Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [71]
Finally the embassy accepted me. All I had to do was pay for my flight over there. My happiness was interrupted by Donato, who called me over Labor Day weekend and fired me. It was a classy move, firing me on Labor Day. I didn’t have any money to get on a plane. I had no credit cards or extra cash. I was tempted to charge what he owed me, $1,400 for two weeks’ work, to his American Express card in dildos and have them delivered to his house.
The next day I got a call to audition for a new Arthur Miller play at the Public Theatre. My life was a mess and nothing ever worked out, but damn if it didn’t have some movement.
Apparently this well-known theater director had seen me in a totally wacky play in a barn in Vermont, and he called me in to audition for the American debut of The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, a play I knew and liked a lot, about a man who has two wives, two families, who argues that his crime has only resulted in not one happy woman but two. The wives agree with him while hating his guts. It’s not Miller’s strongest, but it’s still good. Patrick Stewart and Blythe Danner were playing the parents of my character. After the initial round of auditions I was brought in to audition for all the people from the Public Theatre and Arthur Miller. This was a really big deal for me. He was going to see what all the bonehead casting directors couldn’t and after the show on opening night, when Patrick and Blythe and I were all relaxing with some mai tais at Joe’s Pub next door to the theater, Arthur Miller was going to get rather quiet and serious and tell me how to write a decent play. He was tall, probably eighty at the time. I shook his hand and auditioned well. I always regretted not mentioning that as a kid I lived on Stony Hill Farm, where he and Marilyn honeymooned. As I waited to hear from the Public after that audition—it was between me and one other girl—I felt perhaps this was the thing that was going to set me on some ground that was real, not fantasy.
I didn’t get the part, who knows why, they never tell you why, and for the next year I drank like a maniac. I couldn’t properly support myself, a writer friend died from a heroin and vodka overdose, I endangered a pregnant friend with my Jackie Chan routine on Atlantic Avenue. It was decidedly un-PC, this series of karate kicks and air-chopping with much Asian-accented screaming. I busted it out on some guys on Atlantic Avenue, accidentally almost kicking them in the face and they did not think it was funny and semi-restrained me. The next day I realized my pregnant friend Sara was on the street with us and could have been hurt. I drank alone, I drank after parties, I started going to bars by myself when no one else wanted to drink with me, I got kicked out of bars for drunkenness (this never made sense to me, if you can’t be drunk in a bar where can you be drunk? It’s like a hospital kicking you out for being too sick). I couldn’t control how much I drank or what I said, a lifelong problem that was only heightened when drunk. I frequently hit on the wrong people. I knew women who had sex with oodles of men when drunk, but my dirty secret was that I hit on people not to get laid but to lure them back to my apartment (or usually theirs, as the no-bathroom thing was a hassle to explain), where I would drunkenly spoon them. I was cruising for cuddles. Here’s a big moment of clarity as a lady alkie: When guys stop wanting to bang you when you’ve been drinking, it’s a pretty good sign that you have a drinking problem. One night I was house-sitting at a friend’s loft on Crosby Street (I did a lot of house-sitting) and this guy I was taking home didn’t get out of the cab with me. I was dumbfounded. Look at me. I look so pathetic and dependent I’m almost a tax write-off. And you don’t want it?
I knew I wasn’t going to beat this thing. I saw that my mother couldn’t beat it. I also knew that I would be my own kind of alcoholic. I didn’t have