Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (26 page)

It doesn’t take long before I feel a sharp pain behind my eyes. Cheap liquor always gives me this headache. It’s as though my brain is recoiling from the label, like the guy who tests the wine

at the dinner table by gurgling, spitting it out, and sending it back. The headache is usually followed by nausea. My stomach turns over like I’ve been swallowing Clorox, and it is a sickness I can both smell and taste. I feel hungover before I’ve even stopped drinking.

I ought to take this as a sign that something bad is about to happen, the way murderesses on soap operas get battering mi-graines before their dual personalities take over, before they crack heavy art-deco sculptures across the backs of their twin sisters’ heads. But I never do, and I don’t this time. Instead, I ask the bartender for some ibuprofen, and I wash down the tablets with rum and pineapple juice.

Elle and I take off our shoes and join Hannah on the dance floor, holding hands and shaking our heads hard from our necks. When I look around, everyone is coming undone. The boys have freed themselves of their jackets and vests, and un-hitched the silk nooses of their neckties. The girls are pulling out their bobby pins one at a time, and their hair is cascading down around them like liquid. Hannah’s bangs are standing up in spikes where she stuck one wet hand in them, and Elle is dancing with someone else’s date, blind to the squabbling it’s aroused among the sisters. She keeps moving with her hands on her hips, and her dress straps skate off her shoulders.

Somewhere in the middle of a slow song, I look up from the palms of my hands and notice that I have drawn a crowd. There are multiple arms grabbing for me, and too many faces fighting for a space inside my line of vision: first Nadine, then the house president, then Elle, urging everyone to get the hell away from me. Someone’s date picks me up and carries me over to sit at a linen-covered table, so I don’t cut my bare feet on the bits of bro-ken glass on the floor.

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I don’t remember the glass wriggling loose from my hand, so I’ll be relieved tomorrow, when Elle assures me that I dropped—and didn’t throw—it. Nor do I remember exactly what slipped inside me, the eyeblink’s time where I went from fine to totally fucked, precisely when the barricade around my brain broke, making it impossible to contain a private thought inside me. The fact that I’m crying doesn’t fully register. I can only gauge my actions by other people’s reactions, by the fact that Elle is using a towel to sponge streaks of rum off my face and legs.

When the moment’s sounds come through, I can hear my voice whining at a pitch of pure pain, as if I’d just closed my hand in a car door. My breath is jerking through me like a succession of sneezes. I have no idea how miserable I am until I hear myself confess it out loud.

A half an
hour later, my booze-induced tantrum means nothing. It’s only one of many that night. The girl whose date Elle has been dancing with has locked herself in the bathroom, where she is sobbing and scribbling on her legs with a tube of red lipstick. Plus, whatever scene I made passes quickly, like a tropical storm that leaves you soaked and dazed, with little actual damage. Elle goes back to our room to fetch my CDs and gives them to the deejay. The moment “Rock Lobster” comes scratching through

the hotel speakers, she convinces me to shut up and dance.

The real trouble with my fit is that it has distinguished me from the crowd. I’ve bared my emotional wounds, made myself the lame lamb of the flock, and earned the attention of any nearby predator.

Elle and I are hopscotching across the dance floor with the hems of our skirts in our hands when a boy hooks me around

the waist and twirls me off like a top in another direction. A slow song has come on, and he has positioned his face precari-ously close to mine. He is so close, in fact, that the tips of our noses keep touching. Still, I can’t make out who he is. His head looks very small and far away, like I’m looking at him through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

For a while, I’m fine with the idea of having someone to dance with. But after a few songs, he is nudging me in so close to him that the length of my dress is getting caught up in my legs. I push my palms against his chest, trying to eke out enough space to say
Thank you for the dance
and urge him to go back to his date. But he just keeps jouncing me up by the waist and pulling me into him, the way someone moves down the street with a big bag of laundry. Later, I’ll realize he doesn’t have a date because he is one of the hotel’s employees.

Every time a sister walks by us, I try to open my eyes big and round, which, in my experience, is the universal code for
Please help me,
the same way that two hands around the throat is lin-gua franca for choking. But they just smile back, like they are happy to see that I’m feeling better. Someone flashes me a thumbs-up.

It occurs to me to say that I have to go to the ladies’ room. But when I do, the big shadow of the man lurks just outside the restroom’s door. I stand in front of the mirror, for a long time, washing my hands. The bathroom light is soupy, and I feel too sluggish to find an escape hatch. I decide the only ways around him are through the double-hung window or around the corner while his back is turned. I slide onto the floor beside the sink, sitting while I try to decide what to do, which is where Elle finds me. She decides to go outside and tell him that I’ve gone home to sleep. Once the man is gone, I follow Elle down the blacktop

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path to our cabin. My heels are in my hands, and I am wavering. I don’t even feel the wet gravel under my toes.

Not far from our cabin, we hear the scuffing of shoes and realize that the man is padding up the path in the opposite direction. I try to adjust my eyes to get a good look at him, to see through the fog that has arranged itself on the walkway and in my head, and decide if he is as menacing in real life as he is in my mind. But I can’t make out anything beyond a thumbnail sketch of a man’s broad shoulders.

Elle jabs me and tells me to get down. We sprawl on our stomachs in the wet grass behind a chokecherry shrub for a long while, holding our breath until he has passed, and being so silent that I nod off with my face in the dirt. Drizzle is floating down in one sheet, like a mist of perfume. Tomorrow, our dresses will be ruined with watermarks. Hannah will say the man knocked at the door for an hour, after he pulled our room number off the hotel’s computer database.

I don’t think
people realize that drunk girls are themselves a fetish object. The phrase itself is as porn sensitive as
schoolgirls
or
lesbian orgies.
Type it into an Internet search and you’ll get more than
450,000
porn sites in less than twenty seconds. And I’m not only talking about sites that feature spring-break footage of “easy drunk girls flashing their tits,” but also ones that highlight “deaddrunk girls passed out,” and publish gritty, overexposed pictures of girls lying unconscious while anonymous male hands pull off their underwear.

Take, for example, clubdrunk.com, which advertises, “This site is not a joke! We find real drunk girls and fuck them on video. We go out all year round to bars, beaches, colleges, and wherever else drunk girls are and get them to come home with

us!” Or consider deaddrunkgirls.com, which boasts
60,000
members who log on because: “We all know the situation when a girl feels shy. If you don’t help her to relax, you will end up wanking off alone ... If you get her drunk she’ll do anything for you, she’ll even satisfy
all
of your friends.” These sites show photos of girls slamming back glasses of whiskey, right alongside the nasty close-ups of the sex acts that we’re led to believe came afterward. Visitors are reminded, “Kelly was deaddrunk and I don’t think she realized what was going on. But one thing is for sure, she certainly enjoyed herself!”

And the tragic part is, we can’t even allow ourselves to feel sorry for girls like Kelly. Because if we follow through with Laura Mulvey’s argument about visual pleasure and apply it to the modern-day party girl, if we say that Kelly, who is clattering beneath some man in the live feed of a hidden camera, exists as a passive object for the gaze and enjoyment of men at their laptops (one that intrigues us, then grosses us out, then makes us feel superior), she is already guilty. She has already been transformed into the type of fetish object that makes the guys who watch her feel reassured, rather than endangered, by her sexuality.

There is a sadistic quality in our assignation of blame to her. Once we write her off as an “easy drunk girl” (porn-site speak), we can feel comfortable that her punishment fits her crime. We can distance ourselves from the room where she is lying all but lifeless on leopard-print sheets, and chalk up her “drunken gang bang” to the fact that there were animal instincts skulking in-side her, just waiting for the moment when men and tequila would draw them out. We can accept headings that suggest she had this coming. We’ll buy statements like: “You are about to see three hot party girls get fucked in the VIP room. They were so drunk, they didn’t even care.”

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• • •

By the
final weeks of fall semester, I notice that the quality of men’s manners seems to be directly proportional to how drunk I am. It’s a fascinating relationship between variables. When I’m stone sober at a party, I can count on a man offering me his seat (if we’re in the den) or his jacket (if we’re on the deck). He will shake my hand during an introduction, and offer some wrenched pleasantry like, “Weren’t you in my cultural perspectives class?” On the other hand, if I’m running amok in a bar, I can bank on the fact that some gruff-faced guy will snap my bra strap while I’m swaying on my feet, en route to the ladies’ room. One night in a campus dive, a man I barely know bites my armpit, leaving a vampire-like ring of teeth marks and bruises that lasts weeks.

To be fair, the boys I date after Chris might account for the decline of etiquette. They are a series of drunks and depressives. They are nocturnal boys, the kind who rarely come alive until the library has been locked for the night. They don’t return phone calls or buy textbooks. They live in off-campus apart-ments because the administration has ousted them from the dorms for possessing drugs or booze.

I spend the final weeks of fall semester dating Jody, a boy who has a date-rape accusation to his name. I’m not sure why I do it, except to say that he doesn’t scare me. He is a musical-theater major, an elfin boy with a feminine face and scant deltoids, and I’m pretty sure I could take him in a fight. Moreover, he is al-ways drinking Scotch or snorting coke off my album covers, and his desire for drugs seems to displace his desire for sex. Jody is a nonthreat. I can invite him to stay the night in my dorm room and swill wine the whole time. I can drink excessively with him, until I knock myself out cold, knowing he won’t make any move to paw me.

Drinking and drugging, Jody is a bigger wreck than I am. On the nights that he’s drunk, my phone machine bleeps with messages at five
a.m.
, when he calls, crying, to say his car has a flat tire and he’s too rat-assed to change it. And on the nights that he’s high, he’s a one-man production. He jogs between the phone and the stereo, calling his agent, belting out show tunes, dragging his fingers through his bleached hair, digging up old scripts, and rattling off disjointed daydreams that I think he sin-cerely believes—like he used to date a young indie-film star, or he was in the Broadway revival of
Annie Get Your Gun.
We lie side by side on my bed, staring glassy-eyed at a late-night talk show and drinking red wine. I usually dip into sleep while Jody prattles on about which of tonight’s guests he once did a play with in London, or bought weed from, or screwed in the bathroom of a five-star sushi joint.

I like having Jody around because, in contrast to him, I feel in control. Alone, my life is beginning to feel like it’s running away from me, so much so that I’ve started to have recurring night-mares that I am driving a car with faulty brakes, skidding wildly out of control, and plowing ninety miles an hour into highway overpasses. But next to the white lines Jody cuts up on the cover of the
Tommy
LP, my bottles look as benign as lollipops. Next to the two thousand dollars he gave his dealer this month, the two hundred I dropped at the campus bars doesn’t look half bad.

Other times when I’m with Jody, alcohol feels childish. I fi myself mixing drinks liberally in order to keep up with him, and to make up for the fact that booze isn’t some stronger drug. I slosh vodka two inches deep into my S.U. coffee mug, and feel like a baby for refusing the rolled-up dollar bill he’ll hold out for me.

For better or worse, I’m a product of Nancy Reagan’s Just Say

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No campaign. Drugs make me fearful in a way that booze never does, probably because public service announcements have worked their magic on me: The U.S. government still spends twenty-five times as much on campaigns to fight drugs as it does on campaigns to prevent underage drinking.

Even in the moments when I’m so smashed I’m scared, when I’m lying on the bathroom tiles I can’t hoist myself up from, throwing up so tirelessly that I start to cry, I can still rest assured; it’s comforting to know my brain is not on drugs. I assure myself that this, too, will pass. After all, it’s just rum.

One night
, Jody gets drunk enough to talk about the girl that people say he sexually assaulted. We are sitting at his coffee table mixing Salty Dogs when he gets up and starts burrowing through an antique oak chest, tossing out weathered scripts and old
Playbill
s as he goes, until he comes up with a sheet of note-book paper. It’s a letter, he says, that she wrote him during the semester that he was studying in France, which irrevocably proves he is not guilty.