Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (35 page)

of difference.

I gloom through the soup, the salad, and the fish course, ignoring the wine menu that my mother has set in front of me like a place card. Just when I think I’ve escaped the pressure to drink, a waitress sneaks up behind me and delivers a slice of Chocolate-Merlot cake topped with a candle. My boyfriend starts to hum “Happy Birthday to You.” I close my eyes and wish for a new life.

Two weeks
before classes start in August
2001
, I sublet my apartment in a complex that’s just off campus. I do it because the build-ing stands amid the fraternity and sorority houses on Walnut Park, and I have no desire to be anywhere near Greek row since I withdrew my membership from Zeta. I sense that the series of town houses, laid out in a three-sided square, will be awash with

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the type of drunken disorder I am trying to avoid. Nine months later, the apartment’s management offi will send me a laundry list of what looks like drunken destruction by the women who took my place on the lease, including stained fl cigarette-burned carpets, and shrubs that someone lit on fi

Instead, I move into a ground-level apartment on East Genessee Street. I bring the terrier puppy that I adopted from the local animal shelter in July, when it occurred to me that hav-ing something to take care of might force me to act responsibly. The apartment’s location is terribly ironic: Not only does it position me as far as possible from the campus bars and senior housing complexes, it is also equidistant from Crouse Hospital’s psychiatric and rehab facilities—about one block from both. On the mornings that I walk to class, I’ll have to sidestep a mass of people smoking cigarettes and slugging coffee as they wait to be

let in for their morning AA meetings.

I live here quietly for two months like someone in the Wit-ness Protection Program. Later, all I will remember from that time is a cold stone of fear in my stomach. The threat is bigger than the apartment’s dangerous location, bigger than my up-stairs neighbors’ nightly dish-throwing ritual, or the parking lot outside my living room window, where an attendant is robbed and stabbed while I’m watching prime-time TV.

It is almost as if I expect someone from the past to come find me. I am afraid to see the people who I have abused, and the ones who have abused me. Chris and Skip have graduated, but I am afraid of Brianne and Elle, who narrows her eyes when she passes me on the campus sidewalks. Even when I dye my hair an inconspicuous shade of black, I don’t feel unseen. I call Bell At-lantic twice to confirm that my phone number is unlisted, and I still jump at night when dark has blacked out the windows and I

can hear someone’s shoes crunch outside in the gravel. Whenever there is a knock at the back door, I glance through the peephole, heart bumping, even after my boyfriend announces, “It’s me.” Two months blow past. During the day, I boil water for tea and walk the dog up the hill to Thornden Park. He, too, is fun-damentally opposed to leaving the house, and when I fasten on his leash, he hooks his claws into the carpet. He is anxious, antisocial, and clingy, and my mother jokes that I have projected my personality onto him. I start skipping classes for his sake because, in the rare hours I leave him alone, he rips the stuffing from my bedspread and chews the stringy, white stuffing like gum. I ditch at least two classes a week to stay home and toss his

rubber ball to him across the sloped kitchen floor.

The only class I attend religiously is my poetry workshop. It is comprised of only eight students, most of whom I recognize from my hard-drinking past, including an ex-X’s roommate, one of the campus bars’ bouncers, and the Alpha girl I used to throw eggs at. For workshop, I submit a series of creepy poems about Catholicism that are wholly out of character. Years later, I will see the struggle for abstinence in the lines, which are con-structed entirely around the poles of good and evil, right and wrong, and all or nothing. Loads of people write poems about getting drunk.

Our professor entertains them all. She reads every drunken ballad aloud with the same fervid energy. Instead of the affected drone of most poets, who hold the last word in a line like the challenging note of a song, she reads from the belly. Lines sput-ter out of her like clips from a machine gun. Occasionally, one like, “I got drunk and listed everything from this girl I loved to my first car and entitled the list: ‘all the shit I got drunk and

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fucked up,’ ” will pitch her forward in her chair, to laugh and slap both hands against her desk.

How could she instruct us to write on some other subject? She was a woman who had devoted some six hundred pages to family addiction. Better than anyone, she knew that liquor could shoot a good life dead, and inspire in its place a most moving eulogy. She photocopied for us a copy of Franz Wright’s poem “Alcohol.”

I stay
sequestered until Halloween. That’s the night when the foil-wrapped candy and teenagers in face paint remind me of the fi time I got drunk, and my boredom gets the best of me. The tedium of life in my apartment overshadows my fear of see-ing people from the past. Like a big guy who forgets his own strength, I forget how easy it is for me to get violently drunk. I go to a campus bar on the arm of my ghoulish boyfriend.

Once I am packed inside with the crowd of bodies, already belligerent, I change my mind and want go home. The bottle of light beer that I allow myself tastes buttery, and it does nothing to calm me against the boys dressed in orange waste-disposal suits who use their elbows to push through the bodies around the bar. I have forgotten how the air in these places is sticky. I’ve forgotten the way the smell of the smoke hovering in the light fixtures seeps into your hair, and stays even after you’ve washed it. The wire end of a girl’s angel wing pokes me in the eye. I feel stran-gulated. My dull boyfriend is lost to the men’s room, but I am desperate enough to leave without him. When I start to shoulder through the doorway’s gossamer spiderwebs, I run into Vanessa. Vanessa is one of the girls I used to slug vodka with during sophomore year. She is a statuesque, Scarsdale-bred redhead who rebels against her wealthy family by binge drinking and

dating working-class men. Tonight she is dressed in gloves, a tiara, and cat-eyed glasses for the purpose of being Holly Go-lightly from
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

We talk as we wait for a spot at the bar. Vanessa is back after a semester in Paris, and she tells me all about the winery laborer she met in the Southwest of France and was briefly engaged to, while she takes drags from the wand of her foot-long cigarette holder. She buys us rounds of her favorite shots, called “Redheaded Sluts,” and charges them to her dad’s American Express Platinum card. We are slamming back the mixture of juice and Jägermeister in big swallows when she persuades me to part with my unlisted phone number.

Once I
begin to reliquefy, or return to a vodka-based state after a period of solid abstinence, I think it will be a prolonged homecoming. When Vanessa calls two days later to invite me to a jazz bar downtown, I think I will have to reacquaint myself with booze the same way I will have to catch up with her. We will slump down on one of the bar’s velour couches, and it will take some effort on my part to drink flavored martinis. I expect reliquefying will be like drinking for the first time ever. Like a shelved game that you have to set up and start all over again, I will have to review the tactics and the rules. Stoli will taste and smell too strong. My tolerance will be next to nil.

But it doesn’t happen that way. Instead, I pound three of those raspberry-colored suckers. Rather than feeling drunk, I feel nourished, like a starved kitten clamped down on its mother’s tit. The warmth that sparks in my sternum and creeps up to my cheeks feels familiar. It runs in tingly explosions, like bubbles ris-ing in a glass of champagne.

Vanessa is going on about an ex-boyfriend’s emails and her

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new boyfriend’s motorcycle, and asking do I remember Tuesdays at Harry’s, when we used to order carrot-cake shots by the tray? I listen, leaning down to sip from my glass in its space at the table, rather than lifting it to my mouth, taking care not to let one precious drop slosh over the mouth of the V. After we pay the bar tab, we drive to her boyfriend’s house to play Trivial Pursuit and drink beer. And after that, I wobble home to my apartment and pass out plumb numb in bed, while the dog licks my face.

I also expect to be able to limit my drinking to just a few nights a week. But that won’t work out, either. One of the cam-pus bar owners realizes that he can supplement his slow nights—Sundays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays—by designating those nights “for seniors.” It’s a ridiculous concept, considering that seniors, for the most part, are the only students of legal drinking age, anyway. But the gimmick works on us. Vanessa and I turn up early in an effort to score a table among the pack of people that pushes in around the bar, holding out their “beer tour” passports for the bartender to stamp. A certain number of ink marks is required to have one’s name listed on the bar’s an-nual plaque of seniors, which hangs on the wall like a drunk-ard’s yearbook. We go to happy hour on Fridays, even though five hours of chain-smoking, pitching playing cards, and pouring light beer from plastic pitchers is a big-time commitment, since people come straight from classes and linger until midnight. On Saturdays, we go to dive bars in Armory Square, where we have to orbit the same three blocks to find a parking space, and one drunken night Vanessa puts two separate dents in her parents’ Mercedes.

Less than a month after our reunion, Vanessa and I are hunched at one bar stool or another, sucking down Blue Hawaiians by the strawful, fi or six nights a week.

It’s not that Vanessa persuades me to give up abstinence alto-gether, she just persuades me to postpone it. She says we will have plenty of time to dry out and stop killing brain cells once college ends. But until then, we should take advantage of the fact that we don’t have to wake up for work every morning. She says, “This is your senior year, and you’ll regret missing out on it.” It’s as though she knows my fear of omission motivates me to do just about everything.

One night in November, I break things off with my boyfriend while I am still pie eyed from happy hour. I do it because I associate him with not drinking, the same way I used to associate Chris with drinking. And now that I’ve decided that abstinence means little to me, I decide that this boy, who has dated me for ten long months, means little to me, too.

When I come home after a night out with Vanessa, I don’t dread tottering up the steps, feeling for the light switch, or stumbling over the dog, who likes to execute figure eights through my legs. What I dread is the prospect that my boyfriend will be sleeping in my bed, that he might reach out to touch my back in the dark. Just as I used to, I prefer booze to boys. Nights, I now want to roll into unconsciousness undisturbed. I want to enjoy the rocking sensation of falling asleep plastered, which feels like sleeping in the gully of a drifting canoe.

It’s snowing outside when we return each other’s apartment keys. Fat flakes of it are clinging like starfish to the window screens, and part of me is glad because it means he has to walk home in it. For a mile, all those specks of snow will slap him cold in the face. “Sorry,” I say, “I’m in no shape to drive.”

Vanessa and I are in each other’s pockets the way that Elle and I used to be. Together, we can make a drinking game out of anything: infomercials or Scrabble or the pattern of traffic trick-

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ling down Ostrom Avenue. I spend the time between and after classes at her apartment, where we tip back in matching sling chairs and drink bottled Labatt’s. I wake up often in that chair, to the sensation of my own head pulsating like a human heart. When I glance over at Vanessa, her mouth is knocked open in a way that makes her look like someone in a boxing movie, like she’s just been hit with a slow-motion left hook. Hours have passed. My dog has been busy chewing the spines off her roommate’s textbooks. And my station wagon, which is blocking the complex’s driveway, has half a dozen angry notes stuffed under the wipers.

Vanessa’s boyfriends are the only force that can break our routine. During our nights downtown, men heave themselves into her as though by magnetic force. One moment, we will be gesturing with lit cigarettes and ordering glasses of something hard and syrupy, and the next, the man Vanessa has been smirk-ing at will crisscross the room and wedge between us at the bar. A guy from her study group, or a married lawyer, or the waiter she meets one hungover morning at T.G.I.Friday’s can drop her out of my life for weeks at a time and leave me to my own devices.

I have my own magnetic fields, which repel romantic interaction to a safe distance. So I spend the time alone in my apartment. I start up a pen-pal-variety relationship with Chris, who graduated last spring and has since progressed into the realm that those of us who are still studying Greek epic in English translation call “the real world.” I spend nights drafting emails to him, looking for the combination of “best words, best order” that Stephen Dobyns says poets ought to strive for. The dog perches on my lap through every round of edits.

Once I start reliquefying, I have an avenue through which to

see Chris again. Even if I hadn’t had a boyfriend during the months that I wasn’t drinking, there would have been no way to see Chris without alcohol. For years, our interaction had been limited to parties and bars. I’d learned that waiting on a bar stool, downing shots, and peeling the labels off beer bottles was the only hope I had to spend time with him. Experience taught me that he would cross the room at last call to wordlessly follow me home.

When Chris visits campus during homecoming weekend, he calls me from the road to tell me which campus bar to meet him at. I haven’t seen him in nine months, but when I spot him through all the bodies and cigarette smoke, his look is so familiar that it makes my breath catch, and I have to drink big gulps from my glass to keep my tongue from tying.