pinch drunk

Last Wednesday night, I did something that is such an unbelievable breach of Gotham etiquette, such a mark of extreme louche behavior, such a shame-making urban act that every time I have confessed it to another Gothamite—and confess it I have, as if the telling of it will scrub my soul clean—to a one, they have reacted the same way: A jerk of the head, a gasp, and an exclaimed, “Oh, no!”

“Oh, no!”: it’s the same words, but it’s not the same exclamation as when I had my iPhone jacked out of my bleeding hands on Fordham Road in the Bronx. It’s the same words, but not the same exclamation, as when I had a roommate move out taking as much stuff as he could carry (including, inexplicably, the light bulb from the ceiling). It’s the same words, but not the same exclamation, as when I went to work one night in the ‘90s and found my strip club door padlocked with a big Marshall sign on it proclaiming the property seized. It’s the same words but not the same exclamation because while the other situations occasioned compassioned and understanding, this one engendered only horror and the clear, unadorned relief that what happened to me had not happened to them.

And what had I done? I got so drunk that I puked in a cab. It was the full cliché glory of taxicab puking. An unanticipated need. A thin rivulet of bourbon stink. An irate taxi driver. An inability to find my wallet. A quick panic. A huge payment. An unsteady mile-long walk home in high heels. It was ugly. May it never happen to you.

Slender are the surface facts that brought me to puking in the back of a Gotham taxi. I’d been busy all day and I’d not eaten much. I think my grand total of food for the day amounted to five eggs, two corn tortillas, a pile of potatoes and a couple threads of green beans. I rushed off to a party, stopping only to grab a bottle of Buffalo Trace Kentucky whiskey from my local liquor store. At the party, we all dispensed with glasses and took slugs out of the bottle, in a circle, totemically, as if we were sharing a hookah.

I don’t, therefore, have a clear idea of how much I drank, but it probably wasn’t much more than a customary heavy pour. I’ve never held my liquor well under the best of circumstances, and these circumstances were not even in the same congressional code as the best.

But the surface facts really don’t tell the whole story and the whole story is that I went to that party with full intention to get drunk. Not as drunk as I got, nor as quickly, messily, shamefully or as pointlessly, but drunk. I wanted to get drunk because the day before I discovered that the doctor who performed my rotator cuff surgery is, and I quote my insurance company, “outside my network.” I owe him just under $13,000. It may be immature, and certainly for me very unusual behavior, but I wanted a night when I could forget the money and feel angry about it simultaneously and illogically.

I’m not good with money. I’ve written before about how bad with money I am. Money is hard to write about. I’d rather write about the seamier side of my sex life than my bank balance. I feel shame over being as deeply, profoundly and, let’s face it, inescapably in the red as I am. Again, the surface explanations for my extreme in-the-redness are fairly simple. I’m bad with math. In fact, I have dyscalculia, which makes negotiating numbers incredibly hazardous and anxiety provoking. My parents never taught me to manage money. They dropped the ball on that, as they did on many other things like table manners, social etiquette and playing well with others. And money has never been much of a driving force. It’s nice to have, but I’ve never really cared about a status of living that affords me much beyond the general basics adorned with an occasional furbelow.

But the three-D truth is naturally more complex, and the truth is that I never really considered myself worth much. Therefore, managing my money wasn’t a priority. I didn’t think I’d be here very long. I thought I’d be dead by my own hand or, more likely, by an “accident.” I didn’t pay attention to my student loan debt. I owe in the low six figures. I didn’t pay attention to my taxes. I owe in the low four figures. I didn’t pay attention to my credit cards. I owe in the mid-four figures. I have a lot of debt.

What I don’t have are assets. I own nothing. I don’t have a car, a house, an apartment, jewelry, stocks, bonds, or anything anyone would want to buy on E-Bay. I have over a hundred snow-domes and too much vintage Norma Kamali and ten pairs of Frye boots. I have second-hand furniture and a computer that’s going to celebrate its fifth birthday. I have many pairs of Wolford tights. And that’s about it.

Shockingly, I’d begun to make peace with it, my lack of ownership and debt, and I’d begun to take measures to make my debt more manageable. In fact, I have an appointment with an accountant tomorrow, an appointment I’m going to have to cancel because I can’t afford it. In the past couple of years, I had begun to take steps to fashion a life that allowed my ends to meet, that would help my hand reach my mouth and feed me, that would—perhaps—allow me to pay my debt while living. I, in short, got a job that I hated. And then I quit that one, and I got a job that I actually like.

At 46, in the worst economy since the Great Depression, I got the things that culture had been telling me I should get while I clapped my hands over my ears and sang “La la lala, academia lalala, freelance writing la la la.” I got a job. I got a pension. I got health insurance. At 47, I got another job. I got an IRA. I got different health insurance. I got doctor’s appointments. I got surgery. I got a great, big stinking debt that I wasn’t expecting, and I got it just when I was towing the cultural row, doing the work that I didn’t like and then work that I sort of like, but whatever. I was living the life I had never wanted. I was living the life of a schnook.

A few weeks ago, I was out at dinner with three others: a big-deal writer, a writer poised on the brink of being a big deal, and a writer whom we all believe will be a big deal. We were talking about the necessity of being successful and the big deal writer’s belief that to make a dream come true you need to say you’ll do it, out loud, to others. I told him about my six-figure student loan debt and then I devolved into my anxiety about a penniless future. He stared at me and said levelly: “You can’t worry about all that yet. You just need to get to broke.”

He is right, of course. Right now, my goal is to get to broke. Not to save. Not to buy. Not to pad the walls of my Spartan cage with downy softness. To fill in with dollars and cents the yawning cavern of debt. The debt that weighs on me, that makes my life unmanageable, that in my mind marks me and makes me unattractive, unmarriable, this yowling anti-dowery that not all the goats in the world could counterbalance. (Tell me now that your self-worth isn’t inextricably tied to your bank balance.) Right now my goal is to get even, and even is something I’ll never get working this $60,000 a year job.

In that dinner conversation, I agreed with the big deal writer. He looked at me again, the gears in his labyrinthine brain going full spin. “What sexually explicit and intimate memoirs have sold?” he asked. “I mean, have any?”  I was stumped. (I still am.) I was taken aback. (I still am.) I was crushed. (I still am.)

I’ll be over there in the corner, curled fetal, but without the bourbon. It’s bad enough to be plunged in an industrial sized vat of fiscal despair. I don’t need to puke in a taxi to remind me of my shame.

 

Comments

[Kate Black]

“What sexually explicit and intimate memoirs have sold?”

Well, one survivor of Michael Jackson sleepovers wrote a tell-all about it, which was only published in South America somewhere. MJ's people (allegedly) bought every copy they could get their hands on and destroyed them. (But a few slipped out and made the rounds of various media offices...)

So there's that.

[chelsea g. summers]

Yeah, and there was Kathryn Harris' The Kiss, Toni Bentley's The Surrender, Gael Greene's Insatiable, and (forgive me) Tucker Max's Hope They Sell Beer in Hell. Then there was also Jonathan Ames' What's Not to Love?, all of Steven Elliot, and various other male writers.

But when a major writer fixes you in his steely gaze and asks you that question, tell me your mind doesn't go blank.

kissykiss,
chelsea g.

[Kate Black]

I do not dine with steely-eyed famous people, but I'm socially retarded enough that I probably wouldn't be any more or less speechless than with an unknown writer.

I love Jonathan Ames' "What's Not To Love." When had a bookseller gig during college, I once removed a David Sedaris book from someone's hands and replaced it with WNTL.

[Onthesensor]

Part of me wonders why the surgeons office didn't advise you a bit on the medical coverage a good administrator would have asked some questions. Water under the bridge, however consider asking the surgeons office what the bill would have been for their in network patients, just a thought.

Have you considered self publishing here in the new electronic age? I've read some accounts of writers that have started publishing electronically on Amazon.
I've been following your writing for over two years CG, I certainly see your talent, unfortunately I'm not an agent. On the other hand agents don't buy books, readers do.

[sera]

Not that I've read them, but also what about Naomi Wolf's Promiscuities and Mary Karr's Cherry? But my mind has also mostly gone blank. By the way, most major writers I've known spend time crushing the mino . . . I mean, the less-major writers, including their proteges. I think it's part of the job description.

[d]

Marguerite Duras' "The Lover" (which, I might add, also became a film) a semi-fictionalized memoir, but still--mostly memoir
Henry Miller
Anais Nin

[d]

p.s. Imagine if James Joyce had lost hope after someone said to him, "So how many novels written in stream-of-consciousness have sold? Any?"

Because probably someone did say that--or thought it anyway. Even if there hasn't yet been a first time for something, there has to be sometime.

[chelsea g. summers]

Sera, I've not read either that Wolf or that Karr, but maybe I'll check them out. The steely-eyed major writer has emailed me and told me kindly to ignore him.

D, fair enough re: Joyce and Duras. And, if you'll permit my ego to run free, thank you for the implicit comparison.

[Sarcastic Bastard]

My sympathies. I find myself in similar circumstances at 44 years old. I don't have the student loan, but boy do I have credit card debt.

[MJ]

Yeah, I relate - during a particularly awful time at work I attended a meeting, ran into a former colleague, and heard his tale of woe about how no one wanted him or his skill set (and he's only a few years ahead of me in age/experience). Ended up sobbing like Lassie died all the way home - an hour in the car, wiping my face on my tee. Lovely. A little dark night of the soul - which seems to be what you rather reasonably had too.

[1st Republic 14th Star]

Two words: Xaviera Hollander.