Summer of The Greyhound

The secret for packing after your husband moves out is vodka, ruby red and The Violent Femmes

For Jose, all of it mattered

Jose moved out first, taking most of the furniture and the bed. I gave him pretty much everything as if to repent for initiating the separation and divorce. For the first and last time, I slept on the pullout sofa bed and sobbed for forty-eight-hours. There was no TV, only my boom box. Our cat, Peaches, roamed around on the hardwood floors meowing in distress. Then he sat by my head as I cried, his soft fluffy fur a temporary comfort.

As much as I wanted out of the marriage, I thought, what have I done? I blew up my whole life and now I’m here with a sad cat in a sad life. I was about to move back into the city from Bronxville where we lived. And I hated Bronxville, particularly because it wasn’t really Bronxville, it was Yonkers. It was only a Bronxville PO address. And I hated suburbia, which was where my life began in Larchmont, though Larchmont was much tonier than Yonkers. And still, I hated every minute of living in Westchester when I wanted to be a city girl.

It’s not that I thought I should have stayed in the marriage, but when Jose walked out that door for the last time, I couldn’t console myself. I still cared for him and we had a history together that would forever be altered, except in memory and in the words that I write.

For those two days, I wandered in and out of the empty bedroom, looking at half-filled suitcases and moving boxes. I knew I had to finish the monumental task of fitting what was left of my life into those boxes, but I couldn’t gather enough strength without crying again.

There was virtually nothing in the fridge, save for a half-dozen eggs, the Brita water pitcher, ruby red grapefruit juice and wait, vodka? There was vodka… A huge bottle of Absolut about half full was sitting towards the back of the top shelf. It was left over from our wedding five years earlier. That fact should tell you that we weren’t heavy drinkers. And then I thought, ruby red grapefruit juice and vodka? What a grand idea! And it was. The tart punch of the grapefruit paired perfectly with vodka and it glided down my throat beautifully.

Before long, I fired up the boom box and let the vodka do its work in me. I found the secret for packing after your husband moves out; vodka, ruby red and The Violent Femmes. I felt like I was the first person on earth to discover how much vodka could help. Of course, I drank in college, but my drinking was never refined or medicinal. It was just getting drunk to get drunk. This was definitely medicinal and necessary. It allowed me to finish packing all the boxes.

I moved into a railroad apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. I had a roommate named Tilly, a dominatrix by trade, but when we first met about the apartment, she said, “Oh, I’m an actress.” She didn’t tell me about her other line of work until I was already moved in. I learned that the term actress could mean any number of things.

“I don’t care what you do,” I said, “but I have one rule, please don’t bring any clients home, even when I’m not here. It’s not safe.”

“Oh, I would never do that,” she said. “I work at a dungeon.”

Peaches was traumatized and hid for a week, especially since Tilly had an intrusive cat that bullied him. I was worried until I heard the loud bellow of his sorrowful meow, which made me feel worse. I tried to unpack my dishes and put them into one of the kitchen cabinets that Tilly cleared for me, but I started sobbing again. These were the plates of my marriage. They were Italian Countryside by Mikasa and they were ivory, simple, classic and aspirational, since I had never been to the Italian countryside.

I called my therapist, Ellen, and she miraculously picked up.

“Are you okay, Georgie? Did you get through the move?”

“I’m not okay,” I said, as the tears drenched my cheeks. “I can’t do this. I can’t put my wedding plates into a shitty cabinet in this shitty apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. They don’t belong here. They belonged to me and Jose.”

“Do you have to do this right now?”

“No…”

“Then don’t do anything now… Or you can do one plate at a time and I’ll stay on the phone with you while you do it.”

And I did it, one plate at a time. And she stayed on the phone with me. And somehow, the rinky-dink cabinet got filled with my plates.

But it wasn’t enough. Only vodka and grapefruit did the trick.

That summer of 2003 was one of the hottest summers on record, and since I was still living on unemployment, my days were spent rollerblading down the west side highway, taking dance classes at Broadway Dance Center, working as a script supervisor on various indie films, eating Ben and Jerry’s oatmeal cookie dough for dinner and consuming vodka and grapefruit, which I later learned had the name Greyhound. If I was going to be drinking, better to consume something with a name that represented “the champion sprinters of the canine world.”

My short film, Fresh Hot Pizza, had gotten into several festivals and I did what I could to promote it. But I was living in a kind of dissociative state where I seemed to be breezing through life, but was really sinking into darkness. Perhaps, I already knew deep down that I couldn’t maintain the life I was living. The house of cards was going to collapse sooner or later. But in that summer of separation, vodka had become my friend. It was another character in my story and it allowed me to stay lubricated and amnesiac about the loss of my marriage to Jose.

But it wouldn’t last. Does anything ever?

Twenty-two years later, I’ve learned that some losses stay in the marrow of your bones. When you share your life with someone, no matter how long, that person leaves a permanent mark. And there’s nothing to be done, but to play with pain. I’ve also learned that while vodka served as a short-term fix in my life, it is no longer my friend.