I admit I was somewhat surprised that they wanted me. I’m not exactly the Mademoiselle type. I swear a lot, I write all day in the dirty T-shirt I slept
and cooked dinner in the night before, I have combat boots over my bare feet
and unshaven legs, and I am usually unbrushed everywhere and in a horrible mood.
When I go out at night, if left to my own devices, I dress like Frankenhooker. You’ll find me in tight vinyl and KISS boots, smoking and drinking and getting in playful slap fights. I always pictured Mademoiselle as a magazine
devoted to healthful young ladies dressed in pastel angora midriffs with natural eye shadow and little white nursing keds — stuff which an upper-middle-class pedophile would like to see on girls in the sixth grade. Something about my involvement with this made me feel like one of the GIs in “The Manchurian Candidate” when they were brainwashed into thinking they were sitting in the old woman’s botany club. But I ignored the big Chinese Communist in the back of my mind and said “yes ma’am.”

On the phone I was connected with a woman
we’ll call “Pauline.” Pauline had the type of phone voice that has always
made me want to beat a puppy’s head in with a tennis racquet — the kind of girlish, Nutrasweet-y, hair-flippy, half-apologetic liltiness that I associate
with women who work in clothing stores and make it politely obvious that they
feel superior to you. I pictured her as a pristine
Asian beauty in soft rosy light, with laser-cut hair and a body-conscious pink Chanel
suit, speaking on a green marble princess-style phone from an office decorated
by Danielle Steele.

“We need an article about ‘How To Remain
Friends With Your Ex,’” lilted Pauline. At this point, I made Fatally Dumb Assumption #2: That Mademoiselle’s readers could actually benefit from my experiences, since I had remained good friends with all of my most recently exed-boyfriends.

“Sure!” I growled in my best imitation of femininity, trying not to sound like I’d been gargling cigars and Jack Daniels for the last ten years. I think I even used one of my fake accents on Pauline, a subtle slightly-Swedish-or-maybe-French-having-lived-in-America-for-yearsy thing that
I normally only use to intimidate auto mechanics.

I launched into a draft immediately. “Don’t stalk him in a little tiny dress at four in the morning with a bottle of peach schnapps!” I advised. “Don’t leave
stupid little notes on his car! If you keep having sex with him, you’re a loser! He’s more likely to be your friend if he still wants to have sex with you!”

Filled with authorial pride, I shot Pauline my first draft. I could already hear her gushing: “Oh my God, this is GREAT. This is so
FUNNY. How did you do it so FAST? Would you like a MONTHLY COLUMN?” and I would be all shucks and modest.

When Pauline called back, her apologetic liltiness was turned up from its usual
three to a blaring eight. “Um, first off, it’s really FUNNY,” she said in a way
that made me believe that she really felt sorry for me for thinking that kind of
thing was amusing, but that I probably couldn’t help it because my parents were abusive winos and I had been raised without ever being given a bath. “But we’ve got some problems with the tone … it’s kind of mean. See, it’s just not ‘Mille.’ “

“MILLE?!” I choked, the word invoking a vision of a Hello
Kitty slumber party full of rich cheerleaders on rollerblades watching 90210. “Excuse me, Pauline, but you’ve read my stuff … do you really think I’m capable of ‘Mille?’ “

“I’m Fed Exing you our last five features. We want the article to be actually
helpful. Use situations and quote people, we like that. Let me give you an
example of how to set it up…”

With that, Pauline diagrammed for me the Absolute Structure of a Mademoiselle
piece in all its imperturbable and inflexible glory. It was like an example of the Sacred Geometry used to build the Temple of All Articles about how to remain friends with your ex-boyfriend. The dark reality settled on me like a wet claw: They didn’t want Me. They wanted a “writer” to write a faceless article that would blend seamlessly into the stylistic stucco of all of their other
“helpful” pieces on being an inoffensive upper-middle-class-female-who-wants-a- husband-someday-in-America.

I tried. I gave them what I thought were some pretty bitchin’ situations from my own life. I wrote, “Serge (my ex-roomate) was having a
loin-scathing liaison with the girl downstairs, Lindy, which ended horribly, then festered over a period of weeks until he was obsessively chain-smoking and muttering profanities to himself, lying with his ear suctioned to the unwashed hardwood
floor over her bedroom, to hear if she was ‘doing anybody.’ This became such a
twisted obsession that Serge eventually moved to India to live in a cave and
make shoes. India can be avoided if you establish a healthy physical distance at the beginning … “

“But we want it to be true ,” implored Pauline, who really was trying to reassure
me and be helpful.

“It is true!” I snapped back, knowing for a fact that I was the only person
working for the mag who actually had friendships with my exes. Pauline had
confided to me other that none of the “Milles” had.

Yet they argued with me. “We want a section about Why You’d Want To Be Friends With Your Exs,” helpfulled Pauline. “Make it like an outline. And one of the reasons we want in there is He’s Seen You Naked.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?!” I barked in outrage.

“You know … a lot of women are insecure about their bodies.”

“Oh, so ‘Mille’ is insecure?”

There was a pause. I offered Pauline a deal to cut our losses. I told her she
could pull the plug and I’d understand. I told her I wasn’t that kind of girl.

She went way out of her way to get me to try again. She gave me four more suggestions of things that “Mille” wanted. She said she’d give me $600. Out of a Dante-esque desire to punish myself, I agreed.

Over a period of eight months, I did four more drafts of this article. I tried
everything, even being “nice.” I removed all of my personal taste and style and
studied all of their previous articles, and tried to paint the whole thing in by
the numbers as honorably as possible. I put in all the stuff she told me to put
in, all of which I thought was ridiculous.

“Sondra (the executive editor) didn’t like the part about Why You’d Want To be
Friends With Your Ex,” said a downcast Pauline after I called her to ask about
the third or fourth draft.

“Oh really ,” I said, a barely contained explosion of bile straining to burst forth.

“She said if you were reading the article, you’d already know why you wanted to be friends. You know, we’ve been calling this article, ‘The Article That Can’t
Be Written,’ because, like, each situation is so different, there’s just really
no good set of rules that all of the editors here can agree on. You’re, like,
the third writer we’ve tried.”

Pauline then told me that the head editor also
“had problems” with the other five things I was told to put in the article.

I wept. I shook and raged. The phone melted in my trembling paw as the
forces of darkness raised my body temperature to that of an exploding kiln. I
threatened to smear the building where “Mille” resided with the blood of its
editorial department. I rained animalistic tribal curses in an unknown dialect
down upon the Conde Nast empire. Our relationship had moved into that state of ex-ness from which future friendship is impossible. Pauline finally agreed to give me another $600 as a kill fee, with the stipulation that I remain in my own city and never call her again.

There are very few things that make me hate women to the point where I’d like to
have all my sex parts bored out. Whiny female performance art having to do with
fat thighs and waiting by the phone for a man to call is first on the list. I’ll
give you three guesses what the next one is.

Once people have crashed the door of taboo and disclosed that they are mutual members of the tribe, however, they furtively bond with each other over which pill they’re taking to keep the beast in the sock drawer. Prozac was, of course, the number one for a while (if you had Nirvana’s Nevermind in your CD collection, chances are you too were on Prozac). But many now favor antidepressants such as Zoloft (called “Soul-Off” by those who don’t enjoy its spooky detached qualities), or drugs like Wellbutrin, which is daring because nobody really knows why it works and purportedly has the extra bonus of causing some people to have orgasms every time they yawn or sneeze, and a little pink pill I’ll call “P” which drives one in a thousand people to become instantly suicidal.

Antidepressants, for all of their high-tech glory, are still prescribed mostly by smell and intuition and voodoo guesswork, and my doctor might just as well have had a dartboard with the names of the 10 most popular pills fanning out from the center in different colors.

I go to a very expensive and reputable psychologist. When she finally decided that I did indeed have a biochemical depression she referred me to a psychiatrist. Knowing that I had no medical insurance and would be paying for the visit in cash, she found one who would see me for $60.

The person to whom I would be entrusting the seasoning of my brain opened the door and I found myself in a small, windowless troll cave filled with plates of unfinished food, pen tops all over the floor, empty wadded-up bags, boxes exploding with dog-eared files sticking out in all directions, and, most disturbingly, clothing shoved indiscriminately into the largely empty bookcases. The doctor was a little Freud-cum-Willy Wonka man with a pointy white Satan beard and the posture of a hermit crab. He found a clipboard under his couch and asked me a few questions.

Thus began our throw-the-baby-in-the-pool-and- see-if-it-swims quest for The Pill That Works. Antidepressants, for all of their high-tech glory, are still prescribed mostly by smell and intuition and voodoo guesswork, and my doctor might just as well have had a dartboard with the names of the 10 most popular pills fanning out from the center in different colors.

The first drug we tried was P. I had been doing such a ghastly amount of aimless sobbing and self-medication with Excedrin PM and six-dollar Merlot that I was thrilled to be told that in four to five weeks I would probably feel much, much better. As any depressed person will tell you, four or five weeks is a second Ice Age, but I was infected with a small germ of hope, so I drove the tumbrel down to Thrifty and bought my expensive little tickets to what I hoped would be the land of well-being.

Within four days I found myself sleepless and rabidly bizarre, with my eyes sunk into my skull like a dessicated raccoon’s and an absolute dead certainty that I was feeling far more lucid and much, much better, except that I was definitely going to have to kill myself right away, as soon as I got it together to write the letters.

This attitude only struck me as odd when I found myself weeping openly at the testimonial of a preternaturally cheery Hispanic gas station attendant who cornered me over the beef jerky at the mini-mart: “Eh! Jou only leeve one time! Ees not good to be sad. You got to be happy! Smileen! OK!” and then sang a festive folk song in his native tongue and did a manic little dance with his oil rag. His words were the balm of angels, and I immediately stopped taking the little pink Death Mints (as I had fondly begun calling them) and went back to my unkempt doctor.

“Well,” he said thoughtfully, taking the pencil out of his dark, furry ear, “wanna try Wellbutrin?”

“Sure!” I said, thinking it would be truly romantic, since it was the antidepressant my boyfriend was on and I thought we would be even closer on the same cute chemical wavelength.

My first few weeks on Wellbutrin were like the rocketing ascendancy of the retarded guy in Flowers for Algernon. Dogs had complex and colorful personalities. I read and memorized obscure dates in thick textbooks. My sex drive blasted through the roof, and even though I didn’t climax every time I sneezed, my entire body was a joyously attuned erogenous zone. I woke up each morning with a list of productive things to do in my head and accomplished them. I walked around like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, braying popular show tunes, clicking my heels, and sweeping old women off the sidewalk in order to ply them with open-mouthed kisses. “There oughta be a law against how good I feel!” I crowed merrily out of the blue in supermarkets and post offices.

Several weeks later, at the peak of my chipperness, I got vaguely upset after a minor phone altercation with my boyfriend and found myself with an amazingly violent fit of physiological shudders not unlike an epileptic seizure. “Gosh, it must be the Wellbutrin!” chirped Dr. Strange. “Wanna try Prozac?” I said I’d think about it.

Today, my expensive and reputable psychologist decided that I might have Adult Attention Deficit Disorder and asked me if I would consider getting on something like Dexedrine or Ritalin, since my drug history indicated that I had a liking for speed. I said I’d think about it. I figure that if medical science is going to root around in my brain like a bunch of chimps trying to fix a helicopter, I might as well opt for the most entertaining prescription.

I’ve been off all pills for two weeks now, and every time I crack one of the long-haired textbooks I was devouring like airport novels last month, it looks like a vast and unintelligible calculus equation and my eyes cross and I want to watch TV. Dogs look dumb again. I’m cynical and annoyed. The world I live in is a dark and bitter place filled with malicious greed and inconsolable grief. And hey, for now, it’s nice to be back.