Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood Read online

  By the time the song fades out, I’ve drained only one Michelob, and we can’t leave for the next destination until we each finish two. The alumnae make me sit on the floor, drinking until both bottles are empty, the same way my parents used to keep me at the dinner table until I swallowed every last pea.

  Tonight will turn out to be the only time we will ever be hazed by being forced to drink. The following year, Zeta will scratch the big-sister scavenger hunt for good when the house elects to make its pledge period totally dry, meaning no drinking whatsoever for new members because the implications are just too risky. Ironically enough, for the next three years, pledges will beg for the drinking in its absence. They’ll approach sisters over and over again to say: “We want to be hazed. Make us drink. Please, funnel gin down our throats.”

  It’s hard to say why so many of us crave this type of humiliation by intoxication. Maybe it’s because, for some girls, drinking is a scarily intense need: if not a physiological need, then certainly a mental and emotional one.

  Usually, if you need alcohol you can’t admit it, unless you are in AA, at which point you can’t proceed without first admitting it. And usually, once you do own up to the fact that you’re powerless over Bud Light, some gruff-faced addiction counselor makes it clear that you can’t have it ever again. Being hazed, however, is one of the few times you can actually admit you are powerless while you coat your insides with light beer. You can lean back into defenselessness, into the voices chanting “Drink, drink, drink.” For a solitary moment in time, you can claim you aren’t responsible for your own disasters. You have the elbow room to say: “Of course I’m a mess. I didn’t have a choice in the matter.”

  The alumnae cart us from one off-campus apartment to another, driving despite the fact that they’ve been drinking right along with us. When they get loaded enough, they give in and let us smoke in the car, even though they first warned us it would mean our asses. In the backseat, we fall into each other at every turn. Embers tumble everywhere, and smoke curls around us like halos.

  In the future, I will come across many people who don’t understand hazing. They don’t understand why anyone would want to endure humiliation in order to be a part of a team, or why, for that matter, they would desire the company of such sadists to begin with. For me, hazing is more about masochism than peer pressure. For me, the alumnae feel like the only friends that have the guts to say, “Yes, your ass looks gigantic in those jeans.” On the inside, I feel like a real shithead. And on the outside, they confirm that I am. I respect them for that, the way Sylvia Plath says, “Every woman adores a fascist, the boot in the face.”

  For some of us, fear and humiliation feel honest. They ensure devotion more than reverence, more than love. The damned loves the hand of the executioner. And compassion holds more weight when it follows ruthlessness. Frankly speaking, “You’ve got to be cruel to be kind.”

  WE STOP at a Tudor, where an older girl shows me how to smoke from a ceramic water bong shaped like a serpent, and then pushes me to fill my lungs again and again. We go to a frat house where the brothers make us down screwdrivers and read Penthouse Letters aloud (Maya tells me later that the porn was the boys’ personal touch). And then we go to a sublevel apartment on Lancaster Avenue, where boys tie our hands behind our backs and force us to eat pot brownies off the kitchen floor, which, it’s worth noting, is not clean enough to eat from.

  By the time we make it to the beanbag chairs in somebody’s attic, everyone, including the hazers, the hazees, and the hosts, is drunkity-drunk. An alumna brings home a pledge who is passed out and puking.

  The rest of us are dropped off at Forty-Fours, an S.U. sports bar that got its name because eleven of the university’s football players have worn that number, and three of them have earned all-American honors. The sign on the outside of the bar is printed with the slogan A SYRACUSE TRADITION, though it will always be unclear to me whether the owners mean to say that the jersey or the drinking is traditional.

  I’m admitted with a fake ID that has appeared in my pocket from nowhere.

  Maya is smack in front of me as I shoulder through the door. I don’t have the faculties to put two and two together, to even notice that she’s got a lei on, too. Instead, I just fall into her. Even if I hadn’t already suspected that she was my big sister, one of the boys who forced me to read the sentence “Her fingers danced over the material and she began unbuttoning his jeans” had told me outright. I can’t even pretend to be surprised. Drunk and stoned, I’m like a turtle without a shell, just that soft and demented.

  I ALREADY HAD a rapport with Maya. I like the stream-of-consciousness messages she leaves on my answering machine, the way she can wind around what she is trying to say for a full ten minutes. I like her windswept hair, and her one-armed sweaters, and her motorcycle boots. I like the way she calls out my name across the quad, no matter how many people are circulating between classes or how far away I am when she spots me.

  But the evening’s hazing has secured our union. It has bonded us the same way physical fights with my real sister brought us closer when we were young, when I would accidentally knock her hard enough to make her bottom lip bleed, and if she agreed not to tell our mom, I’d feel so thankful that I wouldn’t deck her again for at least a week. Maya and I have the same kind of trust in torture. I keep the confidence of the hazing, and she keeps me as her graceless namesake. She even lets me make her a wooden paddle painted with our names, the age-old Greek symbol of our sadomasochistic connection.

  At Forty-Fours, someone takes a picture of the whole lot of us while we lean together, looking stunned by the flash of the bulb. I have my head on Maya’s shoulder, eyes drooping. My mouth is bent into an eerie smile, lips smeared with the garish red lipstick I forgot the alumnae put on me. Tomorrow, I won’t remember much about this bar, which is the first I’ve ever been in. I will remember only how it felt to be someone’s little sister, how good it felt to be relieved of the terrible burden of good judgment. I am relieved, for that matter, of the ability to make choices at all.

  Already in college, the inability to be defenseless is the thing that makes me homesick. It kills me to think of all those years in high school when I lived for the idea of being on my own. The reality is exhausting and lonesome. Already, I’m finding it takes too much energy to do the things that people do to pass for competent adults. Walking in the snow to a study group, or to the student store to buy a new toothbrush, requires a valiant effort. Some days, so does getting dressed; that’s why the vast majority of us go to class wearing pajamas.

  Even when I’m drunk, my nights will almost always be marred by the indecision of my days. I will spend fifteen staggering minutes trying to figure out what drink to order, which knob to pull on the cigarette machine, whether or not to let some boy from my sociology class walk me home.

  Tonight it is a great comfort to have Maya telling me what to do. In some ways, from here on out, alcohol will act as my power of attorney. I will drink to incapacitate myself, and then let sisters or friends decide things for me. I will enjoy delegating my authority. I’ve never been one to mind not having a mind of my own.

  EXCESS

  YOU’RE PRETTY WHEN I’M DRUNK

  BY THE TIME I am initiated into Zeta as a full-fledged member, excess is my main objective for any night. When I drink, I aim to exceed a state of being just drunk, and enter instead into a state of consciousness that is more like annihilation of brain waves.

  Of course, that word, excess, won’t occur to me until years later. It isn’t possible to exceed normal when my drinking feels normal to begin with, when geography makes it acceptable, when everybody is doing it, and when too much never seems to be sufficient, anyway. I won’t realize until much later that every sorority function resembles a five-day meth binge in a Kansas City RV park: For however long they last, I live in my own filth. I am united with strangers solely by my interest in getting high
, talking about getting high, and doing everything I can to maintain that high.

  Of course, Coors isn’t crank or coke or crack. And Heineken isn’t heroin. And vodka isn’t Valium. And nothing that’s mixed with cranberry juice will score you respect with the folks who cop drugs in the public bathroom in Tompkins Square Park. But don’t tell that to my brain because when I’m drunk, it purrs with the ecstasy of being thoroughly high.

  By the time I am initiated into Zeta, I am like any other junkie left alone with her drug of choice. Amstel Light is my upper and my downer, it is my euphoric bump, my sweet nod into vagueness, the hallucinogenic that contorts my world into one that’s worth living in. After two beers, there is no question as to whether I should have two more. After four, my world is the first forty minutes of a movie so moving I can’t bear for it to end, or a cake so sweet I can’t help but cut another, and then another, sliver. My reality is a climax so close I can’t bear to pull away.

  I AM FORMALLY initiated into Zeta at four A.M. on a Wednesday in March.

  The ceremony proves to be the most disorienting experience I will ever undergo while sober. Sisters in hockey masks and black robes tackle and blindfold me the moment I step through the door. The soundtrack from 2001: A Space Odyssey is screaming from a tape deck in the foyer, and someone is clanging pots and pans so loud that the neighbors call the police.

  I’m dazed throughout most of the process. Zetas are covering my eyes or my ears. My skin feels weirdly wet. My senses are all discombobulated. The only part I’m really lucid for is when I’m made to drink with Maya from a ceremonial chalice, which is filled with spiced cider that tastes alcoholic but isn’t. Afterward, someone pushes me down onto a folding chair inside a shower stall. I sit there for an hour, staring at the drain and cradling my elbows, until the Zetas pull back the vinyl curtain, toss me a sweatshirt stitched with the sorority’s letters, and offer hugs of congratulations.

  The best part about being a full sister is that, for a while, it really does give me more to do. Every Sunday night, we have “chapter,” which is the Greek term for the mandatory weekly meeting at which we discuss recycling the house’s milk cartons, redecorating the rec room, bake sales for elder care, Frisbee tosses for fibromyalgia, Greek Week, alumnae luncheons, and other incidental babble. Zeta’s secretary takes a role call and I get to cry out “Oy coy,” meaning “here,” when she reads my newly given Greek name, “Alcina,” after the sorceress who turned her friends and lovers into trees and stones after she tired of them. Chapter closes with announcements from Zeta’s social director, Robin, who plans our parties.

  Robin plans a party for most weekends, and during chapter, we struggle to scribble down the dates in our day planners. Most of the parties have a theme, lest drinking until we see double gets dull. There’s a kindergarten party with Gamma Psi, to which we all wear Catholic-school uniforms and suck on baby bottles filled with gin-milk punch. There’s a pajama party at Sigma Tau, where the boys wear silk pajamas and serve “sleepers,” and a pillow fight leaves the den littered with stray feathers and slippers.

  One Saturday night, we have an “Anything for Money” party with Phi Chi Omega, where the goal is to earn as much Monopoly money as you can by lapping whipped cream off other people’s navels, and performing other sex acts for currency. The girl who has the biggest bankroll when the party ends wins a bottle of tequila silver. By the end of the night, more than a few Zetas cry, when they realize there is a name for girls who earn money that way.

  There are wine-and-cheese parties, beer-and-bowling parties, wake-and-bakes, casino nights, power hours with Midori sours, plus preparties and after-parties, in case one bender isn’t enough.

  But the biggest party by far is Zeta’s semesterly formal.

  A FORMAL IS like a high school prom, but with an open bar and no chaperones. Most sororities at S.U. have them, and mostly at resorts in Canada, where across the border just four hours away, the legal drinking age is eighteen. Everyone spends the night in a three-star hotel, doing their best impression of Led Zeppelin at the Continental Hyatt by kicking over nightstands, putting cigarette burns in hotel towels, and disrupting things enough to make other guests file formal complaints.

  No sister wants to go alone, but asking a date is a big deal because you have to share a hotel room with him.

  I end up inviting a boy named Milton who lives on Hannah’s floor in Sadler Hall. We met a month earlier, in the dorm bathroom, where I was getting sick after a night of downing 7&7s. The room felt as damp as a sea cave, and Milton found me in one of the stalls, where I was drifting to sleep with my cheek on the toilet seat and hugging the bowl like a life preserver. In memory, he was a giant sea beast that latched on to me, kissing me right there on the tiles without even bothering to help me up from my space among the stray wads of toilet paper. I hadn’t resisted. Unmoored as I was, I was happy for rescue.

  I don’t really like Milton, but I don’t dislike him, which is the standard by which I measure the boys with whom I drink. I figure bringing him will be better than not going at all, or going stag, in which case I’d be sure to end up alone in a corner, taking shots, while everyone else snuggled into slow dances. Since I haven’t ever been to a formal, I don’t know that boys interpret the invite as an open invitation for sex, on account of both the open bar and the hotel room. If I’d known, I never would have asked.

  Milton and I hitch a ride up to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls with Hannah, who also joined Zeta, and her date, Perry, a platonic friend she went to high school with. It is the slow, awkward drive of people who don’t know what to talk about. We wheel up Interstate 81, past the army base in Watertown and through the Thousand Islands. Hannah fiddles with the radio. Perry folds and unfolds the map. Milton says over and over that he should have brought his stash of pot. When we get to the border, a customs officer in a glass booth waves us through, despite the fact that when he asks what country we are citizens of, Perry says “Scranton, Pennsylvania.”

  We park the car in front of the first packaged-goods store we spot, and skitter through the aisles like contestants on Supermarket Sweep, amassing bottles of rum and tequila, plus a thirty-pack of beer and the stubby Canadian cigarettes called Players. It should be a thrill to be able to buy booze legally, but for some reason, I still feel sheepish, like I’m doing something wrong. I hand a few bills to Milton and let him carry my share to the counter, where a bald man knowingly rings them up.

  BY THE time we get to the hotel, most of the sisters have already checked in. They are moving the elevator up and down, bursting in and out of rooms holding beer bottles. There are Zetas smoking a joint in the lounge chairs beside the indoor pool, and more sitting at the hotel bar like birds on a wire, picking through peanut bowls and chatting with the bartender while he pulls back the lever of the beer tap. It’s the first time I’ve ever checked into a hotel without my parents, and I’m unsure what to do at the horseshoe-shaped front desk, where a clerk in a hunter-green blazer hands me my room key card.

  Hannah and I have arranged to have adjoining rooms on the ground floor. Mine has two double beds because I don’t feel wholly comfortable bunking with Milton.

  The rooms have sliding glass doors that open onto a small bay, and Hannah and I jog outside without our coats on to marvel at its half-frozen finish. We sit on the broad wooden railing that divides the lawn from the water, holding bottles of Labatt’s in our laps and sighing in the dippy, satisfied way the situation seems to call for. The air around us is smoky before we even light a cigarette. It’s not dark yet, but we can see the moon, as though by mistake. Hannah says the clouds make its edges look serrated, like a bottle cap.

  Back in the hotel room, Hannah and I drink while Perry snaps pictures. We lie under the bed’s stiff paisley comforter with our backs against the headboard, like a married couple watching the eleven o’clock news. Between us are an ashtray, a bottle of Captain Morgan coconut rum, and the tiny juice glasses from the hotel bathroom that we’ve been us
ing to take shots.

  After a few deep dips into the bottle, I locate the inner button that can take me off mute mode. I come up with a point of conversation. I ask everyone, “What was the last ludicrous thing you did when you were drunk?” I find out that Milton passed out in his closet. Hannah accidentally penciled in her eyebrows with red lip-liner in a bar’s dark bathroom. Perry peed into his refrigerator’s vegetable drawer during a drunken sleepwalk.

  People seem to visit our room in sixes. Girls I pledged with come by to rap on the door, as does Maya, as well as boys in rumpled dress shirts who turn out to be other sisters’ dates. Everyone is chain-smoking Players and posing for pictures, asking for beer and offering pot, until our standard-sized room starts to feel like a bank with Perry playing the teller. Since he bought most of the booze, he supervises the deposits and withdrawals.

  The whole time, I stay curled up in the sheets with the rum bottle, feeling too gratified to leave it. Around the room, other sisters are bear-hugging a plastic pink bong or nuzzling drinks, and it occurs to me that this formal is like our honeymoon, like the ravenous periods of early love. In Canada, we can hardly believe we can drink legally, the way newlyweds can hardly grasp that they’re married. We shut ourselves up in our rooms, consummating our lust. We consume room service, our drinks, and our dates. Each taste makes our union feel a little more real.

  I know I’m starting to get drunk because I can feel my eyes turn to marbles in my head. I love that about alcohol. It has a way of making my whole face relax, the way I imagine a facial must. When I’m this slack, I wonder why I always feel so tense to begin with, why I walk around with my cheeks pulled so tight they look hollow, why my mouth is always drawn tight, into a constipated-looking little o.