Party Girl

by Anna David

  PARTY GIRL

  A NOVEL

  ANNA DAVID

  FOR ALL THE PARTY GIRLS OUT THERE—

  AND ALL THOSE WHO PUT UP WITH THIS ONE

  “Silly things do cease to be silly if

  they are done by sensible people

  in an impudent way.”

  —JANE AUSTEN

  “My girl wants to party all the time,

  Party all the time,

  Party all the time…”

  —EDDIE MURPHY

  Contents

  Epigraph

  1 It is a truth universally acknowledged that crazy things happen…

  2 Back in L.A., Stephanie asks me about the wedding and…

  3 I’m just finishing a “Where Are They Now?” story on…

  4 I’m in Brian’s office, griping about how I pitched something…

  5 “Can we please concoct some reason we have to move…

  6 When I wake up later that afternoon, things seem a…

  7 While I really did convince myself that Chad Milan could…

  8 My first instinct when I see Stephanie standing at my…

  9 I read everything I can find about Kane on the…

  10 Kane has one of those video camera doorbell things that…

  11 “It’s completely unfair,” I say to Mom. “I mean, I…

  12 I’ve always heard about how people come to and have…

  13 When we pull up at Pledges, I marvel over what…

  14 I’m trying to focus on reading the Pledges book when…

  15 I’m not sure when rehab starts to seem like the…

  16 The day I’m getting out, I decide to check the…

  17 “Would you like to have your lawyer look over the…

  18 I’m sitting at the Starbucks smack in the middle of…

  19 “Tres belle,” Jean-Paul coos as his camera snaps away. Three…

  20 I’m dreaming about signing autographs—and in the dream, my handwriting…

  21 “Oh, you’re adorable!” a brunette in a wraparound Diane Von…

  22 “Here we go,” Tim says as the Town Car pulls…

  23 “I can’t imagine doing all of that sober,” Stephanie says…

  24 When I walk in the door after a pre-Emmys party…

  25 “I need to talk to you,” Justin whispers in my…

  26 It’s a Sunday night, arguably the most depressing time of…

  27 “He didn’t call me back,” I say into the phone…

  28 “Here you go,” Stephanie says, reaching through a throng of…

  29 When I come to at about three in the afternoon…

  30 I spend the next week writing down my resentments, only…

  31 “Amelia, we already went through this—on our hike, remember?” Stephanie…

  32 “You’re something else,” Joy Behar says after she takes a…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that crazy things happen at weddings. Or at least that’s what I tell myself as my activities segue from outrageous to risqué to downright depraved.

  There’s the bathroom blow job incident, which I categorize as “outrageous” rather than “downright depraved,” solely due to the fact that my eighty-two-year-old stepdad walks in while I’m going down on the cousin of the bride in the poolhouse bathroom. Because of his eighty-two-ness (the stepdad, not the cousin, thankfully), he was prone to more “senior moments” than nonsenior moments—and thus is easily convinced that what had just happened never in fact happened. By the time I’m done talking to him, I’ve actually managed to convince him that not only was there no blow job, but also there had been no cousin of the bride. I’m pretty sure if I’d kept going I could have gotten him to believe there was no wedding. But the point is, in convincing my stepdad, I’m pretty sure I convince myself. And thus: outrageous, not downright depraved.

  Don’t bother asking me how I go from sitting next to the cousin and finding him mildly attractive—not gorgeous, just mildly attractive, someone I might have gone out with had he asked me—to kneeling down in front of him while he sat on Mom’s bidet. It wouldn’t have been my style to have asked, “Care for a blow job in the bathroom?” At least I don’t think so. It’s possible that after a bottle or so of good wedding champagne, Amelia Stone is replaced by Paris Hilton minus the millions, plus a good twenty pounds, but since my exploits haven’t been caught on tape—note to exes, not that I know of—I can only venture this as a guess. I’d like to imagine that I happened to visit the restroom just as he was leaving and that our sudden passion erupted spontaneously. But by the end of the night—well, morning—the whole cousin incident was so comparatively pristine, I may as well have been a virgin in white in that bathroom.

  Later, I find myself in the sauna with the groomsmen. It had been my mom’s idea, that all the “young people” from the wedding should sauna and swim, but somehow it got down to just two guys and me. By this point, I know that I’m way more than mildly intoxicated, but since technically I’m on vacation, aren’t I supposed to be? If I were this drunk in L.A., someone would probably bring out the coke and I’d thus be able to alleviate my alcohol buzz a bit, but parties at Mom’s house tend to be pretty short on drugs—at least non-SSRI ones. And since in some ways there’s no better high than having two men vying for your attention, I figure it’s just as well that I’m not holding.

  “I’m going to be graduating in May,” Mitch says, as he offers me a sip of his warm Amstel Light. “Medical school has been a bitch.”

  “Oh, but now you’re going to have to do your residency,” Mitch’s alleged best friend Chris interjects, while interjecting his body into the minuscule space that exists between Mitch and me. “You’ll be working, like, ninety-hour weeks for no money.”

  “Which is so much worse than ‘doing your residency’ at Paramount for a salary just above the poverty line?” Mitch lobs back, looking at me.

  I swear I never get tired of the attention of boys. But I prefer direct attention, rather than transparent male dick-swinging contests. Do they honestly think that the one who gets the last dig in will win my affection? Don’t they know that being an assistant and a student, even a medical student, aren’t exactly lady-killer positions to be in, and that they should perhaps be digging into their personal arsenals for more compelling things to compete over?

  I stand up and they’re silenced. “Last one in has to do a shot,” I say and before I’ve even finished the sentence, they’re pushing each other aside in their zeal to jump into the pool. I stand at the sauna door, cold air rushing in, their wet towels at my feet. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that the two of them just wanted to have sex with each other.

  Okay, we’re going to sleep now,” I instruct them, as I try to get as comfortable as I can while lodged between these two guys in a double bed. “Sleep.”

  I honestly think we’re going to bed. Was anyone ever that naive? I can’t even sleep on two Ambien by myself, but the birds are dangerously close to chirping—a horrifyingly depressing time to still be partying, as I’ve recently learned—this is the only bed left in the house, and neither of these guys are in any condition to drive. I turn toward Chris, who’s facing the wall. Mitch is on the other side, facing the other wall.

  A few minutes pass and I hear Mitch breathing heavily in that way that means he could be asleep. I sigh and feel more relaxed. My insomnia always seems embarrassing, and I’m all too relieved to be able to suffer through it without witnesses. Miraculously, I drift off for a moment or two.

  And am awakened by lips on mine—specifically, lips belonging to Chris. My eyes swing open just in time for me to realiz
e that Chris’s kissing skills aren’t half bad. Some people pride themselves on their gaydars. I pride myself on my kissdar because I can usually tell on sight if a guy is going to be one of those drench-your-face-with-saliva kissers, too-tentative pecking kissers, or a possessor of one of those lizardlike tongues that darts into places it’s not wanted. Most guys, unfortunately, fit into one of these categories. It’s the ones that don’t that drive us mad, in all the good ways. Unfortunately, their kissing skills always seem to accompany a tendency for unemployment, a lack of an IQ, or just a general asshole-ishness. If they could kiss well and also possess qualities that actually made them good boyfriend material, women would probably maim and kill one another to have them. I had assumed that Chris would be some combination of too-tentative and lizardlike—that he’d start out with inappropriate propriety and then swerve into too much without the required sensuality—and am startled to discover that he seems to know what he’s doing. He even knows the take-my-face-in-his-hands move.

  I kiss him back, enjoying the secretiveness of the act. Despite all their lame competitiveness, despite the fact that Chris is an assistant at Paramount and that he attacks his alleged best friend who’s actually doing something useful with his life in a pathetic attempt to win a girl’s affection, I’m more attracted to him than I am to Mitch.

  Chris is kissing well enough that it’s impossible to say how many times we kiss—one time just seems to mesh into another. And then I’m utterly shocked when I feel a hand creeping from behind into my nether region. Had Chris and Mitch, in some sort of a silent pact, targeted my two most manipulatable zones and decided to each work one of them? The thrill of kissing someone while another hand works me from behind is unbelievable. I’m completely getting off on the anonymity of the hand (even though I obviously know whose hand it is) and on this wise solution to all that petty male competitiveness that was going on earlier, until I come back to earth and remember where we are. Which is in the guest bedroom directly below my mom and stepdad’s bedroom in their house, which I’m visiting for the weekend to see an old friend get married—not to blow his now-wife’s cousin and have a ménage à trois with two of his groomsmen.

  “Wait—you have to stop!” I suddenly screech. I jump out of bed and the two of them look alarmed, if not altogether shocked. I grab a pillow off the bed. “I need to go somewhere where I can actually sleep,” I say, as if they’d been talking and I was tired of shushing them. Without another word, I stomp off to the den, where I promptly pass out on the couch.

  2

  Back in L.A., Stephanie asks me about the wedding and I regale her with my exploits. She laughs hysterically, the same way I did when she told me about twisting her ankle while dancing at the wedding she went to back East—at least she thinks she was dancing, as she was actually in a blackout and didn’t want anyone around to know so she never was able to determine how it happened. “They should keep us away from weddings—the way we behave is completely foul,” she says.

  I work at Absolutely Fabulous, a celebrity weekly magazine that’s basically a glorified tabloid, and Stephanie works one level down, at American Style, a weekly magazine that devotes itself to dissecting the outfits and homes of celebrities in minute detail. And thank God for Stephanie. Most of my Absolutely Fabulous coworkers are about as cool as Sunday school teachers.

  Because of its high circulation rate (five million and rising all the time), those who work at Absolutely Fabulous speak of it in the revered tone most might use to describe The New Yorker. “We, quite simply, have the best writing and reporting of any magazine out there,” our bureau chief Robert likes to say, and we all drink the Kool-Aid. Glimmers of reality peak into that otherwise glorious way of thinking—like the fact that I’m sometimes embarrassed to tell people I work here, that the constant note I’m always given about my articles is that I need to “make my sentences shorter,” and that the big joke about the publication is that everyone reads it on the toilet, but it’s amazing how convincing a staff of roughly thirty people can be. People seem to stretch reality just enough to motivate them—but it’s a little weird, you know? Can’t they just say, “When I was little, I didn’t imagine that figuring out what Madonna eats would be my living, but hey, this is a successful magazine and someday I may work somewhere else”? I know that it takes a bit of denial for all of us to get out of bed in the morning, but sometimes the people at Absolutely Fabulous seem to be swimming in a whole river of it.

  Stephanie absolutely hates her job—only works there for the party invites and free clothes, and willingly announces as much to anyone who will listen. Which makes it all the more difficult for me when she keeps rising on their masthead while I stay stuck as a low-level writer at Absolutely Fabulous. It’s not that I want Stephanie to fail—it’s just that sometimes I wouldn’t mind if my number one partner in crime were sort of in the same place as I am.

  Unfortunately, I seem to inspire a sort of figurative foaming at the mouth from my boss Robert. This could have to do with the fact that I was hired by his second-in-command, Brian, when Robert was on leave, or maybe I just remind him of someone he absolutely hates. I try most everything to turn him around, but when people make up their mind about you, you could save their mother’s life and they’d still think you were an asshole. Case in point: Brad McCormick, my high school boyfriend, who hovered somewhere around the five foot four mark during our adolescent relationship. Though he’s now about six feet tall—a late growth spurt and, unfortunately, not one I was able to benefit from—to me, he’ll always be “little Brad McCormick.”

  “You ready?” Stephanie asks me on a Thursday at about six. She’s standing at my cubicle, workbag slung over her shoulder, flashing the flask that I gave her for her birthday from under her coat.

  I used to get really excited before going to premieres. I think I imagined that someone would see me there and discover me for God knows what—I’m not an actress, or I should say I only am in my personal life—but I guess I thought getting discovered for being so utterly fabulous that I would need to be immediately removed from my day-to-day life and deposited into an existence that revolved around being fabulous full time. I think I thought that rubbing up against movie stars would make me happy. But it occurred to me this one night that I found myself in a cigarette-fueled drunken discussion with Jeremy Piven at a premiere. Jeremy Piven didn’t seem too happy, so why should I be happy for having had the experience of talking to him all night?

  We stop for drinks at some Westwood college bar beforehand. Or, if I’m going to have to be perfectly honest and specific about everything, I should say that Stephanie stops for drinks and I stop for drinks and a few lines.

  When I first started doing coke, at parties, it was usually easy enough to count on being in the right place at the right time for a steady supply. But more than a few experiences chatting up thoroughly disgusting men only to learn that they were simply fellow coke-seekers themselves had brought me to a point a few months ago where I finally understood the necessity of having my own dealer. And the sheer joy I’ve felt over the fact that I can do coke whenever I want because I’m not relying on someone else to get it has made the additional expense seem almost irrelevant.

  I wander into the bathroom after a woman with gray hair in a bun leaves, and shut myself in the stall farthest away from the door. Pulling a vial from my purse, I shake some coke onto the window ledge and chop it with a credit card, then take a rolled-up bill from my wallet and snort it up. I hear someone come in and hold my breath while she washes her hands and thankfully leaves, then pour some more coke on the ledge and snort it.

  “I still have plenty left,” I tell Stephanie as I return from the bathroom and sit down in my swivel chair. The metal taste of cocaine drips down the back of my throat deliciously. Some people say they hate the drip but I love it—that practical evidence that the drug is working its way through my body.

  “Nothing could sound more foul,” she answers, as she tries to pour some of her
vodka tonic into a flask. Stephanie doesn’t do coke—she used to have panic attacks and is convinced, probably correctly, that a few lines of cocaine would send her right back there—so I ask her more as a course of habit than as some sick kind of peer pressure.

  “Ready?” she asks. I smile, nod, and sniffle so I can swallow and taste more cocaine again.

  We walk briskly down the red carpet as skeletal blond actresses—shivering in their summer dresses on this uncharacteristically cool night—smile obediently for the paparazzi.

  “Leslie, over here!” the photographers all scream at once at this beautiful blonde who’s grinning seductively. The way the photographers are jostling one another and screaming her name with such glee, you’d swear they were trying to get snaps of Julia Roberts, or at least the president or the queen or something. The fact that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of Leslies with bit parts in movies like the mediocre one we’re about to see and one, if that, will actually continue to work in Hollywood after this current role, certainly doesn’t seem to be at the forefront of the photographers’ collective minds. But Leslie handles her moment well.

  Stephanie and I decide to make a run for it to avoid being caught in the back of one of these shots. It happened to Stephanie once—a picture of Lindsay Lohan was almost ruined by the image of Stephanie, an extremely unflattering image of her at that, doing a shot with someone the picture didn’t capture (that is, me) and the photo ran in about a hundred magazines. Stephanie has yet to live it down.