Your Voice in My Head (3 page)

When I first came to see this apartment, the view of the Empire State Building across the city felt like the moment when Richard Beymer first spots Natalie Wood across the crowded room in
West Side Story
. The rest of the city fell away. It was just us, the Empire State rising to touch the sky, me living above my means. I’m only five foot one. I looked at the building and imagined it would help keep me safe; grabbing items for me from top shelves I couldn’t reach.

The MetLife Building sits, squat, to the right, like the Empire State’s fat but funny best friend. I can also see the Chrysler Building, pointy and sharp as the heel on a Louboutin stiletto. I imagine a giant Carrie Bradshaw lying on her back, one shoe in the air as she cries quiet, hot tears because Big decided she was too demanding. Amazing that I ended up here, just looking out at that hospital, just another sight to be seen, me alive and looking in on it.

“You will not be pretty for husband!” scolded an Indian nurse, that dreadful March day, surveying my cuts as he inserted an IV drip into my inner elbow. I say dreadful, which it was for those who loved me, but for me there was no dread; it was as I had expected. I had looked forward to it. This was the endgame.

As they pumped my stomach, they tried to figure out if the cuts on my arm were part of the suicide attempt. They weren’t. They’d been added over days and weeks and months. A graffiti artist, coming back in dead of night to a
favorite wall. I self-mutilated regularly, mostly with razor blades, mostly on my arm, sometimes on my thighs, latterly my neck and face, my stomach (just once, with feeling). I started cutting when I was sixteen.

“And when did the bulimia start?” asked Dr. R, high-trousered in his leather swivel chair. His forehead was round, as if his brains were trying to leap right out and lay themselves between us, a gallant cloak to help me over my psychiatric cesspool.

“It started the day I moved to New York.”

“You suddenly thought it would be a good idea?”

“Yeah. I guess. Like, how cavemen invented fire.”

He laughed. He had a lovely laugh.

And it was funny. I moved to the greatest city in the world and stayed home and ate cakes. And threw them up. It was a miserable existence but I felt powerless to stop it. Bulimia is the wicked twin of orgasm. The penetration, obviously, the loss of control. It is
la petite mort
.

“Your mother thinks,” he said, the Midwestern flatness of his voice making any sentence seem like hard fact, “that New York brought this out in you.”

“Yes, oh yes, of course. But I think New York did it in a good way. Like the medieval use of leeches …”

“Bringing fever to the surface?”

There wasn’t a reference point he didn’t get. Musical. Cinematical. Emotional.

“Yes. I feel incredibly grateful to the city. It was always there, this sadness—I was twelve, sitting up at night, praying to die—but it had never been, you know, openly expressed before I moved here.”

Dr. R swiveled. “I think we can say it was the combination of cutting and bulimia that was the speedball that triggered the event.”

Event! Like event planning! I found his language made my actions less frightening.

He was right. I had stopped my daily calls with Mum. We’d always talked three, sometimes four times a day. Before the attempt, I was harder to get hold of. I was awake all night and asleep for most of the day, letting the ansaphone take her calls. When I did talk, I would be either monotone or babbling.

“You sound speedy,” she’d say.

“Well, that’s because I’ve had a brilliant idea for a film. It’s called
Mrs. Dolphin
, and it’s about a man who falls in love with a back massager in the shape of a dolphin.”

Given how mentally divergent I sound, you might think it fantasy when I say that the top executive at Sony had flown me out to California to discuss making my debut novel into a film and to see what other scripts I might want to write. But it’s true.

“That,” said Mum, as I babbled about
Mrs. Dolphin
, “is not a good idea for a movie.”

I was outraged. I refused to speak to her for three days. I sent in my pitch to the woman at Sony. I don’t hear back.

At the same time that I’ve graduated from cutting my body to cutting my face, I have started to worry, terribly, about the mental health of people I have never met.

“I would prefer,” says Dr. R in the week before my suicide, “that you stop sending prison packages to Robert Downey Junior.”

“I just feel like I can save him and that I’m the only one. I’m sending him mix tapes of music that will help.”

“Instead of sending mix tapes to Robert Downey—”

“Junior.” I make this distinction as if it excuses my behavior, like, what kind of sick person would send unsolicited packages to Robert Downey
Senior?

“Junior,” Dr. R concedes, “please send them to me.”

So I give him a mix tape. And I send my dad a mix tape. And then I try to kill myself.

ON FIRST MOVING TO THE CITY
, I live on Bleecker and 11th Street. In later years, the block will be destroyed by three Marc Jacobs stores, a Ralph Lauren, and the Magnolia Bakery (which we call “Studio 54 the Bakery” because the lines are so long, they have security on the door to moderate crowds). But in 2001 Magnolia is sparse, especially in the morning when I eat my daily breakfast bun, a cake in disguise. Magnolia has coffee like muddy tears, but it gets me out of the house. Next door are the Moondog Café and a psychic shop. There’s an ill-lit florist where the owner shrieks, “I shall create you a bouquet such as Gianni Versace might have made for a favorite niece!” There’s a bookstore, Biography, where they dress their golden retriever as Marlon Brando for Halloween. (He has a white V-neck T-shirt with Marlboro rolled into the sleeve. He doesn’t shout “Stellllaaaa!” but he does have a baleful bark.)

Bad Boyfriend likes to eat late night at the Moroccan restaurant on Avenue B. On our first date I notice, when
he hangs it, that his jacket is Helmut Lang, and he notices I have a gold nameplate necklace that says
PRINCESS
. I don’t feel like a princess. Or rather, I feel like a zaftig and uncomfortable, trapped princess. A White House—era Chelsea Clinton. Since I’m a cat who doesn’t know what I am, I wear track pants with old-skool Nikes but Gina Lollobrigida skintight sweaters. I am caught between childhood and va-va-voom. My dark hair is pixie cut, with little wisps of blond and orange at the tips. I’m trying to look like Roxy, my old tortoiseshell cat from childhood. I’m trying to look like a dead cat. I’m trying to look like an elderly movie star no one cares about anymore. I was trying to figure out what the hell I looked like. I envied women with signature hairdos, signature perfumes, signature sign-offs. Novelists who tell
Vogue
magazine: “I can’t live without my Smythson notebook, Pomegranate Noir Cologne by Jo Malone, and Frette sheets.” In the grip of madness, materialism begins to look like an admirable belief system.

Because of this, I think Bad Boyfriend really has his life together. The only love letter he ever sends me says:

He doesn’t matter, in the end, Bad Boyfriend. I don’t have his number in my special tin: I have the pieces of paper on which the Big Three wrote their numbers the night we met. I was with each of them from the instant we met. Bad
Boyfriend was, instead, a product of that ugly American thing—dating—romance as a branch of accountancy.

On that first date, I burn my tongue on couscous and spit it into his hand. He looks like he might pass out. And yet we keep dating. He gives me pot one night and I inhale for the first time and am a zombie for twelve hours. I remember, in his railroad apartment, his roommate the other side of an IKEA curtain, Bad Boyfriend undoing my top and looking, just looking at my breasts, touching and squeezing them. Then he forces me to go out and eat something. I take one spoonful of soup and then lie on the floor of the Moroccan café and vomit. Lots. He drags me to my feet and I throw up on someone’s dinner plate. On our way out he hands me a psychic’s flyer from the restaurant’s community pinboard that says “If You Need an Angel.” It is sweet. I still have it. The gesture was sweet. Bad people very often do one good thing. In my memory, that gesture was Bad Boyfriend’s miniaturized version of Nixon and China.

Other things I still have: lots of photobooth strips.

Because I’ve started to feel I’m not long for this world and because I’m fascinated by my newly prominent ribs. I am aware that I am dying. On another coast, though I haven’t met him yet, my Gypsy Husband is beginning his descent.

There are still many reasons to stay awake, mainly humans, who metaphorically slap me into consciousness at various points during the day. There is Teeter, who has pink hair, green eyes, and a fetish for the teen adventure film
The
Goonies
. She stands on the fire escape, quoting from it, like a Shakespearean soliloquy:

“Don’t you realize? The next time you see sky, it’ll be over another town. The next time you take a test, it’ll be in some other school. Our parents, they want the best of stuff for us. But right now, they’ve got to do what’s right for them. Because it’s their time. Their time! Up there! Down here, it’s our time. It’s our time down here. That’s all over the second we ride up Troy’s bucket!”

Her connection to the movie is so strong that she will eventually move to the town in Oregon where it was filmed. For now, she lives in the building next door. We can climb into each other’s bedroom from our mutual fire escape. In New York City, a mutual fire escape feels infinitely more profound than a mutual orgasm.

Of my other friends, there is Bianca, a beautiful Chilean from Queens who loves Run-DMC and the Ramones equally. She shops compulsively for baby clothes. (Ten years later, after myriad miscarriages, she will have her first child. She will buy all new clothes.)

Angela fights people who aren’t metal enough, who wear Motley Crüe shirts because they’re trying to be cool and not because they really care about Motley Crüe.

Shannon is a holistic chiropractor who can do healing energetic work on you whilst simultaneously drinking a mojito and reading
Us Weekly
.

Sarah Bennett, aka SB, has a plush stuffed doll of Frida Kahlo on her sofa and a photo of Eudora Welty above her bed. SB and I are very different people. The best example I can give is our divergent reactions the time we were in the
ice-cream aisle of Whole Foods and “Rhythm Is a Dancer” came over the piped music. SB ran out, mortified, dumping her shopping. I stayed behind and danced. One day we went into a public restroom and someone had done a poo
on the toilet seat
and when I saw it, I screamed and half-fainted and SB had to carry me home.

Peter lives next door. He is a skateboard photographer. He comes over to kill things for me. What kind of things, I cannot tell you—I just hear them scurrying in my mess of old newspapers piled through my apartment, and I run for his door.

Karen is a friend of Bad Boyfriend’s from childhood and he doesn’t want her anymore so I take her because she’s smart and kind and funny and deeply, profoundly needy and nobody wants her, not even her own family, and it breaks my fucking heart.

Several of my mum’s college roommates are in New York. I have the aforementioned family. I have so many places to turn. But anytime I go to see my family I barely talk and then I have to excuse myself to lie down for a while.

I often go to Century 21, the discount clothes store located at the World Trade Center, because it opens at 7 a.m. and I have too many hours to kill. I float from room to room and engage opinion from women in the communal changing room. I buy things, partly because I just want a reason to talk and partly because, even in terrible depression, I am unable to say no to wholesale prices.

Bad Boyfriend and I finally break up and I go, crying, to Shopsins, which has since moved. It was a diner on the corner of Morton and Bedford streets. The cantankerous owner, Kenny Shopsin, would throw people out if
he didn’t like them/their attitude/their face. Every day I would eat his egg-and-cheese enchilada concoction called “Blisters on My Sisters.” It was mad. Everything was mad. There was no context to my madness because everyone was bonkers. But they were all functional and I didn’t realize that I wasn’t. “You’re like Marilyn Monroe,” Kenny tells me, which I take as a compliment and say a nervous “Thank you.” Interrupting, he adds, “You’re all velvet and velcro. Men want you because you’re sexy and broken and when it gets too tough they can say ‘Hey! This toy is broken!’ and toss you aside without feeling bad.”