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7
Drinking in Dallas
I started out on burgundy
But soon hit the harder stuff.
Everybody said theyād stand behind me
When the game got rough.
But the joke was on me.
There was nobody even there to call my bluff.
Iām going back to New York City.
I do believe Iāve had enough.
āBob Dylan, āJust Like Tom Thumbās Bluesā
Summer of 1987. Dallas, Texas. The Oak Lawn section, to be precise. I have finished my sophomore year at Harvard. Somewhere down the road I managed to pick up the 1986 Rolling Stone College Journalism Award for an essay I wrote about Lou Reed for the Harvard Crimson, and now I have a summer job at the Dallas Morning News as an arts reporter.
This is exactly where I want to be: I have been enchanted with Texas forever, or at least ever since I first visited all my cousins down in Dallas when I was still a little kid. To me, Texas is big strong men in cowboy boots, rugged Thoreauvian individualists, mining for oil as if it were gold, which it kind of was at one time. And Dallas is just the commercial center of all that wildcat fuel, one big country club in one sprawling suburb where all the boys play football and all the girls dream of growing up and having plastic surgery. Brawny brothers and silicone sisters everywhere. Iām not crazy about that part of the culture, all the materialism and wealth worship, but I go to Dallas thinking it will be good for me: Untrammeled capitalists are too busy making and spending money to be bothered with melancholia. Dallas, I believe, will be so vibrant, so spanking new, so urban-cowboy rowdy, so much the opposite of everything I associate with depression, so much brighter and shinier than all the dull darkness of the Northeast.
Of course the reality when I arrive in Dallas is quite a bit different. There is an oil glut, a concomitant real estate glut, the economy is depressed (not as bad as Houston, everyone points out optimistically), and Big D is in kind of a sorry state. Texas, in general, is meant to be rich, its entire culture is about good old boys making it big quick, and Texans, particularly those in Dallas, donāt seem able to handle poverty gracefully. They still buy Baccarat crystal at Neiman Marcus on Saturday, even if they just laid off two hundred of their company employees on Friday. Itās like watching a grown man whoās too proud to cry, who is desperately stifling his tears, cry anyway.
Every house I pass seems to have a FOR SALE sign in front, every apartment complex has a FOR RENT: ONE MONTH FREE! placard posted at the entrance, and along the highways there are tons of half-completed skyscrapers, pink granite and silver glass affairs conceived in times of prosperity, which are never going to be finished. Cranes and rubble everywhere: They used to say that the Dallas mascot was a crane opening its jaw to the blue skyline. This is nothing like the city I saw when I was visiting my relatives who live in North Dallas during the Republican Convention in 1980.
Dallas in 1987 is depressed and depressing.
Still, I am mysteriously happy here, at least at first. I live in this grand and dreamy apartment that Iām subletting from a city desk reporter who is trying to cohabit with her boyfriend. From the first time I looked at the placeāwhich is only $300 a month, even less than my weekly salaryāI thought it was the most beautiful thing Iād ever seen, with French doors, a ceiling fan, a little porch lush with plants and flowers and greenery and a cast-iron and glass breakfast table, and the sort of vast, open kitchen area with blue and white Mediterranean tiles that made me want to put small spice plants and ivy by the sink and hang chimes by the window. The bathtub even had little feet, and its edges curved out like cappuccino froth overflowing a mug. Iād be living alone for the first time in my life, like a big girl, and I felt a certain joy at the idea of moving in. I kept walking through the rooms of this charming railroad flat, and thinking to myself, This will be mine, this will be mine, all mine. I felt like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffanyās, the independent gal in New York beaming to be on her own, smiling all the time as she strolls down Fifth Avenue; or like Mary Tyler Moore throwing her hat as if it were caution to the winds of Minneapolis.
I love the apartment so much that sometimes I just want to roll around on the hardwood floors with rapt delight.
And much to my surprise, thereās even kind of a counterculture in Dallas, a small one, but enough to entertain me for the summer. I end up spending a good deal of time in Deep Ellum, a warehouse district on the eastern edge of downtown where artists and musicians live in lofts with exposed pipes and whitewashed brick walls, where rock clubs are as spartan and vast as airplane hangars and all you can get to drink in them is beer in a can, where you can catch groups like Edie Brickell and New Bohemians playing outdoors at Club Dada once or twice a week. Deep Ellum seems so vital to me that itās almost corny. Here young people are trying to build a scene from scratch and live in an alternative way as if it were something brand-new. Which for them, of course, it is. Down in Deep Ellum, itās a bit like being lost in the sixties, not because all the kids who hang out there idolize or idealize that era and bring it back with retro touches, but because the Kennedy assassination so paralyzed the city that the sixties are hitting Dallas twenty years late.
I could have been happy in Dallas. Except for the car problem.
Having grown up in New York, I never learned how to drive, and the lessons I took in Cambridge in preparation for the summer didnāt end up helping much when I slept through my road test. Without a driverās license, without a rental car, and without access to anyone elseās car, I was going to have to do a lot of transit negotiating that summer. The Morning News would pay for my cabs when I was on assignment, but otherwise I would pretty much be at the mercy of strangers. I would have to schedule all my activities around other people. I would always leave things I enjoyed early or stay somewhere miserable late because I needed to go with my ride. I could never just run home for five minutes to change clothes or grab something the way anyone with a car could, so I had to plan my days carefully.
It sounds like a small price to pay, but that summer I came to understand why teenagers all over America associate a driverās license with freedom. I understood that without a car, I was basically trapped in Dallas. And when the big bad downs started kicking in, as I should have known they inevitably and eventually would, Iād find myself scared to death, alone in my apartment, with no way out.
For all of June and a lot of July, I was convinced that everything was really okay for the first time ever. I even started to think that I had recovered from my depression, that all I had ever really needed was a satisfying job that kept me busy, that all this sitting around and intellectualizing and analyzing and hypothesizing and contemplating and explicating and prognosticating all the time was the source of all my problems. Semiotics, not a chemical imbalance, was killing me. I just needed to stop thinking so much and start doing.
I wrote like crazy, at least two or three reported pieces a week, sometimes more. I wrote like my life depended on it, which it kind of did. My editors were mystified by my productivity, thought I was mainlining copy or something. They rewarded me by letting me write odd and unconventional essays about art and feminism and Madonna and Edie Sedgwick, or anything else I could come up with, and then theyād stick them on the front of the Sunday section. They nominated me for awards from the Texas Newspaper Association and the Dallas Press Club. They paid for my overtime, which added up to so much money that I was practically doubling my salary (and it was costing them so much that after a while the assistant managing editor who oversaw my section of the paper suggested I take some comp days instead). My editors were pleased with my work and I was extremely prolific and conscientious. So they kind of let it slide when I started to crack.
Cracked in little ways. Walked into work at three in the afternoon on the grounds that I had to do some reading at home. Or had been up all night watching bands at the Theatre Gallery and couldnāt function on no sleep. All of which was perfectly legit, no problem, my editor would say, so long as I didnāt have to be in to go over some copy that day. But then, when I did arrive at my office, I spent most of my time returning personal phone calls or telling the other reporters about the latest man in my life, an ever-changing array of cowboys, restaurateurs, musicians, and college sophomores. Iād tear through them with such alarming alacrity that after a while I was dating brothers, cousins, entire families, it seemed. I found this all very amusing. Iād just blab and blab. People would look kind of entertained but mostly bewildered as if to ask, Why is this girl telling us all this stuff? This is an office, people are trying to work, I think they sometimes wanted to say.
But no one really cared. I managed to meet all my deadlines, my work was always good, and, they figured, sheās young, sheās from up north where people chatter, no harm done. Even after everyone else left the office at 6:00, I would still be there for hours getting my pieces done since it was impossible for me to work when there were people around to talk to. Between so much writing and so much chatting, my weeks were too packed for me to notice my emotional state at all, except in passing blinks of fatigue.
But on weekends, with no exigencies of the moment beckoning at my head, I realized that I was all alone in the great state of Texas and all alone in the world. Even the brief, two-day gap in activity was enough time for that old ugly feeling, that familiar black wave, to start creeping up on me, threatening to drag me away. Since I slept so little Monday through Friday, youād have thought that Iād appreciate the days off to catch up, but I could barely sleep anyway, and my nights passed fitfully. I was tired all the time, but unable to find relief. It was like being on cocaine after the trippy effect has worn off and all thatās left is a wired feeling that keeps you staring at the ceiling all night, unable to doze. The only difference was, this was not the aftereffect of some cokeāthis was me. So I filled up the hours as best I could. No one else wanted to surrender a Saturday to cover a day of heavy metal that was known as the Texxas Jamm, so of course I expressed my willingness to review Poison, Tesla, and the rest of the motley assortment of bands that would be playing at the football stadium. No one else wanted to spend July Fourth in Waxahachie at Willie Nelsonās Picnic, so I did my civic duty and accepted the assignment. Pain in the ass though I was, who could really fault a girl whoād saved them from having to cover these tawdry and embarrassing bits of Texas culture that only a Yankee could appreciate?
To a certain extent, anyone whoās alone and new to an area would be inclined to do a lot of running around, and at first I thought all my manic energy was the result of simple curiosity and the novelty of Dallas. But I was hardly a stranger in a strange place: Iād spent a lot of time in Texas when I was growing up, Iād traveled from one end of the state to the other, I had family in Dallas, I knew the town pretty damn well, and I could very easily have spent weekends in the peaceful company of my relatives, eating barbecue and going to the mall. Sometimes I did do that. But it was never pleasant for me. I was so nervous all the time, always feeling like there was something I should be doing but wasnāt, always feeling at the mercy of something that felt like a hive of bees buzzing in my head.
Once I woke up at three in the morning, but without my glasses on I mistook the three on my digital clock for an eight. In fear of being late forāfor whateverāI charged out of bed, jumped in the shower, dressed, made myself up, drank coffee, and ate Cocoa Krispies, and only as I grabbed my handbag to walk out the door did I notice that the sky was dark, it was the middle of the night, there was no need to rush. And itās not exactly like I had to punch a time clock. When I got back into bed, I laughed to myself a little bit, and then I just thought, This is crazy. Whatās happening to me? Iāve got all this energy, not the refreshing, delightful kind but the edgy anxious type, and not a damn thing to do with it. If the editors of the Dallas Morning News decided one day that I had to write the entire contents of the newspaper by myself, I still wouldnāt be busy enough to satisfy this enormous, deleterious need I have to keep moving. There will always be this deficit, this flabby remainder of self hanging over me, demanding more attention than I and seventy-two other people put together could possibly satisfy. What I wouldnāt do to be Alice climbing through the looking glass, taking one of those pills that makes you small, so small. What I wouldnāt do to be less.
And I started to think, Damn, I need medicine. I need something reining in all this thinking. Because Iām going to go crazy like this. I was almost twenty years old, which is often the age that people with bipolar illness experience their first manic episode, so maybe thatās what was happening to me. When I wasnāt working, I was out partying, dating sixteen different men at once, never sleeping at night, gulping Jolt cola and snorting speed for breakfast so I could get through the rest of the day. I figured out that I could manage my moods fairly well if I stuck to a rigorous chemical routine of beer and wine in the evenings, followed by mornings of major uppers.
Drinking in Dallas was a lot more fun than it had ever been anywhere else, although I couldnāt say why. Perhaps it was because I took to hanging with some hard-news reporters who tended to hard-drink with relish. In fact, to talk to them, youād almost think that alcoholism was the sign of a journalist doing his job well, a sign of someone whoād seen the blood, the white outlines, the body bags, all the gore of a triple murder, and drank to clear his head of all the ugly he was forced, and perversely delighted, to see. But the variety of alcohol-related experiences also excited me. At the time, Corona beer was available only in the Southwest, and having a bottle with a lime squeezed into it was such a novelty to me, a brilliant admixture of a real drink and a simple brew. Boilermakersāa shot of bourbon, preferably Makerās Mark, quite literally thrown glass and all into a stein of beerāwere another new discovery. Getting ahold of some speedāwhether it was methamphetamine or Dexedrine or Benzedrineāwas a pretty easy task because the drug scene in Dallas was so clean-cut. It seemed like everyone lived next door to some nice collegiate dealer who was putting himself through Southern Methodist University selling plants, pills, and powders, or knew someone else who did. But usually all it took was all the caffeine and sugar provided in Jolt to get me through the day, so the cycle of up and down could be maintained cheaply and legally.
One night, I planned to interview the Butthole Surfers after they played a gig down in Deep Ellum. As it happens, they were leaving for a European tour the morning after they played Dallas and decided that rather than get only a couple of hours of sleep after the show, theyād just not sleep at all. So I stayed up with them, smoking their weed, sipping on Coronas with lime, hearing stories about their pit bulls, hearing about how they had an indirect sexual encounter with Amy Carter by rubbing their private parts on her suitcase when they played at Brown University, hearing about how one of their former drummers is now a bag lady living in San Franciscoās Golden Gate Park, hearing about how they got the name the Butthole Surfers, and realizing that these guys were the real-life embodiment of the movie Spinal Tap. I learned that they had once been called the Winston-Salems and now occasionally played local bar gigs under the name the Jack Officers.
I was so amused that I just kept getting more and more stoned and drunk, and the last thing I remember before I went home to shower and change my clothes so I could go back to the office is standing behind the club, in a back alley, talking to the guitarist, who was, I thought at the time, the cutest thing alive, with sweet brown eyes and a compelling smile, the combination of which, when he looked at me so directly and soberly even though heād smoked even more pot than I had, made me want to do anything, anything for him. Never mind that I was feeling stoned and sensual and dying to take all my clothes off, even back there, standing next to the junkyard, the site of new construction, part of the gentrification process, and surrounded by nothing but the night. We started to kiss, his shirt came off, and pretty soon his hands dug under my blouse, rubbing my breasts as his finger made circles around my nipple. And I reached into his pants, touched him, touched his half-flaccid penis that got harder as I held on to it, and suddenly I realized that I didnāt want to do this.
It hadnāt even been a year since I lost my virginity to a recent Yale graduate who Iād met at the Rolling Stone College Journalism Award luncheon. It hadnāt even been a year since I decided that my mouth was getting tired and chapped from giving so many blowjobs, that it was time to start having sex like a normal nineteen-year-old. It hadnāt even been a year since my complete initiation into sexual activity, and I was not ready to start screwing around with a virtual strangerāwith whom, I might add, it was unethical for me to be carrying onāin some Dallas back alley. Somehow, I had this moment of truth, and I felt certain that I didnāt want this, didnāt want to live this life, had to get out of there right then. So I pulled my hands away from his fly, pulled my shirt back on, and started to run, but the thing was, I couldnāt run anywhere. I had to call a taxi first. And I thought to myself, You know this sucks. It sucks when you canāt make a clean getaway.
And I felt that something was very, very wrong. What had I wanted from that guy, anyway? Why had I led him outside in the first place? This seemed to be a routine for me, getting started on sexual encounters and not only stopping them, but actually fleeing from the room as if in shame or in danger, realizing that I just donāt want to be there, that I felt trapped and cramped. I wanted so badly to lose myself in sex, to be thoroughly slutty and have one zipless fuck after another. I wanted to be a wild thing. But in the end, I couldnāt ever go through with it because itās never like that, there was no pleasure for me in being an easy lay. Fast, cheap sex was no fun at all. My body and mind are just too complicated. Iād seen movies like 9Ā½ Weeks, and I envied the Kim Basinger character and the way she could achieve a fullāeven multipleāorgasm while standing in the rain with her back against a brick wall in a dark cul-de-sac as street thugs chased after her and Mic...
