Unwifeable(20)

No one at work seems to “get” my pitch for this story: “The only person who knows the darkest secrets of your soul is the bodega guy at three in the morning.”

The next day, like clockwork, I wake up after a binge a few pounds heavier and vow that even though I don’t want to be anorexic, I don’t want to go back to my nearly two-hundred-pound weight from when I was married. So I pledge not to eat at all.

But everything changes when nighttime comes around, and, with nothing in my stomach for the last eight hours, I get hammered—and the binge-eating cycle resumes.

Anything to blunt out what I am feeling: fear, uncertainty, self-hatred, and not feeling like I have anyone there for me who cares.

By the time April arrives, I am so unmoored that one afternoon, without planning to, I log onto a travel agency site and book a last-minute trip to Florida.

I have no one to see. I just know, as Dr. Tom advises me after my last update, “You need to get the fuck out of Dodge.”

So I do—appropriately enough, right after writing my “reconciliation vacation” piece, which I finally get into the paper after DJ AM and Nicole Richie take a trip together that I can use as a launching point for the story. I have no real purpose attached to the trip, but Fort Lauderdale is a place on a map. I know that.

When I arrive, I hail a cab and ask to go to the coral-beachy hotel I booked as part of my weekend package. But the cabdriver gets lost—really lost—and after he finally gets sick of trying to find the hotel, he just drops me off on a street corner somewhere. Not quite sure what to do, and having ruled another cab out of the equation, I decide to hitch a ride from a couple twenty-something guys driving a beat-up red Chevy who make room for me to sit on the lap of the tattooed skinny one in the passenger seat.

“Nice car,” I say.

“Thanks,” the one in the passenger seat says, blasting Ol’ Dirty Bastard on the stereo. “It’s all we’ve got.”

“So, what’s your story?” I ask. Because this is something I know how to do. Interview.

They tell me about getting off of meth and starting a new life for themselves, and I stare dazed out the window. We pass a sleazy nail salon, a happy-ending place, and a shop with a sign that says U WILL STOP SMOKING.

I ask them if I can bum a Newport. I hate being told what to do.

When I finally arrive at my hotel, I lay out my notes for my never-ending hopelessly doomed rom-com treatment of “How He Blew It” and turn on the TV. I know I should be so grateful for all these opportunities coming my way, but all I want is something real. And I don’t know how to give that to myself.

So I head outside and realize that while I never considered hitching as an adult before, since I’ve just done it, why not try again? Some red-faced guy with frosted tips on his hair picks me up and looks at me strangely. I tell him to take me where the action is.

“Yeah, I’ll do it,” he says, with a look of concern it seems he is not used to giving strangers, “if you promise to never hitch a ride again.”

“Fine,” I say. “Whatever.”

He lets me off at a beach bar, and I drink Sex on the Beaches like a fucking tourist and smoke Camel Lights, watching the tanned, swaying women dance with the old Hawaiian-shirted men who stare lustfully into their blank, drunken eyes. I try my hand at flirting with a group of businessmen, but the sadness and alienation in my affect blinds like a “stay away” flashlight.

“You’re weird,” one guy says.

“You have no idea,” I reply. “Buy me a Long Island iced tea.”

“No,” he says.

“Whatever,” I say. “I’m leaving. This place sucks.”

I keep my promise to the giver of my last hitched ride, find a cab, and ask the driver to take me to the best nearby restaurant. He drops me off at a local Olive Garden. I sit there by myself, reordering more breadsticks and swallowing whole my lasagna until I feel nothing else inside. I am full to the point of throwing up, but I order the cheesecake, too. Feeling physically uncomfortable and bursting from my jeans, I head back to the hotel, where I sink into the Jacuzzi alone, admiring my increasing waistline in my bikini and sinking underwater.

Numbness. That is a much better feeling than depression.

This vacation is no better than fucking Dodge itself. I don’t know how to have fun without chaos or self-loathing. The most enjoyable part so far has been hitching rides from strangers, knowing I could be murdered.

It made me feel alive, like there was a possible dangerous end.





chapter four




* * *





The Gossip Girl


2006

Back in New York, during another one of my binge-and-starve cycles, I go to a party—again at the Magician—with a few comedy writer friends of friends, and find myself talking to a bearded comedy TV producer whom I stand next to as a girl comes up to us with a giant black eye. She says nothing about it, and when she finally leaves, the producer comments on it.

“Well, that was the fucking elephant in the room,” he says.

“Maybe that’s the new thing,” I say. “Chick punching.”

He laughs. Dark.

Cut to three or four or fifteen Stolichnaya and sodas later: Everything blurs into black and gray until I am back at his place getting fucked. The sheets are so crisp and downy. I remember that.