Jo Piazza
Authors: Love Rehab
a novel in twelve steps
JO PIAZZA
To all my ex-boyfriends for making me crazy and
all my girlfriends for making me sane again.
Admit you are powerless and your life is unmanageable
Find something greater than yourself to make you sane again
Make a decision to turn your life over to a higher power
Admit to yourself and someone else all the crazy shit you have done
Become entirely ready to have a higher power remove all these defects of character
Humbly ask our higher power to remove our shortcomings (fix us, please!)
Make a list of all the persons (exes) we have harmed, and become willing to make amends
Make amends whenever possible, except when doing so might cause someone harm
When we are wrong, promptly admit it
Listen to that higher power (whoever she may be). She knows her shit.
Having had a spiritual awakening, carry our message to others
Admit you are powerless and your life is unmanageable
Annie and I hit rock bottom the same week. She sucked down enough tequila to incapacitate a three-hundred-pound sailor while I overdosed on a very bad man. Neither of us thought what we were doing was self-destructive until it became too, too obvious that it was.
Too, too obvious started on a Tuesday night in July.
I was curled into a human nest on the couch—legs crossed over each other, arms looped through bent knees, hair in a state of serious unwash—waiting for a reply text to a message I had sent hours earlier. I had resorted to playing childish games with the iPhone. If I turned off the ringer and flipped the phone upside down, then maybe I could force the appearance of a new message when I broke down and flipped it over … every thirty seconds.
I cleared out junk mail (those near-daily quivers you get from Match.com if you’ve even glanced sideways at their site in the past ten years) and old texts from my parents in the irrational hope that by creating space on the phone something new would appear.
The message I had sent, the one I was waiting for a reply to, was a pathetic kind of message begging for one more conversation to prolong the continuing breakup with my boyfriend, Eric—a breakup he desperately wanted and I didn’t.
This breaking-up discussion began in person with me storming out of his apartment. It continued over exactly six and a half hours of phone calls that became increasingly more one-sided and had moved first to Gchats and now to text messaging—the devolution of a relationship in the digital age. It’s funny how they always end the way they start out.
Our text messaging was all I had left.
See, even though I was the one to storm out of his apartment, I didn’t want to break up. I thought the storming and the eruption would lead to some grand gesture or admission of undying love and devotion and a desire to move in together, buy rings, have babies.
It was pathetic, because I should not have wanted these things with this man. I had found a litany of e-mails between him and his assistant—dubbed by Annie (who, by the way, is my best friend), Floozy McSecretary (actual name Lacey, a complete bullshit name, which will henceforth not be repeated … because it sounds like a hooker name).
Why was I the one begging and pleading for our two-year relationship to continue another day when
he
was the one who cheated? I did tell you I was approaching rock bottom. I don’t actually know where the phrase “rock bottom” comes from. Because I design children’s books for a living, I have this tendency to illustrate certain phrases or situations in my head. I have always pictured “rock bottom” as a situation where your actual backside turns into a pile of rocks so heavy you can’t move and are stuck in one horrible, really bad place, with a big pebbly behind! That kind of thing would weigh anyone down.
What I know now is that crazy “in love” people make bad decisions, and I was making my Eric decisions with my ass firmly implanted in a pair of bad idea jeans. I somehow convinced myself his cheating was my fault. I had been away from my real life in Manhattan for a whole month since my grandmother passed away. I was taking care of her estate back in my hometown in New Jersey (NOT THAT HE COULDN’T HAVE COME OUT TO NEW JERSEY!), trying to figure out what to do with a giant six-bedroom Victorian house with a widow’s walk and wraparound veranda that needed about as much fixing up as my self-esteem. Grandma’s entire block was like a lineup of discarded ex-girlfriends who had once been adored when they were shiny and new, and then turned in for something sleeker with more reliable plumbing. No one seemed to want giant six-bedroom old houses anymore in New Jersey. People in New Jersey all wanted the new style McMansion with its granite countertops, Sub-Zero fridges, and large breasts (I mean three-car garages). My parents had already semiretired to Florida and were clueless when it came to contracts and real estate. I think my grandmother’s last joke on me was to bring me back to New Jersey and turn me into a spinster in her former house.
Grandma, who actually insisted that I refer to her as Eleanor in public because having a granddaughter meant you were old, was never a spinster even when she reached the proper age when one should actually be a spinster and surround herself with cats and crocheted things. Ever since my grandfather passed away when I was six, Eleanor was the Blanche Devereaux of our town, shacking up with every newly available widower as soon as they came onto the market. Men adored her. They simply doted on her with flowers and presents and trips to West Palm Beach.
Growing up watching her I got the impression that dating should be all about the man courting the woman and showering her with limitless attention.
That’s definitely only true for senior citizens.
She would have hated the way I was plodding through the now dusty rooms like a modern-day Miss Havisham—if Miss Havisham had been partial to a hole-riddled Juicy Couture tracksuit that smelled like Doritos. A moth-eaten wedding dress would have been an improvement.
But as a I wore a groove into the wooden floors with all my plodding, I had developed some theories about why my relationship ended—eleven different theories in all to be exact (only two of which were outlined to Eric in detail over a series of text messages). My latest brainstorm was that the blame couldn’t be put onto Floozy at all. I had seen enough episodes of Dr. Phil to know that cheating was always symptomatic of something gone wrong in a relationship. Floozy was a symptom. I was the problem. I was an absentee girlfriend. If only I had returned sooner and made my relationship a priority, then Floozy never would have been able to sink her acrylic French manicure into Eric.
Objectively I did understand what a red-blooded American man saw in Floozy. She was blond to my brunette, blue eyed to my murky hazel, big boobed to my modest B-cups, and twenty-three to my thirty. She wasn’t shy about showing off her ample assets either. Before rock bottom swiftly approached along with the night of the unreturned text messages, back in the halcyon early days of our courtship, I would stop into Eric’s Midtown hedge fund office for lunch and there they would be, Floozy’s D-cups popping out of an assortment of unitards made of a material closely related to Saran Wrap. They were truly a wonder to behold. Given enough grappa I probably would have reached out and touched one. When I illustrated Floozy in my head—fairly often I caricatured the two of them together, often in peril—those boobs were so immense and disproportionate to her little blond head that she fell on her face, before being eaten by a lion.
I contend that you can tell a lot about people and what is most important to them by the first question they ask you when you meet them. I’m easy. I usually ask people how their day is going. It’s boring, I know, but I actually
do
care what kind of day most people are having. I genuinely appreciate people being happy and feeling good.
There are the people who long for their teenage glory days, who always ask you what high school you attended. This is often very important for people who went to high school where things like football were a big deal or for people who went to very fancy boarding schools in western Massachusetts.
Then there are the people who ask you where you went to college. This is more customary than high school and less specific (since who really cared that I went to Valley Green High in Yardville, New Jersey, home of the fighting Challengers, awkwardly named for the long-ago exploded space shuttle). College gives strangers a common ground. It lets people play the name game, which is always a nice icebreaker.
“Do you know Susie Goldberg?”
“Of course I know Susie Goldberg. She lived on my hall freshman year. She was so outgoing.”
And then in hushed tones the other person adds: “Yeah, superoutgoing. Was she still a little bit of a … you know. Was she popular?”
“Oh my God, Susie totally got around freshman year. One time at a Phi Delt rush event, two guys and a midget stripper … ”
And then you were clinking beer glasses and becoming shot-doing friends with this random person all because you were able to bond over Susie Goldberg (now a mother of two, happily living in Greenwich, CT) being a whore. The college question is a good one, except when associating with people from Harvard.
Harvard people like to say: “I went to school in Cambridge.” Of course, everyone knows that means Harvard because there is only one school in Cambridge. The not saying of Harvard somehow becomes more pretentious than the saying of Harvard and then you have to hate that person. I once had hate sex with a guy who did the whole “I went to Cambridge” thing. He gave me crabs.
The first question Floozy asked me was where I went to the gym. I mumbled something about a Crunch, because seven years ago I had stopped in to activate a free monthly pass and taken an ill-fated Zumba class at the Crunch gym in the East Village. I don’t care what Madonna says about the benefits of Zumba—white girls from New Jersey with two left feet shouldn’t partake in the art of Brazilian dance. I could hardly sit down for a week.
Floozy was also always supernice to me, which made the betrayal part of this whole thing a little bit worse. Since she organized Eric’s calendar, I knew it was her who remembered my birthday and sent daisies to my apartment (since I didn’t like roses) and who made dinner reservations for my parents’ anniversary.
What a bitch.
Around three in the morning, as my shame spiral was finally starting to settle in for the evening, and I teetered in and out of sleep, twitching at any vibration from the general direction of my phone, I was startled by the blue-and-red flashing lights of the town sheriff’s car on the front lawn.
What time was it? Four a.m.? Shit. Eric had gotten a restraining order against me? I had only sent ten, maybe eleven messages in the last ten hours. One an hour. What’s the statute for texts? Is it like wine? You can send one every sixty minutes and not increase your blood crazy level above the legal limit? It was hardly restraining order–worthy. I peeled myself away from the plastic-covered couch I was too lazy to de-plastic and almost fell on my face, my left leg asleep. The police car was parked askew in the driveway, and it didn’t look like there was even anyone in it.
This was the beginning of a horror movie. Sad, sad rejected girl with ratty hair lured outside by fake police officer to be killed by mad man with a hook for a hand. I wasn’t going to let that thought keep me from going outside. Captain Hook was currently the least of my adversaries. Mine were big-boobed, love-of-my-life-stealing administrative assistants. Besides, the pretty blondes are almost always the first killed in those kinds of movies. I was too dowdy to be taken out. If Floozy were here, she would have been fucked. I padded down the cobblestone walkway in bare feet without bothering to flick on the porch light. Getting closer, I saw a figure slumped over the steering wheel. Captain Hook took a nap before bludgeoning? Maybe he saw me in the window and decided I wasn’t worth a bludgeon? God, my self-esteem was in the gutter.