Breadcrumb #633
KRISTYN POTTER
In New York City, it’s common practice to give up a vice for an isolated period as a way to prove to yourself that you have some semblance of self-control. In a city that values unabashed hedonism over the American formula of white picket fence, marriage, and kids, it’s easy to lose sight of yourself; most people give up alcohol or other bad habits in January, but I always like to end the year on a high note. As part of my self-imposed Lent in December, I went the full monty by giving up pork and alcohol, deleting the slew of dating apps from my phone, and resolving to stop having casual sex with my clinically sociopathic ex-boyfriend. All of these sound a lot easier than they actually were.
I needed a purge before the new year so I could guiltlessly partake in gratuitous consumption again. It was the water before the wine; the baptism of bad behaviours. It’s no secret that by February, we would all go back to imbibing and eating too much red meat, but as a good little New Yorker, I was devout to my annual cleanse.
It was two weeks into December and my fasting was off to a good start: I quarantined myself in my South Brooklyn apartment, constantly boiling pots of herbal tea, starting and stopping books that I’d recently bought, and avoiding texts from my friends asking for a ‘quick drink before the holidays.’ And then I went to Orlando for our family Christmas vacation.
Surrounded by God-fearing, self-loathing, two-family-garage toting Midwestern Christians, I tried my damndest to stay true to my cleanse. In between arguments over how I cut onions, when I plan on marrying a black man, and why I never have any money despite making 100K a year, I realized that not drinking during the painfully long weekend was going to be harder than anticipated. I kept myself holier than thou for three days, making statements on my sobriety and carrying myself like a virgin in a whorehouse, but by the final day I broke. It would reverse all of the great work I had done, but I decided to do it anyway.
Leaving the timeshare where we spent most of our afternoons and evenings, my aunt gathered all ten of us and drove to a kitschy Orlando restaurant nestled into a boat dock. Caught between a glacial breeze from my right, a mediocre reggae cover band on my left, and my sneering mother seated directly across from me, I quickly calculated the cost-benefit analysis of staying sober through the meal and capitulating to a glass of wine. Earlier in the day, my mother had remarked at how much weight I had gained—a fifteen-pound deviation from my usual one-hundred-pound frame—and I carried the anger from her comment into the restaurant.
In spite of my frequent side comments throughout the Christmas vacation on my sobriety, I ordered a Malbec from the skinny blonde waitress, thanking the Heavens when my glass arrived, and subsequently cursing under my breath when my aunt interrupted the table’s conversation to say, “I thought you weren’t drinking.” I turned to my little brother, who was graciously picking up the tab, and thanked him for the meal and, more importantly, the glass of wine. I slowly sipped the crimson drink, allowing my mouth to feel each layer of nirvana as it swept across my palate. It was going to be ok, come hell or high water I was going to get through the night.
Once back in New York, submersed in my daily routine, I was able to quickly slip back into sobriety before the year’s end—not faulting myself for succumbing to a glass of wine in a true time of crisis. I resumed my practice of boiling herbal tea and stayed committed to not responding to my society friend’s nightly texts promising sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I obediently went to work, did my job, came home, walked my dog, set my alarm, slept, and followed this rinse and repeat routine until New Years Eve. Then all hell broke loose.
At 10 p.m. that holiday evening, I ran up the stairs at the Grand Street subway station, adjusting my neon bikini top and leather skirt, both covered inconspicuously by my peacoat, and headed in the direction of my DJ friend’s New Year’s Eve party at a frequent subterranean haunt. I wasn’t planning on drinking; I’d resumed my self-righteousness. Two hours later, surrounded by scene photographers, DJ’s, and musicians—amongst the fraternal hoi polloi—I was filled with imposter syndrome and way too much water. I’d never worn something so skimpy in a Manhattan bar as I had that night, and surrounded by quintessential New York musicians whose sartorial choices were nothing short of pomp and circumstance, I couldn’t help but feel like I didn’t fit in. My mother’s comments echoed in the back of my mind each time I looked down at my bare belly, and I accepted my friends’ offer for a glass of wine. And another glass. And another.
By 4 a.m. I was blowing cocaine in a dirty Lower East Side bathroom with a guy whose name I didn’t know. He was telling me how he loved my energy and my moxie, how we were going to marry someday. I could have sworn he was gay, but I just smiled and nodded as we did bumps of blow off of his apartment keys. My cherished wine vice led to a revered coke habit that I could have sworn I kicked, and I was now the whore in the whorehouse and couldn’t care less. I told myself that no one had to know, only the guy in the bathroom and the one who gave us the coke, and neither of them knew me by name.
I came to the next afternoon, toting both a migraine and a trash heap of calls that I’d made to my sociopathic ex-boyfriend—the one who added me to his will after a few weeks of dating and threatened suicide when I ended things soon after.
“By 4 a.m. I was blowing cocaine in a dirty Lower East Side bathroom with a guy whose name I didn’t know. ”
“I’m in the hospital come help me,” I remembered saying to him—the timestamp on the call log showed that this happened at 10 a.m.. I was still high out of my mind.
I couldn’t remember much from the conversation, as cocaine has that effect, but one piece of our conversation stood out against the chaotic blur.
“I’m in bed with my girlfriend,” he’d proudly stated.
“You have a girlfriend already? It’s been less than a month since we broke up. What the fuck is wrong with you? You’re a psycho disgusting creep.”
He hung up.
I could remember shouting insults into the phone—my pride was overtaken by my jealousy. No one wants a suicidal sociopath as a lover, but one definitely doesn’t want that sociopath moving on first. Who was I to call when I infrequently lost control from the carefully-crafted life I had constructed? I needed a scapegoat and he was as good as any; now he’d gone and started grooming another woman for my former role and turned a blind eye to my needs. The audacity was unnerving; the domino effect from displacing personal responsibility mixed with my cocaine-fueled hangover was too much to bear, and I wasn’t in the mood for coming to terms with my personal failings—physically and emotionally.
I spent most of my mid-twenties buoying between cocaine highs and the interminable lows, and knew exactly how to restore my dignity. Purchasing every liquid made possible—and sold—at my local bodega, I nursed myself back to health and swore myself back to sobriety. I’m better than most people, I don’t need anything to distract or entertain me, I told myself, shuffling through my drawer for 600mg of Ibruprofen and wondering where all of my Klonopin had gone.
The next day, I went back to work with newfound sobriety and optimism for the year ahead. That happiness lasted no more than a few days when I received a rejection email from the job I applied to in Paris, which admittedly sounds like the ultimate millennial first-world problem, but when you’re making six figures a year and mask unrelenting self-control behind obsessive-compulsion, not receiving something that you set your mind to drops you lower than any cocaine spiral. And to make matters worse, I didn’t even have an ex to have sex with for a quick pick me up.
My nagging sense of entitlement was getting farther from being met as the days went on. I spent the first week of the year applying to jobs in London and Paris—the ‘easy apply’ feature on LinkedIn became one of my new vices that, unlike alcohol or cocaine, allowed me to feel good about myself and my decisions the next day. I was making changes, I was going to do something new this year. I wasn’t going to be the drunken whore in that whorehouse—unless it came with French citizenship.
I’d made it almost an entire week without a drink, but on the fifth day of the new year, burdened by self-doubt and a lack of job prospects in Europe, I realized it was going to take a hell of a lot more to become the Parisian novelist that I aimed to be. I carried heaps of New York stories from my music industry past, but I couldn’t broadcast my cocaine-fueled nights in TriBeCa brownstones in stories or on social media; I had a reputation to uphold. My Twitter page lay blank, staring back at me asking ‘what’s happening,’ but I didn’t know how to respond. I had gained 100 followers in a few days—all European writers and editors and publications. ‘You are so awesome,’ they would say to me, and I quickly paralyzed myself from the possibilities before I could take part in the process.
I couldn’t get out of my head, so I got a drink. It was about a full week into the New Year and I was already well overwhelmed.
Leaving work with a beer buzz, hazy eyes, and that perfect perception of optimism that only comes from being under the influence, I swiped my Metrocard and thought about the evening ahead of me. I would open the bottle of red wine in my refrigerator and write a new short story to be submitted to those literary magazines that recently followed me on Twitter. God damnit I was going to be a star. The drink gave me both the confidence to assume I had everything sorted out and the keen ability to not give a fuck at quite the same time.
A busker played drums to Al Green's “Love and Happiness” as I impatiently waited for the train at 14th street. Almost ten years in the city and I couldn’t say if New York was love or happiness, whether my cocaine habit had returned, or if I would start regularly drinking again. I didn’t know if anything had provided me with love or happiness for an extended period of time—or if anything ever would. I pushed my way onto the crowded train, grabbed an empty seat, smiled in my drunken haze, resolved to not having the answers at that moment, and headed back to Brooklyn.