Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir (23 page)

*   *   *

Early in the 2006 New Year, a few weeks after the disco music had faded from the office Christmas party, Liz took me out to a come-to-Jesus lunch to discuss the near collapse of my small department. A series of petty rivalries had broken out among my staff over my favoritism of Jason, the comely, gay one. He was like a young me (only much more handsome), and I was replaying the dynamic between Jack and me, with me starring in the Jack role. The resentments exploded when I promoted Jason, eventually causing two staff members to resign. My management answer throughout all of this was to throw alcohol on the rising fire and treat everyone to drinks at Mesa de Espa
ñ
a after work.
But I’m a
fun
boss. Why don’t they
like
me?
Not thinking to ask,
Why don’t they
respect
me?
Eventually, they all stopped accepting my Mesa de Espa
ñ
a invitations.
Have I become Michael Scott, the boss from
The Office
?

The New Year lunch with Liz didn’t come after the shit hit the fan, but after it hit the corner office. Before Lea, one of the resigning staff members, left, she had an exit interview with the CEO of the company. Lea sold me down the river. What Lea told the CEO I don’t know, but everything was probably prefaced with the adverb
too
:
too
much attention to Jason,
too
many drinks at lunch,
too
many drinks after work,
too
many sick days. The CEO shared with Liz the conversation he’d had with Lea, which is why Liz took me to lunch. Liz didn’t tell me what Lea unloaded in the corner office, other than to say, “She was one angry bitch.”

When the waiter took our drink order, I made a big show of ordering Perrier, and Liz winked at me. Then she got serious. She was wearing the same Christmas-party sweater of winter-white angora with the rhinestone buttons that sparkled like the bubbles in the Perrier I was drinking.

“My heart is so heavy over all these problems with your staff.” Her heart either sang or it was heavy. She acknowledged that I had had a bad mix of people working for me that had caused the stars to align against me. She gave me a pep talk about needing to hire good people—and fast—to get the department back on solid ground.

With her elbows resting on the table and her hands pointing at me in a prayer gesture, she said, “I know you’ve battled your demons with alcohol, so if you need help, honey, find it.” I shook my head yes. “But trust me, you
don’t
want the CEO to get involved.” She didn’t mention my disastrous spin on the dais at that sales conference nearly three years ago. She didn’t mention the time I showed up late to an author meeting, my body a Niagara Falls of sweaty booze. What a mistake to have ever told her I was getting sober during that “dial on/dial off” time of not drinking.
How long ago was that trip to Rio?

*   *   *

Later that January, not long after five
P.M.
one day, everyone but me heard Jo Ann let loose a shriek straight out of a Hitchcock movie. Karen, Liz’s partner, had phoned to say that Liz had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Stage four. I didn’t hear the scream because I had already left the office for Mesa de Espa
ñ
a to have my usual martinis before my commute home. My commute was a mere ten-minute walk, but come quitting time I needed that drink and couldn’t wait until I got home.

I sat alone on the red vinyl seat of the barstool along with the other solo regulars, bitterly drinking over work, drinking over my department, who’d done me wrong, and drinking over yesterday’s drinking.
So what if I drink a lot after work. So what if I have a few at lunch. I still come back to work and do my job. So what if I have a few sick days. So what?!

The warring voices in my head shut up long enough for me to focus on one of the regulars. He always sat in the middle of the long end of the bar drinking a martini and reading the newspaper, occasionally staring at his reflection, which floated above the bottles in the mirror behind the bar. He looked kind of like me, but ten years older. We never spoke or even acknowledged each other as I sat at the short end of the bar, drinking my martini and reading the paper. Watching him was like staring into a looking glass:

The martini is placed before the man. He looks down at it, almost salivating. He reaches out his right hand to pick it up, but sees that the hand shakes like a palsy victim’s. Then he reaches out the left hand to help the right hand pick up the filled-to-the-brim glass that he knows from experience will spill with the least tremor. The left hand is equally shaky. So he waits until no one is looking, and like a trained seal playing a horn, he dives into the drink to suck up two robust sips. The hit of booze is the medicine he needs, and it calms his shaking hands enough to allow him to pick up the glass with both hands like a toddler holding a sippy cup.

When I heard the news about Liz the next day, my first thought was
Jesus Christ. This is curtains for Liz.
My second thought:
This is curtains for me.

This job was no longer any fun and I didn’t want to be there without Liz, but I was going to hold it together while she was out sick. “Titties up, girl! Titties up,” I said to myself. I was going to whip my department into shape. I was going to make bestsellers out of all of our books. I wasn’t going to be out “sick” anymore. I was going to be early to work. I was going to cut back on the drinking and not drink at lunch. I was going to do it for Liz.

Liz had not returned to the office after the diagnosis. Sometime in early February, after we had received intermittent reports of her progress funneled through Jo Ann, Liz surprised me with a call on my cell phone as I was returning to the office from lunch. I read the caller ID, “Liz Cell,” and couldn’t flip open my tiny phone fast enough.

“Hello, Liz?”

She answered a staccato “Hi,” her voice almost ethereal.

“Oh, Liz! Hello.
Hello
.” She was probably having nothing but “gown days”—Mama Jean’s name for days when she didn’t get out of her nightgown or put on her face. However, I didn’t imagine Liz in a nightgown when I spoke to her. I saw her in that winter-white angora sweater with rhinestone buttons. She asked how
I
was, then asked if I would attend a dinner for a Catholic conservative author of hers in her place. “Tell him that I can’t attend”—she said her next lines in mock horror—“because I have
ovarian
cancer! That’s a good excuse, right?” We both laughed. “I may be sick, but I’m still funny.” It made me think of Peggy Lee:
Can’t even get out of bed. But I’ve still got the voice.
When the call ended, I stood on the corner holding the phone as if it were Liz herself.

After that her prognosis grew more dismal every day. Jo Ann classified the reports she received from Karen as “not good.” I tried to cobble together my department. I tried to be on top of my game. I tried to do it for Liz, but my titties began to sag. If the road to hell was paved with good intentions, the road to the bar was paved with broken promises.

In mid-February I lost it on Mr. Parker’s bed in the middle of his studio apartment, which was packed ass cheek to jowl with party guests. I was in hot-pink corduroy pants and a faux-mink jacket (a sad substitute for the Persian lamb), so I wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. Here’s what I remember:

Arriving with Michahaze at four in the afternoon in good spirits.

Three hours later crying hysterically in a puddle on Mr. Parker’s bed about the dying Liz.

Sliding repeatedly into the snow like a Pink Panther rag doll while Michahaze tried frantically to hail a cab.

What I don’t remember:
biting Jason on the neck on my way out of the party.

Then black.

The hangover the next day was award winning, even though I slept until two in the afternoon. I thought I was going to die. No, really. I thought I was going to die. Michahaze and I were shopping at Home Depot. My head was the weight of a bowling ball, my legs were wobbly, and the right side of my abdomen throbbed. I didn’t tell Michahaze how sick I felt. I pressed on the spot on my abdomen where it hurt.
Isn’t that where the liver is? Oh, God. My liver is going to explode just like Jack Kerouac’s. Right here in the Home Depot in front of the $19.99 orchids.

Every day wasn’t a question of
would
I be hungover, but to what debilitating degree? If the degree was major, I’d call in sick and have a gown day.

After one of those gown days I was sitting at my desk, paralyzed by an overwhelming to-do list that had piled up. I was praying that a guillotine would relieve me of my head and its throbbing pain when Jo Ann walked into my office. I sat up and tried to perkify myself. “Hey! What’s up?”

Jo Ann didn’t smile and didn’t sit down. She stood at the edge of my desk and peered down at me over the reading glasses she had chained around her neck. “Jamie, I’m not your boss—”

“Sorry I missed yesterday. How was the meeting?”

“Listen to me. I’m not your boss and I can’t tell you what to do—”

“What are you talking about? I was out sick. I mean, I’m sorry but—”

“Let me finish. I hope you’re feeling better, but you’ve been out a lot lately, and now that Liz is”—Jo Ann closed her eyes, searching for the word—“out, the CEO has started to notice. When I showed up to yesterday’s meeting without you, he asked where you were. ‘Out sick,’ I said.
‘Again?’
‘Apparently.’” She gave me what must have been the same
Who knows?
shrug of her shoulders she had given the CEO. She paused and glared at me over her glasses before adding, “‘Not good,’ he said. ‘Not good.’”

Not good
is almost British in its understatement because it always means more than “bad.” It means “disastrous,” “calamitous,” “critical condition.” I tried to rationalize the phrase as “not great,” “slightly marginal,” “could be better.” I was deluded.

“Uh-huh. Well, thanks so much for telling me. I appreciate that. I promise I won’t miss another meeting.”

She sat down. “Jamie, dearie,” she said with a nervous chuckle to try to lighten the moment. “I used to have a colleague who drank so much every night that he had to drink at lunch to steady his nerves the next day, the hangovers were so bad.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He didn’t always make it to lunch because he didn’t always make it to work.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m just saying that you’d better be on the lookout.”

“Thanks, Jo Ann. Thanks for that.”

*   *   *

When I had gown days, they were usually precipitated by a dressing drink. A dressing drink used to be the cocktail or two I drank while getting ready to go out for the evening. It had morphed into the drink or two I had while I got ready for work in the morning after Michahaze had left for work. I didn’t drink every morning, but I needed to. When I lost the battle, it meant drinking a couple of vodka screwdrivers. By the time I left for work, the crispy, crunchy feeling and penetrating self-loathing had temporarily lifted and I walked with a spring in my step.

But I liked the mornings when I lost the battle completely. If after two dressing drinks the self-loathing hadn’t evaporated and the routine barfing hadn’t relieved my physical malaise, I’d tell myself that tomorrow is another day, wave the white flag in complete surrender, and call in sick.

It was a tremendous relief.

Then I’d pour a tall vodka on the rocks in an iced-tea glass, abandoning the pretense of fruit juice. I’d place the untouched drink on the nightstand, not even taking a sip until everything was in place. I’d close the louvers on the tall window shutters and block out the day. I’d undress. I’d unmake the bed. Then I’d slip between the sheets, my head slightly propped up on the pillows. I’d pick up the drink with both shaking hands and hold it up like a chalice. I’d take a long, deep gulp and allow myself to luxuriate in the sensation of the booze sliding down my throat, making me warm, pulling me down into oblivion. At last I could enjoy the drink without worry or fear that someone might see me. I was at one with the drink. The annoying sounds of the city ten floors below, coming more alive as the day blossomed, faded with each sip until I started to feel myself slipping, slipping …
Ahh
.

*   *   *

I never saw Liz again, and the “I’m still funny” cell-phone conversation was the last time I spoke to her. She died in early April 2006. I was able to pull it together for her one last time, long enough to write her obituary with Jo Ann. “She could make an ordinary editorial meeting into a stand-up comedy act” was Jo Ann’s quote for the obit.

At the funeral I was a wreck, shaking and hyperventilating with sobs in a rear pew at St. Ignatius Loyola Catholic Church on Park Avenue. Michahaze was by my side, holding my hand. Jo Ann was behind me clinching my shoulder. Liz was in front of the altar in a casket.

At the post-funeral reception I made a point of waving around my can of club soda in front of my colleagues. After two of those, I gave up and switched to a Bloody Mary. As I moved in a fog through the mourners, I spotted a striking, spindly older woman with spiky silver hair and Lucille Ball–blue eyes. Aunt Joan
.
I took a sip of my Bloody Mary and walked past her without introducing myself. She was drinking a ginger ale and wearing a beautiful fur coat.

*   *   *

Two weeks after Liz’s death I returned to the office after one of my solo lunches. I had started to frequent the Irish pubs that lined Third Avenue. With their day laborers clutching the sports section of the
New York Post,
eyes glued to the wall-mounted TV stuck on ESPN, and drinking beer with a shot of whiskey—
boilermakers!
—I was certain that no one would ever think of finding me there.
My version of a witness protection program.
I sat in the back with a lunch of three or four vodka tonics and a shepherd’s pie on the side. After I had amassed a pile of red swizzle drink straws, I surreptitiously pushed them off the table onto the floor on the off chance that anyone I knew did arrive.