Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (23 page)

I’ll only know to call it a riot when I read tomorrow’s headlines:

how one s
.
u
.
party turned streets afire after a police request to close down
. Reporters will call it “alcohol-fueled” and “the city’s first riot in at least a decade.” All in all, it will cost

the city $
22,000
in damages, including $
700
to fix the shattered windshield of a fire truck. Thirty-nine students will be arrested and ordered to pay $
2,500
fines. Livingstock will be a thing of the past.

I follow Chris (that’s my phantom’s name) around the corner of a duplex to a parking lot out back, where we stow away in the flatbed of a white pickup. We lie with our backs against the cargo space, kissing and watching the fray unfold like a display of fireworks. The fuss on the street has the same romantic qual-ities, the same loud popping and sparks of explosions.

We have the type of immediate intimacy that is brought on only by alcohol or physical danger. It is the kind that usually happens only in movies, when men and women save the world from nuclear holocaust or escape a detonating bus.

Up until tonight, in the bed of this pickup, I have always pre-ferred booze to boys. For the most part, I’ve always wanted to be left alone with my buzz, to study the thoughts curving in my head like a girl admiring her own silhouette in the mirror. In the past, if I kissed boys during those drunken moments of self-wonderment, it was only because it was easier than resisting. I would let some boy put his mouth on mine because I knew no harm could come of it, because I was stoned and stony, and I felt nothing.

For the first time, with a stranger in a strange car, I
feel.
From

nowhere, desire surfaces, and it swirls through my insides. The want is thrumming and it is everywhere, like a hive knocked from a tree that unfixes a squall of bees. The fluttering in my chest is as unfounded and unnerving as the riot itself. And dread follows it because I know in an instant that I would, and will, do anything in pursuit of this yearning. It will not be enough to want once. I will want to
want
a million times over, to feel this

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You’re Pretty When I’m Drunk

warmth where there used to be coldness, this prickling sensation where everything was once numb.

Chris is a prime example of why it will be hard to stop drinking: Drunk, I take bigger chances, and therefore reap bigger re-wards. He is the polestar that I would never have found if I wasn’t shipwrecked, were my internal navigation not haywire. He is my temperate latitude, someone to drive me home, wearing his sweatshirt because my clothes still hold the dew of the fire hose. When I say good-bye, I write my phone number on a parking ticket. It will be void in a week, when I go home for the summer.

The next day
, Chris calls to invite me to a barbecue at his fraternity, and I suddenly don’t care about anything else. He is a buzz incarnate. Just like straight vodka, he has the capacity to quell my worries about everything else. When he calls, I forget about being cut from the cheerleading team, and about the fi that I fl out failed. I brush off the boxes I still haven’t packed for home.

I bring Hannah to the barbecue for moral support, but when we get there, the throng of boys drinking beer and swinging Wiffle bats is still hard to approach. It’s like the moment the door opens on a crowded elevator, and we’re not sure whether we should try to squeeze in, too.

Chris is chasing a tennis ball across the yard, and he waves hello. A few brothers drag an armchair onto the front lawn for us, and Hannah and I sit, doubled up on it. Together, we smoke cigarettes like joints, lighting them and then passing them off. Boys pour us blended margaritas, and we turn ourselves in circles to lose the bees that trail our cups. We are less than fifty feet from campus, and the stony face of the chemistry building looks helpless to stop us from drinking.

Sometime after my third Catalina margarita, dusk lands like a
747
, and the sudden change of light makes me wobble. The fraternity’s cook calls the boys in to eat potato skins. Hannah squeezes my shoulders, then takes off for cheerleading practice, drunk as a handcart. For a moment, I sit there in the low light, pulled between the desire to stay and a compulsion to go. I breathe the sugary smell of hard alcohol and fresh-cut grass. And then Chris comes for me, the way you find your date when a slow song comes on at the prom.

Throughout college, every time a buzz comes on like sweet music, a man will seem to sense it and grab for me.

I follow the
back of Chris’s T-shirt up the fraternity’s stairs, all three floors of them, and then out the attic window and up a twelve-foot, wrought-iron ladder to the house roof. Three years later, a brother will attempt this climb while schloggered and break both of his legs. I feel a little like Orphan Annie climbing the train tracks at the end of the movie; my boozy-woozy feet tap-dance on every rung.

When I make it to the height of the house, the view feels like the big picture. I can see all of campus—its green lawns, yellow hedges, and the white walkways that section it all off. I imagine myself streamlined. My mind and body are finally working in tandem, and there is no rift between what I want to do and what I actually will do. There are no stars, but I imagine I can sense them approaching, the way people can sense rain coming deep in their joints.

I kiss Chris in a plastic lawn chair, and let him pass his hands over me, while my hair whips sideways like a flag on a pole. I know it is more than the height that makes my heart leap into my throat, the way it does in the brief moment before a roller

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You’re Pretty When I’m Drunk

coaster breaks over the crest of the first big hill, the ground screaming toward me, the person next to me lifting his hands up.

Andrea Dworkin
said most people see intercourse as a private act, but it’s actually a social act because men are sexually predatory in life, and women are sexually manipulative. I think being drunk makes men even more predatory, and women more manipulative. Too often, I find myself drifting into a decanted daze when some boy like Milton swoops down like a thunder cat, coming at me with both paws and his big, whiskered face. And lately, even more often than that, I find myself employing a weird hocus-pocus that seems to appear from nowhere. Sober, I’ll cross the street to avoid looking a leering man in the face, but drunk, I will talk him up for an hour, robbing him blind, ex-tracting all the free drinks and free flattery he will give me. I’ll watch his mouth move like a stock ticker and pretend to be deeply interested in the quotes. I’ll even tell him that his voice reminds me of my favorite song, or that he has eyes like two blue flames, or maybe even that I’d like him to walk me home, before I’m gone to the refuge of the ladies’ room, never to return. Drunk, I’m quick becoming an assassin, eager to settle an ancient score, to extricate payback for a guy’s crimes, offenses I don’t know but feel certain exist.

But tonight, my carousing with Chris feels like a wholly private act, even though it’s in a most public place. Maybe it is because he’s more timid than I first thought, or because alcohol has made me feel more like the mountain lion than the piece of dropped meat. Or maybe it’s because we are wholly self-interested, in the way that only drunkards can be.

I once heard someone say that the concept of moderation seems a little extreme, and tonight, on this rooftop, I agree.

Moderation is idiocy perpetuated by the alcohol industry, which bombards us with warnings about “drinking responsibly” in or-der to absolve itself from the irresponsibility that alcohol awakens in just about everyone at one time or another.

Even years from now, once I’ve stopped drinking, I will never stop trusting extremes. I will always believe that anything worth having is worth having in excess. The good things are worth hoarding until you have a cookie-fat ass, sex-aching loins, joy that fires through you like popping popcorn, or love, the weakness at the sight of some boy that makes your chest ache like indigestion. If it’s good for you, it ought to be good for you in any amount, and you should track down every available bit of it. And if it’s toxic, if it turns your liver into a hard little rock of scar tissue, or curls your memory at the edges like something burned in a fire, or makes your stomach flop, or your mind ache, or your personality contorted, you shouldn’t buy the bullshit about temperance.

Alcohol, like all addictive drugs, changes the chemistry in your brain in such a way that after one drink, the brain wants another. The same thing happens after one kiss from Chris— my mouth wants another. After one graze of his fingertips, my skin yearns for another. Alcohol and attraction are addictive properties on their own, but the combination makes my blood bolt through me. I am hooked.

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When it comes
to romance, my drinking is almost fetishistic. For years it will be the third wheel in every one of my romantic liaisons. Like the blonde bombshell in a passionate threesome, booze, in its near presence, will always make me feel sexier. Alone with a man, I’ll get used to liquor’s company. After a time, it will be hard to manufacture any affection without it. Sober, I won’t be able to squeeze a man’s hand or say “I’ve missed you.” I won’t be able to divulge the slightest hint of endearment.

Back at school sophomore year, my yearning for Chris per-sists with or without alcohol. But liquor makes it swell like one of those sponge capsules that flower in warm water. Sometimes my tenderness for Chris has a breadth so wide that I can’t see

around it while I’m sober. That is the case when he stops by my dorm room on a whim, or invites me over to watch
A Clockwork Orange
with our shoes off, or drives me to the bus station to meet Kat, who is in from Cornell for a visit. Without alcohol, his glance alone can rattle me. Just hearing someone call his name across a room makes the fluff on the back of my neck stand up. One damp Sunday in October, Chris invites me to be his date for his fraternity’s date party. It’s an affair that isn’t all that different from a junior-high make-out party. But instead of playing Yahtzee, we gulp Martini and Rossi. And instead of “seven

minutes in heaven,” it’s more like seventy.

When I call Hannah with the news, she runs directly over in her cotton pajamas, toting a bottle of Skyy vodka and four little black dresses, which I try on in frenzied succession, even though they’re almost exactly like the five that I own. She stays even af-ter I settle on a ruffled black one, and together we pour vodka into a carton of lemonade we find in the mini-refrigerator. Each sip from its cardboard lip tastes strong and bitter, but it slows my stomach jitters, so I keep drinking. Tess, who is my sophomore-year roommate, ties a red velvet bow in my hair and outlines my eyes with a kohl pencil. Hannah tucks a Durex condom into my purse’s inner pocket because she thinks I ought to carry one, “just in case.”

Throughout college, my friends carry condoms defensively, in stark contrast to some boys, who carry them offensively. It’s part of a warped female thought process: When we’re gutter drunk with some boy we just met, we like to think that if we can’t fend off danger, we can at least beseech safety. We learned this outrageous mode of prevention in part from the public-health officials who visit once a semester to lecture sororities on

the dangers of excessive drinking. In
2002
, a public safety slogan

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Love in the Time of Liquor

from the University of Colorado at Boulder will actually advise female students: “When you’re drunk, you’ll have sex with someone you wouldn’t have lunch with, so bring a condom.”

For better or worse, my girlfriends and I are products of Generation Safe Sex. As an age bracket, we were inundated with condom catchphrases before we hit puberty—misogynistic slogans like “Before you attack her, wrap your wrapper” and “If you think she’s spunky, cover your monkey.” We’ve been taught to BYOC as we BYOB. We fear HIV before the unplanned or nonconsensual sex through which it’s contracted, which is like not listing injured troops among casualties: The number of bat-tle deaths is tragic, but it’s only a part of the carnage.

Chris is
not the type of boy to make you wait, sitting on your bed for forty minutes, trying not to smear the lipstick your roommate painstakingly applied on whatever bottle you are swilling to take the edge off your tension. He turns up at ten o’clock sharp, dressed sweetly, the way boys do when they’re giving in-class presentations. He is wearing crisp oxford cloth and khaki. Mini marlins leap on his tie. His skin carries hints of mint and cologne.

I’m too spooked to glance up at Chris as we walk from my dorm to his fraternity house, which is just down the street. He has brought a small black umbrella, which we have to huddle under to stay dry. In the cracked sidewalks, there are pools of rainwater and fat knots of worms to step over. My breath jerks when my elbow brushes against Chris’s dress shirt, when it oc-curs to me,
I’ve never navigated these close inches without being drunk.

I feel the same way I used to in high school, when I would have to put on my mother’s panty hose and accompany some boy

to a homecoming dance. The prospect of being someone’s date embarrasses me as deeply as it did when I was fourteen. As far as I am concerned, the word
date
holds too much meaning. I operate in a culture that is hopelessly noncommittal. My sentences are punctuated with
like
and
whatever,
the linguistic indifference that was forged by Generation X, adopted by Generation Y, and is to every subsequent age bracket just as natural as
if, and,
or
but. Date
is too certain a word in a world that prefers vagueness. To me, it means a responsibility to be entertaining, bright, and opinionated, to adjust a man’s shirt collar and dis-pute Medicare over vodka martinis. Being Chris’s date feels like a terrible, terrifying burden.