Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [76]
Whether I succeeded or failed at quitting drinking it was going to be my success or my failure.
Things were worse than before I quit drinking. I was now living in a couple rooms with wigs drying on a hanger outside my front door and a restless, unpredictable teenage pothead next door and no bathroom and no money, no job, no ascertainable work skills, all without alcohol. This was much worse. I knew I couldn’t be around my friends at first because I knew if they asked, “Darst, what are you drinking?” I would have just burst into tears.
So when Cassie called again and said, “Why don’t you come get sober out here in Aspen? You have nothing going on there,” I said I’d be out there in two days.
SOBER SCHMOBER
I’M NOT THAT BIG on dreams, telling other people about them, interpreting them, the symbols. Pretty boring stuff. When I hear “I had the weirdest dream last night . . .” I usually give the throat-slash sign to the speaker. I had a recurring dream for about fifteen years that I never told anyone about for the aforementioned reason. It wasn’t noteworthy. Until I stopped having it. In the dream I would fall down, often roll down a hill, and come to the bottom, and I couldn’t get up. My legs wouldn’t work right and I was weak and unable to stand up. And in the dream I desperately wanted to get up but couldn’t. I would fall down every time I tried to stand. When I quit drinking I never had the dream again.
In Aspen, I got a job as a driver for a limo company, driving luxury SUVs. I had a black Denali. My first day as I was backing out of the garage I took off the sideview mirror. I thought, I hope they don’t give me a lot of shit for this, seeing as I’m the only woman driver here on the force. A second later I heard one of the guys yell to the manager in the office, “Yup, that was the girl!”
A lot of the runs were from the Aspen airport to the St. Regis hotel in town. It was an easy drive; Aspen is not midtown Manhattan. I kept getting reprimanded because I would pull into the semicircle driveway of the St. Regis and my Denali would be a good three feet from the curb. This was apparently the mark of an amateur. A good driver would get the car right up against the curb for his passengers. Maybe now was not the time to tell my employers that I hadn’t even taken my own road test, that my sister Julia took it for me. One day my supervisor, Tad, was in a car ahead of me in the St. Regis driveway and he hopped out of his Denali and came over to my vehicle and said, “Hey, Jeanne, when you have a second, like when you’re waiting for a client, it’s a great time to do a little maintenance on your vehicle. Like, why don’t you hop out, grab a rag and wipe down your vehicle?”
“Because someone might see me?”
A few days later I picked up my assignment sheet for the day and saw that one of the runs out of the airport was Deepak Chopra at twelve forty-five. Cassie thought I was the luckiest person alive; she almost wished she were me for half a second. This could be a real turning point for you and listen to what he has to say and ask him what you’re supposed to be doing with your life, don’t be negative, be present for the experience and all this “Everything happens for a reason” caca. I was more concerned with not winding up in a ravine with the guru than I was with understanding what the reason is why I couldn’t drink anymore and now had to drive people to and from airports. Naturally I had no idea what this joker smoker looked like, so I made a little DEEPAK CHOPRA sign and stood at the gate with it. The whole plane had deboarded after about fifteen minutes. There was nowhere else he could be; the airport is teeny. Then four giant black men, New York Giants it turned out, came toward me. I lowered my Deepak sign.
“Are you our ride?” one of them said.
“Yes, yes, right this way,” I said, forgetting to ask if I could carry anything for