Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (7 page)

She is about to turn the cold knob on the kitchen sink when I say, “Wait a minute.”

I lunge for the refrigerator, where I know a big, round jug of

Chardonnay occupies a large portion of the wire shelf. Its green glass feels cold in my hands.

“What do you think?” I ask. “It’s a diversionary spell.”

Billie wears a horrified look, like I just suggested doing one of the black-magic hexes that involve torching chicken bones. It’s a look that says every good quality she’s ascribed to me has been wrong.

I should get used it. I will see this look many times in the years to come. I’ll see it later in high school, when a month after an alcohol overdose, someone sees me taking shots of tequila. I’ll see it in college, when someone sees me drinking beer before noon to alleviate a hangover. I hate this look, but I should get used to it. It’s the look you’d give a pregnant woman who orders a rum and Coke. It is people cocking their heads and wondering if they’re seeing me right.

Billie looks frozen. She is still holding the stein in such a way that it looks like she might burst into an old German drinking song at any moment: swinging the glass back and forth, a frothy stout slopping out. Instead, she slams it down in the sink with a small crash.

I am mortified. I didn’t think alcohol could ruin this moment so completely. I haven’t met a girl yet who hasn’t been interested in drinking. Every time I’ve seen a bottle emerge, girls have followed it the way children follow Browning’s Pied Piper of Hamelin: with small feet pattering, wooden shoes clattering, lit-tle hands clapping, and little tongues chattering.

I slide the green jug back into its spot beside the Chinese food takeout containers and try to figure out how to pass it off as a joke.

I lie and say, “I didn’t really mean it.” The wall clock ticks once.

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Billie says, “Fine.”

I should feel relieved, except she’s making the same face she’d made once in English class, when Mr. Coffee said there was no way that she read
A Tale of Two Cities
in a single Saturday.

She plucks the stein from the sink, and I fill it a quarter full with Chardonnay. My shaky hand makes the blond stream come out in fits and bursts.

She sips slowly. The cup’s wide rim covers half of her face, and I can’t gauge her reaction. When she brings the stein down to the counter, she says, “It almost tastes like water.” Under any other circumstances this would be an extraordinary lie, but everything in Mrs. Jankoff ’s cabinet has only a slightly higher alcoholic content than mouthwash.

We’ll mix drinks during our sleepovers from this moment on. We’ll sit on the tiles in front of the refrigerator or the liquor cabinet, shift bottles around, read their labels, and try to figure out what we have to work with. When it comes down to it, we have no idea how to tend bar. We mix gin with Coke and zin-fandel with orange juice. Every drink we make tastes too sweet or too bitter, repellent. They are concoctions we can’t bring ourselves to drink, and therefore don’t ever get drunk on.

Billie and
I book Halloween as the night we will officially get drunk. It falls on a Monday, and Billie is spending the week with her dad in his four-bedroom town house in downtown Salem. I manage to persuade my mother to let me sleep over even though it’s a school night.

We enlist Billie’s stepbrother Mac to help us. At eighteen, he looks old enough to buy bottles from Market Wine & Spirits, and he can procure harder liquor than Billie’s mom’s schnapps. While Mac roves the aisles at the liquor store, we wait for him

behind a hedgerow in the Salem graveyard. The night is cold as an icebox, with the kind of chill that gets into your skin and sticks there. After a half hour of waiting, I know nothing but a hot bath will be able to restore the feeling to certain body parts. Billie and I are wearing fingerless gloves and smoking Mild Sev-ens because we don’t yet know how cliché that is. In plots all around us, we can hear whistling bottle rockets, dropped flashlights, someone’s ill attempt at the ghoulish
oo-haa-haa.
People are tripping over their costumes, and a paranormal tour guide is leading a group toward the haunted jail, urging them to stay close because “People faint all the time.”

It occurs to me that Halloween is the perfect date to get first-time drunk. It is the single day of the year on which you can shield your flaws with a layer of latex, the way Lucy Grealy did in her memoir
Autobiography of a Face.
She’d survived cancer and an endless bout of surgeries to reconstruct her jaw, and yet

the only time she ever felt free was on October
31
, when she

could hide in a costume and feel confident, knowing no one knew what she looked like inside.

Externally, I’m not perfect, but I’m healthy. In fourteen years, I’ve never once fallen down stairs or caught my hand in a car door. I’ve never had stitches. I’ve never so much as twisted an ankle. It’s my insides that I need to hide. Privately, I
feel
disfigured. I am ashamed of my gnarled soul, which is something no surgeon can correct. Were my inner workings exposed, I feel certain they would make children stare, and adults avert their eyes. Like Lucy, I, too, want a mask, the type Dylan Thomas talks about: “to shield the glistening brain and the blunt exam-iners.” I want to get shit-faced, a term itself that connotes cam-ouflage.

Mac shows up at the gravesite with his friend Phil and a bot-

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tle of Captain Apple Jack
100
-proof brandy. When Billie asks if it will get us drunk, Mac says, “More like
Exorcist
possessed,” and I secretly hope he doesn’t mean projectile puking.

Now that the boys are with us, I wish I hadn’t worn a costume. It was my idea for Billie and me to come dressed as Wayne and Garth from the movie
Wayne’s World.
I’m Wayne. Billie got to be Garth because she’s the blonde. Our “costumes” aren’t much different from the flannel button-ups and di-aphanous T-shirts we usually wear. Even so, I have to look up at the boys from under the rim of my black
Wayne’s World
cap, which makes me feel silly.

Mac has a skeleton T-shirt on. Phil is in everyday clothes, but he’s looped nylon rope into a noose around his neck.

We position ourselves in a circle around an old camping lantern and the bottle of brandy. If anyone comes up through the headstones behind us, they’ll probably assume we’re con-ducting a séance. Billie in particular is staring at the bottle like she is trying to channel its energy.

Billie told Mac that we’ve never been drunk before, so he knows this is serious business. He twists off the brandy’s plastic top and apologizes for not bringing cups. He asks if we’re ready, and looks at us one at a time, waiting for a response.

Billie says, “Yeah.” Phil says, “Fuck yeah.”

I nod, and pull my leather jacket tighter around me. I’m ner-vous. My sternum is shivering the way it does when I have to give a class presentation, but I know I am prepared for this. I like the idea of getting drunk in a group of four.

Before, when I drank by myself or with Billie, I think I held back. I didn’t drink as much or as fast as I should have because I was afraid of entering new territory while I was all or mostly

alone. As a girl, after all, you are taught to be fearful when you’re alone. In the park or at the drugstore, you’re a target. You can be abducted, scooped up by any number of unforeseen dan-gers, molested, tortured, left for dead. But in a group, you are taught to feel stronger, like the sum of your parts. Gradually, you forget your anxieties and reservations. You practice the buddy system. You falsely believe that tragedy cannot single you out.

Drinking brandy with Billie and the boys feels like booking a passage on the
Titanic.
The thought that we are all going down together consoles me.

Somebody comes up with the drinking game Have You Ever, which basically involves the boys shouting out offensive ques-tions like “Have you ever seen one?” and Billie and me sipping brandy if we have. In my case, this game is perversely embarrassing; which is to say, I’m not embarrassed by what I’ve done, but by how little.

Phil asks, “Have you ever smoked pot?” He and Mac drink.

Billie asks, “Have you ever done it?” Mac and Phil drink.

Billie says, “Yeah, right, on both accounts.”

Mac asks, “Have you ever given anyone a hickey?” He and Phil and Billie drink.

Phil asks me, “Have you ever done anything?”

Mac hands me the bottle and says, “Just drink already.” I avert my eyes when I take it.

All night, I have been afraid to look directly at the boys, and I don’t know why. It’s not because they’re handsome. They have scarred skin and sneering lips, and their eyes are small and

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squinty. It must be something else that’s intimidating me, something in Phil’s broad shoulders that reminds me of his strength, or in the stubble on Mac’s chin that reminds me of his age. I’m startled by the way they both lean in to light my cigarette, as though the Zippo were too unwieldy for me. When I glance into either boy’s eyes, I feel a jolt like static electricity.

Apple brandy rolls over my tongue and past my tonsils, and doesn’t leave me time to process the taste. After one sip, all I can think about is a movie I saw once, in which a man torched a house that was the site of a murder. I’m imagining the film frame by frame: the striking of the match, its slow-motion drop onto the gasoline-soaked floorboards, the line of fire that creeps up the stairs and down the hall until the house is one big fireball with blown-out windows.

That’s what apple brandy does. One gulp of the plum-colored stuff kindles my tonsils, starting a fire that knocks down my esophagus like a trail of dominoes. The fumes fill my sinuses. I feel flammable. I’ll combust if Phil lights another cigarette.

A new sensation follows this drink. After the brandy’s initial blaze, I feel dead calm, like a shot of novocaine to my chest has set numbness spreading. I feel like it’s in preparation for something, as though a tooth is about to be pulled. I take a few more sips while Mac looks me dead in the eyes. I suddenly don’t care if he’s watching.

The anesthetic is in my brain. All my worries fall over and die like canaries in a mine shaft. I put both hands on my hat to make sure my head is still there.

Five sips later, I start to feel like I’m watching a home movie. The camera is moving too quickly, panning from one person to the next with amateur dexterity and minimal focus. I have to

close my eyes every few minutes, when the rapid motion makes me woozy. My life, at this moment, feels like
The Blair Witch Project.

Billie is standing on the steps that lead up to somebody’s hulking, granite tomb. She uses her hands to make a mega-phone around her lips and screams, “Rest in peace, Salem!”

Phil is wearing her Garth glasses and crooning the Billie Holiday lyrics, “A kiss that is never tasted forever and ever is wasted.”

And I am accidentally snapping my lit cigarette in half and then trying to smoke the filterless stub, while Mac talks about the band Crash Test Dummies and the plight of the human in-dividual.

Everyone is talking at once, bruiting irrelevant stories, but brandy holds us together with a strange harmony like a doo-wop group, where each voice rises and halts with its own stray
ooh waah ooh.

The very
next thing I know, I’m lying faceup on the ground with my head propped against a headstone engraved with the name
clyde barker
. I imagine Clyde’s corpse directly under me, like we are two parallel lines spaced six feet apart. Overhead, the sky is huge and domed like the screen at the Boston Plane-tarium, where we went on a recent class trip.

Mac is over me, too, saying “Barker, Barker,” and barking like a deranged poodle. In the lantern light, his pumpkin face looks distorted, as though he’s holding a flashlight under his chin. The wind rattles the trees and leaves tumble everywhere, like it’s snowing foliage.

Mac is heavier than he looks. When he lowers his skinny skater frame on top of me, I feel like I’m being buried alive. I

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think of Madeline in the
“
The Fall of the House of Usher,” which we just read in school, and wonder at what point she stopped scratching the lid of the coffin and just fell into death, the way I let Mac fall into me. He is holding my head with both hands, the way I might hold an open book. My hat slides off and falls at the foot of Barker’s tombstone, where someone bereft would place a bouquet.

Under any other circumstances, I would be afraid. Mac is four years older, and he is probably a bum the way my dad says “All boys are bums.” He has a pierced eyebrow and a Chevy Camaro, and Billie says he sells pot. He may or may not have had sex before. He may or may not want to have sex with me right now.

At this moment I am not one bit chicken. I like the ano-nymity, the fact that I don’t know who I’m kissing beneath his skeleton suit. Mac isn’t kissing me, either. He’s kissing my shit face, which makes me feel less vulnerable. I imagine it’s the way Elijah Wood felt, wearing that Nixon mask, while Christina Ricci had sex with him in
The Ice Storm.
Mac is pressed smack into me. He is closer than any boy has been before, but I feel like there is a protective layer between us, a type of atmospheric safe sex.

His tongue parts my lips. His breath is potent, the way I imagine mine must be, and his cold, wet lips remind me of a bowl of eyeballs (they were really skinned grapes) I stuck my hand into once, when I was blindfolded at a Halloween party. I kiss him back because out of the corner of my eye I see that Bil-lie is kissing Phil, and that seems like as good a reason as any. Mac’s hands are on me, too, latching on to me in places I my-self don’t dare touch. One curled hand is wrapped around the bantam bulge of my bra, the other kneading my upper, upper