The Washingtonienne (6 page)

Sometimes you had to make your own fun at work.

After signing the books, I went back to my desk and checked my voice mail. A week after sending out my resumes, I hadn’t received a single callback. I finally broke down and called Phillip, the guy who promised to help me get a job.

“So happy to hear from you,” he said. “Just e-mail me your resume, and I’ll forward it to my friends on the Hill. We’ll have to go out to dinner and celebrate once you get hired.”

I knew how these things worked: If Phillip got me a job, I would have to go out to dinner with him and, at the very least, give him a blow job or something afterward.

About an hour after sending my resume to Phillip, I got a callback for a staff assistant position in a Republican senator’s office. I had never heard of the guy, but then again, I didn’t know most congressmen from shit, except for the really glam ones like Senator Clinton. If the important people on the Hill were better looking, it might be easier—and more exciting—to spot them.

“
Sweetie!
” Kate called from her office again.

She asked me to run an errand, all the way on the House side.

“I’m wearing heels,” I told her. “I’ll ask one of the interns in the mailroom to do it.”

“
Sweetie,
” Kate said, “maybe you shouldn’t wear shoes like that to the office anymore.”

“But I’m short. I have to wear heels.”

“
Sweetie,
when I ask you to do something, you do it.”

“Fine,” I said, kicking my Gucci shoes off so they went flying into the wall. “I’m going!”

I walked out of her office barefoot. When I got back to my desk, my shoes were on top of my desk with a Post-it stuck to them.

SEE ME,
it said in Kate’s handwriting.

Yeah, right. I wasn’t going back into her office, just so she could berate me. I put my shoes on and walked out of the office. Fuck Kate, and fuck this internship. I had an interview for a real job tomorrow anyway. And I still had Fred.

I WENT TO THE NEARBY
Hotel George, where he had a room reserved for us that day. We had started meeting there instead of April’s apartment because he was afraid of her walking in on us.

I picked up my key at the front desk and undressed upon entering the room. Fred was already there, working on his laptop.

He asked me what was new in my life, and I told him about my job interview the next day.

“Congratulations,” he said. “We’ll have to celebrate. I’ll order up a bottle of champagne when we’re done.”

Fucking always came first.

I didn’t even like champagne, but it was such a lovely gesture, I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the smell of it alone made me nauseated. (Too many Dommy P hangovers during the dot-com era.)

“Here’s to your new job,” he said, putting a glass of Veuve Clicquot in my hand.

I choked it down and asked for more. (Yes, I choked down
champagne.
How spoiled was I?)

“Jacqueline,” he said, reclining on the bed next to me. “There’s something I want to tell you.”

I sat up, intrigued.

“Can I trust you?” he asked, refilling my glass.

FYI: If you even needed to ask this question, the answer was obviously no, but I said yes anyway. I had a feeling that I was about to hit pay dirt.

He started telling me that his wife didn’t fuck him anymore, which frustrated him and hurt his feelings. Typical married guy stuff, right?

But get this: Up until a few months ago, Fred had a mistress. Some secretary type he had picked up at The Prime Rib. So they were sneaking around, having an affair. Fred even considered leaving his wife for this other woman, he was so in love with her.

Then one day, Fred got a phone call from his mistress. She demanded fifty thousand dollars cash from him, or else she was going to tell his wife about their affair. He was heartbroken that the woman he had fallen in love with would try to extort money from him, but instead of paying her off, Fred told his wife everything.

It was a great story, but why was he telling it to me? Was I supposed to feel bad for him?

“My wife is making me go to therapy,” he explained, “and I’m not sure that my therapist would approve of this relationship.”

Therapy?
I thought that Fred talked all of his problems out with me. What did he need a therapist for?

“Did you tell him about us?” I asked.

“Not yet,” he replied. “I wasn’t sure that I should.”

“Do you
want
to stop seeing me?”

“No, I really don’t. But he says that I objectify women, and I think that this relationship might be symptomatic of that problem.”

“Oh, Fred. All men objectify women. It’s not a
problem.
It’s just what men
do
.”

I climbed on top of him.

“Maybe you should stop seeing this guy,” I said. “Your therapy is obviously going nowhere.”

I didn’t want Fred second-guessing our arrangement until I had another source of income. I rubbed myself against him lap-dancer style, and he got hard immediately.

“Doesn’t this feel good?” I whispered into his ear. “There’s nothing wrong with what we’re doing, and
I’ll never tell
.”

It was scary how fast a man will forget his wife and child, all of his responsibilities, and everything his therapist tells him, just for some sex.

Fred’s therapist would say that he “objectified” me, but there was more to it than that. Fred was obviously having a midlife crisis. He was unhappy in the same way that I was unhappy with Mike: He was bored and wanted passion in his life. It was a classic syndrome. Remember
Madame Bovary.

And Fred really should have known better. He had been busted for cheating before, but he couldn’t stop himself when he saw a pretty young thing sitting next to him at the Four Seasons. He couldn’t stop himself from calling her, meeting her in hotel rooms, fucking her. He had plenty of opportunities to stop himself, but he didn’t want to.

He had never even asked about birth control. (I was on the Pill, but for all he knew, I could have been carrying his love child.)

Fred had everything to lose, but maybe he
wanted
to lose it all. It was possible to be suicidal without actually wanting to kill yourself. You just got so sick and tired of your life that you brought on your own self-destruction in hopes of starting all over again.

I understood because I had been there myself. And like Fred, I wanted to believe that it was possible to make your life better this way. I had to believe it, or why go on?

When the time came for Fred to go home, he gave me my envelope and tucked me into bed. Could he trust me? Maybe, maybe not. But I was no extortionist.

After he left, I ordered a $300 bottle of Left Bank Bordeaux from the wine list and drank until I couldn’t move. I vomited purple sludge into the bushes on the way to my interview the next morning, but I still made it on time, looking damn near perfect.

It’s scary how well some people can put themselves together despite their messed-up personal lives.

Chapter 11

M
y interview was with Janet, the office manager. She was no softie. She kept cutting me off and tapping her pencil impatiently on her clipboard while I spoke, as if she couldn’t wait to get rid of me.

So I was taken by surprise when she offered me the job on the spot. I was to start the following Monday.

I guess Phillip had put in a good word for me, so she didn’t need to check my references or anything. Then again it’s not as if I needed a college degree to open the mail and answer the phone.

It was a shitty mailroom job, but a step in the right direction. I could call home and tell Dad that he had one less thing to worry about.

There was no answer, so I left a message. I was sure that my parents would be happy, possibly even proud that I was working for a senator, albeit one they had probably never heard of. But no one called back. I forgot all about it when April took me to Saki that night to celebrate.

WEDNESDAY WAS MY
favorite night of the week for going out. You might think that nobody in Washington would want to party hard on a weeknight, but there was always a line to get in to Saki on Wednesdays. Not many Hill people showed up, which was a good thing: We could get crazy and not have to worry about it coming up at work. The crowd was a good mix of rich kids who didn’t have to work for a living and party people who didn’t give a fuck about their jobs and planned to call in sick the next day.

Laura met us just in time for “White Lines (Don’t Do It).” The deejay played the Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel song at approximately the same time every night. It was a good song to writhe around and look sexy to.

A boy who looked like Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys circa 1985 put a glass in my hand and filled it with Grey Goose. He and his friends had bottle service at a nearby table, so we gravitated in that direction.

Seconds later, we each had a drink in our hands and a boy’s lap to sit on. I had really just come here to dance tonight, but the Ad-Rock boy kept asking me questions like “Where are you from?” and “What do you do?” The crowd and the music were far too loud to carry on a conversation, so I was forced to lean closer to him so I could hear what he was saying. Then I caught a whiff of his breath, jumped up, and started dancing away from the table.

Just my luck. I found the cutest boy in the club and he smelled like he’d been smoking weed and eating Doritos all day long. Dammit.

Laura followed me to the ladies’ room, while April made out with one of Ad-Rock’s friends, some dude in a suit who had a bodyguard.

“What time is it?” Laura asked, blotting the sweat from her face.

“It’s almost three in the morning,” I told her, checking my phone for messages.

“Did you get any calls?”

I shook my head no.

“Loser,” she said, snorting a line off the mirror in her Chanel compact.

She had pried out the pressed powder that came inside of it for this sole purpose.

“Are you going to the office tomorrow?” I asked.

“Shit no,” she said, chopping out a line for me with her Senate debit card. “Do you think anyone here is going to work tomorrow?”

Apparently, the opening of Saki had heralded a huge drop in productivity among the twentysomething workforce in Washington.

“Do you have any more?” I asked when I finished my line. “I can’t do one line and just stop like this.”

“
Is anybody carrying in here?
” Laura shouted at the people in the other stalls.

“
No!
” they all shouted back.

“Goddamn liars,” Laura muttered.

“It’s, like,
impossible
to get drugs in this town,” I complained. “April and I were forced to do Robo last week.”

“A bottle of Robitussin costs what, eight dollars? I should quit doing all this coke and start drinking cough syrup to save money.”

Suddenly, we heard April’s voice in the bathroom.

“Jackie? Laura? Where are you guys?”

I opened the door to our stall, and we stepped out to meet her.

“Should I go home with that guy I was making out with?” she asked us. “He’s a vice president of a bank or something.”

“Do you know how many vice presidents you’re going to meet?” I asked her.

She shook her head no.

“More than you’ll know what to do with.”

“What about Tom?” Laura asked.

“Until I get a ring,” April said, wiggling her left ring finger, “I can do whatever the fuck I want.”

April was obviously drunk, but she deserved a fun night out, too.

We heard the deejay put on “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and we all ran back out to the dance floor. April and Laura disappeared, so I started dancing with some fool who was wearing a tuxedo.

Suddenly, Laura grabbed me by the arm and pulled me over to the bar. She had a boy with her.

“Sean has coke back at his place!” she told me excitedly.

By then, it was three in the morning, and Saki was about to close.

“Sidebar, Laura,” I took her aside. “Who the fuck is Sean?”

“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “Does it matter? He’s a guy with coke!”

Laura and I followed our new best friend Sean up the stairs to the exit. We saw April climb into a limo with the vice president she had met.

“A thousand points for April!” Laura yelled after her. “Leaving the club in a fucking limo!”

“Who the fuck takes a limo to
Saki
?” I asked as it sped off to someplace fabulous.

Sean took Laura and me to his duplex on nearby Euclid Street. He had a big glass coffee table in the living room, perfect for doing coke on. We gathered around it, watching Sean chop out some big, fat lines for us.

“Dude, we like you already,” Laura said, taking a seat next to him on a black leather couch.

“How
much
do you like me?” Sean asked suggestively. “Because I have some more stuff upstairs, if you want it.”

Laura and I looked at each other, not sure if we should be offended or turned on.

The coke was making us frisky, so she asked me, “Hey, Jackie, do you
want it
?”

I nodded.

“Do
you
?” I asked.

We started giggling as we followed Sean up the stairs.

SO TYPICAL. HE MADE US
snort the coke off his dick. I always felt kind of stupid doing this, but decided it was worth it: It never hurts to make friends with someone who has a lot of drugs.

“So what do you do, Sean?” I asked while Laura did a line.

“Like, tell us about yourself,” she said, coming up for air.

Sean climbed on top of me as I assumed the position. “I’ll tell you as soon as I finish.”

“I’m a bike messenger,” he said about two minutes later.

No wonder he didn’t want to tell us before. Girls like Laura turned their noses up at guys like Sean. But I
adored
bike messengers. They looked like rock stars to us girls trapped in offices all day
,
with those big chains around their waists, and the one pant leg rolled up. I creamed my pants whenever one rode by me on the street. The DC bike messengers were that hot.

Unfortunately, sex on coke wasn’t. It was fast and vigorous, but the technique went out the window when you were high. And the more people involved, the sloppier it got. Laura kept shunting me aside and climbing on top of Sean, forcing all of his attention on her.

Why did girls have to make everything a competition like this? I assumed it was just the coke that made her act so greedy, but few people were having more fun than us that night, naked, in bed with a hot guy with a tight ass, and high out of our minds.

Then the sun came up.

“I want to get the fuck out of here,” Laura whispered when Sean left the room to pee. “Where is my bra?”

“I don’t know,” I said, shielding my eyes from the daylight with the very bra she was looking for.

“They should make a chick flick called
Dude, Where’s My Bra?
” I said, laughing.

Laura snatched her bra away from me, and I pulled the bed sheet over my head.

“I’m serious. I want to get out of here,” she said, scrambling to get up. “Are you coming or not?”

“Not,” I grunted.

I didn’t have to be anywhere until Monday. I rolled over, turning my back to her.

Laura crept out of the room and down the stairs before Sean came out of the bathroom.

“Did your friend go home?” he asked, pulling down the shades to block out the sunlight.

“Yeah,” I answered, sitting up.

“Don’t get up, pretty girl,” he said, climbing back into the bed with me. “I want you to stay.”

Again, the sex wasn’t very good, but his body made up for it. The boy had
back
from riding his bike all day. And he had tattoos on his arms, on his neck, and on his calves. I hadn’t fucked a guy with tats in years, but it was fun to go slumming every once in a while.

“You know, you were the primary interest,” he told me afterward. “I didn’t really like your friend that much.”

Of course he liked me more than my friend: That’s what guys were supposed to say to the girl who ended up staying when the threesome was over.

I gave him my number and he promised to call, but whatever: Call me, don’t call me. Sean was hot, but I could never bring him home to Mother.

I TRIED CALLING HOME
again when I got back to my apartment. Again, no answer. I was beginning to feel neglected, which was ridiculous since I was a grown woman. But the only man a girl could count on in this world was her daddy, and if even
he
was dodging my calls, I knew that something was very wrong at home. I had no way of finding out until someone felt like picking up the telephone and telling me what was going on.

In the meantime, I had plenty of ways to keep myself distracted.

April came home shortly after I did, her hair disheveled and her eyeliner smudged.

“Why does my makeup always look better the morning
after
I put it on?” she asked, dousing a cotton ball with my Caswell-Massey Sweet Almond Oil. “Do you know if Laura is going to work today?”

“I doubt it,” I told her.

“Shit! That means it’s my turn to go into the office.”

“You’re going to work today?”

“Well, we
both
can’t call in sick on the same day, and I called in
last
Thursday.”

“Do you need any of this?” I asked, showing her the nice parting gift that Sean had given me: a vial of coke, street value of $300.

“Where did you get that?” she wanted to know.

“Laura and I had a threesome with a drug dealer-slash-bike messenger.”

April’s green eyes widened.

“Are you serious?” she asked. “Did she eat you out?”

“No! We didn’t do anything with each other,” I explained. “Laura is really pretty bad at threesomes—don’t tell her I said that.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t,” April said, doing a bump of coke off her finger.

“So what happened with the vice president?” I asked her.

It turned out the guy who April left the club with was the vice president of a small
country,
not a bank—which explained the limousine and the bodyguard.

“He was such a freak. Do you know what he wanted to do?” she asked. “I’m warning you, it’s totally sick.”

Of course I wanted to know. I lived for this stuff.

“He wanted to put M&Ms in my butt,” she whispered, even though she was telling me this in her own bedroom.

“What?”

“And then he wanted to eat them!”

“Ugh!”

I fell on the floor, laughing.

“Plain or peanut?” I asked her.

“He had plain ones.”

“Did he keep them in a candy dish next to the bed?”

“Oh, shut up, Jackie! It was seriously the scariest thing that ever happened to me. I couldn’t understand half the stuff he was saying, but he implied that he could do whatever he wanted with me because he had diplomatic immunity or something.”

“But that doesn’t give him the right to make you his human Pez dispenser! You didn’t let him do it, did you?”

She wouldn’t answer.

“Ha,” I laughed. “You can never tell me anything ever again!”

“I was scared, okay?” April admitted. “For all I knew, the guy could have kidnapped me, pumped me full of drugs, and dumped my body into the ocean from a helicopter when he got tired of raping me. And he would get away with it because he’s a Very Important Person.”

“I don’t know, April. That seems pretty far-fetched.”

“Oh, whatever! Didn’t you once say that you had a boyfriend who liked to strangle you during sex?” she reminded me. “There are a lot of weirdos out there.”

“It’s actually pretty common. I used to think that I was the only one who did this freaky stuff, like there was something wrong with me, that I was attracting all these sickos. But the more people you talk to, the more you realize that
everyone
has stories like these.”