by Sarah Hepola
I blink and breathe deeply through my nostrils. Fucking Christ. It is a compliment that makes me want to wither away. I have spent years chasing after compliments, with the ridiculous hope that every man in the universe would find me beautiful. And now a man arrives at 3:30 am to tell me I have succeeded in my pathetic, girlish hopes and dreams, and I want to crush him. I want to scream.
“Thanks,” I say.
“I saw you Saturday night when you came in,” he says. I stare at the floor, wondering how to get my hand back. I’m not sure what makes me angrier: that he will not leave, or that I will not ask him to. For the millionth time, I’m enraged by a man’s inability to read my mind. Look at how I’m standing here. Can’t you see how revolting I find you?
“I’m glad I could take care of you,” he says, and he brings my hand to his lips.
“Johnson, I’m really tired,” I say. “It’s been a really long day.” I want him to leave so badly my stomach aches.
I think: If tell him to go, he’ll probably stand up politely and walk out of the room without saying more than a few words. So why don’t I? Do I feel I owe him something? That I can’t turn him away? That he’ll be mad at me? What do I feel?
He pulls me toward him, and we kiss.
The kiss is neither bad nor good. I consider it a necessary penance. I can’t explain it. How little I care. Zapping back to my life in the middle of sex with a stranger seems to have raised the bar on what I can and cannot allow. All I keep thinking is: This doesn’t matter. All I keep thinking is: It will be easier this way.
He tugs me toward the bed, and my body moves before my brain tells it differently. I let him run his hands along me, and he strokes my hair. He kisses my nose, now wet with tears he does not ask about. He moves his large, rough hands over the steep slope of my fleshy sides, up along my breast, nudging down my top and gently sucking on my nipple.
And the confounding part is how good this feels. It shouldn’t feel this way. My skin should be all bugs and slithering worms. But the truth is I like being held. I like not being alone anymore. None of this makes sense in my mind, because I don’t want to be here, but I can’t seem to leave. I don’t understand it. What accumulation of grief and loneliness could bring me to this place, where I could surrender myself to the hands of a stranger? Who is this person in the hotel room? And I don’t mean Johnson. I mean me.
We lie in the bed, and he strokes my face, my body. I can feel him hard against me, but he never asks for more.
At 4 am, I push Johnson out the door. I climb into my bed and cry. Huge howling sobs, and I feel a small amount of comfort knowing the story exists only in my memory bank and that I do not need to deposit it in anyone else’s. This whole episode can stay a secret.
REAL DRUNKS WAIT and watch for the moment they hit bottom. Your face is forever hurtling toward a brick wall, but you hope that you can smash against it and still walk away. That you will be scared but not destroyed. It’s a gamble. How many chances do you want to take? How many near misses are enough?
As I lay in my hotel bed, covers pulled up to my neck, I felt the gratitude of a woman who knows, finally, she is done.
But I drank on the plane ride home. And I drank for five more years.
SIX
THE LIFE YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED
My apartment in New York was on the southern edge of Williamsburg, back when rents were almost reasonable. I had a view of the bridge into Manhattan, strung up with lights like a Christmas tree. I had painted my living room in red candy cane stripes. When Stephanie came over to visit shortly after I moved in, she said, “You’re never leaving this place.” And I was so proud to have impressed her for a change.
Paris had been devastating, but also a onetime deal. A private disaster is easy to rewrite for public consumption. “How was Paris?” / “Amazing!” And people nodded, because how else would Paris be? Besides, I had better views in front of me. Here I was. I was here. A writer in New York: the phrase that compensated for nearly anything.
Dreamers plan their lives long before they live them, and by the fall of 2005, mine was finally catching up to the script. The details were a little off. I wasn’t 23 when I moved to the big city; I was 31. I wasn’t exactly writing Catcher in the Rye. I was writing hack profiles and advance blurbs for Lego Star Wars: The Video Game. And I wasn’t nestled in the tree-lined Valhalla of literary Brooklyn. I was scraping by in a borough where razor wire was giving way to ironic T-shirts.
But I loved my big, rambling apartment. The owner of the building was a small Dominican woman in her late 50s, with a tight bun and a stern demeanor. She spoke little English, and I refused to speak Spanish with her, because I didn’t want to cede what little comfort zone I had, so we were reduced to curt nods in the hallway. Her entire family lived in the building. Her heavyset single daughter, who stopped by to discuss noise complaints. (I had a few.) Her sketchy son, who smoked on the front steps while talking on a cell phone. Her six-year-old twin granddaughters, with heads of kinky curls.
“Is your cat home?” one of them would ask from the hallway, lisping through her gap teeth. This question would crack me up. As though sometimes my cat were at work.
My first year was mostly good. Promising. And having finally settled the bullet points of my life, I was ready to finesse the details. Less furniture pulled from curbs. Better skin care products. A little personal improvement.
I had this great idea: I should learn to cook. My mother had tried to teach me a few times in my early 20s, but I blew her off. Women don’t need to know this stuff anymore, I told her, like she was instructing me in stenography.
But 12 months in the city had made me question this tack. Too much of my paycheck was being handed over to deliverymen. I also hoped cooking might forge a healthier connection to food and drink, which I badly needed. How had I determined that not learning a skill was a position of power?
My cooking experiments began with promise. Me, in that empty kitchen, slicing and dicing like a mature, grown-up adult person. I would open a bottle of wine to enjoy while I did prep work. But wine made me chatty, so I would call friends back in Texas. And I’d get so engrossed in the conversation, I didn’t want to cook anymore. I’d lose my appetite after the second glass, and I’d bundle the food and stuff it back into the refrigerator, trading asparagus spears for half a dozen Parliaments by the window.
When the bottle was drained, I’d slip out to the bodega and pick up two 24-ounce Heinekens. The equivalent of four beers, which I had titrated to be the perfect amount: just enough to get me to the edge without pushing me over. (The only recipe I knew.) Around midnight, when hunger came on like a clawing beast, I’d throw some pasta in a pot of boiling water, slather it with butter and salt, and devour it while I watched cable. Didn’t Wolfgang Puck start this way?
My friend Stephanie actually married a chef from the Food Network. Bobby. They lived in an elegant Manhattan apartment—two stories, with a standing bar and a pool table upstairs. Visiting her was like stepping into the Life You’ve Always Wanted, but the thing about Stephanie was, she wanted to share it. She paid for our dinners, floated my cab fare, and made the world lighter with a million other tiny gestures that had nothing to do with money.
Stephanie was in a Broadway play in the spring, and I went to the opening-night party at Bobby’s Midtown bistro, which was like taking straight shots of glamour. Naomi Watts was there. Supporting actors from Sex and the City. I stood in line for the bathroom behind Bernadette Peters (from Annie!), and I had a cigarette with the guy who starred in the second season of The Wire. I texted a friend, “I just bummed a smoke from Frank Sobotka!” In our circle, this was like splitting an ice-cream sundae with Julia Roberts.
Kids who crave fame often imagine New York will be like this. One big room full of celebrities and cocktails. Stephanie’s party wasn’t too far from my own childhood fantasies. Except this time, I was in it.
I went back to Bobby’s restaurant as often as I could after that.
One night in the fall, I was having a drink there with a bunch of Stephanie’s friends, including a saucy redhead I liked. Around 8 pm, our friends peeled off for dinner plans and more responsible lives, and the redhead turned to me.
“You want to go to another bar?” she asked.
And that was an easy question. “Sure.”
We rambled on to a trendy spot in Hell’s Kitchen and bonded over the miseries of the single life while slurping down $17 martinis. I remember what they cost, because I had to do quick math. How many of these can I squeeze on my last working credit card and still afford the cab ride home? The redhead had been out of work for a while, a fact she was very open about, and I couldn’t figure out how she managed to stay in her Upper West Side apartment and afford $17 martinis. I wanted to ask her, but I never found a polite way to introduce the topic. So we sat there discussing our favorite sexual positions.
At midnight, we walked to the corner to catch a cab. My heels were in my hands, my bare feet slapping on the gummy sidewalk. By the time the taxi dropped me off at home, I had an insane hunger. I boiled water on the stove and threw in some pasta. I flopped down on the futon and turned on that VH1 show where talking-head comedians make fun of Milli Vanilli and Teddy Ruxpin.
The next part is confusing. A banging at the door. The landlord’s sketchy son with a fire extinguisher in his hands. Gray smoke churning over the stove. The earsplitting beeping of the alarm.
“Open the window,” he said. Sweat was dripping off his face as he worked to secure the kitchen. I stood behind him, arms dangling at my sides.
“Your alarm’s been going off for half an hour,” he said, and he moved the pot of charred spaghetti stalks off the burner.
“I must have fallen asleep,” I said, a much gentler phrase than “passed out.” But I wondered if they knew. Surely they’d seen all the cans and bottles in my recycling bin.
Ten minutes later, the landlord stood in my kitchen. She was in a blue robe, with her arms crossed. “You try to burn down my apartment,” she said.
“Oh no,” I said, startled by the accusation and hoping it was a glitch in translation. “It was an accident. I’m so sorry.”
I couldn’t go back to sleep that night. At 5 am, before the sun rose, I decided to take a walk. I walked across the Williamsburg Bridge, and I walked through the trash-strewn streets of the Lower East Side, past the discount stores with their roll-down metal gates locked shut, and through the tidy sidewalk cafés of Chelsea, and into the din of Midtown. If my feet hurt, I didn’t notice. I needed forward motion. I needed to keep in front of my shame. I was near the zoo at Central Park when the landlord’s daughter called me.
“When your lease is up in April, we’d like you to move out,” she said.
“OK, I’m sorry,” I said.
She must have hated making that call. She must have hated being the translator of Difficult Information. “Listen, you’re a good person, but my mom is really upset. The building is old. Her granddaughters live there. The whole place could have gone up in flames.”
“I understand,” I said, though it felt like an overreaction to a genuine mistake. I fell asleep, I kept thinking. How could spaghetti smoke burn down your building? But underneath those defensive voices, the knowledge I was wrong. To cast the event as anyone’s whoopsie was to exclude key evidence. Like the part where I drank three martinis, two beers—and passed out.
“I was thinking about buying your mother a plant,” I said. “Or maybe flowers. Do you know what kind she likes?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, because I thought everyone liked flowers.
“I think the better idea is if you don’t say anything, and you move out in April.”
I walked all the way up to Washington Heights, up to 181st Street, where my friend Lisa lived. We’d met at the Austin paper, and she was one of the first people to convince me I could make a living in New York. I slept on her couch during my first month in the city, and I used to drift off, listening to her and her husband laugh in their bedroom, and I would think about how I would like that one day. Lisa and Craig were leading candidates for the greatest people I knew, and if you are ever as low as I was that morning, I hope you can walk far enough to get to Lisa’s doorstep.
She and I pulled a couple chairs outside and sat quietly in the sunshine. I stared off at the George Washington Bridge, the blue sky behind it. My lips were trembling. “I think I’m going to have to quit drinking,” I said, and she said, “I know. I’m sorry. I love you.”
And I quit drinking. For four days.
I HAD THIS great idea: I should get a job. Freelancing came with freedom, but maybe what I required was a cage. I also needed a regular paycheck. I was $10K in the hole to credit card companies. And I had neglected to pay a hefty IRS bill. Twice.
I got a job as a writer and editor at an online magazine called Salon. The gig came with full benefits, perhaps the most important being hope. I looked at each new change—every geographic move, every shuffle of my schedule—as a reason to believe I might finally reform bad habits. Drinkers have an unlimited supply of 4 am epiphanies and “no, really, I’ve got it this time” speeches.
But no, really, I had it this time. One of my first Salon essays was about confronting my credit card debt, which had gotten so out of control I had to borrow money from my parents. That was a low moment, but it came with a boost of integrity. A free tax attorney helped me calculate the amount I owed to the IRS—$40,000—and put me on a payment plan. My commitment was seven years, which made me feel like the guy from Shawshank Redemption, tunneling out of prison with a spoon. But finally, I was coming clean.
The credit card debt story introduced a new problem, however. The day after the piece ran, an intern stopped by my desk. “What do you think about the comments on your piece?” she asked. “Pretty insane, huh?”
“Totally,” I said, though I hadn’t actually read them. That night, fortified by a bottle of wine, I waded into the comments. There were hundreds. Some people scolded me for my debt. Some mocked me for not having enough debt. But they mostly agreed this was a worthless article written by a loser.
My mother used to tell me I was my own worst critic. Clearly, she wasn’t reading the comments.
I began losing my nerve. I started second-guessing everything—not just my writing, but my editing. The Internet was a traffic game, scary and unfamiliar to me, and I felt torn between the real journalist I wanted to be and the snake-oil salesman who had to turn a fluff piece into a viral sensation. I woke up writing headlines, rearranging words like Scrabble tiles for maximum effect.
I started drinking at home more. A way to save money. A reward for a challenging day. I switched up the bodegas each time, so none of the guys behind the counter would catch on.
When the first layoff hit Salon in the fall of 2008, I was spared. But I was frightened by the tremors under my feet. My boss told me the names of the people who were let go, and I cried like they’d been shot. Those people are so nice, I kept thinking. As if that had anything to do with it. As if a global financial disaster is going to select for kindness.
The more unstable the world became, the more earned my reckless drinking felt. After a night out with friends, I would stop by the bodega for a six-pack. Sunday nights became a terrible reckoning. I would lie under my duvet, and I would drink white wine, watching Intervention, coursing with the low-down misery that another Monday was on its way.
I should quit. I knew I needed to quit. After a doozy I would wake up and think “Never again,” and by 3 pm I would think, “But maybe today.”
I HAD THIS great idea: I should go into therapy. My parents agreed to shoulder most of the bill, and I felt guilty, because I knew the strain it would cause. But even worse would be not getting help at all.
My therapist was a maternal woman, with a nod I trusted. Whenever I thought about lying to her, I tried to envision flushing a hundred-dollar bill down the toilet.
“What about rehab?” she asked.
Eesh. That was a little dramatic.
“I can’t,” I said. I couldn’t leave my cat. I couldn’t leave my colleagues. I couldn’t afford it. If I was gonna do rehab, I wanted to be shipped off to one of those celebrity-studded resorts in Malibu, where you do Pilates and gorge on pineapple all day, not holed up a dingy facility with metal beds.
Still, I longed for some intervening incident to make me stop. Who doesn’t want a deus ex machina? Some benevolent character to float down from the clouds and take the goddamn pinot noir out of your hands?
I had this great idea: I should try antidepressants. And another great idea: I should toss the antidepressants and join a gym. And another great idea: What about a juice cleanse? And another, and another.
My body was starting to break down. After an average bout of heavy drinking, I would wake up in the mornings feeling poisoned, needing to purge whatever was left in my stomach. I would kneel at the toilet, place two fingers down the back of my throat, and make myself vomit. Shower, go to work.
I had to quit. I would try for a few days, but I never got further than two weeks. I became paranoid I was going to lose my job. Whenever I sat down to write, the words wouldn’t come. The pressure and the doubt and the stress could no longer be sipped away. I was completely blocked.
“I’m going to get fired,” I told my boss one afternoon, freaking out over a late deadline.
“Look at me,” she said. “You are not going to lose your job.” And she was right.
But she lost hers. The second layoff came a few weeks later, in August of 2009, and when the list of the damned was read, my boss’s name was on it, along with half the New York office. I couldn’t believe it. All those months I was convinced I’d be axed, and I was one of the only survivors.
Why did they keep me? I’ll never know. Maybe I was cheap. Maybe I was agreeable. Maybe my name never got pulled from the hat. I suspected my boss never let them see how much I was floundering. She protected me, and she got the pink slip. I was left with my job, my fear, and my guilt.
