Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (17 page)

lights of Crouse Hospital carpet the incline like bits of glittering glass. I don’t know whether it was the height, or the buzz, or the disorientation that came with having a strange boy’s hands cup my cheeks, but my head was filled with a whirling sensation like I was about to fall. I’d sobbed on the spot for being a lousy cheat. For months, I’ve known about the rumor that most high school relationships end by Thanksgiving of freshman year. It is a warning as old as the “freshman fifteen,” and probably far more imminent. It is much easier to keep fifteen pounds off your ass than it is to keep your interest in someone else’s when

it’s six hours and four hundred miles away.

By Christmas of second semester, almost every girl on my floor unleashes her high school beau for one of two reasons: The breakups are either reactionary or cautionary. The girls have ei-ther been drunk and adulterous, or they can’t trust that they won’t be. One tells me early on a Saturday morning, while do-ing shots of Jim Beam with some film major she just met, somebody else rolling a joint, and time spinning by like a bicycle, that she couldn’t be loyal to anything except the song on the stereo, the first down comforter that bulldozed her under, the cool glass of water in the morning that tamed her cotton-mouthed throat. She couldn’t be faithful to one man. This is college, after all. At a house party, you can’t wait in line for the toilet without some doll-faced boy leaning in to try to kiss you.

I can’t even last until Christmas. It is during Reed’s next surprise visit that I decide to break things off with him. Tess and I sit in the dorm bathroom, drinking glasses of Zima she’s stirred with cubes of hard candy to infuse the drinks with a sour-apple taste. For a half hour we sit and drink, while Reed waits in my room, Tess snubs cigarettes out in the drain, and I drum my feet against the side of the bathtub and rehearse what I’m going to

say. Only after the tart-flavored malt warms my insides do I emerge and say, “Reed, we need to talk.”

One night
, at a house party being thrown by one of the university’s sports teams, I meet a gymnast named Hannah, who per-suades me to try out for the cheerleading team. We are sitting at the kitchen’s beige plastic patio table, holding cups of viciously yellow beer and blowing smoke in each other’s faces, and she is sweetly telling me what to expect: the audition space, the judges, and the stunts I would need to knock off.

Maybe it’s the beer bubbling through me, but as Hannah speaks, I forget to be indifferent. I drop the brooding face that college has given me the freedom to wear openly, now that my mother isn’t around to remind me to smile. The sullenness I dis-guise as artistic sensibility gives way, and I let Hannah convince me. She assures me that my height-to-weight ratio will make me easily throwable.

The next weekend, I drag myself to Archbold Gym, almost as a test to myself, the way people joke that the best way to curb your drinking is to follow through with the promises you make when you’re drunk. Inside, the high-vaulted room is full of hopefuls, stripped down to their sports bras, orange stars glued to their cheeks.

The coach pairs us off, one girl and one guy. I’m assigned to a big fellow named Joe, a veteran. He holds me tight around the waist and says, “Stay straight as an arrow,” before tossing me skyward and grabbing hold of my heels. Standing upright in his hands, I don’t dare draw a breath, afraid to lose the inner light-ness I never knew I possessed. When it’s time for the gymnastics portion I tell Joe I can’t manage the compulsory back tuck, and he says, “Don’t worry, just jump and tuck your knees to your

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chest.” I do exactly that, while Joe launches me backward into orbit and then catches me like a fly ball to left field.

When I make the team it’s like winning the grand prize for acclimation. As my prize I am awarded a cheek-grazing skirt, an orange ribbon for my hair, and plastic pom-poms that shed like the dickens. I have regular five-second appearances on ESPN, clapping and smiling into the lens ’til the cameraman says, “And we’re out.” My mother puts a notice in the local pa-per. People I knew in high school email to say they saw me on TV during a game against Rutgers. By all appearances, I am a bona fide student athlete, earning college credit and everything. At football games, boys I’ve never met before lean over the field gate and ask for my phone number.

Privately, I feel like a phony. “Cheerleader” is a title that fast becomes a metaphor for the girl I have always tried to be, and miserably failed. On the green rubber turf of the Carrier Dome, I just can’t yell loud enough. I can’t smile wide enough. Without a buzz streaming through my system, I can’t laugh off a fall from Joe’s shoulders. I can’t drum up the obligatory level of op-timism.

My days course into a stream of classes followed by team practices, weight-room training, and one-on-one practices with Joe. I dread doing stunts. My stomach churns for hours before I climb onto a pyramid that’s three people high, before the coach makes me stand in the hands of two girls who are standing on the shoulders of two guys. The view from the top is appalling, and my nervous ankles can’t quit shaking. I spend hours in the gymnastics room, practicing back flips that I can’t seem to mas-ter, slapping my head over and over into the blue crash mat, unleashing a string of
fuck, shit, fuck
s. I am twitchy and sleep deprived. Weight falls off me.

The only thing that eases me through the bruises from my misfired back tucks is the promise of drinking with my teammates after practice. I don’t think this is avant-garde, mainly because it’s not. Roughly half of college athletes, both male and female, are binge drinkers, and a
2001
study by the NCAA found that 80 percent of college athletes drink.

At S.U., the sports teams throw the most desirable weekend parties. People pack shoulder to shoulder into a basketball player’s South Campus apartment, until the air inside is more humid than the gym’s treadmill room and an overflow of bodies spills out through the sliding glass door and into the trodden backyard. At these parties, there are all varieties of groupies and leeches, and players move from room to room with an en-tourage as daunting as any tabloid star’s.

The experts
say that jocks are susceptible to “group think,” a decision-making model that includes collective rationalization (i.e., “There is no
I
in
TEAM
”) and the illusion that shit can’t hap-pen. I, however, am a freethinker. On my teammate’s birthday, I do shots of Devil Springs, a
160
-proof vodka that burns my throat like acid and makes me cry out in awe. Afterward, I collide with the coffee table while having a cake fi with the birthday boy, in which we are nailing one another in the face with fi of devil’s food cake. The next morning I go to Spanish class with a black welt on my knee and chocolate frosting in my hair.

By Thanksgiving, I start to realize that the drills we do in practice—the nonstop crunches, reverse triceps dips, and sui-cides—are diminishing my tolerance for cocktails. Lighter, I’m noticing, I have a greater margin for error.

One night, I do a few shots of Bacardi with Hannah and Joe, nothing that would have done me in when I weighed
113
, but at

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105
I am caught by surprise when the floor totters under me, and Hannah tells me I’m slurring my words. The next thing I know, I’m throwing up in the trash can while Joe holds my head, his giant hand pinching the back of my neck like he’s lift-ing a kitten from a crate. When I start passing out, he carries me to my room in a trust fall.

One year later, when Joe dies in a car crash, stone sober, I won’t be able to stop thinking of the boozy wrecks that he pulled me from like the jaws of life. I’ll unearth an old photo of us drinking Rheingold and get goosefl I’ll be forced to fl it over.

Also by
November, I have profound misgivings about Wendi, an ill will that tears through my abdomen like an ulcer. I feel the first stabs of injury on the night I wake up and hear her clatter-ing into the phone about me, telling her boyfriend she hates my clothes and my friends, not to mention the way I sleep, eat, an-swer the phone, and employ the word
rad.
My bile swells the day she short-sheets my bed. By the time she tries to solicit me to write her women’s studies paper for fifteen dollars, odium is choking me. The sentiment cuts off all other basic functioning. All the college-prep books that my mother ordered obses-sively before I left home warned me about this. Tensions are bound to arise, the authors wrote, when you’re sharing a room the size of a bus-stop shelter. They said get out of there. It’s eas-ier to keep the peace when you’re both busy. Heeding that ad-vice, I try to distance myself from the room and from the dorm itself, where Wendi, as if she senses the loner tendencies with which I constantly struggle, has used them to rally the fourth—

floor girls against me.

One night, the hallway carries the sound of a conversation she is having a few rooms away. From my bed, the acoustics are

good. I can hear the high whine of Wendi’s voice, telling Cara P. and Julie L. that I stay away from the girls on our floor because I think I am better than they are, and that’s why I go out and drink with my teammates. I feel as though Wendi has stuck a voodoo pin through my heart because that’s where the ache is. She has gone right for my weakness and twisted it into misun-derstanding.

For a moment, I consider running down the hall in my night-shirt and telling them the truth. I want to say,
I don’t avoid you because I think I’m superior, I do it because I think I’m inferior. I do it because I think you don’t want me, and that lowliness is the reason that I drink, too.
But I know I couldn’t deliver that message without crying, which would only substantiate the weirdness and weakness that I think they suspect of me. So instead, I roll over to face the wall, and when Wendi comes in, I pretend to sleep.

I retreat even further from the dorm. I study in a fifth-floor cubicle at Bird Library, among poetry volumes that haven’t been checked out since the early eighties. I eat sodden pizza with Hannah in the student center. I learn to lie in bed wearing head-phones, relying on the lyrics to fold me into sleep. I handle Wendi with kid gloves until light beer hinders my diplomacy. One night, after power hour with Hannah, my dormant resentment bursts and impels a tsunami. I am staggering down the hallway to my room, dragging my hands along the walls on either side of me, when Wendi cuts me off in the doorway, hands on her hips, carping about a phone message that I wrote on a Post-it and forgot to stick to her mirror. Under any other circumstances, I would bow my head and make an apology. But on this night, I feel as shimmering and fluid as a jellyfish drift-

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ing on a wave. The words in my head are rhythmic and pulsat-ing, and there is nothing to stop me from saying them. I tell Wendi to leave me alone because I can’t handle her bullshit.

It only gets easier from there. From there, I will come home more nights, feeling as lucent as the vodka I drank, half hoping Wendi will start a fight with me. All week, I will save up my rage for her. I’ll stockpile it like ammo, so it will be there on the weekend, when I’m drunk enough—and therefore brave enough—to retaliate. The night she makes a reference to my dirty-clothes pile, I’ll throw the telephone against the wall, split-ting it open to reveal a tangle of rainbow-colored wires. The night she takes me on over a cable bill, I’ll slam the door in her face so hard that the force of it blows her hair back. One night, I’ll come home and rip her Mariah Carey calendar off the bul-letin board for no reason other than I’ve decided that somebody needs to do it.

I’m uncomfortable with my new capacity for drunken bel-ligerence. I have a feeling it’s the type of thing that people can use against me, the way prosecutors on TV crime shows call character witnesses to prove that the defendant is capable of committing an unspeakable crime. But I console myself with the Claude Bernard quote “Hatred is the most clear-sighted, next to genius.” I praise myself for expressing malice plainly, like a man, for howling and swearing and knocking over what-ever is handy, instead of employing rumors and nasty looks, the subterfuge of women.

Wendi is not so progressive. By chance, I find out that she’s telephoned my parents to discuss me, to tell them that I’ve lost some weight and she thinks I might have an eating disorder. As an afterthought, she tells them I am drinking a lot.

My mom tells me about it on a Sunday afternoon, a few weeks after Wendi reached out and touched her. When I ask her how she responded, she says, “Please! I told her you were working out with the team four hours a day. On top of that, you eat totally normally.”

When I ask her what she thinks about the drinking, she says, “I’m not delusional; I know people drink in college. Just be re-sponsible.”

My mom is right about people drinking in college. The girls on my floor scatter to a party at least once a weekend, like seeds being blown by the wind. When Saturday nights find me stuck in my dorm room, typing a paper, I am guaranteed to have at least five hours of soundlessness in which to listen to the clicking of my own computer keys. The girls wander home again in the early morning hours, when I can hear thumping, or vague hol-lering, or doors fluttering open and closed, despite the tube socks we’ve all duct-taped to our doorframes to muffle the slamming. If I wanted to, I could go room by room down the hallway and list each tenant’s drunken acts of delinquency: There is Emma M., who, after a house party, crawled buck-naked to the bathroom on her hands and knees, as though she’d regressed to the state of infancy. There is Kylie T., who, after too many gin and tonics, mistook Anna B.’s room for her own and scrambled into bed with her. And there is Danielle P., whose cast we all signed in felt-tipped pen after she got drunk and fell through a