Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(30)

I have retold this story for years to friends and family alike, while Gaby has consistently denied it ever happened, ridiculing my flair for the dramatic and propensity for exaggeration. I was finally vindicated when Molly found some old home videos from that time in which you can actually hear Gaby saying on camera that if I wanted to make it in Hollywood I had better drop some weight. Molly knows my memory has a solid track record, and when she found the evidence to support what I had been claiming for twenty years, she made sure the whole family watched the footage together in order to clear my good name. In the video, you can see my face turn bright red. Even I felt bad for me. Gaby must have felt like Hitler in that moment, but ever since then we’ve had a better understanding of each other.

    Gaby is Molly’s mother, and my mother’s sister, and in exchange for the living accommodations I was provided at nineteen, I was required to drive Molly and her eight brothers and sisters to school each morning at seven o’clock. This is when I discovered that I never wanted children. I wasn’t upset by the realization that I wasn’t cut out for motherhood. I was only upset that I hadn’t thought of it sooner.



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By the end of our family vacation week in Spain, I stopped going to meals with my brother and his family. If I woke up and heard anyone speaking Russian, I’d go downstairs for my medication.

“I can’t take any more kids or any more Russians,” I told Gaby, popping a doggy Xanax. “I’m going to take a nap.”

“You just woke up,” she told me.

“Who’s that person?” I asked Molly, gesturing to the front balcony, where a woman and my sister-in-law were sitting.

    “That’s Olga’s Russian friend who stopped by last night when you came down from your bedroom in your bra and underwear to get another Xanax.”

“So, I’ve already met her?”

“Well, she met you, but I wouldn’t say that you met her.”

That’s how I felt about my trip to Formentera—it met me, but I didn’t meet it.



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On our return flight, Chunk and I had the two seats next to each other with the option of putting the partition up or down. We chose down.

Once Chunk and I were both comfortably settled in and each watching our respective movies, I popped a Xanax and then realized there was none left for Chunk. I didn’t want to knock myself out with Chunk awake, so I took one of my weaker sleeping pills I had brought and tried to get him to swallow it. After failing to get it down his throat for the third time, I opened the capsule and emptied it into about two ounces of water and Chunk drank it down.

I had been using Sonata ever since I learned how terrible Xanax was for your brain: the memory loss, the irritability the next day, the fact that it makes you dumb. I justified abusing it that week because of the Russian interference in my summer vacation. Right before I passed out, I wrapped Chunk’s leash around my waist and tucked it into the back of my jeans.

Hours later, a flight attendant shook me awake and told me that my dog was loose and running around the first-class cabin. The simple task of standing up suddenly became incredibly difficult to accomplish, as I was lying on my side and had one leg swung over Chunk’s seat, where his body had been. My body was confusing me, as was the situation. I could hear Chunk’s panting, which sounded almost maniacal. I stumbled through the first-class cabin in a fugue state, scared by the heavy throat-clearing, coughing sounds I was hearing—and at one point during all the confusion, I called out Brandon’s name.

    When I found Chunk, he was licking the bathroom door with no leash in sight. I grabbed him by the collar and ushered him back to our double pod, where I had to force him to get back up on the seat. His tongue was almost touching the floor and there was foam on either side of his mouth. He looked like he had just snorted an eight ball.

I had never seen Chunk in that state before. I grabbed one of those miniature bottles of room temperature water they give you on planes, but thought Chunk would appreciate something more refreshing—like a Fresca—and then bounced back to reality and recognized I was talking about a dog who was on the verge of swallowing his own tongue. I started by pouring the water into the tiny plastic lid, but after Chunk almost swallowed that, I made a cup out of my hand and started pouring the water in there. When that didn’t suffice, I gave up and just started pouring the water directly into his mouth. He wouldn’t sit still and kept yanking his head around to get out, but I held him down, trying to get a handle on the situation. The shame that enveloped my double pod took the shape of two blankets I converted into a fort covering the tops of our seats in an effort to prevent the two of us from causing any more of a scene.

    “Can I get some more water bottles and a bowl?” I whispered, peeking out from under the covers.

“I don’t work here,” the passenger across the aisle said, as she sat back down in her assigned seat. The procuring of water became a tricky endeavor, as I couldn’t leave Chunk to his own devices and I couldn’t find his leash. I looked around for the call button, which I generally try to avoid using because of how rude it seems. I also made a mental note of possibly installing that option when I got home to Bel-Air. Brandon would love a bell.

When I stood up to press the button above my head, Chunk made a run for it. I dove over my seat, grabbing his tail. I hit the floor face-first and felt a sharp burn around my stomach. I discovered that Chunk’s leash was wrapped around my waist, under my shirt. In my delirium, instead of fastening the clip of the leash to Chunk’s collar, I had clipped it to one of the belt loops on my jeans.