Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (25 page)

size does matter” and “They’re not real, so what?” And on the Captain Morgan rum Web site, there is a “blow-off-line generator,” which is presumably for women, right alongside a “pickup-line generator,” which is presumably for men.

Pay close attention to the next TV beer ad you see, particularly for the light beers and malternative beverages that are marketed to women, and you’ll notice that the guy hardly ever scores the babe anymore. In recent years the alcohol-ad guy has become a calculated douche bag. He is so simple that he is simpleminded, so horny that he is actually hamstrung. He is the guy epitomized by Bud Light’s “Real Men of Genius” campaign, which salutes every schmuck from “Mr. Way Too Much Cologne Wearer” to “Mr. Silent Killer Gas Passer.” He is the kind of man-child who says and does everything all wrong. These days, women brush him off as often as they brush up against him.

This is because the alcohol industry would have us believe that beer-ad Barbie is a modern-day gal. She doesn’t have time to slow down, to sit still for too long in one place with just one guy. She is the woman embodied in Baileys commercials, the one with enough sense to laugh when a man spills a drink on her chest, but too much self-worth to let him wipe it off. We root for this girl because she seems smart but not snobby, sexy but not slutty, receptive to men’s advances and yet completely in control of them. We need to believe that whatever she is seeking—be it a next great love or a next great lay—is just a few drinks away. Really, why else would there be some seventy-odd drink recipes with the word
sex
in the title? Not to mention twenty with
screw,
and thirty with
orgasm.
Altogether, there are roughly a hundred and twenty recognized ways to solicit sex from a bartender. Just ask for a “Shuddering Orgasm” or a “Passionate

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Screw.” You can demand a “Blow Job,” “Hot Anal Sex,” or “Oral Sex on the Beach,” not to mention “Sex in a Parking Lot,” “Sex on the Ceiling,” “Sex on a Pool Table,” “Sex with Todd,” or “Sex with the Captain.” You can literally ask for “Sex Anywhere,” and have it with just about anyone.

Like everyone else ordering “Hot Sex” at the bar, the connec-tion between drinking and dating has been hardwired into my system. Even five years from now, once I have quit relying on booze as a mechanism to make friends or feel okay about my-self, it will be nearly impossible to interact with men in the absence of liquor. A first date will feel too stiff without a drink at the table, and I will be too blank for conversation, too mortified when a fork falls off the table with a deafening clunk.

I spend the
rest of the semester drinking at a bar called Chubby’s with Elle. In fact, we are there so often that the owner starts to call us “the twin birds” because we’re always at the bar, holding shot glasses, with our heads bent together, swanlike.

“Basketball shots” become our new favorite drink. These are the flaming shooters the bartender turned us on to, though he never revealed the exact ingredients. I know only that he fills a sherry glass with a bile-colored liquid and lights it on fire. And there is something mystic in the vapors rising off the blaze that suctions the rim of the glass to his palm, so he can dribble it in midair without using his fingers, the same way someone bounces a basketball. When he slides his hand off the rim, we lean down to inhale the gaseous stuff before we swig the actual liquid.

The result is a lot like huffing household cleaning products. After just one, I look like TV news footage of mad cow disease; my eyes roll back in my head, and when I try to get up off my

stool, my legs collapse under me. After two, I throw up in my bedsheets. After three, on the fateful night of November
1
, I can’t hoist my head off my pillow the entire next day. My head aches like I nose-dived onto it from three stories up. It’s the first time that I’m old enough to elect a president, and I physically can’t go to the polls. I don’t need an MTV news anchor to tell me: I’m not a chooser, I’m an utter loser.

Part of the reason I start going out four nights a week is that I can’t bear to stay in my room. The partial wall that splits my dorm room in half can no longer divide my mess from Tess’s. Together, we live in turmoil, like animals or addicts, maintain-ing only enough free space to satisfy our immediate needs. Clothes blanket my floor, my desk, and my bed, and I am always too exhausted to undertake the big job of picking them up. Instead, I transfer them from station to station, depending on what I need to accomplish. I push them aside to write a paper. Sometimes I sleep on them. I pick them up to try them on, and then I take them off again. Everything I own smells like the floor of a bar.

The other reason I spend more hours at the campus bars than I do at the gym, the library, or the dining hall is that it’s my only hope to run into Chris. Alcohol has set us into a cycle whereby we only get together when we’re drinking. Even then, we don’t sit and talk as we play cards and hold beer bottles. I usually mark time until he careens through a crowd to find me and fol-low me back to my dorm room. We are stuck in neutral, and alcohol has made it increasingly impossible to switch gears.

On the nights when I make a concerted effort not to get too drunk, I notice that Chris passes out as often as I do. I’ll be nuz-zling against his collarbone when I’ll realize his chest is rising and

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falling too heavily, and breath is escaping from his mouth with a hiss. When I whisper his name a few times and he doesn’t stir, I snatch back the covers. I’m always half relieved and half pissed. To make matters worse, Chris starts leaving in the mornings before I wake up. At nine
a.m.
on a Wednesday, when I click awake with a hangover, he’s as gone as the ancient Mayans. Books are stacked on my desk. Dirty T-shirts are heaped in the hamper. I’m lying diagonally, like a backslash, across the whole bed. I ask Tess if she heard the door close. When she says no, we dangle our heads off the edges of our beds, scanning the carpet for rolls of mints or stray socks, any artifact that might prove

that he’d been there.

One Thursday
night in November, Elle and I go to the Tropics, a downtown bar that’s a short bus ride from campus. It is one of our favorite places to get sunk: a big split-level space with walls painted orange, tables shaped like sand dollars, and a giant aquarium teeming with googly-eyed fish. There, for seven dollars, we order gallon-deep, plastic fishbowls filled, I think, with a combination of strawberry and peach schnapps, Midori, Malibu rum, pineapple, and orange juice. The truth is, half the time we don’t know what we’re really ingesting. We just suck it down fast, through foot-long plastic straws.

In my experience, there is a bar and a drink for every mood. Sorrow has a certain taste, and joy has a certain atmosphere. You can’t indulge your gladness anywhere that has cement floors, where people watch infomercials on the bar’s lofted TV, or where two dollars buys you a shot of tequila and two tallboys. Similarly, you can’t coddle your blues anyplace that has tables or single-sex bathrooms. You need to piss and get pissed with the

dregs of humanity. You and your grief have to be on display, on a stool at the bar, digging through the pretzel bowl that the bartender keeps on filling, like reparation.

The Tropics is my happy space. It is predicated on denial. With the vintage sunscreen ads tacked on the walls and the red lightbulbs in beach-bucket fixtures, not to mention the fact that the furnace is cranked up so high that the front window fogs over and the bartenders have to wear tank tops, it’s easy to for-get that outside it is twelve degrees below zero. Here, it’s easy to forget that I’m missing another study group for statistics class. I forget life can conceivably suck as much as it does.

Elle is striking and blowing out a succession of matches. I am caught up in trying to sneak maraschino cherries from the bartender’s plastic tackle box, which is stocked with cocktail napkins and orange wedges. A crowd of people is milling around and holding their bottles like Academy Awards, and when it parts, I see Chris mouth to mouth with some other girl, who clearly has no problem expressing affection. Even flat drunk, I can feel something strain inside me. It is a wrenching pang that can only be my detonating heart.

Elle is the ideal friend to have in moments of melodrama. She will dive into conflict with you so that you’ll have company, instead of pulling you out. She will smack down her MasterCard on the bar and tell whoever is listening to “Keep ’em comin’.” She’ll happily play the decoy so you can maintain some semblance of self-respect, making the big distracting bang that prevents people from noticing while you drink until you’re gone. Elle is not the friend who puts one hand on your cheek and coos “It will be okay.” Elle is the friend who stands on the bar stools and hurls bottles, the one who understands pain so completely, even when it’s not directly her pain, that she doubles

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over and sobs. She reminds me that this is
not
okay, that “
This
is bullshit.”

I don’t remember seeing Elle kick out her bar stool to go talk to Chris, nor do I remember her giving him a right hook to the temple, which is too bad in a way. And I don’t remember how long I slumped at the bar with my chin in my hand, telling the whole damn story to the bartender, who offered his phone num-ber on a napkin. Who knows how many gin-filled fishbowls I downed? I know only that the bitterness of them lasted—I could still taste it, metallic like pennies, on my tongue the next morning.

I should know
better than to go to Zeta’s fall formal alone; there’s nothing like drinking alone in a room full of happily paired people to make you want to off yourself. But I do go alone because a lacy green dress has been hanging in my closet since the day I asked Chris. Plus, Hannah and Elle don’t have dates, ei-ther, and an older sister named Nadine sets us up with three boys from her date’s synth/prog-rock band.

The fall formal is on one of the big spade-shaped islands in Alexandria Bay. Hannah, Elle, and I hitch a ride up with a sis-ter named Brianne, a sophomore who has a date beside her in the front seat. So we have to sneak sips of Amaretto the whole

way up I-
81
, rolling our eyes every time they touch hands and

pretending we’re not jealous.

It turns out that the “charming Victorian resort” that was de-scribed to us by Zeta’s president is actually a stretch of hunting cottages with wooden decks that the concierge proudly says we can fish off. In all fairness, it probably would be breathtaking in summertime, when you could dive for antique bottles in the St. Lawrence River or roam through the stone structures of Boldt

Castle, ride a pony, race a go-cart, or eat egg sandwiches under covered pavilions. But as usual, we do everything ass-backwards. My friends and I operate only at night and in the winter, when things are dead or sleeping or frozen, and the only thing to do is haul up with a liter of citrus-flavored vodka.

After Hannah, Elle, and I check in to our room, a bald com-partment with rust-colored comforters and elks stenciled on the walls, we wander down the walkway to Nadine’s room to meet our dates. According to pictures, this is the only time we spent with these boys with thin arms and skewed haircuts. Clearly, liquor made us feel we knew them well enough to commit them to a good chunk of film. A dozen pictures show us pig-piled on top of each other. Everyone’s face is stopped in a look of shock, lips pursed in speech like they’re exhaling cigarettes. One guy is licking Hannah’s forehead. Another, who is wearing a leopard-print scarf, has me hoisted like a sack over his shoulder.

Since we don’t have cards or dice or coins, oddly enough, we play the verbal drinking games that I hate, the stupid tongue twisters and tests of trivia that I’m always too slow to say without slurring. We play “Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll,” the game in which everyone has to name something from one of the cate-gories that starts with the letter A (“anal sex,” “amphetamines,” “Alice Cooper”), and then on down the alphabet, drinking while they think, or if they get stuck, or if they’re stoned enough to repeat someone else’s answer.

Then we move on to “Rhyme or Reason.” Then “Screaming Numbers.” Then “Celebrity Name Game.” The whole time, we sip straight vodka until we start forgetting the rules, whose turn it is, and who just got skipped. By the time we get around to playing “Categories,” I’m leathered enough to forget that the capital of New York State isn’t New York City.

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• • •

At the
dance, the hotel’s ballroom looks like an Elks Club. It’s hung with flannel curtains and mounted heads, including a doe-eyed deer that someone crowned with a party hat. The table cen-terpieces are clusters of pinecones and glitter. Overhead, strands of ribbon dangle from a hundred helium balloons. We produce our fake IDs for the doorman, and he passes them back to us with total indifference.

I’m surprised to find we’re among the last few people to ar-rive, which makes me wonder just how long everyone has been here, snapping cameras and eating pigs-in-a-blanket, dancing so fervently that their foreheads shine. Elle and I take stools at the bar, squaring our shoulders over glasses of vodka and cran-berry juice, while Hannah makes a beeline for a crowd of sisters swishing their satin gowns on the dance floor. Already I’m dis-covering that my two friends mix together as badly as beer and liquor, the by-product of which is
you’ve never been sicker.

The bartender seems to be mixing drinks under the mode of trial and error. Everything tastes not quite right, like spoiled juice. In pictures, we are all carting around parfait glasses filled with toxic-looking, tangerine-colored fluid.

Looking through photo albums a couple of years later, I’ll find it telling that we never put our drinks down when we pose for pictures. We choose instead to hold our glasses in front of us like iron shields, our cigarettes unsheathed from the pack like drawn swords. I don’t have a single photo from college in which I’m not wearing this armor. In every one, I’m clasping a glass like the date I just can’t keep my hands off.