Jo Piazza

by Love Rehab

  “Come on.” I pulled Annie’s shoulder and dragged her out of the car, half carrying her into the house, tears streaming down my face and other bodily fluids down hers. She threw herself onto the couch I had just vacated, forcing a plasticky POOOOOOT sound. I went to the bathroom to clean my feet and phone and change into an appropriate pair of pajamas. I grabbed a damp towel and de-puked Annie as best I could, then perched on the floor, my back against the plastic. I picked up the phone to read the message again, and as I composed and recomposed exactly the perfect thing to say that would make Eric fall madly back in love with me the instant he read it, my eyes became heavy and I fell asleep with the phone in my hand.

  The morning sun hit the east-facing living room windows around 6:30. If my eyes were puffy and my head pounding amid the smell of dry vomit I could only imagine what Annie was about to experience when she opened her eyes to greet the day. There was no point in postponing the inevitable. I prepared to wake her with a swift tug of her big toe when Eleanor’s bellowing brass doorbell did the work for me.

  “What the hell?” Annie gurgled before grabbing a pillow and pushing it down over her eyes. I managed to stand and looked out the window to see the police cruiser still parked askew in the driveway and two very pissed-off officers on my doorstep to match it. Apparently they had driven over in Annie’s abandoned car.

  “Get up, cowgirl. You’re about to be corralled and you might want a change of clothes for this,” I yelled over my shoulder. I knew these cops. I had known these cops since the third grade when Sergeant Chris Zucker had these horribly smelly feet that he let air out at his desk in Teva sandals, and everyone called Sergeant Alan Bress, Alan Breast, something that still made me giggle because Alan had an unfortunate pair of man boobs, impossible to conceal even in his blue uniform.

  “Morning, Sophie,” Chris said, crinkling his nose a little at the smell when I opened the door. “I think you have something that belongs to us.” I had seen Chris a few times since I came home a month ago. He had been at Eleanor’s wake. He came with his grandfather, who kissed my hand and told me the world, in Eleanor’s passing, had lost one of the true great beauties.

  “We were just giving her a place to park for the night, Officer,” I said, smoothing down bangs that refused to settle against my forehead.

  “She here?”

  “Of course she is. She’s getting cleaned up.”

  “Got our keys?”

  “I believe they are still in the ignition.”

  “Great place for ’em.”

  “How’d she get them in the first place?” Now Alan, his chesticles straining against the brass buttons of his vest, looked sheepish and began playing with his imaginary bangs—the ones that were there before his receding hairline got the better of them.

  “Alan made a bet with Annie and he lost,” Chris chimed in for his partner.

  “Darts?”

  “What else?”

  “Doesn’t he know better than to challenge Annie on her home turf to her game?”

  “I think Alan was a little tipsy himself. Anyway, he lost the bet.”

  “So he gave her his car?”

  “No, no, she just asked to run the siren. She said she wasn’t going to take it. But then she took it.” It was pretty obvious that these two, despite being on duty, had also been partaking of beverages at the bar, which is why they didn’t end up tracking Annie down until after the sun came up.

  “Of course she did. It sounds like this is just as much Alan’s fault as Annie’s. I don’t see any reason to haul her in.”

  Annie was famously good at darts. She had learned how to play while studying abroad in Prague, when a group of gangsters in her local pub took a liking to her because they had never seen a ginger before and took her under their wing. To pick up extra cash Annie worked with them hustling tourists who didn’t think such a pretty American girl would be so good at hitting a bull’s-eye or remaining standing while shooting bathtub vodka.

  Chris looked down, and Alan shuffled his feet some more.

  “There’s the problem. Annie caused quite the path of destruction on her way over here. She took out two mailboxes, dented a fire hydrant, and ran over Ms. Dinkdorf’s cat.”

  I put my hand to my mouth. “Fluffy!”

  “Cat heaven. Half the town saw her rip shit barreling through the streets with that siren going. We’ve got to get her for DUI and destruction of private property or we are going to be held liable.”

  “So what are you going to do? Arrest her?”

  “She can come to the station with us willingly and we’ll have to charge her and we can tell the judge to go easy on her. She’ll probably get probation and some alcohol education classes,” Chris said. Then, dropping his tone to a conspiratorial whisper, he went on, “Which I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing at this point. She’s kind of outgrown adorable drunk, don’t you think, Soph?”

  “I hear you out there,” Annie said, all of a sudden appearing and looking absolutely no worse for the wear from the night before. Serial abusers of alcohol never suffer the same hangovers as us moderate drinkers—the same way I imagine serial daters rarely experience the same kind of heartache that the serial monogamous person enjoys after a bad breakup. She had somehow found a washed pair of jeans and a violet button-down top that looked killer with her green eyes and fresh-from-the-shower hair. It’s too bad Annie doesn’t like boys like “that,” because both the officers turned to mush when she strode over to them.

  “Last I saw you I was getting my latest bull’s-eye,” she said, wrapping an arm around a red-faced Alan’s formidable waist.

  “Last I saw you, you were burning rubber on Decatur, siren blaring and Backstreet Boys on the radio.” Now it was Annie’s turn to go red. If I knew anything about my friend’s tendency for blacking out, and at this point I knew a fair bit, it was that she had all her faculties about her until she hit some mysterious wall and then the rest of the night was a complete loss to her.

  “You hauling me in?” Annie clasped her hands in front of her own waist with a coy smile, her embarrassment turned to obeisance in an instant.

  “Get in your car, Annie, and we’ll sort it all out at the station.”

  Annie and I rode to the police station together in silence.

  The Yardville cop shack is a four-room affair with a reception area and tiny lobby containing a faded yellow couch that had seen better days back in the ’70s, a drunk tank, where I knew Annie had ended up a couple of times before I came back to town, a bathroom, and an open area for the town’s six cops and sheriff to do their desk work, which was minimal given the low level of exciting crime activity. I perched on the edge of the crusty old sofa waiting for Annie to emerge from the back, hopefully properly cowed after she had been filled in on the destruction she caused in the wee hours.

  Cowed she wasn’t.

  “BULLSHIT! Probation? Rehab? I don’t have a drinking problem!” Annie was stomping through the station like a rhinoceros on Red Bull.

  “Annie, come on now,” old Sheriff McNulty said in his grandfatherly tones, better suited for public radio than reading people their rights. “We called the judge and we can give you probation and rehab, and none of this will stay on your record once you do those things. You don’t even have to go to court. He’s doing you a favor, you know, because he was a friend of your dad.”

  “I. Don’t. Need. Rehab.”

  I was starting to think that she did need some rehab, but I didn’t know how to tell her they were right. I stood up and asked McNulty, “What kind of rehab are we talking about? Does she have to go away? Does she just have to go to meetings?”

  “That’s up to her and the judge. She needs to start by going to the town’s AA meeting tomorrow night in the Presbyterian church basement. Then we can talk about options and we can try to figure something out.”

  Annie tossed me the keys to her MINI Cooper convertible in the parking lot.

  “I don’t drive stick,” I shriek
ed, tossing them back.

  “Figure it out. Suspended license, bitch.”

  Blerg! I hadn’t touched a stick shift since high school when my boyfriend, Matt Siggman, got hopped up on whippets at a Dave Matthews concert (the first time he proved himself anything but boring and stone-faced sober) and I had to drive us home from Jones Beach in his Mustang convertible, the one he bought because he thought it made him look like Dylan McKay from 90210. Matt had a real thing for 90210. He had every episode on VHS. He recorded them himself and labeled each tape with a white label in sequential order from 1 to 27. He let me watch them all when I had mono, which was really nice of him, but also led to our inevitable breakup, when I lost tape number 11, the one of the summer before senior year where Brenda goes off to Paris with Donna and Dylan cheats on her with her best friend, Kelly Taylor. I always thought Kelly was such a skank for doing that. Kelly Taylor may have been my first encounter with a BTCBT (blonde that can’t be trusted). Anyway, Matt broke my heart after number 11 went missing. We’re on speaking terms these days, and when I’ve been home in the past few years, I’ve had a glass of wine over at the house he shares with his husband, Robert. The Dylan McKay thing should have tipped me off.

  I grinded the gears all the way home. “How long is your license suspended?”

  “Ninety days, or until I complete the outpatient rehabilitation program, the AA.”

  “Which is every week?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “And not walkable and we live in a town with no public transportation.”

  “You have so much going on?”

  That stung. I didn’t. I was able to do my job as a children’s book illustrator from the house, even though before Eleanor died and before the Eric situation turned me into a useless lump on the couch, I had faithfully gone into the office every day to meet with editors and authors and storyboard book ideas. I had initially taken two weeks off to deal with everything in New Jersey, but my boss had been understanding when I said I wanted to work from home to get everything in my life settled.

  “I do have to work. I may be a depressive, pathetic shut-in who will die alone, but I have to work during the days and I don’t know if I feel like being your personal chauffeur.”

  “Let’s just go to this first meeting and we will figure it out,” Annie said as she twiddled with the radio.

  “We?”

  “I can’t go by myself, Sophie; come on, just come for moral support.”

  I resigned myself to doing exactly what Annie wanted since that is what I have done since we were eight years old.

  “I need a drink,” Annie said when we arrived, slamming her car door with a force she rarely showed on her delicate darling of a car.

  Not what I wanted to hear. I’m sure you thought stealing the police car and the obsessive text messages were our rock bottoms. Not quite. Prepare for our rear ends to turn to stone.

  Annie settled onto the couch with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I hate any brown liquor, so I cracked open a bottle of pinot noir. Two hours later, Love Actually was on the television. It had been our go-to romantic comedy for years, I think because it gave you hope that true love could actually happen to just about anyone (even the British prime minister!) when you weren’t even looking for it.

  I made Annie stalk Eric’s new girlfriend on Facebook. And then …

  I was startled from my red-wine-induced stupor by “All I wanna do is zoom zoom and boom boom, just shake your …” My mouth felt spongy, and I had to run my tongue over my lips to make sure I could make words. I needed a new ring tone.

  It was Eric.

  This could be it. He was calling to apologize. Floozy had perished in a tragic treadmill accident at the gym and he was already waiting for me at Penn Station with flowers and balloons just like in the final scene of Love Actually when everyone meets their loved ones at the airport and you realize that love is indeed all around.

  There was a really angry man on the other end of the line.

  “Take it down, Sophie.”

  “What? Eric?”

  “Take my penis off the Internet,” he grunted with a bit of a panicked squeak at the end of the sentence that indicated he thought (no, knew) that he was dealing with a person who did not have her marbles intact.

  Oh dear.

  The night before came rushing back to me in a blur.

  After I polished off a second bottle of wine, I made Annie help me make a list of why Eric was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad man. Lists have always been helpful to me. I make them for just about everything, from what to buy at the grocery store to how to decide what to do on a weekend.

  “What about the time he got back from Europe and insisted on double kissing everyone hello like he was a count or an Italian supermodel,” I slurred.

  “Or how he would never sit at the first table they seated him at in a restaurant,” Annie added. “He would always make the waiter feel silly and then arbitrarily pick a different table to make him seem important and selective.”

  “Ooo, ooo, or how about how he never just said, ‘Hey, these are my friends from college,’ or ‘These are my friends from high school’; he always had to say, ‘These are my bros from Exeter.’ ”

  Then Annie added the doozy that inspired us to do evil: “Remember how he went through that gross sexting phase where he used to send pictures of his penis to you all the time? Penises are so gross. No one should take pictures of them. They look like sea monsters ready to attack. Ughhhhh, it’s a big reason I like girls.”

  Eric had only done that for a week when he learned that I was less than responsive to the modern love declaration of sexting. I tried, but I couldn’t bring myself to take a picture of my lady bits and send them over the Internet. They also never looked good in their close-ups, no matter the lighting (and I tried lots of different lighting).

  Of course Floozy did it all the time. I found the sexts the same day that I found the incriminating e-mails. It was like Penthouse Forum on his iPhone.

  Oh, where are you?

  I’m at my grandparents’ house.

  Look at my boobs.

  Or

  I’m in a very important meeting with the Japanese. Take a look at my hard, hard cock. Wouldn’t you like this in your mouth right now?

  Or

  Tee hee, look who forgot to wear panties to the office.

  Floozy never seemed to remember to wear panties to the office.

  I mused to Annie. “If Miley Cyrus and former congressman Anthony Weiner have taught us anything, isn’t it that sexting will always be made public?”

  “Not if you’re not famous,” Annie said.

  “Everyone’s a little bit famous these days.” It’s true. We live on Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn. Everyone is a little bit famous to the people in their networks.

  And then I had the idea—the very horrible idea, my true rock bottom.

  “Let’s make Eric’s penis famous!”

  Annie snorted. “I think in some circles it already is.”

  That would have made me nauseated if I didn’t have an armor of 14 percent alcohol pinot noir and Chianti Classico protecting my feelings.

  “Let’s put his penis on the Internet.” I jumped onto the couch and punched my fist into the air. “Let’s put it on his Facebook page!”

  Annie hated penises, but she loved a project and she was a wildly productive drunk. “No, no, let’s give Eric’s penis its own blog, Ericspenis.blogspot.com.”

  “I don’t know how to make a blog.”

  “I do. I made one for the bar.”

  And at that Annie was on BlogSpot creating a user name for Ericspenis.blogspot.com (password: Not2Hard).

  Then things got blurry. I remembered scrolling through my phone and finding a picture of Eric’s lower torso, leg propped on a stool or a chair and completely average-sized penis poking up between two down-covered thighs. I remembered Annie uploading the picture and I remembered celebrating our creation by sending
Eric an e-mail with the link. Then I remembered nothing.

  “Who else did you send it to, Sophie? What the hell is wrong with you? Are you a tween girl? Are you a mean girl? A bully? Do you want to ruin my life?”

  I was a mean girl. A mean, mean tween girl.

  “We didn’t send it to anyone else. I don’t think we sent it to anyone else,” I whispered.

  “You don’t think?”

  I was furiously scrolling through my phone as fast as my hungover fingers would let me. Outbox.

  To: Eric (Personal Mail)

  From: Me

  Take a looooook at this jerkface. www.ericspenis.blogspot.com

  SophieSophiemi

  P.S. I thought you’d be better endowed, Annie.

  And that was it. That’s all there was. It looked like that had been sent just as I passed out.

  “Sophie, this is getting sick. I am going to have to call the cops.”

  “We’ll take it down, Eric. Please don’t call anyone. No one saw it. Please,” I begged.

  “Fine. But leave me the hell alone, Sophie. We had a good thing for a while. I don’t know why you can’t leave it at that and find someone new. I don’t owe you anything. Good-bye, Sophie.”

  “Good-bye, Eric,” I said to a dial tone.

  I could hear Annie hurling in the guest bathroom across the hall. I was sitting speechless on the bed, head still throbbing, feeling like my brain had somehow disconnected from the bone part of my skull when Annie walked into the room.

  “I think I have problem. I need help,” she said with a calm resignation.

  “So do I, kiddo. So do I.”

  Find something greater than yourself to make you sane again

  Annie’s mandated AA meeting was in the basement of the Presbyterian church my parents went to for three weeks when I was ten years old. They thought church would be a productive thing for our family unit, but before we made it a month they came to the mutual decision that Dad’s Sunday golf and Mom’s time in the garden were a much more productive thing for the family unit. My brother, Jamie, and I were left to our own devices on the Lord’s Day. Everyone was much happier; Dad’s handicap dropped by three and the roses looked fantastic.