Anna Dav

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caller ID and thus making her believe that I always answer the phone
like I m as cheerful as a midwestern schoolteacher.
Amelia? she says. I have Holly for you.
I can t believe it. My first interaction with the woman who s be-
come sort of larger-than-life with her dog cages and assistants who
hire assistants and barf-colored tract house in my mind.
This is Holly Min, she says, and for a second I m confused. Am I
calling her or is she calling me? Everything has seemed so surreal
lately, like it s all coated in a thin layer of gray paint, that I keep find-
ing myself confused like this.
Hi, Holly, I say with exaggerated cheer. It s great to finally hear
your voice.
Oh, you, too, she says. Listen, do you have a minute to talk?
This is what I ve been waiting for the conversation where we
discuss how I shouldn t be doing her errands and picking up her dog s
shit but, in fact, writing screenplays that she can produce or, at the
very least, having coffee or drinks or lunch with her. Yet the timing of
this seems strange, since she couldn t possibly be aware of how special
I am yet.
I understand from Karen that I m paying you $10 an hour to walk
Tiger, she says.
Yes. This is not how I expect the conversation to start but I hide
it well.
And are you walking Tiger for a full hour?
Well, no. I know as soon as it s out of my mouth that this is the
P A R T Y G I R L 107
wrong answer. Why the hell am I afflicted with this ridiculous instinct
to tell the truth at the most inconvenient times?
That s what I wanted to discuss, she says. I was thinking . . . if
I m paying you $10 an hour to walk him and you re, say, only walking
him for twenty minutes, then you re being paid for forty minutes of
time that you re not earning.
My right nostril runs and I wipe it. But you live twenty minutes
from me, so even if I walk him for only twenty minutes, it still takes
me an hour. I don t want to be argumentative with my mentor/
producer/savior but I m also dimly aware of the fact that I don t like
where this seems to be going.
I get what you re saying, she says, rather condescendingly.
But well, you know that I work at Imagine, right? And I get paid to
work here. But Imagine doesn t pay me for the time it takes me to get
to work and home. Are we understanding each other?
Um. . . I think?
Good, she says. Karen has been telling me how great you are so
I d hate to lose you over something like this. So, how s this? You get
$10 an hour, starting from when you report to work. If you only walk
him for twenty minutes, you get a third of that. We ll be working on
the honor system, of course.
Glancing around my bedroom at the clothes in piles; the only par-
tially painted closet; the gray paint spilled on the floor; and my shak-
ing, half-gray hand with its bloody cuticles clutching the phone, I find
myself nodding. Sure, Holly, I say, feeling like I m about to hang up
the phone and never speak to her, Karen, or the fucking dog ever
again. That s fine.
I hang up and toss the phone across the room, where it lands in the
middle of the paint can, splattering more gray everywhere.
Dusk. I ve always hated the word, and the time of day. They say that
people get depressed at the time of day that they were born but I was
108 A N N A D A V I D
born at 9 a.m. and usually feel okay around then, if I happen to be up.
It s the evening hours where the day isn t quite over and the night
hasn t quite begun that kill me.
Even though I seem to have lost whatever powers of estimation I
may have once had, I m guessing that it s been a few hours since Holly
and I spoke and I ve moved to the living room, where I seem to be un-
able to move. I ve had to pee for at least an hour, but either my ap-
pendages have lost their ability to follow through on directions from
my brain or the messages are getting lost in the translation because I
just continue to sit there. I ve been steadily doing coke for God knows
how long and not moving.
I m wired to the gills, I think, borrowing the expression from this
militant lesbian I overheard one night and feeling good about it, the
way I always do whenever I manage to hear a figure of speech and then
use it as my own. And then I think, What the hell does that even mean?
Fish have gills. Am I so high that I think I m a fish? Or am I so high that I ve
grown gills? I think about this as I do more coke and don t pee.
At a certain point, I realize I m shivering and have the distinct
sensation that it didn t just start. Is it possible to get hypothermia
inside a heated Los Angeles apartment? I shake my vial onto the CD
case in front of me. Fucking hell, I think. I can t be out. I don t want
grams and grams more just a few good lines to get me over this
shaky, immobilizing state I m in.
And then I come up with a new plan. I manage to stand up it s
not so difficult once I convince myself that my very survival is depen-
dent on it shuffle to my bathroom, open my medicine cabinet, and
swallow five Ambien before I can freak myself out with thoughts of
what combinations of cocaine and sleeping pills can do to people.
Total unconsciousness is my only desire. Not for the rest of my life,
mind you just until I can feel a little better. I drink a bottle of Ar-
rowhead to make sure the sleeping pills flow as far into my system as
they possibly can, lie down on my bed, and wait to feel exhausted.
Nothing happens so I go back to the living room, light a cigarette, and
P A R T Y G I R L 109
wait some more. Ambien is usually amazingly sharp in its ability to
knock me from complete consciousness into serious REM while not
as drastic as an anesthetic, a close second and I always revel in that
split second where I slip from life to a place that s temporarily problem
free.
But this time, the Ambien does nothing. It seems, if anything, to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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