The Gilded Razor: A Book Club Recommendation!

by Sam Lansky

This was one difference between writing and drugs: with cocaine, after the first line, other lines followed whether I wanted them or not. When I wrote, I could control exactly how many lines there were, and when it all stopped.

I wasn’t old or mature enough to face my cognitive dissonance. He loves me; I am unlovable. He finds me attractive; I am disgusting.

I’d asked him whether he could get any ketamine, which was my favorite drug but was so hard to find, but when he’d called the dealer, his voice mail message had said, “I’m in fuckin’ jail!” which made us break into peals of laughter.

“There is only clean,” I whispered. “There is no in between.”

I had traded a series of flip messages with a girl named Annalise von Tegerfelden. Her photo showed her in a leotard, posing in a spectacular arabesque. She’d written that her interests were “ballet and Klonopin,”

“Do I need a green Dior trench coat in rehab?” I said. “I mean, what’s your rehab look?” I thought about it. “Urban safari,” I said. She nodded briskly. “Pack it.”

“You just think you had it so fucking rough,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like to lose anything.”

When I called him and said, “Charlie, I’m going to go see this quack doctor in Chinatown who gives you B12 shots in your ass and prescribes phentermine, no questions asked,” he asked me for the address so he could come, too, and when I told him, “Charlie, this guy I dated who once threw me down a flight of stairs is in town and wants to have dinner,” he recommended a fashionable new Asian fusion restaurant.