Kids who crave fame often imagine New York will be like this. One big room full of celebrities and cocktails. Stephanie’s party wasn’t too far from my own childhood fantasies. Except this time, I was in it.
I went back to Bobby’s restaurant as often as I could after that. One night in the fall, I was having a drink there with a bunch of Stephanie’s friends, including a saucy redhead I liked. Around 8 pm, our friends peeled off for dinner plans and more responsible lives, and the redhead turned to me.
“You want to go to another bar?” she asked.
And that was an easy question. “Sure.”
We rambled on to a trendy spot in Hell’s Kitchen and bonded over the miseries of the single life while slurping down $17 martinis. I remember what they cost, because I had to do quick math. How many of these can I squeeze on my last working credit card and still afford the cab ride home? The redhead had been out of work for a while, a fact she was very open about, and I couldn’t figure out how she managed to stay in her Upper West Side apartment and afford $17 martinis. I wanted to ask her, but I never found a polite way to introduce the topic. So we sat there discussing our favorite sexual positions.
At midnight, we walked to the corner to catch a cab. My heels were in my hands, my bare feet slapping on the gummy sidewalk. By the time the taxi dropped me off at home, I had an insane hunger. I boiled water on the stove and threw in some pasta. I flopped down on the futon and turned on that VH1 show where talking-head comedians make fun of Milli Vanilli and Teddy Ruxpin.
The next part is confusing. A banging at the door. The landlord’s sketchy son with a fire extinguisher in his hands. Gray smoke churning over the stove. The earsplitting beeping of the alarm.
“Open the window,” he said. Sweat was dripping off his face as he worked to secure the kitchen. I stood behind him, arms dangling at my sides.
“Your alarm’s been going off for half an hour,” he said, and he moved the pot of charred spaghetti stalks off the burner.
“I must have fallen asleep,” I said, a much gentler phrase than “passed out.” But I wondered if they knew. Surely they’d seen all the cans and bottles in my recycling bin.
Ten minutes later, the landlord stood in my kitchen. She was in a blue robe, with her arms crossed. “You try to burn down my apartment,” she said.
“Oh no,” I said, startled by the accusation and hoping it was a glitch in translation. “It was an accident. I’m so sorry.”
I couldn’t go back to sleep that night. At 5 am, before the sun rose, I decided to take a walk. I walked across the Williamsburg Bridge, and I walked through the trash-strewn streets of the Lower East Side, past the discount stores with their roll-down metal gates locked shut, and through the tidy sidewalk cafés of Chelsea, and into the din of Midtown. If my feet hurt, I didn’t notice. I needed forward motion. I needed to keep in front of my shame. I was near the zoo at Central Park when the landlord’s daughter called me.
“When your lease is up in April, we’d like you to move out,” she said.
“OK, I’m sorry,” I said.
She must have hated making that call. She must have hated being the translator of Difficult Information. “Listen, you’re a good person, but my mom is really upset. The building is old. Her granddaughters live there. The whole place could have gone up in flames.”
“I understand,” I said, though it felt like an overreaction to a genuine mistake. I fell asleep, I kept thinking. How could spaghetti smoke burn down your building? But underneath those defensive voices, the knowledge I was wrong. To cast the event as anyone’s whoopsie was to exclude key evidence. Like the part where I drank three martinis, two beers—and passed out.
“I was thinking about buying your mother a plant,” I said. “Or maybe flowers. Do you know what kind she likes?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, because I thought everyone liked flowers.
“I think the better idea is if you don’t say anything, and you move out in April.”
I walked all the way up to Washington Heights, up to 181st Street, where my friend Lisa lived. We’d met at the Austin paper, and she was one of the first people to convince me I could make a living in New York. I slept on her couch during my first month in the city, and I used to drift off, listening to her and her husband laugh in their bedroom, and I would think about how I would like that one day. Lisa and Craig were leading candidates for the greatest people I knew, and if you are ever as low as I was that morning, I hope you can walk far enough to get to Lisa’s doorstep.
She and I pulled a couple chairs outside and sat quietly in the sunshine. I stared off at the George Washington Bridge, the blue sky behind it. My lips were trembling. “I think I’m going to have to quit drinking,” I said, and she said, “I know. I’m sorry. I love you.”
And I quit drinking. For four days.