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.
