Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (30 page)

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dates were passed out upstairs after a date party. Elle popped open one of the house’s front windows, and we proceeded to wreak havoc there, too, picking up the leftover beer, along with a few more plaques and baubles. We found our way to the basement, where we discovered a can of Benjamin Moore paint, and overturned the whole can onto the floor. We lay in the spill and made snow angels.

Anxiety usually accompanies a hangover. It is just part of the equation: Your stomach turns over, your head beats itself like a drum, your hands jitter, your muscles feel drained, and you feel nervous. But this is a whole other level of panic. There is campus security to worry about, plus Zeta’s president. But more than that, we are ashamed of our anger, and what appears to be su-perhuman strength. It means we are not well behaved or well adjusted. Normal women would be more composed, far less se-duced by an excess of booze or emotion.

As for the plunder, Elle “borrows” Brianne’s car, without asking, and we unload the whole rain-damaged cargo on the fraternity’s driveway. We pull down the sun visors to hide our faces as we peel away.

Elle and
I lie low for the rest of the semester. We stop trying to compete with men when we’re drunk because Skip’s fraternity has taught us that men are brawnier, that they can hurt us in ways we will never be able to hurt them. Men have the shut out; we will never beat them.

We try to stop getting drunk so much. We try to stop being
so much
in general. We tone down the P.D.E., meaning public displays of emotion. Elle loses herself between the musty stacks in the physics library, in an ongoing chain of extra-credit assign-ments and study groups, where she and ten men sit bent over

graph paper and calculators, arguing and laughing and jotting things down. My transfer papers go through, and I delve into the required classes for my new journalism major. I spend whole evenings in the school graphics lab, fiddling with newspaper layouts in QuarkXPress, with the clip art and dummy text that refuse to line up.

I also start dating a photography major who fills my blank nights. He is perfectly arrogant, another twig-armed, potty-mouthed meth head. And after Skip, I am extra afraid to let him touch me.

Spring comes
again to Syracuse, and it isn’t easy. There are girls everywhere, still tan from spring break, sunning their legs on the quad, sipping Chardonnay in the outdoor cafés on Marshall Street (they switch from beer to wine come bathing-suit sea-son). Girls are wearing ridiculous sunglasses with pastel-colored lenses, puckering their lips while they smoke light cigarettes. Painted toenails curl over their sandals. Cleavage heaves out of their sundresses. Everyone is exquisitely happy.

On the other hand, I want to knock them all off, execution style. I can’t help but think about my favorite part in
The Bell Jar:
when Esther Greenwood is sitting around a conference table at a New York fashion magazine with a dozen other nineteen-year-old interns, thinking,
I’m so glad they’re going to die.
In fact, I think that image is what makes me start to work on my own exit plans. Not plans to take my own life, but to take a summer internship. It is an almost-desperate measure.

People with substance-abuse issues like to think that changing physical states is the equivalent of changing emotional states. We like to think that removing ourselves from the craziness of the city, the suburbs, the house, the workplace, the cam-

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pus, will remove the craziness from us, too. And why wouldn’t we? Everywhere we look, instant gratification is alive and well. It is the concept that drives consumerism, manifest destiny, and the American dream. Somewhere inside all of us, particularly women, lies a ruby of hope. It is faith that once we find the right skin product, or piece of real estate, or cocktail, or car, or lipstick or diet, we will, at last, feel good about ourselves. The void will fall away and we will feel complete. We are willing to pay out the ass for it. And I am willing to spend the summer alone in New York, where I expect to find it.

My parents
seem almost happy that I won’t be spending the summer at home.

Years from now, they’ll admit just how much I ruptured their routine during the summers I stayed home. My mom was work-ing fifteen-hour days, constructing department-store displays. My dad was doing consulting work from home. And my sister, who was obedient then, was earning Girl Scout badges and memorizing vocabulary words at the kitchen table.

When I was home on break, they had to worry about me. At night, they had to listen for the whir of the garage door, a sign that I had made it home safely from a party. Midnight would

come and go. So would two
a.m.
Then five
a.m.
My father would

drive over to the party in his slippers, spot my car still parked in the driveway, and sigh a breath of relief that I hadn’t wrapped it

around a tree on Route
117
, that I’d only passed out and stayed

the night. He would scrawl a note on my windshield that said, We were worried, call when you wake up, and drive home.

Summers in a small town are sweet. There is iced tea, and black-eyed Susans. Kids still buy penny candy the way they did some fifty years ago. There are sparklers and group hikes. The

dog pokes at a suspicious toad in the driveway, and deer creep up to the house to rub their heads against the dining-room win-dow. All this is lost on me, so I take an internship at a small trade magazine in New York City.

New York
is the ideal destination for the drunk and the down-trodden.

Even four years from now, after I’ve worked hard to shake both depression and booze, summers in the city will still make me sad. The urban landscape is a paragon for the one inside. The increased sunlight just distills the grayness. Everything looks bleached out. Inside, lobbies smell like sweat. Outside, garbage is more putrid. Sidewalks marinate in the smell of urine and warm beer.

When I arrive in May
2000
, I think it will be the other way

around. Clomping down Sixth Avenue on my first day of work, I think,
This is a vast improvement.
Here, in a city of eight million, I think whatever temporary afflictions I am experiencing will feel scaled down. I expect to evanesce in the rush-hour crowds, to feel dwarfed by the tall buildings and tall women, teetering on their four-inch-tall heels.

And if not, I think I will feel commiseration.

New York is like the crisis hot lines that tell potential suicides, “You are never alone.” Here, you really aren’t ever alone. Everywhere you look, there is someone to remind you they are there. There they are, crossing against a light. And there, catching your hair in the corner of their open umbrella. And there, letting their fluffy, white poodle crap in the middle of the sidewalk. Everywhere you turn, there is someone else to remind you just how miserable they are, too.

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I find out quickly that this doesn’t help. If anything, it only reminds me how disconnected I am. After a few weeks, I can ride eight stops on the number
6
train with one person’s hand on my ass and another person’s sour armpit two inches from my face, and still emerge through the sliding glass doors unruffled because I’m troubled by something bigger. Even in Midtown, amid the throngs of people that shoulder by me, I feel the thump of loneliness. From the outside, it’s hard to imagine life can exist inside the mirrored skyscrapers, when I walk by and all I can see is my own pained little face staring back.

When I feel sad after work, and I usually do, I call Josh, a friend from a summer I spent at Columbia University during high school, who has a summer sublet a few blocks away on Carmine Street. Josh spends his days earning five times the wages that I do, reading biographies about Virginia Woolf for the founding editor at one of New York’s top publishing houses, and calling me to say how much I remind him of her (in terms of psychosis, not talent). Together, we drink vodka tonics at cavernous bars in Chinatown and argue through half-open eyes about which one of us is more hopeless.

Plus, I make new drinking buddies. My next-door neighbors in a Washington Square dorm are boys who live there year-round. They are the privileged city boys I’ve heard rumors about. Half of them are the sons of screen actors, in town for the summer to make up the classes they failed and to hunt for East Village lofts. They never rest from drinking. Their compartment-sized rooms are packed with guitars and amps and turntables, gourmet food they ordered from errand-running services, jugs of wine,

bottles of Jim Beam, upside-down Frisbees heaped with cigarette butts. They tell me that I come visit them at four
a.m.
some mornings, drunk as a skunk after a night out with Josh, to smoke cigarettes, do more shots, and share intimate details about my life. I tell them I don’t remember stopping by at all.

At work, I throw up in the bathroom so often that a coworker asks if I’m bulimic. But I’m never the only one who is hungover. At work on Friday mornings there are dozens of people, from assistants to managers, who look haggard after launch parties. They congregate around a dripping coffeepot, smoothing their unwashed hair and cracking jokes about how wasted they got last night. Looking back, it should have been my first indication that excessive drinking doesn’t automatically stop after college— you don’t just quit relying on alcohol as a mode to connect you to people.

I meet a twenty-three-year-old advertising assistant named Glynn. She is my kind of girl, a former literature major who rents a tenement on Avenue B. We spend a few nights together after work, smoking a joint in her apartment or bar-hopping be-low Houston, drinking beer at Brownies and nodding along to the chords of a friend-of-a-friend’s band.

There are yuppie friends to make, too. The dot.com bubble hasn’t burst yet and media layoffs, while always at hand, aren’t as frequent and vicious. It is three months after
New York
magazine published a feature about Manhattan’s poverty elite: the

twentysomething media planners who make $
24,000
in annual

salary, but $
100,000
in corporate perks, like cruises on the Forbes yacht and all-expenses-paid ski trips, tickets to the MTV Movie Awards, and all the drinks they can drink. I make friends with two of the male club promoters who are featured in the story, and every weekend they put Josh and me on their parties’ guest lists.

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The boy I was dating back at S.U. is spending the summer at NYU, too, in one of the one-bedroom apartments on Union Square that the school manages to pack kids into in fours. We go on a few forgettable dates before he stops returning my calls. I can only remember one of them: We went to a Creole restaurant in the Village, where he ordered melon balls, and the owner’s cats freely wandered the tables, turning loops through our legs. Even topped on vodka and melon liqueur, I was as mute as a stone, and about that animated.

When the boy stops calling, I quit eating. It seems like the natural thing to do, partly because I’ve picked up on the fact that I’m ugly, and partly because food turns my stomach, which is already squirming with sadness and nerves. For a month, I eat two ba-nanas and a carton of yogurt per day. Sometimes I’ll eat the frozen, low-fat, low-calorie chemicals that pass for ice cream. In a flash, I’ve lost ten pounds. At work, my pleated skirts slide down off my hips. Josh drags me to dinner on Spring Street, in an attempt to force-feed me. But I ignore my thirty-dollar plate of pasta and suck down red wine by the glass.

I also quit my weekend job and quit going to night class, instead wandering for hours through the East Village, sweating through clothes that are too heavy and black to wear in the sum-mer. One day, I meet a French photographer. I drink cold beer with him at a bar called The Library, follow him down to Pitt Street, and pose for his photos. I lean against door frames with my jeans unbuttoned while he snaps the shutter and calls out, “Look drunk,” and I let my face slacken into a look that I know well.

Drinking becomes my full-time summer occupation. I devote increased hours to it. I give it increased effort.

• • •

The weight
I’ve lost makes up for the tolerance I’ve gained. Pretty soon I am lying down in the backseat of a cab every time I go out, telling Josh, “I’m going to throw up,” while the driver speeds faster down Second Avenue in an effort to get me out quick. Every hungover morning, I am sitting on the ledge of the window overlooking East Fourth Street, smoking a cigarette with the screen up, trying to decide if I’d break my legs or my neck if I jumped.

And I’m not the only one who has these destructive thoughts while I’m wrecked. My phone hums constantly at four in the morning. One of my drinking buddies is always on the other end, stewed to the gills and sobbing hysterically. One says she just dragged a knife too deep across her shin, and she’s scared because it won’t stop bleeding. Another girl, who is at S.U. for summer sessions, says she just walked over to Lawrinson Hall, the twenty-one-story dorm, for the explicit purpose of jumping off the roof. It seems that alcohol, which has always given us the courage to dance in public or be close to men, is giving us the fearlessness to abuse ourselves, too.

Elle’s self-batter is the most terrifying. She calls at ten
p.m.

one Saturday to say she is lying in a hammock in her back-yard. She has downed eight beers and ten sleeping pills, and she can’t move her legs. Her parents are at a party, and there is no one to check on her, so I make a frantic phone call to the poison control center to find out if ten is a lethal number. A frosty op-erator tells me, “Anyone who swallows ten of anything needs to go to a hospital.” I don’t know Elle’s address, or the name of her town, so I call the state police and leave her phone number.