I SHOULD HAVE GRACEFULLY ADMITTED defeat when I returned to Lucky in the third week of November. Instead, I stuck around. Everyone treated me with kid gloves; Jean Godfrey-June was particularly protective as always. She told me to take it easy, gave me minimal writing assignments, and repeatedly pulled me into her office to check in, and to tell me to believe in myself. That I was talented. That I was creative. That it wasn’t going to always feel like it felt today. But I could no longer hear her.
I’d returned to drugs the same way I’d gone back to work: quickly, and without thinking too much about it. My weeks-long abstinence had been a very nice holiday, but now that I was back in my regular life, I was taking a big, soul-flattening daily mix of pills just like before. Then I was deep inside my addiction again. Was it obvious? Probably. I wasn’t engaged with people when I talked to them. My affect was flat as a flounder. I was popping in and out of the office to smoke like a drunk girl at a bar. I wasn’t interested in the thank-you Sprinkles cupcakes that arrived from Pantene. I sat at my desk chair picking at my scalp and staring into space. You know. Little things! But they all add up. And my boss had to observe this stuff every day and—I imagine—figure out what exactly she was going to do about me.
I wasn’t allowed to attend events anymore.
“For now,” Jean said.
It was the height of the holiday season. Now there wasn’t much for me to do but open gifts. I kept attending invite meetings, making things awkward for everybody. My coworkers would divide the dinners, press trips, and mascara launches three ways while I sat there with my eyes as glazed as a Krispy Kreme. I had no one to blame but myself, but still, it hurt my pride.
And then. Talk about adding insult to injury! With Cristina and Simone doubling down on events, I was assigned both weekly production meetings: Tuesday and Thursday mornings. And these would go about as expected.
“Beauty Spy Three?” Regan, the managing editor, would ask.
“Ummmm . . .” I’d say.
I started calling in sick—a lot—for the first time in my career. I’d always shown up for work before my second disability leave: I showed up high, I showed up bloody, I showed up crying and hid in the beauty closet all day, but I showed up. Not anymore.
“I can’t come in,” I’d mumble to Simone or Cristina from bed. I never called my boss directly. “Tell Jean.” Then I’d hang up, turn my ringer off, and not check e-mail all day. It was sneaky and avoidant, and don’t think everybody didn’t know it.
“If you’re going to stay home, you must speak to me,” Jean would ream me out the next day. “Is that clear?”
I’d nod. Then three days later, I’d leave a message with the intern.
Despite all this, my boss kept trying to keep my career—and me—afloat. After Christmas break, JGJ told me that she had great news. Everyone loved my once-a-week luckymag.com posts so much that they wanted me to blog three to five times a day! It was an obviously made-up position that played to my strengths and also kept me at my desk, where JGJ could keep an eye on me. I tried to be grateful. I gave it a shot, but nothing I wrote was clever or witty. My spark was gone. And I was too tired to fake it.
My addiction was beating me like a rug. It became harder and harder to get out of bed at Avenue C. I started oversleeping, arriving forty minutes late. Sometimes I didn’t come in until noon.
“Golden Globes Beauty: Cameron Rocks the ‘Cat Marnell Is Late for Work’ Look” I wrote of a messily coiffed Ms. Diaz on January 20, 2010. Another post from this time alluded to sitting down in the shower. I was giving up.
By late January, I’d lost the ten pounds I’d put on eating French bread pizza and psych-ward bagels. Then I lost five more. I’d bring a stir-fry back to my desk and eat two water chestnuts before I lost interest. Thump! I’d throw it away in my trash can. Often Jean lifted her eyes and saw me doing this. And I saw her seeing me.
I’d stopped sleeping again, too. One afternoon when Jean, Cristina, and Simone were all out, I was sitting at my desk when I saw it: tissue paper moving at my feet. Something alive was in there!
“AAUGHHH!” I sprung out of that chair so fast that I careened into the beauty closet.
“There’s a rat under my desk!” I cried to the intern. “HELP!” Intern put down the Rodin Face Oil she was about to file and let me drag her back to my cubicle. She got on her hands and nubile teen knees to investigate.
“There’s nothing here,” Intern said, pulling out sheets of designer tissue paper. I went to the Condé Nast nurse’s office for a rest after that. I’d been up for two straight days.
The following Monday, I pulled another all-nighter. I was still wavy when I sat down for the Tuesday-morning production meeting.
“Beauty Spy One?”
“I dunno . . .” Ray glared at me.
“Beauty Spy Four?”
“Dunno . . .” I slurred through the whole thing like I was Johnny Depp at the Hollywood Film Awards.
Word got back to Jean, of course. I’d sobered up by the time she called me into her office that afternoon. It was gray outside the windows of 4 Times Square, with a fluffy flurry swirling around.
“I’m just depressed,” I lied—as I always did. “It’s not drugs or alcohol.”
“You must do better,” Jean said—as she always did.
“I know,” I said. “I just . . . don’t . . . know . . . what is wrong . . .” I met Jean’s eyes. “With me.”
We both sat there.
“What else can we do to help you?” For the thousandth time.
“I’m just going through a rough patch,” I said.
I returned to my cubicle and sat down. Jean resumed editing with her blue pens. I started opening messenger bags with my numb hands.
Then I stopped. It was silent in the beauty department. Cristina wasn’t there; neither was Simone. It was just my boss and me.
I stared at the gray carpet for a long time.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I blurted out.
What are you doing? someone screamed inside of me.
“Hmm?”
“I can’t do this anymore,” I repeated.
“What?” Jean looked up from her work.
“I quit,” I said. I was still slumped in my desk chair. “I quit my job.”
“Come in here!” she said. I obeyed and then resumed slumping, this time in a chair opposite her. Jean shut the door. “Look at me!” I lifted my eyes. “There are still so many options. You don’t have to do this! Talk to me. Tell me how we can help you.”
I stared at her. I was very tired. I thought about telling her the truth all over again: that it was drugs and alcohol, that I had been lying ever since I got back from Silver Hill.
“No,” I said. “I have to go.”
“You don’t have to do this,” Jean kept saying. “We want to help you. Let us help you!”
But I didn’t want help. I was so tired of the fight inside of me.
“I can’t have a job anymore.” I shook my head. “I am so sorry, Jean.”
My ambition and my addiction had been duking it out like two boxers in a ring for years. My ambition was bloodied, bruised, and—finally, now—defeated. Ding ding ding. That is supposed to be a bell. Addiction won. I didn’t want to be an editor in chief or a creative director or a beauty director anymore. I just wanted to go to bed.
And that was that. I officially terminated my career at the greatest media company in the world in February 2010. I wish I could tell you how it felt to say good-bye to Jean, Kim, and all of my colleagues. I want to tell you how it felt as I packed up my desk, loaded everything into a taxi, and drove away from the dream. But I don’t remember. Or maybe I’m confused. Maybe I do remember—it’s just that by that point, I wasn’t feeling anything at all.
I wanted to put my blackout curtains at Avenue C right up, go to sleep, and stay that way forever, but there was one last push I had to make. I’d been given a month’s pay and—more crucially—one more precious month of health-care coverage. Over the next thirty days, I tore through my usual Upper East Side psychiatrist circuit like I was on Supermarket Sweep. I filled a few months’ worth of Adderall, Adderall XR, Vyvanse, Xanax, Klonopin, Valium, Ambien, and Lunesta. Each script was only five or ten dollars with my Aetna card.
When my insurance ran out, I officially bowed out of the game of life. I was all alone. No more Condé. No more alarm clocks, no more F train. No more iced coffee. No more beauty events; no more desksides; no more production meetings; no more editors in chief. No more deadlines. No more pedicures; no more haircuts. No more Internet—I’d only used that at work. No more outside world. No more getting dressed. No more effort. It was all over.
It was just me.
I slept through March. When I woke up at strange hours—time didn’t matter anymore—I’d turn on my side to stare at the wall I’d been collaging ever since I moved in.
HELP, Jack Pierson scratched out on one drawing of a mascara wand.
FUCK THIS LIFE, the artist Weirdo Dave told me in another one.
LIFE IS A KILLER, it read over a photo of William S. Burroughs.
INSANE! the Britney-on-a-gurney Star cover read.
WAS IT MURDER? That was the headline of the Anna Nicole Smith New York Post front page I’d tacked up. All of this toxicity comforted me. It made me feel less alone.
But I wasn’t even there—inside my body. One day I looked in the mirror and hardly recognized myself. I was so pale, with an inch and a half of black roots. Eye makeup was smudged all over my face. The bathroom was crusty with clothes and a broken Essie nail polish bottle stuck to the floor. Glass pieces stuck up like stalagmites. When I sat down to pee, I saw blood in my underwear. I’d forgotten about periods. I’d forgotten I was a woman.
Swamp Thing snoozed through April. Did I worry about money? No. I shut off that part of my brain (drugs helped: I was always either high or unconscious). I ordered grilled cheese every day just to barf it up. When my bank account hit zero, I stuffed bags full of all the designer stuff I’ve been namedropping like a brat this whole book—A.P.C. dresses, Prada cashmere cardigans, YSL T-shirts—and hauled them to Buffalo Exchange. I sold it all. Marco’s things, too. The swag Christmas presents from beauty companies fetched the most.
Of course, a hundred bucks here and there didn’t pay the two-thousand-dollar rent. So neither did I. I kept waiting for someone to bang on my door. My apartment seemed just like my job—something I was bound to lose.
Months later, people did come pounding on my door, but it wasn’t rent money they were after. It was early spring.
BANG BANG BANG.
What? I jerked awake to the racket. It was a sunny afternoon in May. I was on my sofa, wearing a leopard-print chiffon slip by Mischen. It was sheer and very short, with a lace hem. What was going on?
Then I remembered that I was overdosing.
Yup. I’d run out of both money and Adderall, and I’d decided to die. I’d taken every pill in the house—let’s say twenty Xanax bars and twenty Ambien—and washed them down with Diet Snapple.
My mom had texted me just as the pills started kicking in.
I a0e24jeust took an overdose bbkfbal, I’d texted back. Then I’d started shutting down.
And now here I was, still on the couch, slipping out of consciousness. Trying to, anyway. BANG BANG BANG. The noise kept bringing me back into focus.
“POLICE!” a man was shouting. BANG BANG BANG. They were jiggling at the knob. “OPEN UP!” Yeah, right. I crawled over to the door and sort of . . . collapsed against it, and put my ear up to everything.
“We need to go through your window!” someone was hollering over the din . . . at my next-door neighbor?
“What’s going on?” She was hollering back. Then I heard thump-thump-clang-thump-clang: firefighters, with their tanks on their backs. Oh God. I didn’t want to listen anymore.
I slid down to the floor and curled up in a ball.
My eyelids were so heavy . . .
GRRZZZZZZZZ! I woke up to drilling.
But then I went under again. Mmm.
BANG BANG BANG BANG. I opened my eyes. GRZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. That drill!
Then I heard a familiar voice.
“CAITLIN,” it was screaming. “UNLOCK THE DOOR!”
My big sister was out there! I tried to lift my head, but it was like I had a broken neck.
“EMILY!” I moaned from my fetal position. “EM-I-LLY!”
“SHE’S AWAKE!” Everyone started freaking out—and banging harder than ever. BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!
“CAITLIN!” Emily was shouting.
“EMM-I-LLLY!” I wailed. “EMM-I-LLLY! HELP MEEE! I’m scared of the police!”
“I’m right here!” Emily shouted. “I’M RIGHT HERE.”
My sister pleaded with me through the door for twenty-five minutes. GRRZZZZZZZZ. BANG BANG BANG. The commotion wouldn’t stop. Finally—and after a few false starts—I reached for the bottom lock. Click. Then I flipped the top lock. Click—
BOOM! A mob barged in and snatched me up by my ankles and my elbows. I was four feet in the air before I could even try to slump back onto the ground! It was like an episode of Lockup: Raw. Don’t worry, I handled the whole thing like a lady.
“FUCK YOU,” I spat, and thrashed at the cops and paramedics as I twisted around in the air. “LEMME GO!” I kicked one of them. They were struggling to strap me onto a gurney. “GET OFF ME!”
“RELAX, MA’AM!” the cops were shouting at me. “RELAX!”
I was being wheeled into the elevator when I spotted my sister. Her face was practically purple; she was crying so hard.
“EMILY!” I howled. She started crying harder. “EMILY! EMILY! HELP ME! EMILY!” I started thrashing around again. Two female cops were trying to hold me down. My slip was coming off. “FUCK YOU! GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME! NO! NO! EMILY! HELP ME, EMILY!” My sister was crying even harder now. They rolled me onto the elevator. “LEMME GO. FUCK YOU!” I was still struggling. “EM-IL-YYYY!” I screamed for her the whole ride. “EM-IL-YYY!”
Ping. The elevator opened into the lobby. The paramedics rolled me out onto East Second Street. Fire trucks and police cars were everywhere: they’d closed the whole block off. The people gathered outside stared as I was put in the back of the ambulance. Suddenly, I was very tired.
“Where am I going?” I murmured to the EMT. Then I passed out.
I woke up the next day—for real—on a stretcher in the hallway of a psych ward. I was clammy all over, and my skin smelled bitter. I guess Xanax was coming out of my pores. I was starving, so I begged some chocolate puddings off a nurse and wolfed down three in a row. Then it was time to get out of there.
I called my sister at her PR firm.
“I’m in Bellevue,” I greeted her. “Long story. Can you come sign me out?”
“I’m busy,” she said.
“Busy?” I said. “I’m in the hospital!” She didn’t say anything. “Do you have any idea what I’ve been through in the past twenty-four hours?”
Emily hung up.
What’s her problem? I thought.
But my sister came through. An hour later, I was following her out into the bright Murray Hill sunshine. She was silent as she hailed a taxi. I tried to climb into the backseat after her, but Emily slammed the door shut.
“Wait!” I cried. “I don’t have any money!”
The cab drove away.
It was a long walk to Alphabet City—especially in that see-through leopard-print getup and no bra. Guys in trucks kept honking at me, and I was so thirsty. I felt pretty sick from all those pills, too. I was mad at Emily. Why was she being such a bitch? It wasn’t until I got home and stood in my hallway again that I remembered my big sister had been there the day before, screaming and screaming. Trying to save my life.
Marco was circling again. I could feel it. I hadn’t seen him since Payne Whitney, but he still had a key to the building—on my neon-yellow lanyard. Some nights I jerked upright in bed, convinced I heard him at my apartment door, fiddling with the lock. One day I noticed his signature in spray paint on a wall on Avenue B—right by my house. Had it always been there? A few days later, I spotted another autograph on a lamppost on my block. I felt sick—and vulnerable. It had been a mistake to steal his clothes. I was always on edge.
It was just a few weeks after I’d landed in Bellevue, and I wasn’t sure I could handle another showdown with my ex–best friend. So when the DJ from LA—the guy who’d followed me home from that coke party, remember?—told me he was returning to New York and asked if he could crash for a few weeks, I said yes. Marco preyed on girls and wimpy gay guys (sorry, Trevor) but feared grown straight men.
The DJ from LA arrived at four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon.
“Why aren’t you at work?” he said. The last time he’d been in town, I’d gotten up every weekday morning and left him behind in my bed.
“Oh,” I said. “I quit my job.” I could tell he wasn’t pleased to learn that I’d be around.
The DJ from LA was nice enough for the first few days. He and his friend Soupy even called Marco from my phone.
“I’m staying here now!” he barked. “And if you come around, we’ll fucking kill you!”
“Yeah!” Soupy snarled. “We’ll kill you!” As far as I know, it worked. I didn’t see Marco again for years.
But I had a new jerk on my hands. After a week or so, the DJ from LA started acting really awful.
The DJ from LA was in a dark place, too—a downtown-nightclubs and after-hours schedule. He wanted the apartment to be like a cave. So I climbed up on my radiator with a mouthful of thumbtacks and pinned up sheets and beach blankets like blackout curtains.
“Left,” he directed me. He didn’t want a single sliver of light. “Down.” Then I stacked books and magazines on the windowsill to cover any holes. We left it like that for weeks. I couldn’t ever tell what time it was. But since I was only getting out of bed to take baths, I didn’t mind.
He’d get in from the clubs at eight in the morning and watch the video for “Estranged” on my laptop, on the sofa in the dark, coming down on coke.
“Alone . . .” Axl Rose would whisper through the blackness. The DJ from LA would crack open a can of beer. Sometimes he’d do bumps. All I could see was the red cherry of his cigarette. He smoked constantly, even with those sealed windows. I never said anything.
“How was your night?” I asked one morning when he came in at eight o’clock. I was always awake when he got home—and it irritated him.
He pretended not to hear me, even though we were in a studio, and sat down on the sofa.
“Hello?” I said.
He stared straight ahead.
“Okay . . .”
“I may be staying here, but I don’t want to talk to you,” he finally snapped. “We’re not friends. Got it?”
But no matter how terrible the DJ from LA was, I let him stay. That’s how low my self-esteem was when I was twenty-seven and a half.
I was zonked, anyway. My mom had given me cash to see a psychiatrist after the overdose, and I had a half dozen pill bottles on my bedside table again. Late at night, I’d take my sedative and sleeping pill and Seroquel, and the DJ from LA would watch from the sofa. He liked when I was stoned. Half an hour later, when my eyelids got droopy and I started acting all wonky, he’d come over from the sofa. He was mean during sex, too. I’m no prude; believe me, I can get down with a lot of stuff. This was not a good time. But I kept doing it. And when he pulled out his thirty-five-millimeter camera and took XXX pictures with flash, I let him. I was out to the ball game, as the song goes—too gone to care if I ever came back.
Weeks went by. One day I was wearing a white T-shirt from a Los Angeles company called Fucking Awesome. The letters were black, and there was a noose hanging from one of them.
HOW TO MURDER YOUR LIFE, it read.
The DJ from LA did a double take.
“Where did you get that shirt?” he said—like he was accusing me of something.
“eBay,” I replied.
“But I used to have that shirt,” he said.
“So what?” I was confused. He looked disgusted.
This would be the most pleasant conversation we had all day. The DJ from LA and I were getting into horrible fights. He’d say such ugly things! So I stopped having sex with him. He tolerated this for about a week. Then he started . . . just trying to take sex from me. One afternoon I tried to sit down on the sofa next to him and watch Christiane F. David Bowie was on-screen singing “Station to Station” when the DJ from LA reached over, grabbed the back of my head, and pushed it into his lap! I hadn’t noticed him take his dick out.
“Hey!” I cried. “Stop!”
“Suck it,” he was saying. “Suck it!” It was five o’clock in the afternoon! He wouldn’t let my head up.
“NO!” I yelled. Now he was tearing at my clothes. He grabbed my arms and held them behind me. “Fuck you!” I struggled to get away from him. “GET OFF ME!”
“You know you like it.” He was still trying to pull my sweatpants down.
“LET ME GO!” I screamed. I was still fighting to break free. “I’M SERIOUS! THIS IS RAPE!” He kept laughing. Finally I escaped his grip. I beelined to my bathroom and locked myself inside. I’d played sexy games before. That wasn’t what this was. I got in the shower and stayed there for twenty minutes, shaking. Then I got dressed in the clothes I’d just taken off.
“I need you to go,” I said. “I need you to get your stuff and leave my keys”—I’d given him a set, of course—“and go. I don’t want to see you ever again.”
The DJ from LA smirked.
“Whatever,” he said. He grabbed his duffel bag and handed over the keys. “It’s fucking depressing here, anyway.”
A few days later, I was soaking—half sleeping, really—in a bath at five in the morning when . . . BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
I opened my eyes to darkness. The candle I’d lit had gone out, and the water was cool. I turned the faucet to get hot water. Then I got out of the tub and wrapped my dirty Bambi towel around my body.
“Hello?” I mumbled into the intercom.
“It’s me.” The DJ from LA was very drunk.
“You can’t come up here,” I slurred. “I’m through with you.”
I stumbled back into the dark bathroom and into the tub. The hot water was still running. I slid down and submerged my head. I closed my eyes.
BZZZZZZZZZ. BZZZZZZZZZZ.
I came up for air.
This time I went to the intercom naked.
“I SAID NO!” I screamed into the speaker, holding down the talk button. My body felt like rubber. “GO AWAY!”
Then I wobbled back to the slippery, dark tub and sat down hard. Splash.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. He was leaning on it.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
My life was on repeat, like Marco’s Eyes Wide Shut DVD. I knew the man outside was bad. I buzzed the bad man back up.
Then it was June, and suddenly the DJ from LA was around less, anyway. I wouldn’t see him for days at a time, and when he was there, he ignored me and slept on the sofa. I guessed that he’d found another girl to torture.
Good riddance! I needed to focus on my new freelancing career, anyway. After the Bellevue fiasco, suicide was officially off the table—which meant I had to make some money. I’d reached out to someone I knew at Self beauty and had been assigned four items: on the “gray” makeup trend, high-tech eyelash serums, and . . . well, I forget the other two. But it wasn’t anything too tough. The pay was twenty-eight hundred dollars! Geez! I felt hopeful for the first time since I quit Lucky. Maybe I could make this drug-addict-who-works-from-home thing happen after all.
I had four weeks. I spent the entire month high and only started writing three days before everything was due. Then I sat at my desk for days, abusing speed with forty open windows on my desktop. Same old me.
Stormy shades are storming the runway, I wrote. No, that wasn’t any good. Storm-cloud colors. Concrete-colored manicures . . . My mind was mush. Why couldn’t I think of things that were gray? Smoke. I was so burned out. Ash. River stones. My face was swollen from not sleeping. I pressed it down with my fingers. Gray goose. My nose was running; my eyes were watering. Gray mice.
I’d been up seventy-two hours straight when I finally turned in the stories. Not only were they days late, they were awful. Self had asked for expert advice and quotes from research labs about the latest beauty technology. I hadn’t delivered any of that; plus, the sentences were choppy and screwy and weird from my incessant cutting and pasting. It was “Secret Ingredient: Goat’s Milk” all over again.
I couldn’t deal with it anymore. I just wanted to be unconscious. I went to bed with my Xanax and Ambien bottles under my pillow. I barely moved for three days. Every time I woke up, I knew I should check my e-mail to get feedback and edits from Self. But I didn’t want to. So I’d take another pill, and things would go back to black again.
And then I had company.
I woke up and the DJ from LA was on top of me. He hadn’t been home since the previous week. And now he was inside of me.
“Don’t,” I mumbled. I tried to push him off. My mouth felt like it couldn’t talk—like the thing that happens in bad dreams. “Stop!”
The DJ from LA thrust a few more times. I tried to push him off.
“Get off me!” I said. “Stop!”
Then he came inside of me. I started to cry. He pulled out and rolled over. My shorts were still down around my ankles. I couldn’t believe what had just happened. I lay in the dark on the bed, sniffling and shaking. The DJ from LA pretended to sleep.
I kicked him out of my house for good the next day. He left without a fight. Then I stayed in bed another few weeks. It was beautiful outside, but I hardly ever went out. I just lay there reading celebrity gossip on the Internet and sleeping with the air-conditioning on.
Eventually I just knew I was pregnant. Was it from that encounter? I wasn’t sure. It didn’t matter. The test I peed on was a formality: it was positive as a proton. I booked an abortion. It was for ten days later.
I lay in bed for ten days.
Then I got up and went to my appointment. It was at one of the clinics hidden around Madison Square Park. I changed out of my white Daisy Duke shorts and McQ by Alexander McQueen rib cage baby tee and into a gown.
“Do you want to go under?” the nurse asked me. You bet, lady.
It was over in a snap. I woke up surrounded by other girls coming out of anesthesia. But only I was strapped to a stretcher.
“You were screaming and thrashing around,” the doctor said.
The nurses took me out of my restraints. I went into the bathroom. My hands trembled as I applied my lipstick.
I didn’t have anyone to take me home, so they just let me go. I walked out onto the street and put my headphones on. It’s Britney, bitch. It was a gorgeous early evening. I’d been in the abortion clinic for hours and hours. The sky was turning pink over Union Square. I pulled a thirty-milligram Adderall out of my pocket and crunched it between my teeth. Ahh. Then I put a piece of Trident pink bubble gum in my mouth. Britney and I sauntered down Park Avenue South. I knew there was a blood streak on the waistband of my white cutoff shorts but I didn’t care.