Sad Desk Salad by Jessica Grose Read Free Book Online Page A

turned him down, but when Adrian asked me to a secret Magnetic Fields show just after my dad died, I said, “Sure, why not.”
    I don’t remember much of the show because I started chugging whiskey as soon as I got there. When Adrian asked me to go home with him, I slurred, “Whatever,” and the next thing I knew a cab was ferrying us to his Lower East Side bachelor pad. As I watched this man I wasn’t even attracted to roll on a condom, I knew I was about to cry. I pleaded with my drunk self: Don’t cry in front of this troll. But as soon as we started having sex, I couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down my face. What was I doing in bed with this loser? What was I doing drinking and snorting my life away?
    To his credit, Adrian noticed I was crying and stopped, but he looked annoyed. “Are you okay?” he asked. I shook my head and started crying harder. I started crying so hard that I had to run to the bathroom and throw up. I stayed in that sticky bachelor bathroom for half an hour, splashing cold water on my face and trying to pull myself together. When I emerged, Adrian was fully clothed in beat-up corduroys and a Samples T-shirt, and I could barely look him in the eye.
    “Do you need me to get you a cab?” he asked, by then genuinely concerned.
    “No, I’m okay,” I told him, and rushed out of there.
    The next day I had already turned this mishap into a comedy routine—“Having sex with Adrian makes me puke and cry”—but I knew that I had reached some kind of turning point. I only went out after work to DJ, and I stopped drinking more than one cocktail a night. I spent those morning hours before I had to be at Rev buffing up my résumé and sending out links to my best posts, hoping that some other publication would take notice so that I could start truly fulfilling those creative ambitions my parents had sacrificed so much for. My mom couldn’t pay for my health insurance anymore—there was now only one income to save for her retirement when the expectation had been for two—so I needed to find something more lucrative, and fast.
    I was so down on the idea of writing professionally, I even started applying to advertising agencies and branding firms. Copywriting was a kind of writing, I convinced myself, and one that could even give me a 401(k). When I told my mother about these applications on the phone, she sighed deeply. “I guess you should do what you feel like you have to do,” she said. “But if you want my advice, you shouldn’t waste your talent on diaper ads.”
     
    A few weeks into my new shit-together regime, I was DJing at a small bar in Park Slope, near where Jane and I lived together. It wasn’t a particularly fashionable place—its only nod to décor was a string of chili pepper lights ringing the backyard—but they were paying me $200 for the evening and advertising me as if I were some semifamous DJ diva just because I worked at Rev .
    I had just finished a set and was getting a club soda at the bar when a sweet-looking preppy guy with nearly black hair and very blue eyes appeared next to me. He was wearing a button-down shirt, acceptably stylish jeans, and Tretorn sneakers. He basically looked like all the guys who ignored me at Manning. I glanced at him and then turned away.
    “Can I buy her drink?” he asked the bartender, undeterred.
    “It’s free for me because I’m DJing,” I told him, hoping he would just go away.
    “Well, can I buy you a drink somewhere else?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because you’re a strange guy and I don’t even know your name.” I was still in a vulnerable place then, and I wasn’t in the mood to fend off creepsters in shady bars. I saw his crisp exterior, dark hair, and square jaw, and (this really says something about my headspace back then) my first thought was, He looks like the “Preppy Killer,” Robert Chambers.
    “I’m Peter,” he said, extending his hand to me.
    “Alex,” I said in a way I