Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (13 page)

The last thing I remember is telling Claire about the poet Frank O’Hara, the way he’d said that after the first glass of vodka you can accept anything about life, even your own myste-riousness. After that, my own mystery opens up.

There are
only so many calamities that could have warranted this hospital gown. My first thought is that I lost my footing on the path leading up from the dock and cracked my knee in the place where it still wasn’t fully healed from the surgery. One would think I’d remember that kind of fall, but perhaps the pain of it blacked me out.

For one horrible moment, it also occurs to me that Allen, who had driven, might have had too many sips of straight rum and veered the car off the road on the way home. It was only a month ago that a boy in our class got drunk and drove his car into a lake, where it sank like an old tire, and he had to unroll the window to swim out. For a moment, I think whiplash could be responsible for my lumped head and stiff neck, not to men-tion the amnesia. But then I decide I’d surely remember something from the moments before we crashed: gasping, blackness spreading across the windshield, the sound of pine branches scraping the flanks of the car.

I should call one of the girls who’d been with me, to see if she can fill in the gaps. But when I look for the portable phone, someone has removed it from its cradle on my bureau, as if to prevent that from happening.

I step softly
to my full-length mirror, using the ballet-walk where you stand only on the balls of your feet.

The image reflected back at me makes me cup my mouth with both hands: I look like a woman in a zombie film from the

1950
s. My hair looks like it’s been replaced with a Halloween

wig; it is teased into a high pile of knots and dusted with dirt and leaves, and something sticky has lacquered the ends together. From this position, I can make out a whole range of fingerprints that wrap around my forearms in shades of brownish-blue and yellow. A cat-scratch is carved into the cor-ner of my eye; aside from that, my face looks slack and pasty, but unmarked.

I can see now that I’m wearing hospital booties with my gown. They are blue ankle socks with plastic beads on the soles,

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presumably so you won’t slip on the linoleum floors while you’re fleeing the ward.

I add another item to the list of possible accidents: psychiatric emergency.

My alarm clock says it’s
10:30
. That tells me that whatever

happened must be serious because no one has bothered to wake me for my poetry workshop. I was scheduled to spend the weekend at a conference for Worcester County’s most promis-ing young writers, and it started more than two hours ago. The workshop is one of those college résumé padders that my mother would send me to in any state short of death. (Just two months ago, she
forced
me to spend a week at diplomacy camp at Washington, D.C., and just to spite her, I’d skipped the lectures on youth leadership to buy forties of beer and drink them with local delinquents on the hill behind the dorm.)

I would stay in my room all day, trying to figure out what happened, if I didn’t desperately need a glass of water. My throat is so parched it feels raw, and each swallow is arduous.

I keep the hospital booties on because the morning has the cold nip of fall, but I trade the gown for a sweatshirt and a pair of flannel pants. I try to brush my hair, and realize with one painful stroke that the task could take all afternoon, so instead I wind the whole snarled mess into a lopsided bun. I look at my-self in the mirror and wince before heading downstairs to meet my parents with the premonition that I am fucked.

It is
my first blackout.

I will never again experience one so comprehensive. I get the details first from Claire, who I find pretending to sleep on the couch in the living room. My parents will rehash them with me

again later, as will Kat and Allen and Abby when I see them Monday morning at school. The remaining gaps I’ll fill in years later, when I get the courage to ask my father more questions, and when I see my emergency file.

I passed out on the dock in a puddle of my own vomit. I imagine it was mostly liquor because my dad told the doctor I didn’t eat dinner that night. Before that, I pulled my shirt up over my shoulders to show my bra to someone’s brother because, knowing I was slipping into oblivion, he’d asked me what color it was. I’d also professed a soul-shattering love for an older boy who had taken me for a drunken walk in the woods a few months earlier—a boy who had pushed my back into the cragged banks of a stream and called me a baby when I wouldn’t let him pull off my underwear.

After I tottered and fell sideways onto the planks of the dock, nobody could wake me. Allen, Abby, Claire, and Kat carried me up the hill to the road by my arms and legs, which is why my body bears what look like forty finger-shaped bruises. They dropped me a few times, too, which explains the raised bumps on my butt and the back of my head.

When they tell me this, I envision a dead body—not my body, but the body of someone in a thriller movie who has just been clubbed with a paperweight and dragged in a bloody streak across the floor by her feet. When I ask them why they didn’t roll me up in a rug, no one finds it funny.

The girl whose house we were at brought out a pair of pilled sweatpants because I’d retched all over my jeans. I can’t imagine that she would have let me inside, given that I was liable to puke over all manner of Venetian rugs and calico curtains, so I’ll come to imagine that they pulled off my jeans outside on the porch, leaving my underwear fully exposed while they struggled to

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stick my feet through the sweatpants’ elasticized legs. Then they draped me across the backseat of Allen’s car and drove me to Abby’s house.

From what I can tell from the medical records, this whole or-deal took at least an hour. It was around
12:30
. Abby’s parents were asleep when my friends lugged me in through the front

door.

They tried to give me a shower, to clean off the combination of liquor, vomit, dirt, and leaves that adhered to me. I’ll never know if I was fully naked or if they left my underthings on because I am too embarrassed to ask. Nor will I know if Allen was there while they did it, though I don’t know how they could have held me under the showerhead without his strength. Afterward, they must have put me back into the sweatpants because they are there in the plastic bag that my dad carried home from the hospital, and they are all but crusted with vomit. My mom will wash them and insist that I return them, in a most undignified moment, to the girl at school on Monday morning. By the time I was showered, I had already missed my curfew,

so Abby called my father to tell him not to worry. She said I’d fallen asleep while we were watching a movie and asked if I could stay the night.

My father hadn’t believed her. He asked to speak to her parents, and when she said they were sleeping, he asked to talk to me. I was dangling over the edge of her brother’s bunk bed, getting sick again. In a second-long flash of memory, I recall someone shaking my shoulders and telling me to pull it together for two minutes, probably so I could ask my dad if I could stay the night. When they held the receiver to my ear, I slurred, “I’ll be home in fifteen minutes, Daddy.”

Years later, he will say it was one of those pivotal moments—

he sensed that the whole world swung on whether he went back to sleep or drove to me.

Claire went
to the hospital with my father. She was an emergency medical trainee and knew how to calculate heart rates and breaths per minute, which she did throughout the thirty-minute drive.

After everything, it is the thought of Claire answering my dad’s questions that makes me feel most guilty. He is intimidat-ing when he’s not trying to be, and bloodcurdling when he is. If he puts the full boom into his voice, he can make boyfriends tremble and customer-service reps cry. When he asked Claire what happened, she told him nearly the whole truth. She injected fiction only when he asked where we got the vodka—she said older boys from the neighborhood brought it, instead of ad-mitting that we poured it from her parents’ depository of Absolut jugs.

When the car pulled up in front of the emergency room, my father says, he carried me through the doors the way he used to carry me to bed.

The doctors tested my urine for drugs. According to the doc-tor’s notes, it was the only time I showed signs of life. When the nurse was trying to insert a catheter I kept muttering, “Stop, it’s embarrassing,” proving that even semiconscious, I was self-conscious. In my chart, there are ten pages of lab results, includ-ing all sorts of decimal numbers and strands of letters that I don’t understand, but really don’t need to. Alcohol alone was responsible for knocking me out, a combination of rum and vodka and coffee liqueur. On one page there is a long list of chemical

compounds for which I came up
nondetect
.

Claire tells me the doctors seemed certain they would find

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some substance, besides alcohol, sweeping through my system. It is the year that everyone first read about Rohypnol, the brand name for flunitrazepam, the tranquilizer used to treat sleepless-ness, anxiety, convulsions, and muscle tension. Four months earlier, two women who had been raped after someone slipped them Rohypnol testified before Congress to urge them to take action against the vast numbers of people who were smuggling the drug into the United States. One of them said of the man who raped her, “This guy could have sawed me in half and I wouldn’t have known the difference.” A classification known as “date-rape drugs” had emerged. And everyone in the ER thought I was on them.

My dad will say later that the doctors were far less compas-sionate when my test results revealed I was just another teenaged girl who’d nearly poisoned herself by drinking. I will always wonder, though, if the staff ’s lack of sympathy had more to do with another brief flash of a memory, in which I clawed at the tubes tethered to my arm and screamed at the faint impression of a woman, maybe a doctor or nurse, calling her a “dumb-ass bitch.”

No one
could imagine that I’d done this to myself. My dad, particularly, was convinced that someone had held a gun to my head. It was beyond his comprehension that I’d willed myself to this level of past gone. I was an A student in English, psychology, and art. Sure, math and science were touch-and-go, but that just meant I was right-brained. As far as he knew, will was what I reserved for the PSATs and ballet auditions. It was what I used to solicit cash for the mall.

My charts say my skin was cold and clammy, which is one of the signs of alcohol poisoning, as is the fact that I was only semiconscious. When my tests came back they showed my blood alcohol content to be
0.25
. A
0.4
BAC is considered lethal for the average person, but it can take less for young people and first-time drinkers.

At sixteen, I’m
5'2
" and
105
pounds with a ski parka on, which means it would take about one hour of downing eight to ten drinks to kill me. Claire told the doctors I’d been drinking for an hour and a half. I’d had half a thermos of vodka, plus im-measurable sips of rum and Kahlúa, straight from the bottles. As the doctor told my father, a few more drinks and I’d have fallen into a coma or died right there on the dock.

No matter how many ways I go over the story, I’ll never know if some part of me sought that kind of close call. A good bit of it was inexperience; it was not waiting for all those gulps of liquor to absorb into my system, but just expecting to feel them right away. But I also wonder if that night wasn’t the first glimmer of a budding death drive, what Freud called the in-stinct we all have to return to the perfect stillness we felt before birth. Other girls my age steered into that urge with starvation diets or razor blades, but I chose alcohol because it seemed far less fanatical. On nights when I felt sad, particularly, I could feel my drinking accelerate.

I’d been saddened a lot lately, and stressed. Even with new friends like Kat, high school was a nightmarish system of checks and balances. It required observing yourself constantly, making sure you distinguished yourself enough to be accepted, but not to the point where you might garner resentment. Schoolwork required inscribing index cards for hours, all the while main-taining the illusion that you didn’t give a shit about the decimals of your GPA. Getting a date required acting just uninterested

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enough to make a boy interested in asking you. Every consideration required reconsideration. I’d begun waking up at
4:30 a.m.
so I could reappraise my outfit for the school day; the fate of the next two years seemed to weigh on whether I chose suede cow-boy boots or Adidas sneakers.

My parents always swore that in my childhood they had to let me win at board games. If, by the lucky stroke of the plastic wheel, my father would accidentally beat me at Candy Land, I would fly into fits of bawling that I’m told would last for hours. If I couldn’t triumph, I didn’t want to play. I would pack up my toys and go home. This was perhaps how I felt about being sixteen.

But I’ll never know if I intended to forfeit. They pumped my stomach, and I sprang back to life that morning in my bedroom. I went directly back to homeroom. I did not pass “Go.” I did not

collect $
200
.

Saturday
, at breakfast, my parents seem almost serene. The coffee is still steaming. The Saturday
Boston Globe
is still spread out beneath us, in sections. My dad is sitting across from me, with his elbows folded on the woven tablecloth my parents bought in Greece early in their marriage. My mom is at the head of the table, with her hands crossed on the paper’s business section. Bear is pacing the floor by our feet, hoping for a dropped cube of cantaloupe. The seating arrangement makes me feel like a fox in an English hunting painting. It feels like everyone is closing in around me, and I feel the terror of being surrounded.