51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life

by Kristen McGuiness

  Sabbath fell in love with me. But I was too wrapped up in my alcoholism and my sad, sad sorrow over losing the greatest love of my life, so I failed to see who this rebound really was. I failed to see that Sabbath was one of the good ones. About two months into our relationship, Sabbath tried, like Oliver before him, to get me to quit cocaine. New Year’s had just passed, and though we were all on ecstasy, though Sabbath had joined us in the cocaine that night, I noticed that he had stopped doing it around 3:00 a.m. and by 4:00 a.m., he was ready to leave.

  We returned to his house, and as I started doing some addict mathematics I realized that Sabbath was the last one holding the bag and that he should have more on him. I begged, I cried, and finally, I slipped into bed with him, shaking and whimpering as I did when coming down from cocaine. He pulled me into his chest. “Sweetheart, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t know what?” I choked.

  “That you had a problem. I thought we were just having fun. I’m so sorry. We’ll never do that again. I don’t ever want to do coke with you again.”

  “Okay,” I murmured into his chest. Because at that moment I didn’t ever want to do it again either.

  But four days later I was doing it again. I went over to Sabbath’s house the next day, and he didn’t even need to ask. He could see it in my swollen nose, my bloodshot eyes, the way I cringed to even move. He didn’t say anything. He just got up and went to his bookshelf.

  “I was going to throw this away,” he told me as he pulled out a CD.

  “Huh?” I asked. I was hurting too much to really pay attention. And then I watched as he dumped a gram of coke on top of the CD cover.

  “It’s yours,” he said. He pulled out a dollar bill from his wallet, rolled it up, and offered it to me. “But I don’t want to see you anymore if you do it.”

  This was too big of a challenge for me on any night, let alone a night where I had woken up thirty minutes prior.

  “You wanna keep partying, fine. But I don’t want a part of it, Kristen.”

  I couldn’t move my eyes from the cocaine. It begged for me; it called my name; it knew me so much better than this man. I didn’t know what was more confusing: that I was being asked to fulfill some sort of ultimatum, or that Sabbath lied on New Year’s, and I could have done more blow that night. The fact that he was able to keep it without doing any was, at this point, staggering to me.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  I wished I could say that I wanted him. That I wanted him so much more than the cocaine. But I didn’t. I wanted the coke. And there it sat, the answer to all my problems. To all my pain. So easy. And so free. My favorite kind.

  “Keep thinking about it,” he sneered as he walked outside to smoke a cigarette.

  To make such a clear decision, I knew, was dangerous. I was a good addict. I avoided any major moves that would have resulted in a loss of job or home or anything which might have harkened the dreaded process known as “intervention.” And though I wasn’t quite clear on why I needed to get up and go outside to join Sabbath, I knew that if I chose the line of coke right then, it would take that addict label Sabbath had given me and broadcast it across my life like the Goodyear blimp.

  When I walked outside, he pulled me into a great big hug and kissed my head and told me that he would help me. And I knew he would. But I didn’t want it. He flushed the gram that night, but it didn’t take long before he was once again going home from parties alone. And he would cajole me and ask me again to stop when I would slip into his bed many hours later. Ultimately, he let me go when I moved home to Dallas to get sober.

  When I came back to L.A., I stopped by his apartment, and we had a cigarette.

  “I thought maybe there might be some hope for us again,” he offered. But I was hoping there might be hope between me and Oliver, and so I told him, “We’ll see.” I walked away, knowing it was now me who would disappear from someone else’s life. And so I did, and I never called, and he moved to New York, and we never saw each other again.

  Peter sits across the table from me, making me laugh. I like his honest demeanor, the way he readily admits to “being a little alone in this town.” And I can’t help but think, while he’s telling me about his most recent road trip to the Salton Sea, that I wouldn’t mind exploring California with him. We could go on trips to Big Sur together and laugh on the drive up about a misspelled traffic sign. We could drive to Joshua Tree and pretend to spot meth labs. We could visit my friends Jenny and Phil in San Diego and play video games, and everyone would get along great.

  Peter and I shut down the coffee shop. We keep talking as they clean up around us, and I realize that for all his MVP status, Jimmy Voltage and I never had this. We didn’t sit and laugh with ease.

  Peter walks me to my car. I am hoping he will surprise me and kiss me passionately. I am hoping that after all the laughter and easy conversation he will kick in a firework for the sake of romance. Instead, Peter hugs me awkwardly and then shuffles around as he asks me out for a second date. I want to say that I feel empathy for him, for all men who have to make that offer and pray the girl accepts.

  So I say yes.

  I don’t know if Peter will be my new Sabbath. Because that was the thing, Sabbath wasn’t afraid. There was nothing I could do to scare that man. And though I was too busy thinking about the one I had lost, I can’t help but think today that I lost again when I refused to give Sabbath the chance he so deserved. And I don’t want to make that mistake again.

  13

  Date Thirteen: New Beginnings

  It’s raining in L.A. tonight. The way it sometimes does. In huge gushing blows. As though the heavens have opened, and God lets loose on our otherwise drought-worn city. The New Year began this week. What a loaded holiday. “Auld Lang Syne”. The search for a pair of lips at midnight. And new beginnings. I’m pretty sure it’s all about new beginnings.

  Ivan and I decide to throw a party at his house to celebrate 2008. I am on my way home from Smart & Final with a trunk full of Red Bull, cookies, and cheese for the party because that’s just how the sober folk roll. My phone rings, and though I can’t identify the number, I have become used to these calls. It is my dad, and he has started his own new beginning. In the middle of December, he was released from prison in Pennsylvania and sent once again to Northern Florida to serve out his probation. This time, he went. Begrudgingly, but he went.

  “I’m no rat, K,” he explains to me over the phone. I can hear the heaviness in his voice, and I know he has been drinking.

  “Then don’t rat, Daddy.”

  “But I figure I’ll give them enough,” he continues. “Enough, and they’ll get me out of this hellhole.”

  The FBI has offered my father a longer leash if he provides them with information about things he learned on the inside of federal prison. He begins telling me about a terrorist plot, but I stop him.

  “Dad, please. I don’t want to know this stuff.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” He sounds disappointed. He sounds like he was hoping he could win some cool points with me by telling me as much.

  “Oh, K, I can’t stay here. You know that, right? I can’t stay here.”

  My father refers to the halfway house he has been paroled to as a homeless shelter.

  “I don’t get it, Daddy. You’ve been in prison for almost thirty years, how bad can it be?”

  But I do get it. The nonprofit where I work is situated in a relatively unknown ghetto in Los Angeles. We’re between downtown and a major hospital, and there can’t be much worse of a pedestrian highway than that. Around the corner sits a halfway house for recently released convicts. It is called “New Beginnings.” I see it every day. I see the men sitting outside, smoking cigarettes. I see the broken-down alcoholism in their faces. I see my father. And I know that it was actually so much better in prison for him and for all these men, who lost their new beginnings long ago.

  In prison, they’re all the same. The same jumpsuits an
d haircuts and makeshift huaraches. On the outside, my dad is a middle-class guy with high-class tastes sitting in front of a halfway house in Northern Florida, squinting at the sun. But he wasn’t always there. He once wore Ralph Lauren. He once lived next door to Ralph Lauren. Back in the late seventies, we shared an East Hampton compound with him and a magazine czar. My dad would get the magazine czar and some of the Saturday Night Live guys from the late seventies high. We had the biggest house in the compound; we even had the pool, and my father would play host to the fancy people on Egypt Road, and for a moment, everyone thought that the great, big dream was coming true.

  He tells me on the phone, “K, this isn’t me. This isn’t me.”

  And again, I get it. I get living a life that feels so much smaller than the one you once had and the one you think you deserve. My heart breaks for him. And it breaks for me too. I am beginning to fear that I will continue to go on consecutive aimless dates with no real love in sight. That I will be stuck answering Noelle’s phones and scheduling her meetings, never fulfilling my own potential. I am afraid that these new beginnings are only teases about life actually changing, becoming something different, when really they’re just halfway houses for our dreams.

  I tell my dad I love him; I wish him a happy New Year, and we both agree that next year we’ll be celebrating it together. But we’ve been saying that since I was four.

  I go home to change myself into something hot. I get my hair cut with Brigitte Bardot bangs, squeeze into my 1920s prom dress from high school, and am surprised by how good I look. For all intents and purposes, I am in my prime. God love heartbreak.

  I pick up my friend Siren. Siren’s mother still tells people that she named her daughter Rene, Siren’s real name, because she looks like Rene Russo. This drives Siren nuts, but her mom is right. Siren does look eerily like Rene Russo, with her thick red hair and long, lanky limbs. I’ve had a crush on her since the moment we met, when I had just come back into sobriety after my relapse, and she was one of the only women at the meetings to ask for my number and actually call.

  Since then, we have become each other’s diaries—reporting almost every day to one another on our thoughts, fears, brilliant plans for the future. And tonight, when I need her most, she gets over her social anxieties to join me for a New Year’s night out. We go to the party, we drink Red Bull, we play Spin the Bottle, and we hit the dance floor.

  The DJ is spinning “Beast of Burden,” and there I rock in my vintage gown and my red Chucks and my bright red lipstick. I look toward the door for the seventh time in the last half hour. Because without realizing it, I have also staged a great potential reunion landscape for Jimmy Voltage and me. And I wait for his tall build to saunter in, grab me up in his arms, and kiss me torrentially.

  But he doesn’t.

  I want to invoke the “It’s my party, and I can cry if I want to” rule, but it doesn’t play as well at thirty, if ever. Instead, I stay poised. I dance until the last guest leaves. I clean up Ivan’s house like a good host. I drive Siren home. And I wake up the next morning with an emotional hangover that keeps me in bed for the better part of the next two days.

  On the second day, I receive a text message from a number I had almost forgotten. Oliver. All it said was, “Happy New Year,” but that was almost too much. When it ended, I had felt that there was an unspoken agreement between us that such trivialities were too dangerous for two people who would always be caught in a game of cat and mouse. And so I don’t respond because I know that if this year is to be a new beginning, that means taking new actions, creating new behaviors, and not continuing to respond to the same old call.

  The following Monday, I go into work, and I tell Noelle that I can no longer be her assistant. At first, she sits back and glares at me. I am afraid she will become just like the notorious publisher and turn on me. I am afraid she will tell me she can’t help me. I swallow the lump in my throat and keep going.

  “I nnnn-eed something more, Noelle.” I don’t know where the stutter came from, but I’m not very good at asking for promotions. This is one of the reasons why I am a thirty-year-old assistant. “I wwww-ant to stay here,” I continue, “bbbb-ut I, I, I need something more.”

  I wait. And then she smiles. “Yes, you do.”

  She doesn’t know what it is yet, she tells me, but we will find something. We will get something where I use more of my talents than answering phones and scheduling meetings. She asks me to go back to school, and I agree. I enroll in a night course that day. I do these small, silly things that years ago I would have laughed at. Because years ago, I was just like my father, always believing that I was something more than I was. Always thinking I deserved a certain life, but never being willing to change to make that life happen.

  That night, I leave my office building in the rain, the one right around the corner from that halfway house. As I carry boxes that are too big for me, struggling against the large metal gates that lock up our nonprofit in the hood, I am scared that though I might be willing change for the new beginnings, no one will change for me. And I am tired of doing this alone. I am tired of having no one to help me carry this load. The boxes, the gates, my father. I ache for a partner who will steady me through it, and I fear that I will run out of faith before he gets here.

  14

  Date Fourteen: Gay Uncles Give Good Heart

  All girls should have a gay uncle. And for those who weren’t fortunate enough to have been born into a family where the gay gene is prevalent, I highly recommend finding a surrogate. My gay uncle is named Vic. He was one of Southern Florida’s premier florists until he hit fifty and went through what appears to be a national phenomenon best called “gay menopause.” Gay menopause pretty much skips the hot flashes and memory loss and instead focuses all of its energies on making its host body completely, entirely insane. It’s sad but true. Not that my uncle Vic hasn’t always been crazy; it’s what made him my dearest uncle in the first place. Sure, my uncle Tommy was cute and young and came to all the school dances, but my uncle Vic took me shopping for Gaultier.

  I remember first questioning my mom and Nana on Vic’s gay-ness when I was eight. We were vacationing in Ft. Lauderdale and staying at my uncle’s house. I had noticed that he and his “roommate” Paul slept in the same bed, even though they had a three-bedroom house. And then there was the issue of the word “honey.” My uncle always called Paul “honey” or some other term of endearment and that too seemed suspicious. Because of the AIDS epidemic and the subsequent letter that was sent to every household in America, I had gotten wind of this “gay” thing and had begun to think that my uncle might be one.

  I knew better then to just come out with it. This was still the eighties, after all. My mom, Nana, and I were getting into our rented car when I decided to pop the question. “Mom, why does Uncle Vic call Paul ‘honey’?” I saw my mother and Nana pause; they both shot each other a look over the roof of the car, and then my mom began, “Um, well, you know Uncle Vic, he...”

  But Nana stepped in, “He calls everyone honey. Your grandpa did the same thing.” My grandfather is a very rarely mentioned figure in my family, so bringing him up at all almost threw me off my game, but then I remembered that Vic and Paul shared a bed and decided I would try that tack. As though she could see me formulating it, Nana turned her steely-eyed glare on me and ordered, “Get in the car.” The glare didn’t always get me to obey, but this time it did. I got in the car and decided it was better not to bring it up. Yet.

  Years later, Nana and I were vacationing at Vic’s house again. I was watching TV while Nana talked on the phone behind me. I decided to see what was in the VHS machine because it was summer, and I was bored. The next thing I knew I was watching a man get fucked in more ways than I knew was possible. In fact, more ways than I still know is possible. I tried to turn it off but the battery in the remote control wasn’t working, I banged the damn thing a couple of times, but it just kept going. Nana’s back was away from the TV, but s
he could turn at any moment. I flew up, leaped over the coffee table, slammed my ankle into the side of it, and hit the “off” button on the TV.

  Nana swiveled around. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” I said, rubbing my ankle as I limped backward out the front door. Then I turned around and ran. I ran fast and hard, as though if I got far enough away from the video, Nana wouldn’t dare see it. I got to the end of the block, and then I began to smile. Because I was right; I was right! Vic was indeed gay. Very gay.

  Vic calls me the other day because he has been speaking with Nana and has some concerns about my recent attempts at dating.

  “Nana says it’s that neighborhood you’re living in,” he tells me.

  “What? Silver Lake?”