All That You Leave Behind: A Memoir(35)

Sheila looked at me with her brilliant brown eyes and said, “Nope, that is not the least bit interesting to me. Who cares?” I could feel a grimace coming on. Andrew looked unfazed as he changed topics and began to pitch something else. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I could feel my golden opportunity fleeing.

I stared at Sheila. She interrupted Andrew, turned to me, and said, “Your eyes make me nervous.” I doubted this. Very little made Sheila nervous. I smiled in response and for the next two hours we discussed Christianity, circumcision, nuns, Russians, Warhol, mortality, and her dreams. I brought up a story I had read about in Gawker about Gilberto Valle, nicknamed “the Cannibal Cop” by the New York tabloids. Valle was an NYPD officer convicted of conspiracy to kidnap, rape, torture, and eat young women. The case was an unusual one. The defendant had never actually kidnapped anyone; he’d just thought about it and wrote about it in an online fetish community. A definite First Amendment rights issue. Now we were talking. I had unlocked some sort of interest in Sheila, and after one of the longest meetings of my life, it was time to hug goodbye. She looked at me and said in a teasing manner, “I don’t like your ideas, but I like you. Andrew and you will make a good team. Bring me back something I like.”

Turns out she did like one idea, because in the weeks that followed we were given a small development deal and the opportunity to turn the Cannibal Cop documentary into my directorial feature debut. Andrew was thrilled and said that it was a great meeting. As I walked away in the November chill, I felt electrified. Maybe my firing had happened for a reason. I called my dad and described the meeting. He said the words I heard so often but that had never felt so meaningful until that moment on the sidewalk in New York.

“Who knew? We knew.”





19


    Liability



“Remember. Eating b4 drinking. Sleep b4 rocking. And measure twice.”



While my career had righted itself, my drinking had not. Coming off my successful meeting with Sheila, I was excited to celebrate and share the news at an engagement party for my friends Will and Cary. I was one of the few former co-workers invited and I counted myself lucky to be included in these smart, chic people’s lives. Had I always been sweet on Will? Sure, but who hadn’t? He was that kind of guy. I wasn’t worried about it, but I was aware that my drinking had been a little above and beyond lately, even for me.

After being cut loose from my job I had more free time than ever, and the wine was coming earlier in the evening than I cared to admit. As soon as the clock on my monitor hit six, an economical bottle of wine was produced from the fridge and drank in its entirety. Sometimes I would pour Yunna a glass, but more often than not, she demurred when it came to drinking with me. I drank five or six nights a week, always a bottle of wine or more. Wine calmed my fears about freelancing and the dark subject matter that I was engaged with on a daily basis. I knew alcohol was part of the reason I’d been fired, but I rationalized it whenever it popped up in my brain—the broken camera, the hangovers. I knew sobriety was for “later,” not now. I needed alcohol.

As I got ready for the engagement party I made the conscious effort to look myself in the mirror and say, “You are going to have no more than three drinks tonight; you are not going to do any coke.” I decided to put an Adderall in my pocket to reward myself for keeping to three drinks. This is the kind of bizarre logic I resorted to. If I verbalized my limits I would sometimes adhere to what I had set out to do.

I met a mutual friend on the walk over and felt myself growing more and more anxious. It had been ten months since I left VICE, and this was one of the first times I was going to see some of my former co-workers. I was embarrassed to admit that I was no longer at the job that I had left the company for, and the development deal with HBO, while exciting, didn’t feel very tangible. Nerves and a party had always been a toxic combination for me, but I pushed the feelings away as we made our way toward the venue.

The party was at a production company space that looked like a film set, full of stuffed birds and glass jars. The first half hour of a party is usually very dull, but drinking white wine helped ease the boredom. I stared at my hands and feet and thought about what made sense to talk about with other guests: the happy couple, the endless winter that we had been having. Suddenly and without consciously noticing it, I began to feel the effects of the three glasses of wine. I heard the men laughing next to me as I put my hand on my hips and grinned. I instantly felt more attractive as I went into the bathroom to reward myself for keeping on the three drinks train. I snorted the Adderall instead of popping it, deciding that it was probably best to save half for later.

There was a champagne toast and I was confronted with a familiar choice: Say yes to another drink, or say no and stick to the plan I had set out for myself. I always chose the former. Whenever the question of to drink or not to drink arose, the answer for me was almost always a hard yes. I was unable to control or moderate my drinking once I had already consumed alcohol. I drank that champagne, my fourth glass of wine, in a matter of minutes.

That was the last conscious decision I made that night. The following details were told to me after the fact because I was blackout drunk at the time. I decided that it was time to make a speech about how I felt about the groom. I meant well, but instead of a quick, thoughtful toast, I rambled on and on, offering up flirty innuendos at Will and making completely inappropriate remarks, including saying I was jealous of the bride-to-be, but she was pretty hot, too. Eventually, after falling down on the dance floor for the third time, I was asked by a family friend to leave the party. One of my good friends and favorite drinking buddies, Kathleen, helped get me into a cab. I pleaded with her to hit up another bar with me, but she shook her head, begging off and saying that she wanted to go home. The night was over for her but not for me. I made the taxi stop at the bodega near my home where I grabbed a six-pack of tall boys, content to sit on my computer and drunkenly Gchat until the sun came up. Three drinks had turned into ten.