"Just Do It! (for money, you hooker)" By: Selena C.

For me, the lone silver lining of rock bottom times in my life is that I start to resemble a female boxer who is cutting weight for an important match. My response to stress, depression, and rejection is maniacal workouts, recreational anorexia, and furious weight-loss cigarette smoking.

I’ve been in the best shape of my life during the darkest chapters.

After a horrible relationship with a fellow comedian in Boston, during which his belittling made me question my self-worth, I dropped about fifteen pounds and looked fantastic. A few weeks later I ran into an old friend who said that I looked great and asked how I’d lost the weight, what was my secret? I encouraged her to be publicly dumped by a narcissistic comedian in the same clique of friends. That will make the pounds melt off better than any regimen of balanced diet and exercise.

When almost all of my friends turned on me during the spring of my senior year in high school, I dropped weight and looked fantastic in my graduation day photos. I’m seen walking across the platform to accept my diploma wearing a tiny white dress and I’m grinning ear-to-ear both because I’m leaving my hellacious hometown for good... and also because I had spent the prior month on a steady diet of fruit, cigarettes, and self-hatred.

So of course my lowest rock bottom was an experience I endured while possessing D’Angelo-like abdominal muscles (D’Angelo the R & B sensation of the early 1990s; not D’Angelo the Boston-based sandwich chain.)

During 2002-2003 I lived in Chicago (a town where I knew a grand total of 4 people), worked as a paralegal (earning just-above-poverty wages and hating all of my co-workers except the one gay guy who collected kitsch in his cubicle), and went for long runs along the beach next to Lake Shore Drive every evening. These runs were really more like angry sprints set to Christina Aguilera’s anger anthem, “Fighter.”

My year of living in Chicago was like ten straight months of rock bottom experiences. It’s hard to select the absolute worst—the time a creepy old man approached me on Rush & Division (the Chicagoland apex of asswipes and creeps, also where I spent most of my nights, which explains a lot about why I hated Chicago) and tried to speak with me about ejactulation; the time both my debit card and my credit card were rejected when attempting to purchase a $5 Jamba Juice in Union Station; the time I watched my then-boyfriend grab the ass of another girl at a Christmas party where I already hated everyone in attendance for being rich and living in Lincoln Park; the time my boss posed the age-old question, “What the fuck were you thinking?” when I misfiled a client’s documents. So many choices! Which is the worst!? For sheer degradation, embarrassment, and sadness, for this rock bottom story, I think I might have to go with the night I was mistaken for a prostitute.

I moved to Chicago under the false impression that a city’s a city’s a city. I had never heard of Bratwurst or Big 10 Football or deliberately mispronounced French names (Ver-Sales for Versailles, Dez-Planes for Des Plains) but I soon would. I had a degree in English from a small, liberal arts college on the east coast and upon arriving in Chicago I learned two things pretty quickly: (1) If you didn’t go to a Big 10 school and you don’t BLEED their school colors, Chicagoans treat you like an alien; and (2) English degrees won’t do much for you in the real world, but an ethnic-sounding name can land you an interview at a magazine called Sophisticated Black Hairstyles (I didn’t get the job).

One night I went out with an old high school friend who had moved to Chicago and fallen in with a pretty crappy crowd of creeps. We went to her friend’s apartment for some drinks and while her friend absolutely creeped me out, I was just happy to be out of my apartment, as the heat would come on only sporadically and my evening hours that night had been spent fully clothed, huddled under my comforter in a futile attempt to stay warm. So to be in the living room of a mother-of-two who was estranged from her children and already so shitfaced that she could barely stand up in her skintight jeans and tube top was actually an improvement from where I had been a scant two hours before.

We headed to the crossroads of horrible people, dubious motives, and sleeze: the intersection of Rush & Division Streets. The population of this region is an amalgam of suburban bachelorette parties, 30-something tough guys who work in finance (and don’t you forget it!) and high-class hookers.

We first headed to a bar populated by old mafia men, The Grotto. I threw back many drinks that I could neither afford, nor could my liver really digest, as during that time I was drinking hard every night after my run. I would get home from work and put on my “Hamilton College” t-shirt and dream that one day I would be tearing down the running path, singing along about how a terrible time had ultimately made X-Tina stronger and harder (a fighter!) and pray that a normal, not-obsessed-with-Big-10-football, nice guy would see my t-shirt and strike up a conversation. It never happened, though. So every run was followed by a booze binge.

After conversing with some senior citizen sleeze bags at The Grotto, we headed to an even worse bar, Tavern on Rush. On the way, my two companions decided to blow some cocaine in an alley and the skeeze factor of the night went through the roof. I opted to have a cigarette alone on the sidewalk and marinate on a question that I asked myself at least once a day while in Chicago: What am I trying to prove? Why am I here? I am completely depressed. My current fantasy is to be hit by a car so that this nightmare will end—why don’t I just go home to Boston with my tail between my legs and pull myself out of this hell?

But before I could actually actively do anything, the drug duo, my “friends” were back from the alley, gnashing teeth and grinning. Onto Tavern on Rush.

Within moments of arriving, the three of us were pulled into a roped-off VIP area where the mother-of-two promptly straddled a businessman and continued writhing on his lap for the remainder of the night. The only conversation that I could manage was with another businessman who launched in on a missive about why he doesn’t wear a wedding ring and how somehow that means he is even more committed to his wife than guys who do wear wedding rings. I was surrounded by terrible people. But my apartment had no heat and was a freezing, lonely bus ride away. So I sat there and just kept drinking. One of the guys asked me to “be a doll” and go up to the bar to get him a drink. He then handed me a hundred dollar bill, winked, and gave me a knowing smile. He thought I was a prostitute.

I was so broke, I was tempted to simply take the hundred dollar bill and walk out. A hundred bucks—that’s a whole lot of hard-boiled eggs and tuna cans (the diet of broke people). But I’m too damn nice, so I went up to the bar (like a doll) and bought the guy his drink, then delivered it to him, and walked out of Tavern on Rush without saying goodbye to my friends. It was late and I had to get home to my unheated apartment so that I could cry myself to sleep on a frozen pillow. After all, the next day was a Saturday, which meant an extra long run.