Party Girl_ A Novel - Anna David [16]
Grabbing the package of straws, I slide one out, cut it in half, and snort the four lines quickly, feeling the drip down my throat and excitement coursing through my veins.
One of the cats jumps up on the table and starts swishing her tail over the CD case that still has a thin layer of coke on top of it, enough for a small line. In my more paranoid moments, I think that my cats know that I’m doing coke, and are hell-bent on keeping Mommy from cracking out, but right now I get that she just knows that I’m intently focused on something that doesn’t involve petting her or opening cans of her food, and she wants to know why. I pick her up and place her on the floor, but she jumps back onto the table and knocks the CD case completely over, scattering bits of the powder into the off-white carpet. I feel crushed by this disaster and utterly convinced that everything I do always ends in this kind of catastrophic disappointment, and there seems to be only one way to cushion this realization.
When I pour out my next two lines, I decide that I’m going to make them extra thick but I make them so thick that they essentially kill my entire supply. I light a cigarette and lodge it into the silver Vanity Fair ashtray that I swiped from a book party at Kelly Lynch and Mitch Glazer’s house.
I feel infused with somewhat manic energy and suddenly decide that I should spritz on enough Marc Jacobs perfume to give off just a whiff of it, transfer the contents of my frayed brown bag to my fake Frada nighttime one, and get out the door within the next three minutes. But between the spritz and the purse transfer, it occurs to me that I’ve done enough coke now to have to be concerned about a comedown, which—if I’m to trust my powers of estimation combined with my body’s consistency when it comes to drug reaction—should occur sometime after appetizers are being served . I’ll just have to drink my way through it, I decide. I only call Alex when I’m partying with friends so I certainly won’t be paging him to come meet me at some phony Culver City event.
If I were to do that, it would mean I had a problem, I think, and remind myself that I’m acting like an amateur and I’m perfectly capable of doing a little coke and then going to an event. “I wouldn’t be so paranoid if I didn’t have these thoughts,” I say out loud, but then realize it’s the other way around.
My paranoia has developed legs and possibly arms too by the time I valet my car. I try to shrug it off as I approach the bar with faith that a screwdriver will bring me back to “happy buzz” mode. The drink goes down smoothly and I realize that this had been my problem—I’d just been missing my lubricant. I decide to do a lap to look for anyone I know.
I pass Tori Spelling (regaling a group of men with some story about her dog) and Bill Maher (ogling an Asian woman’s breasts, to her seeming delight) and the stylist Philip Bloch (talking about how he picked Halle Berry’s dress the year she won her Oscar) during my circle of the room before finally coming upon a face that’s familiar because we actually know each other: Brett Lawson from Sprint, who gives free phones to celebrities and other allegedly influential people but never to me. It’s not so much that I want one—I actually have a BlackBerry that I’m more than happy with—but I always want to be deemed important enough by him to receive the offer. He’s sometimes extremely nice to me and sometimes a bit cavalier, depending on if he’s talking to someone less or more important than me at the time, so interactions with him always feel a bit like a worthiness test.
“Brett!” I say and he gives me the cheek kiss and then goes in for the other side. The two-cheek kiss seems to be sweeping L.A. lately.
“Amelia, do you know Trent?” he asks, nodding his head in the direction of a tan, gelled guy that I can tell is gay and also a publicist before he even opens his mouth. Trent and I shake hands as Brett explains that Trent works at