“What are you talking about? You’re not a serial monogamist. You’re always single,” Dan said, laughing.
I’m not sure why this was news to me. I was a long way from my three-guys-at-age-thirty days. And a lot of my new friends, the ones with whom I was running around the world, hadn’t even known that other me.
Another thing happened in 2007: I went back to therapy, and started taking antidepressants. In Los Angeles, this news is exactly as odd and interesting as saying you started eating three times a day, but since I know this isn’t quite as everyday in the rest of the world, I’ll explain. (Or perhaps by this point in the book, you’re not at all in need of an explanation, and are instead reacting to this news with an exasperated, “Finally.”)
In any case, the therapy and the antidepressants sprang out of a trip I took in November, just after my monkey-ass-rape show went down and my pilot didn’t sell. I met up with Hope for Thanksgiving in Spain, where she had been working for a week before I arrived in Madrid. A few hours after I got in, we went out for dinner, waited for our table for two hours at the bar, then had another bottle of wine once we finally sat down, and then took the party to a club, where I danced with a man who assured me he was a toreador. Jetlagged and not at all sleepy, I wanted to pursue this information further, but Hope ran out of energy, and so we took our drunk selves home at about four in the morning.
She collapsed in bed, but I was still wide-awake. I’m normally a marathon sleeper, but I always travel with Ambien for long flights and those first couple of nights of jetlag. So I popped a sleeping pill, and sat, drunk, at my computer while I waited for it to kick in.
It kicked in.
In the morning, I would discover that I had e-mailed just about every man who had ever touched my body or soul. I even jumped on my Match.com account to e-mail a few who might do so one day in the future. At first, the e-mails were just drunken, typo-filled notes that looked like they had been written by a cat. But eventually, clearly, the Ambien kicked in, and that’s when the correspondence got upsetting. Here is a partial list of what I wrote:
To Matt, the boyfriend I broke up with in between my trips to Argentina, I wrote a huge amount of upsetting “miss you” stuff, which boiled down to asking if it all would have worked out if only his penis had not been so big.
To Oscar, the Argentine bartender: filthy stuff. Just … yeah. Filthy.
To Frenchie Summer 2007: very sexy, cat-typoed suggestions that also turned a little angry.
To an Asian guy on Match.com:
You seem suuuuuuuupercool, but unnfortunately i’m just not atttracted to Asians. i know that sounds horrible, I swear i’m not racist, I date every other race, just sadlyy never Asian.
Horrifying. Even more horrifying, years later, I would of course meet this guy. A friend of a friend. Super-attractive, super-cool, totally remembered being bummed out by our correspondence, I’m a dick.
And there were more! To a few other random guys who had not called me after date one or two or three, I sent more anger, with progressively more typos.
And then, worst of all, even worse than Asian racism, I wrote to Ben:
Didm i makee the bigggest mistake omy life breaking up with you? Do youthink we could have been aa family by noow? Ilove you, you’re beautifulll and iwonder.
In the morning, I woke up with a gasp. I ran to my computer and groaned with progressive volume as I read what Ambien-fueled Kristin-Adjacent had done, and then quickly wrote about a dozen more e-mails: rescind, rescind, rescind! Ambien! Madrid! Sorry! The recipients were all very gracious, the Asian guy even offering to still go out with me. But Ben’s was ominous:
No worries. But we should probably talk about this when you get home.
Years later, I would start hearing stories of other people who stayed awake and wrote on Ambien. And everyone used the same words to describe what they wrote: angry and sexual. This is apparently an Ambien thing, just like sleep eating and sleep shopping. But I didn’t know that at the time, and I felt horrible about all of these messages. And also, for the entire Spanish trip, disturbed. What was all of this anger that came out of me? And this love for Ben? I had rejected him for years, and yet this is what came out of me when drugs and alcohol could knock down my walls? What kind of enormous, messed-up walls were in me if these were my real feelings, but I didn’t at all want to act on them in the sober light of day?
And so, a little freaked out, I went home, went back to therapy, and started taking antidepressants. I started talking about why I was so terrified of really, truly connecting with a man, of needing someone the way you need someone when you build a life with them. We talked about my relationship with my father, with whom I’d had my strongest parental relationship because I grew up with a constantly working mom, and who had then disappeared from my life completely for four years when I was nineteen.
That story is a long one, but here are the highlights: My dad had married my stepmother with three days’ notice when I was seventeen. The marriage came out of the blue, because for the prior two years they had been dating, she had told him she only wanted to marry a doctor. I didn’t go to the wedding for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I thought my dad was marrying this materialistic woman primarily out of fear of being alone.
While my parents’ divorce had at first been amicable, when my stepmother came into the picture she forbade my dad from ever seeing my mom, and limited his contact with her to phone calls about me. I spent my high school graduation searching the crowd for my father, who she had made sure wasn’t there. When I decided to go to Northwestern, my stepmother made it clear she thought I was being selfish and spoiled. She gave me a lecture about how she knew plenty of people with houses and boats who didn’t even go to college, let alone a private university far from their family. My parents had put aside money for college for me when they divorced that covered my first two years of school, but when my junior year was upon us, and the tuition had to start coming out of everyone’s pockets, and all of that coincided with the birth of the first of my three half-siblings, my stepmother did not like it. I suddenly found that my father’s visits to bring my new baby sister to see me were getting cancelled, and, one day, that my father’s phone number had been changed, and I was not given the new one. The next day my mother was served with papers: my father was suing her to get out of paying his half of my tuition. He and my stepmother followed their attorney’s advice and slandered my mom in the suit, I flew home from college to testify on behalf of my mother, she won, and my father and I didn’t speak for four years. His parents cut me off, too—the Bible says to honor thy mother and thy father, after all, and I was apparently not doing what Jesus would do if Joseph sued Mary.
After this first big, childhood-ending heartbreak, I dove headfirst into my relationship with my college boyfriend, Vito, hastily filling the hole left by my father. Over the years when my dad and I weren’t speaking, I would write long, multipage rants to my father, furious that he wasn’t fighting for me, that he wasn’t coming to get me. He would respond with simple cards that only read “I love you,” which did a great job of rendering those words almost meaningless. Five years later, I would lose Vito in the same “Sure I love you but sometimes shit happens” way I lost my father, and my belief that true love doesn’t last was reinforced nicely.
The therapist did not think I had let go of any of that yet.
Eventually, just before Christmas, I went out to coffee with Ben, who wanted to talk about what was obviously still between us. I started crying immediately upon seeing him, and told him that the lovey Madrid e-mail had just come from the Ambien and, perhaps, from depression and fear. I was working on the depression and fear thing, but I did not want to get back together. I told him I wrote lots of e-mails to lots of people.
It was not cool. That would come back to bite me in the ass.
Not unrelated to my decision with Ben, I was also back in contact with the now single Father Juan. Let’s remember that Juan lived a c
ontinent away, which, as per my issues previously discussed, worked great for me. After some friendly “no hard feelings” e-mails about our awkward time in Buenos Aires, he had invited me to meet him on a trip to Peru he would be taking solo, just after New Year’s Eve, where he proposed we climb up to Machu Picchu together. But Father Juan was hard to read, and I feared he was inviting me as a friend, which I feared would lead to massive disappointment and depression on top of a very, very tall cliff. Or maybe we’d finally have sex and fall in love. The possibilities were extreme.
I was trying to decide whether or not to join Juan in Peru when I went on Ferris’s New Year’s trip to the Dominican Republic. It was two months into the strike, and about thirty people (many of them striking writers) rented three properties on the sand, nestled prettily between a windsurfer beach and what turned out to be a brothel filled with teenaged Dominican prostitutes serving elderly Russians. A lovely family of five ran our bed-and-breakfast, and the family’s sixteen-year-old daughter seemed interested in starting a little side business that involved procuring one of my thirty- and fortysomething male friends for her own use. Apparently lots of girls in town had these much older international “boyfriends,” who brought their wallets to visit a few times a year.
We did not stay on the right side of the island. We learned this one day when we were taken to the other side of the island by one of the girls in our group, a hilarious fourth-generation Palm Beach aristocrat who was weirder than the rest of her family, and so hung out with us. She put the thirty of us on a bus and drove to the other side of the island to visit her sister’s “property,” or what might more rightly be described as her sister’s landgrab.
Her sister and her husband had just led a coalition of American investors to buy a twenty-two-hundred-acre plot of Dominican land that included a resort, a five-star golf course, hundreds of acres of virgin jungle, and miles of beach that had been on a Best Beaches in the World list. They bought this piece of property from the government of the Dominican Republic because the president decided selling one of his country’s ecological jewels was worth the money. Their vision for the green, perfect place on the white-sand beach was “updated Athenian village.” A New Yorker article on the project explained this as a place “in which four-star restaurants and art galleries could share street space with locally-run fish shacks and pool halls.” Moby and Charlie Rose were also investors. There was going to be an “artists’ colony.”
Needless to say, the property was spectacular. And while we felt much like, well, colonizers who had stolen the land of the natives, we had a lovely day golfing and being fed picnics on linen-covered tabletops that truckloads of help quickly set up on the spotless sand. Then we came back to our low-rent side of the island, where the beaches were developed, covered in trash, and inhabited by, mostly, Dominican hookers, navy guys visiting brothels, and Russian guys visiting brothels.
I spent a few days debating what I should do once the trip was over—go with some friends to Cuba, or jump on a plane for Peru and Father Juan. It turned out I would do neither. On the morning of December 31, a group of us piled into a car to go climb some nearby waterfalls. My friend Will was driving. He pulled over, I stepped out of the car, he didn’t know I had stepped out, and then he decided to repark because he always parks twice because he’s got what could be called OCD or, at the very least, an extreme case of “worrywart.” Anyway, he reparked on top of my foot.
“Back up back up back up!” I screamed.
Mercifully, he stopped before the car rolled all the way over me, which would have crushed my ankle and leg and perhaps severed a major artery that was about half an inch from where my injury was, and which the doctors later explained might have caused me to bleed to death. So, we luckily avoided all of that, but when he backed up, my bare foot was still smashed into the broken asphalt. Degloved is the word the doctors used to describe what happened, which meant I basically tore off the flesh on the bottom of my heel, down to the bone. I degloved my foot.
As soon as the wheel rolled off me, I took a brief look. People later described what my foot looked like as “a shark bite.” The next time I would get up the nerve to look at my right foot would be about four weeks later. In that moment, I just lay back in the car and started to cry. One friend got in next to me, and held my bleeding foot out the car window.
“It’s okay, it’s really not that bad,” he assured me.
Two little Dominican girls walked by, glanced at my foot, and screamed.
An hour’s drive and two small-town health clinics later, I ended up having surgery to put the bottom of my foot back on. Mercifully, my husband, Hope, was by my side, as always. And she had lived in South America for two years, so spoke fluent Spanish. So she could translate as I wept and screamed things like, “No, God, they have to stop, please tell them to stop!” as the nurses tried, over and over again, to get an IV into my vein. The twentieth time was the charm.
IV finally in, I lay in pre-op in the Dominican hospital, listening to the waves crashing and the local baseball game outside the open window. I asked Hope what was going to happen if I needed a blood transfusion here, on the same island as Haiti. That sounded like a bad idea.
“Well, what blood type are you? Maybe I could give blood,” Hope suggested helpfully.
“Hm,” I said dubiously. “I don’t know about that.”
“Are you saying you feel safer getting blood from the country with one of the highest HIV rates in the world than you feel getting blood from me?” she demanded. I shrugged. She started laughing. We then spent some time wondering which of the thirty close friends currently on the island had blood that one might be willing to inject into one’s own body.
“Will’s girlfriend is pretty young,” I said. “Less time out there filthing up. Maybe her.”
Luckily, I did not need a blood transfusion, just forty or so stitches inside and out, and a warning from the doctor that the skin was so mangled that I might still need a skin graft when I got home. Mysteriously, my rusty Spanish turned into fluent Spanish under anesthesia, and so orderlies, nurses, and amused assorted workers were gathered around my hospital bed when I woke up apparently telling absolutely filthy jokes in fast, easy Spanish. Will filmed it. He also has footage of my foot bleeding in the street, and some photos taken later that night of him, in a car, looking sheepish as he pretended to drive over a life-size cardboard cutout of Hervé Villechaize that inexplicably came with us on all of these New Year’s trips.
The doctors wanted to keep me overnight, but it was New Year’s Eve, and the thought of a night in the hospital alone, or with a sad friend I’d made miss out on a party, was too much to bear. And so Hope, always my savior, catered to my pathological need for fun and broke me out of the hospital for a New Year’s Eve on many painkillers. She threw a gold shirt on me, and my fantastic friends took turns carrying me around, making me feel like a crippled, drugged-out princess. Lindsay Lohan might get that every night, but it was pretty special for me.
For our New Year’s party, we took over an open-air restaurant where we made a couple of new Finnish friends: the host of Finnish Idol, with the Seacrest frosted tips and waxed chest and all, and his friend Levi, a professional online poker player who was traveling around the world indefinitely. Rachel Dratch was on the trip with us, and they were especially excited about “Debbie Downer.” I wish you could hear two blond Finns try to do that bit.
My friends decorated my cast, nestling a champagne bottle top on my big toe, and danced on tables around me, sprinkling glitter on my drugged-out head. There was the annual celebratory strip down to the gold man bikini by my friend Thomas. Nice boys carried me to the bathroom, and nice girls gave me attention and champagne, and the sixteen-year-old girl from our B and B dirty-danced with one of my thirty-five-year-old friends. Ferris danced with his Parisian girlfriend, whom he had flown in for the occasion, and my secret crushes continued not to lead to midnight kisses. I finally gave in to the events of the day and went
home around one, as the party raged on.
The next couple of days were a haze of intense heat and excruciating pain next to an ocean I couldn’t get into. I finally called my doctor stepdad, and found out the “painkillers” I had been given were really just extra-strength Tylenol. Hope then spent her day driving around the island like a trouper to find me the good stuff, and then I happily propped my foot up on a lounge chair poolside, and hung my head and arms over the side of the pool into the cool water. I read Eat Pray Love, which caused me intense stress due to how much I both hated the narrator for her self-involved, self-inflicted misery in the middle of a pretty amazing life, and deeply related to her, due to my tendency to be self-involved and inflict misery on myself in the middle of my pretty amazing life.
On our last night in the D.R., we had a bonfire on the beach, and the Finns were invited. I was getting pretty good on my crutches, and, if I may be so bold, the poker player noticed. Much like the lion might notice the limping ibex. Meanwhile, the ibex noticed the lion right back. Boy, being a limping ibex sure is exhausting. Maybe getting devoured wouldn’t be so bad. Now that I was not recovering from general anesthesia, I could focus on what was important: Levi was a six-foot-four, white-blond, blue-eyed Viking. He was a rainbow of pastels, sort of the color of an infant’s bedroom, but in a hot way. He looked squeaky-clean, like he would smell like a cool, northern, ocean wind.
My future Finnish lover sat down next to me, and we talked about our lives. He apparently won enough online poker that he just lived all over the world, in hotels, on a constant vacation. He had been in the Caribbean for months, and was considering where to go next. I waxed poetic about Argentina for a while, like always, and then he carried me down to the sand for the bonfire, fetched me a drink, and hauled an enormous log over so I could elevate my cast. And there we sat for eight more hours.
What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding Page 13
