by Dan Peres
“Listen, you’re going to be great,” David added. “You wouldn’t have been given the job if the right people didn’t think so. But any time you want to talk, you should give me a call.”
He leaned over to grab a small piece of paper and a pen from a table next to the sofa and scribbled down two phone numbers—one for him and the other for his assistant.
“I’ll be back in New York in a couple of weeks,” he told me. “Let’s get dinner. I’ll get your number from Kelsey.”
I’m not sure what I was expecting to happen that afternoon. For a moment earlier in the day, I’d even been considering how to let him down gently if he asked to be on the cover of my magazine. I was well aware that my fondness for David Copperfield and magic wasn’t necessarily the right fit for Details. But he never asked. He didn’t even hint at it. It turns out that the afternoon wasn’t about that. My visit to his apartment wasn’t about him at all.
I walked back to the hotel, took two Vicodin, and climbed into bed. It was six p.m.
“There’s a button on the floor under the desk that allows you to close the office door,” my new assistant, Trish, was saying a few days later. “Just don’t ever slam it in my face, please.”
I’d spent the morning looking at apartments in the Village with my friend Adam and was now touring Details’s temporary offices on Madison Avenue, where we’d been given half of a floor in the old Condé Nast headquarters until space could be made for us in the Fairchild building on 34th Street. There were ten or so window offices, a large conference room in the center of the floor with frosted-glass windows, and a few dozen cubicles. I’d already hired eight people, a few of whom were going to be starting the following Monday. Trish and I were just getting the lay of the land and making a rough seating chart when Scott, the front-desk manager from the Morgans, called.
“Sorry to bother you, Mr. Peres,” Scott said. “Unfortunately, we’re going to have to move you from the suite you’ve been in for the last three weeks and into another, slightly smaller suite on the fourteenth floor.”
Apparently, there had been a long-standing reservation for my suite beginning that night, he explained, but due to a computer error, no one realized that it was double booked. He apologized for not telling me sooner and asked if I’d mind if housekeeping moved my things to the new room. I’d seen an apartment on 11th Street earlier that day that I liked and figured my days at the Morgans were numbered anyway, so I told Scott I didn’t—a decision I’d come to regret a few hours later.
“Welcome back, Mr. Peres,” the doorman said as I approached the hotel. “The front desk asked me to remind you to stop by and get a new key.”
The new suite was noticeably smaller and didn’t have a second bathroom, but there was a gift basket on the coffee table overflowing with bags of the Dean & DeLuca cheese sticks and gummy bears along with a note from Scott thanking me for understanding, which more than made up for it. I grabbed a Diet Coke from the minibar and went to the bathroom to take the Vicodin I’d been craving all day.
The pill bottle wasn’t there.
A sudden feeling of panic came over me. I looked in my black nylon Dopp kit that was sitting on the bathroom counter—razor, shaving cream, an empty container of Efferalgan Codeine, nail clippers, and about dozen white plastic collar stays, but no bottle. My heart racing, I went out into the bedroom to check the nightstands. Not there. The walk-in closet was also smaller—more of an alcove—but it wasn’t in there, either. I took my clothes off the shelves. Nothing. I pulled my suitcase out, but there was nothing but dirty laundry and the Armani shoes. I looked under the bed and behind the pillows, scoured the living room. Everything else was there—the files of résumés and writing samples. The old copies of Details and the current issues of GQ, Esquire, and Maxim I’d been looking at. Even the half-eaten pack of Twizzlers and the Asia de Cuba matchbook I’d left on the coffee table of the old suite were there. No pills.
“This is Mr. Peres,” I said calling the front desk. I was having trouble catching my breath. “You guys moved my things to a new room today and I can’t find my medication. It was right on the sink in my old room and it’s not here.”
Two minutes later, Scott and the housekeeping manager, a woman in her mid- to late thirties wearing a light brown pantsuit and holding a leather notebook portfolio, were at my door.
“I need my medication,” I said when they walked in. “Who packed my things?”
“Mr. Peres, I’m so sorry,” said Scott. “We’ll find it.”
“Who packed my things?” I asked, raising my voice.
“It would have been someone from housekeeping and one of the bellmen,” he said. “I’m sure it’s here. Can we help you look?”
“Get the people that moved my things up here right now,” I demanded.
“Mr. Peres, please calm down,” said Scott.
“Don’t tell me to calm down,” I said. “I need my medication. This is unacceptable. Get the people who moved my things up here now.”
“The housekeeping shift would have changed at five p.m.,” he said. “The bellman is probably still here. Let me call him.”
The bellman arrived and explained that he only loaded my things on the luggage cart and took them to the new room, but the housekeeper did the actual packing and unpacking.
“I knew it. The housekeeper stole my medication,” I announced, throwing my hands up in the air.
Scott and the housekeeping manager just looked at me, their heads slightly cocked. The bellman looked away when I made eye contact with him.
“Find the housekeeper,” I said. “I want to talk to her.”
“Mr. Peres . . . please,” Scott said calmly after a long pause. “Why don’t we go check your old room?”
“Let’s,” I said. “And I don’t care if there are people in there. We’re going in.”
The suite was still empty. There was a bottle of wine and a plate of chocolates waiting on the coffee table with a note to welcome the new guests. The shades were drawn and soft jazz was playing on the radio. The room was dimly lit and smelled of lemon-scented air freshener.
Scott and the housekeeping manager walked briskly through the suite. I followed them as they darted from the living room to the powder room to the bedroom to the bathroom, opening and closing drawers and checking trash cans as they went. My heart was pounding and I was breathing heavily.
“It doesn’t seem to be here,” said the housekeeping manager.
“Mr. Peres, I’m terribly sorry about this,” Scott said. “The hotel has a doctor on call. Perhaps we can call him for you and he can replace the missing medication. The hotel would cover all costs, of course.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I said, pushing past him and going back into the bedroom. “We’re not done looking in this room. And has anyone even tried to find that housekeeper?”
“Sir, I understand that you’re upset,” he said, “but it’s not here.”
“Yeah, well, I’m going to take a closer look,” I said. “Maybe the bottle rolled behind the bed or something.”
I walked over to the side of the bed, gripped on the frame and pulled. It didn’t move.
“Mr. Peres, the bed is mounted to the wall,” said Scott, who had followed me.
“Come on!” I said, knocking the pillows to the floor and throwing the black-and-white-checked throw blanket over my right shoulder. “This is fucking ridiculous.”
I walked over to the window seat, tossed three tan bolster cushions onto the bed, and pulled the main cushion to the floor.
“Mr. Peres,” Scott said firmly. “I realize that you’re upset, but we’ve checked this room.”
“Bullshit,” I yelled. “Looking into empty trash cans doesn’t count.”
I stormed into the bathroom, sweeping a stack of neatly folded white bath towels off a metal rack and onto the floor.
“I need my medicine,” I said. “You don’t seem to understand.”
Scott stood silently by the window seat.
“Did anyone bother to check behind the nightstands?” I said, yanking the small table away from the wall and sending a skinny silver lamp and the phone crashing to the floor.
“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the room,” said Scott.
“You guys suck,” I said, kicking over the small mesh trash can that had been under the desk but that either Scott or the housekeeping manager had left in the doorway. I walked into the hall.
“I understand this is a tremendous inconvenience, Mr. Peres,” said Scott, now trailing behind me. “Can we arrange for you to see the doctor?”
“No,” I said. “And don’t just stand here looking at me while I wait for the elevator. I want to be alone.”
“Of course,” he said, turning and walking away.
“Wait a minute,” I said, calling after him. “What floor is my new room on again?”
Back in my room on the fourteenth floor and still breathing heavily and sweating, I lit a cigarette and sat on the sofa to check my cell phone for messages. I’d missed two calls while I was upstairs searching the other suite. The first message was from Adam.
“Hey, bud,” he said. “I really liked that apartment on 11th Street. You should definitely take it. Call me.”
Then I remembered. I flipped the phone closed and ran into the bedroom, where my suitcase was still sitting open on the floor of the closet. My heart sank. I reached into the pile of dirty laundry inside and pulled out the bottle of Vicodin. I had forgotten that I’d hidden them there earlier that day. Adam had planned on picking me up at the hotel that morning so we could go look at apartments. I wasn’t sure if he was going to come up to my room, but I didn’t want him seeing the pills—or even worse, asking for some—so I stashed them in my suitcase.
I took three Vicodin and slumped back down on the sofa. I dumped the pill bottle onto the table and started counting tablets. I wanted to know exactly how many I had left.
I took a drag from my cigarette and listened to my second voice mail.
“Hey, it’s David Copperfield. I just wanted to see how you’re holding up. Don’t forget, you’re going to be great.”
St. Vincent’s
The woman seated directly across from me wasn’t wearing any underwear.
This wasn’t a hunch or wishful thinking or some perverted fantasy. No, I knew she wasn’t wearing any underwear because she seemed determined for me to know that she wasn’t wearing any underwear. And she wasn’t especially subtle. She practically hit me over the head with her vagina. This wasn’t your garden-variety “Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct uncrossing-of-the-legs crotch shot” either. This was a full-on unobstructed view.
It was close to three a.m. on a Friday morning. We were sitting directly across from each other in an unpleasantly well-lit room at St. Vincent’s Hospital. It was just the two of us. She couldn’t have been older than thirty and had shoulder-length strawberry blond curls, which from where I was sitting appeared to be her natural hair color.
The room wasn’t even really a room—it was more of a small alcove off to the side of the hospital’s bustling triage department. She was wearing a pink paper hospital gown that she’d hiked up to her wide-open freckled thighs. To her immediate left was a counter with a small sink, a box of latex gloves, and several stacks of individually wrapped alcohol wipes. One after the next, she tore open a wipe, dropped the wrapper on the floor, and rubbed alcohol all over her face. I watched her do this dozens of times.
I didn’t know where to look. I studied the worn poster illustrating the muscular system that was tacked to the wall behind her. I pretended to search for some lost item in the plastic bag they had given me to hold my clothes after I changed into my own blue paper gown. Every time I looked over at her, she was staring back at me while painstakingly wiping her face with alcohol. She looked away only in order to briefly glance down at her exposed crotch, before quickly making eye contact again.
I had zero interest in her vagina, or any vagina, for that matter. One of the many side effects of opiate abuse is the total loss of libido. And I was most definitely abusing opiates at this point. Her genitals were about as appealing to me as a Big Mac is to a vegetarian.
I’d noticed her when I first walked into the hospital about an hour earlier. She was in the waiting room, wearing ripped jeans and a low-cut black CBGB concert tee. I remember her because she laughed at me and muttered something to herself when I walked past. I can only imagine it had something to do with the fact that I was wearing a tuxedo.
I’d put on the tux earlier that evening to attend the 2001 Council of Fashion Designers of America awards gala. I’d been the editor of Details for about a year. The CFDA awards were presented every June and were considered by some to be the Oscars of the fashion world. Designers, supermodels, celebrities, and socialites would turn up to celebrate the year’s best in womenswear, accessories, menswear, etc. Paparazzi lined Lincoln Center’s grand plaza for a chance to snap a photo of Diane von Furstenberg or David Bowie and Iman or Gwyneth Paltrow or Tom Ford. It was the hottest ticket in town.
I was dreading it.
I was never terribly excited about attending events like these, but lately they’d become even less attractive. I had never been the life of the party, but I’d learned how to work a room. I usually circulated around the edges of the action, moving in only to say a quick hello when I needed to. And I was always one of the first to leave.
Still, I wasn’t jaded. It was cool to be at a party with Calvin Klein and Naomi Campbell. I liked being able to double-air-kiss Karl Lagerfeld or bum a smoke from Kate Moss. I had made the cut. I was on the inside and that wasn’t lost on me.
There was a perverse pleasure in walking past the assembled onlookers packed together on the sidewalk outside of these glamorous events.
“Excuse me, please,” I’d say, my invitation visible in my hand as I pressed through the crowd of starstruck bystanders. “Sorry, folks. Just trying to get to the front here.”
“He must be someone,” I figured they were thinking as they made room for me to pass.
It was a douchebag’s delight.
This night, however, I was in no mood to schmooze. In fact, I’d been anxious about it all day. When I woke up that morning, I realized that I had only a handful of Vicodin left. There were no more than thirteen pills left in the ziplock bag I kept stashed in my closet. Over the course of a year, I’d gone from taking fifteen pills a day to downing sixty. Normally I swallowed at least fifteen pills first thing in the morning, shoveling them into my mouth all at once the way some people might with a handful of popcorn at the movies. I took pride in the fact that I could get them all down with one small sip of water. I generally repeated this exercise at least four times a day.
Not on the day of the CFDA gala. I simply didn’t have enough ammo. Since I wasn’t scheduled to see the doctor to secure a new prescription until Monday morning at nine a.m.—the first appointment available with one of the five pain management specialists I’d been seeing—I had to make do with thirteen pills. That’s all I had to get me through the weekend. It was Thursday. Of course I considered taking them all that morning, but if I had, I would have started feeling the dreaded symptoms of withdrawal by the time I was putting on my tux at around 6:30 that evening. That would have sucked. I can only imagine walking over to say hello to Tommy Hilfiger, my nose running uncontrollably as I offered a clammy handshake. Or worse, fighting to suppress the sudden urge to vomit while chatting with Helmut Lang. These were not viable options.
It was times like these that I would envy run-of-the-mill drunks. I assumed that in a pinch they could always find something to drink. It may not have been their beverage of choice. It may not have gotten them fucked up the way they needed to get fucked up, but at least it was enough to get them through. Enough to stop them from puking in front of Ralph Lauren. The way I saw it, they were lucky. Not me, no. Leave it to me to become addicted to a ridiculously expensive drug that is closely monitored by the
federal government.
I had no choice but to make those thirteen Vicodin last all day. I’d deal with the hell of withdrawal in private over the weekend, just as I had countless times before. I simply needed to make it through the party. So I mapped out a strategy to do just that. I took four pills in the morning, another four at lunchtime, and four more just before leaving for the event. That left one remaining, which I carried with me in my pocket just in case I started to feel wobbly. It seemed like a solid plan.
Needless to say, by the time my taxi pulled up in front of Lincoln Center at around 7:15 p.m., I was feeling wobbly. My body was accustomed to being fed close to sixty Vicodin a day. It had little patience for anything less.
I kept it together, though. As I was walking in, Diana Ross was in front of me. I smiled as I was reminded of the time I sat directly behind her at a fashion show. When you sit behind Diana Ross, the only thing you see is Diana Ross’s hair. I didn’t see one model. Not one stitch of clothing. Just hair. It was one of the most memorable fashion shows I’ve ever been to.
As the night dragged on—these awards shows tended to move at a glacial pace—I began to feel a familiar cold sweat creeping up my spine. It was starting. My body was not only craving more drugs; it was demanding them.
I was seated with my boss, Patrick McCarthy, and a number of former colleagues from Women’s Wear Daily. The paper’s longtime fashion critic, Bridget Foley, was being honored with an award for fashion journalism, and I figured I had to stay at least until she made her acceptance speech. I was itching to leave—literally.
