Party Girl: A Novel (17 page)

I’m wavering between these my-roommate-will-save-me fantasies and thinking that checking in here was a horrific mistake as I listen to everyone laugh and read about how I’m going to have to go and apologize to everyone I’ve ever harmed.
I’m nothing like these annoyingly cheerful freaks
, I think, and decide I should probably call Mom and explain this to her. I’m thinking about this when Kimberly, the no-nonsense front desk lady, walks in to the dank, depressing room.

“Knock knock,” she says, even though she’s already inside. In drug rehab, this probably counts as a joke. “I’m here to go through your bags.”

Joel had warned me about this. He’d told me that Kimberly would come and search my belongings for smuggled-in coke and pills. How desperate did people have to be, I wonder, to sneak drugs into rehab? Kimberly grabs my pink hobo purse from the floor and pulls my BlackBerry out.

“You won’t be needing this,” she smiled, as she tucks the BlackBerry into her pocket. Even though I vaguely recall someone telling me this would happen, I can’t help but feel horribly violated, and positive that Kimberly is getting some sadistic pleasure out of taking away my connection to the outside world. And then she continues to go through my bag until she lands on a bottle of Listerine.

“Oh, no way, Jose,” she says while cradling it, sounding excited.

“You encourage bad breath?” I snap.

“Oh, that’s funny,” she says, not sounding remotely amused. “There’s alcohol in there.”

And then I snap. “Jesus Christ. I’m not going to drink Listerine for the fucking alcohol,” I say.

Kimberly clearly doesn’t feel it’s necessary to respond, for she simply slides the bottle of mouthwash into her other pocket and looks at me the way one might a serial killer.

“You ready for your UA?” she asks.

I just look at her, not interested in explaining that I have no idea what she’s asking me.

“Your test?” she says.

I continue to stare at her blankly.

“Urine analysis,” she finally says, then adds, “You have to pee in a cup.”

She turns and starts walking out of the room and I get up and follow her. It probably should have occurred to me, but of course I hadn’t even considered the fact that they were going to be constantly testing me to see if I was taking drugs. While I can’t imagine who the hell would take drugs while they’re in rehab, after getting a look at Joel and some of the other residents, I’m beginning to gather an answer. I follow Kimberly to the front office, where she picks a clear plastic cup from inside her desk and hands it to me. At this point, I know what to do—I have been to the gyno, after all.

“Okay, be right back,” I say and start toward the bathroom.

“Ha ha,” Kimberly says, immediately on my tail. “As if.” And that’s when I realize this bitch is planning to come into the bathroom with me. Jesus! What the hell does she think, that I’m high but storing some “good” pee in my side pocket that I plan to put in the cup if she doesn’t log my every move?

We go into the bathroom and as I pull down my pants, I think that it’s a good thing I don’t have issues about being naked in front of people or I’d really be in trouble. I flip the toilet seat up and am about to sit down when I realize that thousands of skanky, drug-addicted asses have surely been here before me and, based on what I’ve gathered so far about the Pledges hygiene policy, the remnants of those experiences surely still remain. In public toilets, I never have the patience to bother with those toilet covers—I simply squat an inch or so above. But am I going to be able to squat and pee in a cup with a humorless, suspicious wench watching me?

I tell myself to ignore her, then just squat and hold the cup under my stream, grateful that I’m not having performance anxiety. I fill the cup, place it on the counter, finish peeing, and start washing my hands. Kimberly stands there, gazing at my cup of pee.

“It’s all yours,” I say, gesturing toward the cup.

She walks over, picks it up, and gazes at it with wonder. “Amelia,” she says, “you really ought to think about drinking more water.”

“Why?” I ask as I think about how much I want to smack her.

“Healthy pee,” she says, “should be almost clear.” We both look at mine, which is basically orange.

“Great,” I say. “Thanks for the tip. Can I go now?”

She nods and sashays out of the room. As I follow her out, I wonder if she’s going to write down the color of my pee in my file.

I yearn for my BlackBerry so that I can call someone. Of course, I could wait in line for the pay phone that Rich—an eighteen-year-old kid from Boulder, Colorado—has been dominating since I got here. Asking twenty adults to share one pay phone is ridiculously inhumane, but then again, so is silently accusing a nonalcoholic of packing contraband mouthwash for a secret buzz or acting like she’ll probably cheat on a fricking pee test. Even if Rich, the Colorado kid, does ever get off the phone, I know that I don’t feel like talking to Mom or, in fact, anyone. I have no credibility anymore, so my announcing that these people are all psychotic wouldn’t mean anything to anyone. It occurs to me for not the first time that I really don’t have any friends. And for once, this thought doesn’t make me cry. Maybe I’m just all out of tears at this point.

I’m sitting in the breakfast room the next morning, thoroughly exhausted, when Tommy greets me with a huge smile and says that sometime today I have to go see Dr. Thistle, the resident doctor at Pledges, for a checkup. The girl who was supposed to have been my roommate clearly came to her senses and decided to forgo rehab, so last night I slept alone in my creepy room. Of course, “sleep” is a pretty optimistic description of what I’d been doing. Staring at the ceiling, getting up occasionally to smoke and trying to read the Pledges book in order to bore me into slumber more accurately describes last night’s nocturnal activities.

Here at breakfast, everyone’s chattering but I can’t think of anything to say until my third cup of coffee, when I ask the tan blonde, Robin, what she does for a living. She tells me that she’d been a model, once stripped down to her G-string on Howard Stern, and continues to go on sharing anecdotes about her life. I get the distinct sensation that she considers rehab another stop on her party tour—like, summer in the Hamptons, winter in Aspen, spring in Culver City—and I envy her relaxed attitude. Was there something wrong with me for thinking rehab was such a horrible place to be?

When we’re done eating, Robin walks me over to Dr. Thistle’s office and tells me she’ll see me later in group. It’s beginning to dawn on me that group happens constantly, like every moment we’re not eating or sleeping or cleaning our dishes. So far, no one’s mentioned a word about the pool or equine therapy.

Dr. Thistle—or “Doc” as everyone around Pledges calls him—nods and takes notes as I tell him about all the coke I’ve done but when I explain my situation with Ambien, he starts shaking his head and looking disapproving.

“Up to five pills a night?” he asks, dumbfounded. This was a guy who listened to people come in and talk about shooting vats of drugs up their ass and doing eight balls in five-minute spans, if what people had been sharing during and after group was any indication, so I don’t know why he had to be so judgmental about me taking a few sleeping pills.

“Look, I wasn’t taking them for
fun,”
I say. “I was taking them because I suffer from
insomnia.”

“I understand,” he says. “And when did you stop taking them?”

“The other day,” I say. “When I got out of the hospital, I decided to go cold turkey.”

Doc shakes his head. “That wasn’t smart. You should have told them how many you were taking when you were in the hospital so they could have detoxed you off of them with an IV. You could have had a seizure.”

I don’t think anything sets me off more than being told I’ve done something stupid—so I have to stifle an urge to start wringing Doc’s neck. No one in the hospital asked me how much of anything I took and it certainly didn’t cross my mind to offer it up. “Well, clearly I did not have a seizure, Doctor, so I guess we can conclude that I survived despite my stupidity,” I say.

“It’s going to be a while before you’ll be able to sleep through the night,” he says. This guy needs to be given a serious lecture about glass half-full versus glass half-empty logic, but I’m too desperate to get away from him to be the one to do it.

14

I’m trying to focus on reading the Pledges book when Tommy pokes his head in my room.

“Just wanted to see how you’re adjusting,” he says, cheerful as ever.

“Oh, great,” I say. Even in this ridiculously downtrodden state, I seem to care about what my drug counselor thinks of me so I don’t want him to know how scared and miserable I feel. I try to smile. “Everyone’s really nice,” I add, even though it’s a bald-faced lie.

Tommy just looks at me. “Why don’t you and I take a walk?” he asks.

A walk, like anything else right now, sounds absolutely unappealing, but what are my options? To sit here and think about how much I must have fucked up my life to be ensconced in this place with a bunch of losers?

“Can I smoke?” I find myself asking.

“Absolutely,” he says, as he helps me to my feet. “In fact, I encourage you to.”

I grab my Camel Lights and my lighter, slide on a pair of flipflops and follow Tommy outside as he picks up a pebble that was sitting on a picnic table covered with ashtrays and starts walking down the Pledges entryway toward the street.

“I’m going to say something and I don’t want you to be offended by it,” Tommy says as he tosses the pebble onto the ground and leads me onto a busy street lined with thrift stores and fast-food places. It’s my first time seeing civilization since I checked in a few days ago, and it seems shocking that the real world has actually only been a few hundred feet away.

“Shoot,” I say, lighting up what has to be my eighty-seventh cigarette of the day. I had to imagine that getting offended was probably going to be the nicest thing that would happen to me today, now that my life was shaping up to be a series of depressing incidents brightened only by Camel Lights and the occasional brownie. Besides, I like Tommy.

“You strike me as pretty much spiritually dead,” Tommy says as he leads me across the street. He looks at me sadly while squinting his eyes, as if my face were the sun and he’s not wearing sunglasses.

I’d expected him to tell me he thought I seemed really depressed or like I wasn’t fitting in or that I’d clearly let myself go physically but this didn’t seem particularly offensive. I wasn’t, in fact, even sure what he meant.

“Spiritually dead?” I ask, exhaling smoke. “Well, I’m not religious. And,” I add with a smile, “I’m not remotely offended.”

For once, Tommy doesn’t smile. He stops walking and steps in front of me so that we’re standing face to face. “Spirituality doesn’t always have to do with religion,” he says.

I know what he’s doing. I know that sober people are obsessed with everyone else believing in God—even though they called it a “higher power” so as not to put off people who weren’t Catholic or whatever—and Tommy is going to try to do the God hard-sell on me.

“Absolutely,” I say and hope that’s the end of the conversation and we can just walk back to the rehab in peace.

“Going to the beach and staring at the ocean can be spiritual,” he says, standing perfectly still. “Going to a pet store and getting on your hands and knees and playing with puppies can be spiritual. Going on a walk and smelling flowers can be spiritual.”

For a straight guy, Tommy is pretty dramatic, and something about his heartfelt spirituality lecture makes me smile. I have to admit that sitting on a beach, playing with puppies, and smelling flowers sounds pretty damn nice. And I can’t remember the last time I did any of those things.

Group that afternoon isn’t all that different from group the day before, but this time the person who speaks gets to decide who talks next. I sit there picking my cuticles, feeling fairly safe that I’m doing a decent job of remaining mostly invisible. And I’m glad for it once the meeting gets going and I start hearing the bullshit coming out of people’s mouths. A “pink cloud” is apparently a space you get in when you’re sober and everything seems so good that you have to pinch yourself to make sure you’re not dreaming, and roughly half the Pledges residents claim to be there. I can’t for the life of me figure out why everyone is claiming something so ridiculous—it’s not like they’re being graded on their rehab behavior and performance.
They’re probably all actors
, I think.
Like everyone else in L.A.

Finally it’s the hot guy’s turn to speak. After introducing himself as “Justin, alcoholic,” he says, “I have to be honest—I’m really not feeling all this pink cloud shit.” He pushes his hair out of his eyes, and I basically fall in love with him on the spot, for both his cheekbones as much as the fact that he seems like the only honest one in the room. “I miss using with every pore in my body. I fucking hate being sober. It just feels so…unnatural for me.”

“That’s just your disease talking to you,” Tommy says.

I expect Justin to snap that diseases don’t talk, and that most people don’t believe all this alcoholism-is-a-disease crap, anyway, but he actually nods.

“I know it is, and I know this feeling will pass because it did the other day, but I guess I’m just…pissed off that I’m an alcoholic, a drug addict, whatever. It just doesn’t seem fair that my friends can party and not end up in here with all you crazies.”

Even though I expect people to be offended, everyone nods and laughs and Robin even claps.
She’s probably trying to sleep with him
, I reason. But I can’t begin to explain what’s going on with the rest of them. They
know
they’re crazy and find it
funny
? People who know they’re crazy should be seriously alarmed and not amused, I decide. Even Justin starts laughing, and I find myself incredibly confused by his behavior. He seems so cool, but maybe he’s just as weird as everyone else. I mean, why is he looking so damn cheerful when he just shared about how pissed off he is?