The Washingtonienne (12 page)
I
love New York.
Why did I ever leave?
“Isn’t that dress from, like, Fall ’02?” Diane asked me, knowing very well that it was. “You’re slipping, Jacqueline.”
“I live in Washington now,” I reminded them. “You have to pay retail for everything there.”
“How do people live?” Naomi wondered, chewing her nicotine gum.
“But at least you can still smoke in DC.”
“Really? Maybe I’ll come visit you after all.”
“You should take the Chinatown bus. It’s only fifteen dollars.”
“Really? They don’t make you carry a chicken in your lap or anything, do they?”
I shook my head no.
“Then maybe I
will
take the bus to Washington. I’ll check my calendar.”
We wobbled over the cobblestones in the meatpacking district in our high heels, over to the club on Little West 12th Street. It was incredible that I had no problem getting in on a Saturday night in New York, but if I wanted to go to Saki on a Wednesday in DC, I had to stand on line. Life was always so unfair.
We scrambled down the narrow hallway to the pool-blue dance floor.
“Where’s Kool-Aid?” Naomi asked some random model-actor who was drinking bottled water. (Only people on drugs would drink bottled water at a club.)
He pointed at a guy in a white Sean John hat, leaning against the wall near the restrooms.
“We didn’t recognize you in the hat!” I told him.
Kool-Aid had been our dealer since college, when he used to work the big clubs like Twilo and Limelight. When City Hall decided to clean up the nightlife in New York, the dealers had to set up “boutiques” in the smaller clubs.
The procedure was as follows:
Stop and say hi to Kool-Aid on your way to the ladies’ room. (That was when you told him how many pills you wanted.)
Go to the ladies’ room, freshen up or whatever, then come back out and meet Kool-Aid at the bar.
Buy a drink or something and act like you’re changing money with him. That’s when the deal was made, and it looked totally legit. That was how Kool-Aid stayed out of the slammer all of these years. Smart guy.
“Long time, no see!” he said, kissing me on the cheek. “Where have you been, baby?”
“I moved to DC,” I told him. “Before that, I was living with my boyfriend.”
“Why would you do a stupid thing like that?”
“Which one?”
“Both!”
The guy had a point.
“I’ll see you in
three
minutes,” I told him. (Wink, wink.)
The ladies’ room was full of Brazilian model-types, reapplying NARS Lip Lacquer and tossing their hair around. Naomi and I looked like trolls standing next to them.
“They don’t have girls like these in Washington,” I told Naomi. “Thank God!”
“After we get the drugs, let’s go somewhere else,” Naomi suggested.
“Oh, please! We can have anyone we want here. Guys love sluts!”
We left the bathroom and met Diane at the bar.
“Here, you guys,” she said, slipping pills into our hands. “Take your brain medicine.”
We all took turns dropping so we would come up at the same time.
“Jacqueline,” Naomi said, gesturing toward a banquette on the opposite side of the room. “Isn’t that Mike over there?”
We all turned to look.
It was him, with a perfect-looking blonde in a black Gucci cocktail dress. Drinking champagne, no less.
I blinked as tears rolled down my expressionless face. My friends looked very uncomfortable, not knowing what to do about me.
I wasn’t
crying,
was I? Because this was really nothing to cry about. I already knew that Mike didn’t love me anymore.
But to
see
it?
Ouch.
Naomi took me aside, blotting my face with a cocktail napkin.
“Stop it, Jackie,” she said. “
Stop caring.
If you don’t cheer up right now, the E is going to make you cry all night long.
Stop caring!
”
“Let’s get out of here,” Diane suggested. “Let’s go to Tribe.”
“Tribe is on the other side of town!” Naomi argued. “I don’t want to come up in a cab!”
“Well, we can’t stay
here.
”
“Jackie, where do
you
want to go?”
“I want to go back to Washington,” I told them.
“Right now?” Naomi asked.
“I don’t want to be here anymore.”
“We can go someplace else, Jackie,” Diane said, but she could tell by the stubborn look in my eye that I had already made up my mind. (I was a classic Taurus.)
I
took the Acela back to Washington, instead of the Chinatown bus. I came up inside Penn Station, just as I was purchasing my tickets from one of those machines.
“I’m so much happier when I’m high,” I sighed, not caring if anyone heard me.
Not caring. It felt so good.
Washington was really my favorite city anyway. It was the prettiest place I had ever lived, with fountains and flowering trees everywhere. And the rent here was far less expensive than Manhattan. I could see spending the rest of my life here: I’d get some fluffy government job, a couple of dogs, and live happily ever after.
And maybe—if I ever met someone in DC who I could tolerate for more than a few hours—I would marry and have a baby someday.
But in the meantime, I could hardly take care of
myself.
I still hadn’t bought any furniture for the apartment, and I didn’t even know where the grocery store was in my neighborhood. (Whenever Fred came by, he would look at my bare rooms and empty refrigerator, and ask if I was “taking drugs.”)
I wasn’t even sure that I could hold down a job. I had one of the easiest jobs on the Hill, and I had a problem doing my work. Some days, I didn’t do any work at all.
I had been dreading my work performance review all week. If I wasn’t getting fired this time around, I would at least get a warning, accompanied by some humiliating lecture. I wasn’t sure which was worse.
My drug-induced peak in productivity had backfired on me. While my output had increased, so did my margin of error. Constituents were calling the office complaining that their names had been misspelled on the response letters they received, or that they had received a letter about a different issue than the one they had written in about.
And since I was no longer high on the job, my productivity had gone way down.
My long lunches, constant tardiness, excessive personal calls, dress code violations, puking in the office bathroom, and erratic behavior in general made me more of a distraction than an asset to my office. And that was just the stuff they knew about!
But my review came back overwhelmingly positive: I was a “Very Good” employee.
Apparently, nobody knew what my job was, or what I was even doing in their office.
I went back to the Locker Room to watch back-to-back episodes of
Law & Order
at my desk, as I often did when I didn’t have a lunch date with Fred.
Meghan, one of the senator’s personal assistants, stopped by the Locker Room to microwave one of her disgusting Lean Cuisine frozen dinners.
I hardly ever spoke to her, so I was somewhat caught off-guard when she told me that my “boyfriend” (Dan) was in the cafeteria having lunch with another girl.
“I just think you should know,” she said. “Janet says she saw them
talking.
”
Talking? I wanted to tell Meghan that she and Janet should mind their own business, but I was also curious to see who Dan was “talking” to these days; if he wasn’t “talking” to me or Laura, he was making fools of us by “talking” to other girls in the cafeteria.
I went down there and saw him sitting at his favorite table with a pretty girl wearing a purple-striped intern badge around her neck.
I didn’t object when Laura told me about her dinner date with Dan just for this reason: I knew that he would fuck her over the way she had fucked me.
Like I said before, do you ever feel like you’re not accomplishing anything at all?
AFTER WORK, I WALKED
back to my apartment and threw myself on the bed. What did I have to look forward to? Really, I needed to know. I needed a reason to get out of this bed tomorrow. My job was bullshit, my friends were totally shady, my love life was a disaster, and my own parents wouldn’t return my phone calls.
Then I realized that the only thing I had to look forward to would be my next orgasm. Yes, sex was a free gift from God, wasn’t it? I could always look forward to that.
So when Sean called me around midnight to apologize for his crazy girlfriend, I forgave him. His story was that his girlfriend had found several strands of my long, black hair in his bed. She threatened to call his probation officer (!) if he didn’t tell her everything. And since she was such an obviously insecure psycho, she insisted on knowing
everything
about me so she could harass/scare/stalk me.
“The next time she catches you cheating, deny, deny, deny. To your very last breath,” I advised him. “Now get on that bicycle of yours and pedal your ass down here ASAP. Oh, and bring your drugs.”
I was tempted to call the police and tell them to put out an APB for a bike-riding drug dealer headed toward Capitol Hill. But then I wouldn’t get the sex and drugs I needed to lift my spirits. I decided to wait until he left my apartment tomorrow morning. I would call the cops
then
if I was still feeling cranky.
I WAS LATE GETTING INTO
work the next day, and Janet reminded me that my coworkers living in Maryland and Virginia managed to arrive on time, and my apartment was only a ten-minute walk away from the office. But people who lived in the suburbs were probably asleep by eleven, so how could I be expected to live up to those standards?
Our weekly staff meeting was about to start by the time I arrived, so I took an empty seat in the back of the conference room.
Everyone stopped talking when Janet walked into the room. A petite woman covered in freckles with a severe red bob haircut, she had a very loud voice for a woman of her size. She was always cursing and complaining, and everybody in the office seemed absolutely terrified of doing anything that might piss her off.
She started the meeting, going over some minor changes in the dress code. She told us that we could finally wear jeans during Recess, but none that were “embellished.” (I snorted with laughter at this.)
“As all of you know, one of our LCs is leaving,” Janet announced, “and we are currently looking for a replacement.”
My ears perked up.
“Since nobody here has expressed an interest in the position, we’re going to open it to outside applicants.”
Nobody? What about me? I was more than qualified to write some wishy-washy form letters. I couldn’t understand why I was being overlooked.
I asked Janet about it after the meeting.
“You’re just not right for the job,” she told me plainly.
And she left it at that, leaving me alone in the hallway to wonder why.
Perhaps I was being snubbed because I wasn’t from the home state. Or maybe they knew how much time I spent posting goofy stuff on the Internet.
Fuck it,
I decided. I didn’t really deserve a promotion, did I? I was damn lucky to have a job at all. But there was no way in hell I would keep blowing my money on coke just so I could keep busting my ass in the mailroom. Jesus, what was I thinking?
Maybe this was a blessing in disguise. I loved drugs, but now I could go back to doing them just for fun, and I could finally start saving my money.
So I ran to the ladies’ room to vomit. I had taken too much Valium on an empty stomach to cushion my comedown from the blow Sean and I did last night. When I came out of the stall, my eyes were red from puking so hard, and Janet was standing there, aghast at my appearance.
“Oh my God, are you okay?” she asked. “Have you been crying?”
I shook my head no.
“It’s all right, Jacqueline, I know all about it. That guy is a jerk!” OMG, Janet thought I’d been crying in the bathroom over my “boyfriend” Dan. As if!
“Do you need to go to the nurse’s office and rest for a while?” she offered.
“I can do that?” I asked.
“Please, take as much time as you need.”
But I went back to my desk instead, embarrassed that everyone in my office thought I was a heartbroken fool.
I bought a new pair of Gucci shoes on the Neiman Marcus Web site to cheer myself up and waited for Happy Hour.
OUT OF LAZINESS, WE
chose Capitol Lounge for Happy Hour. It was down the street from my apartment, an easy and convenient place to pick someone up on the way home from work.
We got a table next to a large group of deaf students from Gallaudet University. They were furiously signing to each other, and it looked like a pretty heated debate was going on.
“At least they’re quiet,” April joked.
“April!” I scolded her. “Watch what you say! Some deaf people can read lips, you know.”
April picked up a menu and held it in front of her face.
“At least they’re quiet!” she repeated.
“I heard you the first time.”
“I bet
they
didn’t!”
“April, sometimes you can be so du—Oh, never mind!”
The waitress delivered our drinks as the lights went down in the bar.
“Oooh, it’s sexy time!” I announced. “Time to start thinking that the guys here are cute.”
“I met Tom here,” April admitted. “He looked my number up in the Senate directory and called me the next day.”
“Aw, that’s sweet.”
“Yeah. Tom’s a sweet guy.”
April sighed.
“So why can’t I stop cheating?” she asked, as if I were the expert on the subject. “I mean, I love Tom. But here I am, looking for Mr. Goodbar at Cap Lounge. Why do I do it?”
Every cheater asked herself this question whenever she felt guilty. But I wasn’t going to let my friend beat herself up over something that was only natural for a woman who had options.
“Because love is not enough,” I told her. “It just doesn’t cut it anymore.”
April thought on this.
“God, you are depressing,” she finally said. “I need another drink.”
“Yeah, but that’s life,” I replied.
“No, that’s not life
,
that’s just you being bitter
.
Most people don’t feel that way.”
“Yes, they do,” I argued. “They just don’t realize it.”
April rolled her eyes.
“I can’t believe we’ve been here almost twenty minutes and no one has bought us drinks yet,” she complained. “We look really good!”
“I think the guys here are on to us,” I said. “No one buys us drinks anymore because they know what stuck-up bitches we are.”
“Well, we made our bed, I guess. We can either wait for new boys to come to town, or we’re going to have to start wearing disguises or something,” April surmised.
“This is bullshit,” I said, getting up from the table.
I walked up to some random dude and tapped him on the shoulder.
“Can I buy you and your friends a drink?” I asked.
“Uh, sure!” the boy replied, amazed that a girl would even offer.
And that was all it took. Now we were the coolest girls on the Hill. All we had to do was throw some money around, and the guys loved us. Boys really weren’t so different from girls in that respect. Male or female, we all loved free shit.