by Amy Dresner
“I need to get loaded,” I said vacantly.
“Get loaded! Do it! It will be easier to get rid of you,” he snapped.
“Oh… you want to get rid of me? No fucking problem.” He had just given me what I needed: an excuse.
I went into the kitchen to retrieve my epilepsy medication. I’d read somewhere that there was no antidote to a phenobarbital overdose. I had a full bottle in my hand. I thought of Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, and Elvis. Fuck it. I can go out like that.
I poured the phenobarbital onto the bed. I took off my wedding ring and tossed it on the bed. Then I shoveled a handful of white pills into my mouth.
“Don’t do that,” Clay said. “You’re not going to die. You’re just going to get really sick.”
I paused. A mouthful of chalky pills. Whatever, I thought, and swallowed. I was immediately greeted by a sense of relief mixed with horror.
He called 911. I went into the kitchen and grabbed a steak knife to slit my wrists in front of him. Classic borderline move: you hurt me so now I’m going to hurt myself. This was my first knife incident. Evidently I have an unfortunate penchant for utensils when I’m upset.
“She’s brandishing a knife!” he said into the phone.
Brandishing? Who says “brandishing”? Was this a production of Hamlet?
Knowing the cops were on their way, I bolted out of the apartment. At the elevator, I was nabbed by the EMT people. I slumped down the wall onto the floor, defeated—but by no means calm. An overdose of pheno gives you a drunklike high, and when I’m drunk, I’m angry, so I was very fucking angry.
A female EMT asked me what I took.
“Phenobarbital,” I slurred.
She looked puzzled.
“If it’s good enough for Judy Garland, it’s good enough for meeeee!” I said, lying down on the gurney.
By this point, Clay was in the hallway, watching it all go down. As they wheeled me into the elevator, I gave him the finger and shouted a loud “Fuck youuuuu,” just as the doors closed. Very dramatic exit.
In the ambulance, as the paramedic started an IV line, she said, “Why not just get a divorce, honey? I mean, you don’t have to kill yourself.”
“You don’t understand,” I murmured.
The thing was, I had married a parental figure to police and take care of me. My husband was my daddy, my mommy, and my therapist, all rolled into one. Who would I be without him… a feral, forty-one-year-old, mentally ill, broke divorcée? I’d sold my soul to the devil, and the devil’s name was security.
Next thing I knew, I was in the ER, being forced to choke down liquid charcoal. I was blasted. The ER, however, is not the place to enjoy a buzz. As medical personnel worked to save me from a lethal overdose, I cracked Jew jokes and did bad impersonations of old Southern black men.
“I’m ready to go home. I’m feeling gooooooooood,” I said brazenly.
“You aren’t going anywhere, Ms. Dresner,” a nurse admonished me.
“What?” I was puzzled.
“You tried to kill yourself. You are going to the psych ward for a seventy-two-hour hold.”
“Oh, that.” I flopped my hand with disdain. “That was just a little… woo… mistake.”
“Yes… sometimes life can be confusing,” she said, smiling softly.
I blacked out and woke up in the psych ward. Unfortunately, familiar digs. Clay came to visit. I’d been vomiting from the overdose, and my face was very swollen—my eyes just tiny slits. He brought me my wedding ring and a card. I wept in his arms. “I’m sorry,” I said. Even I was tired of hearing me say it. The next day he jetted off on a business trip.
My sponsor made me reset my sober time. I’d had three and a half years sober, but she said I abused my medication and that I needed to identify again as a newcomer.
“It wasn’t a relapse!” I protested.
“Did you take your medication as prescribed?”
“Is it really a relapse if you try to kill yourself, but just end up accidentally loaded instead? Isn’t that just a shoddy suicide attempt or a faulty chemistry experiment?”
“Did you take your medication as prescribed?”
“No… I took all of it.”
“There’s your answer.”
Goddammit.
At this point, Lori, my lesbian crush, was working for Clay, my husband. Weird, I know, but the recovery world is incestuously, claustrophobically small. Everybody dates everybody. Everybody sponsors everybody. Everybody works for everybody. I wouldn’t exactly call it nepotism. It’s more like “networking.”
Clay told me that Lori got in a bad car accident. The doctor gave her pain pills, and, of course, she was shooting dope again in no time. One night, she shot a speedball and had a stroke. Almost died. I’m sure she’d heard about my latest debacle, so I called to check in.
“I was trying to die, and I only ended up getting high,” I told her.
“I wasn’t trying to die. I was just trying to get high,” she told me.
“Maybe we need to swap recipes, then.”
She laughed. “You’re still funny…”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
My Russian friend who came with me to the cunty Russian psychiatrist asks me to house-sit her place for two weeks while she goes back East for the holidays. I ask Mariana, the house manager, whether I can, and she says yes.
My friend has two super-annoying small dogs that need to be walked a couple of times a day. But after almost two years in a twin bed in a shared room in sober living, I get not just a queen bed, but a whole apartment to myself? I’ll gladly pick up dog shit for that.
Her place is just a few blocks away from the sober living, but it feels like another world. It’s so quiet inside, I can hear the skaters smoking blunts and doing tricks in a nearby alley.
Joe, the sober guy who insisted on silence as he aggressively fingered me in his Porsche, reappears. He starts calling me “slut” and “whore.” It makes me really uncomfortable, but I don’t want to seem like a prude. He orders me via text to go to a sex store and buy a huge black dildo—the biggest I can find. I don’t even want to know where this is going. But, weirdly and mechanically, I obey, texting him pics of different ones—This one? Maybe this one?—as I lay them out on the floor of The Pleasure Chest.
“U r a good girl. A very good girl,” he texts me.
I roll my eyes. This is fucking stupid. But I don’t stop, and I don’t have a good reason why. I’m lonely? Curious? Whatever my reason, it isn’t a good one.
Despite having almost two years sober, I am still innately attracted to things that are bad for me. Whether my self-destructive inclination comes out of alcoholism, thrill-seeking, or is a symptom of my low self-esteem, I have no idea. Some people like to go wing-walking; I like to test my mortality and luck by shooting cocaine while having a seizure disorder or by barebacking promiscuous strangers. I am one sick motherfucker.
Joe wants me to dress like a seventeen-year-old trailer park whore: knee socks, high heels, girly underwear, and a ratty T-shirt. I send him a picture of my outfit for his approval. He is not pleased. First, the underwear aren’t right. They’re too sexy and hip; not juvenile and trashy enough. He finally agrees on a pair of baggy white mesh ones with pink hearts, and we move on to the socks. No, no… those aren’t right. They are too wooly. I put on some different ones. No, no… those are too dark, and those are too patterned. Jesus Christ, I think, this role-play stuff is a pain in the ass. Maybe some people get turned on by the whole “ritual” of it, but I just wanted to get to the sex part.
It all feels demeaning and demoralizing to me, but even those feelings are preferable to being alone with the void that is me. I am coming up on the three-year anniversary of my domestic violence incident. I need distraction. “Just be with yourself,” my friends advise. Honestly, I can’t think of anything more hellish.
Like most addicts, I hate feelings. I know feelings are temporary, that they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Howe
ver, to an addict like me, they feel overwhelming, unbearable, and endless. Therein lies the violent urgency to fix or escape them. For example, if I’m hit with rage or sadness or desire, at the beginning, I think, “I can get through this.” But as the feeling builds, moving toward the middle, I feel like a rat in a cage that’s slowly heating up, and I start frantically looking for a way out. The way out can be handing somebody their ass in a vengeful text (that I’ll have to make amends for) or masturbating over FaceTime for some freak from Tinder. It can be chain-smoking Marlboro Blacks while also chewing Nicorette as I feverishly troll eBay for the perfect vintage whatever. And sometimes just to make it to the end of a feeling, that magical place when you see that it doesn’t actually last forever, I just make myself go to bed. I’ve been known to crash out for fourteen hours straight in the fetal position, hoping that when I wake up, I will have somehow rebooted.
I get a text from Joe with his instructions: “I’ll come in @ 8:30. Leave the front door unlocked. U will be sitting on the edge of the bed. U will not speak. U will not look @ me. I’ll take some photos 4 my own use. When I’m done, I’ll leave.”
“Ok,” I text back.
“Ok what?” he demands.
“Ok daddy.”
“That’s right.”
Joe shows up exactly on time. I’m sitting on the bed, precisely as he asked, and I’m so scared I’m shaking. He’s wearing a hoodie over his head, partly covering his face, which I’ve only seen once in the dark backseat of his SUV. He doesn’t kiss me. He roughly flips me over onto my stomach, rips off my underwear, and fucks me with the black dildo I bought. I can hear him breathing heavily. He’s very aroused. I pretend to be. But I feel detached, shut down. I’m sort of hovering outside of myself, watching this whole bizarre scenario, wondering how I went from being a bejeweled CEO’s wife to getting fucked with a black dildo by a stranger while dressed up as a seventeen-year-old white-trash prostitute. Was this my new sobriety—just exchanging one horrifying self-destructive behavior for another? While this guy is panting in my ear, shoving this black dildo into me, I hear my sponsor Jay’s voice: “You put down a behavior when what it is doing to you is worse than what it is doing for you.”
Joe finishes and leaves. I wash off the dildo and stuff it in the closet. I throw the torn underwear in the garbage. As much as I want to dress this up as “I am liberated” or “edgy” or “sex-positive,” I know that I am out of control and deeply unhappy. I tell none of my friends about this latest incident, and I tell my friends everything.
There was a comic I’d been friends with for probably seven years. His name was Sully. He was big and kind of lunky, with a belly and a beard and sloe eyes. He looked like a lumberjack. A lot of hipsters do. And even though he’d been clean for a few years, he still had that slow, apathetic junkie drawl. There had always been an attraction between us, but I was married at the time, and he was having an on-again, off-again relationship with a crazy model. It was obvious that if we were ever single at the same time, we would at least fuck.
Once his relationship to Miss Cheekbones fell apart for the umpteenth time and I was divorced and sober again, he started calling me every day. He was funny and attentive, but he wanted me to video myself peeing and also call him daddy, and I thought that was fucking creepy. I did it, but I saw we had different kinks, and any long-term thing was ill fated.
He was in town from New York to see his family, and I had my friend’s whole place to myself. He came over and we had sex. It was pretty good. He’s dirty and uninhibited, but I felt some strange apathy in myself when we were in bed together, and I knew immediately I would never ever fall in love with him. But our long friendship was a good base. And we had the important commonalities of addiction and comedy. I should at least give it a go, right?
He was on his way over for the second time when Joe texted.
“I want 2 see u.”
“I can’t.”
“20 min. I’ll meet u anywhere u want.”
“I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“You dare say no 2 me u slut?”
“I have somebody coming over.”
“A guy?”
“Yes.”
“I want 2 watch.”
“No, that’s weird.”
“Do it! He’ll never know. U can just prop up ur phone & FaceTime.”
“No.”
“Be a good girl & do this. Don’t disobey me.”
He hammers on, and I finally concede. I prop up my phone on the bedside table and aim the camera at the bed. Sully comes over, and we start fooling around. Somehow Joe gets disconnected, and keeps calling back again and again and again.
“Wow. Somebody is really trying to get ahold of you,” Sully says.
“Don’t worry about it. Ignore it,” I say, kissing him.
Sully had been a homeless street junkie. He’s no dummy. He quickly figures out what’s going on.
“Are you filming us? Is somebody watching?”
“Uhhhh…”
“Amy!”
“I’m sorry. It’s this weird guy, and he’s so demanding and… I dunno… I thought it could be kind of hot.”
“I just wished you’d asked me first.”
“I know. It’s shitty. I’m sorry. We’ve been friends a long time; I…”
“It’s cool. Whatever…”
After he leaves, I call Joe. “What the fuck is wrong with you? You just kept calling and calling? He totally figured it out!”
“That was hot. I was getting really into it. Now you have to help me finish.”
“What?”
“Go get that dildo and fuck yourself in the ass and touch yourself on FaceTime.”
“That thing is huge. It will hurt.”
“Do it!”
I go get the dildo and call him back on FaceTime. I touch my pussy and slowly push the dildo up my ass. It’s extremely painful. I don’t like this. It’s complete vulnerability without a drop of intimacy or safety, and it leaves me feeling frightened and sick to my stomach.
I can hear him breathing into the phone and see a dark shadow of his hand moving as he jacks off. When he comes, he hangs up.
I just sit on the bed, silent. I hear a dog barking up the street. I hear the homeless guy who lives in the alley pushing a creaking shopping cart. I feel more dirty and alone than ever, and I don’t like who I’ve become.
I realize that I need to stop making these grand pronouncements to people: “I’ve quit smoking!”; “I’m never going back on Tinder!”; “We’re fucking over!” As true as those things might seem in the moment, these feelings can be as fleeting as your two-day attempt at veganism after watching one of those gnarly documentaries about factory farming. Before long, you’re left all sheepish, saying, “Uh, yeah, actually, I’m smoking/Tindering/seeing him again.”
Jay W., my sponsor, helpfully pointed out that I can’t really be called insane, because insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I do the same thing over and over again, knowing full well the result will be exactly the same. And I’ve realized that underneath all of this sexual acting out is my basic desire to be loved. When I say, “Don’t you want to fuck me?” what I really mean is “Love me!”
I suddenly remember hearing this guy speak about shame and self-loathing at a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting. I cried throughout his whole share. He seemed to have pretty good recovery. He was a comedy writer; a nerdy Jew with a kid. Harmless. I call him, a sex addict reaching out to another sex addict. It’s what you’re supposed to do.
“Hey, I just did something really degrading, and I just feel like I wanna hose off my soul. I feel really out of control and I’m scared.”
“Are you physically hurt?” he asks.
“No, I mean my asshole hurts, but I’m sure it will be fine.”
“You’re okay. It’s over now. It’s done. You can’t undo it.”
“Right.”
“It’s what we do. You need to find compas
sion for yourself.”
“Okay.”
I have no idea how it happened, but he ends up masturbating with me on the phone, maybe aroused by the sordid details of what I’d just recounted. He seemed so nice—this sweet-faced Jew with a young kid. Later, I find out he lives with his girlfriend, and this is his MO. I’m not surprised. The rooms are full of sick people, exploiting each other at the behest of their “disease.” Just when you think you’ve seen it all, the floor drops out and there’s another basement, a whole other level of debauchery. I’m disgusted and appalled, but it is just what I need to be finally and irrevocably done with my sex addiction.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I’m back in my room at sober living with my Glamazon roommate, Elizabeth. Though I enjoyed my freedom house-sitting over the holidays, I’ve never vaped so much or fucked so many losers in such a short amount of time. I’m sort of relieved to be contained again.
I’m unpacking my stuff and I notice that Bradley, the New York theatre actor (barf), has sent me another Facebook message: “Hey, thanks for your advice a few months back. Baby mama is doing much better. I gotta be honest. I have a talent crush on you.”
“Oh, my God, this guy again?” I say aloud.
“What guy? Who?” Elizabeth asks nosily.
“Some actor in New York… I barely know him!”
“Let’s see a picture.”
I click on his profile.
“Wow… he’s cute! Look at that cleft chin and those dimples,” she coos.
“I don’t know. Is he a… redhead? I don’t mess with soulless gingers.”
“He’s a hottie. At least talk to him!”
“Fiiiine.”
I start messaging with Bradley on Facebook. This guy is not my type. No visible tattoos. No drug problem. In fact, he’s never even done any hard drugs, but brags that he’s smoked weed a whopping four times. He stubbornly claims to be “blond,” but I maintain that he’s straight-up ginger. He’s an Ivy-educated, German-Irish quasi-country boy from Virginia. “Half white, half trash,” he calls himself. He’s done pretty well in New York, appearing on Broadway, done a bunch of TV shows and movies, headlines at several comedy clubs.
