THAT WINTER WAS DOPEY, ITCHY, slushy, and dark. During the week, I zombie-wrote eye cream captions; feigned interest in deep-dish side parts backstage at Fashion Week; received complimentary lash extensions in the basement at Barneys; and hit 1 OAK nightclub at three in the afternoon to chat with 50 Cent about his new cologne, Power by 50 Cent—as well as his debut novel, The Ski Mask Way. (“HARD LIFE. HARD LUCK. HARD DRUGS. HARD DEALS.” Indeed!)
After work, Marco would pick me up in his father’s old Fiat, which was white and full of garbage. He’d be wearing a sheepskin denim jacket. Marco knew every pothole on the FDR Drive. We’d race up there along the East River, then careen across town to Washington Heights.
“Slow DOWN!” I’d scream, but he never did. He’d be blasting Pulp (we loved “Common People”). Then we’d buy a special kind of weed called pudé, which made us giggle like little kids. We’d park next to the Hudson River and smoke in the car.
Marco had lost his room on Madison Street; he couldn’t keep up with the five-hundred-dollar-a-month rent (I don’t know how he ever did). He’d relocated to the Bronx, where his dad owned a few buildings. His dad, who spoke in a heavy Romanian accent, was elderly and always sick. I think he’d been close to death a few times. Marco hardly ever talked about it.
When I visited on weekends, I heard Marco’s dad’s hacking cough in the other room. He was always trying to feed us. I remember his kind face in the messy little kitchen as he unfolded wax paper. The family only ate beautiful thinly sliced meats from the butcher: prosciutto and things.
“Butchers have the softest hands because they work with fat,” Marco told me. This was the European elegance he inherited. He always taught me special things like that.
Underneath the apartment buildings was a phenomenal maze of tunnels and cement rooms: a spooky underworld for vampires like Marco and me. It was built as a two-hundred-thousand-square-foot nuclear fallout shelter during World War Two. The signs were still up from back then. The black corridors seemed endless. His father had filled them with discarded furniture, and Marco had dragged it around and set up hidden rooms everywhere. That’s where he’d paint me. I’d take off my minidress and tights and Hanky Panky thong and arrange myself on a throwaway sofa. Eventually I’d nod off with an orange juice in my hand. Marco usually removed it before I dropped it. He worked on canvas, in oils. Lots of blues and blacks: corpse colors. I could stay still for him for hours when I was on the skag.
One modeling session I woke up to a flash and the mechanical crunch-and-hum of an old-school Polaroid camera. Marco had snapped a photo of me with my legs spread.
“Funny,” I mumbled, closing them. Then I went back under.
“My eyes are rolling back in my head!” I said, inspecting his painting the next day.
“That’s how you looked.” He liked women to look dead.
On Sunday night, Marco would drive me back to Manhattan and on Monday morning I’d be at my desk, staring at my computer monitor, feeling very very dead indeed.
That spring, I found a new place to live, and a new roommate. You may know Nev Schulman as the star of Catfish (as well as MTV’s spin-off series Catfish: The TV Show). The documentary, which was directed by Nev’s hot older brother Rel (who was moving out of the apartment) and his partner Henry Joost, explored how people pose with fake identities on the Internet to lure unsuspecting rubes into relationships. When I met these guys, they’d just finished filming; Nev wasn’t all famous yet. I’d come across his looking-for-a-roommate ad on Craigslist. I e-mailed him and I’d said that I was a Condé Nast editor and that I would be a great roommate and could we meet?
“I am VERY healthy and normal!” I wrote. Nev took the bait. Catfish.
I moved into Rel’s old room in March of 2009. The clean, stylish two-bedroom on East Sixth Street was full of art books and vintage Eames chairs. The Schulman boys had great taste. My room had its own entrance from the fifth-floor stairwell and two large windows. I was particularly excited to be living in Alphabet City, a magical pocket of the East Village full of secret gardens and stuttering dustheads.
Marco came to inspect.
“This is good.” He nodded. He especially liked the private entrance. He was studying the lock on that door when one of Nev’s two cats wandered in and . . . mewed, as they do. Mew.
Marco’s gaze snapped up. He lunged at the cat—like he wanted to stomp on its head with his boot! The cat jumped a foot in the air.
“Marco!” I said as it scampered away.
“I fucking hate cats,” he grumbled.
He didn’t like any animals, as far as I could tell. I’d also once stopped Marco from kicking a drug dealer’s dog in the projects. And this was one of the . . . many weird things I’d started to notice about my sweet soul mate, about my dreamy best friend.
But I was too busy at work to dwell on Marco’s quirks. Online was now a “thing” at Condé, and even the all-powerful Jean—who championed separation of print and web with all the conviction of Thomas Jefferson—couldn’t get us out of blogging for the new (i.e., no longer just a place to subscribe to the magazine) luckymag.com. I, too, was Team Print all day, but to my surprise, I actually enjoyed drafting my once-a-week blog post. I could play around. It was more fun than writing boring, phony-sounding fragrance captions for the magazine.
“I know black eyeliners better than the busboys at the Sea Org snack bar do. . .” I opened one post. I referenced Pete Doherty, Britney Spears’s meltdown, Sharon Stone—all of the weird stuff I was into. I was no Richard Pryor or anything, but humor in beauty writing was definitely a little edgy at that time—particularly in the world of women’s magazines. Sometimes I snickered to myself while I was writing.
My wacky beauty blogs were a hit. Well, not with readers (no one was reading luckymag.com, let’s be real), but Jean praised my work for the site every week.
“I know when I hear you laughing at your desk that it’s going to be good.” Jean would smile when I turned in my posts (which she edited by hand before they went online—old-school). And you know I’d just beam. Kim was into my blogs, too! Our editor in chief came over, laughing, to tell me how much she’d liked something I’d written. It felt so good.
I guess she really meant it, because in June, Kim chose me—me, out of everyone on staff—to cover music festivals for luckymag.com. All summer long! These special assignments had nothing to do with beauty, but JGJ wasn’t about to tell Kim no. Simone and Cristina would pick up extra work while I was away.
What a time! I traveled all over—to the New Orleans Jazz Fest, Lollapalooza in Chicago, Bonnaroo in Tennessee—scouting “real” girl style and interviewing rock stars. I hung in catered press tents with writers from Rolling Stone and Spin. I saw MGMT, Jay Z, Nine Inch Nails, and Jane’s Addiction. I also saw a lot of fucking gladiator sandals. Every day a photographer and I would prowl the fields for hours, hunting for chic concertgoers.
“I SEE ONE!” I’d squeal over the music. “CATCH UP WITH ME!” Then I would sprint across the grassy plain and pounce. Half of my victims were ’shrooming so hard that they could barely sign their model release forms. Even the “talent” I met was out to the ball game.
“Can you tell that I’m rolling my face off?” an up-and-coming pop singer (now a big star) asked at Lollapalooza. Glitter was literally leaking out of her nose. Had she been snorting it? (Swag.)
My special project ended in August. All in all, it had been a success. Kim and other high-ranking Lucky operatives were very pleased with my performance. Which meant Jean was very pleased with me.
Marco got a girlfriend. Carly drank whiskey from a flask and weighed seventy-five pounds. She was perfect for Marco.
Their romance meant I saw my friend less and less, but that was okay. Lately he’d been acting sort of . . . obnoxious.
For example: one Tuesday, Marco had stopped by to bum a few sexy Dexys. Or was it to borrow cash? Marco never seemed to have either those days. That wasn’t the annoying part: I was happy to spot him. It was just that . . . he never said thank you. For anything, ever. Had it always been that way? I couldn’t remember.
“You’re such a good girl, Cat,” Marco said—instead of “thanks”—after I gave him what he wanted. He was drinking a beer and had his dirty boots propped up on my bed. (I’d also noticed how lazy and entitled my friend had been acting lately—like he was a king in my home.) “I always tell Carly she’s wrong about you.”
“What?” I said.
“She thinks you’re jealous.” Marco shrugged.
“Huh?” I said. I caught his eye in the reflection. “Of you guys?”
“Are you?” Marco said.
“No!” I said. “Why would I be jealous? She’s just insecure.” Then: “Don’t tell her I said that.”
“I won’t.” Marco smirked. Then he stood up. “Gotta go.”
“You just got here!” This was the second time this week he’d . . . whatever. It wasn’t a big deal. “Throw this out for me?” I held up a small plastic deli bag knotted at the top.
Marco looked at the bag like it was full of rotten meat and maggots instead of Diet Sunkist cans and Popsicle sticks.
“No.” Marco shook his head.
“I beg your pardon?” I said.
“My hands are full,” Marco whined. He was carrying a Jean Paul Gaultier gym bag (which he’d been lugging around ever since he lost his apartment and had become “transient”)—but only with one hand. The other was free.
“Just take out the trash, please,” I said—sharply.
Marco stared hatefully at the plastic bag.
“Fine,” he finally said, snatching it from my hand. He slammed my door shut behind him. The next morning, I couldn’t find my Dexedrine bottle.
A few nights later, Marco returned.
BUZZZZZZZZZZ. BUZZZZZZZZZZ. BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. BUZZZZZZ. BUZZZZZ. I jumped up and ran through the living room to the intercom. Nev came out of his room half-asleep.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. He was standing in his boxers. His girlfriend was sitting up in bed; his two black-and-white cats were weaving around his ankles.
“Can you tell your friends not to buzz this late?” he mumbled.
“Of course,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
Marco sauntered into the apartment in his leather jeans. The cats ran from him.
“Marco!” I said. “Apologize to Nev!” But Marco didn’t even look at him. He stormed into my room and slammed the door. I followed and found him lighting up a Marlboro Red.
“Hey!” I said, yanking him over to the windows and opening one. “What’s the matter with you?”
Marco had scratches on his face. He put his gym bag on the floor and unpacked his stuff: a copy of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray—and Carly’s passport.
“I stole that bitch’s passport,” he said unnecessarily. Then he stared at it, curled his lip.
“That’s fucked up,” I said.
“Fuck that cunt,” he growled. “Next time she falls asleep around me, I’m gonna cut off all of her hair!”
“Marco!” I recoiled. “Don’t even joke about doing that to a woman! That’s the sickest thing I’ve ever heard!”
Suddenly Marco was sugary sweet.
“Just kidding,” he said. “I’d never do that.” Still, I shuddered. Love really was a battlefield, wasn’t it? That’s why I preferred Vyvanse to boyfriends.
I sat on the sofa with my best friend until sunrise, chewing gum to keep my eyes open. He was hopped up, hogging my computer, talking about himself.
“And then,” Marco said. “I walked up to the bar at Lucky Strike—”
“And you demanded a Pellegrino and they just gave it to you,” I finished. Lately he’d been telling me the same stories—ones in which he was fearsome, audacious, and glamorous—over and over.
“Isn’t this great?” Marco turned my laptop around to show me a black-and-white photo. It was of him, of course.
“Nice,” I yawned. Marco had thousands of self-portraits banked in his Gmail. He was always e-mailing them to me and to Carly and his mother.
Giving him a Flip cam had been a bad idea. Now Marco always wanted me to film him—and sometimes it got weird when I did.
“MEN WANT MY PENIS!” he’d shrieked to the streets a few weeks ago. We’d taken ecstasy and he’d handed me the camera. “MEN WANT MY PENIS! MEN WANT MY PENIS!” He’d pulled out his bouncy ball. Bounce bounce bounce.
A few weeks later, he showed me the stickers he’d had professionally printed from a photo of his body in silhouette—with a huge erection. He slapped these things all over downtown (there’s still one on a stop sign on Broome Street in Soho). I tried to appreciate his “art,” but I was a little . . . perturbed. What did it all mean? Sometimes I felt like my friend was a puzzle I had to figure out.
Tonight was definitely one of those times—but I was too tired to think too hard about it. I had a beauty event in Connecticut in a few hours. I begged Marco to keep it down, gave him a kiss, popped a pill, and returned to bed.
I woke up an hour later to rapid-fire camera sounds.
Click-click-click-click-click-click. I sat up on my elbows. My room was light blue and purple: the sun was just starting to rise outside. Click-click-click-click-click-click.
Marco was hanging out the window as he shot himself with a thirty-five-millimeter camera. Click-click-click-click. He had on my Chanel aviators and my leopard-print fur Adrienne Landau vest. YSL Rouge Volupté no. 17 lipstick was smeared all over his mouth. He was vamping like Buffalo Bill (“Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me”) in The Silence of the Lambs—and this was long before selfies were a thing.
“Are you serious,” I mumbled. It was such a surreal tableau that I wasn’t sure I wasn’t hallucinating.
If Marco noticed me stirring, he didn’t let on. Bitch’s natural lighting was too good. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click click click click. I passed back out.
When I opened my eyes again, it was morning. Marco was next to me, on top of the covers with his boots still on. I left him and let him sleep. I spent the day in Ridgefield at the opening of a beauty boutique in a flagship CVS store. I made small talk with Kristin Davis of Sex and the City—and applauded dutifully at the VIPs’ speeches.
I didn’t go back to the office that afternoon. Instead, I came home early with Marco’s favorite sandwich from Sunny & Annie’s—the Mona Lisa—and a green juice for me. But when I opened my bedroom door, Marco wasn’t there. Oh well. I scanned the room for the cute note he usually left me: nothing.
Actually, there was something. I’d left the room messy, but now it looked . . . different-messy, like someone had been rummaging through things. My drawers, my closet, the papers on my desk all seemed to have been disturbed.
I walked around the room and took in the odd energy I was feeling—was I imagining things?—and wondered what my best friend could possibly have been looking for.
The next time Marco visited Nev’s apartment, he brought a wee octogenarian. The old man wore a ratty cardigan and appeared to be hunched over his own rib cage.
“This is my friend Lester Garbage Head,” Marco said, ushering him into the apartment. Nev and his girlfriend were in the kitchen cooking tortellini, perhaps.
“Nice to meet—” Nev started.
Marco grabbed Lester and darted into my bedroom, slamming the door in my roommate’s face.
“Nev, I’m so sorry,” I apologized, and ran into my room after them.
“Marco!” I said. “I’m not going to tell you again. That’s my roommate! You can’t be so rude! Say hi to Nev!”
Marco made a big fuss of rolling his eyes. Then he popped open the door and stuck his greasy, handsome head out. “Hi, Nev.”
Then he slammed the door shut again.
“You’re the worst,” I said. But I had him over every day, so I don’t know what that made me.
“Nice crib,” Methuselah said. Upon closer inspection, I saw that Lester was probably only about twenty years old. What was Marco doing with him?
“Lester’s gonna teach us to fix,” Marco announced. Ah. He’d found a junkie—a real one—to tutor him.
The junkie was taking a kit out of his backpack: a bag of syringes, a belt . . .
“I don’t know,” I said. I’d never shot dope before. Also, it was, like, a random Wednesday evening.
“Need a spoon,” Lester Garbage Head said.
“I’ll get it—” I said, but he was already out in the kitchen. I followed.
“Got a spoon?” he asked Nev, who was stirring a pot.
“Yes,” my roommate said. “Why?”
“Magic trick,” Lester Garbage Head said.
Nev shot me a look.
“He’s really talented.” I swallowed.
Nev looked suspicious, but slowly reached into his perfect silverware drawer anyway.
“Here,” he said, extending the spoon to Lester Garbage Head.
“Thanks.” Lester snatched it.
“Heh-heh.” I smiled at my roommate. Then I scurried after Lester and shut my bedroom door.
As I said, I didn’t want to mainline heroin on a work night, but I decided that a little cocaine would be okay. I had some in the house, so I just let Lester Garbage Head shoot me up with that. (I know what you’re thinking, and yes, I always used clean needles. I am HIV free! The ER doctor told me so the last time I overdosed.) I thought it would be awesome, but I didn’t like the feeling at all. It was extremely wild and overwhelming to have a stimulant flooding my body like that. Too much. I felt like a pinball was ricocheting around inside me for like twenty hours. (Injecting gives you hep C. Don’t even think about it, teens.)
That night after he left, I didn’t see Marco again for weeks. I tried not to take it personally, but it hurt my feelings. He was spending so much time with Carly. And he was my only close friend! My text-message alert would chime, I’d pick up my phone, expecting it to be my bestie, but it was always Lester Garbage Head. I’d let him come over. I’d watch him shoot up and he’d ask me out. I always declined—the dates, not the dope—but it was nice to have a dude paying attention to me, even if he was a baghead. A guy hadn’t had a crush on me since . . . God, I didn’t even know.
I was mad lonely. So one afternoon, I hung out with Marco’s “other” best friend, Trevor—who was gay—after work. We watched Ab Fab and smoked weed.
I missed Marco. When he did finally come around to my house again, I mentioned that I’d hung out with Trevor without him—and Marco lost it.
“Fuck that faggot!” Marco ranted. “He’s obsessed with my dick!” The penis thing again. “That faggot wants to suck my dick!” He was pacing in my room.
“Don’t say those things!” I said. I was so confused. Marco loved Trevor! They’d grown up together; he was over there all the time.
“What did you guys say about me?” He was all paranoid. “What did you talk about?”
“AB FAB!” I said. “The TV show!”
“That’s it?” Marco didn’t believe me. “WHAT ELSE?”
“Um . . .” I couldn’t even remember; we’d gotten so stoned. “Cicciolina!” I cried. “David Lynch! Twin Peaks!”
“You’re not allowed to hang out with him again without me there!” Marco barked. “He’s not your friend!”
“Fine, I won’t,” I said. “I won’t!”
“You promise?” I nodded. “You swear?”
“Yes!”
And just like that, Marco stopped pacing the room and, like . . . mutated—into something soft and doe-eyed. He plopped down on the sofa and started rubbing up on me like one of the cats he hated. “I really love you.”
What the hell was going on? Whatever; I was just happy he’d calmed down. I gave that weirdo eighty dollars to go out and score us crack, just like old times. Marco hit the streets. I messed around in my shelves, organizing my art books. Then I lay on my bed. An hour passed, then two. My friend’s phone went straight to voice mail. I felt angrier and angrier. Marco never came back.
It was around this time that I was escorted out of Cirque du Soleil by my elbows at the instruction—I believed—of the Vice President of Marketing for a major advertiser beauty brand. Remember? (I sure do.)
A few weeks after that fiasco, I was at my desk at Lucky, working very hard at trying on the latest Poppy King lipsticks. It was an afternoon like any other. Simone had been up and down all day, escorting beauty VIPs to Jean’s office with their bags of new products. I listened in on these “desksides” all day whether I wanted to or not, since I sat so close to Jean. She always left the door open.
At around four, Simone brought back . . . the Vice President of Marketing.
We locked eyes right away.
“Hey,” I forced out. The Vice President of Marketing nodded. Barely.
That’s when I noticed that the Vice President of Marketing didn’t have any gift bags with her—nor her usual gaggle of publicists.
“Good to see you . . .” Jean air-kissed her visitor.
“Can I close this?” The Vice President of Marketing gestured to the glass office door. Then she slid it shut.
“Is the Vice President of Marketing here for a deskside?” I asked Simone.
“I think it’s just . . . a meeting,” she said. Oh, bloody hell.
Twenty minutes later, the door slid open again. I looked right at the Vice President of Marketing as she exited my boss’s office. She did not look back at me.
“Simone will walk you out,” Jean said. The vice president continued to stare straight ahead as she followed Simone back to reception.
I picked up a press release and pretended to be engrossed.
Three . . . two . . .
“Cat?”
Yep.
I went into JGJ’s office.
“What’s up?” I said.
Jean looked at me.
“That meeting . . .” Jean said slowly, “was about you.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Were you . . . wasted at Cirque du Soleil?” She sounded like she was still processing what she’d been told. “And at the Mayflower?”
“No!” I assured her. “Jean, let me explain . . .” And you can imagine how it went from there. All I could do was spin, spin, spin: “That woman has it out for me, Jean! You know I’m not disrespectful!” Deny, deny, deny: “I was late for dinner at the Mayflower because I wanted to skip the cocktail hour!” Lie, lie, lie: “She thought I was drunk at Cirque du Soleil because I tripped on my way to the ladies’ room!” Accuse, accuse, accuse: “She had me thrown out in front of everyone, Jean! It was insane! She’s unprofessional! Not me!”
“Mmm . . .” Jean said.
I looked her straight in the eye.
“It wasn’t drugs or alcohol, Jean,” I said. “I wouldn’t lie to you about that. Not after everything you’ve done for me.”
She looked at me hard for what felt like ten hours.
“Okay,” my boss finally said. “I believe you.”
“Thank—” I exhaled.
“I’m choosing to believe you,” JGJ cut me off. “But you must do better. Do you understand? You must do better.”
“Yes.” I was nodding like a bobblehead doll. “Yes. Yes. Yes, I will. Thank you. I’m so sorry—”
“Don’t apologize,” Jean said sharply. “Just do better.” Then she swiveled her chair around to face her computer. Meeting adjourned.
I went back to my cubicle. Simone and Cristina had heard the whole thing. I sat down in my rolling chair. My boss’s back was to me as she continued typing.
I’m sorry, I thought.
Gay guys always have better drugs. For this reason, Marco and I drove to New Jersey on a Friday evening to spend the weekend with Trevor and his party-boy friends at his family’s house. Our host popped Molly in our mouths before we were even out of the car! Forty minutes later, we were deeper into the matrix than Keanu Reeves, and we stayed there all night.
That’s when . . . it happened.
Ugh.
Look, I’d never felt sexually attracted to Marco, okay? We’d slept in bed together like children our entire friendship. I’d posed naked for him twenty times; we’d done MDMA just the two of us a hundred times. But we were not like that.
And yet somehow, on this night, we went to a bedroom and got together. Together-together. I truly have no idea who initiated what, though I do have a theory on why I went along with it: I wanted to feel close to my friend, who’d been so distant lately. I’d been feeling insecure, and Marco knew it.
And then somehow that dynamic—that energy between us—turned into strange, cold sex. Marco’s icy-blue eyes were blank and glazed as he boned me. In the middle of it, my mind flashed to his sketchbooks full of girls getting fucked up their asses with torture devices. I was relieved when the sex was over. I knew it would never happen again.
We woke up together in the morning, then got in the Fiat to return to the city. Something was wrong. With Marco. He was hardly speaking at all, and when he did, his affect was very flat. He almost sounded like a robot. I made jokes to lighten the mood, but Marco wouldn’t laugh. It was disconcerting and uncomfortable.
We drove along in mostly silence. I looked out the window at the highway streaking by. My brain felt fried. I had work the next day.
“Is everything okay?” I finally said.
Marco didn’t say anything. He had fully shut down. We got back to New York, and after that, things were never the same.