Yes Please

  Then there were the bad parts. Too many kids in our town died from drinking and driving. At least once a year there was a horribly sad funeral. Flowers would appear, tied up against some pole. Paper cups would spell out WE MISS YOU, KATIE in a chain-link fence at the entrance to our high school. I shudder to think of all the times I got into a car with someone who was wasted. Once I was with my best friend, Keri, and we were in the backseat of some ridiculous car, like an I-RAK or a Z-40 or a MIATI22 (I don’t care about cars). Keri had a crush on the driver and he had brought his friend along. We were headed to Revere Beach to drive around and do nothing. The boy was a little drunk and driving really fast, and I was screaming at him to slow down. I was so angry. I kept thinking, “I can’t believe I am going to die in this cheesy car with these two assholes with spray tans and names I don’t even know.”

  I am ashamed of the few times I drove drunk. Drinking and driving is the absolute worst, because unlike doing coke in your basement while you teach yourself guitar, you could kill someone else. I think about the few times I drove drunk and I picture all of the beautiful families I passed in my car whose lives I could have taken. Please don’t drive drunk, okay? Seriously. It’s so fucked up. But by all means, walk drunk. That looks hilarious. Everyone loves to watch someone act like they are trying to make it to safety during a hurricane.

  My town was good at supporting future drinking problems. Our parties consisted of kegs in the woods. The boys wore “drinking gloves” and we played quarters with cups of beer. Wine coolers made their debut just around this time, and the sugary concoctions made it easier for teenage girls to get drunk. Being young means you have no sense of your own limits, so we would all drink like it was our last night on earth. But even back then I fantasized about what it would be like to drink socially, like Sue Ellen on Dallas. I would pour grape juice into wineglasses and sit in our “fancy” dining room arguing with myself. This was the beginning of a long life of attempting to be much older than I was. I was on a search for the perfect amount of ennui. I would babysit while I watched Thirtysomething, clucking out loud when the characters were failing to communicate. I was sixteen. Why did I care if Hope and Michael had another baby?

  I’ve tried most drugs but avoided the BIG BAD ONES. Meth never squirmed its way into my life, thank god. It is so evil and horrifying, but I am not going to pretend that I am not fascinated by the idea of staying up for days on end painting my basement. When I was twenty-five and living in Chicago, the building supers were two very polite and meticulous meth heads. Matt and I lived above them and listened to them constantly washing their floors. They also loved to vacuum. They often spent the night rearranging furniture and wiping down surfaces. More than once I woke to the sound of them sweeping the porch steps, moving the same pile of dirt around and around. They were tough to talk to, almost impossible to understand and make eye contact with, but I had a strange affection for their ability to channel their meth-taking into real apartment improvements. The problems began once they started knocking on our door claiming our sink was leaking. Then they would spend the whole day taking the sink apart. Then they would ask for twenty bucks to go find a special sink part and disappear for a week. Then one of them died. So all in all, meth seemed too risky.

  Heroin was another drug that didn’t catch my tail. I lived in New York’s East Village in 1998, when heroin was making its forty-fifth comeback. The streets were filled with suburban junkies shooting up next to their pit bull puppies. My building was across from Tompkins Square Park, which had been suffering and/or improving due to gentrification, and the apartments were filled with a lot of musicians and models living alone in New York City for the first time. Most of the models took a real liking to me. Tall women are attracted to my littleness. I have a lot of tall female friends. They like how I am always looking up to them and I like having the option to jump into their pocket if I want to hide. One model, a Midwestern beauty I will call Hannah, met me at the mailboxes and told me she liked my sneakers. Not long after she confessed she was having an affair with a very famous professional basketball player and asked if I would like to go to a game with her. She wouldn’t tell me his name, but she mentioned he was “the one you know.” We sat courtside as the team warmed up, and this player made eye contact with us and nodded approvingly. “He likes when I bring girls to the game,” she said. I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I did know that if that gentleman had put his penis inside me I surely would have died. I couldn’t stop thinking about his giant penis, and every time I looked at tall Hannah I pictured the two of them having sex. A giant pale oak tree getting penetrated by a dark taller oak tree, their size-fifty feet rubbing up against each other on some special bed built to hold their enormous bodies. The player would come visit her at night while his driver waited outside, black SUV idling. Hannah lived above me, and I would picture them fucking and eventually breaking through the floor and crashing through my ceiling, killing us all with one giant official NBA penis. The fear of this encouraged me to move to a new apartment. That and the one freezing morning I had to step over a passed-out model who had nodded off while filling out a W-2 form, only to open the outside door to find a giant pile of human shit. I said good-bye to the East Village and moved over to the West Village, where we don’t have those kinds of problems. In the West Village we just have tweaked-out gay hustlers who hit us over the heads with rocks, thank you very much.

  I also didn’t try heroin because I was told that everyone threw up the first time they did it, and I was never at a party where I felt like throwing up. When given the option to throw up or not throw up, I usually choose the latter. That being said, I am pretty good at making myself throw up, which I tried in high school when I watched my bulimic friends do it. I was lucky that habit didn’t stick. Our school was riddled with beautiful girls who thought they were fat and ugly. Anorexic girls who cut peanut M&M’s in half and climbed the stairs during lunch. Sometimes I think about those skinny girls and their rapid and hungry hearts and I just want to put my hands on their chests and cry chocolate tears that they can lick and swallow.

  What else? I have never tried antidepressants. I probably should have after my first kid, when my postpartum blues felt deeper than I could handle. At the time I thought I was just tired and sad, and I remember the flat defeat I felt when my doctor suggested I “put on a dress and take in a Broadway show.” I climbed out of that dark place, but rubbing shoulders with that depression made me keenly aware of the difference between being depressed and being DEPRESSED. Anxiety and depression are cousins and I have had a few panic attacks in my adult life that knocked me off my game. The best way I can explain a panic attack is that it’s the feeling of someone inside my body stacking it with books. The books continue to pile up and they make me feel like I can’t breathe. Meditation helps a lot. Sex does too. Calling someone equally as anxious on the phone makes you feel less alone. Sometimes the best thing to hear is not “Don’t worry, it’s going to be okay” but actually “Tell me about it! The whole world is going to explode and I haven’t slept for weeks. Now let me tell you about my specific fears of small boats and big business!” As I have gotten older, my social anxiety has worsened. I am not great in a crowd. I don’t see a lot of rock shows because sometimes I am afraid I won’t get out. I used to squeeze my little self into the scrum and jump around and cause tiny trouble. Now I just want to sit down and have someone perform my five favorite songs while I eat a light dinner and receive a simultaneous pedicure. Is there some kind of awesome indie/alt/hip-hop/electronica music tour that can do that?

  In my twenties I tried cocaine, which I instantly loved but eventually hated. Cocaine is terrific if you want to hang out with people you don’t know very well and play Ping-Pong all night. It’s bad for almost everything else. If you’re wondering who is on coke it’s probably the last people left at the bar talking loudly about their strained relationships with their dads while the bartender closes up and puts stools on the tables. The da
y after cocaine is rough. Same with ecstasy. I remember a wonderful UCB New Year’s Eve party where we all danced and drank water and loved each other. I also remember the next day when I thought I had no friends and I was so sad I wanted to sink into the carpet and permanently live there. The next day is the thing I can’t pull off anymore. How do you explain to a four- and six-year-old that you can’t play Rescue Bots because you have to spend all day in bed eating Cape Cod potato chips and watching The Bicycle Thief ?

  We didn’t take a lot of pills in my day, which was lucky. Those suckers are heart-stoppers. It’s scary today to see all those downers find their way into young people’s hands. Teenage bodies should be filled with Vonnegut and meatball subs, not opiates that create glassy-eyed party monsters. But the pills aren’t just for teens. There are lots of middle-aged ladies who are thin and cranky hanging on to their slurring husbands who can’t make a fist. It’s all kind of a mess, isn’t it?

  But weed doesn’t seem as bad.

  I know there are people who get addicted to marijuana. I don’t want my kids to smoke it. I plan on lying to my children about most of my drug use. I had a friend who told her adolescent son he was allergic to pot, and if he tried it he would break out into hives. This lasted for a while until one of his friends gently suggested maybe she had made that fact up. His whole world was blown. He came to her asking, “Did you make that up? How could you?” and she said, “Of course I did. Let me make you a BLT.” I think this is a terrific idea. I think we don’t lie to our children enough. We also don’t bribe them enough. It’s a wonderful day when your child gets old enough to be bribed. It’s a whole new tool in your arsenal. I plan on telling my children I had a few drinks and a few joints but the whole thing just seemed like “it wasn’t for me.” Then I am going to hire private investigators to test their urine. It’s not like they are going to read this book anytime soon. What’s more boring than your own mother’s take on her own life? Yawn. Also, I am counting on everyone living on the moon by the time my children are teenagers, and that they’ll have really interesting space friends who are kind and good students and think drugs are lame and “totally, like, Earthish.”

  The first time I smelled pot was when I was a teenager and at a Bryan Adams concert. I thought to myself, “Hmm, that smells like my dad’s car.” I am aware that some of you may be wondering what I was doing at a Bryan Adams concert. Um, try rocking out and buying neon T-shirts, dude. Anyway, I went home and searched all of my father’s pockets and drawers until I found some weed. The revelation that my dad was a pot smoker wasn’t too shocking. He was always friendly and happy. He loved getting to places early to pick us up and sitting in his car, and he was always first to suggest we get ice cream in the middle of the day. I had some friends with alcoholic parents, and my memories of those houses always involved people being scared, afraid of what mood was around the corner. I never worried about my father and how he would act around my friends. He was generous and nice and didn’t yell. He sort of whacked me once when I was being a straight-up biiiitch about wanting to wear my mom’s coat. He surprised himself and I burst out crying and he apologized long into the night. I milked it for as long as I could, but I knew even at fifteen that he was under a lot of pressure and I was being a spoiled brat.

  High school and college came and went and I smoked pot very rarely. Then I arrived in Chicago and lived the life of a stoner for a year. I would smoke in the morning and listen to Bob Marley. I would wear headphones and buy records and comic books. I would make mac and cheese while watching Deep Space Nine. I am not one of those people who smokes weed and suddenly has a burst of creativity. I am one of those people who smokes weed and spends an hour lightening my eyebrows. It slowed me down and helped with my Irish stomach and anxiety and the constant channel-changing that happened in my head. I can’t perform, drive, or write stoned, and therefore I smoke pot a lot less than I used to. Gone are the days when I could walk to 7-Eleven and play the game of “buy the weirdest two things.”

  To sum up:

  •Drugs suck. They ruin people’s lives. They kill people too early. They destroy hopes and dreams and tear families apart.

  •Drugs help. They pull people from despair. They balance our moods and minds and keep us from freaking out on airplanes.

  •Drugs are fun. They expand our horizons. They create great memories and make folding our laundry bearable.

  Addendum:

  © Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images

  my boys

  I AM A MOON JUNKIE. Every time I look at the moon, I feel less alone and less afraid. I tell my boys that moonlight is a magic blanket and the stars above us are campfires set by friendly aliens. I track lunar cycles on my iPhone and take my kids outside at night when a moon is new or full or blue. We call this “moon hunting” and we bring flashlights and moon candy along. The moon candy looks suspiciously like M&M’s, but so far neither of my sons has noticed.

  On moon-hunting nights, I give them a bath and rub both of my boys down with Aveeno lotion and comb their hair. I spread Aquaphor on my lips and try to kiss them. Sometimes I chase them around until I catch one and throw him on the bed like a bag of laundry. Most times I am too tired. Then we head outside. We wear pajamas, because going outside at night in your pajamas feels like breaking out of jail. I watch their little fat feet and their shiny cheeks as they jump into the backseat of the car. These boys, they are delicious. I swear, if I could eat my children, I would. I’d consume them like some beast in a Hieronymus Bosch painting, but in a friendlier, more momlike way. Their little bodies make me salivate. It takes everything I have not to swallow them whole.

  During one full moon, I announced my plans to drive to an open field and have us climb into our sleeping bags and howl at the night sky. As we drove to my preplanned spot, my boys once again reminded me to stay in the moment and stop overthinking. They kept pointing to the huge moon, shouting, “Mama, it’s right there. We don’t have to drive to the moon! It came to us!” We pulled over just a few blocks from our Los Angeles home and abandoned my previous plan. I spread out a blanket and we snuggled together, our bodies on the warm hood of the car. The car hood was slippery so we used our bare feet for traction. We all made wishes. I wished that my children would be kind and happy and I would wake up with a flatter stomach. Archie wished that “everyone in the world was a robot.” Abel wished for “more Legos.” They are boys, my boys. My Archie boy. My baby Abel.

  My boy Archie has eyes the color of blueberries. He has a solid sense of design and is only months away from his first cartwheel. When he was just two weeks old, his dad and I took a picture of him in his crib with the New York Times draped over him like a blanket. The headline read OBAMA: RACIAL BARRIER FALLS IN DECISIVE VICTORY. He loves to run and strongly identifies with Luke Skywalker because they “have the same hair.” He recently told me, “Mama, do you want to know something funny about me? I am afraid of little things and not afraid of big things.” I think he was talking about bugs and elephants, but I understood what he meant in a very deep way. He deals primarily in poop and fart jokes, and insists these things will never fail to make him laugh. He is absolutely right. He is delighted when I laugh at him, but he is no ham. He is sensitive and stubborn, and as of this printing would like to be a police officer and a veterinarian and also Iron Man. He once asked me, “Are you sad that you don’t have a penis?” I told him that I was happy with the parts that I had. I then reminded him that girls have vaginas and everyone is different and each body is like a snowflake. He nodded in agreement and then looked up at me with a serious face and asked, “But did you once have a penis and break it?” I was tempted to make a joke that would screw him up for life. “Yes, my son. Your mother once had a penis but it broke because you didn’t love her enough.” The bond between mothers and sons is powerful stuff. I firmly believe that every boy needs his mom to love him and every girl needs her dad to pay attention to her. Archie needed to figure out if I had ever owned and operated a penis. I ge
t it. His penis is important to him. Anyway, he starts college next year. Just kidding, he’s six. He recently asked if he could marry me and I said yes. I couldn’t help it. I would marry him anytime.

  My boy Abel has eyes the color of a pine forest. He is a red monkey who named himself. I went to a psychic before he was born and she told me I was having “another big boy. He wants to be called Abel.” We agreed. As he was born, the song “Young Turks” played on the radio and Rod Stewart sang, “Young hearts be free tonight / Time is on your side.” Abel has chocolate chip freckles and hair like a copper penny. He loves to dance and sing and recently composed a song called “I’m a Genius.” He is a big hugger. He doesn’t mind when I stick my head into his neck and smell him. He smells like a love cookie. He recently told me he “really like[s] it when girls wear nice blouses.” He has a deep laugh and thinks Darth Vader is funny. He cries big tears and sweats in his sleep. He makes friends on airplanes. He is four. The first thing he does when he wakes up in the morning is look for Archie. He loves his big brother so intensely. His big brother protects him and tortures him. Abel feels like the wisest and oldest member of our family. When he was just starting to talk he used to ask me if I was happy. He has dreams that he is a different little boy with black hair and one eye. My beautiful Tibetan nanny, Dawa, believes he has been reincarnated many times.