Party Girl: A Novel (31 page)

“I think I’d like to take another,” I say to Jeremy as we leave the bathroom with the sauna.

“I don’t know.” He looks slightly concerned. “This is pretty strong stuff and you’ve had a lot already.” I can read his face perfectly: Girl says she’s sober, then goes off the wagon and now appears to be going on some drug binge, which will probably end with a 911 call.

“Look, I can handle my drugs—trust me,” I say, and hold out my hand. It feels uncomfortable to be having to ask someone for drugs. When I did coke, I was almost always the provider.

“Let’s split one,” Jeremy finally says, and he breaks a pill in half. As we go down to the kitchen for more wine, it occurs to me that I don’t really like him at all, and I don’t even mean romantically. As I swallow my half of the pill, I wonder why I’m even spending time with someone I wouldn’t want to talk to for ten minutes at a party, and that’s when it occurs to me that this entire night may well have been a massive mistake.

After a few more cigarettes, I realize I’m a little tired so I lie down on one of his overstuffed velvet couches. “I think your Ecstasy kind of sucks,” I say, as I tuck one of his Oriental rug–covered pillows under my neck.

“Trust me, this is the best shit in town,” Jeremy says, pulling a pillow of his own from the other side of the couch under his neck and mimicking my position. “My guy is the go-to guy for everyone who works on the Fox lot.”

I guess I close my eyes for a while because when I open them, I feel groggy and confused. At first I don’t remember where I am and in the second where I do, I feel even more confused—especially when I realize that Jeremy’s lips are on mine and we’re kissing.

“Oh, God,” I say, pushing him away and sitting up. He smiles at me and I notice that his pupils are enormous. He trails a finger on my leg and even though I hate it when people do that and I’m fairly convinced he’s taking complete advantage of me, I still feel bad when I move my leg away. When I gaze around the room and see empty wine glasses filled with cigarette butts, CDs scattered all over the floor and my favorite Theory jacket crumpled in a heap by the deck door, I’m suddenly overwhelmed with a nearly paralyzing emptiness that I haven’t felt in over six and a half months.

“I should probably go,” I say, walking over to my jacket and picking it off the ground. “What time is it?”

Jeremy glances at his silver Rolex. “Three thirty,” he says. “Come on—don’t even think about going home. I can’t drive in this condition.”

“I’ll call a cab then,” I say, like it’s the most normal thought in the world, even though I can’t actually remember the last time I called one. Do we even have cabs in L.A.?

“You’re being silly,” he says, standing up and walking over to me. “You should just stay here.”

Now, I don’t know if it’s the fact that his pupils are making him somehow resemble what I think the devil might look like or if I just need to get as far away from this experience as quickly as possible but I reach for my bag, pull out my BlackBerry, dial information, and ask for Yellow Cab. Every city surely has a Yellow Cab?

“Amelia,” Jeremy says, as—Eureka—the operator connects me. “You can stay in one of the guest rooms. We don’t have to do anything.”

Something about the way he says that utterly convinces me that I won’t be left alone no matter what room I’m in. I don’t know if the drugs are making me paranoid or if I’m having some kind of clairvoyant vision but I don’t have any interest in finding out. “What’s your address?” I ask and he reluctantly says it. I repeat it to the Yellow Cab receptionist and hang up, feeling like this is the smartest move I’ve made in hours.

And then Jeremy suddenly seems overwhelmed with concern—or at least paranoia. Or perhaps disappointment that he shelled out almost his entire supply of E and several expensive bottles of wine and isn’t even going to get laid for his efforts. “Look, I feel sort of bad about all this,” he says, following me outside, where I pick up a nearly empty pack of Camel Lights I’d left on his patio table.

“Don’t,” I say, but my voice is cold. Now that I’ve decided I’m done, I want him out of my face. “I make my own decisions. There’s nothing to feel bad about.”

He hands me one of my plastic 7-Eleven lighters. “You know, I don’t think this is anything we need to tell people about,” he says, and I feel like I can suddenly read his paranoia, which is telling him that a
Variety
story on the hotshot movie producer who coaxed a sex columnist out of her sobriety with drugs could be imminent.

I nod just as I see the taxi pull up outside.

“Bye,” he says, pulling me in and giving me a kiss on the cheek, like this has been a perfectly lovely and appropriate evening. “I’ll call you.”

I start walking toward his front door, realizing that I seem to be having some trouble walking without falling. I want to say, “Please don’t,” but I don’t have the balls. When I get to the door, I turn around to look at him one last time. “You should probably get a new drug dealer,” I say, and then I leave.

29

When I come to at about three in the afternoon, I expect to be borderline suicidal, but I actually feel strangely calm. I sit up in bed, knocking a sleeping cat—who’d been meowing with unabashed vigor a few hours earlier but had clearly given up and decided to catnap it on my shoulder—onto the floor. Last night is incredibly clear in my mind: saw Adam, felt rejected, relapsed.
I’ve fucked everything up
, I think, as I reach for a cigarette.
Why the hell am I not hysterical about it?

Deciding not to smoke, I get out of bed and wander into the kitchen, where I have some toast. While my head doesn’t seem to be reeling as much from the experience as I’d think it would, my stomach is convulsing in what feels like somersault after somersault.

As I force toast down, I remember how Tommy used to say that a relapse starts long before you take a drink. When did mine start—when Justin told me he was using? When I climbed into the life-size champagne glass? When I faked doing a vodka shot? I guess there’s no way of knowing. Then a thought pops into my head:
Clearly, I can’t drink without doing drugs.
Somehow this feels like an immense relief because now I don’t have to wonder. In rehab, people kept calling alcohol the “gateway” drug because as soon as they drank, the gate for doing drugs would open. But since I tended to do coke first and drink later, I hadn’t had many alcohol gateway experiences.

Looking back over the night and realizing, with bizarrely amazing recollection, that I’d easily consumed a couple of bottles of wine myself, I start to wonder if maybe there’s something to this concept of my being an alcoholic, too. Riding back in the cab earlier this morning, I’d toyed with the idea of not telling anyone about my little Ecstasy and alcohol escapade, thinking that I’d just keep going to Pledges and still celebrate a year’s sobriety in six months. Apparently, people do that—they go out and don’t tell anyone and smile about how well their sobriety’s going—but they usually end up relapsing in a far bigger way as a result.

I realize that if I leave the house without showering or even brushing my hair, I can make the Pledges afternoon meeting. I probably look like death but since going to a meeting can help me escape that, at least for the time being, I allow necessity to trump vanity.
Making progress already
, I think as I slide a bra on under the wife beater I slept in and step out the door.

“My name is Amelia and I’m an alcoholic,” I say, expecting the people in the room to all swivel their heads in unison over the fact that I’ve finally surrendered to using the word “alcoholic” over “addict,” but everyone just does the smiley Hi-Amelia thing.

“I relapsed last night,” I say, and I see the whisperings that start up whenever anyone mentions the word “relapse.” When Vera drank, I remember leaning over to Justin and saying, “I could see this one coming from a mile away,” so I feel like I deserve whatever it is anyone’s saying. I realize my heart is beating incredibly fast, which seems strange to me, since I’ve shared a lot in this room and haven’t felt nervous talking in front of the group since my first day of rehab. “I didn’t really believe you guys when you said that being an alcoholic and a drug addict were the same thing,” I say and I notice a couple of people nodding with compassion. “So last night, after being blown off by the guy I like, I decided to go have a glass of wine with the guy I don’t like.” Several people laugh and, while I’m surprised that anyone could find humor in my fuck-up, at the same time it makes me feel like I belong. I’ve definitely shared things here that I’ve known were funny, and felt completely validated by the laughter it’s gotten, but I haven’t ever really talked about anything sad or wrong or that makes me feel bad. In fact, I’ve heard people laughing at other people’s hardships around here and wondered how things like having been suicidal or institutionalized could be so uproarious to other people—let alone to the person sharing, who always seems to join in the hilarity. But somehow, now that I’m the one talking, it makes sense: what I’m saying is illogical and basically crazy. And for some reason, in this room filled with people bobbing their heads and laughing, that seems okay. “Three and a half hits of E later, I realized I’d made a horrible mistake,” I finish and most of the room guffaws. I break into a smile—I can’t help it. “So I guess…I don’t know…I guess that’s it. I don’t know. And you guys seem to.” Everyone claps.

As the sharing in the room continues, people pat me on the back and women start writing down their numbers and passing them to me on pieces of scrap paper. As I tuck the phone numbers into my purse, I realize that I’d completely stopped reaching out to people here. When I was in rehab, I bonded like crazy with Justin and Robin and Vera and Peter and Joel and everyone else. But these days, with Justin and Robin both long gone, Vera always relapsing, and Peter and Joel only hitting the meetings every now and then, I’ve stopped. I now see that from the day I moved out of Pledges, I’ve essentially been acting like I was cured. Rachel always told me not to show up at meetings right when they started or leave right when they ended but I hadn’t really listened. Looking around the room, I realize that I don’t really know any of the other alumni sitting there—some of their faces are familiar and I know a few of their names, but I’ve tended more to look at them as audience members during my funny or profound shares than people I might befriend.

When the meeting ends, I decide to stand in line to thank the main speaker, something Rachel has always suggested but I’ve never done. It always seems so much like waiting in a receiving line at a wedding, where you’re only going to be able to say something the person before you already did.
I’m probably just thinking about myself too much
floats through my head as I wait in line.

I tell the woman—who looks like your average Valley housewife but had shared about her heroin addiction, multiple marriages, and former life in porn—how grateful I am to have heard her, and she gives me a hug. I feel tears stinging my eyes as we embrace and, while the tears aren’t, of course, surprising, the reason for them is: they’re tears of comfort and relief, not the more familiar ones of self-pity.

Different people come up to me as I make my way out of the room and I realize, with shock, that it’s twenty minutes after the meeting ended and I’m still here. As I’m hugging this girl with nine months of sobriety who tells me she “related to every word I said,” I see someone I hadn’t even realized until this moment was in the meeting, and my heart starts racing like an IV of cocaine has been injected straight into it.

“We need to talk,” Rachel says, and I nod.

“You need to start making friends at Pledges,” Rachel says, looking at me sternly. We’re sitting at one of the plastic tables outside a burger stand near her apartment in Culver City after leaving the meeting. There’s something about her that seems almost angry—a sort of schoolmarmish drone has replaced her typical singsongy lilt.

“I have friends at Pledges,” I say. I look up at her. “I have you.”

She looks me straight in the eye. “I’m not your friend,” she says. “I’m your sponsor.”

I feel a bit like I’ve been pummeled in the gut but don’t want to show it. “Okay, Miss Serious. I’ll make some new friends.”

She still doesn’t smile. “Amelia, this
is
serious. It’s about life and death. And sometimes I think you treat recovery like it’s an accessory—it helped you get your shit together and made you better and now you can go about pursuing your fabulous life again.” She picks up a fry and dips it in ketchup. “But it doesn’t work that way. You can’t show up at alumni meetings when you want, smoke cigarettes outside, and pretend that everything’s going to be wonderful and easy now that you’re getting famous.” She shoves the fry in her mouth, chews, and sighs. “It’s not about incorporating this into your life; it’s about incorporating your life into
this.
”

I want to object and defend myself but I see she has me so nailed that there’s no use in fighting her on it. Since getting out of Pledges, I’ve basically neglected everything I was taught in there—about how my day-to-day happiness and serenity depended on getting out of myself and being of service to other people, about going to meetings and connecting with the people there.

“Being sober has to be your primary purpose in life or you don’t stand a chance,” she says. “Do you get that?”

“Well…”

“My point is this: if you’re really committed to doing this right, I’d be honored to keep working with you. I think if you set your mind to doing this the way it’s suggested, there’s no limit to the kind of serene life you could live. But if you want to half-ass it, I don’t really want to be a part of it.”

There’s a tiny pause. “I want to do it.” When I say it, I realize I’ve never felt more certain of anything.

“That means sitting down to write about your resentments and fears and being willing to go apologize to the people you’ve hurt because of your disease.”

Every time she’s brought this up before, I’ve somehow diverted her attention away from it—usually by telling a funny story. I’d assumed that I’d been so sly that she hadn’t even realized I’d been purposely distracting her. Writing all this stuff down and having to face my entire past has always sounded wholly unappealing but somehow, right now, I look at it in a different way.
I’ve been waiting a long time for people to ask me who I’m pissed at
, I think.
Possibly my whole life.
“I’ll start today,” I say.