Something has to happen. Otherwise, how long until I’ve worked my way through the entire News Corp building and am fired in some kind of spectacular scene, then carted off to rehab?
Trying not to overthink it too much, I call up this sober friend, and we make plans to go to a lunchtime AA meeting on Houston Street. As soon as I walk into the slightly run-down but very lovingly cleaned old building, I feel like I’m entering church.
These people seem like they’ve seen some shit. These people feel like my people.
Near the end of the meeting, there are only a few minutes left, and while I didn’t intend to speak, I shoot up my hand impulsively. “My name is Mandy,” I say, and then, without even realizing I’m going to, I identify myself for the first time in my life, “and I’m an alcoholic.”
The moment the words come out of my mouth it feels like such a huge weight has been lifted off me. It’s like a different kind of rush. But I don’t treat it with real respect. I don’t think about what it means. And in the days that follow, I don’t actually go to another meeting. After eight days of not drinking, my “sobriety” is starting to feel like something dangerously familiar. It’s starting to feel like one of my stories.
But no matter. All I have to do is just not drink. One day at a time. Everyone knows that.
I even shine a little brighter from not drinking. When I go to a Page Six going-away party, it doesn’t even surprise me when a gorgeous twenty-seven-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio type named Alex starts talking me up for what seems like hours. Everything feels so great and fun and free. Hell, I’m even meeting amazing guys in sobriety.
Alex flatters me by asking me a lot of questions and expressing endless interest, and I launch into my balls-to-the-wall, trying-to-impress, super-extreme-honesty, sexual-anecdotal Tourette’s mode, telling him some of my greatest-hits stories to just do it up, lay it all on the line. My closer is, of course, being on the cover of the newspaper with the gigolo.
“Wow, I love it,” Alex says. “You’re not like a normal girl, are you? You’re unusual.”
I beam proudly. Man, this guy really gets me. I am so cool. It feels so nice to be seen, to be recognized, to be appreciated.
“You know,” Alex says, looking at me with measured intensity, “there are these swinger parties they have. Except you need a woman to go with, and I’ve never met a girl cool enough.”
Ah yes . . . there it is.
I have not been working this guy. This guy has been working me—the whole time. His follow-up statement reveals just how obvious a mark I really am.
“It’s so funny,” Alex continues, “there’s actually a party tonight.”
I look at him and I feel naked already. Like my clothes have been ripped off and every shameful flaw is on display. My heart drops a little. I glare down at the nonalcoholic water I’m holding in my hand and have been dutifully drinking like some asshole. I feel a flash of rage. Who am I kidding? Everyone knows who I am, even strangers I’ve just met.
I’m the girl you take to a sex club.
“All right, you little shit,” I say, harder than before. “I’ll take that drink now. Because I’m not drinking water if I’m going to a fucking orgy.”
Before we reach the club in the Meatpacking District where the dubiously named One Leg Up party is being held, Alex grabs my hand and whispers: “I’m your boyfriend now.”
I laugh, but it also secretly delights me. Of course, I know what he’s doing. He’s just trying to ensure we appear to be a real couple and will be let inside. Versus the reality of what happened, which is that he is a single horny guy who wants in to the party, so he plucked a chick off the street whose self-worth is so in the gutter she’s literally up for going to a last-minute sex orgy—like, within two hours of meeting.
Outside the mysterious China One club, Alex gives the password (“I’m naughty”) and whips out two hundred-dollar bills for entry. One for him. One for me.
We head down the stairs to the lounge below, elliptical Moroccan music encircling us, and he takes my hand again, guiding us to the bar to get drinks, then to a maroon velvet banquette on the side. The two of us sidle up next to a buxom British chick who is pouring out of a tight red dress and snuggling up next to some dashing Peter O’Toole–looking motherfucker.
The Absolut I’m downing is starting to take effect. I’m feeling loose, brash, and free.
“We should play a get-to-know-you game!” I say to this ridiculously attractive couple. “Like truth or dare or something.”
“Ooh yes, okay, me first,” the man pipes up. “How about, I dare you . . . Mandy, is it? I dare you to go down on Sylvie here. Sylvie just loves girls.”
“No problem,” I say, smiling and empty. As I walk over to Sylvie, a small crowd begins to form, which includes the resident coke dealer—whose job is to obviously know where the action is before anyone else.
No one wanted to buy any coke.
“Oh, that’s okay,” the dealer says to me, “I just want the visual so . . . I’m going to give you a bump to do off that girl’s big-ass titties so I can have that burned in my brain, okay?”
I do the line greedily, then dutifully lift the bottom of Sylvie’s dress and slowly lick her clit, all the while perking my ass up in order to best pornify the whole encounter for Alex and all our new friends.
“Oooh, my turn!” Sylvie cries out. “Mandy, I want you to go down on Alex!”
The energy changes a little, and Alex looks annoyed.
“Sure,” he says, clipped and less confident than I’ve seen him all night.
I soon see why. Alex is adorable, but this is his best—his biggest—attribute.
There are times like this in life when you are really forced to woman up to be who the man you are with needs you to be. And I am not going to let Alex down.
“Oh yeah,” I say, summoning every acting lesson I’ve ever had. “Mmm, give it to me.”
I get on my knees, count to a hundred Mississippi, and do the best object work of my life.
Yeah—my first attempt at sobriety is not going well at all.
* * *
EVEN WORSE THAN blowing my eight days of sobriety is the unbearable guilt I feel at having totally blown eight days of sobriety. I hate more than anything the feeling that I’ve done something wrong. It’s a debilitating kind of perfectionism I’ve had since childhood where I’m so afraid to have done something wrong that I stubbornly stick to whatever wrong choice I’ve made—all so I can avoid the shame of having to admit I screwed up in the first place. So instead of returning to the rooms of AA, I stick to my guns that I did the right thing in going back to partying. Besides, you never know, Alex the sex-club boy might . . . actually . . . be interested in me?
I am so dumb. But, truly, from the moment Alex grabbed my hand and said, “I’m your boyfriend now” and talked about going on a “sexual heart of darkness” journey with me, I thought there might be a real connection. That he would call. That he would want to hang out again. That the drinking and the partying and all of it was worth it—the right thing to do. It had to add up to something . . . right?
But the sun still rises in the east, the sky is blue, and of course he doesn’t call.
That doesn’t mean I can’t talk about the experience, though, to get the whole thing out of my system. Which leads me to a conversation with a man who is a friend of friends. When I spill to him the details of that crazy night, he tells me that he, too, has been to sex clubs. He seems to accept my weirdness, and I like that. He gives me weed and booze and coke, and I like that even more. It’s an escape. That’s all I’m seeking. Just one more escape. Just for a little while.
But the higher we get together, the darker our encounter becomes. He slaps me, insults me, and jerks my hair in a way that feels like my neck is snapping. It doesn’t feel like playful S&M. It feels sinister.
When I finally sober up to realize I need to get the fuck out of his apartment, I rush to get dressed in the dark. I don’t want to ha
ve sex with him. I don’t want to be this fucked-up. I don’t want any of this. As I’m walking out the door I ask him weakly, “Can we just be friends?”
“I don’t think so,” he replies.
His rejection confirms all my worst fears. He knows what I am good for—and when I don’t give him that, I’m good for absolutely nothing. As I walk home in the rain as the morning light starts to break, my mind races as I chain-smoke and stare at the disgusting pavement below. None of this is fun anymore. None of it. I feel like I am offering myself up as some kind of human sacrifice for a story that has long since lost the plot.
When I wilt into my crumpled-up pile of sheets at home, I grab my phone and study the cracked screen. Someone inside my iPhone must genuinely care about me, surely. But I don’t want to burden my friends. I know my family doesn’t want to know how bad things have gotten. I don’t want to break everyone’s heart.
Scrolling through my contacts, I swallow my pride and dial a sober comic I know who’s given me really straightforward advice in the past. Truthfully, though, I feel like a jerk for even reaching out, because I spoke to him a few weeks back when I tried sobriety the first time around—and he congratulated and supported me. Then, of course, I cockily updated him on exactly why sobriety wasn’t for me and how I obviously had to drink because of my super-legendary swinger’s club night. That time, he was still nice, but his response was more distant and polite.
No worries, Mandy Sounds fun.
This time around, I drop the act entirely.
“I don’t understand why . . . I just feel so incredibly sad,” I confess over the phone, my eyes closed, my voice choked and thick with grief. Why is this all hitting me so hard this time?
He isn’t cold to me in his tone, but he isn’t indulgent either. Instead, he gives me what I need more than anything else: a cut-through-the-bullshit lifeline.
“You know, Mandy,” he says, “you can keep calling me up every few weeks, or you can change your life.”
Wow.
This lands—so, so hard.
You. Can. Change. Your. Life.
His words strike me like a thunderbolt. I know right then and there that if I don’t decide this moment, this day—June 28, 2010—is truly my “low point” that I might not come back at all.
The next morning feels different when I wake up. I have a purpose. A goal. I can change my life. I can decide things. No one else. No matter how tempting drinking and drugs are, no matter how much they feel like an inevitability or a necessity—I can always choose to stay sober. I see that now. I see what I did wrong. And it’s okay that I have been wrong so many times. The very next day, after work, I go to an AA meeting in SoHo, where I weep and tell a story that only makes sense to me to a room filled with strangers. I see the beauty, the peace, the freedom in admitting my weaknesses and my flaws. I feel how powerful it is to admit how truly powerless I am. Someone gently gives me my first twenty-four-hour coin, and I put it in my purse like the precious object it is. One sweet girl suggests to me a meeting that’s good for newcomers. That meeting leads to another and another, and for a few weeks, I’m really doing okay. I’m doing pretty good.
I have twenty-two days of sobriety. I have a new life. And then—I finally hear from Alex the sex-club boy again.
There is another “party” coming up, he says, and we should go. The male-validation pull is strong with this one. Convince me to go, I tell him. After a few texts, he does.
The night of the party, this time at Macao, this time with the password ultimate fantasy, we have an incredibly tame evening. I don’t even kiss Alex. I just observe and have a genuinely fun time making observations and interviewing people. I ask a tiny Asian woman getting fucked from behind, “So what do you do for a living?” She replies, “I’m a CPA!” The guy fucking her says, “And I’m a corporate investigator!” It is all very normal.
At one point Alex brings up the fact that I went to Northwestern, and I’m genuinely surprised he remembers. He responds, “Oh, I have a little app on my phone that tells me which school the girls I take to sex clubs graduated from.”
Over the course of the evening, five things occur that do not seem like accidents.
1. The bartender brings me a free drink that I did not order. I refuse.
2. At the entrance to the party, the organizer squirts vodka into people’s mouths. I refuse.
3. Inside the party, they squirt vodka into people’s mouths. I refuse.
4. Inside the party, Alex brings me a drink. I refuse.
5. After the party, Alex and I go back up to the bar, where I order a Pellegrino. I am brought a champagne.
The gesture feels like some sort of cruel joke. I have literally never had alcohol forced on me so many times when I didn’t ask for it.
Could it be a sign? Maybe it is a sign. Maybe I should just keep drinking. Maybe . . .
I look at the alcohol. I look at Alex. I don’t say no. Justifications in my mind are hitting me rapid-fire now. Instead of picking it up, though, my hands instinctively fumble around inside my purse, and without realizing what I’m doing, that’s when I feel it: the twenty-four-hour chip.
I cling to it like it’s a life raft and stare at the champagne, stare at Alex. This guy doesn’t give a shit about me. I know that. My fingers rub the coin intently, turning it over in my hands, and I think of all the women in AA I’ve spoken to over the last few weeks. Women who don’t even know me, but I can already tell want to protect me more than I’m able to protect myself.
I don’t want to give that up.
chapter eight
* * *
The Rebirth
2010–12
The “pink cloud” is real. That’s a term in sobriety where you float around in a cloud of happiness, redemption, and seeming magic. I begin killing it at work and in my personal life.
One day I’m getting the first American interview exclusive with the Winklevoss twins, who’ve sued Mark Zuckerberg for stealing the idea of Facebook. Another day I am splashed in the Post’s pages next to the Guinness World Records titleholder for world’s shortest man—measuring in at twenty-two inches—who is visiting from Nepal. He asks me on a “date” as a swarm of photographers click their shutters to document me literally cradling this man-baby in my arms. (By the way: Never discount the world’s shortest man for his lack of follow-up game. Five years later he messages me on Facebook: “Hi Mandy. You remember this picture?” And then, “You are bad.” And then, “Or are not you?”)
Overall, in my life, I feel largely unstoppable.
I get a sponsor, and I even start to make amends, which is kind of the worst—but hey, I’m unstoppable, right? The hardest one to make is with Hannibal Buress. The thing I have to make amends for is basically just me acting like a drunken idiot, but when I whisper the confession to my sponsor, relaying the excruciating details of it, my head hangs as if I’m confessing to a cross-state killing spree. Why do sometimes the smallest mortifications impact us the hardest? Maybe, in some way, because they are so real and cut to the quick of what we hate the most about ourselves.
What happened with Hannibal occurred near the end of my drinking days. After several hours spent smoking weed and chugging beer, I ran into him at a party. He had by this time gotten a job at Saturday Night Live, and, thinking I was being totally “hilarious,” I approached him and started yelling accusingly, “I know more famous people than you!”
Yeah. I actually said that. With, like, multiple witnesses.
Needless to say, we didn’t speak for months.
Now sober, apologizing to him and eventually making things right somehow represents a tiny redemption for me—and shows me that maybe it is possible to dig myself out of even the deepest ditches, instead of just finding new ones to fall into.
Unfortunately, this profoundly honest moment is also the exception. Getting sober isn’t like a “buy groceries” to-do list where hey, you picked up the chicken so who cares if you forgot the pot to cook it in—you
’ll live . . . right? But I treat it that way—with blind flippancy and naïve disrespect. Because, honestly, it feels too painful to peel another layer away from the onion. So instead, I remain superficial about examining all the problems underlying my behavior. Instead of attempting to untangle the many mixed-up addictions at play, I decide to just pretend to be someone else entirely.
Of course, I didn’t realize any of this at the time. But looking back, it’s so completely clear.
I simply slipped from one costume to another.
I’ve now dropped the archetype of cocktail-party-flitting fake wife for Blaine. And I’ve given up the role of coked-up party girl who will do anything for debauched good time.
Now—I decide to be the Temptress. What the Married Man had once called me, I essentially drape on as an identity because hey, I’m sober now—and I’m definitely never going to fuck another married guy again—so it’s okay, right?
Right?
Besides, playing a role protects me—from feeling any hurt I might feel if I was just being myself.
And so, without quite realizing what I am morphing into, I strut around the city and my job at the Post, playacting the jaded, conniving femme fatale. I use sobriety like a drug. It gives me superpowers of cognition and hyperawareness, and I take these enhancements as video game–style “boosts” to sidle up not just to rich dudes anymore—but now to the rich and famous.
Which is how in 2010 I start dating three men in media and celebrity who are all strangely interconnected—Aaron Sorkin, Keith Olbermann, and Lloyd Grove.
While the old nihilistic me would hash out the entirety of this gossip (and I could fill several books), I now realize that’s the same person who didn’t think she was worth anything on her own. This is perhaps the biggest realization I’ve had in writing all of this.
You don’t need to “attach” yourself to anyone. You just need to make yourself someone who you can stand to be with—alone.