As Needed for Pain

by Dan Peres

  I devised what I thought was an ingenious plan.

  I showed up for my interview the next day lugging a duffel bag that I’d loaded with dirty laundry to make sure it looked heavy. After meeting with a few people over the course of an hour, I was offered a job as DNR’s knitwear editor.

  “We just need for you to take a drug test before we can make it official,” the paper’s editor in chief told me.

  “No problem. Unfortunately, I’m leaving from here to travel down to visit with my family in Baltimore for the week,” I told him, motioning to the overstuffed duffel bag resting on the floor by my feet. “Happy to take that test just as soon as I return.”

  It worked. The following week I passed my drug test and started my career in journalism. Writing about men’s sweaters was not exactly what I had in mind when I’d envisioned my life as a reporter. I always dreamed of becoming a war correspondent like David Halberstam or bringing down the president like Woodward and Bernstein. Never did I imagine I’d be writing about chunky cable knits, shawl-collar cardigans, or the benefits of layering with sweater vests. But I was grateful to finally have a job and embraced my beat. In no time, I was quite comfortable discussing the nuanced differences between merino, angora, cashmere, and mohair—by far the itchiest of the lot, particularly if it was sourced from older goats. The younger the goat, the softer the mohair. I’m certain Woodward and Bernstein didn’t know that.

  Growing up, I never gave much thought to my wardrobe. My only requirement was that my clothes had pockets to accommodate the vintage Walking Liberty half-dollars that I liked to carry around in case I wanted to practice some coin tricks. Even as a teenager, when my friends were rocking nylon parachute pants or whatever else they scored from Merry-Go-Round in the mall, I was rather indifferent to fashion. Every now and then I would steal something from my brother’s dresser that I’d seen him wear earlier in the week, but his stuff never looked as good on me. Needless to say, my newfound appreciation for fashion took some by surprise.

  When I was at home in Baltimore for the weekend shortly after taking the job at DNR, my mother walked into the kitchen wearing a new red sweater. “Oh, chenille,” I said. “Love it.”

  She tilted her head to the side and looked at me lovingly for a moment before sitting down beside me at the white Formica kitchen table. “Honey, I want to talk to you,” she said. “I want you to know how much I love you, and that if there’s ever anything you want to tell me, that I’ll be open-minded and supportive.”

  “Come on, Mom,” I said with a sigh. “I’m not gay.”

  “Okay, baby,” she said, gently patting my knee as if to put me at ease. “I’m just saying. There haven’t been too many girlfriends, and, you know, you were never really interested in sports. And there’s the magic. I just want you to know that it’s okay with me if you are. You can tell me anything.”

  What I should have told her was that chenille was very “last year” and a bit passé, but that would have sounded, well, a little gay.

  “That’s great, Mom,” I said. “Thanks.”

  I think she was disappointed.

  In the end, my tenure as DNR’s knitwear editor was short-lived. A junior position on the Eye page at WWD opened up, and Fairchild’s powerful editorial director, Patrick McCarthy, asked if I was interested. I took the job.

  Working on the Eye page required that I attend parties, sometimes two or three a night, and then show up at the office the following morning to write copy and edit the pictures that were taken by the photographer who was assigned to accompany me. It was an unusual profession for a homebody, but I dove in. I had always enjoyed talking to strangers, and I absolutely loved talking to famous strangers.

  When I was a high school senior, my mother took me to New York so we could tour NYU. Walking through Washington Square Park, we saw lots of lights and cameras and I spotted Rob Reiner standing on the sidewalk. I marched right up to him, introduced myself, and told him I was a fan and that I was considering going to college there. He shook my hand and wished me well. The following year, when I saw When Harry Met Sally and realized that’s what they’d been filming that day, I felt an odd sense of accomplishment, as if I’d somehow had a hand in making the movie.

  Getting people to talk about themselves was always far more interesting to me than talking about myself. Standing there with my reporter’s notebook in hand at the edge of a red carpet or backstage at a fashion show or at the opening night gala of the New York City Ballet or Metropolitan Opera, I had confidence. People—celebrities, even—wanted to talk to me. They sought me out. It was like walking into a world of magic, like the one I’d created in my basement years earlier.

  Women’s Wear Daily’s Eye page was a favorite of the company’s legendary and mischievous publisher, John Fairchild. Mr. Fairchild, as everyone called him, loved to stir the pot and poke fun at fashion designers and socialites, many of them his friends. He delighted in feeding me scoops about who had been dining with whom at La Grenouille or who had a shitty seat on the Concorde, as if there were such a thing.

  One day I was called over to Mr. Fairchild’s desk—he sat out in the newsroom of the paper’s vast 34th Street offices—after he returned from lunch.

  “I’ve got a good one for you,” he told me, his voice high-pitched and gleeful. “Oscar de la Renta was like a rooster in the henhouse today at lunch, as he dined surrounded by the grande dames of society.”

  Mr. Fairchild then proceeded to rattle off the names of the women who had lunched with de la Renta. I knew all of them except one.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Can you please spell that last one?”

  You would have thought that I had leaned in and kissed him on the mouth. Everyone within earshot looked up at me in horror. Patrick McCarthy, who was standing next to me as I took down my notes, just slowly shook his head and told me to go back to my desk. He made his way over a few minutes later.

  “Did you just ask John Fairchild to spell something for you?” he asked. “You don’t ask the head of this company to spell a name. He’s not some debutante you’re interviewing at a party. What’s wrong with you?

  “New rule,” he continued. “If Mr. Fairchild mentions someone to you and you’re not sure who they are, pretend you know who they are, for Christ’s sake, and then ask me later.”

  It was a good tip. Still, the best piece of advice Patrick ever gave me was never to forget why I was being invited to all of those fancy parties in the first place. He cautioned me when I first took the job to always remember that it was Women’s Wear Daily they wanted at the party, not me.

  “Don’t make the same mistake I’ve seen others in this role make over the years,” he said. “You are being invited because people want to see their picture in the paper. Be careful. Sure, you may become friendly with some of them, but by and large, these people are not your friends.”

  This was a mistake I wasn’t likely to make. Making friends had never been my strength. When I was a boy, it was challenging for my mother to throw birthday parties for me. She would always have to include some of my brother Jeff’s friends just to make the party minimum size of eight players at the bowling alley. Jeff collected friends. He had school friends and camp friends and lacrosse friends and college friends. He went away on “guys’ weekends” and organized bachelor parties. He had inside jokes and nicknames.

  I did have some friends, of course, but I wasn’t very good at holding on to them. I was the kid who always left the sleepover before we went to sleep. I was the kid who always got hurt when we were playing touch football. I was the kid who never wanted to take his shirt off at the pool party. I joined a fraternity at NYU because that’s what Jeff had done at Cornell, but I wasn’t really a fraternity kind of guy in the end, and by junior year I didn’t show up all that much.

  By the time I was named senior editor of the Eye page in spring of 1995, my friends—as had been the case throughout most of my childhood—were Adam’s friends. In fact, on the night of the cart
wheel, I had plans to meet Adam and some of his college buddies after covering a party at Joan Rivers’s palatial Upper East Side apartment. Adam had recently moved to New York to start work at a small graphic design firm with an office in the Flatiron Building.

  Adam was waiting for me outside of Brother’s BBQ on West Houston Street. “Tanner is running late,” he told me. “He wants us to meet him in the lobby of his office. He has to go to a going-away party for someone from work and he wants us to come with him.”

  Tanner was Evan Tannenbaum, Adam’s roommate from Connecticut College. He worked as an account executive at Saatchi & Saatchi on Hudson Street, a few blocks from the restaurant. I had gotten to know Tanner pretty well over the years. He was a short Long Island Jew who worked out five days a week and almost always wore a faded blue Mets hat. I had joined a gym with Adam and Tanner a few months earlier. I’d gone once.

  There were three attractive young women with Tanner when he stepped out of the elevator into the Saatchi & Saatchi Building’s vast marble lobby. They were all laughing. Tanner’s height and thinning hair—hence the baseball hat—never seemed to negatively impact his luck with women. He was funny. When we would all go out, Tanner would always have some woman he’d just met giggling and genuinely interested in him.

  He introduced us to his three attractive coworkers. I had always struggled to stand out when standing next to Adam. The fact that I had just been hanging out with Joan Rivers and a bunch of rich women with beauty parlor hairdos and nubby tweed Chanel suits was hardly going to make an impression. Plus, Tanner told them my name was Danny, which always made me feel like a six-year-old on a Big Wheel. Determined to get them to notice me, I decided it was time for a “what the fuck” moment.

  So here I was, a twenty-four-year-old man wearing a navy blue Donna Karan suit standing in the art-filled lobby of the Saatchi & Saatchi Building in lower Manhattan, with an overwhelming desire to call attention to myself.

  So, as if possessed by some demon gymnast, I suddenly—and rather unexpectedly—did a cartwheel.

  Tanner had just finished telling Adam and me that one of the young women, Phoebe, had recently been promoted to senior art director.

  “Congrats,” I said. “That’s impressive. But can you do this?”

  I raised my arms over my head like a circus performer about to execute his final death-defying routine. I took a few steps forward, more of a skip than a walk, and I went for it. My left hand hit the floor first as I sprung off with my feet hoping momentum and gravity would do the rest.

  It bears noting that I had never been in great shape. I was skinny-fat—doughy in some areas and rail-thin in others—and had been since puberty. My arms, like my legs, were underdeveloped, to say the least. It’s also worth pointing out that I had never done a cartwheel before in my life, though I’d seen Chris Farley do it a bunch of times on SNL—and I was definitely in better shape than he was. Still, how I expected my twig of a left arm to support the weight of my entire body was beyond me. Needless to say, I didn’t stick the landing. I came crashing down on the marble floor like . . . well, like a grown man trying to do a cartwheel for the first time.

  “Ouch,” said Phoebe. “Are you okay?”

  I wasn’t, but I hopped up and laughed it off. I was embarrassed, but a bruised ego was the least of my problems. I went limping off to Tanner’s friend’s going-away party trying not to let anyone know how badly I’d hurt myself.

  The following morning, I could barely make it from my bed into the bathroom. My back was killing me and I couldn’t stand up straight. I took some Advil and a hot shower and tried to make it into the office to write about Joan Rivers’s party for WWD. I was a few blocks away from the subway when I decided to turn back and go home.

  “I’m going to get you in to see an orthopedist,” my doctor told me when I called his office and explained it was an emergency. “It may not be until Monday, but I’m going to send you for an MRI now just to get it out of the way. In the meantime, no more cartwheels for a while.”

  On Monday morning, I took a taxi from my apartment in the Village to the orthopedist’s office on Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street. I was lying down in the back seat for the entire ride.

  “Do you lead a particularly sedentary life?” Dr. Portnoy asked as he studied the MRI report. “It looks like you did a number on your lower back.”

  I had indeed. There was a ruptured disc at the L5/S1 level of my spine, he explained.

  “We can wait and see if the pain dies down and then try some physical therapy,” he told me, “but I suspect you’re going to need surgery.”

  He sent me home with a prescription for thirty Vicodin, told me to take one to two every four hours and stay in bed for the next couple of days. I scheduled an appointment to see him again later that week.

  The Vicodin helped ease the pain immediately. I was still hunched over a bit and limped when I walked, but I was able to move around. After a few days, I went back to work. When I saw the doctor that Thursday, he said I could try therapy if I was willing, but that I still needed to wait a week or two to see if the pain died down some more.

  For some reason, I woke up the following morning in agony. My back was hurting more than it had the day after the cartwheel. I took a Vicodin and waited for relief. When it still didn’t come an hour later, I took another pill and eventually fell asleep. When I woke up after a half hour, I was miserable. I couldn’t stand. I hobbled to the living room, took two more Vicodin, and put on the television. Soon I was feeling no pain. My whole body was warm and relaxed. I felt like I’d been wrapped in an electric blanket.

  An unfamiliar level of comfort and calm came over me. This was a high that I had never felt—the same high I imagined my brother experienced when he scored the winning goal in a lacrosse game or that Adam felt when he had a threesome his junior year in college. This was the way I’d always wanted to feel.

  A week later, my back still in agony and unable to walk without sharp pain shooting down my left leg, I had the first of two surgeries at New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery to repair a ruptured disc. The operations were three weeks apart, and after each, I was prescribed a large bottle of Vicodin. Other than that one time before surgery—despite how great the high felt—I took the medication as prescribed. One to two tablets every four hours, as needed for pain.

  Several weeks after the second surgery, as the pain gradually subsided, I stopped taking the pills every four hours. I took one or two a day to help me get through work, until I eventually didn’t need them anymore. One morning before work, I reached for the bottle before stopping myself. I left for the WWD offices without needing—or taking—any Vicodin.

  That evening when I was getting ready for bed, I saw the bottle sitting on the nightstand. I grabbed it and walked into the bathroom to put it in the medicine cabinet. I was about to close the cabinet when I thought, Maybe I’ll just take two to help me relax. I opened the prescription bottle and shook two pills out into my left palm. I studied them for a moment before giving the bottle another shake.

  What the fuck . . . I’ll take four.

  Unraveling, Part 1

  I’ve trashed two hotel rooms in my life.

  Nothing epic enough to move the needle on the Keith Richards/Johnny Depp scale of hotel-room destruction, but for a quiet kid from Pikesville who spent his formative years alone in the basement practicing card sleights, they definitely merit honorable mention.

  The first time it happened was in Hartford, Connecticut, in the fall of 1995. I was twenty-three and had been a reporter at Women’s Wear Daily and W magazine for a little over a year. It was my first-ever business trip and the first time I’d spent the night alone in a hotel—in this case, a twenty-story Sheraton in the center of the city. It was the kind of place that had individually wrapped plastic cups stacked on the dresser and a rubber mat suctioned to the center of the bathtub to keep you from slipping. I had a standard room with a queen-size bed on the same floor as the pool—which ma
de the hallway humid and smellier than the average Sheraton hallway.

  It should have been one of the greatest nights of my life, and for a while, at least, it was.

  I was in Hartford to meet David Copperfield. He was performing at the Civic Center there, and I had somehow managed to convince my boss that we should do a story on Copperfield for W magazine timed to the release of a book he was publishing called Tales of the Impossible. It was a collection of original stories written by writers like Ray Bradbury and Joyce Carol Oates about the power of magic, which, of course, was of zero interest to W’s rarefied audience. No, the story got the green light thanks to Claudia Schiffer. At the time, Copperfield was engaged to the German supermodel, who was at the height of her career and a regular on W’s glossy oversize covers.

  “If this article is about magic, you’re in trouble,” my boss, Patrick McCarthy, told me from behind his large wooden desk in the 34th Street newsroom of WWD. “I’m not kidding. Remember, I know how you feel about magic,” he added, with a judgmental smirk.

  I had foolishly outed myself as a magic lover a few months earlier when I made a coin vanish and then reappear in the ear of the young daughter of an executive assistant who was visiting her mom at the office. Though she giggled and begged me to do it again, not everyone shared her enthusiasm.

  “Did you just do magic?” Patrick asked, in the same incredulous and mildly offended manner that one might ask, Did you just fart?

  “I have an idea,” he continued. “How about you go back to your desk and make your copy for tomorrow’s paper appear on time? That would be a great trick.”

  It turned out that magic tricks were about as fashionable in the fashion world as wearing a clip-on tie.

  “Yeah, yeah. No magic. Got it,” I promised after Patrick reluctantly said yes to the Copperfield interview.