Around noon, I’d reach out to my deputy editor Thomas. “Lunch?” I’d type.
He’d type back, “Give me a sec.”
“This is bullshit,” I’d type with mock impatience. “You are so fucking fired right now. FUCKING FIRED, DO YOU HEAR ME?”
“Ready,” he’d type back.
We’d walk to a chain restaurant in the ground floor of the Empire State Building, where I ate a burrito as big as a football, and Thomas calmly explained to me why I was not going to quit my job that day.
Sober folk have a phrase for people who quit drinking and float about with happiness. In the pink cloud. I was the opposite of that. I was in a black cloud. A storm cloud. Each day brought new misery into focus. New York: When did it get so unbearable? People: Why do they suck so bad? Sometimes, when I was riding the subway, I would think about burying a hatchet in a stranger’s skull. Nothing personal, but: What would it feel like? Would their head sink in like a pumpkin, or would I have to really yawp and swing the hatchet to get it in?
I was not great company, and so I retreated into my apartment. I turned down dinner parties. I excused myself from work events. I listened to podcast interviews, the texture of conversation without the emotional risk. The voices of Terry Gross and Marc Maron filled my apartment so often my neighbors must have thought they were my best friends. And I guess, during those lonely months, they were.
I visited my chic, unsmiling hairstylist in Greenpoint to get my hair done. Nothing like an old-fashioned makeover to turn that grumpy black rain cloud to blue skies. I sat down in her vinyl swivel chair, across from a giant full-length mirror, and was startled by my own reflection: dumpy and sweaty, my chunky thighs spread even wider by the seat. I looked so buried. And as she snipped and measured around my shoulders, all I could think was: I want to rip off my own face.
When she was done, she handed me a mirror to see myself from multiple angles. “It looks amazing,” I told her. I wanted to die.
No, I did not want to die. I wanted to fast-forward through this dull segment. I want to skip to the part when I was no longer broken and busted up. Was that day coming? Could we skip this part and get there soon? I’d spent years losing time, nights gone in a finger snap, but now I found myself with way too much time. I needed to catapult into a sunnier future, or I needed to slink back to a familiar past, but what I could not bear was the slow and aching present. Much of my life has been this way. A complete inability to tolerate the moment.
But the moments were adding up. Day 32. Day 35. Day 41.
One small gift was that I did not crave cigarettes. I detested the smell, and even the thought of smoking made me nauseated. It made no sense. I smoked for more than two decades, sometimes two packs a night, but without the booze in my system to build up the nicotine craving, I couldn’t have cared less. And yet I would have clawed up the walls to get a six-pack of Sierra Nevada. In case anyone needed a reminder that addiction is complex and variable, there it is. What we long for, what our bodies crave, is as individual as the whorls of our thumb.
I was reminded of this in the AA rooms. One day this guy said, “I just can’t believe I’ll never do blow off a hooker’s ass again.” He wasn’t being funny. His face was in total despair. I felt terrible for that guy, because it was the same heartbreak I experienced every time I passed a craft cocktail bar or read about the local-beer renaissance. Paradise lost, motherfucker.
Each Sunday evening, I walked out to the Hudson River, and I sat on whatever bench was unoccupied by families or nuzzling couples, and I stared across the glistening water at New Jersey. This was crazy to me—a whole other state visible from where I sat—and I tried to imagine what came after the fast-forward. My future fantasies were not unique. The boyfriend with brown eyes and shaggy hair, the writing award, the lather of love and admiration. But what occurred to me as I sat on the bench was that the fantasies all had one thing in common. I was someone else in them.
What a poignant commentary on my own self-worth—I recast myself in my own daydreams. I wondered what it would take to change this. If I could ever collapse the space between my imaginary self and the human being sitting on the bench. Was it even possible? Because you can be a lot of things in this world, but you can never be another person. That’s the deal. You’re stuck with yourself.