My high school drama friend Stephanie wasn’t. She had been living in New York for a few years and already become one of those rare creatures, a successful actress. She landed a role as an attorney in an NBC crime drama also starring ’80s rapper Ice-T. SVU, it was called, though I liked to call it “SUV.” She had made it in the big city, just like we said we would, and I watched her ascend in a gilded hot air balloon, as I stood on the ground and counted the ways life had failed me.
I was particularly burned up on the boyfriend issue. I thought having a byline in the Austin Chronicle would bring cute, artistic men to my doorstep, but it really only brought publicists. Years of Shiner Bock and cheese enchiladas had plumped me by at least 40 pounds, which I masked in loose V-necks and rayon skirts scraping the ground, but I also spied a double standard at play. Male staffers dressed like slobs, but they still found pretty girls to wipe their mouths and coo over their bands. Meanwhile, I was nothing but a cool sisterly type to them. Where were my flirty emails? My zippy office come-ons? How come nobody wanted to fuck me for my talent?
So I needed that road trip to California. Five days by myself through West Texas, New Mexico, across the orange Creamsicle of the Nevada desert at sunset. In Las Vegas, I booked my room at the demented-circus hotel Hunter S. Thompson wrote about in Fear and Loathing. It pains me to admit I had never read this book. But I understood Thompson’s work to be a locus of debauchery and creative nonfiction, the intersection where I planned to build my bungalow.
I slummed around the nickel arcades on the low-rent side of the Strip that night, and I won $200 at a machine that was clearly broken, so all you had to do was mash the same button over and over again, winning every time. A brunette in a French maid skirt brought me a check, but there were no flashing lights on the arcade. No coins clinking into my bucket. It’s weird how you can hit the jackpot—and still feel a little robbed.
The sky was dark when I got to Anna’s place, and she was standing on the corner when I pulled up, doing her jokey little happy dance in the beams of my headlights, biting her lower lip and swaying.
“What does a girl have to do to get a drink around here?” I asked, and we smiled like two people who have crossed great distances to find each other. But when she pulled my bags out of the car, something sank in her and never reappeared. Was she mad about how late it had gotten? Was she disappointed to see I’d gained so much weight? Best friends have a spooky voodoo. We’re like cats on airplanes, who can feel each dip in cabin pressure, and at that moment, Anna and I took a nosedive.
The way Anna tells it, she came to my car and saw a bunch of empty beer cans clattering around in the backseat. It was her epiphany moment. I’d been alone on that trip. I’d been immersed in solo adventure and the majesty of the outdoors, and yet I could not let go of my cheap silver crutches from 7-Eleven. The funny truth is that I drank less on that trip than I usually did. Even now there’s a defiant part of me that wants to correct her observation. Like I was being punished not for my indulgence but for a commitment to recycling.
Anna knew other stories, though. Troubling episodes that had accumulated. On my visit to New York, I got so drunk I fell down a flight of stairs and ended up in the hospital with a concussion. One night in Austin, I went out to karaoke with friends, and I was so loaded I jumped onstage and wrestled the microphone from some poor guy in the middle of “Little Red Corvette.” When I went to get a drink afterward, the bartender said, “I’m sorry, you’ve been cut off.” Cut off? Why? For nailing that fucking Prince song?
There were stories about questionable men, and trips to Planned Parenthood the next morning, and a stubborn refusal to use condoms followed by a terrible guilt. And once I told Anna these secrets, I felt purged and hopeful. But I’d laid a heavy heap of jagged worry in her arms.
After I got back to Texas, Anna sent me another letter. Her voice did not have the hop-skip this time. I read it with a thunderstorm rolling in my belly, the words of rejection leaping out as if a yellow highlighter had been dragged across them: “worried about you.” “can no longer watch.” “please understand.” She did not demand that I quit drinking, but she told me she couldn’t be the safe place for my confessions anymore. It was a love letter, the hardest kind to write, but I did not see it that way. It felt like a bedroom door slammed in my face.
A YEAR LATER, I quit drinking. Not forever, but for 18 months, which felt like forever. And in that stretch of sobriety, much of my happiness came back to me. Weight dropped off my hips. My checking account grew heavy with unused beer money. I took off the hair shirt of my own entitlement and began reaching for the life I wanted. One day, I walked into the editor-in-chief’s office, closed the door behind me, and told him I was moving to Ecuador.
The travel part of my story is one of the greatest times of my life. Scary, but thrilling: Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia. I read books half the day and spent the rest of the hours however I wanted.