Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (19 page)

Almost spontaneously, we group ourselves socially, too. At nineteen, knowing who our friends are is the closest many of us can come to knowing who and what
we
are. Even if we haven’t yet committed to a major, to a hair color, or to eating three square meals a day, we know the group of people that can best tolerate us. Our posse is a label that we wear proudly: The student government knots Brooks Brothers ties; the Outing Club anchors snowboards to the roofs of their cars; and the staff members at
The Daily Orange
use hollow lingo like “off-lead” and “hammerhead.” They are markers that everyone knows how to spot and read.

The Greek system is itself a signifier. And within it there are subsignifiers. They are the letters mounted on gold brooches, embroidered on sweatshirts, and nailed to the exteriors of every house. During rush, every sorority rolls out trays of cupcakes with their codification spelled out in icing.

During rush, it is all too easy to line yourself up against a score of female stereotypes and try to figure out which one you fit. All day long girls debate—before class, in the library, on the stationary bikes in the school’s gym. Do they belong in the house of funny girls or the house of prim and propers? Can they imagine themselves in the stone farmhouse or the California ram-bler? Do they belong with the girls who look like Courteney Cox or the ones akin to Anna Kournikova? Choices, choices. Girls everywhere remind me of the orphaned duckling in my favorite children’s book, the one that runs the streets, asking stranger af-ter stranger, “Are
you
my mommy?” Every girl is looking for her
sisters,
total strangers with whom she expects to share some strand of genetic code.

I am not above it.

I visit Zeta Alpha Sigma just before the sky darkens on a snow-spitting Wednesday afternoon. I’ve heard ahead of time that they are not your average sorority girls. In a pantheon where every house has a denomination—Kappa Kappa Glam-our, A Chi Ho, etc.—they are called the Zeta Alcoholics, the fun-loving, fast-living, antisorority girls. Whereas most of the sororities on Comstock Avenue have ivory shutters, Bombay furniture, and a fine-tuned baby grand, Zeta is as squat as a frat house, an ivy-covered stucco with crumbling walkways, a secret smoking room, and discarded cups in the potted geraniums. It is rumored that their house chef bakes pot brownies and serves them alongside chicken à la king.

Given their reputation, I imagine the Zetas will be brawny tomboys who open bottles with their teeth. For now, I buy the myth that female binge drinkers are overweight brutes with di-sheveled hair and sweat stains. It is the allegory I’ll later call the “Drunk Girl” myth, after the
Saturday Night Live
skit. It is a

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convenient misconception that gives those of us habitual drunks, the ones who don’t look like Jeff Richards in a crooked wig, the license to keep discounting ourselves among girls who have alcohol-abuse problems.

In reality, the Zetas are hugely feminine. The arch-top door swings open on natural beauties, waifs, lip-gloss-and-mascara girls. They wear their lettered sweatshirts over tattered jeans, vintage slips, and paint-splattered Pumas. Tiny diamonds twin-kle in their pierced noses. Tattoos peek over the waistbands of their jeans. They are the hipsters, the hippies, the rock-and-roll girls, and the renegades. They come from families of sons.

Moreover, the Zeta house has the dim, haunted feeling of New York’s Chelsea Hotel. Floors croak. Pipes clang. A framed portrait of a dead housemother eyes you with too much interest. The sisters float through the tour without any overblown pep, gently joking about the sloped kitchen floor and mismatched furniture. Even clean, their bedrooms are a hash of negatives, paint tubes, and scraps of fabric. Paint-smeared photo collages hang slightly crooked in the stairwells, alongside composite pho-tos of old members, some of them dating back to the fifties, all those women with furry cardigans and sturdy-looking hairdos. The house immediately appeals to me as a historical land-mark. It is the type of place that retains the air of its past residents: the outrageous, the artistic, the self-destructive, the wounded, the anything-goes. When I move into the house one year later, I’ll find out the second floor really does show signs of the macabre. The girls who live there hear wailing at night. Some see shower curtains blowing sideways, even though the windows are closed. Many report having the same dream, in

which a young blonde drowns in a bathtub.

All mentions of alcohol are strictly forbidden during rush,

but when I take a seat on a slanted window bench, opposite a sis-ter named Maya, all of our talk drifts back to drinking. She tells me she’s a sophomore photography major who hangs out at a jazz bar downtown. I tell her about drinking with Tess, and then drinking with Hannah, and the string of off-campus parties that are fast becoming déjà vu. Together, we talk like sentimental fools, like girls who can’t quit gushing about our boyfriends. We don’t see it, but we are just as bad as the sorority girls who define themselves by family money and designer jeans. Booze is the axis our dialogue revolves around. It is our centrifugal force.

“Look,” Maya says, leaning in to grip my upper arm like a railing, and making me feel for the first time like I’m built for feminine support. “During rush, a lot of sororities try to deny the fact that they drink. Talking about it can get them in big shit with the Greek council. Sororities have a lot of bad stereotypes, you know? But I’m going to tell you, here we believe in the phi-losophy of ‘work hard, party hard.’ The girls in this house are really real, and they really go for it. But we have our fun, too.” The Zeta girls consider themselves what addiction counselors call “terminally unique,” which in their case is actually more like “terminally cool.” I’ll learn soon enough that their triumphs are pinned up like taxidermy. And their failures are felt like a cerebral hemorrhage that no one without a poet’s intensity, an artist’s receptivity, or a radical’s planetary foresight has any hope to understand. For the next four years, they will again and again tout themselves as “real,” and I will be too naive to know that anyone who uses that designation is disguising a representation

of immense falsity.

Four years later, I’ll meet an old sorority sister at a Manhattan restaurant, and between sips of her third artificially colored, ar-

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tificially flavored sour-apple martini, she will unironically tell me, as though she is still wired to the same audio loop, about her postcollege quest for “something real.”

It will take me years to decipher the code of the chemically dependent, to learn that “fine” implies
hammered,
“relaxed” translates to
stoned,
“normal” means
totally fucked.
Reality just is. It is the light that permeates the thin bedroom curtains on the morning of a fierce hangover, after all the nocturnal beer tears and boozy sentiments, and the self-annihilation disguised as fine art.

Anything that needs to be represented with a concept-word (e.g.,
sisterhood
) is almost always a crock of shit.

Zeta is one of eight sororities that invite me back for the sec-ond round of rush. The second round is the skit round, and I am subjected to far too many tearful renditions of “Wind Beneath My Wings.”

Zeta’s skit is a musical review that spans the ages and includes lyrics like, “If you’re smart, you’ll be here, and you’ll be drinking lots of beer” and “Going to M Street, Zeta’s there, everyone in the bars beware!” The sisters in the audience, the ones standing on their chairs and throwing their hands up at any mention of alcohol, make my young, drunk’s heart glad.

When we hear the ringing of a dinner bell, an indication that it’s time to go, Maya finds me in the crowd. She is wearing a deep-blue, polyester lounge dress that is probably a costume, but in this house, one can never be sure. Her pale face is freckled with glitter. As we walk to the door, she bends in to say, “As far as I can see, you’re a Zeta through and through.”

Outside, snowflakes fall like confetti. I am utterly abuzz on approval.

When it comes time to place “bids” (our three favorite sororities, ranked in order of how much we want to join them), I write down only Zeta. This is what our rush leaders call “sui-ciding,” namely because it’s Russian roulette; if you pick only one sorority and that sorority doesn’t invite you to join it, it’s a shot to the head. But I can’t see myself anyplace else. The Zetas and I have common interests. In any other sorority, I’d be a fish out of firewater.

Maya calls
me the day I receive my invitation to pledge Zeta, to say congratulations and ask, “Aren’t you excited?” And even though I am excited, even though my pride swells with the idea that a group of women likes me enough to solicit me in this way, I can’t get over a pledge I was forced to sign when I vowed my intention to become a sister of Zeta: It made me promise I would abstain from alcohol for the next three months.

I tell Maya how ironic it is that one of the meanings of the word
pledge
is to drink a toast to, considering our pledge leader says we can’t drink as pledges. She explains that underage drinking has been the cause of a few chapters’ suspension at S.U., and a few of the nearby universities have closed down their houses altogether. There’s been a lot of bad press. The local news networks make Greek organizations look like one big bender. To read it in the papers, you’d think sororities drink mimosas for breakfast and draft beer for lunch, that they turn water into wine. You’d think they toss empty bottles in the driveway and make pledges run barefoot through the shards. “A lot of freshmen—not you, but a lot of others—just don’t know their limits,” Maya says. “A pledge could be drinking in her room, or out at a party that has nothing to do with the sorority, and if she goes too far—if she gets taken to the emergency

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room or something—there’s nothing to keep the administration from shutting down the house. Everyone assumes she was hazed. Everyone always assumes the worst.”

Sure as hell, Maya is right. The following spring, campus security will find six girls, all pledges of Alpha Omicron Pi, drunk as badgers in their dorm rooms. Two of them will be brought to the hospital for acute intoxication, after which the administration will order the sorority’s S.U. chapter to close for good.

Statistically, freshman sorority girls are a liability. Whereas freshman frat boys begin college with more boozing experience than non-frat freshman, freshman sorority members are just as green as non-Greek girls are. When freshman girls drink, we are like people learning how to drive a stick shift: We either let go of the clutch too fast or too slow. We take too many shots, or not enough. When we’re trying to get drunk we stall short. When we’re not trying to get drunk, we mistakenly lurch into it anyway. Either way, driving the drink is never a smooth ride. “Hang in there,” Maya says. “We’ll have a party sometime

soon.”

It is
the occasional tantalizing reminders that bait you. They are the sorority’s way of keeping you on the line long enough to reel you in, along with your semesterly dues. Big-sister week is the wriggling worm on the hook. It takes place just a week before hell week, apparently so we’ll have a confidante for when the shit hits the fan, a Virgil to shepherd us through so much ridiculous chaos.

Big-sister week is five days of anonymous gifts: bouquets of flowers and buckets of candy, not to mention shot glasses and cigarette lighters bearing Zeta’s letters. Every day, our names

are lettered on envelopes lined up on the mantel. Inside them are cryptic clues that say too much without saying anything at all:

So here, Koren, is clue number three Soon you’ll know who your big sister will be.

I’m from a small town, not far away from a city I have two dogs, a bird, and a kitty.

When it comes to smoking cigarettes,

I pass, though occasionally I get drunk off my ass. For music, I’m into The Cars and The Ramones,

As well as Dylan, Costello, The Who, and The Stones.

Guess who? Your Big Sister

The mystery is to be revealed Saturday night, when the big sisters organize a scavenger hunt on and off campus. Their identities will be unveiled at the finish line, like a whopping grand prize.

On Saturday, I show up at Zeta at
8:30 p.m.
as instructed by

my final clue, wearing the plastic, party-store lei that came with it. I’ve spent the week pretending I don’t know my big sister is Maya because I don’t want to spoil her fun.

There are four other pledges waiting in the foyer, variously outfitted for the occasion: One girl is wearing a pointed party hat; another is wearing striped leg warmers; and one unfortu-nate girl wears her bra outside of her shirt. There is the usual rumbling that happens when girls get together, the kind that I always shrink from. Girls are comparing costumes and spitting up laughter, and the volume escalates until Zeta’s president comes downstairs and tells everyone to shut up.

She gives us a math problem to solve, something like
49,832

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times
0.615
, minus
30,000.68
, plus
20
, minus
42
. The final an-swer reveals the address that we’re supposed to go to,
624
Ack-erman Avenue. In the driveway, two cars wait to drive us there.

None of
us recognizes the drivers, which is enough to send us into a fury of nervous whispering. At the house, we’ve been hav-ing weekly quizzes in which the sisters file into the rec room one at a time, singling a pledge out and asking her, “What’s my name? You want to be a member of my sorority and you don’t even know my fucking name?” Some of the high-strung pledges have fainted under interrogation.