Places I've Woken Up
Standing on a table in slightly soiled Louboutins before 24th birthday hijinks led to one thing or another
Try as I might, not every ends with a clean, makeup-free face and silken pajamas
Of the 10,080 minutes in the week, 9:00 p.m. on Friday is the most exhilarating. The weekend is full of promise and you don’t know where the night will take you. Cut to twelve hours later, give or take, and you awaken. Groggy, with a stuffed-up nose and a rancid taste in your mouth. Perhaps next to a snoring stranger who looked a lot better through your beer goggles in that bar’s gracious veil of darkness… wait, which bar was it? Sometimes life isn’t about the journey — because you can’t remember it. Sometimes life is about where you end up. Cheers to the freakin’ weekend!
Now, a roundup of the places (and states) where I’ve woken up, or at least found myself:
-In the staircase of my West Village walkup. The last thing I remember was taking a shot of Patrón at the club where I worked, with a rowdy group of busboys. I found my iPod one flight down. Score…?
-In my friend’s single bed, gratefully alone, wearing one boot and a blood-spattered dress. The blood was coming from my nose. I later found out I had leapt off a kitchen counter “for fun.”
-At the Gramercy Park Hotel, after crawling on the bar and dunking credit cards in people’s drinks at Employees Only.
-In Nick Nolte’s suite at the Four Seasons. I was dating his son, not him (I have limits) and blame my low tolerance on Xanax.
-In the arms of a Las Vegas prostitute. Or let’s call her an escort, shall we? I can’t remember her name, but I still have her business card. A “when in Rome…” attitude can get you into sticky situations. No pun intended.
-On the beach in North Carolina, severely sunburnt and coated in sand. Sadly, the police had confiscated our machete during our bonfire the night before. Hey, it’s all part of the road trip experience.
-In a car in Brooklyn, getting chased by the cops for speeding. Luckily I wasn’t driving at the time.
-In my own bedroom, fully dressed. Across my mirror, scrawled in a Nars lipstick shade known as “Heat Wave” was a phone number, followed by the words: “Call me. Ed.” Ed said he carried me out of Marquee (circa 2003, mind you), brought me home, and took a nap in my bed.
-In a shack on the beach in Bocas del Toro. Turns out Panamanians really know how to throw a party.
-Face-first on a night table in a Montauk motel room on Labor Day weekend. I’d mistaken it for the bed and dislodged my front tooth. A minor buzzkill.