Unwifeable(65)

No worries, Mandy Sounds fun.

This time around, I drop the act entirely.

“I don’t understand why . . . I just feel so incredibly sad,” I confess over the phone, my eyes closed, my voice choked and thick with grief. Why is this all hitting me so hard this time?

He isn’t cold to me in his tone, but he isn’t indulgent either. Instead, he gives me what I need more than anything else: a cut-through-the-bullshit lifeline.

“You know, Mandy,” he says, “you can keep calling me up every few weeks, or you can change your life.”

Wow.

This lands—so, so hard.

You. Can. Change. Your. Life.

His words strike me like a thunderbolt. I know right then and there that if I don’t decide this moment, this day—June 28, 2010—is truly my “low point” that I might not come back at all.

The next morning feels different when I wake up. I have a purpose. A goal. I can change my life. I can decide things. No one else. No matter how tempting drinking and drugs are, no matter how much they feel like an inevitability or a necessity—I can always choose to stay sober. I see that now. I see what I did wrong. And it’s okay that I have been wrong so many times. The very next day, after work, I go to an AA meeting in SoHo, where I weep and tell a story that only makes sense to me to a room filled with strangers. I see the beauty, the peace, the freedom in admitting my weaknesses and my flaws. I feel how powerful it is to admit how truly powerless I am. Someone gently gives me my first twenty-four-hour coin, and I put it in my purse like the precious object it is. One sweet girl suggests to me a meeting that’s good for newcomers. That meeting leads to another and another, and for a few weeks, I’m really doing okay. I’m doing pretty good.

I have twenty-two days of sobriety. I have a new life. And then—I finally hear from Alex the sex-club boy again.

There is another “party” coming up, he says, and we should go. The male-validation pull is strong with this one. Convince me to go, I tell him. After a few texts, he does.

The night of the party, this time at Macao, this time with the password ultimate fantasy, we have an incredibly tame evening. I don’t even kiss Alex. I just observe and have a genuinely fun time making observations and interviewing people. I ask a tiny Asian woman getting fucked from behind, “So what do you do for a living?” She replies, “I’m a CPA!” The guy fucking her says, “And I’m a corporate investigator!” It is all very normal.

At one point Alex brings up the fact that I went to Northwestern, and I’m genuinely surprised he remembers. He responds, “Oh, I have a little app on my phone that tells me which school the girls I take to sex clubs graduated from.”

Over the course of the evening, five things occur that do not seem like accidents.

1. The bartender brings me a free drink that I did not order. I refuse.

2. At the entrance to the party, the organizer squirts vodka into people’s mouths. I refuse.

3. Inside the party, they squirt vodka into people’s mouths. I refuse.

4. Inside the party, Alex brings me a drink. I refuse.

5. After the party, Alex and I go back up to the bar, where I order a Pellegrino. I am brought a champagne.

The gesture feels like some sort of cruel joke. I have literally never had alcohol forced on me so many times when I didn’t ask for it.

Could it be a sign? Maybe it is a sign. Maybe I should just keep drinking. Maybe . . .

I look at the alcohol. I look at Alex. I don’t say no. Justifications in my mind are hitting me rapid-fire now. Instead of picking it up, though, my hands instinctively fumble around inside my purse, and without realizing what I’m doing, that’s when I feel it: the twenty-four-hour chip.

I cling to it like it’s a life raft and stare at the champagne, stare at Alex. This guy doesn’t give a shit about me. I know that. My fingers rub the coin intently, turning it over in my hands, and I think of all the women in AA I’ve spoken to over the last few weeks. Women who don’t even know me, but I can already tell want to protect me more than I’m able to protect myself.

I don’t want to give that up.





chapter eight




* * *





The Rebirth


2010–12

The “pink cloud” is real. That’s a term in sobriety where you float around in a cloud of happiness, redemption, and seeming magic. I begin killing it at work and in my personal life.

One day I’m getting the first American interview exclusive with the Winklevoss twins, who’ve sued Mark Zuckerberg for stealing the idea of Facebook. Another day I am splashed in the Post’s pages next to the Guinness World Records titleholder for world’s shortest man—measuring in at twenty-two inches—who is visiting from Nepal. He asks me on a “date” as a swarm of photographers click their shutters to document me literally cradling this man-baby in my arms. (By the way: Never discount the world’s shortest man for his lack of follow-up game. Five years later he messages me on Facebook: “Hi Mandy. You remember this picture?” And then, “You are bad.” And then, “Or are not you?”)

Overall, in my life, I feel largely unstoppable.

I get a sponsor, and I even start to make amends, which is kind of the worst—but hey, I’m unstoppable, right? The hardest one to make is with Hannibal Buress. The thing I have to make amends for is basically just me acting like a drunken idiot, but when I whisper the confession to my sponsor, relaying the excruciating details of it, my head hangs as if I’m confessing to a cross-state killing spree. Why do sometimes the smallest mortifications impact us the hardest? Maybe, in some way, because they are so real and cut to the quick of what we hate the most about ourselves.