51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life (13 page)

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Authors: Kristen McGuiness

BOOK: 51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life
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He was nice looking enough—with the brown curly hair, big brown eyes, and the pert nose that I normally find to be such a kicker. Had he been magnanimous, I would have gladly been magnanimous in turn. We had plenty in common. He grew up in New York City. My mom lives there. He had time sober, relapsed for two weeks, came back in and has been sober since. I relapsed for three weeks and did the same.
 
Micah tells me, “It didn’t take me long to figure out that I didn’t want to drink anymore, that I needed sobriety.”
 
“Me too. I just wanted to go home.” I think we might be having a moment, but Micah’s focus is back to over my shoulder, like he’s waiting for somebody else to walk in. I turn around because I’m kind of hoping someone will. Please. Anyone. Take my fucking seat. I want the date to end. But that is awkward too. Because what do you say? Well, outside of the fact that we have a lot in common, and we’re both sober, and we’re sitting at a Coffee Bean in the middle of West Hollywood on a Saturday night, I’ve got to go because, quite frankly, this is the worst date of my life.
 
Micah doesn’t really laugh, so I can’t even make a joke to break the long silences. Instead, I just take the opportunity of one of the tumbleweeds blowing through our conversation to say how tired I am and that I should probably get going. He readily agrees, and I can tell he has been dying for me to shoot this one in the head. And within the space of an hour, the most entertaining prospect on the table ends not with a bang, as I think Micah might have initially hoped, but with an interminably awkward mumble.
 
But I do not drive home sad. I do not miss that sober guy I recently dated whose name shall not be uttered. I do not feel anything but the same joy I felt looking out at the San Bernardino Mountains. Because tonight, I’m going back to horses.
 
16
 
Date Sixteen: Jakes of All Trades
 
“Yeah, I got laid off about two months ago,” Jake tells me as he sips a beer.
 
Jake is a struggling writer. Jake lives above the bar where we are now meeting in a small studio that he has been in for the last ten years. Jake just went through a major breakup last year. Jake is depressed. And though Jake looks at me with the bored resolve that he knows I won’t date him, my guess is he’ll probably still try to invite me upstairs by the end of the night.
 
I had more hopes for Jake when we found each other online. When you’re e-mailing, it seems like everyone is funnier, more successful, and definitely more optimistic about the state of their life. But as I sit next to Jake at the old Korean bar below his apartment, I know there is little here between us but a memory of a Jake I knew years before.
 
My first Jake, who henceforth shall be named Jake One, was a mother’s worst nightmare. Definitely my mother’s worst nightmare. He was a drug dealer. An ex-con. He drove a motorcycle. If only I had had a pink shiny jacket, we could have formed a gang and started a musical. Sadly, Jake One was also the one to give me herpes. So although it might always be entertaining to make fun of him, part of that joke still stings.
 
Jake Two doesn’t hold a candle to Jake One. He has neither the charisma nor the chutzpah nor the je ne sais quoi to pull the wool over my eyes the way Jake One did. I met Jake One when I was twenty-three. I had been trying for two years to be a good girl. To go to work and collect my check. To only do drugs at concerts and on the weekends, to prove to myself and my family that the degree I had just earned would be put to good use in the rat race of New York City. I rode the F train every morning, and so what if I jumped a turnstile or two on weeks where I had blown my paycheck. I wore enough Club Monaco to make up for it, and for all intents and purposes, it looked like my shit was together. And then I met Jake.
 
I can still remember watching him play pool for the first time. He would aim the cue and take down shot after shot, knowing how his actions would cause a reaction. Knowing how the game was to be played out. Jake was like any drug, wonderfully seductive on the outside and incredibly abusive once you were hooked. And I was hooked. If Oliver was my cocaine, Sabbath my relaxing spliff, Frenchie, a lovely glass of Beaujolais, Jake One was nothing but pure crack rock.
 
“The reason why you two love each other so much is because you bring out the rogues in one another,” Nana warned me at the outset. She was partially right. He brought out the rogue in me, but that’s all he was. Jake One was trying to get over his crack addiction when we met, and after two years of fronting like I was normal, I was heading back into my addiction for coke. So we met halfway, and we fueled the relationship with cocaine, whiskey, roast beef sandwiches, and sex. There would be nights when it would just be him and me on the streets of the East Village, making out in phone booths, doing bumps off each other’s body parts and singing through the streets because we were in L-O-O-O-O-V-E.
 
But like all relationships fueled by cocaine, whiskey, roast beef sandwiches, and sex, ultimately, we also began to fight. Big fights. Though I had always prided myself on not being a codependent lover, I discovered the most powerful drug I had ever done in Jake One. With his scent, his cock, his arms around me in the moments when it was good, I found everything I had ever wanted. The bad boy I had spent my whole life waiting to come home, finally did. And instead of it being in the form of my dad, it came in a close approximation of him. It came in the form of Jake One.
 
One night I was standing in the vestibule of my apartment on 5th and A in Manhattan. The pizza box Jake had just thrown at me lay on the floor between us. The line in the sand so to speak.
 
“I cannot believe you fucking just did that,” I screamed amidst my tears.
 
“Fuck you!” Jake yelled at me across the hallway.
 
“You don’t throw things at me.”
 
“Sorry, little Miss Princess. You’re such a righteous bitch. Go do some more lines.”
 
“Fuck you. Go smoke some more crack.”
 
We stood there. Pizza scattered all over the floor. Jake looked down, and I could see a smile begin to form. I began to feel one spreading across my own face.
 
I laughed, “I can’t believe you just threw away your favorite pizza.”
 
“I know. That was dumb.”
 
And we went about our way upstairs to more codependent sex and fighting. And that is the heart of addiction—of all addictions. I don’t know if I was born with this sad, fat hole in the middle of my being, or if it grew through the years from a daddy who wouldn’t come home and a mommy who worked too much and all my fears that I would never be or get or have enough. But that hole is there, and it’s real. At first, Jake One filled it up. But then he tried to take it away, and I couldn’t have that. In a matter of months, I went from being the bright, boisterous blonde who wanted to play Bonnie and Clyde to a shrunken fearful replica of myself. Even when the fights began to get physical, it was like any drug—the longer you stay hooked, the lower you’re willing to drop the bar.
 
Eight months into the relationship, I moved to L.A. Many of my friends thought I ran to California to get away from him, and maybe I did, but they didn’t understand the power of addiction. I was a wreck within eleven hours of leaving his side. And within a month, he had moved to Oakland, where he lived on a sinking sailboat, and we took our battles to the Bay.
 
One of the last fights we had, we had gotten into an argument at a bar because I had talked to someone while having a cigarette outside, and Jake accused me of flirting. This is what our relationship had become. Brief glimmers of lightness and laughter, but more often than not, it was me living in the fear that he would turn at any moment. We couldn’t find cocaine in the Bay area, the drinking had only gotten worse, and when Nana told me that Jake had become a “cancer on my soul,” I understood because he had. He was rotting me away from the inside, and all my good parts had become eroded by the fear that I was going to lose him.
 
The night he accused me of making a play on a man who had simply asked me for a light, I reacted the only way I knew how: I punched Jake in the face. I knew I was going to get it, and by the look in his eyes, I knew I had better run and fast. I took off down the street and somehow found the sailboat on which we had sailed to the bar. He found me there, and the fight escalated. The next thing I knew I was backed up against the v-berth, Jake’s hands around my throat. I think I was screaming, but between the booze and Jake’s grip, my vision was sliding dark, and then I saw them. The classic sign that for all my good breeding, my fine education, my carefully taught lessons about respect and decency, I was becoming someone I was not raised to be. Red and blue lights flashed outside the boat. Two policemen boarded the deck, and I watched as Jake backed away from me with hatred in his eyes.
 
We tried to patch things up; we tried to make nice. We spoke of buying a house together and growing tomatoes, as only crazy people would think they could do at that point. What really happened is that Jake stole a thousand dollars from me, started sleeping with a methhead he met in Oakland, and gave me herpes. I broke up with him and went through three tortuous months coming off one of my strongest drugs of choice. Recently, I had to send him an amends letter. I could not do it in person because Jake One has spent the better part of the last four years in San Quentin.
 
Jake Two would not know what to do with a woman who has lived that life. As I talk about the horses and my work at the nonprofit and my writing and my funny uncles and my kooky grandma, I know that I am not for this man. I am too much of a story, and he only writes them. Jake One used to say that I was better at pretending to live my life than actually living it. And though he was an asshole, he also wasn’t entirely wrong. I know I can lose myself in who I think I am. But Jake One never really knew who that was either. He just saw a scared and angry girl desperate for his love. And though initially my brightness attracted him, he refused to see that there was real light in it. He hasn’t been the first to make that mistake, and he certainly wasn’t the last. But the Jake I am sitting with tonight won’t be the next.
 
17
 
Date Seventeen: Cadillacs and the Two-Headed Snake
 
I am getting ready for work when my phone rings. Once again, it is a number I don’t recognize.
 
“Hi, Dad,” I answer.
 
I haven’t spoken to him in weeks. The last time we talked, he was still in Tallahassee, still in the halfway house, still threatening to run. I had received some missed calls from various unidentifiable numbers, but whenever I called back, I would always hit an out-of-service message or a motel clerk who had never heard of Dan McGuiness.
 
“Kris, you shouldn’t mention my name to people.”
 
“To motel receptionists?”
 
“To anyone. I don’t use my real name anyway but just in case.” He continues on, telling me that he has been traveling along the East Coast. Telling me what an amazing world it is that we live in, telling me how you have to squeeze every drop out of this life. How it is so precious and so beautiful, and that he is living it. I understand the sentiment. Not a day goes by that I don’t think those exact same words, making me ever more his daughter, but I also know that his way of living it is very different from mine. In fact, it’s illegal.
 
I don’t want to ask; everything in me says it’s better not to ask, but when he starts complaining about the Cadillac he’s driving having too many gadgets, I can’t help it. The last time my dad was arrested after bailing on a halfway house in Florida was in a Cadillac, and the mere mention of the car creates an instinctual kick in me so strong I want to vomit.
 
“Dad, where are you right now? What are you doing?”
 
“Nothing, K. Just visiting friends upstate.”
 
He is referring to upstate New York, and I know from the last stint what that means. He once told me how they had buried a thousand pounds of pot in a van outside of Poughkeepsie. That they were waiting for his next release to sell it. He told me that they were going to make a fortune. And as much as I hope I am wrong, I cannot help but question, “What kind of friends?”
 
“Oh, Kris, don’t ask, don’t tell, please.”
 
The next thing I know I am screaming in the middle of my kitchen. I am issuing ultimatums (“I will not be your daughter anymore if you do this”), I am threatening jail time (“You know where you’ll be by the end of the year if you keep this up”), and I am begging (“Please, Daddy, please try to do the right thing. Please.”). My dad tries to issue some half-hearted explanation, like covering a gunshot wound with a Band-Aid. He tells me, “K, I am working with the Feds. I’m all covered. I gave them enough information to get here, and now I have a chance to make some real money. The kind of money that will buy us a boat. We can sail away. Anywhere in the world, we can sail away.”

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