It Hit Me Like a Ton of Bricks: A memoir of a mother and daughter. Catherine Burns L.

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СКАЧАТЬ the door to my room and don’t come out for three days. I stop doing cocaine but I never go back to Dr. Mellman. Fuck her.

      

      I take an apartment downtown so I can be closer to NYU and farther away from my bullshit friends at Barnard. I am in a van, driving the rest of my stuff from West 108th Street to Thirteenth Street. I see cop cars lined up in front of my new building. “What’s going on?” I ask a person on the street. “Someone got robbed, I think,” they say. Wouldn’t that be funny if it was my apartment, I joke to the man with a van as we carry the last of my belongings up the stairs. When I open the front door to my new apartment I see that my stereo is gone, my TV is gone, every garbage bag filled with my stuff is sliced open. The contents of my life are strewn all over the floor of my new living room. I pick everything up and try to make a home. It is a cute apartment. I guess I just have to keep the gate locked on the fire escape, and step over the junkies in the front hall, and not light the oven when I am alone so all the mice that fly out from the broiler don’t run over my feet.

      I am sure I will feel better when my roommate comes. Her boyfriend, Chuck, moves in with us. Chuck is news to me. I don’t like running into Chuck and his shlong in the morning. We get a kitten for the mice and to keep me company. Chuck rolls over on it one night and kills it under the weight of his left arm. We fight about money. Chuck thinks we should split everything two ways, even though, as I point out, there are actually three of us. The halls stink like pee and Chuck never makes the rent because he is always lending money to one of the guys on the stoop I have to step over. I complain to my mother. She says, “I’ll call the housing department tomorrow. I’m sure I can get you a staff apartment.” As usual, I am nothing without her and because of her.

      

      I can’t eat anywhere if the bathroom doesn’t have a single stall and if the sink isn’t close enough to the toilet because I need warm water and I need the water running to help me throw up. I eat, vomit, and go jogging. I’ve given up cleaning the bathroom. Today there was blood in the toilet along with everything else. It scared the shit out of me. My aggression and despair were aimed at my mother and myself. I never wanted to hurt my internal organs. I call my mother.

      “I found a place to help me.”

      “Well good,” she says. Her voice is flat as a pancake.

      “They have a session that starts next month. I have to give them a deposit to hold my place.”

      “How much is it?”

      “Six hundred dollars.” She doesn’t say anything. “It is supposed to be really good.” She still doesn’t say anything. “Will you pay for it?” I ask finally. She sighs. “What is it?” I ask. She still hasn’t said yes or no.

      “I don’t want to give you the money. Why will it be different this time? When will you get over it? I have been paying for your goddamn psychiatrists for six years and none of them have done you any good.”

      “That’s not true.”

      “What have they done? You are still bulimic, you still lie, you are still angry. When will you get over it? What are you going to do with your life?”

      “There is blood coming out of my stomach and it frightens me,” I say.

      There is a protracted sigh, and finally, “I’m giving you the money but I don’t believe you. It is part of your disease, I read about it. You are in denial and you lie.”

      

      The program is a success even though the woman who runs it is chubby and addicted to cocaine the whole time and gets her license suspended six months later. I make one friend. She is in worse shape than me. She shits all over her apartment and cuts herself and finally commits herself to Columbia Presbyterian.

      It was surprisingly easy for me to stop. I told them I would stop throwing up if I could lose weight while I digested. I am on Weight Watchers. I am a happy little digester. My mother is glad.

       MY ROARING TWENTIES

      Dinner at my mother’s apartment. Alex and Molly are there. I hate Alex and Molly because every dinner I think I am having alone with my mother is ruined when she opens the door and says, “Alex and Molly are here.” My mother adores them. They are Canadian and, as my mother is so fond of pointing out, “Alex is a genius.” “So what,” I tell her. “He’s pretentious and a phony.”

      “He is not. He’s just very, very, very, bright. He won a MacArthur, you know.”

      We are in the living room nibbling on my mother’s typical pre-meal fare, olives and a variety of cheeses from Balducci’s. My mother always forgets to put out bread for the cheese and never provides a dish for the olive pits. Her hostessing style is both gracious and awkward. “Tell us again, Goldie,” Molly coos, rolling an olive pit around in the palm of her hand. “Tell us again.” They always make my mother tell this story. I don’t blame them. It’s a good story.

      “Well, I skipped grades when I was a kid because I had scarlet fever,” my mother faithfully begins. “I was quarantined, and all I did for those three years was read. I read books and I discovered that there were places in the world other than Ottawa and people in the world other than my sister and I couldn’t wait to see them. I knew one day I would get out, but in the meantime I read and finished high school early. My mother told me I couldn’t just hang around the house every day. So for the first year after high school I went to the library every day and read. Which suited me fine because I couldn’t stand my sister and I wanted to get out anyway.

      “And then, when I was seventeen I went to a party at the National Film Board and met a man who took me up in a back elevator to drink liquor. And it changed my life. I will never forget it. I smelled the silver nitrate on the film stock and I was intoxicated. I could think of nothing else. I knew I wanted to make films.

      “So I went back the next day. ‘Can I help you?’ a woman behind a desk asked me. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’d like a job.’ ‘What can you do? Are you a writer?’ she said. ‘Are you a director? An editor?’ she asked. ‘No,’ I said. ‘What can you do?’ she asked. ‘Nothing. But I can learn,’ I said. ‘No,’ she said, ‘that’s not how it works.’ ‘Well this is where I want to work,’ I told her. ‘That may be true,’ she said to me, ‘but unless you know how to do something we can’t hire you.’ ‘Oh,’ I said and I went and sat down in the waiting room.

      “‘Excuse me? What are you doing?’ she asked me. ‘Well I’m just going to sit here until something opens up,’ I said. ‘You can sit there as long as you want, but even if something opens up we’re not hiring you until you know how to do something.’ ‘Well I think I’ll just sit here. This is where I want to work.’

      “So I sat in the waiting room at the National Film Board of Canada every day for two weeks until they gave me a job. And I followed a man down a long hallway to a door with a sign on it that said NFBC DISTRIBUTION. Now, I had no idea what distribution meant but I went back to the woman at the front and I said, ‘Excuse me this isn’t what I had in mind.’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ She looked like she was going to kill me. ‘Well there’s just a lot of desks and filing cabinets in there,’ I said. ‘It’s not very interesting. I want to learn how to make films. That’s what I came here for. I don’t think I’ll learn that in there.’”

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