Girl Walks Out of a Bar (14 page)

“Sure,” he said from the den where he was watching the evening news in front of a roaring fire and flipping through the
New York Times.

I was already a couple of drinks ahead of him. I'd learned quickly that making dinner offered the perfect way to knock back wine unobserved. And there was a great hiding place for extra bottles behind the cleaning products in the panty. Alan never cleaned.

While the pasta cooked, I carried a platter of cheese and crackers into the living room, lit candles, and admired the perfect scene. Cocktail hour with my husband, just as my parents had done it. Then I went back into the kitchen and slugged down another enormous glass of wine while I put dinner together.

“Mmm, this is great, thank you,” he said, as we dug into dinner in front of the television. Against all trendy advice about How to Bond, How to Live the Old-Fashioned Way, How to Make the Most of Your Marriage, and How to Create Intimacy, we usually dined seated on the couch and facing the screen. I curled up next to him with my bowl of pasta on my lap. Alan rubbed my shoulder and kissed my head. My work was done and my buzz was fully formed. Be happy, I thought. Look at how lucky you are. Think about how many women would happily cut the brakes in your car to have this guy, this house, this life. Ungrateful bitch.

As we watched a repeat of
Law & Order
, I kept losing the storyline. My head was bobbing, and when my eyes closed the room began to spin. I was dangerously close to slurring, so I stood up and said, “I'm wiped out. I'm going to do the dishes and then go read in bed.”

“OK, I'll be up a little later,” said Alan, kissing me sweetly. I carried the bowls into the kitchen and filled my glass with cabernet before I started the dishes.

Alan was a night owl and I usually passed out early, so most nights ended with our finding the way to bed separately. In the mornings, Alan usually sprang from bed with energy that trumpeted, “Behold! Another day is upon us! A glorious chance to do glorious things!” For me, morning usually meant nausea, headaches, light-headedness, and waiting until Alan left for work before I soaked a pillow with tears. On the morning after the linguini dish, the tears wouldn't wait.

“Babe, what
is
it?” he asked me. Showered, dressed, and ready to leave for work, he sat on the side of the bed. I curled around him in a fetal position and cried and cried and cried. He stroked my hair and pleaded, “Has something happened?”

“I don't know,” I gasped the words through my sobs. “I'm just so miserable all the time. I don't know why. I'm just so sad.”

“Tell me how I can help. Whatever you need,” he said, which made me cry harder.

The words were right there—
I can't stop drinking
. They were simple and clear and would have offered a bright red signpost to the road out. But I wouldn't say them. If I said them, people would try to get me to stop drinking. I was drinking every day and increasing my intake with every passing week. I knew that this pace meant that I was probably going to lose my job. It meant that I would probably devastate my family. It meant that I'd probably die young. But to let anyone try to take away my alcohol? Nothing was more terrifying.

Alan and I agreed that I would start seeing a psychologist for my depression. Stacey wasn't much older than I, and she seemed to want to overshadow her youth with seriousness. On Thursday evenings in her waiting room, I'd watch the little
rock formation water fountain and try to relax. But the minute I walked into her office, warm tears would begin streaming down my cheeks. Embarrassed by the depth of my grief, I would put my hand to my face and sob as quietly as I could, but there appeared to be no bottom to the reservoir. Stacey would wait silently as I wept. Soon she prescribed an antidepressant, and I took it religiously.

When I didn't feel any better after a couple of months, she asked me, “How much do you drink?” Shit. I knew that alcohol and antidepressants were a bad combination.

I feigned surprise. “Not much,” I lied. She must have asked me this when I first saw her and I must have lied then, just as I did when asked the same question by any medical professional. “A glass or two of wine a night,” I lied again.

She saw through me and I knew it. Hadn't I hidden my shaking hands? Could she read my thoughts? Did she know that in every session I conducted a silent countdown until the moment I could get home and drink?

“Mmm. I don't think the wine is helping you. Do you think you could cut it back to maybe a glass or two a week?”

“Sure, yeah.”
Absurd.

“You know, if you can't there's help for that. Twelve-step groups and others.” She waited until she realized that I wasn't going to respond and then said, “Just give it a little thought.”
Uh-huh. That's exactly how much thought I'll give it.

I vowed never to utter a remotely honest word to her or anyone else about my drinking.

Barely a year after our wedding, I chose to end my marriage in the parking lot of a mall. Alan and I were walking to our car after another miserable lunch during which I cried into
multiple glasses of chardonnay and moaned about my chronic unhappiness. “I can't do this anymore,” I finally blurted. “I'm going back to New York.”

“You're giving up?” Alan said. “I know you're having a hard time, but we'll change whatever we need to. We're a team and I want to help you.”

My heart was breaking. He was genuinely good and I was genuinely awful. And he had no idea how utterly desperate I was for another drink.

I moved back to New York a few days after September 11, 2001, right in the middle of the chaos, horror, and grief. People all over the city clung to the people they loved, and I was grateful to be once again surrounded by my closest friends.

In Russell and Jessica's apartment, Jerry and David told me their stories. Jerry had been in his office just a few blocks from the Towers. “It was a fucking horror show. Everyone just hauled ass out when the second plane hit and got as far away as they could. I was covered in the dust and shit. Some dude and I just kept walking uptown—then the Towers came down. People were screaming and crying. Some of them were running toward the buildings. They must have had people they knew in there.” Devon had sprinted out of her downtown office as well. Russell had been on a business trip in London and David had been in Midtown.

The city was enveloped in fear. There was fear of anthrax, fear of war, and fear that something else unexpected and devastating was coming just around the corner. Almost everyone I knew had a connection to someone who had died. A cousin's husband, a former colleague, a friend from high school—it seemed that no one was unscathed. We lost two friends from
Fire Island, Luke and Martin. Luke was at Cantor Fitzgerald, and Martin just happened to be at Windows on the World for a breakfast that day. I read that a group at Windows had gotten onto the roof and were calling loved ones, waiting for help. I pictured Martin in that crowd, calling his wife and two young kids. Every time I thought of it my stomach surged. When I read that some people at Cantor had died instantly with the first plane's impact, I hoped that Luke was among them.

Everyone we knew was drinking harder, as if the end was near. The bars were overflowing with people talking and talking about that day and the fallout. Many people couldn't work in their offices, so it was easier than ever to drink around the clock. Suddenly my drinking didn't look so shocking.

Despite the circumstances, I luckily found a job in legal marketing at another big firm in New York. I had subleased my apartment when I moved to Pittsburgh because Alan and I had heard rumors that it was going to go co-op. If that happened, we wanted to buy the apartment and flip it for a profit. But it didn't happen, so when the subtenant's lease expired I moved back in.

Walking back into my apartment, I felt a renewed sense of doom. It was as if all my alcoholic ghosts had remained, lurking in the eaves. And oh how happy they were to see me home again. “Welcome back, my lady. May I pour?”

The first call I made was to Stuyvesant Square Liquors on Second Avenue. All they needed was updated credit card information, and soon a case of double bottles of cheap Yellow Tail cabernet would appear at my door. Finishing the transaction sent a warm sense of comfort through my body. Then, as we were about to hang up, the clerk said, “Good to have you back.” I thought I might barf.

9

Just yards from my apartment
, there was a great bar with hamburgers as thick as drugstore paperbacks. Kenny's Place was dark and cool inside, with a deep brown wood bar and red-and-white checkered tablecloths. It was a favorite hang for my friends and me, thanks to the bartenders who knew our names and more than forty Rolling Stones songs in the jukebox. Before long, I found myself at Kenny's every night, even if I went alone. The most consistent regulars were the retired schoolteachers and firefighters who lived in the nearby Stuyvesant Town apartment complex.

In the later hours, Kenny's attracted a seedy crowd. I struck up friendships with these dusky people—the kinds of friendships that left out basic facts like professions, last names, and just about everything we did beyond the pub walls. The most significant relationship that came out of that bar was the one I formed with cocaine.

The first time I tried cocaine, I was fifteen years old. It was at a high school party in a friend's basement, and one of the guys had pilfered some coke from his older brother. People kept going in and out of a small bathroom where there were lines laid out on a mirror. It felt cool to be open to trying drugs, to hold a cut-off
straw in my hand, to sniff and then squeeze my nose as I'd seen people do in movies. That first hit was like fireworks going off in my brain, fireworks that wrote across my face, “I'M FUCKING HAPPY!” But it made me shaky and the buzz wore off quickly.

In the years that followed, coke was often slinking around the periphery of parties; it was there, but people never waved it around like tequila shots. I didn't crave it or even ask around for it, but I never minded bumping into it. Cocaine was like a fling from my young years: I remembered him fondly, didn't mind seeing him at parties, maybe even helped set him up with a new chick. But he couldn't turn my head because my boyfriend was booze. Then came the nights at Kenny's, where my fling and I were reunited. And this time we clicked. This time it was love.

One night, one of my first-name-only bar buddies pulled out a small glass vial with a tiny spoon attached to the cap and slipped it into my hand under the bar. I thanked him and headed into the bathroom where a teeny spoonful in each nostril felt so magnificent, the moment could have been punctuated by its own Led Zeppelin intro.

Being scorched by the pressure of my competitive New York law firm, I was ripe for the return of cocaine. Coke made everything flash brighter, faster, clearer. I could work with intense focus for hours. I could work through a night and into the sunrise without yawning, and I'd churn out the work of three unaltered people. And the best part of all: coke made it easy to keep drinking.

Coke and alcohol got along beautifully! If I'd drunk so much that I was getting slurry and slushy, coke snapped me up crisp and straight. If too much coke had me wound up and toe tapping, booze would mellow me back down. Each drug helped me hide the other. They were like two illicit lovers who together could fulfill all my needs, and neither one minded sharing me. I knew then how viciously addictive cocaine is, but I didn't care.
I believed I could control it or stop using it at any time. For some reason, I thought it would be different for me than alcohol, which by then I knew I couldn't control.

By mid-2003, my phone held the numbers for three drug dealers, and I called them as often as I called my mother. Having drugs delivered to an apartment in New York City is as easy as ordering a pizza or a hooker. Somehow the simplicity of the transaction made it feel less illegal. Of course, I understood that as a legal professional, my new activities meant that I was dabbling in disaster. A drug bust, an arrest—those would bring more than shame, more than a record or even jail time. They would mean the end of my law career. But my life was like that joke about the guy who can't be persuaded to give up cigarettes. His wife begs, “
Why
don't you believe that smoking can kill you?” He says, “Hasn't killed me yet.”

Each time I bought coke, I hated myself a little more. I knew that I was spewing more poison into an already toxic swamp of dysfunction, but I needed to keep drinking, so I invited coke to find a cozy spot at the edge of the swamp. Not long after rediscovering the happy white powder, I was fully hooked. I no longer worried about the consequences. I just needed the drugs.

Henry was my primary dealer. He was a good-looking half-Greek, half-Cuban kid in his early twenties with wavy black hair, full red lips, and scruffy stubble. A part-time business student and a full-time drug dealer, Henry was a smart kid just stupid enough to convince himself that dealing was a good way to pay for school. He usually showed up at my door with the
New York Post
in hand, complaining about Mayor Bloomberg's administration.

“Hey, Lisa, what's going on?” Henry brushed past me into the apartment one evening when I was working on a client proposal. His visit was critical, as I needed coke to support the all-night drinking I had planned. He instinctively craned his neck
all around to make sure I was the only one home, and I stood back to let him perform his routine inspection.

“Not much,” I replied. “You busy today?” It's the rhetorical question people ask each other in law firm elevators.

“Always busy, always busy,” he mumbled as he made himself comfortable on the couch and unzipped his backpack. He looked like any other student on the street, but instead of asking him about how his classes were going, I cared only about his drugs.

“Want a Heineken?” I asked him as I fished in my giant handbag for my wallet.

“Yeah, sounds good. What do you need today?”

“Can I get an eight ball?” I asked. I handed him a beer and yanked together the large, heavy navy curtains in the living room window. Someone had told me that if you could see the Empire State Building from your apartment, the government could spy on you.

“Sure, sure. No problem,” he said, pulling out seven miniature plastic Baggies that each held about a half gram of cocaine, some of it already crushed into a powder. I put $250 on the coffee table and he counted it.

By the time we finished the transaction, Henry's cell phone was buzzing with his next call. After he left, I triple-locked the door and rubbed my hands together in excitement.

When I finally closed the laptop at around three o'clock in the morning, I had written a strong proposal and emailed it to the partners. Receiving work product at that hour isn't unusual in a law firm, so it didn't raise red flags. Frequently, it garnered points for effort and commitment. I often wondered if the partners would mind at all if they knew that any of us were doing coke. I wondered if any of them were doing it themselves.

There was a new problem, though. Sleep. At this point, I was more likely to get Brad Pitt in my bed than a restful seven
hours. I was probably averaging four hours a night, and it showed on my pale face. That morning, my body shook all over and my stomach was sick from the combination of wine, coke, enough cigarettes to plug a porthole, and no dinner. It's no coincidence that coke had long been the fashion industry's drug of choice. No appetite means “no food” which means “no fat.” I was sick as hell and the kind of skinny I'd always dreamed of.

The hangover was immediate. I could feel it the minute I closed the laptop. I lay in bed naked wishing I were just straight booze crashing, which by comparison felt like a cup of warm chamomile tea. But anytime I did coke, I drank more wine than I would have without it, and the combination of the two was like a baseball-bat concussion.

In addition to all the physical symptoms, the come down from coke and wine meant a crushing, black-hearted depression. Tears streamed from my eyes and the chorus of self-hatred raised its voice. It told me that life had no meaning, I was a fraud, I'd never have real love, nothing was ever going to get better. The mind fuck went on for hours as I thrashed my way through broken sleep.

Somehow I managed to get to work the following days, swallowing potentially toxic levels of Advil and industrial-sized cups of coffee. I considered drinking booze to kill the pain, but I stopped myself. Morning drinking was only for serious alcoholics, not high-functioning partiers like me.

Then one night I had a blind date, a guy somehow connected to my cousin Robbie. All I knew was that he was a “nice, good-looking, Jewish lawyer named Jeff,” and that was enough for me.

At Jeff's suggestion, we arranged to meet for a drink at the P&G Bar on the Upper West Side at eight o'clock on a Thursday night. The P&G was a dearly loved dive bar that everybody had a good story about. Great pick, I thought. I'm going to like
this guy. But there was one big problem: I'd already be drunk by 8:00 p.m. In those days my drinking started the second work ended. I couldn't remember the last time I would have been sober enough for a blind date starting even as early as 6:30 p.m. The situation called for a plan.

I ducked out of work early, and by five I was home getting ready. I poured myself a glass, more like a goblet, of cold chardonnay and brought it into the bathroom while I showered. The glass gathered condensation beads as the heat of the room took the chill off the wine. I reached for it and took a gulp as I toweled off. OK! I thought, feeling the first threads of relief. Blind date. No more than two glasses first. Jeff can't think I'm some kind of drunk.

I stood naked with my hands on my hips in front of my closet, staring at my wardrobe. Separate from my work suits hung about ten different pairs of black pants. They were indistinguishable on the hanger, but they were in a variety of materials, some fit tighter than others, some had lower waists, and some had flared legs instead of straight. Some made me feel sexy, some sophisticated, some young. Some of the pants hung next to duplicates I'd bought while shopping drunk. I stood there and debated which would more likely lead to a successful date with Jeff, the Jewish lawyer. On most nights out, I would pair these pants with a black or white camisole, topped by a sheer shirt, usually a tight one. Some of the shirts had buttons and some were pullovers. Some of the shirts were silky and some felt like netting. I had several colors and styles, but they could all be called “dark.” I chose a pair of tight pants that made me feel sexy and finished the outfit with a pair of high black leather boots. It was a standard uniform for the New York City alcoholic too lazy to put outfits together.

As I dressed, I continued drinking, only gradually, and stopped frequently for cigarette breaks in the living room. Then I
put on makeup and finished my outfit with giant silver hoop earrings and a diamond necklace. When I went to refill my wine glass before doing my hair, I realized that I had made a terrible error. I was at the end of the bottle. I had
finished the whole thing off
. It was just after 6:30 p.m., and there was still almost an hour before I had to leave. This was a treacherous moment. One wrong move and I would slip into an inescapable pit of getting too drunk and destroying the night. Three options came to mind, none of which were guaranteed to get me to the P&G in a date-suitable state.

First, I could just stop drinking until I got to the bar—maybe have a coffee until then. Hilarious. Second, I could open another bottle of wine and just sip over the next hour. That would make me tired. Orrrr . . . I could do some coke to straighten out and feel like a supermodel by the time I got to the P&G. Not exactly a dilemma.

Out came the drugs, the mirror, the spoon, the blade, and the straw. The brilliance of my decision was confirmed by the spectacular rush that went along with the ritual: sprinkling the coke on the mirror, crushing it down with the back of a spoon, carving just-thick-enough lines . . . That first prickly blast into my nostrils followed by the chemical drip down my throat told me that it was going to be a fantastic night.

Time flies when coke is on the mirror. The next thing I knew it was 7:30 p.m., time to go. I put away the coke paraphernalia, guzzled another glass of wine, and went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and gargle hard.

Shit, I thought, suddenly staring into the mirror. A five-year-old could see that I was flying. It was only seven thirty on a Thursday evening, but I was already wearing my Saturday midnight face. There was nothing I could do about it.

I hoped that Jeff had been out with people after work and might be riding some kind of buzz of his own. Please, Jeff, please be a boozer. Please be a cokehead.

Walking into the P&G, I recognized him immediately. The rumors about him had been true: he was hot. He had light brown curly hair, blue eyes, and long eyelashes. He wasn't tall but he was fit. His handshake was firm and his smile was big.
But wait, jeans and a leather jacket? Shit, those aren't work clothes. Damnit, he went home after work. He might be completely sober
.

We parked ourselves on stools near the back of the bar and the bartender came over quickly. “What can I get you two?” he asked.

“Absolut Citron and soda on the rocks,” I answered, trying to give Jeff a sexy smile with my side glance.