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By Root 372 0

in the arm until I couldn’t take anymore. Ha ha. That must have seemed hilarious to us both. The bruises and the swollen arm (which I hid for the week or so it took for them to go away) was a nice mural of what my life had become: a drinker’s joke, risky, painful stunts meant to entertain those around me but which felt sad and pointless in the morning. This is why I left Jed? In a weird way I knew that, yes, this was why I had left Jed. For some awkward truth. When you leave a guy as great as Jed you’d better have something magnificent to take its place. I didn’t have anything better than Jed and I knew my friends, my family, people I worked with were watching me thinking, This is what you left that nice guy, that nice life for? I left because I was hoping to find some truth about me. But was this it? The truth should feel better, should it not? It should float down from the sky and fit neatly in your little puzzle, you should hear a soft snap when it’s in place. Or maybe not.

I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out what disease in particular had a hold on me. Considering how much I smoked, I thought cancer was a tad obvious but a decent bet. Every time I lit a cigarette I imagined throat cancer and voice boxes and I couldn’t enjoy smoking anymore. As soon as I put a cigarette out I’d grab a hand mirror and try to see the back of my throat. Red? Lumpy? White spots?

That Monday at the festival office I opened up the New York Times and saw that my cousin Thomas French had won a Pulitzer for feature writing in journalism. It was for a series he had written for the St. Petersburg Times called “Angels and Demons,” about the unsolved murder of three tourists, a mother and her two daughters, in Florida. Brownstones and Pulitzers.

WHEN MY SEASONAL JOB at the film festival ended, I began working for Donato Brunelli, this Hollywood film director who had just moved to New York. Every single photograph in his apartment, where I worked, was of himself with celebrities. Didn’t he know anyone—was he not in regular contact with one single person—who wasn’t famous? Where were pictures of his parents? Sisters? Brothers?

I was working hard to get to Paris to study with this director named Jacques Lassalle, who had been head of the Comédie-Française, a venerable theater that had been home to Molière. The French embassy had a program where they paid for one or two Americans a year to smoke with theater people in France. I spent months translating my passport and college records, faking my way through interviews in French with various people at the embassy, faxing letters to this very busy director. Often I was so hungover at Donato’s that when I would answer the phone and hear the woman at the French embassy who was in charge of my grant, Beatrice Ellis, launching into rapid-fire French I’d have to hang up. She believed I was fluent. I had managed to convince her of this in order to get the grant, but I’m fluent only if I’m the only one talking. The minute someone answers me I’m lost. Perhaps this is how I function in English as well. I was eating all Donato’s food and having guys sleep over and showing people his gun and his dildo, which I had found one day. The only highlight of working for Donato was getting to call my childhood hero Evel Knievel once, when Donato was away with various women whose last names he didn’t know, to wish Evel a happy birthday. This was the kind of shit Donato thought was normal, having his assistant call to wish you a happy birthday. How thoughtful. Evel didn’t seem to notice. Donato asked me to sell his Francis Bacon and I didn’t know which painting that was, so I sent the wrong painting to Sotheby’s Fall Sale. He’d bark things at me while putting on his jacket to head out the door to the airport like, “Get my L.A. house painted and see if anyone wants to buy it.” Slam. Oh. Okay. Any particular color? Oh, and sorry to bother you, but don’t you have two houses in L.A.? Because I will sell the wrong house. Office hours were spent at Chinatown pharmacies getting him Valium. And then when he’d go