I’D THOUGHT THAT THE WHOLE second-trimester abortion thing had been the cherry on top of the most catastrophic adolescence of all time, but it turns out that honor belonged to the letter Bard college sent informing me that I was no longer enrolled as a freshman in the fall. Not only had I been expelled from high school six weeks before graduation, I’d been kicked out of college before I even got there. Oops.
It was awkward around the house, to say the least. I kept waiting for my dad to lose it, but he never did. Instead, he didn’t speak to me or acknowledge me—and that was even worse.
So anywhere was better than at home. Every morning, I was relieved to take the Metro to Emerson Prep in Dupont Circle. It was barely a school—more like a bunch of classrooms in a town house. The place was sort of a joke. Kids smoked weed on the front steps; no one cared. Emerson offered a pay-per-credit program (it’s where I’d ultimately earn my diploma); accordingly, it was full of wealthy derelicts who’d been booted from St. Albans and Georgetown Day.
I fit right in—literally. Four hours into my first day at Emerson, I was squished in the backseat of an Audi at the Connecticut Avenue Burger King drive-through, smoking weed and listening to Big L. Giggling on a lap. You know me. That was lunch. After school, everyone went to the O Street Mansion to drink. Have you ever been? It’s one of my favorite places in DC. It’s, like, three town houses combined, and full of secret passages and hidden stairwells and walls that open into other rooms—like in a murder mystery movie! And there’s a log cabin duplex on top, and all these other themed rooms; every item in the place is for sale, even the toilet paper. Rosa Parks lived there. Anyway, there’s a pool out back in the garden, and that’s where we partied that first day. I took shots and fell into the pool in the back garden à la Brian Jones (and not in a cool way).
I woke up on a leather sofa in a basement recording studio next to a boy drinking an Amstel Light.
“You were rolling around on the ground!” he told me. I’d heard that one before. “In the bushes!” He’d pulled me out of the pool and put me in the back of his car. And that’s the romantic story of how I met my summer boyfriend, Oscar.
I spent the next two months careening around in Oscar’s dad’s BMW sedan with my eyes closed, empty Corona bottles clinking at my feet. Praying not to die! Everyone on the DC private school party circuit drove drunk. Everyone! Oscar was tight with a top-ranking Politician’s Kid. The three of us would cruise around Northwest in his Oldsmobile and park under a streetlight. The Secret Service would park right behind us. Then Oscar and Politician’s Kid would sit there for an hour, cracking can after can of beer as they talked. When Politician’s Kid started the engine an hour later, the operatives wouldn’t swoop in and try to take the keys or anything. (They’d confiscate a disposable camera at a house party, though—lickety-split.)
Yup. Those Sidwell Friends kids were wild, man. Girls with tanned abs and Tiffany charm necklaces were always vomiting into koi ponds and things; Destiny’s Child’s “Jumpin’ Jumpin’ ” was always playing at the house parties. One night we were smoking weed in a kid’s backyard in Northwest and two men in camouflage leapt out from behind trees—with fucking machine guns! They were protecting Elián González, the little Cuban boy who floated into the United States on an inner tube. Remember him? He was in government custody in the house with a backyard adjacent to this kid’s. DC stuff.
I was still only seventeen, but my dad didn’t care what I did anymore. He couldn’t even look at me. Half the time I didn’t even sleep at home. That August, Oscar took me to the Hamptons for the first time. We went shark fishing and snorted heroin off old issues of Robb Report. The glamorous surroundings worked like drugs: they made me forget how ugly I felt on the inside. Yes, I’d devastated my family. Yes, I’d murdered that baby. Yes, I’d totally fucked up my future. But wasn’t it lovely here off Amagansett? Didn’t I look fly in my Calvin Klein bikini, smoking Camel Lights? The boys caught a shark and cut it open at the belly. The blood spilled out all over the deck.
With my eighteenth birthday approaching, there was only one thing to do: figure out a way to move to New York City. That’s when I started auditioning for acting schools in Manhattan. I got in; the ever-generous dad agreed to pay for it. And I was on my way.
Mimi drove me and my stuff up from DC in her red Honda van to my first-ever place in the city: a room in a boardinghouse—since torn down—on West Forty-First Street. It was one block from Times Square and practically on top of Port Authority bus station. If you require further visuals, Google the paparazzi photos of Jennifer Lopez’s bat-faced boy toy Casper Smart emerging from an Eighth Avenue peep show. That was my block!
For eight hundred dollars a month, I had a bunk bed with a desk underneath, three Korean roommates, and a fantastic view of the Tex-Mex restaurant Chevy’s, where tourists devoured delicious mesquite-grilled tacos before taking in Mary Poppins the musical. I sat at that window for hours, looking out at my crazy new world. I’d never felt more at peace in my entire life. Finally, I was home.
It was September 2000. Coldplay’s “Yellow” was on the radio; the George Bush–Al Gore presidential race was popping off, and I started acting school. Acting school! Oh, Lord. I thought it would be fun, but it so wasn’t for me. A typical assignment would be re-creating our morning routines, right? Every day, I’d watch an aspiring actor arrange black wooden boxes to look like his bedroom. He’d “make” the box bed with sheets he’d brought from home. Then he’d lie down and “sleep” for a long time. I am talking like fifteen full minutes.
Finally, the actor would be jerked “awake” by an imaginary alarm clock. Everyone would shift in their seats, like, “All right, time for some action!” But then the actor would hit his imaginary snooze button—and go back to fake-sleep again. For ten more minutes! And we’d all just sit there watching this in silence.
Well, in almost silence. Crunch. Crunch. That would be moi, surreptitiously nibbling on a dose of my new medication, Adderall. Generic name: amphetamine salts! (I’d switched from Ritalin. Adderall—some kids called it Gladderall—was more fun.)
Then it would be time for two hours of voice classes, where I learned the phonetic alphabet and studied anatomical diagrams of the tongue.
“Toy boat,” I’d stand there saying. “Toy boat toy boat toy boat toy boat toy boat. Minimal animal. Red leather yellow leather. Red leather yellow leather. Unique New York. Unique New York.”
Then we’d go to movement class, where we studied the Alexander Technique: walking with purpose, “freezing” in place, flopping down and folding at the waist to “sway like a willow tree in the breeze.”
“Relax your neck, Cat,” the instructor would say when I lifted my head to peep at the clock.
The acting school kids all hung out together after class at a spot on Park Avenue South called Desmond’s Tavern. There was beer on tap, live Jethro Tull cover bands, and a laid-back dive-bar vibe; being there for more than twenty minutes made me suicidal. This was Manhattan, for Chrissakes! I wanted to go to the hot clubs, like I had with Alistair and Greta T.! But I didn’t know where to find that scene, and you couldn’t just look it up in Time Out New York. (Believe me, I tried.)
So I explored my new city alone every night instead. If Ritalin had made me focus, my new shit got me high, honey (especially when I took two pills at a time). It was like I was in a video game or something! Suddenly I could travel vast distances—through rain, snow, anything—and never get fatigued. I just kept walking and walking and walking, listening to BT and dodging rats and smoking cigs and walking and whoops! Was it three thirty in the morning already? I’d always wind up somewhere weird at the end of these excursions, like on the Bowery in front of a fifteen-foot bronze statue of Confucius. I’d cab it back to West Forty-First Street and take a sleeping pill from the box of samples my mom sent me. Classes didn’t start until two o’clock every day, so I could stay conked out until noon. After school, I’d go night walking all over again. And this is how I got to know “Unique New York.”
Only a real weirdo would stay living across the street from Port Authority, of course, so in the spring of 2001 I moved thirty blocks downtown to a loft on Broadway, just south of Union Square—right by the famous Strand Book Store. I was renting a room from a professional storyteller—a friend of Mimi’s friend. The place was decorated all gypsy-boho with Indian cotton fabrics. It was a real, old-school Manhattan loft: strange, creaky, and cavernous, with eighteen-foot ceilings.
The storyteller had twenty-nine thousand rules, and two cats. I wasn’t allowed to have people over; I was supposed to let the cats into my bedroom whenever they wanted. And they always wanted! Those cats were extremely bossy. And though the loft was huge, I wasn’t allowed in most of it. I was only supposed to go in my room, which was built into the middle of the space and had no windows, and the skinny bathroom, where a cockroach the size of a Pepperidge Farm Milano was always perched on the exposed pipe over the shower. It was my first encounter with that particular breed of New Yorker. I’d look up and scream like Janet Leigh in Psycho every time I saw him! I was always racing out of there with shampoo suds still in my hair.
My first year of acting school had ended in May, so I was off for a few months, waiting to hear if I’d been accepted into a second year. The storyteller was always away on her . . . storytelling tours, I guess, and I was too shy to hang with her cool, super-nice adopted son Ishmael, who had a room down the hall when he was home from Oberlin. He was a DJ, always messing with his turntables. Years later, he’d write the bestseller A Long Way Gone, which is about his time as a child soldier in the Sierra Leone armed forces. Yeah, you should probably be reading that memoir instead of this one.
It was an extra-lonely summer. The prescriptions kept arriving in the mail, though—my mom’s handwriting was on the envelopes, and my dad’s name was on the labels on the little bottles. I took longer and longer walks, and I went to tanning beds and lay there with Wink-Ease on and wondered when I’d ever have another boyfriend. I bought a little television with a built-in VCR and four channels, and I watched ABC 7 Eyewitness News and Conan. I did hundreds of sit-ups on the floor each night. The cats watched from under the bed with their shiny little eyes.
I was flat-out depressed by the Fourth of July. It was a bad, bad day. I desperately wanted to go to FDR Drive and watch the fireworks, but I didn’t have anyone to go with; I couldn’t go watch them alone, I thought, because people would know I was a loser. I babysat—as I often did—in the West Village all day. I kept checking my phone, hoping someone from acting school would hit me up about a barbecue or something. No one did. Why would they? I never called anyone. My primary relationship was with pills.
When my job ended that evening, I walked home along West Eleventh Street alone. It was drizzling, and everyone was whooping and running through the streets to get to the big show over on the East River. I didn’t think I’d ever felt so low. By the time I got back to Broadway and bought a chocolate soft-serve ice cream cone with rainbow sprinkles from the truck parked outside the Strand, I was practically crying. And all because I didn’t have friends on the Fourth of July. Being young is so funny, isn’t it?
The fireworks started just as I reached the door to my building. Pop pop pop. I could still hear them as I climbed the steep stairs to the storyteller’s loft. My ice cream was melting all over the place. I slurped the mess from my hand as I unlocked the apartment door. No one was home.
I went into my little bedroom and turned on the TV. Pop pop. I switched it off right away. Seeing the fireworks bursting all glittery on the little screen just made me feel worse. I sat on my bed and finished my cone.
Now what?
The silence felt very heavy.
Then I did something I’d never done before. I went into the bathroom, knelt at the toilet, wiggled my fingers around in the back of my throat, and made myself sick. It didn’t taste bad at all! I was surprised. The ice cream came up cold and sweet, just like it had gone down. The sprinkles were intact in the bowl.
I stood and washed my hands at the sink.
That was easy, I thought. My eyes were teary in the mirror. I could feel the cockroach watching me.
I turned nineteen on September 10, 2001. The next morning was 9/11, and of course, I was living downtown, just a few blocks below the police barricades at Fourteenth Street (I showed a piece of mail as proof of address to get past every day). It all stays with you for life: the missing posters, the bitter air, the ashes, the chaos. I will spare you fifteen pages of rambling recollections and just say . . . I love you, New York! Now please forgive me in advance for diving right back into my sleazy story line.
My second year at the acting school started in September 2001. I don’t remember much about the first term. But in January, I began a stage makeup course that I really liked. I learned to make fake track marks! You apply some tacky glue—it’s almost like rubber cement—into the crease of your arm until it gets sort of blistery looking, and then you pat some red and yellow eye shadow on top if you want them to look all infected and raw and oozy. You can also make faux meth scabs this way. Cold sores. Whatever you want! Or, if you want an ex-junkie look, you can use purple shadow, and that makes the glue-lumps look like gnarled old scars. I did it all! I also pocketed loads of Ben Nye: I mean, if it’s a pretty, natural stain you’re after, there’s nothing better than a little stage blood dabbed just so on the lips.
I was still unhappy with my social life. I didn’t hang out with people much: mainly I just took Adderall and shopped. But then something major happened.
It was spring 2002—near the end of my second and final year at the acting school. Okay, so do you watch Louie? You know how in the opening sequence Louis CK eats his pizza slice, and then he goes into that subterranean club? That’s the Comedy Cellar, a stand-up club in Greenwich Village, and it’s legendary—if you come to New York, you gotta go. In April, I went with three girls from my acting school. We got sloshed on sangria; then, after the show, we flirted with two of the comedians. Back then, Godfrey was best known as “the 7UP guy” (he’s also whom Ben Stiller turns into when he goes undercover as a black guy in Zoolander) and Ardie Fuqua was just wonderful, affable Ardie (who, sadly, was in the news as I wrote this book because he was in that terrible bus accident with Tracy Morgan—though he’s okay now). Both guys had crazy-positive energy and fantastic teeth. I lovv-vve them, truly—still!
Anyway. Ardie and Godfrey herded all of the sangria-swilling white girls—aka me and my three friends—into two taxis and told us they were taking us to the club! We got out on Lafayette Street, just around the corner from where Britney Spears allegedly kept an apartment above Tower Records. There was a line outside, but the doorman lifted the velvet rope for Ardie and Godfrey right away. I took one step inside and knew immediately that I’d found what I’d been looking for.
Pangaea! That was the name of the club. I’d go on to be a regular there. It’s one of the best clubs I’ve ever frequented to this day. (If you are young, you have to move to New York and go to the clubs while you still have the energy! I have no regrets.) Everyone was always gorgeous, and the place was always packed. There were white squishy couches, masks all over the wall, and there were live drummers banging with the music. Every table, it seemed, had a big ice bucket with a champagne bottle on it, and if you were a teenage girl you could just sit down anywhere—there were tons of couches—and immediately be offered a glass or three. And a bump of coke! Men were always giving girls bumps from their little baggies, and the baggies were always lavender and pink and red. And underneath the DJ booth and behind heavy curtains, there was a whole hidden room just for—unofficially—doing coke. Chosen ones got to stay on the couches in there for after-hours. And there were always celebrities there—famous male models, famous magicians—hitting on all the bitches.
That first night, I walked into the club and there was P. Diddy, who was still Puff Daddy back then, and he grabbed my arm and wanted me to sit with his table. It was so exciting; I mean, I was nineteen! I didn’t join him, though. I just kicked off my sandals and gyrated to “Hot in Herre” on a sofa elsewhere—though I might as well have been dancing on a cloud! Bliss, man. I hadn’t been that happy in a long time.
I never wanted the night to end, but of course, it did. I walked home at four thirty in the morning, feeling throbby and exhilarated. I had to go back—not just to that club, but to that world. But how?
Well. Lucky for me, going to nightclubs is very easy when you are teenage, blond, skinny, friendless, wired on stimulants, and quietly desperate. Anyone can do it! And the lower your self-esteem is, the more you put yourself out there. And eventually you become (vaguely) popular.
Three nights later, I showed up at the Olive Branch—the restaurant above the Cellar—around midnight, doused in Michael by Michael Kors perfume, my cleavage shining like the top of the Chrysler Building with Revlon Skinlights Face Illuminator Powder. It was around midnight. Ardie was at a table with some other comics. I trotted over in my hot-pink stilettos.
“Hey!” I tried to act cool. “Remember me?”
“Hey!” Ardie stood up and gave me a hug. “What are you doing here?”
“Just wanted to say hi,” I purred.
“Who are you here with?” Ardie said. “Where are your friends?”
“Oh,” I said. “I was just with them, but they went home. And I was nearby, so . . .”
Later, I sat downstairs in the Comedy Cellar and watched Ardie do his set. When he was done, he gathered up the trashed white girls from the audience again—I guess Godfrey was out of town—and we piled into his SUV. This time, we went to Lot 61 over by the Hudson River, then to Suite 16 in Chelsea. I hit it off with the manager, Matt Strauss (hi, Matt!), and he and I sat with Nicky Hilton and her MTV VJ boyfriend Brian McFadden. Wow!
I was hooked. I spent hours getting ready every night: shaving my whole body and blow-drying my hair. And putting together outfits! The whole thing was finding the tiniest, shortest skirts. I took dresses to a tailor to be hemmed until I started doing it myself at home—a timeless Adderall-tweaker tradition, unfortunately. I ruined so many dresses, just hacking them way too short with big orange-handled kitchen scissors and my hands shaking. Then I’d slather Body Shop Coconut Body Butter, spritz Banana Boat tanning oil on top of that, strap on my Gucci fanny pack, and hit the streets. I used to get into cabs and slide across the backseat; I was so greasy. Absolutely lubricated! But that’s how you keep your legs gleaming all night.
I showed up at the Comedy Cellar five or six nights a week like this—dressed for the club. It was a crazy steez, but . . . I was crazy. I could not stay home. I was at the Cellar so often that I got to know Lisa Lampanelli, Judah Friedlander, Sherrod Small, Colin Quinn, Dave Attell, Tony Rock—all of the comedians who were there every night as well. They were all very nice to me (to my face), even though I was obviously a lonely weirdo. Dave Attell even kissed me once! Yeah, that was strange.
Every night, Ardie took me to a different club after his set: Butter or Veruka or Groovejet or Sway or Spa or Lotus.
After a few months, I started bypassing the Cellar and just going out on my own. I saw the same party people everywhere, every night. Everyone seemed as messy as I was, if not messier. This one guy everyone called Jesus was rumored to live in a unit in Chelsea Mini Storage! They were all nightcrawler vampires who raged until dawn and slept until dusk. This is terrible for the soul, but great for the skin—no sun damage, you know? So everyone looked good.
I particularly hit it off with another smoky-eyed blond girl named Dara, who went out every night even though she was still in high school. She and her spiky-haired boyfriend, Ben, had just been profiled by Nancy Jo Sales in a Vanity Fair story called “Ben and Dara Are in Love (And Nothing Else Matters).” They had a crazy-dysfunctional, yayo-fueled relationship. They became . . . well, not my friends exactly, but something like that.
I still didn’t have real friends, and I was very ashamed about this. Sometimes I got called out on it.
“Why don’t I ever see you with anyone?” sneered Ben one night when I plunked down at his table at Flow. “Don’t you have any friends? Where are your friends?” He was being a jerk, but he had my number.
What do you give the blond teenage pillhead who has everything? Antibiotics! Ardie had always driven me home after our nights together—he was such a good big brother—but once I started going to the clubs without him, I really wound up sleeping around. You know how it is when you’re nineteen! Promoters are always taking their dicks out in the backseats of cabs and pulling you on their laps or biting your nipple through your wifebeater or something comparably unspeakable, and you feel very embarrassed that the taxi driver can see and hear but you let it keep happening anyway. Why? It’s all just part of being young in New York, I guess. No one was taking me home to make love to me, let’s put it that way.
One particularly bad night I had sex with a stranger in the bathroom at Flow on Varick. It was a Sunday: “hip-hop night.” It went down right at four o’clock, when the club was clearing out; the lights were up. Security guards were banging on the stall door and it was humiliating; but this guy—I didn’t even know his name—had a grip on me in there, and I was totally naked. He’d told me he was a guitarist in a famous band. I wound up going home with him because . . . well, I guess because he told me to. The first thing I looked for when we got there were instruments. I saw none. Uh-oh.
I had sex with Not-a-Guitarist on the butcher block in his kitchen anyway—that is, I did until I saw an eyeball in the crack of the door.
“AHHHH!” I jumped off the counter. The creepy little peeper came into the kitchen with his dick out. He was like . . . a tiny man! Not a dwarf, just . . . small. Anyway, that’s not relevant to the story. The point is, he was masturbating furiously! And Not-a-Guitarist was naked, and I was naked, and I don’t know if they were trying to double-tag me or what, but I had to go. I looked around. Where were my clothes? Where was my phone?
“You’re not leaving.” Not-a-Guitarist grabbed my arm. Like, hard. I had to pull it away and snatch my tube minidress and jacket and my shoes from the floor and flee this building—sprint down the stairs and everything. My phone was in my jacket pocket, but I’d totally left my gold Baby Phat purse with all my money and makeup and my fake ID! So I didn’t have any money; I couldn’t take a cab. I walked home on the dark streets without any underwear on.
But those were the bad guys. The good guys were good. My favorite was a really grungy cokehead Calvin Klein model named Michael. Gosh, I’m still in love with him! He had greasy brown hair that hung in his face and wore glasses and beat-up Marc Jacobs clothes. Oh, and he had just a perfect body. Perfect. God, Michael was so hot. And no matter how much blow he did back then, he always had this glowy, gold-flushed skin tone, like he went to tanning beds or was part Cherokee or something. And his cheekbones! Ugh. He had the best cheekbones—though you could barely see them underneath the aforementioned hair.
I first met this divine creature at Ben’s duplex in the Village over a plate of jam! Yes, jam. That is Hamptons surfer-slang for cocaine. So Michael and I snorted the jam, and I had no idea he was this big-deal model. He looked like a hobo! The hobo and I left Ben’s at that presunrise time when the sky is just starting to change, and we walked around downtown until my stupid nose started absolutely dripping blood all over the white tank top I’d just borrowed from Dara. So then I went back to the hobo’s apartment on Ninth Street “to change” and stayed for four days.
We were thick as thieves after that. I soon realized that Michael the Hobo was actually Male Model Michael, and that he was in the window of every store in town, wearing Calvin Klein. He was gorgeous. But he wasn’t modeling much anymore. This was because he had a serious drug problem. So did I, but I was only nineteen and really didn’t understand that yet. Male Model Michael was twenty-nine, and he did coke in the shower! Yes, I did it with him, but he brought it in there.
“Let me really look at you,” he’d murmur after we’d both taken six bumps apiece. Then he’d start to scrub my makeup off. My face would be so numb that I couldn’t even feel the washcloth! Just like in that song by The Weeknd. Argh, it was so sexy. “Let me see how beautiful you are.” After we got out, he’d dress me in his clothes and we’d do more lines, and he’d read to me from his favorite book, The Prince of Tides, and then we’d do lines and he’d tell me all about how he and his male-model friends used to go down on one another, then we’d have sex again and order more coke and do more lines and talk about Bret Easton Ellis, and then we’d order more coke, and then we’d have sex again and then . . . well, you get the idea! He always called me “darlin’.” It was a really dreamy relationship.
After our binges Male Model Michael would need days and days of space to isolate and sleep and be depressed. I didn’t understand that when I was nineteen, but of course I do now. Addiction: it’s rough.
Male Model Michael would go on to sort of lose his mind and have to move out of the city and back in with his parents (who were—incidentally—honest-to-God rocket scientists). It’s sad that the drugs took him down. But of course, he might say the same thing about me.
That summer, I went to the club and met the guy who would alter the course of my life, and with whom I am still close to this day. Alex was twenty years old, tall, charismatic, and preppy, with dark hair and icy-blue eyes. He drank Dewar’s on the rocks and had grown up on the Upper East Side. His mom still lived on East Ninetieth Street, but Alex was always fighting with her. He only liked his little sister, who went to Chapin and was sort of wise beyond her years about Alex’s behavioral problems. It was all very Holden and Phoebe Caulfield.
Alex’s chosen family were his friends, a crew of New Yorkers who went out five nights a week, wore Ralph Lauren Polo, and listened to Wu-Tang.
There was Josh—whom everyone called the Fat Jew—who rocked gold chains and an Afro and lived in a Riverside Drive triplex; SAME, who’d steal thousand-dollar cashmere sweaters from rich girls’ dads’ closets just to spray-paint his tag on them; Sebastian, who looked like a hunky Disney villain with his muscles and white-blond curls; Alden, a white rapper who lived with his mom. And loads more!
They were the coolest people I’d ever met, even if they weren’t the nicest. I wanted to be in their in crowd so badly that I’d overlook their oft-questionable behavior, like when I closed my tab at Bowery Bar and found that three hundred dollars’ worth of drinks had been charged to my credit card. Besides, I was falling in love! I stopped seeing Michael; I only wanted Alex. We’d go to Cafeteria after the clubs closed and share fourteen-dollar bowls of tomato soup. His family would be away in Sun Valley or Sag Harbor or somewhere, so we’d cab uptown and curl up in his mom’s clean Tempur-Pedic bed with the AC on blast. Half the time, Alex would have a fresh split lip or a black eye from fighting—blame the Dewar’s—so I’d lie there watching him toss and turn in his sleep, drunk-babbling and bleeding all over the pillowcases. The sun would rise through the blinds, and I’d feel so happy.
It was hands-down the best summer of my life. Of course, nothing that good lasts. Alex and his friends were moving to San Francisco for a year in September. I knew it was coming, but still, when the day came, I cried for a week. I celebrated my twentieth birthday at Lotus with a gaggle of FIT coke sluts on September 10, but I was so depressed. I’d finally had a crew to go out with, and now everybody was gone.
I was still feeling low as I began my sophomore year (my acting school credits had transferred) at Eugene Lang College on West Eleventh Street. It was a good program and I wanted to care, but no matter how much Adderall I took, I couldn’t focus. I thought of how motivated I’d been to make straight As just a few years ago. Had that really been me? Now I stared out the window every class, if I showed up at all. I didn’t make friends. I didn’t declare a major. I had no idea what I was interested in or what I was ever gonna do with my life besides party.