by Amy Dresner
“Okay.”
“You’re young, pretty, and seem smart—aside from doing this stupid maneuver. Life can’t be that bad. This is a tad dramatic, no?”
I was silent.
They released me. I couldn’t believe it. I had tried to kill myself, but in the U.K., there was no mandatory seventy-two-hour hold. And unlike doctors in the U.S., they didn’t feel bad for me, weren’t interested in analyzing how I felt. Honestly, they just made me feel like an asshole for what I’d done. Welcome to the NHS.
The next morning, I felt a weird sense of relief. It was like I had just let out a primal scream of such proportions that my angst had been lessened considerably but the world was left deafened and stunned.
What had actually changed? Nothing. Nothing at all. The feelings and circumstances that had driven me to slit my wrists were the same, only now instead of everybody’s concern or sympathy, I had their anger.
My father said to me, “How the fuck do you think people are going to react? You are something beautiful and special in their lives, and you took a fucking box cutter to it, and tried to take it away.”
After my suicide attempt, I moved back to Los Angeles, into a sweet, overpriced deco apartment. I contacted Siri, and she offered me a job working as a salesgirl at her boutique while doing PR for her line. I took it. I could sit around her shop during the day and send emails to fashion editors and store managers on my days off. Seemed low stress enough.
I intended to stay sober, but, of course, that plan went quickly awry. One night, Siri and I were hanging out downtown at the Standard Hotel. A super-handsome Cuban surfer started talking to me. He lit up a huge joint right at the bar.
“I’m a big…‘marijuana enthusiast,’” he said.
“So you’re a snobby stoner.”
He grinned. “Wanna hit?”
“No… I prefer meth, but these days I prefer nothing. I’m sober.”
Next thing I knew, we were making out, and he shotgunned me a mouthful of pot smoke. For the first time in seven years, I was high. Really fucking high. And it felt amazing. Yes, that’s right. One dose was all it took to awaken the dragon of addiction from its deep sleep. I didn’t know it then, but I was fucked.
I’m okay smoking pot, I thought. After all, I hate pot. I’m not going to get addicted to something I hate, right? And pot’s a fucking joke. Nobody goes to rehab for pot. I mean, come on… What’s “hitting bottom” on pot look like? Eating too many Chalupa Supremes and losing your day to binge-watching South Park? Bitch, please.
Before long, I was smoking pot all day, every day, and still hating it. But hating it didn’t stop me. See, when you’re an addict, you want to feel “different.” You don’t really care whether it’s shitty-different. And sure, occasionally, I’d have a laughing fit or one of those weird profound insights about how the universe worked. But, in general, pot made me anxious and paranoid and led me to overthink the things I naturally already overthought.
However, as long as I’d opened the pot portal and was no longer “sober,” I decided to add drinking to the mix. I can drink, I lied to myself. At first, it was just beer and wine. I’ve never been a good drinker. I always got sloppy and obnoxious. Alcohol removes the very few inhibitions I do have, which is not a good thing. It also opens up some weird unfillable vortex in me where I. Just. Can’t. Get. Enough. This meant that when I wasn’t drinking, I was thinking about drinking. It was a short hop from there to drinking in the morning. The truth is, being drunk in the morning is the best. You feel like you have a secret or a head start on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, that “secret” is just that you’re an alcoholic and the head start is on your cirrhotic liver.
Of course, it wasn’t long before I got fired. I was “disrespectful.” I had a “substance abuse problem.” The list went on and on, and I’d admit it was a stunningly accurate description of me. But I still felt rejected by Siri for being canned. And without the structure and discipline of a daily job, I felt out of control. It was a bad combo. But it was the perfect combo for me to get and stay loaded.
I pleaded with Siri to take me back. She refused, but, to her credit, she did offer to take me to rehab.
“I don’t need treatment!” I snarled to myself as I pounded a bunch of sickly sweet bottled vodka drinks and went for a drive. I was speeding, and in my drunkenness, I blew a red light. Immediately, I saw the flashing lights and heard the siren of a cop car. Perfect.
I pulled over and quickly tucked the empty booze bottles behind the front seat.
One of the cops took my license and registration and went back to his car to run it. I stuck a mint in my mouth and lit a cigarette to disguise my boozy breath.
Suddenly I got the idea that I should plead for mercy and I jumped out of my car.
“Please… I just got fired on Sunday,” I said. “My life is coming apart. Please don’t give me a ticket.”
“Get back in your car, ma’am. Don’t leave your vehicle.”
I went back to my car and sat nervously in the front seat, smoking. I saw one officer swagger back to the driver’s side.
“Now, listen… I don’t usually give tickets, but you deserve one. I’m going to let you off, but don’t think that you can get off in general by being cute.”
“No, sir,” I say, all tight T-shirt and bedroom eyes. “Thank you.”
“Where are you going now?”
“Home, sir. I’m going home.”
“Good. Go straight home. Have a good night.”
I drove off. Suckers. I went straight to a bar, drinking one vodka after another until I ended up at a club on Hollywood Boulevard with a bunch of guys who sold jewelry to Siri’s shop. One was a French guy I’d fooled around with a couple of times. He’d always been too fucked up on coke to get it up.
Even drunk, it suddenly occurred to me that I was wearing my scary granny panties underneath my seventies wrap skirt. Hmmm. Well, better to have on no underwear than ones that make you close to unfuckable! So off they came, and I jaunted inside.
I started talking to a very good-looking guy who had the hiccups. He was sporting a porn-stache, and he had thick, dark hair and Eurasian eyes. I noticed a gun on him, but I knew the jewelry guys were all Highland Park gangsters dabbling in fashion, so I thought nothing of it.
“I can cure your hiccups,” I slurred. I proceeded to try to impress him with my father’s “knife in the glass” trick from my childhood. You put a knife, blade up, in a glass of water and make the person drink the water without stopping, while the tip of the blade is pressed against their forehead. It immediately stops their hiccups… basically because, if they hiccup while drinking, they’ll spear themselves in the brain. The guy, whose name turned out to be Riley, only had a huge hunting knife on him, so that’s what we used. It worked like a charm—cured his hiccups and made me seem like some fucking magical siren. Next thing I knew, we were off to my house.
We walked in the door, and I tossed my purse on the couch.
“You’re pretty fucked up, huh?” he said.
“Yeah, I got fired recently. Drowning my sorrows and all that shit.”
“Gotcha.”
“What do you do?” I ask.
“I’m a cop.”
“Ohhh. That’s why you have the big knife and the gun. I get it now!”
I didn’t tell him about my drunk driving incident earlier, but I did wonder about the cop theme of the day.
“Let’s fuck,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to fuck a cop,” I lied.
But I was so fucking wasted that I just started throwing up and didn’t stop. He ended up rubbing my back the whole night and holding my hair out of my face while I elegantly dry-heaved. In the morning, when I woke up, he was gone, but he left a note with his phone number and a funny cartoon drawing of a bunny rabbit with X’s as eyes, a bottle by his side, and drunken swirls above his head.
I threw up for another twelve hours—just green bile at this point. I couldn’t even keep water down. I st
arted to panic. Maybe I had alcohol poisoning. I called 911. The medics came, and they wanted to take me to the hospital. I was way too coherent to have alcohol poisoning, I decided. Plus, I could already see the night ahead of me: four hours waiting in emergency just to be given an electrolyte drink and sent on my way. No, thank you. I refused transport.
I noticed that something stank.
“What is that smell?” I asked them.
“I think that’s your trash, ma’am.”
“Ewww. Can you guys take that out for me? I’m going to try to sleep this off.”
They were stunned by my request but grabbed my trash and walked out the door with it anyway.
As my addiction roared out of control again, my parents began, understandably, freaking out.
“What triggered this, Ames?” my father asked.
“I got fired.”
“Plenty of people get fired and don’t go on a drinking binge.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. I’m nuts. Is that news to you?”
“I’ve never bought into that theory. I think you like playing at the edges.”
“You think I like playing at the edges? It’s not a choice!”
“You like to see how far you can go and see if you can bounce back.”
My mom, however, had a different take. “Honey, you’ve got a demon inside you that would happily see you dead. It’s a side of you that wants to sabotage everything.”
My parents don’t talk much. They divorced when I was a baby. They’ll confer if I’m really going off the rails or shoot each other an email if something terrific happens, but, in general, they’re incommunicado. While my mother was lining up readings with Santa Fe psychics, my father was researching Jewish exorcisms in Oregon. I was in L.A., smoking too much pot and drinking beer for breakfast.
Two days later, I called Riley the cop, and I went over to his house to fuck him under the pretense of “using his Jacuzzi.” I wasn’t as drunk this time, so maybe I could find out a little bit about him and not puke all over myself before we got naked. Turned out he was half Korean and half Argentinian and a serious surfer. He had a huge dick and a very beautiful, muscular body, covered in tattoos. However, he was also crazy and a serious drinker. He confessed that he loved to go to punk concerts, pour Everclear all over his chest, and then light himself on fire… when he wasn’t on duty, of course.
Riley and I started hanging out and fucking occasionally. He was sexy, but quiet and pretty emotionally unavailable. Honestly, I don’t know if he was stupid or just shy, but I found him a bit boring when he wasn’t naked. However, since I was driving blasted all the time, it was great to have a cop to follow me home.
By this point, I was pretty much surrounded by other alcoholics, so nobody gave a shit about my drinking. But then, one night, somebody offered me coke. I hadn’t done coke in years. My head told me, You can do coke. Meth was your problem. And before I knew it, I was doing coke all the time.
One night, I met Riley at a trendy little wine bar on Cahuenga.
“Hi.” I smiled.
“You’re high,” he said, accusingly.
“What?”
“Don’t, Amy. I’m a cop. It’s my job to know these things.”
“Okay, I did a little blow. Whatever. You’re an alcoholic. Same difference.”
“It’s not the same. Coke is illegal.”
“So fucking stupid.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t hang out with somebody who’s doing illegal drugs.”
And that was the end of the cop, but not the end of the coke. In fact, the coke quickly became a huge problem—dwarfing the booze—and about eight months later, I took Siri up on her offer to take me to what would be the second of my six trips to rehab.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Xander thing is passionate but very volatile. He continues to date other women, whom he encourages me to meet. That’s the poly thing: everybody knows and loves each other and “gives their permission and blessing” to fuck other people or whatever.
“Wanna have a sleepover tomorrow night?” I ask him.
“I have a date.”
“Oh. What about the night after?”
“I have another date.”
I start bawling. I can’t do this. He had given me books to read: Anthony De Mello’s The Way to Love, about how to love without attachment, and The Ethical Slut, a… umm…Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures. I was really trying to get on board with the polyamory thing, but I am super jealous by nature and highly monogamous at heart. If you really love somebody, why would you want to be with anybody else?
Xander keeps trying to explain his point of view: “If you want to date or have sex with somebody, I’m happy for you. I’m happy that you’re happy.”
“Yeah… I don’t get it. I’m sorry. Maybe I’m not evolved enough, but the thought of you fucking somebody else makes me homicidal.”
“What I feel is called compersion. It’s the opposite of jealousy. It’s the good feelings I get when you’re enjoying somebody else.”
“Bullshit! Bullshit dressed up in some über-spiritual millennial version of free love. If you’re seeing a bunch of girls, and one dumps you, who cares? You’ve got four more in rotation. It’s like insurance.”
“I’m actually turned on by the idea of you being with another man.”
“Oh… so you’re into cuckoldry.”
“Yeah. I’d love to see you fuck my friend.”
“Are you serious? You haven’t even fucked me yet. So while your friend fucks me, what are you doing? Braiding my hair and reading me a sonnet?”
Though Xander won’t fuck me yet, he and I go and lie in the park and look at the stars and make out for hours. It is beyond frustrating.
“Oh, my God, why won’t you just fuck me?!” I finally ask.
“If we have sex, it will be because it feels like the right time. Right now, you feel… I don’t know… rapey. It feels like you and your ego just wanting to get off. It doesn’t feel like it’s about you and me, and it should be. It should be about our spirits connecting.”
“Jesus Christ…”
“It’s funny. You were married, but you know shit about real intimacy.”
Every time Xander has a “date,” I go on Tinder and fuck somebody. For whatever reason, this does not fit into his compersion bullshit. He is not turned on by it. He gets angry. And instead of feeling jealous, he’s disgusted at my reactivity.
“You’re fucking at me,” he says.
Damn right, bitch. My revenge fucking makes me feel better. I’m evening the score a little bit, and putting some distance between myself and my feelings toward him.
Tonight he has a date with a fire-eating burlesque dancer whom he met at one of his Burning Man “day parties.” Her name is Aria or Gemini or something ridiculous. When she isn’t performing, she’s studying Reiki and Tantra. You get the picture.
I log onto Tinder and start chatting with a twenty-eight-year-old kid with a man bun and a scraggly beard. His name escapes me and couldn’t have been less important. Turns out that he, too, is struggling in a relationship with somebody who wants to be “open.”
I drive forty-five minutes to his loft in a scary, deserted part of downtown. He’s young and skinny, a vegetarian who takes a lot of psychedelics and smokes American Spirits. He photographs “botanical life” for a living.
We sit on the concrete floor of his loft at two in the morning and talk about polyamory. I know that the millennials’ Burning Man circle is small, and I have a flash of fear that he might know Xander from the circuit.
Burning Man is a multimillion-dollar industry now. When I was twenty-four in San Francisco, I answered an ad for a job “developing an art festival.” I went to a cocktail party in Marin where a few guys were talking about an event in the desert with music and huge art installations. They were going to call it “Burning Man.” Stupidest idea ever, I thought. Who’s going to trek out to the middle of nowher
e to take drugs, dance, and see some temporary oversize sculpture made out of car parts or whatever? I idiotically turned the job down. So no, don’t be asking me for stock tips.
“Do you know Xander? He plays piano and sings. Shorter Italian guy.” I need to cover my bases here.
“No… doesn’t ring a bell. Sorry,” Man Bun says. I’m relieved, and we fuck. In the morning, I wake up to a slew of messages from Xander. His date was a bust. How was my night? He woke up with me very much on his mind.
I smoke one of Man Bun’s cigarettes and drink a glass of tap water.
“Hey, wait,” he calls from the bedroom. “Did this guy you’re seeing used to have a girlfriend named Jasmine?”
“Uhh, yeah,” I say, trying to sound casual. My heart races, and I tremble tying my shoelaces.
“Yeah, then I do know him. Jasmine has a tattoo of a fairy on her inner thigh. My girl and I had a threesome with her a few years back.” He laughs. “Small world, huh?”
I don’t answer. I’m already out the door.
After four months of being on and off with Xander, I am done. He did eventually fuck me. The first time, it was on the porch of the sober living, right in the view of the video surveillance camera. Mariana never said a thing.
“This isn’t going to work,” I told him. “You’re never going to give me what I want, and I feel like I’m falling in love with you.”
“You’re not supposed to fall in love. You’re supposed to rise in love.”
“Dude…”
“It is my role as a man to inspire the goddess within.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“A true goddess knows the power of submission and vulnerability.”
“You’re a pretentious dickhead. That’s what my true goddess has to say to you.”
“It’s okay if you need to take space. I will love you at a distance that you’re comfortable with.”
“Oh, fuck you. You were always at ‘a distance’ thanks to all your poly bullshit.”
“I understand you’re angry. We had soul contracts we needed to complete. I don’t regret our connection.”
