Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood Page 21

  I don’t know how she answers because I still can’t concentrate on anything external. Inside, I feel mental interference that is almost electrical. It is a deep static that is hard to hear over. Still, I hear Elle talk about how she left me at the party, where I was talking to Skip. She didn’t want to go without me, but I was like the donkey that resists the force of the reins with its full weight. I threw a tantrum when she wouldn’t let go of my arm. I told her, “I’m fine. Just leave. Just leave me the fuck alone.” She has no gauge for how drunk I was because she was drunk, too.

  Still, when Elle tells me, her face screws up in a look of guilt, and I can tell she’s sorry she left. She is averting her eyes, pulling the cotton strings from the holed-out knees of her jeans, and questioning, I’m sure, if she could have done more. No doubt, she is feeling that female-specific remorse that happens when we think we haven’t adequately mothered one another. It is the same remorse I felt when I lost Natalie in Ocean City. It’s the same remorse my mother will tell me she felt when I was in high school, the night I was taken to the hospital. I think the world as I know it is a massive web of feminine guilt. We all mourn and make up for not just our own catastrophes, but also everyone else’s.

  Men don’t do this. When men drink, they help each other, but they don’t feel personally responsible for one another’s catastrophes. Three years from now, when I’m living in New York, three boys I knew in college will crash at my apartment after a night at a nearby bar. One boy will turn up barefoot, and his face will be smeared with street sludge. The other two will let him sleep the entire night on my bathroom floor, without showing the slightest remorse about it. In the morning, when he’s scrubbing puke off his shirt collar, neither of them will tell him, “I shouldn’t have let you get that drunk.”

  Yet my girlfriends and I do this all the time. We play God to one another. We are the omnipresence that won’t let our friend Eve reach for that third apple martini.

  I tell Elle, “It’s fine. I think I’m fine.”

  It starts to snow, and I don’t even bother to pack up my books. I turn my hands over on the table, so I can catch flakes on my inner forearms. I let them dissolve on my skin because I want to feel icy.

  Elle says, “Whatever. If you can’t remember it, it never really happened, anyway.”

  SOMEHOW THE word whatever has outlasted slacker culture. It is the one artifact that has survived all those movies from the mid-1990s, in which high-school dropouts and college graduates embraced Doc Martens and too much flannel, formed grunge bands with obscene names, went grocery shopping with their parents’ gasoline cards, got drunk, got high, slept with their best friends, and challenged the system that would have them believe that doing nothing wasn’t something in itself. Over the course of the past fifteen years, whatever has become one of those linguistic sneezes that transcends partisans. It is there in almost every facet of American culture, a ready-made column and comic-strip name for every would-be satirist. The word is scrawled under as many pictures in my high school yearbook as Peace and Love is in my parents’.

  Girls were especially keen on the word from the start. From the moment Alicia Silverstone injected it with a shrill note of sarcasm in Clueless, it became immediately obvious that anytime I said something a little off-key, some eighth-grade girl would use her thumbs and index fingers to form a giant W to wag in my face, while she rolled her eyes and said “What-ever.”

  But Elle is right. Saying “whatever” is the best way I know to change the subject. It’s a ready-made one-liner, a phrase that is devoid of control, responsibility, or ownership, with the capacity to mean anything, or everything, or nothing at all.

  I decide that whatever happened with Skip meant nothing at all.

  AT SCHOOL second semester, I assemble a steady team of drinking buddies from the girls I see every night at the campus bars. We are the sorriest girls I know. I am one of the lucky ones—among the girls I slug vodka with on the steps of the school chapel are several victims of rape and abuse and girls who have abusive boyfriends, divorced or dead parents, mothers in rehab and fathers in mental-health facilities. Some have half siblings they’ve never met.

  Together, we drink until we’re batty enough to tick off our disappointments, to cry, and to comfort each other the way girls do. It’s like group therapy, only instead of helping me feel less disturbed, our meetings only push me deeper into depression. They make me more convinced that life as we know it is some kind of purgatory, in which everyone suffers and is punished, and every one of us is licking her wounds. All our talks turn back to suicide—who has tried it and who has thought about trying it. Everyone knows how and under what circumstances she’d pull the trigger: if she had AIDS, if a sister died, if she were too irretrievably crazy.

  By January 2000, I’ve felt sadness creeping into my daily routine. It’s like a dampness, that cold, clammy feeling you get during a hurricane, when moisture seems to permeate your hair, your towels, and your sheets, even though the windows are closed. Some mornings, I wake up and snap immediately into crying. My whole body hurts like a bad joint that aches when it rains.

  By winter, even good news makes me cry because I feel it has a swollen underbelly of human truth. Tears start running down my cheeks during class lectures. My eyes water in the laundry room, on the treadmill, and during student-union screenings of slapstick comedies. One night, Tess finds me sobbing during the health segment of the evening news. Scientists have discovered scarred cells from cardiac arrest fall away over time, and she can’t understand how sadly hopeful that is. To me, it means that the human heart has the capacity to heal itself.

  It’s hard to say what is responsible for the change in me. For the most part, I blame Chris, who won’t date me, or the fact that my father was laid off. And once in a blue moon, I’ll fault Skip. It doesn’t occur to me that alcohol might be unhinging me, that drinking at the rate I am can induce depression, impulsive behavior, and symptoms of bipolar and borderline personality disorder. Experts suggest that drinking when you feel low is like taking speed if you’re feeling jumpy: It heightens the ailment instead of remedying it.

  There is no reason that that would occur to me. Alcohol is still the one elixir that can remedy my glum moods. And when my blood buzzes on beer or hard liquor, it doesn’t feel like a downer. The times that I am drinking are still the few when I don’t feel anguish. After a few jiggers of vodka, the heaviness in my chest buoys up, and I feel light, and light-headed.

  Elle and I start spending every spare moment together, and we are a match made in Bellevue. Afternoons, we sip coffee over our copies of The Daily Orange, smoke Marlboros in the carpeted corridors of Watson Hall, or share a joint in the stairwell at the library. We spend nights at a campus bar ordering shots of “Blood and Sand,” or spilling Bombay on her roommate’s bedspread while we mix nightcaps.

  We are together so often that some of the drunken frat boys at the campus bars start to lean in and ask, “Are you dykes?” And even my mother, in a much less explicit way, asks during our weekly phone calls if I have something to tell her about my relationship with Elle. The rumors only get worse when a visiting beer promoter persuades us to peck on the mouth, and posts the picture on a popular college-party Web site.

  But for maybe the first time ever, I don’t care what people think. I admire Elle. Her sadness has a great, booming quality. You can feel it approaching before she does, like the glass of water that ripples in Jurassic Park before the tyrannosaurus roars onto the screen.

  Elle refuses to dress up her hurt for other people’s sake. Save for the bars, Elle refuses to get dressed at all. She goes to class with eyes smudged with liner from the night before, wearing pajama pants and confrontational T-shirts, the type with HELL HATH NO FURY and STILL ILL lettered across the chest. Elle’s moods are as gory as surgery shows on TV. Her every torn heartstring is displayed like payback for the world that inflicted the injury.

  Some afternoons, Elle and I drink on the quad in plain view.
We share a thermos filled with something gamy she mixed up, and swallow the capsules of St. John’s Wort I’ve begun to carry in my book bag. I’ve been following the directions printed on the side of the bottle, but the six pills I take every day do nothing to cure my feeling of imminent doom.

  As we drink, we share headphones. We each have a plastic earpiece stuffed into one ear; we listen to Elliott Smith’s “Everything Means Nothing to Me,” and The Beatles’ “Yer Blues,” and The Smiths’ “I Know It’s Over” on repeat. Sometimes we fall asleep there, with our heads on our balled-up sweatshirts. CD cases are spread out between us, along with the journals we use to store morbid collections of quotes and the suicide letters we call poetry. I wake up in the dark and the grass, head pounding, when the lampposts switch on outside Machinery Hall.

  In many ways, a glass in your hand is an outward expression of pain. It will take me a good number of years to realize it, but drinking is a visible sign to the world that you’re hurting, in the same way that starving and cutting are for some girls. In a movie, drinking is one of the best ways for a hero to convey despair without a voice-over. All he really needs to do is walk into a bar, order a shot of tequila, and stare at it resolutely before he slams it back and orders another.

  Later, I’ll wonder if I hoped someone would catch me during this period. I’ll think maybe I wanted someone to notice that I was always blue, always thirsty for another glass of beer, and ask me who or what broke my heart. I don’t want to use the phrase “cry for help” because I don’t think I wanted to be rescued. Disaster was still too moving. It was a challenge of psychological and bodily limits that seems risky but not wholly dangerous, like skydiving or bungee jumping, any extreme stunt you have to sign a waiver for.

  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, clobbered, damaged, dismantled, all the totally destructive adjectives 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 T-shirts, 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 traffic 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 missing, 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 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 sprinkler 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 compensate 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 revolt 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 backdrop, 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, gathering trophies, dining-hall forks, and copies of Playgirl is no substitute 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 le
t 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 something we’ve stolen from boys. And while we were attempting 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 Playgirls 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 1960s. 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 camouflage, 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.