Sobriety As A Novel Experience
Last night, I had dinner with a few really interesting young women who work at Full Picture, a marketing company started by Desiree Gruber, the wife of Kyle MacLachlan, and an all-around badass kind of woman.
They wanted to have dinner because they mistakenly thought that I was a beauty editor with a lot of clout because I write for Glo, which is one of the most heavily trafficked women’s magazines on the Internet. Instead, they met a girl wearing Land’s End rubber boots and Shiseido lip lacquer smeared all over her front teeth.
Still, they were incredibly friendly and engaging. The conversation flowed easily. By the time the meal was finished, they were utterly endeared to me.
Right before desert, I went to the bathroom, which I found to be locked. After waiting a few minutes, I knocked. A few minutes later, I pulled at the door. Hard. Eventually, a man wearing a trucker hat and a string of silver necklaces emerged, looked at me sheepishly, and then creeped down the hallway.
One of my greatest pet peeves is men who take a long time in the bathroom. Like, with a woman, she might just be an asshole who takes a long time peeing. Or, she could have just gotten her period. Or, she could be re-applying make-up because she’s on a first date, and she wants to, at the very least, have a make-out session at the end of it. Or she could be breaking up with her boyfriend at a table, and needs a few minutes to cry and compose herself. The possibilities are endless.
But what the fuck can a guy in New York be doing in the bathroom for five minutes? I’ll tell you. Taking a shit, or doing cocaine.
After entering the bathroom, and sniffing the air, I concluded that the man I had replaced was doing the latter. My suspicions were cemented when I returned to the table, and he backhanded a glass of white wine all over me—afterwards, he proceeded to apologize no less than 100 times, in less than 30 seconds.
I brought up the topic with the girls, which led into an interesting conversation about substances. Living in New York themselves, they had plenty of experience being around people who get a little too fucking wasted. We talked a bit about LSD, and how, back in the day, it was a legal experience. This, of course, led into a discussion of the prescription pills of today—adderall, klonipin, valium—which I have no doubt will be illegal at some point in the near future.
I told them that lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how being sober is actually a novel experience in our culture, which is pretty substance infused. I talked about how I’ve cut back on my drinking, and started spending more time reading, which is something I haven’t made time for at night since I was a junior in college. Then, I didn’t drink at all. Going to bars was fucking boring. Many a Saturday evening was spent reading a novel in bed, which was a break from my not so rigorous academic work at Brown.
By chance, one of the girls came upon this quote on Prabal Gurung’s Instagram last night, from an interview with Stanley Kubrick that appeared in Playboy in 1968.
Pretty relevant, no?
Just some more food for thought. And if you’d like to read the rest of the interview, which is mostly about Kubrick’s thoughts on Extraterrestrials (awesome), it’s available here.
