Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (41 page)

he will call me when he hits I-
95
, but I am skeptical. I wave

good-bye and turn around before he pulls the car into traffic. I don’t want my last memory of him to be his taillights rounding the corner of East Seventy-eighth Street.

But the phone rings a few hours later, while I am searching for a TV signal in the static, and his call is so prompt that I have

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to stop for an instant and make sure I’m not imagining it. It rings the next night when I am sponging down the refrigerator door. And it rings the night after that, by which time I’ve learned to snatch up the phone before Vanessa can answer it.

For a month, I talk to Matt on the phone every night until well after midnight, when the phone’s battery dies. Another girl might have learned to do this in high school: roosting on the kitchen counter or the fi escape with the phone cradled against one shoulder, soaking up stories, and learning that not all silences are bad. But I’ve never exposed myself without the confessional cata-lyst of alcohol. Maybe the fact that I can’t see Matt’s expression makes it easier for me to tell him things. I describe for him the or-chids that grow wild in my hometown, the argument I had with my parents on a trip to San Francisco, the way our house cat used to claw my sister and me when we tried to tie him into bonnets. Months go by, and I save enough money to move out of the apartment I share with Vanessa and into a small studio in the East Village. Tompkins Square Park, with its women in top hats and men in eyeliner, is the perfect location to practice sobriety. The view from my window holds the promise of unconditional acceptance; in this part of town, cars are bedecked with glitter and baby dolls’ heads, street activists pass out flyers that encour-age you to “ban Republican marriage,” and men slap shoulders outside of Doc Holiday’s, where they compare conspiracy theo-ries. Here, nothing is too kooky or creepy or off-putting. I can let the inner awkwardness I’ve always felt flower, and I can stop using alcohol as a mode of belonging.

Time doesn’t pass while I’m living alone. Every day becomes an ordered little compartment, in which I work, elbow my way into a subway car, buy milk at East Village Farms, mop the

floors, watch pointless TV, and interact with no one other than the two-dollar psychic and people I give dimes to on the street. Thanks to caller ID, I can avoid the people I used to drink with, who call me, dead drunk, from a nearby bar to see if I’ll come down. I’m glad I had the sense to keep my address private, so no one buzzed can buzz my intercom.

I know I am making the same mistake that I made in college, when I mistook being reclusive for being sober. But I have few college friends beyond my hard-drinking buddies, and my new friends from work won’t make the fifteen-dollar cab ride without the prospect of a few rounds of beer. I’m often lonely, but I don’t know whom to invite over. I am hard pressed to find other twenty-two-year-olds who don’t drink.

I spend most of my time with Matt, who takes the train to visit me every few weeks. Matt drinks occasionally, but it means little to him. His relationship with alcohol doesn’t run nearly as deep as mine does. We occasionally sip beer when we are together, when we’re at a show with a two-drink minimum or an after-party where the beer is free. I try to intersperse glasses of water between beers, which everyone always says is the key to drinking moderately.

My new approach to “normal” and “responsible” drinking is to drink only while I’m doing something else, too, like watching a band, as opposed to absentmindedly draining Amstels because I’ve run out of change for the jukebox. The method is kind of like that old cliché of thinking about baseball while you’re hav-ing sex; I rely on outside entertainment to distract me from the joy that alcohol brings me. Only it doesn’t always work. Sometimes, when I’m already buzzed after the drink minimum, the feeling multiplies inside me like microbes and I feel a greedy de-sire to feed it two more beers so it will grow.

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• • •

I am nurturing
that kind of buzz on New Year’s Eve, after four bottles of beer. Matt and I have spent the evening blowing paper horns, sneering for a disposable camera, and listening to a generally bad band that, tonight, sounded good. I am skipping down the street while the wind lifts the pleats of my skirt. Matt is lost somewhere behind me on the crosswalk. The people I pass on the street look out at me through the zeros of their
2003
- shaped glasses, and their faces smear. The headlights of cars trail the way they would in a photo taken with a sluggish shutter in low light.

Every few steps, I turn around to tell Matt that I hate him. I’ve been saying it for many blocks, and I can’t remember why. Maybe it’s because a woman’s name popped up in the caller ID box of his cell phone at midnight. Or it might be because he wants to stay out when I want to go home. Or it could be because my feet hurt and alcohol has resurrected my irrational hostility.

Eventually, I push into a bar on Avenue B, where the air is sweaty and the clientele looks as pissed off as I do. I decide I want to order more beer, to shift and twist angrily on my bar stool, and to give Matt the silent treatment. And when he asks me what’s wrong, I want to slap a bottle off a table, so I do. He laughs and presses his forehead to mine, like I am acting for the sake of some joke. But my rage is real. I’ll be able to see it to-morrow when we develop the night’s roll of film. A picture will show me standing in the middle of Houston Street, flashing my middle finger for the camera, while traffic is stopped behind me for the red light. My smile will look wide and kidding, but I’ll be able to tell by the squint of my eyes that the fuck-you sentiment is genuine.

I decide to quit drinking for good before the hangover hits. I make up my mind during the cab ride home, when I feel dizzy and Matt lets me lie down and rest my head on his lap. My stomach pitches with every pothole on First Avenue, and when I look up I can see his face hanging over mine with ungrudging affection. I wonder how many people have shown his kind of faith in me, how many have made an effort to ally with me without alcohol. Probably no one has. His is the first honest friendship that I’ve had in years, and I don’t want to spend my time with him drinking, sobbing, shrieking, and otherwise pushing him anyway. A rare truth falls over me like the glare from the streetlights. I know that as long as I keep drinking, I will drive back everyone who is good-natured. Only people who are as drunk and damaged as I am will stay.

In the
year and a half since I’ve quit drinking, I’m not sure if I’ve found the “good life” that the addiction counselor men-tioned to me, but I’ve certainly uncovered a better one. It’s made up of good days and bad days, and they are sometimes grossly out of proportion. But I think that’s the thing that makes abstinence momentous; it has a sweet-and-sour appeal.

I’ve learned that I will always be uptight. In the absence of alcohol, I have learned that I am not and have never been an extrovert. I will never be the kind of woman who dances at weddings, unburdens to hairdressers, or stops strangers to admire their shoes. Instead, I have a cautious carriage, an unwavering gait, and the kind of rigid shoulder blades that make yoga instructors grind their elbows into them. Like all escapists, I sometimes get lost in long moments of silence.

I’ve learned that my anxiety won’t ever drop off entirely. I will always fear the outside chances: that a deadline will go un-

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fulfilled, or an elevator will jam, or a mouse will scuttle across the floor no matter how many cubes of poison the exterminator drops behind the stove. Like so many people, I know I can’t ex-pect to stop feeling anxiety during a time in history when there is actually a device for measuring it—the terror-alert level, which in New York always hovers at orange. Without alcohol, it is harder to hide from my fears. Instead, I have to close my eyes, shake out my hands, and try to get a handle on them.

Likewise, I will always have emotional hot spots. Memories of drunken disasters tend to flood back to me at the most inconve-nient moments. In Central Park, when I see teenaged girls un-loading beer cans from their backpacks, I catch a glimpse of what I looked like ten years ago, and I have to look away. My breath seizes up while I’m watching a Brooklyn-based band because the percussion section is so violent it returns a hangover-like heart thumping to me. Some part of me still feels distrustful of men; when I walk home with my hands bound up in plastic grocery bags, I feel the stab of panic when a man on the corner leans in too close to say, “Hey, pretty.” I’ve learned that the deeper I examine the past, the less it wages war on my consciousness.

I’ve learned that I can’t jolt myself out of sadness. Just as I couldn’t do it with alcohol, I can’t do it with naps, herbs, or rig-orous exercise. I think I will always be more vulnerable to it than some people. I will always be moved to tears by an animal-rescue show, or a certain Polish poet, or some bit of advice from my mother. But depression, the feeling that I was slow-motion falling into my own imminent madness—or worse—ended when hard drinking did. Today, bad days have a bottom to them.

I’ve learned that romantic love adapts to life without alcohol. Once Matt and I stopped wasting whole hours in the bar below my apartment, our time together became less haphazard and

more deliberate. We used to talk while we drank beer and played pinball at side-by-side machines. Now, we do it while we sit on a hill in the park. We cluck at squirrels and tell stories un-til we’ve missed the movie that we planned to see.

In the end, Matt elected to stop drinking as a show of solidar-ity. And though I am thankful for his support, I know my decision to abstain began as an individual choice, and I know it has to stay that way. I have to believe that it is easier for me to hold fast to what I want without alcohol. It makes it easier for me to know who I am, and to accept it.

I’ve learned that if my friendships have any hope of surviving, they can’t have their roots in commiseration. As for the female friends I have cried in my beers with over the years, the women I loved so completely—for their sadness manifested as madness, or madness manifested as sadness, for their electric instability and profound pain—I have lost touch with every last one of them. Without alcohol, our friendship seized like an engine without oil. We could support each other through tragedies, but not through good days or even average ones.

In the wake of it all, I think I’ve learned what it means to be authentically glad. These days, I’m grateful for a hazy afternoon when the man behind the counter of the grocer remembers how I take my coffee, when the guy in the long tunnel of the Sixth Avenue subway station is still playing “A Hard Day’s Night” on guitar, when the park is filled with strangers laughing as their dogs try to mount one another. I like picking up a roll of developed film at the corner photo lab and discovering that the world inside the prints confirms that, for a few brief moments, the world was as handsome as I thought it was. It convinces me that my efforts aren’t useless. I think I’ve found some meaning here. I know that I don’t want to be bell jarred by alcohol. I don’t

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want to spend the next ten years waiting for alcoholism to fall like an ax, nor do I want to spin through any more cycles of hard drinking followed by abstinence, in which every lap picks up speed and tailspins me into more depression, aggression, and ac-cidents. I have no desire to sacrifice more years to rebuilding and recovering. I refuse to watch life-as-I-know-it dissolve into a se-ries of disasters transcribed into memoirs. I won’t be a case in point for any more issues of self-ruin, or have solidity that’s that cheap and flimsy.

Over the
course of writing this book, I’ve learned that if any of us, girls and women, want true strength born of stability, we need to find a more productive outlet. Drinking, like all forms of self-destruction, isn’t a valid art form because it allows the world to rejoice in our weakness, the inferiority that it has always expected of us. Rather than turning our dissatisfaction inward, allowing ourselves to be thwarted by gender stereotypes and the burdens to achieve feeble feminine goals like thinness, rather than allowing our frustrations to be wasted and to waste away in-side of us, I think we should use them as ammunition against the world they were born of. We will never really free ourselves of our inhibitions in dank bars. But I believe we can shed them in our projects. In our music, in our films, and on our canvases, we can be wildly immodest.

By the same token, I think it’s time that we allow ourselves to experience real anger as women. And I don’t mean that passive-aggressive dance that we’ve employed for too many years. It’s not real anger if it is implied or a few degrees removed, if it takes the form of whispering, or cold shoulders, or silent treatment. Real anger is what popular culture would have us be afraid of, based on the fact that it is not courteous, elegant, or
feminine.
Since I

stopped drinking, I’ve been perpetually angry: I am enraged by the alcohol industry, which alternates between pandering to women and using us to bait men. I’m sick of ad campaigns by Svedka vodka, which picture women kneeling to support trays of men’s martinis, or holding glasses of vodka between their naked breasts. I’m sick of Wet gin by Beefeater (surely a liquor that was named with women in mind), the print ads of which read, “Your head is telling you to stay dry but your heart is shout-ing Wet! Wet! Wet!” as though alcohol were a necessary lubri-cant, the very ingredient that makes desire possible for women. I am insanely tired of Anheuser-Busch, which insults women’s intelligence by playing to cultural stereotypes about body consciousness. I hate the fact that they think they can sucker us by marketing low-carb, low-calorie beer.