Ghost Writer - Part III
I had just moved back to New York City and was staying with my parents temporarily while waiting for my own apartment to be ready. I was also desperately looking for a job. Eventually I had the luck of meeting a very unusual woman who was looking for a ghostwriter.
THIS IS PART 3 of a SEVEN-PART STORY
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
Image: Shannon Vandenheuvel
Eventually, Lauren Shapiro, my writing partner, explained her strange routine of mid-morning lettuce-eating and the dispensation of booze. She was bulimic. She’d eat a big meal and then vomit it up. Because of her eating disorder, she kept practically no food in the house, just salad fixings, almonds, coffee, booze. If she faltered and bought a gallon of ice cream, she’d eat the whole carton in a sitting and then put her fingers down her throat. For the same reason, not wanting to gain a single ounce of weight, she’d take thirty or more laxatives a night to purge her system. The following day, needing to be near a toilet, she couldn’t leave her house till one or two in the afternoon.
Somehow, even though my lips were sealed and I never said a word, she was able to figure out that I was an alcoholic. Perhaps, because she had an area of vulnerability in her own physiological makeup, she was able to sense one in mine. Certainly, she was extremely intuitive about people and what made them tick. “We might as well hang out with our two addictions,” she told me, chomping on a handful of nuts. “We’ll work better that way.”
Which certainly wasn’t true. I didn’t hold my liquor well (all it took was a few sips for me to start slurring) and I never dared drink till nighttime.
But Lauren would thrust a glass of scotch at me no matter what, and there we’d sit, she with her nuts or lettuce, me with my booze, two addled, creative women trying to come up with story ideas while our brains were fried on food, liquor, laxatives, emesis.
At some point we came up with a story, although I don’t remember what it was, probably something murky and thrillerish. I started writing, and Lauren would read the pages every week and encourage me to keep going. I remember delivering scenes to her at her hairdressers where she thumbed through the work as she sat under the dryer, her mouth a thin, unreadable line. I had to write for my PR job as well, and I’d spend hours in that tiny office, slaving over annual reports and sneakily working on the manuscript I was creating together with Lauren when the boss wasn’t around. Our thought was that we’d produce a bestseller (I was pretty good at page turners), that there’d be money and success. In the meanwhile, it was Lauren’s job to keep me happy and the way she did that was to set me up with various guys she met in her travels (she regularly commuted to be with her husband who lived in DC). One of the guys, a man named Harry Rosen who had a Brooklyn accent and sounded old on the phone, kept calling and calling till I finally agreed to go out with him. I was still living at my parents' apartment at the time.
Cover Image: Pexels - Min An