Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (32 page)

disbelief when they see my psychotic scrapbook: the layers of photographs, fabric, newspaper, clumped paint, and poetry scratched onto scrap paper. At the time, I don’t know why I am preoccupied with the project. But years later, I will think it was because I needed something immoderate to compensate for the fact that I wasn’t drinking excessively. I’ll think I worked wildly to fill my vacant walls because I suddenly had vacant needs.

I can’t
pinpoint the exact moment that I slip back into hard drinking. I know it has something to do with the house, which is always stirred up. There are a million activities that I feel obli-gated to mix myself into. The owners of the campus bars dream up new drink specials, and the girls I live with start going out Tuesday and Wednesday nights, too. The door dings with boys delivering invitations to date parties. The house’s phone line rings with sports teams calling to schedule a party. The fraternities next door are spinning records and playing kickball on their front lawns every afternoon. Every night, some sister I barely know is knocking on my door, pleading with me to go with her to a party because she doesn’t want to show up alone.

The month I took off doesn’t slow down my drinking at all. Pretty soon, I am grappling with the security keypad every night. I am staggering up the stairway while I grip the railing with both hands, watching the oriental patterns on the stairs recede and wobble under me, until I make it to my floor, my door, and pass out in my clothes on my bed.

In the morning, there is too much absence to define my blackouts by the events that are missing. There are more things I can’t remember than things I can. A night is no longer a solid sheet, interrupted by fissures. Instead, it is a gaping hole, scat-

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tered with fragments of conversations and episodes, like a night sky punctuated by planes disguised as stars.

Birth-control
pills have an adverse affect on me; they always will. In the years to come I will repeatedly try them in what the doctor assures me is the lowest possible dosage, and they will bring me to depths of anxiety and depression that I have never known. But in the fall of junior year, the combination of oral contraceptives and liquor unglues me.

For starters, the drinking weight I never put on before starts to amass, and I can feel it bubbling out over the waistband of my pants and under my chin. In pictures, I look like my own stunt double. I am a tough and meaty version of me, with shoulders that roll forward and a mouth that never smiles, unless it is in the accidental flush of drunkenness, when my cheeks are as round and red as hothouse tomatoes. My eyes, when they are not relaxed into a state of rolling, squint in disdain. I look mean.

I start to act mean, too. After a few cups of something hard, combativeness, which is something I haven’t felt since Elle and I raided Skip’s frat house, comes back to me. Only this time, my anger is completely irrational. Nothing external provokes me. I can be lying on the tiles of Zeta’s bathroom, my head can be swimming with half a liter of Smirnoff, and I am still overcome by the urge to punch something, even if it’s just the toilet-paper roll. This time, I am beating off the lances of my own thoughts. I am fighting an invasion that is coming from my own head.

Eventually, I find something material to duel. I find out the boy I was dating during the summer was also dating a girl in the sorority next door. And, as a couple, they give me a target at which to throw the sharp darts of disappointment inside me.

When I see them together, I feel a hatred that curls my toes. It is a tension in my chest like a wire tugged hard from both ends. I have contempt not just for her, but for her whole sorority. I don’t detest only him, but men everywhere. When I drink it all comes unhooked and takes flight like a shot rubber band.

One night at a campus bar, the girl is fingering her hair in the bathroom mirror while I am dabbing at the grenadine stain on my jeans with a wet wad of toilet paper. I can see her glancing at me through the bathroom mirror, and my scorn is biting. I’ve never hit anyone before, but I clench my free fist and promise myself that I’ll imprint my knuckles in her jaw if she doesn’t stop staring at me. I’m a liquor-crusted mess and I know it, and the fact that she is here to see it only makes me want to pulver-ize something. When I start wavering toward the exit, she says, “Bye.” She is smiling, and the corners of her mouth draw into an effortless bow, like she has such a surplus of smiles that she can give them away to just anyone, for any reason; she can give them away to me. Before I swing out the bathroom door, I reply, “You’re boring,” and the words taste like vinegar.

What I really mean to say is, she has a stark elegance that I envy. We had a poetry workshop together a year ago, and we will again a year from now, when I’ll realize that she is really fantas-tic. Every day, she wore headbands and pea coats and checkered scarves that didn’t smell like liquor, or cigarettes, or vomit. She sat tall in her chair, unlike those of us whose hangovers gave us curvature of the spine. And when she spoke to say, “I love the way this poem captures both the inane and the deep,” her voice was crisp and unshakable.

She lives in the sorority next door, with whom the Zetas have a long-standing rivalry. From our end, it’s no contest. We are the Zeta Alcoholics, and they are the Alpha Babes. They are all white,

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all blond, all members of the university dance team. One day af-ter happy hour, it is easy to recruit a few Zetas to join me on the roof, where we have a clear view of the girl and her fellow babes, who are trickling out onto the sidewalk after a chapter meeting. The whole pug-drunk lot of us leans over the edge of the roof and pelts them with eggs. Every scream from the sidewalk quiets me. Each splattering sound makes me feel a little lighter.

The boy doesn’t deserve my best efforts, but I can’t see that when I’ve been slurping vodka cocktails for six hours, and feeling my rage
rat-a-tat
through me like seeds trundling around inside a dried gourd. So one night, at a party where a group of us are slurping wine from the bottle, and Elle slips and overturns the whole thing on a cream-colored couch, I fi myself sitting oppo-site him on the carpet, giving him a piece of my mind. I have my fi pointed gunlike at his chest, and I push it into his sternum to accentuate my points. I push it in over and over, like I’m ringing a doorbell that no one runs to answer. Elle will tell me later that I droned in the slow singsong timbre that only drunkards have. I said, “Your photos are for shit, all of them are fl and ill lit, and you are not nearly as handsome as you think you are.”

I start a relationship with another man. I will call him X because he is a variable that changes constantly and means something different every time.

Sometimes X has authentic feelings for me, though I can’t ever believe it enough to return his phone calls. He is the rugby player who wants me to come watch his games, or the fi major who lets me sleep in his feather-light bed when I am too drunk to go home—the one who kisses me once and then exhales, saying he can’t believe he found the courage to do it.

More often, X is a boy who pushes me up against the wall at a party while I’m loaded and looking for the bathroom, the one

who says nothing before he makes a move to cup my breasts through my shirt. X is the boy who walks me back to his place and doesn’t offer his hand when I slip while stepping over a guardrail and cut a gash in my back. He is someone’s ex-boyfriend, who pulls me down onto the torn couch in the smoking room. He is my date to a semiformal, the boy who hails a cab with the fi dollars he borrowed from the bartender while I was throwing up in the bathroom. Occasionally, X is Chris.

Even as
my tolerance for alcohol goes sky high, I am not consid-ered one of the house’s loose cannons. In Zeta, there are girls who drink seven nights a week, whereas I drink fi They can handle four Long Island Iced Teas, whereas I’m tap shackled after two. Plus, there are narcoleptic drunks: One of the sisters passes out be-hind a Dumpster on East Adams Street and doesn’t wake until the next morning, when she hears the
psst psst
sounds of a con-cerned homeless man. There are humpty-dumpty drunks too: One girl tumbles down the fi escape and breaks her front teeth. Another girl runs into a door frame and breaks her nose

By comparison, my drunken disasters look minimal. When I write to Chris years later, asking him if, during college, it was clear that I had alcohol issues, he’ll say, “No, we all drank as much as you did. Plus, there were people far crazier ... Don’t you remember your friend Elle?”

The sisters of Zeta seem to think Elle is a cataclysm. Elle sets people evacuating when she whirls into the den after dinner, shrieking and pulling her hair, with her breath hinting of whiskey. They scramble to pack up their textbooks and coffee mugs and bottles of nail polish, as though she were a class-four hurricane, like the force of her drunkenness has the capacity to blow out the windows.

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In Zeta, the secret to getting piss drunk is to not piss anyone off while you do it. You can down all the Gin-and-Gingers you like as long as you can still manage to keep your blouse on in public and avoid kissing some sister’s boyfriend. You can also drink wildly when everyone else does, and bank on the fact that your blackouts will line up.

For instance, I wake up wincing one morning when I remember the way I ran around a party the night before, wearing the heavy, ceramic head of a fraternity’s dog-shaped statue. But at breakfast, when I see half a dozen hungover faces, recoiling from the smell of cooked eggs, I realize the squinting faces are trying hard to recall their own acts of embarrassment. No one can possibly remember mine.

The key is to not humiliate yourself irreversibly. It is okay to be the girl who passes out in the hallway or pukes on the porch; there isn’t a girl among us who hasn’t done that stuff. We make up for it the next morning by cracking jokes over the basket of bagels and eradicating the evidence with the garden hose. Drunk, we allow ourselves the space to cry or hide our heads in our hands. We even permit ourselves the freedom to call one another names like
psycho, bitch,
or
slut.
These things are famil-iar. They are passive aggressive, which is feminine.

But may the Lord help the girl who gets drunk and belliger-ent: the one who throws punches and demitasse cups, or puts her fist through the wall of the laundry room. Her drunkenness is scary. It sends us all tripping up the stairs, where we huddle together to watch from the safety of the second-floor landing. We watch her the same way we’d watch a lion tear through steaks behind Plexiglas at the zoo.

Drinking confi men’s gender role, whereas it diminishes women’s. We are meant to believe that men who drink heavily are

men’s men. Beer ads play strongly to the idea that men drink because they like shooting pool, watching ESPN, and bonding with other men. And they drink because they appreciate women— particularly, big-haired, big-chested broads in ’
80
s-style bikinis.

By contrast, a girl’s drinking makes her less feminine. The sisters think of the aggressive drunk as brutish, and as a result her penance is long and difficult. She is nicknamed “Fight Club” or “DUI Hard” or “Hit-and-Rum.” For weeks, she is the punch line at dinner, when someone will lean over the leaves of her salad to say: “Hit-and-Rum walked into a bar ... Ouch.” A whole month passes before the sisters speak to the sophomore who got butt wasted, belted out Queen, and emptied shampoo bottles on the floor of the bathroom.

I have
never been frightened by Elle’s excess because its breadth has always been just as wide as my own, and beneath it has always been the same woe, the same bitterness, the same pang. I like that Elle doesn’t subscribe to the rules of girlhood. I like that she is rowdy, and spontaneous, and intimidating. I like the way she’ll hiss at the girls who get in her way when she’s grappling with four beer bottles in the campus bar. Sometimes, she’ll lurch forward and bare her teeth like she’s apt to bite them.

Later, I will be one of these girls. I will look down at my shoes if I stumble into Elle in an empty bar bathroom. My hands will tremble, and I will be afraid that she might bludgeon me among the tampon dispensers and cigarette-stopped sinks, where there is no one around to protect me. But for now, I take a secret pride in the way Elle can ruffle other girls. She turns them entirely to stone, save for their eyelashes, which flutter like they’ve been poked in the eyes. Standing next to Elle, I almost feel cocky; it’s like having an all-state linebacker on the field with me.

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But all of that changes the night that we are set to initiate a new group of pledges into full Zeta sisters.

The initiation
is scheduled for three
a.m.
, and rather than setting our alarm clocks for that ungodly hour, Elle and I decide to go to a party and drink rum, which always keeps us awake and electrified clear into the first streaks of sunup.

The party is like any other, except as I’ve gotten older, everyone I drink with has begun to look younger. The drinks are too weak, and the music is trite. The crowd of boys and girls who are milking the keg looks babyish. Elle goes upstairs to smoke a joint with someone from her physics classes and leaves me to stand in a doorway, where I bite the rim of my plastic cup and watch the clock.

I don’t know how long I lean there, with my head against the door frame. I am not drunk, and I feel acutely frustrated as a re-sult of it. There is no use filling my cup. My tolerance is huge, and the watered-down beer doesn’t affect me.

Everyone else is drunk, and the fact that I’m not makes me feel left out, as though I’ve failed to grab a seat in a game of musical chairs. Girls lope by carrying cups full of foam. A boy who is careening through the crowd singes my arm with his lit cigarette, and it blisters immediately into a perfectly round sore. Eventually, a boy who works with Elle at a campus bar, where he checks IDs and she stamps hands, sees me waiting and talks to me.