So Sad Today (13 page)

Also, when I knew that Ron Jeremy was having sex with another woman, I would get to envision him the way another woman might envision him. I liked
thinking about other women wanting him. It made me want him more.

The only experience that may have threatened my marriage was with Demetrius. He was my last lover. He was not like the other boys. Demetrius and I did not flame out quickly. We went on for a year, sexting and sending romantic emails from across the country, meeting up in hotel rooms in New York. The communication, the sex, and our connection were spiritual. I felt so connected to him, so consumed by my thoughts of him, that it made me question the truth of my marriage.

I struggled with compartmentalizing Demetrius and Ron Jeremy. It’s hard to compare the person you see once every three months with the person you see every day. It’s hard to compare the person you don’t really know with the person you’ve been with for eleven years. The rarer person starts to look better. You don’t see his flaws. He only shows you his best self.

Such was the case with Demetrius. I would see his most amazing side in a fantasy bubble that we constructed. Then he was gone again, and in his absence I would imagine an even more amazing Demetrius. Questions arose for me as to why what I had with Ron Jeremy didn’t feel like what I felt for Demetrius. Like, why didn’t my love for Ron Jeremy excite and titillate me like my new romance with Demetrius? Intellectually,
I understood. But emotionally, the questions consumed me.

I think that even if I were single, it would be hard to compartmentalize my longing for Demetrius. That longing was an all-consuming longing. It made me wonder why the rest of my life, all of it, didn’t sparkle like that.

Despite his request that I keep my private life private, I came clean to Ron Jeremy. I told him that I had fallen for someone. Or, as he put it,
You let your sidebitch settle in
. We decided, after five years of open marriage, to be monogamous. I didn’t think I had the strength to break it off with Demetrius otherwise. If you are nonmonogamous, why would you?

It feels safer to talk openly about open marriage on this side of it. I felt that when I talked about my marriage as open, I was perceived by my straight female friends either as crazy or too idealistic or in denial. Maybe some people find it threatening—that their husbands could have desires they are not addressing. That they, themselves, might have desires that they are not addressing. That “the way things are,” the status quo, doesn’t have to be the way things are.

People have affairs all the time and this could be a viable alternative to monogamy. An open relationship doesn’t mean all the doors fly off the things and there are no rules. It doesn’t have to be an orgy. You don’t have to be a 1970s swinger on a cruise ship or living on a
commune in Oregon growing hemp to try this. People who look like me are trying this.

The gays, of course, understood. My gay friends loved my open relationship. I was considered “French” and “evolved”—a beacon in the straight world. When I told my friends that Ron Jeremy and I were monogamous again, the straight ones said congratulations! The gays seemed disappointed.

I doubt that Ron Jeremy and I will be monogamous forever. Our relationship continues to evolve. Monogamy vs. open is one question that will always be up for discussion. His health may be a factor in considering whether to remain monogamous or open it up again. But it won’t be the only factor.

Yes, having an open marriage can be a comfort, a defense mechanism, when I feel that my marriage, because of Ron Jeremy’s health, will never look like my friends’ marriages. I feel like, well okay, I can’t have that. I probably wouldn’t even want that, in the case of husbands and wives who do everything together, from the gym to grocery shopping. But look what I can have. But I also think that some people, like myself and Ron Jeremy, are uncomfortable with the traditional picture of marriage. Maybe we do better when we see each other simply as beloveds.

Los Angeles has been good to Ron Jeremy and me. It’s easier to be a sick person in Los Angeles than in
New York. LA allows for more mobility, when weakened. Also, as a sick person on the street, it’s better not to have crowds of people pushing toward you. We originally moved here hoping that the weather would help him get well. While the LA sun has not been a cure, he has more of a life.

Recently, we went to a Jewish deli, where Ron Jeremy ordered an exorbitant amount of food, including a knish, which I told him not to get. The next day he complained about being fat. I was like,
I told you not to get the knish
. He said that would be a good title for an essay about marriage.

I walk into the kitchen and I kiss Ron Jeremy with an open mouth. I kiss him with an open mouth, as though he is not my husband. Or I kiss him as though he is my husband, but that the words
husband and wife
mean something else—not what I have perceived them to mean through my own fears.

In this moment I resolve to kiss my husband with an open mouth forever. I want to freeze him the way I see him in this instant: dark eyebrows, sexy, sleepy hair and sleepy eyes. But we can’t freeze the way that we see the people we love, as much as we would wish. I know that I will kiss my husband with a closed mouth again, at some point. I know that I will even kiss him with a closed heart.

I pray for our love. I pray that even if I kiss my
husband with a closed heart, my heart opens again to him. When I desire my husband, I am grateful to desire my husband. What can we hope for in a marriage but to keep seeing things anew? With the people we love, it is so easy to stop seeing them at all.

I
’VE ALWAYS HAD GENERAL ANXIETY,
and later came panic disorder. But it took me many years before I realized there was depression underneath the anxiety. They are the flip side of the same coin. I never identified as depressed, despite the fact that all along there was an ocean of sadness, disappointment, hopelessness, and nothingness inside me. I think the anxiety was a coping mechanism; its heightened sensations, as terrifying as they are, were in some way preferable to me than the depression underneath.

As a little kid I took fearful thoughts to a greater extreme more than most kids, I think. If a parent got sick, it was cancer. If I got something in my eye, the cornea would be scratched forever. A sprained ankle on a school trip definitely meant an amputated foot. I
was dying and everyone I loved was dying, which was true, of course, but it wasn’t happening as quickly as I thought.

There was no specific event that triggered the anxiety for me. Rather, the anxiety was always there, floating, looking for something to land on. Any minor event could serve as a seed, which, when nurtured with the anxiety, grew into a scary thought. The seed event would ground my fear, rendering it tangible. For someone with anxiety, dramatic situations are, in a way, more comfortable than the mundane. In dramatic situations the world rises to meet your anxiety. When there are no dramatic situations available, you turn the mundane into the dramatic.

My anxiety found a steady focus when I began having nightmares about fires at age twelve. I repeatedly dreamt that my family was burning in our home and that it was up to me to save them. Nightmares turned into daydreams and visions. I made my mother store the family’s fire ladder in my bedroom and learned how to assemble it, plotting an escape route for the family out the second-floor windows. I knew how I would break the windows—the furniture that I would throw through them—should my hallucinations become a reality.

I’m not exactly sure why my anxiety chose fire to fixate on, rather than flood, hurricane, earthquake, or other
myriad natural disasters. From a poetic standpoint, fire depicts passion, sexuality, and a destruction that leads to renewal. I was coming into my sexual feelings, masturbating regularly and crushing on boys, and perhaps I felt that my desires would destroy my family. Perhaps I felt ashamed. From a nonpoetic standpoint, fire is an easy place for anxiety to live, because it is both a visually striking and painful death.

When I was thirteen, my anxiety shifted its focus to the Holocaust. As a Jewish girl, I had Holocaust images shoved down my throat from a very young age so that I would “never forget.” There was the time in Hebrew school when our principal called us all into the assembly room and turned out all the lights. He then began smashing glass bottles on the ground, so as to “simulate the experience” of Krystallnacht. There was the youth group trip where the older kids locked us in a cabin and let us know the cabin was Auschwitz now and we would not be allowed to leave. Ever. There were my Zionist grandparents who warned of neo-Nazi risings in Europe. There was also Tanya, the woman who helped my mother clean the house. Tanya liked to talk about a
20/20
special she saw about the KKK. She said that the Holocaust could absolutely happen again. It could and would happen here.

I had visions of the Gestapo coming to my home. I saw my family separated. I saw my mother and father
put on a train, bound for separate camps. I saw my sister and me huddled together in straw in one bunk. She was skinny and dying.

Tanya said that she would hide me when the Holocaust came again. That was nice of her. But I was hiding from myself. I was deeply miserable about my delayed onset of puberty: my baby fat, the absence of any tits at all, my lack of menstrual cycle. Also, I was hiding from school and from my female circle of school friends, who had decided over the summer that I was no longer cool enough to be spoken to. The anxiety and friend rejection fed off each other. When I did speak to the group of my former friends, I was fearful that I was unliked. So I would say something and then laugh weirdly, right after what I said, which made me further unworthy.

Amid the loss of my friend group, the greatest heartache was the loss of my best friend. The year before, we had gotten into her father’s
Playboy
magazines. We would masturbate to them together, never touching each other, but in the same room: she on the bed and me in a sleeping bag on the floor. It wasn’t a sexual union that we experienced between us, but a humanistic bond:
I do this, you do this too, I’m okay, you’re okay
. She even let me wear one of her bras while I masturbated, because it made me feel sexy. I didn’t have my own bra yet.

But now she said that was disgusting. I was disgusting.
She was over masturbation and had discovered pot and a new best friend. I didn’t stop masturbating. But I felt like the only one.

In my isolation, I had this weird intuition that if I could just make it to my Bat Mitzvah I could both prevent the Holocaust from happening again and also get all my friends back. Strangely, my intuition was right.

When my Bat Mitzvah came in late fall of eighth grade, all the girls suddenly decided that I was “so cute” as to be liked again. Sometimes it takes outside advertising to frame you as “cute.” An American Bat Mitzvah is just that kind of advertising. I got to make an entrance and “march in” to the song of my choosing (“Let the Sunshine In” from
Hair
). I was applauded by family and received a standing ovation. I got to “honor” my friends, who must have felt bad about no longer speaking to me, with a candle-lighting ceremony. The illusion of specialness and adolescent friendship were re-created.

The illusion of safety, as a potential Holocaust victim, was also restored. How could anything terrible come after that party? I still refused to see
Schindler’s List
. But my hallucinations subsided. They say that the Bat Mitzvah is about becoming a woman. For me it was about just becoming okay again.

In high school, I channeled my anxiety into an
eating disorder. Anorexia, with its counting of calories—the busyness of all that math in my head—became a wonderful place to focus my fear. Then when I was seventeen I discovered drugs and alcohol. That was the real solution.

Drugs and alcohol were the best thing that ever happened to me. For the first time, I was okay to be on the planet and completely comfortable in my own skin. Weed made my brain a playground, a new earth to be explored. Liquor, beer, and wine gave me the peace of mind I’d always sought. Psychedelics allowed me to connect with other human beings in a way where I could finally address the question of
What is going on here?
MDMA was union with these human beings in spite of the not knowing. Amphetamines kept me skinny and made me untouchable to sadness. Benzos and opiates made me impervious to the world.

I found new best friends in my substances that could protect me from my thoughts. The world became a magical place, not lonely or fearful or harsh. With my friends by my side, nobody could touch me. But then the anxiety found its way around the drugs and alcohol. Or, in the case of psychedelics and weed, it began reminding me that not only did I not know what was going on but what was going on might be more dark than benevolent. For the first time, I started getting panic attacks.

My first panic attack came shortly after I got an abortion at twenty-one. I had grown up in a household that was very liberal: socially and politically. I didn’t have any hang-ups around abortion. So when I found out I was pregnant, like two days after a missed period, I called Planned Parenthood very casually.

I wanted the thing out of me as soon as possible. I had gotten pregnant by a blunt-smoking kid who ripped the sleeves off his T-shirts to make tank tops that showed his nipples. I wasn’t having this kid’s baby. He asked me if I would mind if he took acid on the day of the abortion.

I remember my friend Anna driving me to Planned Parenthood. I remember not being scared. I remember declining counseling. Why would I need counseling? I remember lying down on what looked like a gynecologist’s table. I remember complimenting the doctor on her earrings and talking about Maine, then being administered some kind of drug. I remember going to space.

I remember coming to in a room filled with fifteen or so other women, some of them crying, some of them vomiting. I remember feeling sick and nauseous, but most of all I remember feeling fear about the sickness and nausea.

I remember getting in the car with Anna. It felt like the first time I had ever allowed myself to be vulnerable. I remember not wanting to tell any of the girls in my
college house what had happened. I remember them all going out that night. I remember smoking weed and getting drunk by myself and then suddenly seeing a vision of myself going to hell. I remember not knowing where the fear had come from. I didn’t even believe in hell. But the fear was there, not intellectual, but coming from someplace else. I remember seeing darkness. I remember feeling like I had crossed over a line that I could never cross back over.

A few weeks later, I went to dinner with the kid who got me pregnant and his mother. I remember her talking. I remember having food in my mouth. Suddenly, I felt like I could not swallow my food. I was scared that if I swallowed my food I would choke. I didn’t know what was happening. Had I forgotten how to swallow? I wasn’t sure whether to spit out the food into a napkin or keep trying to swallow. Then, in addition to being unable to swallow, I forgot how to breathe. This was my first panic attack.

Over the next few years, the panic attacks became more and more frequent. The symptoms included various combinations of dizziness, adrenaline surges, suffocation, rapid heartbeat, and the worst, a feeling of hyperreality, where people looked like plastic versions of themselves. My drinking escalated in an attempt to manage this thing that was happening to me. I didn’t know that what I was experiencing were panic attacks. I
just knew that every morning, ten minutes after waking up, I felt like I was dying. I would say to myself,
You felt like you were dying yesterday. But you didn’t die. So even though you feel like you are dying today, you probably won’t die.
But intellect couldn’t refute the panic attacks.

What was happening, I later learned, was a hybrid of untreated anxiety and morning withdrawals from the same alcohol that temporarily quelled it. A psychiatrist diagnosed me with panic disorder and gave me benzodiazepines. Then I became dependent on both the benzos and the alcohol. I blacked out every night. I woke up in strange beds. My legs were covered with bruises from my blood having been so thinned by vodka. I couldn’t do anything without being drunk or on pills. The thought of going to coffee with another human being while sober seemed impossible. I was either fucked up on drugs and alcohol or I felt like I was dying.

One thing that’s especially sad about alcoholism and drug addiction is the way something so beautiful and sacred turns so ugly. The thing that saved my life, that made the world magical and livable, had turned on me. Alcohol and drugs worked so perfectly until they didn’t work anymore. I kept trying and trying to get back to that beauty, back to the being okay.

I knew that I was tying knots that I would someday have to untie. I knew that I was going deeper and
getting worse. But if you were in my head, had experienced my overwhelming feelings, you would drink too. If you felt like me, you would stay fucked up. The act of not drinking was an impossibility.

Then when I was twenty-five I got sober. I had begun practicing yoga. I didn’t know it at the time, but my yoga teachers, Lisa and Yasmin, had, like, thirty years of sobriety between the two of them. I would come to class every day, high and hung over. They would smell the alcohol leaking out of my pores and gently bend me into my next pose. One day, one of them said something to me. She said,
You don’t have to drink
. I was like,
Yeah right
. That was it. That was all that was said and we moved on.

A few months later I had a bad weekend. It wasn’t that extreme, just sort of your usual weekend for the average twenty-five-year-old alcoholic/addict. I woke up in the bed of a person who I’d sworn I would never sleep with again. I lied to my boyfriend about my whereabouts. I dragged the person who I swore I would never sleep with again to the pharmacy. I sweated in line filling drug prescriptions. I decided to maybe only drink beer from then on. I drank a beer at eleven a.m. I started drinking liquor by evening. I got fucked up again that night. I went home in a cab at three in the morning with a bar bottle of Amstel Light in my hand. I couldn’t leave
it behind, because god forbid I waste any of that precious nectar. I didn’t know that it would be my last drink.

The next morning I was in my teacher’s yoga class again. I cannot say what happened. I only know that I heard her voice inside my head. She wasn’t speaking but I heard it. I remembered what she had said to me, that I did not have to drink. I’d been called many names in my addiction: an alcoholic, cunty McDrinksalot, drunk slut. But no one had ever said it like that to me before. That I didn’t have to drink. Something clicked inside me. I wondered, what if I really didn’t have to drink? What about just for that day?

After yoga I went to brunch with some people. I didn’t drink, which was crazy. I always drank at places where you weren’t even supposed to drink. So how was it that I wasn’t drinking at brunch, where drinking was sanctioned? It was the first of several miracles. The next day I didn’t drink either. Or the next day.

Of course, I didn’t quit everything. I continued to take pills: those prescribed to me and those not prescribed. I picked up weed again. I remember sitting by a fireplace in upstate New York, fucked up out of my mind on morphine, thinking,
This sobriety is great
.

Then, one night, I was walking home in the East Village where I lived. I passed by a church. Standing outside was a group of people, mostly gay men, smoking
cigarettes. It was eight thirty on a Tuesday night. I kind of knew they weren’t going to church.