Party Girl: A Novel (20 page)

“It means…” Justin looks more uncomfortable than I’ve ever seen him. “It means I
know
I need to tell you something.”

“What is it?” I’m immediately in a panic, positive that he’s going to confess that he’s been sneaking out of Sober Living to smoke crystal meth. “Did you go out?”

“Dear God, take that back,” Justin says, shaking his head.

“Then what is it?” I ask. “Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad. Remember what Tommy used to say: ‘There are no big deals’?”

Justin nods and looks down. “Jason wasn’t just my roommate,” he says, and before he utters another word, I know exactly what his big confession is going to be, and something inside of me isn’t all that surprised.

I should have known. Whenever Justin talked about people he dated, he’d say “this person” and never “he” or “she.” And of course it was kind of weird for a thirty-five-year-old to have a roommate, let alone one he was always brawling with. Even though when we first met, I fantasized that our friendship would one day morph into true love, something in me had basically abandoned that concept long ago, and I think that something was a sixth sense that he wasn’t exactly oriented that way.

“I know,” I say.

“You do?” he asks, looking immensely relieved. “How?”

I smile. “Honey, I live in West Hollywood and grew up outside San Francisco. As far as I’m concerned, we heteros are the minority.”

Justin laughs. “I know, it does sometimes seem that way,” he says. “And I’m not ashamed of it. Or maybe I am. I don’t know. Jason thinks I am. But I think it’s just that I have a kind of deep voice and don’t wear supertight clothes and so people just assume I’m straight.” He shakes his head. “Straight people will say, ‘Wow, you look so straight,’ like that’s a compliment.”

“I get it,” I say. “When people find out I’m Jewish, they say, ‘You’re Jewish? But you’re pretty!’ I’m never sure if I’m supposed to thank them or tell them to fuck off.”

Justin laughs again. “Well, I’m glad I could tell you this,” he says softly, once he’s stopped.

I grin at him. “Me, too.”

He takes a sip of his latte and licks foam off his upper lip. “And, I want you to know that if I were ever going to be with a woman, it would be you.”

“And if I were ever going to be with a gay man, I want you to know that it would be you.”

“Shut up!” he exclaims, tossing a napkin at me. “I’m being serious.”

“So am I,” I say, tossing the napkin back.

“Seriously deranged,” he says and then we both start laughing like we’ve just inhaled entire tanks of nitrous oxide. The phrase “high on life” floats through my mind and I want to share it with Justin, but I’m laughing too hard to get the words out.

Stephanie and I meet at the bottom of Runyon Canyon. She’s the one who had suggested hiking, and while the old me would have tried to convince her to do anything else, I’m realizing that there are so many things in L.A.—and the world—that I haven’t experienced or even been aware of because trying them has always seemed more daunting than just, say, meeting for drinks.

I’m not exactly sure what’s going to happen here—if Stephanie wants to talk about my making out with Gus or just proceed as if nothing happened—but I feel clear about the fact that I want to apologize either way. With some sobriety under my belt, I see how truly out of control my behavior was. It really didn’t start and end with making out with Gus the night of the party, either; I’m starting to see how much I’ve always felt entitled to whatever I’ve thought I wanted and how few boundaries I’ve had with friends. But I’m also learning not to beat myself up for that. Rachel is always reminding me that alcoholics and addicts are naturally self-centered people, and that I haven’t been bad but “sick.” And now I’m trying to get well.

“Hey there,” Stephanie says, giving me an awkward hug when I walk up to her at the Gardner entrance. “You look good.”

“You do, too,” I say, and mean it. I’d never really noticed how pretty she was before.

We start walking in sync, and I notice that our legs are literally taking strides that are the exact same size. It reminds me of how women who spend a lot of time together get on the same menstrual cycle—supposedly, foul as it is, because their bodies subconsciously smell each other, and then adjust—and it seems surprising that after so much time apart and so many changes, Stephanie and I should be in the same groove in any way at all.

“Stephanie, I want to apologize to you for being an asshole,” I suddenly say.

“Please, Amelia. I’m the one who wrote you that foul note. Why don’t we just forget everything that happened and move on?”

I stop walking. “In a second. But first let me just say that I’m sorry for always making everything about me—what
I
want to do, where
I
want to go, who
I
want to talk to when we’re there. Kissing Gus that night was the ultimate selfish act, and I’m so sorry.”

Stephanie looks pleasantly surprised. “I miss you,” she says, starting to head up the path again, with me just a step behind. “It was hard not to call you. And then, when I heard about what happened at work, and you going to rehab and everything, I literally couldn’t stop myself from calling.”

“I miss you, too, Steph,” I say. We stop walking and I throw my arms around her. “I’m really sorry for the way I’ve acted,” I say, feeling tears sting my eyes.

She surrenders into my hug. “Me, too. Can we be friends again?” I nod, and I know she can feel my nod because my head is cradled against her neck. After a few seconds, we disentangle and I ask her about Jane and Molly.

“Molly’s good but Jane is thoroughly immersed in the whole coke scene,” Stephanie says, shaking her head. “We’ve completely lost touch.”

“That’s sad,” I say and mean it, genuinely hoping Jane finds a place like Pledges and knowing that if she’s like every other addict I’ve met, my calling and telling her about it would probably only piss her off.

Stephanie and I continue up Runyon and even though I did this walk once before, I was seriously hungover at the time and didn’t notice that you can see almost all of Los Angeles from the top.

“God, this is stunning,” I say.

Stephanie nods, but looks distracted. Then she blurts out, “By the way, I’ve cut back a lot on drinking myself.”

I nod—I’d kind of expected her to say something about her own drinking habits, assuming I’d be judging them now. “The way I look at it, I’m the one who lost the privilege to do that stuff—not anyone else,” I say. “So please don’t think I’m going to be some antidrinking Nazi.”

I’ve thought a lot about this because when I first got to rehab, I couldn’t stop declaring every person I thought about a complete and utter alcoholic. But I’ve come to learn that alcoholism and addiction is a self-diagnosed disease and that it doesn’t have much to do with how much someone drinks. An alcoholic personality is one where the person is massively self-involved and always wants to be the center of attention but still has low self-esteem—“the piece of shit in the center of the universe.” An alcoholic is someone whose life is unmanageable as a result of drinking and using. And for however much Stephanie and I used to party together, I’m the one with that personality, not her. I learned at Pledges that there’s a big difference between alcoholics and heavy drinkers.

We continue to walk and then Stephanie stops suddenly. “Oh, I almost forgot to tell you—I got promoted to managing editor.”

“Oh my God, that’s amazing.” I’m so accustomed to taking other people’s success as a personal affront, like they’ve received something I should have had—no matter whether I was qualified for it or even wanted it myself—that it feels foreign to be genuinely happy for her. “Congratulations.”

“It’s crazy—the less I care, the more they reward me. I’m the very definition of failing up.”

It occurs to me then that Stephanie maybe isn’t as unambitious as she pretends to be, and that perhaps she acts self-deprecating around me because she knows I compare myself to everyone and will thus feel bad. “That’s ridiculous,” I say. “You’re about twenty times smarter than anyone you come into contact with, so you don’t even have to
try
to succeed. That’s why you’re always getting promoted.”

Stephanie smiles but looks at me somewhat quizzically. “Okay, who are you and what have you done with Amelia?” she asks and we both laugh.

“Hey, congratulations,” I hear as I walk back to my folding chair. It’s a few hours after my walk with Stephanie and I’ve just taken a sixty days sober chip at Pledges. “That’s quite an accomplishment.” As other people take their chips, I glance at the person talking and realize I’m staring into the face of Damian McHugh, the boy-next-door sitcom star with a drinking problem that’s gotten more ink than his career. He’d been going through his very public battle with the bottle—throwing up in bars and licking the faces of reporters—while I’d been an inpatient at Pledges and though we’d all jokingly talked about “saving a seat” for him there, I hadn’t expected him to simply show up one day to shake my hand for getting a chip.

“I’m Damian,” he says, holding out his hand.

I’m about to say “I know” before remembering how uncool that is. “I’m Amelia.” I smile and shake but he doesn’t let go of my hand. “Nice to meet you,” I add, taking my hand away.

Just then, the meeting starts breaking up and people begin their rush outside in order to get as much nicotine as possible into their systems as soon as humanly possible.

“Want to go smoke?” he asks. I nod and follow him outside as I marvel at how surreal my life has become—writing about celebrities going to rehab one month and smoking with them the next. Damian walks past the clusters of people smoking right outside the meeting doors and toward the basketball hoop, lighting a cigarette and holding the lighter out for me.

“You know how when some people get sober, they start glowing and shit?” he says suddenly. “You really seem to have that.”

“Thanks,” I respond, taken aback.
Is this a special sober pick-up line?
I wonder, deciding that if it’s not, it should be. It seems like the polite thing would be to tell him that he’s glowing, too, but it would be an outright lie and outright lies aren’t escaping from my lips with ease anymore. “So did you just finish up the thirty-day program?” I ask.

He nods. “Yeah, at the Malibu Pledges. But I like the meetings better here.” He stares at his cigarette as if it, and not me, asked him the question.

“And?” I ask. “How did you like it?”

He blows smoke rings. “About as much as I figure I’d like open-heart surgery,” he says.

I can’t help but laugh. It’s actually an appropriate analogy if you thought about it, but I got the feeling Damian hadn’t. “Really? That much?” I ask.

“If I needed the open-heart surgery in order to survive,” he adds, grimacing.

“I see,” I conclude. “Miserable but necessary.”

“Something like that,” he says, eyeing me as he tosses his cigarette butt on the ground and smashes it out with his Nike Airmax–encased foot. “You?”

“Actually,” I say, “I loved it. I feel like I’ve been given a whole new life.” I know I sound like a walking cliché when I say things like this but I don’t know how else to explain how different everything has become.

“Really?” Damian asks, looking at me skeptically. He gestures his head toward the meeting room. “Don’t you feel a little like all of this is…I don’t know…sort of cultlike? Like they’re trying to brainwash us or something?”

I shrug. Of course, I’d heard people say this kind of thing before—to the point where I pretty much had a standard response. “I guess,” I say, “but my brain really needed some washing.” I smile to try to alleviate how annoying my response must sound to him but at the same time realize that talking to this guy who’s paid, like, $10,000 for every second he’s on camera is about as stimulating as examining an ant farm—and having the ants crawl up your arm.

He smiles and takes a step closer to me. “Say the word and we could be naked and in my pool in ten minutes,” he says.

Stunned, I feel positive I must have misheard him. “What?” I ask.

“Say the word and we could be in my pool in a heartbeat,” he repeats, editing out the nude part, and I realize that Damian has, indeed, asked me—a girl he met under five minutes ago whose name I feel certain he hasn’t retained—to leave an alumni meeting on a sunny afternoon and go home with him, assuming that his celebrity—and, I guess, the fact that he has a pool—would be enough of a selling point.

“Thanks,” I say, “but I’m going to have to pass.”

“No one has to know,” he says. “I mean, don’t you want to just get out of here and away from all these people?” He lights another cigarette.

I look up and see Tommy walking over with Vera trailing behind. Then I glance back at Damian. “You know, I really don’t.” I gesture toward one of the all-female smoking groups. “But I’m sure you could find someone who would.”

Damian nods. “Cool,” he says, not looking even the slightest bit perturbed by my denial. I smile and start to walk away. “Hey, congratulations on your sixty days,” he adds as he waves.
Is this really how things work?
I wonder as I watch him walk up to the girls smoking. When I glance back and see a blonde girl with a scarf on her head nodding at him and smiling, I have to conclude that it is. Even in Culver City, we’re still in Hollywood.

18

I’m sitting at the Starbucks smack in the middle of the gayest part of West Hollywood staring at a blank screen and sipping the remains of my grande latte when Adam walks by. He doesn’t see me, just marches right by and goes to wait in line, and my first instinct is to duck and hide. I can’t really believe I’ve joined the ranks of people who sit in coffee shops with laptops—easily as established a Hollywood cliché as the casting couch—but when I had sat down to write my first column at home this morning, I panicked. I had spent so many nights in the same, cat hair–filled, stuffy apartment completely high on coke, and the four walls seemed like they were going to descend upon me as I stared at my computer screen. And then a thought came to me, as clear as if I were a cartoon character and it was printed in a thought bubble printed over my head: