Scarves

I lost two scarves this winter, but I found one of them last week. I had apparently left it at Alia’s house, and so of course I immediately lashed out and accused her of deliberately stealing it from me. She hadn’t, but you must admit it’s odd for someone to find some article of clothing of their friend’s at their house, but not let the friend know. I had to come upon it by accident in her living room, for chrissakes.

I find it a little bit odd to lose things like scarves. Since leaving New York and moving first to Los Angeles and then to Nashville, I have lost many items—wallets, iPhones, keys, hats, scarves. I suppose I left them in bars or in cabs, and probably when I was more than a little drunk—it takes some effort to leave behind a scarf when it’s cold, or an iPhone when one is usually glued to one’s iPhone. Only once in my life—and this was way before I moved—have I suspected that a scarf had been actually stolen from me, and I don’t remember why I suspected that. I think it may have been because it was in my apartment before a random trick came over, and then after that, I couldn’t find it. It was beautiful—red and blue and white, and I vividly remember getting it at the Warehouse Sale and putting it on my desk at work at Harcourt, where Andrea saw it and complimented me on it, and I blushed and said, “tee-hee!” because of my odd crush on her. Now it’s gone. I still feel the loss of that scarf.

I still feel the loss of Harcourt, too. That was my favorite job ever, with my craziest boss ever, Jennifer. When I first started working for her, in 2005, I was trying a new persona on: Normal Gregory—newly and secretly sober from alcohol and trying to fit in in an office setting, instead of not fitting in—at Sotheby’s, Lehman Brothers, Worm Capital, Capital Z, and MultiPlan, for example—where I was the weird secretary who just didn’t know his place. Jennifer seemed unsatisfied with Normal Gregory, or perhaps she saw through him, because she coaxed Crazy Gregory (Normal Gregory) out of his hiding place—nay, demanded his presence—until finally it was Crazy Gregory working there in all his glory, and not at all the Gregory I had intended to be.

I got a cat around this time. His name was the Colonel, and it took him a looooong time to get used to me. I used to walk the three blocks from my apartment to Harcourt trying to hold my head up high, my hands bloodied from scratches from the Colonel. All I wanted was to pet that cat, but clearly the Colonel felt that that wasn’t meant to be. When Jennifer found out I had a cat, she immediately found it necessary to disparage all cats—cats everywhere!—as disgusting creatures, which confused me. Then she revealed that she was allergic to cats, which I guess sort of excuses it. I was quick to inform her that I, too, was allergic to cats, and that when I first got the Colonel, it was as though I had put on a scarf made of flames!

How did I do it back then? Be sober, I mean. I was sober all throughout my time at Harcourt, then all throughout my time at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, after the merger, and then well into my tenure at HarperCollins. I had been sober for six years when I finally drank again. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my sobriety then coincided with a gradual uptick in a grand, white-hot rage inside me that got fiercer and hotter the longer I remained sober. I would go to my AA meetings and share and help people and tell my story at detoxes and prisons—but all the while I was seething inside, without even knowing it. I didn’t know how to identify the feeling of anger, and finally the great, unseen anger within me turned inward, and became a depression unlike anything I’d experienced up until then. I had a crazy thought, then—I don’t know how to recover from this depression, but I know how to recover from alcoholism. So I drank. But then the depression changed shape again, and went to the complete opposite end of some sort of spectrum within me, becoming a horrible panic of a high that I experienced as a furnace-like heat within my chest, all the time. I was vibrating with a fight-or-flight terror for weeks, and then I went to a psychiatrist. She gave me a word for what I was feeling—bipolar disorder—and then at least I could search with her for the medication or medications that would give me some relief from it. (And I’ve since come to the conclusion that I’m bipolar in the same way that most people are bipolar).

Many people know that I just got sober again. Although I’m not feeling angry right now, I know that I must carefully monitor my feelings and become alert to any hint of the anger I felt before. I know what it feels like now. I know, it probably would surprise my friends to know how angry I can become. When I am Angry Gregory, I get banned for life from things—as I now am banned for life from Uber, from Hertz car rental, from the Beverly Center. If I allow my anger to take over my life, I might drink again, and I mustn’t drink. I simply mustn’t. Tonight, when I get in my little car and motor down West End Avenue at night with the window open, freezing and smoking cigarettes, the Oxcarbazepine I take twice a day courses through my bloodstream like an electrical hum, steadies my breathing, and protects me from my environment, and my environment from me. Scarves do that too.