Party Girl_ A Novel - Anna David [46]
“I get what you’re saying,” she says, rather condescendingly. “But—well, you know that I work at Imagine, right? And I get paid to work here. But Imagine doesn’t pay me for the time it takes me to get to work and home. Are we understanding each other?”
“Um…I think?”
“Good,” she says. “Karen has been telling me how great you are so I’d hate to lose you over something like this. So, how’s this? You get $10 an hour, starting from when you report to work. If you only walk him for twenty minutes, you get a third of that. We’ll be working on the honor system, of course.”
Glancing around my bedroom at the clothes in piles; the only partially painted closet; the gray paint spilled on the floor; and my shaking, half-gray hand with its bloody cuticles clutching the phone, I find myself nodding. “Sure, Holly,” I say, feeling like I’m about to hang up the phone and never speak to her, Karen, or the fucking dog ever again. “That’s fine.”
I hang up and toss the phone across the room, where it lands in the middle of the paint can, splattering more gray everywhere.
Dusk. I’ve always hated the word, and the time of day. They say that people get depressed at the time of day that they were born but I was born at 9 A.M. and usually feel okay around then, if I happen to be up. It’s the evening hours—where the day isn’t quite over and the night hasn’t quite begun—that kill me.
Even though I seem to have lost whatever powers of estimation I may have once had, I’m guessing that it’s been a few hours since Holly and I spoke and I’ve moved to the living room, where I seem to be unable to move. I’ve had to pee for at least an hour, but either my appendages have lost their ability to follow through on directions from my brain or the messages are getting lost in the translation because I just continue to sit there. I’ve been steadily doing coke for God knows how long and not moving.
I’m wired to the gills, I think, borrowing the expression from this militant lesbian I overheard one night and feeling good about it, the way I always do whenever I manage to hear a figure of speech and then use it as my own. And then I think, What the hell does that even mean? Fish have gills. Am I so high that I think I’m a fish? Or am I so high that I’ve grown gills? I think about this as I do more coke and don’t pee.
At a certain point, I realize I’m shivering and have the distinct sensation that it didn’t just start. Is it possible to get hypothermia inside a heated Los Angeles apartment? I shake my vial onto the CD case in front of me. Fucking hell, I think. I can’t be out. I don’t want grams and grams more—just a few good lines to get me over this shaky, immobilizing state I’m in.
And then I come up with a new plan. I manage to stand up—it’s not so difficult once I convince myself that my very survival is dependent on it—shuffle to my bathroom, open my medicine cabinet, and swallow five Ambien before I can freak myself out with thoughts of what combinations of cocaine and sleeping pills can do to people. Total unconsciousness is my only desire. Not for the rest of my life, mind you—just until I can feel a little better. I drink a bottle of Arrowhead to make sure the sleeping pills flow as far into my system as they possibly can, lie down on my bed, and wait to feel exhausted. Nothing happens so I go back to the living room, light a cigarette, and wait some more. Ambien is usually amazingly sharp in its ability to knock me from complete consciousness into serious REM—while not as drastic as an anesthetic, a close second—and I always revel in that split second where I slip from life to a place that’s temporarily problem free.
But this time, the Ambien does nothing. It seems, if anything, to make me more alert. I’ve been taking a lot of it lately, more than I’m prescribed, but my doctor is so clueless about how bad my insomnia is that he actually tells me to cut the