Worst of all, Kevin was still back in Austin, working up the nerve to quit the Chronicle and saving up money to make the move out west. I was lonely, and scared of the silence in my big basement apartment, and I took it out on him, leaving increasingly hysterical voice mails when he didn’t pick up the phone, berating him when he finally did. I had kept a diary, off and on, for years, and now I wrote and wrote and wrote. July 26: “Victories today: Went for walk instead of crying.” November 17: “I can’t do anything right anymore and all I do is cry.” December 2: “I’m too socially awkward and insufferably inarticulate to ever warm up to anyone.” April 22: “Tonight went well. I didn’t say a single stupid thing.”
Reading those pages now, I wish I could go back and tell that scared twenty-three-year-old that it all turned out okay in the end, more or less. Ease up on yourself, I would say. This wasn’t even the hard part.
Back in high school, when things were going really badly, I started having what I called out-of-body experiences. One moment, I would be in a bookstore with Josh, whisper-fighting over my outfit or why I was taking so long or what we were doing next, and the next, I’d be outside myself, listening to my heart pound from a great distance as I watched my body hustle toward the nearest exit. These spells were often triggered by some innocuous sound—rustling paper, or the bell on a cash register, or the jingle of coins in someone’s pocket—and they were unpredictable, sometimes going on for hours. They drove me further inside myself. I never knew when an attack would strike, so I never ventured too far outside my comfort zone: School, my part-time job at a Hallmark store six blocks from home, my room, and Josh. Over time, I came to recognize these “spells” as panic attacks, but it would be years before I learned to manage them, and more than a decade before I learned to do anything other than run away.
The attacks had come on less and less frequently after college, thanks in large part to my therapist, Miriam, who taught me how to “talk back” to the thoughts that were making me leave my body. But as soon as I moved to Seattle, they returned with vertiginous urgency. A panic attack is like a fire whipping through a forest turned to kindling by drought: Even as it starts to die down, the slightest gust of worry (Is my heart still pounding? Can everyone tell I’m freaking out?) can whip it back into an inferno. Worry piled upon worry piled upon worry (the clinical term for this is catastrophizing), and even though I knew obsessing over my state of mind wasn’t doing any good, I just couldn’t stop. (Addicts, it turns out, are a bit prone to obsessive behavior.) I started writing long instructional notes to myself in a jittery hand, things like: “Just stop focusing so much on how you’re feeling physically. It doesn’t do any good and only makes you panic & feel worse. If you just decide to stay in bed again, focusing on how much fun you’re not having, then you shouldn’t be surprised when you feel worse.”) My self-directed lectures did nothing, and before long, I was downing a quarter milligram of Xanax every morning, with a Prozac chaser, courtesy of the free clinic near my office. (I had health insurance, but for some reason, getting a real doctor seemed beyond my capability.) The Xanax mitigated the attacks, but only as long as I kept taking it, and the Prozac made me feel like I was walking under water, choking for air. Nothing will ever feel different or better, my brain told me. You’ll eventually be so paralyzed with fear that you’ll lose your job and have to move back in with Mom and Dad. And then they’ll get sick of you and you’ll end up living on the street. And what will you do then?
One thing did seem to help. I noticed that if I had a drink in the evening after work, the attacks would subside for a while and I could get through the night without climbing the walls, feeling like my body belonged to someone else. Before long, I started keeping a bottle of vodka in my freezer—a frosted fifth of Absolut, the ultimate symbol of glamour in my eighties childhood. (Jennie, always two steps edgier than I would ever be, plastered the wall above her bed with those Absolut ads that were ubiquitous throughout the nineties—the ones where the bottle was turned into a skyscraper or a pile of presents or a reflection on water. When she died, I couldn’t help picturing her mom tearing down all those liquor ads from her wall.)
Buying liquor in Seattle in those days was a bit of a hassle—hard alcohol was only sold at state-run liquor stores, and the closest one was a couple of miles away—so I tried to make a bottle last several weeks, indulging in a weak vodka soda after I had eaten my spartan dinner of canned vegetable soup and Wheat Thins. Drinking alone felt subversive, the kind of thing I found noteworthy enough to joke about with Kevin: just two weeks in Seattle, and already the place was turning me into an alcoholic. Sometimes, if I was feeling especially sorry for myself, I would pour a second drink—just vodka this time, over ice—and settle in to watch Terms of Endearment, which was always on rotation on AMC. Kevin would know it had been a two-drink night if I called him, sobbing, to accuse him of abandoning me in Seattle and trying to meet someone better in Austin. But those were also the nights when I slept the best; when the jitters didn’t overtake me, and when the silence in my quiet neighborhood in a sleepy corner of Seattle didn’t feel as overwhelming as it did when my nerves were running at full voltage.
Kevin did make it out to Seattle, and I fixed him up in an apartment a couple of miles away from me, a top-floor unit in an old building with awful brown shag carpet and a glassed-in balcony that always left the place with a bitter chill. I felt more grounded with him around, but I still missed the easy human connections I had made in Austin.
For months, the only people who passed for friends were my middle-aged coworker Jim and a few city council aides who were still more like sources than confidants. As my social life shrunk and stalled, I started to wonder: What does it take to make friends in this town?
* * *
—
Less than a year after I took the job, the Weekly’s new owners fired all three of the women at the top of its masthead—the editor, managing editor, and publisher—and replaced them with three middle-aged guys who were supposed to revive the paper’s flagging readership. To accomplish that, they hired more white guys, until the only women on the editorial side of the office were me, a half-time education reporter, and a music writer who spent her days shopping for clothes on eBay. The paper became a mirror of its new management. Detached Gen-X irony was out; indignant baby boomer outrage was in. Dishy columns poking fun at city council members were replaced by dour ruminations on the state of the local peace movement, or opinion pieces bemoaning the impact of urban development on a local creek. The house style became reflexive contrarianism with a libertarian bent. Stories that poked at “conventional wisdom” (“The Excesses of Affirmative Action”) made it on the cover, even if that wisdom was conventional because it was true.
Weekly staffers under forty started talking about jumping ship to The Stranger, our younger, cooler competitor, and details of our editorial meetings started to leak into its pages, making us look prissy and out of touch. Furious, the new management team vowed to find and fire the culprit. (Punishment for disloyalty was a bit of a company tradition; a few months after I started, someone broke into my boss George’s office after hours and plastered every surface with signs for Grant Cogswell, a city council candidate George despised. I thought it was hilarious, but my bosses disagreed, and the next day, HR tracked down and fired the ad rep who’d let the pranksters into the building.) The Stranger wasn’t just our crosstown rival—it was our enemy, run by enfants terribles like Onion cofounder Tim Keck and sex columnist Dan Savage, who hadn’t so much paid their dues in the journalism world as plowed through it in a party bus. My counterpart/nemesis over there was a guy named Josh who showed up at city council hearings in a basketball jersey and helped orchestrate a “dance-in” at council chambers to protest a city law called the Teen Dance Ordinance prohibiting all-ages clubs.
The guy who was behind the leaks, a skinny former intern named Tristan who hadn’t stopped sulking since our old bosses got fired, wasn
’t hard to catch. He sat and scribbled openly throughout our editorial meetings, and then his notes, translated into gossipy news items, would appear in The Stranger a week later. Shortly after he was fired, Tristan’s byline started showing up in The Stranger. And while I didn’t condone his ingratiating tactics I was desperate to follow him, so I let Josh know I was looking to make a move.
Within a few weeks, after a warm-up interview at which I don’t recall saying a single word, I found myself walking nervously into a bar across the street from The Stranger’s office. For an hour, the guys—Dan, Tim, and Josh—drank and joked and pummeled me with questions. The Weekly sucks. Why did you go to work for them? (Tim.) How do we know you aren’t a spy? (Dan.) “Why should we hire you when you’re an apostate on the monorail?” (Dan again, referring to a story I had written criticizing a plan to build a citywide monorail system that was, believe it or not, the hottest issue in Seattle in 2003.) I nursed a half glass of red wine with sweaty hands. By the end of the interview, the guys were tipsy, I was terrified, and Dan and I were yelling at each other about transportation policy. I got the job.
The following week, after I handed in my notice at the Weekly, I went to Friday staff drinks at Bill’s Off Broadway, a grungy pizza place with pies so buttery they practically slithered off the plate. Years later, Bill’s would be the place where I would burn a hole in the collar of my favorite red wool coat by draping it drunkenly across a candle; the place where an eighteen-year-old intern would pour himself into my lap, begging me to buy him a beer; and the place where I would make awkward small talk with the wife of the coworker with whom I was having an affair. But tonight, I was the new girl making small talk at a party full of strangers, clinging to a beer I didn’t want just so I’d have something to do with my hands. I was two nervous pints in when Dan showed up, sauntered over to my side, called everyone to attention, and said, “Welcome to the team!” Then he slid his hand onto my back and undid my bra.
“Um . . . what?” I giggled, feeling a dozen pair of eyes on my chest. “Ha, ha, nice welcome.” Grabbing at the clasp through the back of my sleeveless top, I fled for the restroom, face ablaze. What did I do to make him do that? I wondered. Is this some weird kind of hazing? Does he do that to everyone? By the time I got back, bra securely clasped, everyone had moved on to talking about other stuff, so I pulled Dan aside. “Why did you do that?” I asked. “I used to be a drag queen!” he responded, laughing. Oh. That explains it. I smiled nervously, said, “Oh, I didn’t know that!” and poured myself another pint.
Big changes happened in rapid succession. I moved from the basement apartment to a place six blocks from work, within stumbling distance of a few dozen bars. As I got more enmeshed with the people I was meeting through my job—artists, politicians, people who knew where the after-party was—I started to pull away from Kevin, and he noticed; there was always an argument brewing beneath the surface of our Saturday-morning farmers market trips, and more and more I spent weekend nights in the company of my friends from work, drinking and laughing and drinking and drinking and drinking. I was embarrassed, I think, by Kevin’s Oklahoman sincerity, his slow way of talking that people sometimes misinterpreted as being just plain slow. “Why don’t you break up with him?” my new friend Tiffany, The Stranger’s food critic, would ask me, raising one quizzical, perfectly contoured eyebrow. “I mean, I couldn’t date anyone that short, but you are shorter than me, so . . .” I shuddered to think of the two of them in the same room together. So I compartmentalized. I kept my two worlds—Kevin world and Stranger world—apart. I tried to be two different versions of myself—the Erica who loved cooking and dad jokes and bad TV, and the one who did shots and took dares and made fun of posers—until I didn’t know which was real, which was a false front. Until it didn’t matter.
That’s when I started sleeping with Josh.
Kevin and I had broken up—that is, he had stormed out of my house, saying it was over, and I had decided to take him literally—and it was the end of a six-drink night when I offered to drive Josh home on my scooter and ended up hanging around for six months. Josh was one of the smartest, weirdest people I had ever met, and we had an uncanny connection, right from the beginning. I had always found it hard to be fully myself around anyone, but Josh and I were so similar that it was impossible to be dishonest with him, or pretend to be anyone other than I was—a messy, insecure, emotional young woman with outsize ambition and a lot of things I wanted to talk about. When I tried to keep things from him—like the existence of my birth mom, Cindy—they would come pouring out anyway, until I felt that there was nothing I couldn’t tell him. What incredible luck to find someone I never get tired of talking to, I thought. I told myself—not for the first time about a guy I had just started dating—I think I’m in love.
And then—you knew this part was coming, right?—he dumped me. Too emotional, too young, too literally-his-employee. I was devastated. Our coworkers were vindicated. I didn’t know how I would ever get over him while seeing him every single day, but I was determined not to quit. We fought at work for a year—screaming fights, superficially about work—and I frequently stormed out, slamming his office door so hard the whole floor shuddered. And the weirdest part about the whole thing is that it all worked out. Josh—who has airlifted me out of bad situations and picked rocks out of my back after a bad bike accident and saved my life more times than I can count—became the brother I never had: a brother who stays up too late, like I do, and shares some of my idiosyncratic obsessions, but also spends his time doing things I admire but can’t understand, like reading his own poetry to people out loud and striking up conversations with strangers on crowded trains. He’s my rock, and I haven’t always deserved him. In fact, long after we got whatever that was out of our systems, I spent a good five years doing my best to drive him away.
Eight
I Can’t Say It, But You Know I Do
Does anybody really love being in their twenties? I sure didn’t. I spent most of this supposedly happy, carefree decade trying on personas—embarking on a series of unsatisfying relationships, investing in friendships that made me feel worse about myself, feeling profoundly uneasy in my own skin. The idea of “happiness” itself seemed like something dreamed up in a marketing lab, like “zen” or “bliss.” Who the hell is happy? Not me, not my friends. Instead of happiness, we had each other, a bunch of deeply discontented people, sitting around and drinking and making fun of the world.
I spent my mid-twenties waiting to feel comfortable, and drinking to fake it. I didn’t get shit-faced every time I drank—that came later—but I came to appreciate the power of alcohol as a social lubricant. Soon enough, a midday beer started to feel like an earned indulgence, and if I got drunk on both Friday and Saturday nights, who cared? So did everybody else, and besides, that’s why God invented Sunday. I didn’t want to be the outsider who worked until eight and then went home alone to soup and crackers. I wanted to belong.
And eventually, I sort of did.
By now, it was 2004, and my group of friends included Tiffany, an archivist named Sarah, Tristan (the former Weekly spy turned Stranger rising star), and a tall, curly-haired musician named John, who wrote film reviews and fronted a band that had had a big hit when I was in college. I had a parallel group of friends from the political world, including Lisa, a flame-haired, opinionated city council aide who defied every convention associated with the term public servant, and Stephanie, another council aide who talked a mile a minute and somehow knew everyone, from gray-haired ex-governors to the band that was playing at Chop Suey on Friday night. Lisa was the friend I went to bars with, one-on-one, on weekends when I wasn’t busy tagging along with the Stranger crew; with her red hair and flamboyant outfits that accentuated her va-voom figure, she inevitably ended up waving off guys’ numbers by the end of the night.
I liked to keep my friend groups separate—city hall people after work on weekdays, Stranger friends on we
ekends, when a night might last until five in the morning, long past the bars closed at 2:00 A.M. The city hall people found the Stranger crew shallow and snobbish, and the Stranger group found the city hall crowd boring and square. It was high school all over again.
On Saturday nights, five of us—me, Tristan, Sarah, Tiffany, and John—would often end up at Tiffany’s elegant apartment, which was perfect for languid late-night drinking and complaining. Everything was just so, from the pristine cloud of white linens on her bed (visible through the French doors that opened onto the living room) to the elegant monochromatic glassware displayed in the cabinets that lined her perfectly put-together kitchen. Even the toiletries were all carefully covered with blank white labels, like an art project about the concept of bodily functions. After taking off our shoes and filling up our champagne flutes, we’d flop down on the couches and gossip lazily about who was trying to sleep with whom, who were no longer sleeping together, and who was secretly sleeping together and didn’t want anyone to know.
But guess what? Some of us were better at keeping secrets than others.
John was married but was infamous for pushing boundaries—Tiffany told me he once grabbed her by the waist and said, “If we had met at a different time and place, I would kiss you right now”—and when he sent me an initial, testing-the-waters text on my 2003 Nokia candybar phone (“This is more than a test”), I figured it wouldn’t go much farther than that. Married guy, used to be semifamous, starts feeling insecure and seeks some validation from pretty women to prove he’s still got it, and that’s as far as it goes. Right?
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