Party Girl: A Novel (7 page)

“You should,” he says. “Rick is definitely into you. Just call Chad when you get home and tell him that when you couldn’t find him, you got another ride home.”

I’m not sure exactly how this plan is communicated to Rick but the next thing I know, I’m making my way toward the bathroom, being careful to make sure Chad isn’t looking in my direction, and then out the back exit, where I then crouch by the side of the building like I’m the female James Bond or something.

“Let’s get you home.” Rick smiles as he walks outside. Grabbing my hand, he leads me to a black BMW parked in the back and opens the door for me. I slide in and unlock his side, remembering that some guy once told me that he knows a girl is going to sleep with him if she unlocks his door. Rick notes that his door’s unlocked with a wink at me as he slides into the driver’s seat and starts the car.

“Are we all clear?” he asks. “Any sign of your guy?”

I look around and see only valet parkers.

“I think we’re good,” I say. “But just to be safe…” I slide down the seat, so that my legs and butt are on the floor of his car and my head is on the seat. From this angle, I can’t help but notice the bulge in Rick’s jeans. He glances down at me noticing, and winks. I laugh, and continue to when he looks around, jokingly furtive, as we pull in front of Guys and out onto Beverly.

“I think we made it,” he says, pretending to wipe sweat from his brow. “It’s not always easy to escape from the claws of a smarmy agent.”

I slide back onto the seat and sit up straight. “Well, this damsel formerly in distress is quite grateful for your help in the matter.”

When we pull up in front of my building, he immediately starts looking around for a space. “Do you need a permit to park here at night?” he asks.

I hadn’t had any intention of actually bringing him inside my apartment. Call me a tease—and believe me, many have—but if I like a guy and think we have a chance of actually having a relationship, I won’t do anything more than kiss him, unless I’m severely impaired to the point of near blackout.

“You don’t need to park,” I say. He looks annoyed.

“Should I leave the car running?” he asks, and I reach over and turn the ignition off as an answer before leaning in for another of those fantastic kisses. Fairly quickly, we’re making out passionately and, as I alternate between breathing into his ear and kissing his neck, it occurs to me that Rick could be the answer to all my dreams.

Pulling away, I ask in a low, sexy voice, “Are you seeing anybody?”

He looks so horrified, you’d think I’d just asked him if he masturbates about family members. “Whoa—mood killer,” he says, leaning back and immediately pushing the cigarette lighter in.

“I wasn’t trying to kill the mood,” I say, kicking myself for my timing, and yet snuggling up next to him and grabbing another Marlboro Red from his pack. “I was just curious because I think you’re cool.” As soon as it’s out of my mouth and surrounded by nothing but silence, I realize how lame this sounds.

Rick lights his smoke, takes a drag, and exhales. “I don’t have a girlfriend, if that’s what you’re asking.”

I smile and drag on my cigarette, as Rick unleashes a torrent of non sequiturs about a girl he was seeing who was always ruining what they had by trying to make the relationship more serious. He says the word “serious” the way a vegetarian might say the word “steak.” I’m sitting there and smoking and regretting having launched him on this entire line of thinking, when I hear him muse, “Don’t you think it’s interesting that the word for someone being sent to an insane asylum—‘committed’—is the same as the word for being in a serious relationship?”

I nod, for the first time wondering about the decision-making ability I’ve displayed in the past few hours. Though this anti-relationship rant has helped to make his feelings on the matter abundantly clear, I wonder if he still likes me, if we’re going to date, or if my Rick Wilson experience is going to prove to be as ephemeral as his successful Hollywood career. Glancing at my watch and discovering that it’s one thirty in the morning, I decide it’s time to cut my losses.

I lean in quickly for a kiss and then I retreat, saying, “Ask Bill for my number if you want to reach me.” I open the passenger side door, get out, and steady myself on my Miu Miu pumps, just as Rick is saying—mostly, it seems, to himself—“Jesus, you’re just about the most abrupt chick I’ve ever met!” I smile as I slam the door shut. I like being called “the most” anything, even if it is something as unexciting as abrupt.

The next morning, I wake up at about six and can’t fall back to sleep. I’m utterly useless on days like this. I know some people get tired but I get literally insane. My IQ probably drops a hundred points, I have trouble seeing clearly, and the only thing that gets me through the day is the thought that at some point all this torture will be over and I’ll be able to get in bed and sleep.

Since I’m up and have a good two hours before I’d even think about leaving for work, I decide to hit the gym. Maybe I’ll sweat the exhaustion out of me—ridiculous logic, I know, but I told you I can’t think straight when I’m in this state.

At the gym, I force myself onto the treadmill. The place is completely empty, which doesn’t ever happen to gyms in L.A., what with exercise addiction being so rampant. It must be a Jewish holiday or something. I’m so out of it that I barely notice when someone else comes into the gym. Then I look up, catch this person’s eyes, and immediately pray for a time machine and the opportunity to be anywhere else.

“Hi, Chad!” I all but scream to Chad Milan in such a fake-cheerful voice that I’m immediately shocked it’s come out of me. My head races through some shadowy reflections of coming into my apartment this morning after Rick dropped me off and rubbing moisturizer on my chapped chin. Did I freaking call Chad the way I’d planned to, or did I pass out before getting to it? Suddenly, I’m positive I did. I remember almost fainting with relief when I got his voicemail. All of these thoughts zip through my mind in the amount of time it takes me to smile winningly and ask, “Did you get my message?”

Chad nods and stops beside my treadmill. “Yeah, I did,” he says. “And forgive me for not calling you back afterward.”

I’m about to tell him that it’s okay when he walks over to the Stairmaster and adds, “It’s just that since I’d gone outside to find you and saw Rick holding your hand and leading you to his car, it somehow made your message about how you’d looked everywhere for me seem less convincing.” Then he gets on the Stairmaster and starts it up. And I say nothing. There is no retort. There is just Chad Milan, an empty gym, and my utter horror. Chad doesn’t say another word, and even in my state of complete and utter humiliation, I admire him for having the balls to put me in my place like that.
Now I actually understand why a girl might be attracted to him
, I think as I slink out of the gym moments later.

8

My first instinct when I see Stephanie standing at my front door, swigging from her flask with Jane in tow, is to tell her that I don’t feel like going out tonight. I just feel off—more so than usual—and could probably use a quiet night at home. But for some reason this thought doesn’t even make it out of my mouth.

“Ready to pre-party before Steve’s?” she asks and I nod.

Steve Rosenberg parties tend to be massive gatherings of successful studio executives, directors, and B-list actors at his enormous house complete with basketball and tennis courts. There’s no way tonight can happen without Alex.

“Want some Mexican food?” I ask Jane, who knows that “Mexican” refers to Alex’s coke, whereas “Italian” means getting it from this wannabe former wise guy named Joey. “Breaking the fast” is code for scoring from Vera, this Jewish woman whom I met at a party. But since Alex is the only one of the three who delivers, he tends to get the bulk of our business. Jane nods, so after giving each of them an Amstel Light, I page Alex. My mouth literally starts watering after the beeper pause when I punch my digits into the phone and press pound and I think I can actually feel my serotonin levels rise as I hear the long beep that tells me my phone number has been read. People’s anticipation of coke can be so Pavlovian that I know a guy who says he has to go to the bathroom as soon as he calls his dealer since the coke he buys is always cut with baby laxatives.

At seventy bucks a pop, Alex provides the best deal in town for door-to-door service but his coke sometimes tastes and smells so strongly of gasoline that, as it makes its way up your nose and begins its drip down your esophagus, you can’t help but envision the tanks it was stored in for its trip from Mexico. Inevitably someone will always complain when we’re doing Alex that they feel like they’ve strolled down to the nearest 76 station and started inhaling directly from a pump and someone else usually points out that inhaling gas probably isn’t that much worse than inhaling pure cocaine.

Alex is as timely as ever, and twenty minutes to the second after he returns my page, his Toyota Tercel pulls into my building’s driveway. I have about ten neighbors who could look outside and see me doing my deal with Alex—he pulls up, I hand him an envelope filled with $140, usually in twenties, and he hands me a similar envelope, with two grams, each folded neatly into Lotto tickets—and during my more paranoid moments, I’m convinced that my neighbors make a sport out of watching me buy my drugs and secretly gossip about what a bad person I am. It has to be obvious—I mean, who else but a person buying drugs would exchange envelopes with a Mexican guy she never speaks to?—but either they don’t find my behavior all that notable, aren’t watching me, or simply don’t care because no one has ever uttered a word about it or wandered out while Alex has been there and gazed at me suspiciously.

Inside, Jane and I each chop up lines from our separate bindles as Stephanie busies herself playing with my makeup. Stephanie’s relationship with our coke snorting is sort of the same as the one my parents have with my smoking. It’s done—rather blatantly, as a matter of fact—but it seems to still go unseen. As I watch Jane roll up a twenty, I pack up my supply for the night. I usually carry the coke I bring out with me in a bullet that’s attached to my car key chain—such a ridiculously asinine move in terms of getting busted that it’s probably akin only to keeping a beer holder on your steering wheel—but I couldn’t resist its cool practicality when I saw it for sale at the Pleasure Chest.

We do our lines in silence while Stephanie drinks until Jane says that the gasoline smell is giving her a headache and Stephanie suggests we get to Steve’s before it gets completely overrun by fake-titted aspiring actresses looking for their next casting couch.

The party is even bigger than I expected it to be, and during the initial circle that Stephanie, Jane, and I make around the indoor and outdoor bar areas, I feel my skin tingle with excitement over all the promise the evening holds. I remember how much that tingle kept me going when my love affair with partying started back when I was a sophomore or junior in high school. It would build from a sense of excited anticipation I usually had the day of an event—anticipation that was typically far more enjoyable than the actual party—and grow as I strolled around a place, marveling at all the potentially exciting things that could happen to me that night.

Somehow, seeing the odd celebrity—Nicky Hilton talking to a stylist I once interviewed, Colin Farrell laughing with Selma Blair as they wait in line for the bathroom—only enhances my excitement. If these celebrated people could go anywhere they wanted to and they chose to come here, “here” must really be amazing. It’s usually not until a good hour later, when I realize that nothing’s really happening and probably won’t that the inevitable depression—as heavy and over-the-top as my previous elation—sets in.

At least we have pockets full of Alex to help us through those periods. It can be challenging to do coke at parties, considering the complications: not showing judgmental nonimbibers that you do it while also not giving it away to the free riders who like to hit you up and ask if you’re “holding” or who gather in the bedrooms, knowing those are the number one choices for people looking for special party rooms. Jane and I opt for the roughly thirty-minute-interval bathroom break routine. There’s nothing that screams “we’ve just been doing drugs” louder than two girls emerging from a bathroom together, usually sniffling, after having held up a line for longer than it could possibly take them to pee, but it usually seems like the lesser of several evils.

Jane and I seem to be doing a solid job of not letting each other get too paranoid or sensitive or unable to communicate with other people, and I find myself intensely grateful for her companionship. I marvel at those people who seem able to cruise through a party solo, who don’t need a friend by their side to help them deal with bitchy women or cute guys that ignore them. Without a wing-woman, I tend to fall apart.

Stephanie handles big parties completely differently. She basically goes in search of liquor and boys and disappears entirely, only to emerge hours later with her lipstick smeared. Tonight is no different, and by the time Jane and I are on our fifth bathroom visit, we’ve completely lost her. Gus and his friend Dan wander in and Jane and Dan go off to smoke pot—a drug I’ve yet to see the appeal of.

Gus and I move onto the impromptu dance floor in Steve’s living room. 50 Cent’s song about wanting to unbutton my pants just a little bit is blasting from Steve’s enormous Bose speakers as Gus and I start dancing alongside a slew of drunken William Morris assistants.

“God, this song makes me want to have sex,” I say to Gus, and he smiles, nods, and moves closer to me.

And I guess if you want to be annoyingly accurate, you’d probably say that Gus and I start dirty dancing. Nothing insane—it’s not like we’re all but having sex with our clothes on or anything—but yes, it gets a little intimate. But that isn’t really the problem. The problem is more that Gus starts kissing me and I kiss him back.

We’re kissing for maybe a minute or so when I look up. And that’s when I see Stephanie standing at the door staring at us with this completely devastated look on her face. And, even in my not terribly sober state, I realize that for all that she talks about how she doesn’t really care about Gus and they’re just “friends with benefits” and all that, she’s devastated. And I should have known—it’s my responsibility as her best friend to translate what she says into what she means. I pull away from Gus and motion for her to come over.