Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [79]
I never know what to drink. “What’ll you have?” is such an absurd question to me now. What’ll I have? Well, I can’t have anything, if you want to know the truth. Bring me whatever you want. It doesn’t matter. I’m sober. None of it’s gonna be any fun.
But being sober was this amazing trip into regular life, what normal people do every day—pay their phone bills, get stains out of shirts, poo in toilets—an adventure in normalcy. One morning I woke up and made coffee and realized that I had no milk. I was annoyed that I’d have to go out so early and get milk and just as I was shutting the fridge I saw a brown bag I had gotten the night before. I opened it, amazed, delighted, baffled. Backup milk! I had bought backup milk! I am so fucking sober it’s crazy!!! I want major awards for doing stuff normal people do all day long. If I’m at my sister’s and I’m helping clean up after dinner I want acknowledgment for not being a fuckface. “Do you SEE ME? Do you SEE me wiping this table? Pretty amazing, right?” I’ll knock over a lamp while dusting if I think I’m not being noticed being helpful. I find myself phoning friends if I’m walking to a mailbox to mail some bills.
“Hey, Linda, it’s Jeanne. Thought I’d call and say hi. I’m just mailing my Con Ed bill on Court Street. Call me back, I’ll tell you all about it.”
And as I walked around without a hangover I realized I could do some writing now. I was physically able to do it unlike when I was drinking. Maybe I could manage a few words just on cigarettes. And yes, the Hemingways, the Fitzgeralds, the Faulkners and the Capotes. Drank while writing. Drink next to the typewriter. But the longer I lived in Brooklyn, the more writers I met, and I guess I was just too drunk to put it together before but now I realized about half of them were sober. So you could be a writer and be sober. Very interesting.
A SALLY OF THE MIND
I WAS WORKING in a coffee shop in Brooklyn and got a call from a guy who had done the women’s film festival website and was now a vice president at Sundance Channel. He liked the writing I did for the festival’s website and catalog and offered me my first real job, working for Sundance Channel. I was going to get paid to be a writer. I knew getting paid and being good had nothing to do with each other, but that didn’t mean it didn’t feel great. It was a full-time job. I had a nameplate on my office door with the word WRITER underneath it.
But my first real job confirmed a hunch I’d had for a while: I don’t want a real job. The job was great. It really was. I could go have a cig downstairs, make a phone call without being “on a break.” I could take lunch when I felt like it. Adult. Professional. I wrote for the website, interstitial promos, and for two actual film shows. Being a normal person was a lot easier than what I’d been doing for the last decade—but being normal was scary because it seemed like, if I go down this road who knows what will happen to me? It’s just not safe for an artist to blend into the working world. I could, well, I could get used to it for one thing. I was starting to buy “work clothes,” aching for sweaters that would look right for the Monday staff meeting, so my thrift store old man sweaters wouldn’t, you know, draw attention to me.
I was able to move to a studio a few blocks away with a bathroom. Nothing fancy but a regular apartment. I had no credit or credibility so I couldn’t rent an apartment on my own. I got it by just moving my stuff in when a friend was moving out. I had a real job and a real apartment. Which let me tell you felt . . . boring.
Some people I knew, dancers, writers, painters, did work like answering phones in day spas or something completely unrelated to their interest or talent, saving their mental energy for their own creative work. I also knew writers