I walked for a few hours in the snow that day in those flats. I walked until my feet were fucking blue in penance for my own stupidity without thinking of what to do to help myself, in shock and anger and all the rest of the seven steps. I walked and tripped on my one day fall from grace all day in the snow until I got to the self-pitying depths of “what else could happen now?” and realized I could get my fucking feet amputated and where was a phone I could use right now?

I need to add a few things here.

I don’t want this to come off all “slick city boy two-times dumb city girl”, soundtracked for current teen tastes. You have to understand that our three years of increasing intimacy seemed headed toward marriage, or at least an advanced format of living together; we’d joked about the unconventional ways we could do our wedding day, and practised more seriously afterwards for our honeymoon. There was always real light in his face to see me, even if it had just been a couple of days- I’ll still swear it on this one.

I really thought we were on the same page.

If you’re rolling your eyes at the moment, I can assure you I was a lot worse (and then some) back in March, in fact I confess to it all, especially the “dumb” part. In fact, if it wasn’t for dumb luck, I might really have ended up in an emergency treatment room.

What happened is that I ran smack into Georgina from Fin coming out of Balthazar- and damn lucky I am, too, because that girl can diagnose a trainwreck faster than anyone I know. She had me in a cab in a couple of minutes, and after five minutes had figured out that my clothes, phone and wallet were all the one place I couldn’t quite go at the moment, and had a plan, too.

She had the cab wait around the corner with me cowering flat on the seat under both our coats, and ran into my flat saying she had just left her coat and scarf the night before and a quick “Jesus, what the fuck happened here?”, returning with a bunch of my basics, even the phone charger, and got me back to her place and into a hot bath with some strong vodka drink like a bloody mary, but with Red Bull or something instead– anyway after three of them I was warm and dressed and Georgina sat and listened to everything, letting my remaining marbles run wild all over her living room until they stopped bouncing and rolling and came, finally, to rest.

More effective triage, I’ve never seen. And reliable advice, which though somewhat cowardly, was exactly the right thing to do, at the time, and in hindsight, too, I’d do it again. I never meant to stay so long, but the idea of being somewhere warm and sunny, and leaving the whole co-op fiasco to my mom’s imminent NYC arrival from 2500 miles away seemed a bold, empowering and independent solution– my feet were still blue, for fuck’s sake.

Which is how I came to be standing alone outside the San Diego International Airport the next evening, a warm spring night with the purple glitter of the bay right there, cars zipping by with their lights just on, the palm tree silhouettes black against the dusky sunset. The last warmth of a desert-warm day settled its arm across my shoulders, both overly familiar and greatly appreciated as my broken heart burst like a pomegranate into the picture perfect night.

Back when I started this project for Fin and started writing this blog, I kept my boyfriend at the time out of it because he wasn’t wild about being the subject of published commentary like the various characters chronicled coupling with Georgina on her blog, and at the time I had a great deal of respect for him: patient, loyal and chivalrous to a fault with me, the struggles of my new consulting business, whack job mother, all of it.

I kept him out of it, taking great comfort in our Friday night dinners and Saturday morning lie-ins, his text-messages when we were apart, the fabulous unperfumed smell of his arm around my shoulders, his animal teeth and appreciative tongue everywhere else when we were together.

So it was a natural path to safety that morning, as I beat a shivery retreat from the Co-op that Sunday morning in one of his shirts, the first jeans I could find, and a pair of poorly chosen dance flats (nearest the door), to head to his place, even though Sundays for us had always been catch-up-on-work and text-me-later day.

Of course I ran out fast enough to leave my phone, scarf and gloves behind– fortunately there was cash in my coat for the cab and a half hour later with icy feet and burning hands I was knocking unannounced on the door of the nearest safe haven I could think of in Manhattan.

Unfortunately, he wouldn’t let me in.

Through the chained cracked door, he stuttered and dissembled. A sleepy girl’s voice approached form behind him in a blur of raven hair and a sliver of elaborately tattooed pale arm crossed his golden chest, asking “Who is it, baby?”

And out I raced again.

Everyone seemed to have a good laugh over the kitchen sink incident, so I’m going to pick up there with a typical push back: its not really my fault everyone on my whole floor lost their water service for several days over the next few weeks, or that the family below me ended up with a heap of sopping lathe and plaster all over their kitchen– the “Upper East Side’s Finest Co-op” should have had a licensed plumber do my fucking kitchen right the first time.

Anyway, what matters is that that one extra turn of my wrench set in motion a chain of events far beyond my personal responsibility in this matter, and that the Co-op’s resulting legal troubles would have happened at some future point anyway because they were truly negligent in who they hired to remodel several units in the building, not just mine, and someone was bound to (unintentionally) fuck something up, expecting that what they were working on was done to code.

Regardless, all that wasn’t going to get found out until later, and when I turned to the angry mob in the hallway, all I could think was, “Thank god they don’t have pitchforks and torches.”

You have to understand that this was a building full of the indignantly rich, most of whom couldn’t understand why the rest of the world didn’t have the resources to live like they did and seemed to hold it against them. The only reason I even had that apartment was because the board thought my celebrity Mom was going to hang around the building more and maybe some of her fame and good looks might rub off the less attractive amongst them; it certainly wasn’t because I had the money or career to put me in their league.

To be honest, I would have been a lot happier in a little Brooklyn flat with a few designers and college professors for Friday night neighbor cocktails on the roof, but when you’re young, stupid and stuck in the “fake it ’till you make it” mode (and Mom’s paying), you make these sorts of choices not really thinking about the potential future negative repercussions or the prevailing lack of sense of humour.

So there I am with scalded red hands and thighs, wearing just an abandoned dress shirt of my boyfriend’s and panties with snow coming down again outside and water all over the floor, without a chivalrous neighbor in sight to help or defend me from the mob of the seriously inconvenienced and my Mom’s visit to “all she’s done for me” just a few days away.

Well you can guess I did the only sensible thing there was to do:
 
I bailed.

The first thing I’m going to say is, the last six months didn’t go at all according to plan- not even close- and that the don’t-try-this-at-home incident of re-plumbing the kitchen sink in my last post was just the beginning.

The second thing is that most of it really wasn’t very funny, but I will try and make it somewhat so in the recounting, because everyone should have at least one good laugh every day to help keep all things in perspective, and I did originally set out to do good for my friends and clients, not to fuck it all up.

(One of my wiser friends pointed out the laughing thing to me recently- I claim no credit for the insight, but seeing the value of it now with tremendous hindsight, I’m going to plant it like a flag here for future reference if things get ugly.)

Sometimes you just take on too much on the front end and don’t actually finish any of it properly on the back end- at least, that’s how I understand it now. You tell yourself you can handle it, that’s its not really that much, that “this way leads to redemption”, “almost there”- whatever gets you through the night and up out of your corner in the morning and back in the ring.

I don’t know if its like this for everyone, but I smell cliches when I tell you its just takes one seemingly simple yet irrevocable move to bring your whole edifice down around you in a pile of parts you’ll never reassemble in the same way again.

I never liked the smell of camels, not least of which is the unspoken conclusion that, since you can’t successfully put a camel through back surgery or successfully keep one in traction for months on end afterwards, when the straw hits, you’ll just have to put that fucker down.

I didn’t have a little brother, but I can imagine that it would resemble my impulse right now to scream at my computer, “No, Henry, you fucking perv, I already said it wasn’t about Angela and those two execs from Enron!!”
 
That said, I want to get on with my story, since that’s what you’re supposed to do on your blog and I finally can now. Unlike some people, I dread Internet cafes anyway, so while I was work-from-home surfing between apartments in Brooklyn with my laptop in Dallas–
 
oh wait, I didn’t finish the story yet.
 
So you probably know my Mom by now, and if not, all you need to know for our purposes today is that she’s a pitiless, merciless snot in a kitchen not up to her standards, and I was dreading the daily cheerful new insights into why my kitchen sucks that accompany her every visit.
 
Well a few months ago, Georgina had me over to her kitchen and gave me a no-bullshit chef’s eye view of what’s important in life, along with two valium and a glass of shiraz. I had resolved to switch out my shitty old school faucet for one that has a tall gooseneck for filling pots and could finally attach the Mercola water filter she’d given me for Christmas. (For someone whose put all kind of awful stuff in her mouth, you should hear Georgina go on about the importance of filtered water.)
 
I found the perfect one on Overstock.com, too for cheap, and it was waiting still in its UPS packing in my hall cabinet.
 
Well anyway I’m sure you can see where this is going: full of good intentions early on Sunday morning and planning to reward myself after with coffee and book shopping after a tramp in the snow, I decide to take on the kitchen and after switching the faucet out and reconnecting the water lines snugly, I wrench the hot water valve too hard just trying to turn it back on, the compression valve slips on the copper and there’s hot water fucking everywhere, spraying my legs and burning my hands while I’m trying to crank this valve back down and stuff a towel in it at the same time– what a fucking mess.
 
I admit I’m drinking more shiraz as I write this right now.
 
Well it took me a minute but I remembered seeing the shutoff out in the hallway when someone was remodeling, found a bucket to wedge under the soaking, scalding towel and finally get the fucking water turned off out in the hallway in soaking clothes and bright red hands from the hot water.
 
And them my phone rang.
 
I picked it up to find Chef ranting about Admin and how his website isn’t all it could be and where were all the customers– I mean, its 9 in the morning on the Sunday after Valentine’s Day and I can only think “Chef struck out last night and he’s taking it out on me. Fucking great.”
 
And then I turned around to the angry mob in the hallway, peering in my open front door.
 
I’d shut off the water to the whole floor.

It was ugly– now its over.
 
And I’m back.
 
(Don’t get excited Henry– this isn’t the one about Angela and the four golf pros.)
 
What started out as a fun distraction after another shitty Valentine’s Day turned into a most unnecessary ordeal of angry person soothing, apartment searching and moving, all during the most snow this city has seen in many a year. Talk about complicating matters– this is New York, where you can get pretty much anything any time of day.
 
Well, try getting a plumber on a Sunday morning with six inches of fresh snow on the streets. While other women were cozily sleeping off their Saturday night out or making pancakes with their boyfriend while the snow fell, I was trying to keep hot water from flooding my former kitchen and anyone in my building from finding out that I ‘d blown off half a dozen co-op rules by trying to do a quick kitchen upgrade on my own before Mom’s arrival.
 
I know, I know, you’re thinking, “Dumb girl, why would you even try and switch out a crappy faucet fixture on your own in the first place?”
 
Well in the “25 things no one knows about Adrienne” you’ll find that I have a fairly complete toolbox in the closet, and know mostly what to do with it.
 
when I was little, I followed my Dad’s every move when something needed fixed or when he decided to “upgrade” something around the house. He was a builder who couldn’t leave work at work, and of course you probably know Mom by now– even then, nothing was ever good enough for her, even when Dad rode to the rescue of her overloaded garbage disposal or circuit breaker just in time before the guests arrived.
 
So let’s just say, I thought I could do it myself, I always hated the whole approval process that building required for anything more complicated than mopping the floor, Mom’s been ripping me on my kitchen since her first visit, AND I woke up early and alone on the Sunday after Valentine’s Day.
 
I thought a little “upgrade” work of my own around the house would make me feel better, or at least better prepared for Mom’s impending stay in the city.
 
Well, five weeks later, I feel a little better– I won’t have to hear anything about that fucking kitchen again, that’s for sure.