After I’ve been dating Jackson for a few months, we spend an evening watching Saturday Night Live together at his beautiful Central Park West high-rise. It feels like a perfect night. He feeds me a whipped-cream-covered cherry from an ice cream sundae, then he pulls out what is to be the real dessert: weed. I watch as he packs a pipe, lights it up, and inhales.
“I thought you were sober,” I say, my palms sweating and my heart racing.
I love getting high. I love getting high. I love getting high. That’s all I can think.
“So, you’re sober-sober?” he asks. I didn’t know there was any other kind.
I observe as he laughs so much more easily at the show we’re watching. I miss feeling like that.
“I wish you could see it like I’m seeing it,” he says, taking another drag off the pipe.
I leave his skyline-view loft and head back to the Post, shaken up a bit.
This is the most I’ve ever been tempted by drugs since getting sober.
Maybe I should get high with him? Maybe it doesn’t count? I think about the last time I decided marijuana was okay, which spiraled into me in a sex club, snorting cocaine off a stranger’s breast for the delight of a crowd.
But maybe this time it would be different? I like this guy so much.
I want to belong. I want him to like me.
I can’t stop obsessing about it, so I write up a list of all the men I’ve slept with over my lifetime—and next to each I write “drunk” or “high.” Every single one.
It’s the biggest revelation I’ve ever had. My addiction is inextricably linked to my entire sexual history—starting from the moment I lost my virginity. I’ve been re-creating it ever since.
In a move I’ll never be able to quite explain—except that I think I am trying to save myself from falling into drugs and drinking again—I email the entire list of men to Jackson.
As much as sending it is pure kryptonite and renders me forever unwifeable in this guy’s eyes, I’m operating in pure survival mode now.
I won’t go back to who I once was.
I refuse to. Even if it means never finding love again.
* * *
I STOP DATING almost entirely and decide to focus solely on my career. It seems to pay off—and the synchronicity between what I’m reporting and what happens in my personal life blows me away.
When I’m assigned a big story on Courtney Love in the Post, not too long after, I run into her at a Cinema Society party downtown, and she starts chatting me up like a long-lost friend.
I sit and listen to Courtney talk at me for thirty minutes nonstop about a romantic entanglement she’s currently in the middle of. She details the guy’s reactions and goes off on hundreds of associated tangents.
“. . . and then I had a dream about this big penis that was like a shark . . .” Courtney says midway through, and I don’t know what comes over me, but for some reason, I feel like I can be brutally honest with this woman, whom I have been fascinated by since I was a teenager.
“You need to shut the fuck up,” I say when she finally takes a breath. “You must drive men nuts.”
Some kind of a fire lights up in her eyes—and she smiles, like she sees me for the first time. “You need a ride home?” she asks. Before Courtney’s town car drops me off, she scrawls several phone numbers and her email address in my reporter’s notebook.
Several nights thereafter, Courtney invites me over to her house in the Village, and we talk until seven in the morning. Giant amethyst crystals are everywhere, and as I chain-smoke with her, I convince myself that perhaps these “healing” crystals are taking away the toxic qualities of cigarettes. Everything with her is a whirlwind—an intoxicating mix of highbrow and lowbrow conversational crack—like if Page Six and every other gossip column in the world were put into a blender along with Socrates and Proust.
Her assistants bring us fresh mango juice and cookies. Her daily schedule is taped on the mirror. Couture gowns are draped everywhere. On the floor is a giant white sheet with various bits of information scribbled everywhere along with to-do lists and pictures of crying girls she sketches at will.
Everything with Courtney is a nonstop stream of names and conquests and mind games.
Being friends with her is a trip. At her house, we play with her dollhouses, watch old movies about Marilyn Monroe, and root through her insane $10 million collection of clothes. Other times, she’ll send me on wild-goose chases throughout the city, telling me to meet her at the SGI Buddhist institute in Union Square; then the location changes again. It’s like a shit test of the ultimate proportions.
“Do you want a coffee?” Courtney asks me late one night.
“No thanks,” I say, and as the words come out of my mouth, I watch as she proceeds to make me a cappuccino and slide it over.
I drink the cappuccino. Of course I drink the cappuccino.
“My friend Peri is coming over, she’s a psychic, so just like throw her sixty dollars if you want to do a reading.”
I try to enlighten Courtney about the state of my financial reality.
“I’m broke, Courtney,” I say. “That’s why I’m basically stuck at the Post, even if I wanted to leave. Because I need the paycheck. I’m barely surviving in New York. I’m even thinking about doing bankruptcy.”
“Do Chapter 7 if you do it,” she says, without missing a beat. “Chapter 11 is so pedestrian.”
I have no idea what this means, but she’s got a bunch of gold records on the wall, so I’ll take her word for it.
“You know, I used to be really broke when I was young,” she says. “But then I started chanting ‘Nam-myoho-renge-kyo,’ and within two months I had two million dollars. I’m serious. Don’t fuck around. It’s the only thing that really works. Here, let’s chant.”
We chant for a few hours before psychic Peri Lyons comes over, and she does that thing that all psychics do where they look into your eyes and tell you how hard you have it. Don’t get me wrong, I think some psychics are legit “touched” (like the ones police use, and Peri does pro bono for them I find out later). I count Peri as part of that group. But it always makes me laugh how every single one starts out by validating how very special you are in all of your utterly unique pain and victimization.
“People put a lot of shit on you,” Peri says. “You’ve had a really hard year, huh?”
I don’t know what all of it means, but whenever someone seems to acknowledge the loneliness of how I feel, it makes me tear up a little.
“Yeah, that sounds right,” I say, trying to keep my composure. “I’m just kind of . . . I don’t know what to do next.”
“You’re a phoenix, babe,” Peri says. “You know what happens with phoenixes, right? Death and rebirth, rising from the ashes. You’re on your way back up.”
It’s 3 a.m., but before I go, Courtney drops me three hundred-dollar bills and tells me to get a haircut.
She abides by my number one rule for people: Never be boring.
One evening I accidentally run into Courtney downtown when I’m on a setup date with Rex, an artist who is a friend of a friend. He’s scruffy and sexy and exudes sex and Leonardo DiCaprio just bought one of his paintings. I’m impressed, and I love artists.
Before meeting up with Rex, my friend doing the setup did warn me, “He might be kind of crazy, though. Like he might choke you to death, but the sex will probably be great.”
I’m not scared, though. I’m just too cool to be scared.
“That guy was hot,” Courtney texts me as we are checking into Chelsea Inn together.
I haven’t been with a guy in what feels like ages (but is probably, like, a month), and I’m looking at an evening with Rex as being like a trip to the sex gym. Stupidly, I’ve also just gotten a spray tan. Rex and I fool around for a little bit, and it’s fun and exciting at first, but right before we’re about to have sex, the guy turns to me—and he spits on me.
This has never happened to me before. And I’m sober now
.
I start crying, and now there are big zebra stripes on my face from the not-quite-set spray tan and the awfulness of realizing the situation I’ve just put myself in. I get the fuck out of there before I can listen to this dude finish his speeches to me, which start with saying the spit was a compliment and ends with calling me a crazy bitch. Eventually, I take a cab home, crying.
Finally, I text back to Courtney, “Cute yeah . . . But he was awful. That guy SPIT on me. What the fuck. I mean I guess he knew I was meeting up with him just to have casual sex so maybe I kind of set myself up . . .”
Courtney texts back immediately.
“NO! Shut the fuck up! A guy has to ASK before doing something like that. IN NO WAY DID HE HAVE A RIGHT TO DO THAT. What is his name I will fuck him up and ruin his life . . .”
Then she sends me a million pictures of her artwork featuring crying girls bleeding from their hearts. I hear her—and feel the protection. I also hear the really big questions she is asking of me. Why am I so comfortable with abuse? Why did it even enter my mind that his behavior was okay? It’s not okay. Nothing like this from a man has ever remotely been okay.
I need to have boundaries with sex the same way I do with drugs and alcohol. The very next day I attend a Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting for the first time.
“Hi,” I say, “my name is Mandy, and I’m a sex and love addict.”
I even set for myself within that first meeting exactly what my sexual “bottom line” will be: I will never put myself in a situation that I sense is dangerous or makes me feel unsafe again.
I will never accept abuse again. I will never justify abuse— including that which I give myself.
* * *
THE NEXT TIME I see Courtney is the first time I get to meet Jane Pratt.
On the promise of writing an item for Page Six, I get an invite to the launch of xoJane from the president of the site’s parent company.
When I get to the Jane Hotel, bursting with press and catered with adorable miniature cupcakes that no one really eats, I wade through the flash of lights and step-and-repeats and run into Michael Stipe. I realize this is my two-minute window of opportunity to get an item. I remember reading something about him and Kurt Cobain being sexually linked when I did research for a Post story about the twentieth anniversary of Nevermind. It’s an awkward subject to bring up, but whatever. I just straight up ask him to confirm or deny.
“So did you guys ever . . .”
“Let’s set the record straight on Page Six,” Michael says after I relate to him what I read. “Kurt was a really sweet man, and we never had sex. All right? There’s your exclusive.”
The gossip trade is such a humiliating business. For everyone involved.
At the party, I introduce myself to Jane, who is glowing and gorgeous, and I ramble on to her about my deep connection to her legacy over the years—from when I was a finalist in high school for Sassiest Girl in America to only nabbing an internship at the Washington Post because of a comprehensive college newspaper article I wrote documenting the cultural import of Sassy’s sale. But I’m pretty sure I say one sentence too many, because at the end of my impassioned soliloquy, I have that gross feeling of when you’ve overstayed your welcome after a one-night stand.
At the party, I end up talking the entire time to Courtney Love, who starts stealth smoking within the venue and shows me how to sneak cigarettes when you are indoors. Afterward, her driver takes us back to her West Village house, and we keep talking until four in the morning. She pulls tarot cards for me, and even writes Jane a note about how they should hire me. She’s got my back. The text is typical Courtney and an example of one of countless epic screeds she is infamous for sending among anyone who has ever befriended her. You need to have a brain that is also juggling two hundred million ideas, tangents, and brainstorms in order to successfully decipher.
“Its court your text cheered me up, get mandy to do this and we can do it shes efficient and really good writer whereas im longwinded and will getmyself in trouble, and thank you for paying her dont worry about me at all just bail me out if i get arrested for jaywalking or something, ha, i want to blog about alot, this week, why me and anna dont like each other, and the seating at the testino gala, anna mario kate winselt model me josh hartnett facing stefano tonchi carine steve ghan donnatella, it was FUNNY^ and there were times it qwas just anna and me w a gap between us, her in a statement fur and marni fucking marni, me in a beaded cavalli they gave me and after plkatying amfar w the worklds worst band and seeing this cote d azur crowd of rich people, with beading beading beading, fucking bhedazzkled, blingin g blazing yuck, yiou know those gap /collezion couture mags you buy when you start your line in your head? and you see some libyan or lebanese couturier and thik” well halle berry worked that one elia saab i could work this “and try to get the area code for libya? well all i couidl do was see littlke napalese fingers falling off, i never wanbt top sere beading again, seriously beading beading beading, yuck, and there i was all beaqded and beadazzled in cavalliu and a marchesa bag beading blinging blinding, going to biennelle which om clueless about, seriously just beinbg tourista anyway clearly im a scatterbrain and id like qa voice on your blog abnd itd be good fgopr you too, but mandy has to help her writing is efficent and reader funny lets think of a name for mine that doesnt involve the name courtney love, ims o sick of that dammed name, its boring me. hope your well, biggest kis from turkish delight istanbul court”
A few weeks later, I get an email from Emily McCombs with Jane copied asking me to ghostwrite some columns for Courtney, which essentially involves typing out what she’s saying and then bringing it together with a through-line so it’s readable for anyone who doesn’t speak Courtney.
The opportunity only comes because of Courtney sticking her neck out for me.
She’s not afraid. She’s never afraid.
She is also one of the first people in my life to break through to me about men and how I treat myself.
* * *
NOW THAT I am sober, nothing quite “fits” the way it used to. I don’t want to subject myself to guys I might have given a chance to before. I don’t want to go out to parties that leave me feeling empty inside where I’m networking the whole time, with no tangible result in sight. And more and more, my job at the Post no longer feels like it fits either.
If I was still working with Mackenzie, Steve, and Katherine, I think I could have eventually found my way as I floundered around like a child, figuring out my new sense of sober boundaries. But the days of working with all of them are long gone. There’s new management, and I don’t feel the human connection that once made working there so extraordinary.
I know I’m not the only one who feels it either. In his final days at the paper before retiring, V. A. Musetto (most famous for writing the headline “Headless Body in Topless Bar”) would roam the floor wearing the yellow Santa cap he kept on year-round, muttering things like, “This place is turning into a women’s magazine.” I empathized with where he was coming from. There’s a certain neutered interchangeable voice of the stereotypical lady-mag that is never something I’ve identified with, writing-wise—and why I always loved the magazine Jane so much in the 2000s and Sassy before that.
Turns out sobriety is a huge pain in the ass if you’re not completely happy in your job. I can’t stop questioning everything. Like, why did I have to do that piece on Bethenny when I objected? Why am I doing anything in my life that I’m uncomfortable with at all?
Your far-too-clear sober brain starts to feel more ownership over the scope of your whole life. Like, if I can choose not to drink and stick with that, what else might I do?
While I actively seek out creative new job opportunities—including with xoJane—no one is hiring. Check back again with us later, okay, thanks.
I decide that if I can’t find a new job, maybe I can focus on getting help for my soul in the evenings instead.
After asking around, I’m referred to an unas
suming therapist named Sherrye, who has several decades of sobriety, and she listens to me intently during our first session. When I talk about how lucky I am to have my job and all the opportunities in my life, and how guilty I feel for even trying to find a new gig, my voice cracks. The more I talk to my therapist the more I realize that the problem is not the Post.
The problem is me. The problem has always been me. The Post is the Post. If they want to be more corporate, good for them. I don’t have any say in that.
“You react to things childishly,” my new therapist agrees with me when I tell her about conflicts I’m having at work. “Because you are still in a ‘child ego state.’ If you do not have a proper ‘adult ego state’ modeled to you, then you don’t ever progress into learning the healthy skills of understanding how to deal with adversity. You’re still acting out and throwing tantrums like a child.”
I quote to her one of Blaine’s lines that I am a drama queen and that nothing really bad ever happened to me. Is that true? Is the hurt I feel inside unjustified?
“You’ve been through a lot of pain,” Sherrye stops me. “But I want you to look at something. Do you see that you can only even talk about yourself in comparison to other people? There is something called the ‘looking-glass self,’ where you judge your self-worth based on what you think other people think of you. You base your identity off the love you perceive others can give you, and then you readjust your opinion of yourself accordingly.”
When Sherrye says these words, my opinion of myself shifts once again. I’ve never realized how utterly penetrable such a thing was.
“Here’s the key,” she says. “You don’t actually know what I think of you. You are, in essence, guessing what I think of you. And then based off of that guess, that’s how you are determining your self-worth. Do you see how dangerous that can be?”