Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (24 page)

At times
like this, I wish I were a party girl, a term that I’ve al-ways loved.

I know the designation is the stuff of amateur porn sites and

bad cinema. And it’s no wonder, considering that the term was once akin to
exotic dancer.
(In the
1958
film
Party Girl,
Cyd Charisse plays a young showgirl who works as a party girl at

gangster soirees.) The byword has always suggested not only that women’s fun exists solely for the benefit of men, but that it can’t exist at all without the active gaze of Joe Francis, the wildly rich producer of
Girls Gone Wild,
or some other pervert in an

official pussy inspector
T-shirt to confirm it.

I know all of this, and yet I just can’t help myself.
Party girl
al-ways makes me think of jelly bracelets, tangerine-colored tights, and high-top sneakers, not to mention
1980
s cocktail dresses—

the sequined ones that are basted with bows and frills, the ones that are so bad they’re good. It still makes me think of Cyndi Lauper, who was like any fantastical and slightly unnerving children’s character to me at age three, when my mom says I

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would turn loops in my ballet tutu whenever “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” came through the kitchen-counter radio.

The party girl has always existed, and it appears that she will simply never go away, particularly in the era of tabloid television shows in which cameramen stalk Los Angeles nightclubs in the hope of provoking a shitfaced starlet to flash the finger. The party girl will never stop running up five-thousand-dollar bar

tabs, puking in the bathroom at Lot
61
, or getting kicked out of

Vegas nightclubs while screaming “Don’t you know who I am?” She will never stop making headlines in the
New York Post
for gargling champagne and lifting her skirt. Without her, Shan-nen Doherty or Tara Reid or Britney Spears wouldn’t have maintained some semblance of a career, and Paris Hilton wouldn’t have had one to begin with. The party gal is a sad and beauti-ful ingenue, who appears in photographs with tousled hair, smudged eyeliner, and a visible thong. And as long as she exists in real life, we will never cease to be interested in her.

We’re fascinated because the party girl never stops making us feel better about ourselves. In her essay “Visual Pleasure in Nar-rative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey suggests that films and the sexy starlets in them give our dirty thoughts free rein, which in-evitably makes us feel wicked, until the only way to absolve ourselves of the guilt we feel is to blame the women onscreen. The same thing happens when I flip the channel and pause with per-verse fascination while Paris Hilton pounds cocktails or pole dances, her bony legs spread like those of a newborn colt that’s trying to stand up, before I say, “That’s disgusting.”

Deep down, I’m glad for Paris, for the same reason that I’m glad for all party girls, especially Jenna and Barbara Bush: Drunk, they are uninhibited, often sexually, which makes me feel intrigued, then repulsed, then superior. Their atrocities allow me to call them “the world’s biggest assholes,” and momen-tarily remove myself from the very same list.

On the
night of Chris’s date party, I wish I had a party girl’s sex-ual spontaneity.

All the fraternity’s usual party games have been cleared out for the occasion. The pool table has been repositioned against a far wall. The black lights and neon beer signs are absent, as is the rocking-chair-like contraption that the brothers manufactured for taking shots.

It’s pretty obvious that the main floor has been outfitted to be
romantic,
which is another word that disquiets me. I will never get over the feeling that there is too much pressure to feel affec-tionate in formal attire, or in a restaurant with courses, or in proximity to candlesticks or flowers. It will always be nearly impossible for me to feel an affinity for someone unless we’re both wearing unwashed jeans and unwashed hair, unless we’re eat-ing dinner at the corner diner, by the glow of a neon-blue aquarium light.

Tonight, even the furniture looks like it is canoodling. Someone has pushed the wingback chairs and leather sofas into a semicircle around a wood-burning fire. There are tea candles on coffee tables, vases wadded up with baby’s breath, and Eva Cas-sidy’s dumb devotion spilling out of surround speakers. I want to snatch my coat from the coatroom and hightail it home before anyone can tell me that I clean up nice. And I would, were it not for Chris’s psychic pull. I would leave, if my want wasn’t a force strong enough to tie me into a chair.

Chris goes upstairs to help a brother move a table, and when he comes back down to find me, I’m in the kitchen drinking tequila with a sorority sister named Elle. We are swallowing

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shots from the type of thimble-sized plastic cups nurses use to serve pills at the student health center. Chris comes up behind me, so that Elle sees him first and smiles sheepishly.

When he lays his big palm flat in the hollow between my shoulder blades, I feel a fluttering spark like the moment a moth collides with a bug zapper. I take it as proof that my synapses still need stunning. It is an electrical surge, and I know that I need to take the rum drink he’s brought me, plus a few more shots with Elle, before I’ll be senseless enough to let him touch me.

It’s not that I don’t like Chris’s fingertips on the back of my neck; it’s just the opposite. My desire for him is like my desire to drink: Privately, I want, enormously. I want in heaps and dizzy-ing doses, and I want many times over; I want overkill. But publicly, I don’t want my desire to look excessive. So I drink to get a handle on my hot cheeks, my jitters, and my speechlessness. The next time Chris puts an arm around me, I want to be as serene as the surface of a lake: something pretty and reflective that doesn’t dare ripple.

Elle and
I spend the next half hour in the downstairs bathroom. As far as we’re concerned, it’s the best damn room in the whole house, a white mausoleum where we can sit on the edge of the claw-foot tub and smoke her French cigarettes. Chris is aller-gic and makes faces when I light up in front of him, but when I drink, I can’t stand not smoking. A cigarette is the olive in my martini, the garnish waiting for me at the bottom of every glass. At one point, Elle teeters backward into the belly of the tub and knocks her head against the soap dish. When I offer her my hand, she pulls me in, too, and the white room rings with our laughter. When I stand up and look down at my legs, there are all manner of snags and holes in my tights, and I don’t care. I

slide my fingers under the tinted nylon and tear wider gashes. Elle whoops. The tiles underneath my feet rock back and forth in a way that feels pendular, and it reminds me that Chris, my center of gravity, is upstairs.

By the time I clomp up the spiral stairway, I’ve quit feeling anxious and choked. Six cups of cheap liquor have washed away my outer layer, the cold surface of fear, under which there is an emotional stratum of lightness, gladness, and love. I coil beside Chris where he’s sitting on a sofa in front of the fireplace, the way a cat attempts to reconcile after a hasty decision to hate you. I let my head tip onto his shoulder and watch his mouth move from close up, the same way I’d watch a movie from the front row. Every word he exhales lets my flickering fondness catch fire.

Someone snaps our photo while we’re sitting side by side. It is a picture that I’ll keep for too long, carting it with me through too many cities between the pages of
Of Human Bondage,
until the edges are bent and the matte is smudged and covered with crud. For a long time, I will see the illusion of emotional connection in the way we are sitting, totally tangent: shins touching, my arm sleeping quietly on his thigh, his cheek grazing my forehead, his arm folded entirely around me and clasping me as tenderly as any man ever has. It will take me years to notice the miserable truth in our body language, the fact that while he looks as wide open as a sunflower, I am closed as tight as a clam. My legs are tangled around each other. My chin darts down, and my chest crumbles inward. The only thing I’m grasping lov-ingly, with both hands, is a cup of rum and Coke.

Alcohol is
a manipulative bitch. If she was a person, I think she’d be a telemarketer or a used-car saleswoman, the type of woman who could persuade you to do just about anything. I

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think this because when my mind is stewing in alcohol, it prompts me to do things that I’d normally oppose, like take my bra off under my coat in the corner convenience store because I’ve suddenly decided it pinches. Drunk, I can seduce myself into any course of action. I can always come up with motivation to draw that proverbial line in the sand back one more inconse-quential inch.

That’s how I convince myself on the night of the date party that I want to lose my virginity to Chris.

The party doesn’t slowly thin out, it goes directly from jam-packed to vacant, as some girls disappear to the campus bars and others sneak away behind the plywood doors of the brothers’ bedrooms. Once girls follow their dates up to bed, they’re gone for good, the way that once Lucy steps through the wardrobe in

C. S. Lewis’s books, she’s vanished into the forests of Narnia.

I, too, trail
Chris up the spiral staircase to his room. It feels like a sleepwalk. My eyes ache under the weight of their lids, my feet take cautious, little strides. Thoughts rattle in my skull like odd dreams that have their own percussion.

I’m thinking, as I grip the staircase with both hands, that I ought to dig Hannah’s Durex from my purse when I reach the landing. I’m thinking that there are party girls behind every door that I pass, girls who are unashamed and uninhibited, girls who are stark naked, their small voices warbling. I think of them, and I decide that I am, as always, being too square under the circumstances. I am attributing too much to sex, which in my well-liquored state suddenly means little.

I always hoped I’d have sex for the first time with a real boyfriend. I thought I’d do it with someone who took me to the three-dollar movie theater, or to the New York State Fair, where

we’d buy snow cones, ride the Mind-Scrambler, and make fun of the sculpture that a local dairy company carves every year out of butter. Plus, I wanted to be clearheaded when it happened because I sense a hangover could make anyone feel extra defiled the next day.

But that ideal looks antiquated to me now, and I’m too hopelessly unlike the shiny liquor-ad girls who just go with the flow, who drink Sauza because “The tequila is pure, so your inten-tions don’t have to be,” and Frangelico because “fate” is “what happens when the unexpected becomes pleasure.” These are the girls who know that you don’t have to have a detailed plan for the evening, you can just drink Smirnoff Ice and “See where it takes you.” I think,
I will let liquor take me to Chris’s room.
There is no one to stop me; unlike my car keys, no one can take away my desire because they think I’m too far gone to control it.

But I don’t stay conscious long enough to initiate so much as a kiss. Moments after Chris hoists me up the ladder to his loft bed, liquor sings its lullaby. The moment goes dark, and I fall into a bottomless, fairy-tale sleep.

The next day I wake up at noon, in my frilly party dress. My hair is matted against my cheek, and my head is positioned on one corner of Chris’s pillow. My face is inches from his. His open eyes are watching me, honest and blue, and I can’t tilt in the few inches to kiss him even though I ache to.

I am sober and therefore don’t have the prowess to trigger even the smallest act of intimacy. I lie that way for over an hour, frozen, even after Chris has me pulled to his chest the way a kid clasps a teddy bear. In the throes of withdrawal, I feel like one of those ratty childhood bears that smell like spit-up and have one eye popping off.

But my hang-ups are even worse than my hangover. I feel

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like a field mouse caught in a glue trap. I am stuck fast in the sentiments I can’t express without booze.

If you
buy the notion that alcohol improves the way you feel about yourself, you can’t help but buy the message that alcohol improves the way you feel about, and during, sex. That’s because the alcohol industry has spent a considerable amount of time tweaking its image of the sexy drinking woman. If you pay close attention to the alcohol ads of the past ten years, you’ll notice that the women in them aren’t nearly the passive objects of desire they used to be. These days, for every Miller Light girl who mud wrestles in an itsy-bitsy bikini, there’s another girl in spike heels and a sleek skirt-suit who is apt to take the beer and leave the guy who bought it for her.

With women drinking a quarter of the beer sold in the United States, it is as if the industry finally figured out the for-mula that attracts us: It’s no longer enough for the alcohol-ad girl to
look
sexy; she needs to
act
sexy. She needs to be the sul-try product of her sassiness and excessive self-confidence, the woman men want to be with and women want to
be.
Alcohol advertisers have learned that sex as an image doesn’t sell anymore, that the mud-wrestling Miller girls were actually responsible for a slump in sales (including a
19
-percent drop in Texas,

the brand’s most popular state).

What does sell, especially to women, is sex as an
idea.
Even more than men, we buy the concept that sex is a tricky proceed-ing. We understand that interacting on the coed level is a strug-gle for dominance, one that involves a million fouls and false starts, where the playing field is never level, and where one player almost always has the advantage. That’s why Anheuser-Busch advertises Tequiza using the brazen taglines “Actually,