Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood Read online

  I once heard someone use copacetic as a slang term for “drunk,” and I thought That’s me. With a buzz on, I’m first rate. Alcohol is my wood sealant. When I’m painted, nothing can penetrate my essence. My best friend can call me bitch. The boy who is brushing my thigh with the back of his hand can tell me I’m only pretty when he’s drunk. In the moment, these sentiments just bead up and roll off me.

  I don’t even mind when Milton crosses the room to smooth my hair, as though he cared about me.

  SOME TIME later, we run out of booze, and Hannah, Perry, and I go to buy more at what we don’t realize is a gigantic, fine-wine store. The bottles that line the shelves from floor to ceiling are far too good for the likes of us. I tramp through the rows of labels from Portugal, Argentina, and New Zealand—all the regions I’m too uncultivated to know—with the mania of Augustus Gloop in the chocolate room.

  It occurs to me that an hour has passed since my last drink, and my buzz has begun soft pedaling. I am still drunk, but I cannot be just drunk. Just drunk will not gut my head of its worries. Just drunk will not swat away my misgivings about Milton, anxieties that are whirring around me when I’m alone with him, like so many insects. I need a bottle of something sweet and potent to perk me back up to a state of past gone. Champagne will do the trick. Cheap champagne, which is both romantic and lethal, will hit me like a crime of passion. I think it can help me behead myself.

  Hannah is in the back of the store, inspecting the coolers stocked with chilled Korbel, as if she has read my mind. But when I approach her to help select a fat green bottle from the cooler’s shelf, she doubles over with her hands on her knees, and starts dry heaving.

  I’m able to grab her under one arm, and get her out of the store before the store owner has to run for a mop. The door chimes, and the cold Canadian air hits us hard and blue. I tug Hannah just around the corner of the storefront, where we’re out of the cashier’s view, and I hold her blond curls while she throws up on the sidewalk. I grit my teeth when I hear the splashing sound vomit makes when it hits concrete.

  We’re standing on the edge of the town’s main street, and traffic is heavy. Every few minutes, a car whizzes by. The drivers, mostly men, lean against their car horns, and the blares are mocking. Hannah wipes her mouth with the pink sleeve of her sweater and says, “We’re such goddamn Americans.”

  WHEN WE make it back to the Crown Princess Hotel, Hannah is still down for the count, so Perry and I haul her to bed and go about the business of changing for the dance.

  In what will become a mythic recovery, Hannah will wake up stone sober two hours later, wriggle into her black satin gown, loop her hair into an updo, and come downstairs to resume drinking. As college continues, we will all build up this level of stamina, which may be the truest measure of excess. Sorority sisters who are drunk enough to have eyes swiveling around in their heads will learn to tickle their throats with their fingers, hurl, and reel back to the party to pick up drinking where they left off.

  In spite of the scene at the liquor store, I still managed to net a bottle of champagne. Perry pops the cork out the sliding glass door, where it cracks like a gunshot. Milton has been lost for hours, and I’m glad because I don’t have to think about him. I can just drink champagne from a bathroom glass with Perry, whom I feel comfortable with on account that he isn’t my love interest, or even Hannah’s.

  Each sip of champagne tastes like honey. I love the whispering sound its bubbles make, as though the drink itself is trying to tell me something. After a few glasses, I am too unsteady on my feet to slip into my new floor-length gold dress without stepping on the hem and half falling over.

  Getting ready is the most challenging part about formal weekend. After five hours of preparties, a mascara brush is just as dangerous to operate as heavy machinery, and when we develop the film from our disposable cameras, everyone’s makeup looks like Tammy Faye’s. High on champagne, my biggest challenge is scooping out my suitcase. After twenty minutes of pawing through my clothes, I still can’t locate two high heels. When the time comes, I go downstairs to the ballroom wearing Milton’s rubber flip-flops.

  The dance itself is the least interesting part of the weekend. For a few hours, there’s an open bar, and we drink screwdrivers garnished with orange wedges through tiny plastic straws. As a sorority, we were too cheap to have the event catered, so the white tablecloths are covered with confetti but no food, and our empty stomachs make us even more drunk. On a banquet table are a few cheese plates, sticky glasses that are half full or half empty of cocktails, and ashtrays smoking with forgotten, unmashed cigarettes. The deejay we hired was detained at customs, so there’s a Canadian one, spinning the culturally offensive music that’s usually reserved for terrorist interrogations.

  Zeta’s president requests Crosby, Stills, and Nash, which is something that someone will do at every formal henceforth. When it comes on, the sisters make a ring on the dance floor, linking arms and slurring the words to “Our House.” I join in, wrapping my arms around the synthetic material of two people’s dress waists, and chirping about how life used to be hard, but now everything is easy because of Zeta. I tilt my head against the sister standing next to me and let my eyes well up. The words zing out of me because I don’t yet know what a Greek myth they are.

  The rest of the night flickers on like a movie that you watch while you’re nodding off to sleep, and catch only pieces of. The vodka I drank in the ballroom omits some scenes, but I manage to pay attention to the important events in the plot. Milton materializes during a slow song, when he tows me onto the dance floor by my elbow, and I let him twirl me a few times before I flip-flop back to the bar. Perry finds a piano in a hallway and thumps out a labored rendition of something truly campy, maybe “You Are So Beautiful.” Someone snaps a picture of me standing beside him, listening, with one hand on the piano’s lid. In it, my eyes look blank, and my skin is as white as chicken meat.

  Sometime after midnight, Hannah and I get the idea to climb onto the slick roof of a ferry that is tied up in the bay. The red letters painted on the ferry’s side read SEA FOX, though Hannah keeps calling it SEX FOX. We plunk ourselves down on top of the boat’s bridge, smoking a joint and shouting “All aboard” as loud as we can, to see if the ice will toss our voices back in an echo.

  Sometime after that, I slide back through the door of my hotel room and pass out alone in the sheets.

  THE ROOM is as dark as first darkness, the way only hotel rooms can be. In my sleep I can hear the old-fashioned clock on the nightstand flip its numbers. I know I will not be able to sleep soundly here, knowing Milton still remains at large, and that he might tear through the door at any minute with his plastic key. Beyond that, I can never fully doze off when I am this loaded with hard liquor. Vodka, especially, lulls me into a state of delirious half sleep, in which I talk and laugh out loud.

  I’m lying on my side, facing the blank white wall, when Milton comes in. I can tell he is wasted by the way he falters onto the bed, clasping me from behind and wiping his wet mouth on my collarbone. I can feel his penis pressed between my shoulder blades like I’m being robbed at knifepoint.

  I feel stalled between consciousness and sleep, the way I used to on the mornings when my mother used to wake me up for high school. In my dreams, I’m saying Go away go away go away, but in reality I’m not sure I’m exhaling a damn word. My jaw feels too stiff to speak through.

  Milton is kneading my rib cage like a ball of dough, hard enough to make me glad I’m this drunk—otherwise, his hands would hurt. Tomorrow, when I’m inspecting the bruises, I’ll think I should have quoted the poet Milton, who said, “He who overcomes by force overcomes by half his foe.” But in the moment, I can’t think at all. Liquor has strained my mind. It has exhausted my heart. My only defense is my vacancy. I hope if I play dead, he’ll leave me alone.

  But he won’t leave me alone. Instead, he continues the post-mortem, and on top of it, he starts yelling. It’s not intimidating, exactl
y, because Milton doesn’t have the blustering roar of a man. He sounds more like a little boy throwing a tantrum in the supermarket checkout aisle. He keeps squealing, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”—not because I’m dead drunk, but because I won’t let him touch me.

  I gain a little consciousness when I hear an empty rattling and realize Milton is punching the headboard with one fist. In the triangle of light that spills out of the bathroom, his eyes look like two thumbprints.

  I squint to focus my gaze, while I try to concentrate on the power in my fingers. I feel like any woman in any movie that has, in order to save herself, willed her drugged or deadened digits to move. With enough meditative oomph, I finally complete the Jedi mind trick. My hand makes a swatting motion, and I hear a sloppy, smacking sound that says I’ve made contact. Milton rolls off the bed like a log, more because he’s drunk than because of any real muscle on my part. I am finally left alone, permitted to curl back up with my drunkenness, hugging my own torso like a lover. From here on out, when anyone asks what happened, I’ll say he’s a brute, and he’ll say I’m a prude.

  For a few minutes in the early morning, I’ll wake up prematurely and see Milton still sleeping on the floor where he fell, with the faded blue comforter wrapped around him like a torn fishing net. Sunlight will finger the room, and the bureau will be cluttered with cigarette butts and cigarette butt–filled bottles, and the carpet will hold the long, brown stain from somebody’s rum and Coke. My lips will feel achy and swollen, and the sealed air will smell as musty as death.

  I will decide I want to check out of all of this, maybe even for good.

  TWO WEEKS before finals, winter starts to break. Suddenly I am experiencing spring for the first time, the way you can only wholly experience something once you’ve forgotten it ever existed. The sun brightens like a lamp that’s been screwed with a higher wattage of bulb. For once, the city looks less anemic.

  In the quad, the snow melts to mud. I sit there in the grass between classes, beside the boys throwing Frisbees and the girls tonguing frozen-yogurt cones. We wear T-shirts, even though the temperature lags, and our skin blushes like it is shocked by its nudity.

  For the past few months, I’ve been more interested in going to parties than in fixing my ongoing gymnastics glitches, which puts me in a less than desirable position when I have to try out for next year’s cheerleading team. It is the absolute last thing I want to do given the weather and the fact that my coach has reassigned Joe to Hannah.

  My new partner is a three-hundred-pound grad student named Ramon, whose main job on the team up until now has been to run the length of the Carrier Dome with the twelve-foot-tall flag that all the other boys are too small to hold. After the very first stunt I do with Ramon at tryouts, my clothes are streaked with his sweat and hair gel. To make matters worse, I fall midway through a back handspring, and rather than getting up, I lie on the mat like a crushed beer can.

  I can’t say I’m surprised when I don’t make the team, but the elimination stings anyway. I cry on the floor of the locker room shower for forty minutes, grinding my nails up my shins and against the grout between the floor tiles. Then I decide to countervail the pain by getting drunk.

  I go out with one of my sorority sisters, a girl named Grace, to a rock club on Westcott Street, which is the only stretch of Syracuse that could ever pass for cool. It is the old hippie part: a few blocks of thrift shops and pagan bookstores, acupuncturists, tapas bars, a community center walled with life-sized mosaics. Among students, the venue is famous for lousy music and accessible beer, proving that for two-dollar bottles of Labatt we’ll endure untold agony.

  When we get there, the club is under new management, and since we don’t have fake IDs, a man at the door marks our hands with gigantic Xs. The marker is black and pervasive, the type that makes your pores look like a game of connect-the-dots and won’t wash off for days. Grace and I storm the bathroom, where ten other girls are huddled at the sink, scrubbing their stubborn Xs with hand soap. The best we can do is to fade them to gray. When we leave, the counter is awash with ink-stained paper towels.

  We twice try to order beer, but the bartender sees our blackened hands and threatens to 86 us. I feel despair that’s even worse than the anguish of being eliminated from the team. It’s worse than romantic rejection. Without a bottle to hold, I feel incomplete, the way Plato says we are each born only half a circle, and we spend our lives seeking out our other half. A drink is my beloved. Without it, I am wanting; I feel half finished.

  Fortunately a cigarette company is there, passing out free packs, which seems like a far bigger no-no than serving beer to minors. But I grab a pack, and feel happy to have something to occupy my hands. Without a public project, I am painfully aware of my detachedness. It is a sensation like riding the subway without gripping the handrail: Without a beer or a cigarette, something to hold on to, I feel doomed to fall over.

  With my free pack, I sulk at a back-most table with Grace, running my fingers through my hair and click-click-clicking a disposable lighter. I smoke in a hungry sequence, lighting one cigarette with the tip of another until my throat feels as red as raw steak.

  The minimum drinking age is an incomprehensible thing when you’ve been drinking for four years already. Your mind keeps coming back to the past, to the bygone beers that should make you more than eligible to drink in the present. It’s like applying for a job when you have no degree but loads of experience. You tell the bartender, “But, but.” And he says, “If buts were horses, then beggars would ride.” You pine for a taste. A bottle is an old lover mocking you; it’s across the room, being held by somebody else. Nothing else will ever hold you by the heartstrings. No man could ever fever your chest the same way, or awaken that kind of beauty in you.

  Near the speaker, a boy is staring at me. It’s undeniable. He is parked in reverse, with his back to the stage. His gaze spills toward me. I push my hair in front of my face every time I meet his eyes. His stare tears through me like a cleaver. It isn’t the way men stare at women on the street, when they mentally strip them bare and weigh their proportions like lunch meat. Instead, it reminds me of the expression on my mother’s face when I step out at the airport arrival gate. It is that tender look of recognition, the kind that makes me skittish.

  Later tonight, when I am washing my face before bed, I’ll decide that this boy is shockingly handsome, with sound features and eyes that hold light like a child’s. But in the moment, I’m still lonesome for beer. I decide I can’t stand him.

  When a guitarist with dreadlocks tucked under a kerchief croons, “I want to fuck you in 3-D,” I decide I can’t stay another miserable minute. I kick out my chair and kiss Grace on the cheek. En route to the door, the phantom man dogs my footsteps. He is a lanky silhouette that leans down to say something. No words pass through me. I move around him the way I’d by-pass a downed branch in the street.

  FROM WHAT I can tell, S.U. hasn’t ranked on a list of top party schools in over thirteen years. I know because one day, Tess and I do an Internet search on the subject. Rumor around campus is S.U. made the Playboy list in 1987. But the truth is, out of forty schools listed, mine didn’t even earn a mention. And every year for the next four years, when The Princeton Review publishes its own list of the top twenty-five—something they’ve been doing since 1992, and something the American Medical Association has called for them to remove on account of its glorification of binge drinking—someone I know will sigh and say, “We didn’t make the cut.” No doubt the omission relieves school officials. But within the circles in which I travel, it is a blighted hope, a deficiency.

  This is because college, like most life experiences, doesn’t look as good in real life as it looks on TV. Specifically, it doesn’t look as good as it does on MTV. The network’s coverage of spring break first premiered when I was five, from which time I honestly believed that college was what I saw in their ninety-second promo spots. I thought it was all body shots and wet-T-shirt contests,
girls shimmying on life rafts, and paranormally hot folks swapping underwear. I imagine that other people still do think this. Because in May 1999, when MTV brings its “Campus Invasion” to S.U., smack in the middle of the study days that precede finals, the mood on campus goes from stirred-up to manic.

  It’s strange the things the university does to celebrate its own year-end windup. Not only does the administration permit the MTV idiocy, the condom expo and video-game booths and second-rate performances by third-rate pop stars, it also sponsors carnivals on the lawn outside the underclassmen dorms, complete with ring tosses, animal balloons, and cotton candy circulating on sticks. Outside my dorm window, the dining-hall cook flips hamburgers on a hibachi. Freshmen are bucking on a thirty-foot-high inflatable castle, the kind the rental company won’t let you jump on without taking your shoes off. The environment on campus looks totally age inappropriate, like the site of an eight-year-old’s birthday party. All the girls on my floor get drunk or high, and hop on the castle in the name of irony.

  THAT NIGHT I go with Hannah to the school year’s real finale, an annual block party on Livingston Avenue, which students call Livingstock. It’s a haphazard series of off-campus parties hosted by upperclassmen. Many of them are in houses we’ve haunted throughout freshman year, when we’d drop three dollars in a vase at the door in exchange for tapping the keg. But tonight’s festivities are more or less complementary; anyone is free to fill a cup.

  Kegs are proudly displayed on front stoops and street corners, the way plastic Santas are set out at Christmas. No one appears to be afraid of repercussions from campus security. Half of us are finished with finals, and the school year feels as unalterable as our blue exam books and bubble sheets full of ink-shaded circles. Whether we’re passing or failing or just getting by, our fate seems sealed.

  Livingston Avenue is a stubby little road, less than half a mile long. And tonight, every square foot seems to be filled with human bodies. Tomorrow, the city newspaper will tally the head count at over a thousand. Hannah and I bound through them all, recognizing no one and saying hi to everyone, drifting in and out of houses, lifting Jell-O shots off kitchen counters, allowing guys to pry the caps off our beers. For a change, there is live music. Behind the balustrade of a front porch, a girl with a halo of white-blond curls coos into a microphone. Her face undulates. Her syllables, thick with breath, swell like rainwater in the street.