Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (29 page)

What I really wanted was empathy. I wanted the company of women—it could only be women—who understood how it feels to be emotionally bombed, blasted, capsized, toppled, clob-bered, damaged, dismantled, all the totally destructive adjec-tives people use in place of
drunk.

That is exactly what I get from Elle. Together, we are like war veterans. We both feel horrifically wounded.

Elle and
I start to steal things.

At first, it’s nothing big. We’ll be rotten drunk at a bar on Marshall Street on the night of a university basketball game, and some local guy with season tickets will grab the seat of Elle’s jeans. She’ll remark about the wedding band on his hand, and he’ll make a move like he’s going to hit her. And we’ll finally pinch his vintage Zippo or pack of cigarettes, or whatever else he has laid out on the bar, to settle the score.

Sometimes we swipe tips from the bartender who urges girls to donate their panties for free drinks. Other times, we lift cocktail glasses from one bar and drop them at another just because it feels like anarchic disorder. When we bar-crawl, we carry full drinks in our purses so as not to waste them, vodka and fruit juice spilling over our wallets and room keys.

We know no one misses the goods we lift, but scoring them

becomes a type of game. It is a challenge to see just how much we can steal from the men who steal from us: the bar owners who take so much of our money, the beer promoters who come to our campus and try to persuade girls to flash them for Tshirts, the guy at the end of the bar who thinks that because we drink, he can paw us.

And we’re not the only ones on campus who take things when we get drunk enough. On campus, almost every dorm room bursts with theft’s prizes. Kitchenettes are stocked with soup cans and cracker boxes, food that was lifted from house parties in purses and pockets, when the going was rough. Some boys have whole bottles of booze that they’ve stolen from bars, ashtrays and pool cues, plus police barricades and traffi cones, things they picked up off the street during the walk home. At the campus bars, there are even people who steal wallets. They linger behind the mass of people ordering drinks, scouting for someone drunk enough to accept help counting their bills. One morning after a vast bender, Elle and I wake up to discover that our cash and credit cards are gone to the dogs.

The contents of fraternity and sorority houses are particularly fluid. Pranks are ongoing. Seemingly as old as the organizations themselves is the members’ drive to break into rival houses and make off with a composite photo, a paddle, a plaque. Between fraternities and sororities the theft is a type of hair pulling. At Zeta, we keep two ongoing lists: one of the items we have miss-ing, and one of the items we have stolen and intend to return. Our three-digit door code changes weekly, yet the Sigma Taus

always crack it. They break in, screeching drunk at two
a.m.
,

looking for the plaques we have hidden in the laundry room, and taking a bronze cup off our mantel as quid pro quo when they can’t find the goods. Romantically, we never progressed beyond

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junior high. Aside from being drunk, being abusive is still one of the only ways we know to communicate interest.

I have my own reasons for wanting to steal from fraternities. It is the year of the fraternity asshole: At Dartmouth College, Zeta Psi is publishing the
Zetamouth,
a fraternity newsletter that chronicles the brothers’ sex lives. It prints sexy photos of women the brothers claim they slept with and categorizes them as “loose,” “dirty,” “guaranteed hookups,” and “sure things.” They are releasing the “Manwhore Edition,” in which one reporter writes that so-and-so “strikes again,” and “she’s dirtier than ever ... if she hooks up with one more Zeta, I’m going to need a flowchart just to keep up.” Another article promises to deliver “patented date-rape techniques” in a future edition.

After Skip, I’ve decided that fraternities and the boys in them are hazards. At universities, they are the last booby trap that women have left to dismantle. They are the self-flooding sprin-kler system that would drive us violently away. I think fraternities should be dismantled. When you crack open the fraternal system and see it clearly, you realize how outrageous it is, in this day and age, that organizations still exist to protect the interests of white males—namely, drinking and sex.

No structure needs to further these boys’ advancement. They have gone as far as the game goes. They have collected all the Monopoly money and earned the title of all-time champions. Any funds fraternities raise for charitable organizations, all the Habitat for Humanity houses they can build, will not compen-sate for their utter destructiveness. They take far more than they give. They’ve had their cake and eaten ours, too.

I know I sound militant. I don’t know whether it’s because drinking squashes my inhibitions or boosts my courage, but lately, when I’m drunk, I feel a hostility that I’ve never known

before. It is a tension deep in my gut that makes me want to yell until my face is red, knock over glasses with the back of my hand, and kick people I don’t know in the shins.

It is with that thundering rage that Elle and I start breaking into fraternities to steal things. We feel it’s our job to steal back everything that has been confiscated from us. It is an act of re-volt against an invincible adversary. We want to rupture the walls of any space that would keep us out. Our assault on a frat house is a hostile takeover: We want to explode it, seize it, smash the framework of the institution, make it true, at last make it ours.

It is a
Monday night when Zeta’s president charges Elle with the task of returning a composite photo to Skip’s fraternity.

It is a mistake from the start. In the frame, the brothers look dapper as ever. Every one is accounted for in his navy blazer, white shirt, red-and-blue-striped tie. They are the photos that are taken every spring, when a man from the local Budget Photo makes his rounds with a tripod and a gray muslin back-drop, snapping portraits that make everyone look hungover, so puffy and sallow that a third of us opt not to be photographed. This one was stolen during a Zeta scavenger hunt, which was someone’s sorry excuse for a party. Pledging has gone dry, and the new girls are grumbling that running around campus, gath-ering trophies, dining-hall forks, and copies of
Playgirl
is no sub—

stitute for drinking.

Of course, Elle won’t just go knock on the door and hand it back to them; that’s not her style. And I won’t let her recruit someone else to do it for her because that’s not my style. We’ve been mixing vodka tonics since five, and listening to “Hate and War.” In many ways, The Clash is like alcohol: It feels like

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something we’ve stolen from boys. And while we were attempt-ing to harness its power, we fell in love with it. It has seeped into our souls.

The drinks are invigorating. The taste is raw, and the vodka fizzles. And suddenly the opportunity for reprisal feels just too sweet to pass up. I want to stick it to those guys in their Brooks Brothers ties, by turning their composite photo into conceptual art. I am making dumb jokes about how we should cut the penises out of the
Playgirl
s from the scavenger hunt and tape them atop the guys’ necks because they are supreme dickheads. And next thing I know, we’re actually doing it. We are drinking more and more vodka while we work, until the whole project has a frantic intensity. Time is snowballing from eight o’clock to ten o’clock and beyond, and we are sticking dicks all over the glass until we’re out of tape. By the time we’re done, the whole

piece looks like Brigid Berlin’s cock book from the
1960
s. On the backside of the frame, we scrawl
to:
the biggest pricks we

know
in red lipstick, with a drowsy, crooked hand.

We shouldn’t deliver it. In our right minds, we never would. But under the armor of hard liquor, we feel unconquerable. So, I find myself cowering behind a pillar on the front porch of the frat I swore I’d never go back to, while Elle steals in through the unlocked door to hang the photo on an empty nail in the foyer. The second she screams I know they’ve caught her, and when

I inch up to the door to see what’s going on, some jock in a dirty ball cap grabs me by the arm and pulls me inside, too.

A couple of boys have trapped Elle in the kitchen. Having peeled off the black sweatshirt she put on earlier for night cam-ouflage, one boy is spraying her with the long hose of the kitchen sink, while another holds her wrists tightly behind her back. Even as she throws her shoulders, she can’t worm loose. Another

guy is dancing on the tiles in front of her, as though to provoke her, yelling, “Aww, wet T-shirt contest!” She is kicking her legs wildly at the knees and trying desperately to spit in his face.

The guy who pulled me inside has me in the type of wrestling hold that they never make girls learn in high school gym class. His elbows are hooked under my armpits, and his palms are pushing hard against the back of my head. I am immobilized and woozy. My chin has been driven to my chest, and it is im-possible to focus on anything above my shoelaces. I can’t see the brothers who are filtering downstairs as they hear the commo-tion, but I can hear them. They sound like bellowing whales in my ringing ears.

The pressure on my neck is so great that it drives me to my knees.

It’s hard to say what happens next. The hose from the kitchen sink is spraying me hard and cold in the face, and with my hands trapped behind my back, I can’t reach up to push the strands of wet hair out of my eyes. I can hear Elle alternating between laughing and screaming. It is the sound that my mother outlawed when my sister and I were young, on the basis that she couldn’t tell if we were hurt or playing. Similarly, I can’t tell if we’re playing. The boys are smiling like the whole thing is a joke as they slap me across the cheeks, tickle my sides, and spank me. And I am feeling the biting frustration that comes from being restrained, from shouting “TIME OUT,” and hav-ing it fall on deaf male ears.

Whoever has been pushing his thumbs into my elbows finally lets me go. He is a short, red-haired senior in boxer shorts and a tight undershirt that clings around the muscles of his chest. He moves into my line of vision to say, “You’re the girl Skip had sex with.”

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His words are the ipecac that instantly makes me feel like I’m going to be sick. It doesn’t mean anything conclusively; I know that boys lie all the time about their exploits. I can still mentally “whatever” it. But it causes me the kind of hurt that makes me want to hurt someone else. I move a little to my left, to a bucket of varnish I’ve had my eye on. I grab the handle of the brush that’s been stewing in it and shove the bristles as deep as I can into the redheaded boy’s ear.

Someone tosses us our sweatshirts and instructs us to “Get the fuck out.” Elle and I put our heads through our sweatshirts as we move for the door. The fabric fuzz of them is wet, we think, with kitchen water. Tomorrow, we will realize that a brother emptied his bladder on them.

It doesn’t
end there. I am crying, and Elle’s telling me, “God-damn it, don’t cry.”

Instead of going home, we trudge in the rain to a campus bar, where the owner seems pleased to see us. We sit with him in a corner booth and tell him the whole story. He nods and says, “You have to get them back.”

It’s a slow night. On campus, everyone knows that only people with alcohol problems go out on Monday nights. Tues-days, Wednesdays, even Sundays are fine. Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays are universal. But there’s no getting around the fact that drinking on Monday is desperate. Only a handful of people teeter on bar stools, spinning quarters and lighting cigarettes. The owner gives us free glasses of wine. The table is a clutter of smudged glasses, emptied of everything but ice. I feel myself drifting in and out of consciousness like someone going under ether.

Elle and I will piece together the rest in the morning. We will

be sitting opposite each other on her bed, where I spent the night because I was too down and out to go home, and doing our best to fill in the blanks from the piles of clues that are scattered around us. We cover our mouths with our hands when we realize just how humiliating they are.

We did go back to Skip’s fraternity to “get them back,” as the bar owner had suggested. Sometime after two
a.m.
, after the

bars had closed, we circled the house three times, testing every locked door and latched window. It was during a thunderstorm; because our clothes are still streaked with wet dirt. The light blue sweater I have on has a muddy footprint across the chest. While we were skulking in the bushes, Elle found an unlocked basement window and dove through it. It was a four-foot drop from there to the floor of the basement, which was the same space where my blackout had happened three months be-fore. Elle stood underneath with her arms spread wide open to

catch me.

From there, we proceeded to clean them out. I don’t exactly remember snatching books from the bookshelf, and balls from the pool table, and picture frames off the walls. But I know we did because it is all here on Elle’s floor in a massive heap. There are plaques and trophies, a stuffed animal, a television remote, an alarm clock, an umbrella stand, kitchen mitts, an oil paint—

ing, candlesticks, and
three
40
"
x
30
" picture frames. It is thousands of dollars’ worth of junk, and I have no idea how we could have carried it all between the two points. I ask Elle if she remembers making multiple trips.

It gets worse. When Elle spots a thirty-pack of beer on the floor, we start to remember the rest. Our raid on Skip’s fraternity had not satisfied our appetite for destruction, so we crossed the street to Chris’s fraternity, where the brothers and their