Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [77]
“Do you have luggage?” I asked.
“No, missy, it’s your lucky day,” one of them said. They were laughing at me but I didn’t take it personally. They were Giants.
We headed out to the car. I opened the back to put their carry-ons in.
“Let me take those,” I said, looking at their big bags.
“Oh, give me a break, girl,” and they laughed, hoisting their bags into the back. I was relieved. The drive to the St. Regis was uneventful. I felt fairly competent as we cruised out of the airport; I remembered the speed bump on the way out and slowed accordingly, saving me from having to apologize for bumping their heads. I felt like a good driver. I was certain I was going to nail the curb thing this time, too.
The Giants remarked that the village looked like “fuckin’ Hansel and Gretel town,” which was true. They wondered how much “cheddar you gotta have to have a house here.” They guessed “Will Smith cheddar,” and then I got sort of near the curb and dropped them all off. I headed back to the garage. My boss was waiting for me as I pulled in.
“Jeanne, what happened to Deepak Chopra?” Bob asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I do. There was nobody there to meet him at the airport and after standing around waiting for one of our guys for twenty minutes, he took a cab. A cab. To his hotel.”
I thought that didn’t seem like the worst thing that could happen to someone. I mean, if anyone should be able to handle this it’s Deepak fucking Chopra. But my boss didn’t see it that way. I hopped on the thirty-year-old yellow ten-speed that Cassie had coaxed her landlord into letting me use for the summer, and rode to the supermarket for a newspaper. I was going to need another job.
I had had clear skin my whole life, but when I quit drinking I got this weird acne. (Who knew all that beer and Maker’s Mark was making my skin look so fabulous?) Despite looking horrible, I managed to find someone to spoon my boils, this former drug addict mechanic in Aspen, Sam. Sam couldn’t remember anything. His whole life was a blackout and he was pretty sensitive about it so I tried to keep questions like “Do you like mustard?” to a minimum. Sam looked at me with amazement when he saw me after we’d been apart a day or two, and I was convinced he eyed me with such delight because he’d actually forgotten about me and so it was like meeting me for the first time every time we went out, like every day was a Christopher Nolan movie for him. “Hey there . . . beautiful.” Sam lived at his shop across from the airport. The garage was packed with cars he was working on and outside were a zillion cars waiting to be worked on. He lived above the garage, an area you got to by climbing a ladder. There was a makeshift kitchen he and the other mechanics used with a fridge and a microwave, and Sam would toddle down there at night after we’d fool around and come back up the ladder with a pint of ice cream.
Like Sam, I didn’t know how to do anything, and the biggest shock of early sobriety was how uncomfortable I really was, how reliant on alcohol. I hoped my entire being wasn’t dependent on alcohol to operate: my sense of humor, my brain, my ability to talk to people and the pleasure I took in meeting new people. I hoped some normal person would emerge out of all this, me, that I was still in there, but there was no way to predict if that was true—if I would become someone different, or just a sober, less violent version of myself. After about four months it was time to answer this question by getting back to my regular life.
When I got back to Brooklyn, the first party I went to sober was at a good friend’s house in Park Slope, the place where I had partied and eaten dinner and lunch and hung out endlessly, often sleeping over even though I lived nearby because I couldn’t make it home. I was chatting with someone I didn’t know, someone who in my former life would have been mere set-dressing, as people were when I drank, and I poured myself a seltzer and sipped and talked uncomfortably. I had the distinct feeling that something was missing from my drink,