Read It's Not Me, It's You: Subjective Recollections From a Terminally Optomistic, Chronically Sarcastic and Occasionally Inebriated Woman for Free Online

twenty-one, I accidentally freebased cocaine. Sure, it seems a fairly unlikely thing to happen accidentally—I know what people might think when they read that: How do you accidentally freebase cocaine, an illegal drug? Isn’t it a bit like saying you accidentally ran down your ex with your car in his driveway? So, I understand how this could right from the get-go seem suspect. Add to that the fact that cocaine is a highly illegal and expensive drug, so it’s not like “accidentally” devouring all the donuts in a business meeting because they were just sitting there on the conference table taunting you with their deliciousness until you just suddenly went crazy and ate the whole box. Let’s face it, rock cocaine is rarely lying around a conference table—unless the conference table is at a record company.
    But one night, I, a nice Jewish girl from Forest Hills, New York, sat on my couch that smelled like cat pee even though we didn’t own a cat, and smoked cocaine.
    I’d snorted cocaine a handful of times at this point in my life. It was the eighties, and coke seemed about as dangerous as Molly Ringwald. It wasn’t unusual for someone to whip out a little baggie of powder at a bar, roll up a ten-dollar bill, and go to town. I didn’t often partake, mainly because when I do coke I feel amazing, self-confident, chatty yet genuinely interested in other peoples’ lives…for the first twenty minutes and then I lose all the good-feeling part but remain nervous, hyper, and fearful. For the next six hours, I’m slightly less fun to have around than an untrained Pomeranian. Uppers and my high-strung personality have never been a good match. Twenty years later, it’s only gotten worse. These days, I can’t even take a single Sudafed without wanting to go on a killing spree. But back then I was young, cocaine was hip, and I really wanted to make my relationship with drugs work—so I kept giving it a go.
    My roommate, Beth, was only seventeen when we arrived in Los Angeles. Her newfound freedom had spun her straight out of control and she never let something as trivial as “having a job” get in the way of a good time. It wasn’t that she didn’t work; she was spontaneous and not afraid to quit a job at the spur of the moment for another job with better pay or fewer hours. As a result, she’d been through quite a few gigs throughout our first year in Hollywood. The night we freebased, she’d been working in a clothing store on MelroseAvenue for a couple of weeks. She and the assistant manager, Angela, a Swede with a set of startlingly great real breasts, didn’t so much work at the store as much as they embezzled from the owners by intercepting new inventory, loading a ton of it into trash bags, hauling them outside to the trash, then pulling up in Angela’s Jeep around 2 a.m. to retrieve the bags before the actual trash trucks came. Then they could sell the clothes for a major markdown to their friends, reaping a nice little profit, or keep what they liked for themselves.
    As Beth became more and more radical, I found myself cowering in the opposite direction. Beth was seeking adventures and freedom from an oppressive upbringing, but I was looking to make a fresh start and find the security I lacked growing up. After a few crappy jobs, I found employment in a life insurance company as a clerk because I was under the impression that working for twelve grand a year in a stifling-hot office with coworkers who by and large only spoke Tagalog, the native language of the Philippines, would give me that stability I so craved. I thought this might also lead to a better credit rating and a little spending money, but so far the only thing it had added to my life was fifteen pounds, thanks to my cubicle’s close proximity to the floor’s vending machine.
    The morning of the freebasing incident, I was in a hurry to get to work; they’d just hired a new hyper-strict supervisor fresh out of the United States Military