any money so I wouldn’t be drunkenly ordering from Balducci’s and watching Oprah while slumped on a divan surrounded by silver riding trophies, brown from neglect, and ashtrays piled high with cigarette butts and peach pits. I’d be that aged temp, that volatile teacher, that “quirky” salesperson at Williams-Sonoma, waiting for five o’clock to get blotto. I was now talking on barstools about all the things I was going to do. And I knew, when the talking starts, things are not good. I was beginning to be able to see myself from the outside. I was trying to be the person talking the shit but I was also the person watching the shit-talker. It was like being out on a date with yourself and knowing you’re never going to call yourself after tonight. I was hoping in fact never to run into myself ever again. Katharine says that at the end when I drank I shouted nearly everything. That’s what happens after the talking (about all the things I’m going to do) starts, the volume issue. Can everyone hear what an AMAZING person I am? NO? Well, let me try it A LITTLE LOUDER, THEN. I remember being at a party at my friends Brooke and Edgar’s house in Park Slope and we were all sitting around their kitchen table, getting drunk as we did, and Edgar was at the fridge asking if anyone needed a beer. I had a cigarette in one hand, half a beer in the other, a glass of whiskey in front of me, a joint was being passed to me and I was waving yes, I need another beer, to Edgar at the fridge. I felt like an alcoholic octopus. If I could have held my glass of Maker’s Mark between my toes I would have been swilling that simultaneously. I remember thinking, I can’t stop once I start. I can’t even slow down once I start. Other people thought I was fun, nutty, entertaining, but I felt defeated and that this feeling would just go on and on. I’d be eking by on seasonal work and peanut butter sandwiches for dinner forever. I saw that no casting director was going to give me a break, that I wasn’t capable of being in a relationship, that I was a cheater, that I couldn’t support myself. I was going to be left with being a drunk. And that would mean living through the same ordeal twice: first as the daughter of an alcoholic and then as the alcoholic. I couldn’t go through those feelings again. For a long time I was worried about becoming my father. Then I was worried about becoming my mother. Now I was worried about becoming myself.
I was thirty years old. I saw the genome on the wall. It read: Beware ye who cross that line into a life of lies and selfdeception. You may not make it back. Who would visit this apartment and think I was in good shape? Even my father, king of the depressing domiciles, a man who scribbled the letters of the Greek alphabet on pieces of paper and taped them to his walls so he could engage his brain while using his rowing machine, had a bathroom. I had one fork and one spoon and two knives. I had a couple plates and three mugs. I had one blanket and a purple sleeping bag Jed had bought me for a camping trip. It was super-warm and nice, but every time I stuffed my feet into that little pocket at the bottom I thought, I need a decent comforter. This is pretty depressing.
I was trying to get help. I was seeing a shrink in therapyville, the highly concentrated area of downtown therapist offices between Fourteenth Street and Eighth Street from University Place to Fifth Avenue. Hildey was great. Very motherly, and I needed that at first. She was about fifty and very gentle. She was cheap and when I couldn’t afford cheap she let me run a tab with her. We talked a lot about my mother and how difficult it was to watch her give up on herself, how she was seemingly rehab-proof, how she was a total shut-in now, having all her booze delivered, how she looked, how she smelled, how awful it was to mourn someone while they are still alive. Hildey was a great listener and remembered things I said long past the point when I thought it was charming to be quoted directly by your therapist. But she just kept pushing a regular job on me, kept trying to get