I Am Max Lamm (13 page)

But despite the invitations to parties gatecrashed by paparazzi, a Z-series BMW soft-top for Christmas and her genetic jackpot of the hourglass figure, stratospheric cheekbones and golden hair routinely endowed by wealthy parentage, Kelly Wesson wanted to kill herself. Her life wasn’t uniformly unpleasurable – she loved cocaine (and hash, speed, meth, OxyContin, Seroquel or Valium) that she got from the drug-dealing son of a Virginian congressman – but ultimately these syrups, pills, rocks and powders deepened her despair. Kelly habituated to the narcotics, needing more, then more, to quell the terrors, to fog over her irrefutable desire not to exist. To stop her from doing
it.
And if half a day passed without a hit, on came the withdrawal symptoms. Trembling hands, dizziness, cold sweats, the nausea erupting whatever morsel she last ate, the sickening sensation of ten thousand pin-legged insects colonising her skin; all getting worse, unbearably, until finally she snorted a line and exhaled the panic skywards.

Barely old enough to buy a beer, Kelly Wesson was drowning in a medicated abyss at any time, all the time. Drowning down, down, down into her daily misery of mollycoddled boredom, of unyielding insomnia, of mood swings, migraines, bulimia, anorexia, anaemia, of waking alone at three every afternoon in that silent Georgetown mansion with spookily high ceilings where nobody ever told her
not
to kill herself. A dull crushing existence dictated by her dealers, by a conniving bitch of a stepmother and a famous statue of a father, by the inescapable attention bestowed by her surname, by the poisonous anaesthesia facilitated by the money. The unendurable facts of Kelly Wesson’s glamorous, perfect life.

It got worse. Eighteen months into her descent, Kelly wouldn’t – couldn’t – crawl out of bed at 4 p.m. without shooting a speedball to forget who she was and wasn’t. February 2004, the end approached. All day, she envisaged the obvious solutions: go hang yourself from the dining-room chandelier. Gas yourself in the Hummer that nobody ever drives. Gulp four packets of Valiums like they’re Tic-Tacs. Blow your brains out with the .45 that Daddy keeps under his bed. Hurl an empty backpack at the president’s motorcade and get shot by the Secret Service, or, best of all, jump off the Washington Monument to forever disgrace
him
. The deadly intentions only delayed by what she smoked in foil, popped down her throat, shot into her arm, snorted up her nose.

She awoke around 5.30 a.m. most mornings, after three hours’ sleep. Her throat taut, fingers trembling, forehead beaded in cold sweat. Using her stepmother’s silver nail scissors, Kelly sometimes cut her palms. The precise slash: your bloody flagellation for waking up too early. She cut herself for eating too much, for crying too much, for being stupid, for being fat, for being a coward, for being alone. She cut herself for cutting herself. For being alive.
So fucking do it!
But you can’t. A failure at suicide too, although she told nobody. Months earlier, Kelly had thrown her mobile into the goldfish pond because, when her bulimia hit Georgetown’s gossip circles, some cheerleading friends started calling up with their questions. Their dumb fucking questions, asked in the soft, ‘sensitive’ whine perfected by Oprah, Tyra, Barbara Walters, Katie Couric.
Would you like to get a coffee and talk? . . . You need to give yourself a holiday from you! . . . I feel what you’re going through . . . I understand your pain! . . .
these fucking anorexia survivors with a Mother Teresa complex. They wouldn’t stop calling, so Kelly drowned the phone.

Despite a pantry downstairs the size of a tool shed, stocked with the best food from the Beltway’s best delis, Kelly ate only jelly babies, seaweed crackers and Weight Watchers microwave pizza. Anything else she regurgitated, gaining unparalleled knowledge of Washington’s most exclusive toilet bowls. No matter how far into the afternoon she slept, or how much instant coffee she slurped for breakfast at 5 p.m., Kelly felt insurmountably weak until she got high, and soon she weighed not much more than Dwight, her father’s Great Dane guarding the front gate.

Those six months in 2003 – The Terror, with her father away on business as Operation Iraqi Freedom drew nearer – Kelly lay on her bed every afternoon, all afternoon, debating the only question that mattered. ‘
Today!
’,
she sobbed into her pillow, trying to convince herself that
now
,
not tonight after she fed the dog, not tomorrow after she farewelled the chauffer, not the next day, but
now
,
this torturous fucking instant, was the moment to be brave, to be strong or unremittingly stupid, and to finally, unhesitatingly kill herself. But owing to her fear of pain, or the cruel stubborn joke that was her desire to live, Kelly couldn’t do it.

Most days, she stole her father’s gun from underneath his bed, loaded a round, clicked it shut, then collapsed into his Chesterfield recliner. Waiting. Trying. Yearning. But no matter Kelly’s anticipation for the-relief-in-not-being, no matter the stark unendurable featurelessness of everything in her life apart from death, she couldn’t peer down the barrel and thoughtlessly pull the trigger.
You dumb fat coward bitch!
She’d lay twenty Valiums next to a glass of water, look at them for three hours, at every millimetre-long fissure in their bleak powdered forms, but she couldn’t gulp them unthinkingly the way Dwight wolfed down his dog biscuits. Kelly remembered war memorials that she had visited for official functions; the nameless millions who perished in the World Wars, Korea and Vietnam. Angrily, she foresaw the monstrous death toll from her father’s new Iraqi adventure. What difference is one more death? But it is
your
death, so pulling the trigger is no easy thing. Kelly hated life, but was afraid not to live and couldn’t understand why. You love to hate. That’s what you love? The hatred.

This wasn’t the usual adolescent phase of hysterics and histrionics, of life lessons learnt riding the teenage girl’s merry-go-round of broken hearts and hollow tears. Much too real for that. Long ago, Kelly dismissed as a fairytale that her descent would end in anything apart from a funeral. But still, she couldn’t swallow Daddy’s gun and pull her index finger an inch! Couldn’t force herself.

Do it.

Now!

But then, that would be it. Irreversible. What they don’t show on teen melodramas: the one-way death. You’re a stupid fat coward, always were. Indecisive too; the more to decide, the more you can’t. Even at dying, you’re a screw-up. Another reason to kill yourself.

But you can’t.

So always – although for nearly a hundred afternoons that year, Kelly sat in her father’s recliner staring down the barrel, at her trigger finger, tearful yet drained of tears, occasionally motionless as she revisited what fancifully seemed like a happy childhood back in Dallas ten years ago – when the senator returned home, his gun was back in its usual place. In a briefcase underneath his bed, in case an Al-Qaeda assassin ever breached the guards and CCTV cameras outside. Kelly hid the noose she tied from a handmade skipping rope that her mother had sent from Paris as a birthday present; she stockpiled her sleeping pills in the billiards room inside an antique globe of the world, and she waited for her day of courage, of abandon, of deathly liberation to miraculously approach. Kelly’s father and stepmother knew nothing of her desperate intentions; they were busy with their schedule of media launches, confirmation hearings, campaign fundraisers, gala banquets, press briefings, weekend trips on the Learjet, grouse hunts down in Texas, shouting matches against Christopher Hitchens or James Carville on
Larry King Live
,
and so forth.

Nobody except Kelly’s dealers knew the extent of her addictions, for skilfully she concealed her stonewashed skin, sudden nosebleeds, pockmarked arms and vertiginous mood swings. On Thursday afternoons, she visited an ‘organic’ beauty salon at the upscale end of North Street, Georgetown, opposite the handsome townhouse at number 3307 where Jack Kennedy hosted a cocktail party the afternoon of his inauguration. At $175 a session, the beauticians did a fake tan, a facial using mud from a magical geyser in Ecuador, a whole body defoliation, a herbal shampoo and, owing to Kelly’s distinguished parentage, threw in a Brazilian wax for free. Though she barely slept nor ate, Kelly nevertheless resembled one of the flawless Aryan cherubs from Leni Riefenstahl’s pageant films glorifying the Nazi Olympics of 1936.

Inevitably, she was pursued by dozens of eligible Beltway bachelors, fresh from Yale or Stanford law school. The onslaught of dinner invitations increased following Kelly’s appearance wearing a low-cut Lacroix gown, statuesquely gaunt, guzzling Bollinger at her father’s sixtieth birthday bash alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger and the president’s blonde nieces in a
Vanity Fair
puff-piece entitled ‘Versailles on the Potomac’. But Kelly hated her admirers, these arrogant young lawyers, congressional interns and K Street lobbyists for whom she was merely a trophy fuck and a stepping-stone into Daddy’s inner circle. So the day in late 2003 when she mysteriously passed her truant final year at the Georgetown prep school that enjoyed her family’s patronage, Kelly decided to do what she really wanted. She’d get far, far away from Washington DC, from the silent mansion hastening her suicide. Far away from Senator Richard Davis Wesson and all that his prominence inflicted upon her.

But first, the Minotaur’s Faustian pact: you must serve nine months at the National Guard of Maryland. The senator – who never showed interest in his daughter’s aspirations when they shared the limo on route to a banquet – was nevertheless incensed that, unlike her older brother Tommy the hotshot attorney, Kelly refused to sit the entrance exam for a prep school in Connecticut that specialized in getting troublemakers like her into Yale.

Kelly couldn’t cram a year’s algebra and chemistry into three months! She barely stayed awake without cigarettes and speed. Senator Wesson was in many ways a neglectful father – or a deadbeat dad, as he’d once publicly dubbed a black auto worker from Detroit who took paid leave so he could join the Million Man March – but he recognized that, above anything else, what Kelly required was discipline.
Discipline
: that indispensable quality of the military that, the senator liked to say, had won the United States the Cold War and every war since. The Minotaur was legendarily stubborn – he once endured a nine-hour filibuster against a gun control bill without leaving for a toilet break – and he made up his mind. The National Guard would put Kelly on the right track.

He made the offer she couldn’t refuse. If Kelly agreed to nine months of service in the National Guard, he would facilitate her ideal escape. She’d relocate to London, all expenses paid, to study at an exclusive art college that she’d read about in
Vogue
. The Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design on Charing Cross Road. The
alma mater
for many eminent fashion designers – Galliano, McQueen, McCartney, et al – Saint Martins would, Kelly presumed, be a fun, respectable escape from hell at home on the Capitol catwalk. Despite the scarred forearms and dark bags beneath her eyes (concealed by make-up), despite the scorched teaspoons and foil pipes amassed in her lingerie drawer, Kelly nevertheless recognized the value of a quality education; its absence was etched into the hollow crevassed faces of teenage crack addicts, those emaciated black or Hispanic kids with huge eyes, who begged her for change on the bus she rode uptown to Columbia Heights for a twenty-dollar-bag of rocks when her regular dealer, the Virginian congressman’s son, was away in Vail at the family ski lodge. On her rare, painless afternoons when the sun was out and she wasn’t compelled to steal Daddy’s gun from underneath his bed, Kelly liked to sunbake in the gazebo and browse her stepmother’s magazines.
Vogue
,
Marie Claire
,
Cosmopolitan
,
Harper’s Bazaar
. Those fat glossies smelling like the beauty counter at Macy’s. Must-have clothes draped upon catwalk models who, though taller and even skinnier than Kelly, wore her own expression of unassailable drug-addled haughtiness. One day in April, she read an article in
Vogue
about London’s most exclusive fashion college. Ten seconds later, she made up her mind.

Kelly typed ‘saint martins london’ into Google. There it was: the Undergraduate Diploma in Fashion and Communications . . . and she
could
dress, she could talk . . . could the diploma be much harder than that? An ideal escape, this London art college full of kids as wealthy and illicitly medicated as she, where the name Richard Wesson, she was certain, meant nothing. Better yet, an ocean would separate Kelly from her father and stepmother. Kelly accurately foresaw that Saint Martins offered a smorgasbord of stylish, opinionless boys who, instead of balking at transgression like her geeky Georgetown classmates hell-bent on med school or the State Department, unashamedly thirsted for drugs, fucking and more drugs. Her three favourite things. Anticipating her anonymous unchaperoned new life, a smile came to Kelly’s lips; an inartificial smile, unrelated to the mundane opiate rush, that was in itself a rare event. What the Minotaur demanded, he would get. Even the military. Because Kelly
had
to go to London.

‘It’s hard work, but it’s worth every minute,’ the senator proclaimed on the eve of Kelly’s departure, on the phone from a G8 summit in the French Alps. ‘The military will stop your vapid, indulgent lifestyle. It’ll stop your days of waking up at 3 p.m. instead of using your talents, whatever they are. When I was your age I had a helluva time in the Texas Air Guard, I went there instead of Saigon.’ He paused in vain for her affirmation. ‘Stay the nine months. Make me proud. Make
your country
proud. Then take the first plane to London and I guarantee, you’ll get the apartment.’

Kelly hadn’t another way out. Reject her father’s offer and she was forbidden from moving anywhere, owing to mysterious ‘security risks’. Whenever she was prohibited from anything – a solo trip to Miami to see her uncle Robert’s new golf resort, or a fortnight in LA way back when she didn’t need a snort of speed merely to leave the house – her father invoked the spectre of ‘security risks’. There are, he would say,
unsavoury individuals
out there.
People who wish to do you harm
. Evildoers. Terrorists. Although the senator wouldn’t specify who these unsavoury people actually were.