I was pretty straitlaced growing up. I was a perfect student, I didn’t drink too much, I didn’t do any drugs, I didn’t miss curfew, I cleaned my room, I got to school on time: I was good. I wasn’t born with that rebellious streak, and the idea of pushing boundaries made me sweat. But adolescence is not for the faint of heart, and between the usual run-of-the-mill torture of high school, familial trouble, and a raging eating disorder, I had to turn to something to get me through the jungle of existence. So when I was 17, I threw in the towel on my puritan behavior and stepped into the persona of an all-out hellion.
I had a year left on the prison sentence of my academic career. I wasn’t applying to college, and having already started auditioning, I was one foot out the door anyway. And I was drinking, a lot — most likely as a way to numb my gnawing self-hatred and the insatiable hunger I felt from starving myself.
I started taking trips to New York. I’m not sure how I convinced my father, but I suppose my prudish behavior up until that point had bought me enough good karma for him not to question my actions. I’d use the excuse of a meeting, an audition, or, better yet, a huge callback. What my father didn’t know was that there was no audition, there was no meeting, there wasn’t even a potential opportunity. I was going to New York to party myself into a black hole.
I fell in fast with a socialite crowd, sort of a real-life version of Gossip Girl: people who were endlessly rich with no real job or real jobs that they could do badly because their parents owned the companies. Instead, all they did was party and do drugs. I met them out one night while partying with a close friend and her then boyfriend, who was much older and well connected. He’d introduced us all, and for some reason they took a liking to me, so I started to tag along when they went out, like I was a lost puppy they had found on the street and adopted.
On our nights out, nobody really cared how old you were. As long as you were beautiful, rich, or with the beautiful and the rich, the velvet rope parted for you. I had an amazing fake ID, but I was never actually carded.
Instead, one of the socialite girls would grab my hand as we approached the sacred doors of whatever club we were attending that night, and the bouncer would pull back the velvet rope in perfect rhythm without us even having to break stride.
We partied like it was a job. There were rituals and timetables and rules of the game. I’d show up in New York, and they’d tell me what hot new fancy restaurant to meet them at. Dinner always started at an ungodly late hour, so I’d caffeinate myself not only for the pick-me-up but also to satiate the clawing hunger in my gut. Now, I could kick myself for not tasting so much as a bite at these Michelin-starred restaurants. But at the time, I was an expert at rearranging my plate so that it seemed like I’d actually ingested items on it. The girls always made fun of me for it in a loving way, calling me the little bird. I’d drink at the dinners, though. Oh, would I drink.
I can’t begin to imagine what these meals cost, between the food and the booze and the clumsily broken plates and stolen silverware. Because, yes, of course the wealthiest of the wealthy are always kleptos. These girls would steal silver, napkins; they’d steal a fucking mirror out of the bathroom if they could get it off the wall and out to a cab. Most strangely of all, we never paid for the meals. Nobody ever paid. As if these girls’ presence alone at these hot new spots was payment enough.
I look back on this time in my life like a piece of interactive theater — like I was in Sleep No More, and someone was ushering me from room to room, playing out a story for me to watch and learn from. It certainly was entertainment, and I certainly did feel like an audience member. But I cannot deny the fact that I was also a part of the act.
After dinner, we would head to 27th Street, and depending on the night, we would go to one of three clubs. Most times we ended up at Bungalow 8. The space was small, and the bodies were always crammed in so tightly you had to shove your way through like a salmon swimming upstream. I loved how loud and hot and cramped it was, like being inside of an expensive, debaucherous womb. It felt constrictive and claustrophobic in a way that made me feel safe. Like an elective straitjacket.
I’d drink until I felt fluid, like melted taffy. And then I would dance until I’d sweat out all the alcohol. And then I would start again. The feeling of being on that dance floor, violently jostled by bodies on every side of me, held up by their drunken dancing as I partook in mine, my blood thick with wine and endorphins? That was probably the closest I came to joy as a teenager.
Eventually we’d leave the clubs, piling into cabs, sprawled across each other, windows down no matter what season, yelling into the void of New York City whatever drunken obscenities came to mind, ending up at strangers’ apartments where vatlike bowls of cocaine sat in the middle of tables with straws beside them.
This freedom was a drug in and of itself. In New York, with these people, I got to live an alternate reality. One that was free of the crippling social anxiety I felt around my classmates, the concerned eyes of my friends, the questions about my weight, the crushing loneliness and confusion and despair I felt about my future. The fears that I would never make it as an actress, that I would never be skinny enough to love, that I’d never escape the prison of high school, or anorexia, or my own mind. I was unhappy at home. I was lost. And I was afraid. But in New York, I let go, I was released, and all of that fell away. I felt like I was invincible.
I went on like this for a while. Flying back and forth whenever I could make up a reason to. Falling into their current and letting it take me. It felt good to live in their world. To give up control and let them dress me and play with me like their doll.
When you party together, there is an expedited intimacy that occurs. A connection that knits together more quickly than the one with a friend you go to yoga with or get to know over coffee. Because drunken and drugged, you are your most primal, base selves together, and it makes you feel like you’ve seen into each other’s souls. It isn’t real. But it feels like it is. There was one girl in particular I’d gotten closest to. She was sweet in her entitled, bitchy, unimaginably rich kind of way. But at the time, she was the closest thing to a friend I had. I liked her. And she seemed to like me. As someone who wasn’t super-accustomed to having friends, that was enough for me.
I was back in L.A., living my other life as a teenager, when she texted me begging me to come to New York to see her. “I’m bored,” she said. “Come visit meeeeee.” And so I did. I hopped on a plane and made my way across the country looking forward to a week of forgetting myself within the speed of their fast-paced lives. But when I arrived, I found out the rest of the group was away on vacation. It was nearing Christmastime and they had all flown off to the various spots in the world where they spent their winter holidays. This girl wasn’t close with her family, though, and had stayed behind. As the holidays are wont to do, they had forced her into a deep depression. I soon realized she hadn’t texted me to come have a good time; she had asked me to come to console her. Which I tried my best to do, but honestly, I think she wanted to wallow.
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We went out every night, and instead of the carousel of hedonism I was accustomed to with this crowd, there was only a sense of a dark, desperate search for escape. She didn’t want to party to enjoy herself. Much like me, she wanted to party simply to escape the ache. I tried to help her keep her chin up, to be a good wingman, a fun-loving companion. But living in the storm of depression myself, I wasn’t very good at it.
My last night in the city, we went to Bungalow 8. I had hoped that the magic of the club itself would make for a good night and help cheer us both up. When we arrived, though, the vibe inside the mystical nightclub felt soured, heavy somehow, as if someone had leaked sadness in through the air vents. I lost her in the crowd for hours, which is saying a lot since that club was the size of an airport bathroom. When I finally found her, she was slumped on a low couch crying drunkenly into her hands. Her bones held the dull weight of the I-don’t-know-how-many-fucking-drinks she had consumed. I weighed about 90 pounds at the time, so trying to hoist her floppy body up off of that low couch was quite the feat. Finally, after what felt like ages, I got her up and headed toward the door, and I was coaxing her with tales of hot chocolate and pajamas when she tripped, forcing me to slightly bump into someone next to me.
I turned around to apologize when a girl twice my size with nails the length of my forearm flipped around to face me.
“Did you just fucking shove me?” she said, while pointing one weapons-grade fingernail straight at my eyeball.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t shove you. My friend is super-drunk and she tripped and I bumped into you. I’m so sorry.”
“You just fucking shoved me. Baby! Baby! This fucking bitch just fucking shoved me. Are you trying to start something? Baby! This bitch is trying to start something.”
It all happened so fast. Obviously I wasn’t trying to start anything. I have never wanted to start anything in my life. But here was this woman, waving her talons at my face yelling for her “Baby” somewhere else in the club and attempting to defend her territory because according to her, I had declared war. Meanwhile, I was trying to apologize and explain while also continuing to hold up my drunken deadweight friend.
At that moment, he emerged from the crowd, walked right past his girlfriend, strode right up to me, and shoved me in the chest.
“You fucking trying to start something with my girl?!”
It was Axl Rose. He looked like shit. He looked strung out, and it looked like he had white powder all over his nose.
He shoved me again.
“I asked you a fucking question! You trying to fucking start something with my girl?” I wish I could tell you that I had some fantastic retort here. Or that I shoved him back. Or that I grabbed my friend and ran. But honestly, my brain was on overload and all I did was stand there, like a possum playing dead, holding my friend and our jackets. It was hard to compute what was happening at the moment.
He took advantage of my paralysis and grabbed the coats out of my hands. He threw my friend’s coat on the ground and then looked at mine. It was a faux-fur vintage coat that I had found in a thrift store in the middle of nowhere, and I loved it. Apparently, so did Axl Rose. He put it on and started rubbing himself all over.
“Oooh, I like this coat! I’m gonna keep this coat. I look fucking good in this coat. This is mine now. Don’t you like my coat?!”
He went on and on as he stared daggers straight into my eyes. I truly think if there were fewer witnesses the man would have physically tried to fight me. When he was finally done with his performance, he turned to the two eight-foot-tall bouncers guarding the front door and said, “This girl attacked me. Kick her out and never let her back into this club ever again.”
And that was it. They grabbed both of us like we were Beanie Babies and chucked us out the front door and onto the freezing New York winter streets.
It was pouring rain outside. If it had been two degrees colder, it would have been snowing. I stood there in a total daze trying to process the sequence of events that had just transpired. I just kept seeing flashes: her nails, his hands on my chest, my coat, the white residue under his nose.
My friend groaned as if she were waking up.
“What happened?” she asked.
I hadn’t looked over at her during the debacle, too ensconced in my own survival to worry about anything else.
Seemingly, she had drunkenly dozed through the last 20 minutes of insanity.
I turned to her to say something, but as I opened my mouth, nothing came out. What the fuck do you say? Axl Rose just tried to start a fight with me and I think his girlfriend wants to hunt me down and kill me and he stole both our coats and we’ve been banned from Bungalow 8 forever? Instead I said nothing, stepping onto the curb to try to hail a cab.
My friend whined on the curb. “It’s cold. Where’s my coat?”
I told her it was gone. I told her that she’d lost it in the club. She started to cry, which was all I wanted to do, sit down on the fucking wet freezing curb and cry. But I knew if I started too I’d never stop. So instead I stood there in the street in the pouring rain, my hand raised high waiting for the light of the cab to come and take us away from this alternate-universe hell.
All I could think about was Axl Rose sitting mere feet away, behind that huge metal door, within the warmth of the club wearing my coat. At that moment, I knew that it was over. The high had lost its potency and I realized that the flying I’d been experiencing was actually just free-falling and I had finally hit the ground
I never saw that girl again or any of that group for that matter. I went to Bungalow 8 a few more times, but it was never the same. The magic was gone. I had a little ways to go yet before hitting rock bottom, but it was close. I could taste it, and I knew deep down that recovery was on the horizon. I’d like to think that I would have found my way there on my own, even without the door closing on my Sliding Doors New York party existence, but I can’t deny that it helped push me there. In a bizarre way I suppose I have to thank Axl Rose for ruining the vibe and releasing me from the spell of that destructive time.
So, thank you, Axl.
But also, can I have my coat back?
Excerpt from Does This Make Me Funny? by Zosia Mamet to be published on September 9, 2025 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Zosia Mamet.
