, I watch as she proceeds to make me a cappuccino and slide it over.
I drink the cappuccino. Of course I drink the cappuccino.
“My friend Peri is coming over, she’s a psychic, so just like throw her sixty dollars if you want to do a reading.”
I try to enlighten Courtney about the state of my financial reality.
“I’m broke, Courtney,” I say. “That’s why I’m basically stuck at the Post, even if I wanted to leave. Because I need the paycheck. I’m barely surviving in New York. I’m even thinking about doing bankruptcy.”
“Do Chapter 7 if you do it,” she says, without missing a beat. “Chapter 11 is so pedestrian.”
I have no idea what this means, but she’s got a bunch of gold records on the wall, so I’ll take her word for it.
“You know, I used to be really broke when I was young,” she says. “But then I started chanting ‘Nam-myoho-renge-kyo,’ and within two months I had two million dollars. I’m serious. Don’t fuck around. It’s the only thing that really works. Here, let’s chant.”
We chant for a few hours before psychic Peri Lyons comes over, and she does that thing that all psychics do where they look into your eyes and tell you how
