Fiction Ruined My Family (22 page)

Finally the embassy accepted me. All I had to do was pay for my flight over there. My happiness was interrupted by Donato, who called me over Labor Day weekend and fired me. It was a classy move, firing me on Labor Day. I didn't have any money to get on a plane. I had no credit cards or extra cash. I was tempted to charge what he owed me, $1,400 for two weeks' work, to his American Express card in dildos and have them delivered to his house.

The next day I got a call to audition for a new Arthur Miller play at the Public Theatre. My life was a mess and nothing ever worked out, but damn if it didn't have some movement.

Apparently this well-known theater director had seen me in a totally wacky play in a barn in Vermont, and he called me in to audition for the American debut of
The Ride Down Mt. Morgan
, a play I knew and liked a lot, about a man who has two wives, two families, who argues that his crime has only resulted in not one happy woman but two. The wives agree with him while hating his guts. It's not Miller's strongest, but it's still good. Patrick Stewart and Blythe Danner were playing the parents of my character. After the initial round of auditions I was brought in to audition for all the people from the Public Theatre and Arthur Miller. This was a really big deal for me. He was going to see what all the bonehead casting directors couldn't and after the show on opening night, when Patrick and Blythe and I were all relaxing with some mai tais at Joe's Pub next door to the theater, Arthur Miller was going to get rather quiet and serious and tell me how to write a decent play. He was tall, probably eighty at the time. I shook his hand and auditioned well. I always regretted not mentioning that as a kid I lived on Stony Hill Farm, where he and Marilyn honeymooned. As I waited to hear from the Public after that audition—it was between me and one other girl—I felt perhaps this was the thing that was going to set me on some ground that was real, not fantasy.

I didn't get the part, who knows why, they never tell you why, and for the next year I drank like a maniac. I couldn't properly support myself, a writer friend died from a heroin and vodka overdose, I endangered a pregnant friend with my Jackie Chan routine on Atlantic Avenue. It was decidedly un-PC, this series of karate kicks and air-chopping with much Asian-accented screaming. I busted it out on some guys on Atlantic Avenue, accidentally almost kicking them in the face and they did not think it was funny and semi-restrained me. The next day I realized my pregnant friend Sara was on the street with us and could have been hurt. I drank alone, I drank after parties, I started going to bars by myself when no one else wanted to drink with me, I got kicked out of bars for drunkenness (this never made sense to me, if you can't be drunk in a bar where can you be drunk? It's like a hospital kicking you out for being too sick). I couldn't control how much I drank or what I said, a lifelong problem that was only heightened when drunk. I frequently hit on the wrong people. I knew women who had sex with oodles of men when drunk, but my dirty secret was that I hit on people not to get laid but to lure them back to my apartment (or usually theirs, as the no-bathroom thing was a hassle to explain), where I would drunkenly spoon them. I was cruising for cuddles. Here's a big moment of clarity as a lady alkie: When guys stop wanting to bang you when you've been drinking, it's a pretty good sign that you have a drinking problem. One night I was house-sitting at a friend's loft on Crosby Street (I did a lot of house-sitting) and this guy I was taking home didn't get out of the cab with me. I was dumbfounded. Look at me. I look so pathetic and dependent I'm almost a tax write-off. And you don't want it?

I knew I wasn't going to beat this thing. I saw that my mother couldn't beat it. I also knew that I would be my own kind of alcoholic. I didn't have any money so I wouldn't be drunkenly ordering from Balducci's and watching
Oprah
while slumped on a divan surrounded by silver riding trophies, brown from neglect, and ashtrays piled high with cigarette butts and peach pits. I'd be that aged temp, that volatile teacher, that “quirky” salesperson at Williams-Sonoma, waiting for five o'clock to get blotto. I was now talking on barstools about all the things I was going to do. And I knew, when the talking starts, things are not good. I was beginning to be able to see myself from the outside. I was trying to be the person talking the shit but I was also the person watching the shit-talker. It was like being out on a date with yourself and knowing you're never going to call yourself after tonight. I was hoping in fact never to run into myself ever again. Katharine says that at the end when I drank I shouted nearly everything. That's what happens after the talking (about all the things I'm going to do) starts, the volume issue. Can everyone hear what an AMAZING person I am? NO? Well, let me try it A LITTLE LOUDER, THEN. I remember being at a party at my friends Brooke and Edgar's house in Park Slope and we were all sitting around their kitchen table, getting drunk as we did, and Edgar was at the fridge asking if anyone needed a beer. I had a cigarette in one hand, half a beer in the other, a glass of whiskey in front of me, a joint was being passed to me and I was waving yes, I need another beer, to Edgar at the fridge. I felt like an alcoholic octopus. If I could have held my glass of Maker's Mark between my toes I would have been swilling that simultaneously. I remember thinking, I can't stop once I start. I can't even slow down once I start. Other people thought I was fun, nutty, entertaining, but I felt defeated and that this feeling would just go on and on. I'd be eking by on seasonal work and peanut butter sandwiches for dinner forever. I saw that no casting director was going to give me a break, that I wasn't capable of being in a relationship, that I was a cheater, that I couldn't support myself. I was going to be left with being a drunk. And that would mean living through the same ordeal twice: first as the daughter of an alcoholic and then as the alcoholic. I couldn't go through those feelings again. For a long time I was worried about becoming my father. Then I was worried about becoming my mother. Now I was worried about becoming myself.

I was thirty years old. I saw the genome on the wall. It read: Beware ye who cross that line into a life of lies and selfdeception. You may not make it back. Who would visit this apartment and think I was in good shape? Even my father, king of the depressing domiciles, a man who scribbled the letters of the Greek alphabet on pieces of paper and taped them to his walls so he could engage his brain while using his rowing machine, had a bathroom. I had one fork and one spoon and two knives. I had a couple plates and three mugs. I had one blanket and a purple sleeping bag Jed had bought me for a camping trip. It was super-warm and nice, but every time I stuffed my feet into that little pocket at the bottom I thought, I need a decent comforter. This is pretty depressing.

I was trying to get help. I was seeing a shrink in therapyville, the highly concentrated area of downtown therapist offices between Fourteenth Street and Eighth Street from University Place to Fifth Avenue. Hildey was great. Very motherly, and I needed that at first. She was about fifty and very gentle. She was cheap and when I couldn't afford cheap she let me run a tab with her. We talked a lot about my mother and how difficult it was to watch her give up on herself, how she was seemingly rehab-proof, how she was a total shut-in now, having all her booze delivered, how she looked, how she smelled, how awful it was to mourn someone while they are still alive. Hildey was a great listener and remembered things I said long past the point when I thought it was charming to be quoted directly by your therapist. But she just kept pushing a regular job on me, kept trying to get me to see how being a writer was this terrible, terrible thing. I think that as a regular person she just couldn't understand all the dumb shit I did and the pathetic ways I got by, scraping by on no money, never going to the doctor or the dentist, calling my painter friend Linda who was equally broke to come with me when I needed to go to the bank to check my balance, for moral support. This was probably an unsettling thing for Hildey to witness. Things weren't going well for me, I wasn't denying that, but I was doing what I wanted to despite the number of times I opened mail and saw the words “overdue,” “past due,” and “delinquent.” She didn't understand I didn't want the stockbroker hubby and the framed photo of Ronald Reagan in his ranch hat over the bed. I had had the opportunity for a regular life, to be a missus, and had decided that that was not going to get my word count up. She didn't understand this was what being an artist looks like, disaster, total personal ruin. God. Get with it, lady.

“Jeanne, I think you're a wonderful person with a family history that can only be described as ‘chilling,' and I'm trying to get you to see how you can utilize your talents in a healthy way.”

“There's no healthy way to use talent, Hildey.”

It seemed she was always trying to get me to give up the only thing I had, the only thing that gave meaning to my life.

Hildey had some issues of her own that were annoying but not deal breakers. Hildey had Lyme disease and had trouble keeping weight on, so she snacked discreetly during our sessions. I saw nothing wrong with this. I did, however, think it was odd that she answered the phone during my sessions, and when I suggested she get an answering machine she balked as if she wasn't one of those techie people. An answering machine in 1999 was hardly cutting-edge. Most New York City chipmunks had them at the time. It had been weeks since I asked her to get one, and she was still picking up the phone when it rang.

“I'm sorry, Jeanne, but I have to be available to patients. What if it's a real emergency? Fifty minutes is too long to wait.”

I would grumble and go on.

One day she let me know she was having some Lymerelated procedure at the hospital the following day and she would need to pick up the phone if the hospital called.

I told her that was fine, and on my end I might have some feelings about her picking up the phone and these feelings might lead to some actions. “Just so you know,” I told her. She nervously put some leftovers into the microwave that she shared with the other therapists down the hall, and came back in and closed the door.

About twenty minutes into the session her phone rang. She looked at me as if to say, “I have to get this.” I gave her my best death stare, really put some effort into this and into maintaining it for the whole phone call, which was three or four minutes. I was doing really well, she looked incredibly scared of me, when a strange small explosion sound in the hall happened, followed by people murmuring, “Looks like chicken vindaloo.” “No, more like a regular yellow curry.” “Wow. Whose food is that?” “What a mess.”

Hildey opened her door to wave at the other therapists and let them know it was her mess, she'd deal with it, and then the person on the phone audibly screamed something. Hildey said, “I have not called you twenty times today, I need to know what time the procedure is tomorrow. I am not bothering you,” and she looked at me and just started bawling right there in her little therapist's office. I was totally taken aback. The death stare melted into a shocked zombie.

The other therapists headed off in a clump back to their offices as if they might catch what she had. Hildey ended her phone call and slumped in her chair, weeping. I didn't want to comfort her or even deal with her but I also didn't want to be mean and ignore her, so I got my bag and said, “I guess I'll see you next week, Hildey,” and I headed to the elevator.

I walked out onto University Place wondering why all the people who were supposed to be in the stability biz—mothers, fathers, therapists—fell apart on me.

 

 

 

The next week I went back, and Hildey wanted to talk about what had happened like it was some kind of international incident. Each week after that I was meaner and meaner to Hildey. I couldn't help it. She wasn't capable of doing her job. She lost her shit. Maybe she should have taken a day off.

“I think the transference has gone bad, Jeanne. Between therapist and patient,” she said to me one day.

“Oh, really? I think I might know when that happened. It might have been the moment you became my mother and I had to comfort you while you cried and charged me and cried and charged me. Bad as things may have been with my mother, she never charged me. Angry? Why, yes, I am, Hildey! Is there a problem with that? Anger is not just important to me. It's essential. I need it. In my relationships with men, my father, my mother and to turn into material, frankly. Why is everybody so down on anger when to me, it's so bloody practical.”

I never saw Hildey again, and what eats at me is I probably owe her some money. But then I think, Okay, I owe her for three sessions, but she cried at one and the other two we talked about how I felt about her crying on me, so do I actually owe her anything?

I tried talking to Julia about how I felt like blowing my head off. We had dinner, and when I said as much she threw her glove at me, hitting me in the face. I'm not entirely sure why she did this. I then threw my glove at her, and then the miso soup arrived.

One night I listened to Nina Simone and drank grappa I had stolen from my father. I called my friend Cassie from college who lived in Aspen and was an acupuncturist. Her life had seemed to just get better and better in the last few years, at the exact rate that mine was getting worse and worse. She was doing what she wanted to do, she kept making more and more money, she was making $90,000 a year, while I was buying loaves of bread and jars of peanut butter as the cheapest way to make it through a week. I would babysit my niece and bring my laundry over, use my sister's detergent, and take things to eat later that I knew they probably wouldn't miss: one PowerBar, three bags of mint tea, some small boxes of kidsized raisins, an apple, a hunk of cheddar. I always wanted to take coffee but it would smell too much, wafting out of my backpack. I classified this behavior as advanced mooching, something I was doing because I didn't have time to go to the grocery store—that was what boring, married people with kids did. I was too edgy for the grocery store. Please.