Jay Mclnerney’s Story of My Life
“As a tour de force in the fast lane, it’s a perfect Sunday afternoon read—swift-moving, witty, and full of Alison’s own zest for life even in hell.”
—The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
“Mclnerney not only jests at our slightly tawdry life, but also celebrates its abiding possibilities.”
—The New Republic
“Mr. Mclnerney’s earlier novels (Bright Lights, Big City and Ransom) attested to his playful sense of humor, his observant, well-trained eye, and Story of My Life once again demonstrates his gift.”
—The New York Times
“Story of My Life is about people who were given the toga of citizenship and threw a toga party . . . a very good book.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Mclnerney is a hugely talented young writer . . . head and shoulders above most of his contemporaries.”
—Newsday
“His is a true talent.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
story of my life
Also by Jay Mclnerney
FICTION
Bright Lights, Big City
Ransom
Brightness Falls
The Last of the Savages
How It Ended
Model Behavior
The Good Life
NONFICTION
A Hedonist in the Cellar: Adventures in Wine
Bacchus and Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar
story of my life
A Novel by Jay Mclnerney
The author wishes to thank the Corporation of Yaddo, where this book was written.
Copyright © 1988 by Jay Mclnerney
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or
[email protected].
Story of My Life is based on a story that appeared in Esquire. An excerpt from the novel was published in the premiere issue of Smart magazine.
Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data:
McInerney, Jay
Story of my life : a novel/by Jay McInerney
TitlePS3563.C3694876 1988 813’.54—dc19 88-10323
ISBN:978-0-8021-9756-6(e-book)
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
For Gary
CONTENTS
1 Getting in Touch With Your Child
2 Scenes for One Man and One Woman
3 Sense-Memory
4 Truth or Dare
5 Care of the Social Fabric
6 Two Lies
7 Just Contact
8 Scenes for One Man and Two Women
9 Derby Day
10 Truth or Dare II
11 Hunters and Jumpers
12 Good Night Ladies
The age of Cronos was in general characterized as the age of anarchy, the time before the institution of property, the establishment of cities, or the framing of laws. We may fairly infer that it was not gods, but humans, who first became dissatisfied with the blessings of anarchy.
—Philip Velacott,
Introduction to the Oresteian Trilogy
story of my life
1
Getting in Touch With Your Child
I’m like, I don’t believe this shit.
I’m totally pissed at my old man who’s somewhere in the Virgin Islands, I don’t know where. The check wasn’t in the mailbox today, which means I can’t go to school Monday morning. I’m on the monthly payment program because Dad says wanting to be an actress is some flaky whim and I never stick to anything—this from a guy who’s been married five times—and this way if I drop out in the middle of the semester he won’t get burned for the full tuition. Meanwhile he buys his new bimbo, Tanya, who’s a year younger than me, a 450 SL convertible—always gone for the young ones, haven’t we, Dad?—plus her own condo so she can have some privacy to do her writing. Like she can even read. He actually believes her when she says she’s writing a novel but when I want to spend eight hours a day busting ass at Lee Strasberg it’s like, another one of Alison’s crazy ideas. Story of my life. My old man is fifty-two going on twelve. And then there’s Skip Pendleton, which is another reason I’m pissed.
So I’m on the phone screaming at my father’s secretary when there’s a call on my other line. I go hello and this guy goes, hi, I’m whatever-his-name-is, I’m a friend of Skip’s and I say yeah? and he says, I thought maybe we could go out sometime.
And I say, what am I, dial-a-date?
Skip Pendleton’s this jerk I was in lust with once for about three minutes. He hasn’t called me in like three weeks, which is fine, okay, I can deal with that, but suddenly I’m like a baseball card he trades with his friends? Give me a break. So I go to this guy, what makes you think I’d want to go out with you, I don’t even know you? and he says, Skip told me about you. Right. So I’m like, what did he tell you? and the guy goes—Skip said you were hot. I say, great, I’m totally honored that the great Skip Pendleton thinks I’m hot. I’m just a jalapeño pepper waiting for some strange burrito, honey. I mean, really.
And this guy says to me, we were sitting around at Skip’s place about five in the morning the other night wired out of our minds and I say—this is the guy talking—I wish we had some women and Skip is like, I could always call Alison, she’d be over like a shot.
He said that? I say. I can hear his voice exactly, it’s not like I’m totally amazed, but still I can’t believe even he would be such a pig and suddenly I feel like a cheap slut and I want to scream at this asshole but instead I say, where are you? He’s on West Eighty-ninth, it figures, so I give him an address on Avenue C, a rathole where a friend of mine lived last year until her place was broken into for the seventeenth time and which is about as far away from the Upper West Side as you can get without crossing water, so I tell him to meet me there in an hour and at least I have the satisfaction of thinking of him spending about twenty bucks for a cab and then hanging around the doorway of this tenement and maybe getting beat up by some drug dealers. But the one I’m really pissed at is Skip Pendleton. Nothing my father does surprises me anymore. I’m twenty going on gray.
Skip is thirty-one and he’s so smart and so educated—just ask him, he’ll tell you. A legend in his own mind. Did I forget to mention he’s so mature? Unlike me. He was always telling me I don’t know anything. I’ll tell you one thing I don’t know—I don’t know what I saw in him. He seemed older and sophisticated and we had great sex, so why not? I met him in a club, naturally. I never thought he was very good-looking, but you could tell he thought he was. He believed it so much he could actually sell other people on the idea. He has that confidence everybody wants a piece of. This blond hair that looks like he has it trimmed about three times a day. Nice clothes, shirts custom-made on Jermyn Street, which he might just casually tell you some nig
ht in case you didn’t know is in London, England. (That’s in Europe, which is across the Atlantic Ocean—oh, really Skip, is that where it is? Wow!) Went to the right schools. And he’s rich, of course, owns his own company. Commodities trader. Story of Skip’s life, trading commodities.
So basically, he has it all. Should be a Dewar’s Profile, I’m like amazed they haven’t asked him yet. But when the sun hit him in the morning he was a shivering wreck.
From the first night, bending over the silver picture frame in his apartment with a rolled fifty up his nose, all he can talk about is his ex, and how if he could only get her back he’d give up all of this forever—coke, staying out partying all night, young bimbos like me. And I’m thinking, poor guy just lost his main squeeze, feeling real sympathetic and so like I go, when did this happen, Skip? and it turns out it was ten years ago! He lived with this chick for four years at Harvard and then after they come to New York together she dumps him. And I’m like, give me a break, Skip. Give yourself a break. This is ten years after. This is nineteen eighty-whatever.
Skip’s so smart, right? My parents never gave a shit whether I went to school or not, they were off chasing lovers and bottles, leaving us kids with the cars and the credit cards, and I never did get much of an education. Is that my fault? I mean, if someone told you back then that you could either go to school or not, what do you think you would have done? Pass the trigonometry, please. Right. So I’m not as educated as the great Skip Pendleton, but let me tell you—I know that when you’re hitting on someone you don’t spend the whole night whining about your ex, especially after like a decade. And you don’t need a Ph.D. in psychology to figure out why Skip can’t go out with anybody his own age. He keeps trying to find Diana, the beautiful, perfect Diana who was twenty-one when she said sayonara. And he wants us, the young stuff, because we’re like Diana was in the good old days. And he hates us because we’re not Diana. And he thinks it will make him feel better if he fucks us over and makes us hurt the way he was hurt, because that’s what it’s all about if you ask me—we’re all sitting around here on Earth working through our hurts, trying to pass them along to other people and make things even. Chain of pain.
Old Skip kept telling me how dumb I was. You wish, Jack. Funny thing is, dumb is his type. He doesn’t want to go out with anybody who might see through him, so he picks up girls like me. Girls he thinks will believe everything he says and fuck him the first night and not be real surprised when he never calls again.
If you’re so smart, Skip, how come you don’t know these things? If you’re so mature, what were you doing with me?
Men. I’ve never met any. They’re all boys. I wish I didn’t want them so much. I’ve had a few dreams about making it with girls, but it’s kind of like—sure, I’d love to visit Norway sometime. My roommate Jeannie and I sleep in the same bed and it’s great. We’ve got a one-bedroom and this way the living room is free for partying and whatever. I hate being alone, but when I wake up in some guy’s bed with dry come on the sheets and he’s snoring like a garbage truck, I go—let me out of here. I slip out and crawl around the floor groping for my clothes, trying to untangle his blue jeans from mine, my bra from his Jockeys—Skip wear’s boxers, of course—without making any noise, out the door and home to where Jeannie has been warming the bed all night. Jumping in between the sheets and she wakes up and goes, I want details, Alison— length and width.
I love Jeannie. She cracks me up. She’s an assistant editor at a fashion magazine but what she really wants to do is get married. It might work for her but I don’t believe in it. My parents have seven marriages between them and any time I’ve been with a guy for more than a few weeks I find myself looking out the window during sex.
I call up my friend Didi to see if she can lend me the money. Didi’s father’s rich and he gives her this huge allowance, but she spends it all on blow. She used to buy clothes but now she wears the same outfit for four or five days in a row and it’s pretty gross, let me tell you. Sometimes we have to send the health department over to her apartment to open the windows and burn the sheets.
I get Didi’s machine, which means she’s not home. If she’s home she unplugs the phone and if she’s not home she turns on the answering machine. Either way it’s pretty impossible to get hold of her. She sleeps from about noon till like 9:00 P.M. or so. If Didi made a list of her favorite things I guess cocaine would be at the top and sunlight wouldn’t even make the cut.
My friends and I spend half our lives leaving messages for each other. Luckily I know Didi’s message access code so I dial again and listen to her messages to see if I can figure out from the messages where she is. Okay, maybe I’m just nosy.
The first message is from Wick and from his voice I can tell that he’s doing Didi, which really blows me away, since Wick is Jeannie’s old boyfriend. Except that Didi is less interested in sex than anybody I know so I’m not really sure. Maybe Wick is just starting to make his move. A message from her mom—call me, sweetie, I’m in Aspen. Then Emile, saying he wants his three hundred and fifty dollars or else. Which is when I go—what am I, crazy? I’m never going to get a cent out of Didi. If I even try she’ll talk me into getting wired with her and I’m trying to stay away from that. I’m about to hang up when I get a call on the other line. It’s my school telling me that my tuition hasn’t arrived and that I can’t come back to class until it does. Like, what do you think I’ve been frantic about for the last twenty-four hours? It’s Saturday afternoon. Jeannie will be home soon and then it’s all over.
By this time I’m getting pretty bitter. You could say I am not a happy unit. Acting is the first thing I’ve ever really wanted to do. Except for riding. When I was a kid I spent most of my time on horseback. I went around the country, showing my horses and jumping, until Dangerous Dan dropped dead. I loved Dan more than just about any living thing since and that was it for me and horses. That’s what happens, basically, when you love something. It’s like, you can’t get rid of the shit you don’t like, I have this rotten crinoline dress that’s been following me from apartment to apartment for years, but every time I find something I really love one of my sisters or girlfriends disappears with it the next day. Actually, we all trade clothes, hardly anybody I know would think of leaving the house without wearing something borrowed or stolen, if it was just clothes I’d be like, no problem, but that’s another story.
So anyway, after horses I got into drugs. But acting, I don’t know, I just love it, getting up there and turning myself inside out. Being somebody else for a change. It’s like being a child again, playing at something, making believe, laughing and crying all over the place, ever since I can remember people have been trying to get me to stifle my emotions but forget it—I’m an emotional kind of girl. My drama teacher has this great thing he always says—get in touch with your child, which is supposed to be the raw, uncensored part of yourself. Acting is about being true to your feelings, which is great since real life seems to be about being a liar and a hypocrite.
Acting is the first thing that’s made me get up in the morning. The first year I was in New York I didn’t do anything but guys and blow. Staying out all night at the Surf Club and Zulu, waking up at five in the afternoon with plugged sinuses and sticky hair. Some kind of white stuff in every opening. Story of my life. My friends are still pretty much that way which is why I’m so desperate to get this check because if I don’t then there’s no reason to wake up early Monday morning and Jeannie will get home and somebody will call up and the next thing I know it’ll be three days from now with no sleep in between, brain in orbit, nose in traction. I call my father’s secretary again and she says she’s still trying to reach him.
I decide to do some of my homework before Jeannie gets home—my sense-memory exercise. Don’t ask me why, since I won’t be able to go to school. But it chills me out. I sit down in the folding chair and relax, empty my mind of all the crap. Then I begin to imagine an orange. I try to see it in front of me.
I take it in my hand. A big old round one veined with rust, like the ones you get down in Florida straight from the tree. (Those Clearasil spotless ones you buy in the Safeway are dusted with cyanide or some such shit so you can imagine how good they are for you.) So I start to peel it real slow, smelling the little geysers of spray that break from the squeezed peel, feeling the juice stinging around the edges of my fingernails where I’ve bitten them. . . .
So of course the phone rings. A guy’s voice, Barry something, says, may I please speak to Alison Poole?
And I’m like, you’re doing it.
I’m a friend of Skip’s, he says.
I go, if this is some kind of joke I’m like really not amused.
Hey, no joke, he goes. I’m just, you know, Skip told me you guys weren’t going out anymore and I saw you once at Indo-chine and I thought maybe we could do dinner sometime.
I’m like, I don’t believe this. What am I?—the York Avenue Escort Service?
I go, did Skip also tell you about the disease he gave me? That shrinks this Barry’s equipment pretty quick. Suddenly he’s got a call on his other line. Sure you do.
It’s true—that was Skip’s little going-away present. Morning after the last night I slept with him I was really sore and itchy and then I get this weird rash so I finally go to the doctor who gives me this big lecture on AIDS—yada yada yada— then says the rash is a sexually transmitted thing that won’t kill me but I have to take these antibiotics for two weeks and not sleep with anybody in the meantime. I go, two weeks, who do you think I am, the Virgin Mary? and she goes, as your doctor I think I know your habits well enough to know what a sacrifice this will be for you, Alison. Then she gives me the usual about why don’t I make them wear condoms and I’m like, for the same reason I don’t fuck with my clothes on, you can’t beat flesh on flesh. I want contact, right? Just give me direct contact and you can keep true love.