The insiders

Photograph: Caroline Voagen Nelson

At some point I became one of those despicable New Yorkers who was “out” all the time, “schmoozing” and “circulating” and adding evermore names to my list of “friends.” Aside from the 10 to 15 hours a day I spend working (“working”) from home, I am never at home, because at a certain hour I cave to the first pangs of loneliness and text all 27 of my actual friends to see what they are doing. Spending five straight days in my apartment is going to be a challenge. A challenge that requires alcohol.

SUNDAY I awake in my clothes on a friend’s couch, conditions that in any conventional New York story arc should only ever result in brunch. Not today, though! Today I begin my period of rebellion. Today I buy groceries: Triscuits, two cans of soup, a few ounces of cheese, unsweetened cranberry juice and one container of Greek yogurt to ward off infections, four large bottles of pretentious high-alcohol beer, one half pint of raspberries. This is more groceries than I have purchased in months—$87 worth. I have a story due tomorrow morning, so naturally I spend the afternoon G-chatting with friends. I waste nearly two hours chatting with an anonymous blogger about an obscure ramification of the Lehman bankruptcy. I get my first visitor at 7; he brings cigarettes and mercifully has to be off to a party. He seems to feel genuinely sorry for me, as if I have cancer or something. I do not finish the story. I do drink two beers.

MONDAY I do some work and commence instant-messaging friends. Today they are obsessed with a magazine story about women who drink too much. I am mentioned in the story, upheld as the apotheosis of this trend of barely functional female alcoholics. The description seems singularly absurd to someone who stayed in last night and managed to get to sleep after only two beers, which is to say nothing. I get two visitors; they bring food, but since the only exercise I’ve gotten is the stairs that my lack of a buzzer compels me to use a few times a day, I haven’t quite worked up an appetite.

TUESDAY Tonight another friend wants to get a drink. I tell him he’s welcome to swing by. “Wait a second: Your assignment is staying in for five days?” he asks. “I sometimes do that unintentionally. You are giving endurance journalism a bad name.” No shit! Especially as today I will host my first impromptu “gathering.” It turns out that people are willing to scale five uniquely grimy LES flights of stairs and sit in my 150-square-foot living room for several hours without even getting any sex out of the matter. Tip for the housebound in search of company: Invest in dim lights and candles, and allow everyone to smoke indoors in the winter. I drink three and a half beers. I am still not hungry.

WEDNESDAY What else have I learned? Not how to manage my time or do my taxes or install shelving or (ha ha) cook anything. Thus far I have subsisted on coffee, one container of yogurt and a half-box of Triscuits. I suppose I should mention the oil-cleansing method, whereby you wash your face with castor oil and hot washcloths; it is about the only new thing I’ve tried. It is time-consuming, and I can’t really tell if it works better than regular soap. Today I follow up with some dramatic blue eye shadow, purely out of boredom. When still more friends visit, I offer them beer—the only commodity that will actually run out this week, simply because people keep visiting me. My consumption of a single beer tonight is leading me to believe my addiction is not to alcohol. It is to wasting time.

THURSDAY It’s dark and stormy. Longingly, I look out at the bar across the street. It’s not unusual for me to spend five days on end without venturing beyond the six-yard radius that encompasses my house, my deli and bar Marshall Stack, but even that is something. Suddenly, I miss the gentlemen who pour my pale ales and assemble my egg-and-cheese sandwiches. I realize I miss eggs a little, too, and “fresh” air. I note that Wall Street swindler Bernie Madoff will be granted bail and placed under house arrest for his financial crimes, a punishment so lenient his own sons refuse to sign the bail bond. I can safely attest that staying indoors is really not so bad—someone tell Madoff the good news.