“You’re lit again,” he would say, pushing me away as I barreled toward him, having finally drunk myself into a place of unbridled wanting. Maybe it sounds odd that a recovering alcoholic would take up with a problem drinker, but we were familiar to each other. We beckoned from forbidden sides. In me he saw his past decadence. In him I saw my future hope. And it worked. For a while.
Six months after we started dating, Patrick turned to me one night and told me he didn’t love me anymore. The best way to explain how I took this news is to tell you I didn’t date anyone for seven years.
But I beat a lot of men at pool. I watched out of the corner of my eye as their nostrils flared, and they stamped their cue on the ground, and their eyes tracked me around that table. Were they gonna get beaten by a girl? At least two of my one-night stands began this way. Most of the others? It’s hard to remember how they began.
FOUR
DRINK MORE AT WORK
I wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl. Actually, I wanted to be a writer-actress-director (and, for a brief and confusing time, a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader-writer-actress-director). But I made up my own worlds; I didn’t report on real ones. I never even considered journalism until my roommate Tara became the head of our college daily and invited me to contribute. I walked down into a dingy basement where pale chain-smokers argued about school vouchers. A sign hung at the entrance. Welcome to the Daily Texan —where GPAs go to die.
I found a home in the entertainment section, which allowed me to cover any theater production in town, while boys in ratty concert T-shirts grappled for the latest Pavement album. It hadn’t occurred to me I could write a story today, and it could show up on your kitchen table tomorrow. What a rush. There are wonderful reasons to become a journalist. To champion the underdog. To be professionally curious. Me? I just wanted to get free stuff and see my name in print.
And I was charmed by the companionship of the newsroom. Writing had always been a solitary pursuit, but winding my way alongside those cubicles full of keyboard clatter felt like being backstage before a show. I had stopped acting, in part because I’d grown uncomfortable with people looking at me. Journalism offered a new kind of exposure, like performing on a stage with the curtains closed.
At 23, I landed a gig at a beloved alt weekly called the Austin Chronicle, and I couldn’t have been more ecstatic. A reallive salary. Something called “health benefits.” I felt like I was standing on the first step of a staircase that stretched all the way to—why not?—the New York Times. Then again, the Chronicle was the kind of place a person wouldn’t mind staying forever. Staffers wore flip-flops and arrived after 10 am. A group got stoned by the big tree each afternoon, and production halted at 5 for a volleyball game. Each morning, a woman appeared in the lobby to sell breakfast tacos for a dollar, one of a million reasons Austin was amazing: random people showing up out of nowhere to hand out hangover food.
My desk was in front of a brick wall that I decorated with a giant poster from the musical Rent. I’d bought the poster on my first trip to New York City, where I visited my brother, who was in grad school there. He’d taken me to a Broadway show, and I sat in those squeaky seats watching a vision of bohemia I hoped might one day be mine: documentarians with spiky gelled hair, drug addict musicians, lipstick lesbians in black catsuits.
A week after I started at the paper, a scruffy guy from production stopped in front of the poster, pointed to it, and shook his head. “Seriously?” he said, and moved on.
I didn’t know Rent had become a punch line of ’90s sincerity and manufactured edge. I didn’t realize AIDS victims singing in five-part harmony about seasons of love could make some of my colleagues want to punch an old lady in the neck. But that day I learned my first lesson in pop-culture tyranny: Subjective tastes can be wrong.
That Saturday, when no one was around, I took down Rent and replaced it with Blade Runner, a film beloved by sci-fi nerds and cinephiles, although I wasn’t certain why. I’d only seen it once, and fallen asleep.
The production guy passed my desk again on Monday. “Now we’re talking,” he said, giving me the thumbs-up, and moved on.