Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [64]
I was partying a lot with a Scottish woman with whom I worked at Le Gamin. Her daughter lived with the grandmother somewhere upstate because she was unable to care for her. When we were working together we did loads of coke and drank rum during shifts; she was friends with all kinds of models and rockers and actors, maybe she was their dealer, she definitely had a lot of secrets, and she’d get drunk and blather on about her daughter and how much she missed her and then she’d snort up a bag of coke and suggest, “Let’s go for a dance at that place on Ludlow Street.” It was weird partying with a mother who was unable to take care of her young daughter. I was now the age my mother was when she’d had me, and I felt I was in some kind of cycle that I didn’t understand but knew was not good.
I blacked out all the time. I streaked through Tribeca. I thought if I married someone with the kind of money where no one has to work, I might become my mom. This would start with having babies when I barely knew how to take care of myself, and it would go on with drinking with a bunch of babies, and it would continue with not writing, which would make me feel like I hadn’t done what I wanted to do. The worst feeling I had as a kid was the feeling that my mother was willing to miss my life for a drink, that she wouldn’t stop for me, no matter how much it hurt me, no matter how much I talked to her and worried about her. And I never wanted to make anyone feel like that.
My sober boyfriend was beginning to resemble a giant mirror reflecting back to me my drinking problem. This mirror talked, too.
“I don’t know whether you’re an alcoholic but you definitely have a drinking problem,” he said, in the elevator after the streaking.
“Okay, baby,” I said. Anything to end the conversation.
Later at the bar I’d tell my friends about my troubles with Grandpa.
“His sobriety is getting so bad, you guys.”
“You don’t have to put up with that shit, Jeanne,” they’d say.
“I know,” I’d say. “I know.”
WHEN I QUIT MY JOB at Le Gamin, I lived off of the change that Grandpa threw in this enormous jar in his bedroom. I’d go over when he wasn’t home and hit up the jar. I’d wake up and think, What do I need to eat today? Okay, back up, back up: a pack of cigarettes first and foremost, then a coffee, a bagel, maybe a few bucks for a burrito later. The idea of shopping for food for tomorrow was insane to me. Tomorrow? Who knows what’s going to happen tomorrow.
One afternoon I had been trying to nap to the tune of “. . . and I’ll never find that recipe again! Oh no!” when I decided I was going to break into the bartender’s apartment. I didn’t test-market the idea. I just ran with it. The windows in my apartment were odd—sometimes they seemed locked but they weren’t. I figured my neighbor’s windows might have the same quirk. I got out on my balcony, facing the tenement buildings of East Fourth Street and smoked a cigarette, surveying the scene. Would there be any witnesses? I saw no one on any balconies or in any windows and decided to go for it. I threw my cigarette to the ground and scooted over to his window. I sat for a moment to establish that this was my window and then I reached back and pulled on the bottom of the window. It indeed had the same quirk of unlockability that mine had. I pulled it up really hard and then fell backward through the window, landing on