My parents were always trying to get me to toughen up, and it was true that I was a fraidy-cat—I once stayed indoors for half a day because I was convinced that there was a snake in the middle of our cul-de-sac. (Turned out it was a dribble of tar on the sidewalk.) Mom made me join the Junior Girl Scouts; I went to one sleepover camp, sat in a bed of fire ants, and got sent home for carving my name in the wooden base of a tepee. Mom and Dad decided I might be better off learning to make friendship bracelets and paddle in a canoe at day camp; I fell straight into an algae-choked pond and didn’t get into another boat for fifteen years.
The Great Outdoors was a nightmare, filled with things that bit and scratched and burned and stuck to my clothes. All I wanted to do was have sleepovers with my new best friend, Monica, transcribe Monkees lyrics into the special notebook I kept in my denim-covered tape case, and play Legend of Zelda until the sun came up. When President Reagan wanted every kid in America to run a mile to prove our worth, I walked all four laps in protest, becoming the only kid in my fourth-grade class to log a twenty-minute mile.
It was around sixth grade—the year that Mom’s mother, Susan, told me, “You’re starting to get quite the little figure,” and that Monica and I discovered the trove of Playboys under my dad’s side of the bed—that I became aware that my body was a problem to be solved. It bulged and jiggled in all the wrong places, inspiring grown men to stare at my eleven-year-old chest when they talked to me, or holler as they drove by in their mud-splattered work trucks. The women I saw in Playboy and Seventeen had twenty-four-inch waists, and breasts that seemed to defy gravity; by the time I was twelve, I was a thick-waisted, big-hipped girl with boobs that had to be wrestled into submission with a bra that left marks on my shoulders.
Diet and exercise, it seemed, were the proper remedies for a body that failed to conform to the Jessica Rabbit-meets-Cindy Crawford beauty standard of the late 1980s. The magazines and books my mom brought home promised both “Thin Thighs in One Month!” and “Buns of Steel,” and I figured that if I just had enough discipline, the way Mom did, I could get both. I started small, doing Jane Fonda tapes and power walks with Mom, two-pound wrist weights on our arms. When that didn’t do the trick, I ate less and less, until, for a brief while, I was eating almost nothing at all. Commercials for Special K and Weight Watchers told me that if I could “pinch an inch,” I needed to watch my diet—and I could, so I did. Tuna salad sandwiches dripping with mayonnaise and pickle juice were replaced by iceberg lettuce with lite ranch dressing and steamed artichokes with low-calorie margarine. Novels by Dean Koontz and Stephen King were shelved in favor of my mom’s diet books and pocket calorie counters. And ice cream—vanilla Blue Bell, topped with two layers of Magic Shell—was replaced by portion-controlled servings of a watery, crunchy concoction known as ice milk, which promised half the calories and delivered one tenth the joy.
I never lost that much weight—my militant self-discipline tended to vanish at night, when I’d scarf down fistfuls of cereal or nibble away, bite by microscopic bite, at forbidden treats like leftover Halloween candy and Grandmother’s chocolate fudge—but it probably wouldn’t have helped my self-esteem much if I had managed to sculpt my body into a perfect 34-24-34 hourglass, because I was also taller than every other kid in class. In every photo, I loom over classmates who hadn’t hit their growth spurts, hunching to make myself as small and cute as a five-foot-seven twelve-year-old with bad teeth and a crunchy perm can possibly be.
Like many awkward kids, I wrestled with two conflicting desires: I wanted to be the center of attention, and I was paralyzed with fear the second anyone noticed that I existed. The second impulse always seemed to impede the first. I loved singing—so much, for example, that I made my own “audition tapes” on my dual-deck boom box, but when my mom dropped me off for actual choir auditions, I ducked into a bathroom stall, tucking my knees up to my chin until the danger of public humiliation had passed. When I did get cast in a play, I forgot my lines, running off stage just as I was supposed to deliver the punch line in our G-rated Saturday Night Live send-up.
My career in theater stalled, I decided to reinvent myself, and I found myself gravitating to First Colony Junior High’s small crowd of burnouts—scowling kids who smoked in the bathroom, cut classes, and spent school hours drawing skulls, swords, and heavy-metal logos in their notebooks. There was Charles, a dead-eyed, greasy-haired skater who started drinking at nine years old and whose dad let him smoke inside the house; Jennie, an aspiring model whose stepdad, Bob, seemed to be perpetually shirtless, drunk, and yelling; Robert, a laid-back guitarist with bowl-cut blond hair and a repertoire of ironic three-chord Violent Femmes rip-off songs; and Chris, who lived across the street from Jennie, drove a Spree, and had already flunked ninth grade once by the time the rest of us caught up to him.
Robert was dreamy but unattainable—sharp-jawed, aloof, almost feminine in his resolute cool. Chris was the opposite: goofy, approachable, sweet, and always up for whatever anyone suggested. Robert was the guy I sat next to on the floor of my kitchen, hips touching, cracking jokes at a mile a minute to make it crystal clear that I didn’t think there was any chance he’d be into me. Chris was the guy I actually kissed, after getting stoned enough to muster the courage, in a dark corner of the Houston Museum of Natural Science while Robert and Jennie were distracted by the T. rex in the lobby. By thirteen, I was already downgrading my expectations based on what I thought I deserved. Roberts were for the Jennies of the world. Awkward, tongue-tied girls with big feet and bad teeth settled for the Chrises.
When I swallowed my first sip of Southern Comfort or brandy or whiskey, in Jennie’s upstairs rec room sometime during that summer between middle and high school, there was no explosion of stars, no feeling that I’d finally found the missing piece that made me feel like myself. In fact, straining my memory more than twenty-five years later, I can’t remember my first sip of liquor at all. What I do remember is the woozy backdrop of that summer: the worn brown couch, the faded shag carpet, and the liquor cabinet, a tall glass china case that sat, unlocked, at the top of the stairs.
I used to think that drinking at thirteen made me some kind of badass, but thirteen-year-old me would be disappointed to learn that, in 1991, I was really just a few years ahead of my time. By 2003, nearly a quarter of girls would tell researchers that they had tried booze before they turned thirteen, and by 2015, 45 percent of high school girls would self-identify as drinkers. We know a fair amount about why girls drink, and when, because studies of teenage drinking and drug use tend to be broken down by gender—unlike studies about the consequences of drinking on adults, which have mostly been restricted to men. According to one of the most widely cited studies of girls and substance abuse, by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University, factors that put girls at risk for early drinking and alcohol abuse include low self-esteem, depression, early puberty, anxiety, impulsivity, sensation seeking, eating disorders, insecurity, and rebelliousness—any one of which might make a person likely to try alcohol and drugs, but which, mixed together, make up a potent cocktail of predisposition.* Many of the factors that predict which girls will drink are also the symptoms girls drink to alleviate: We drink to feel more comfortable in our own skins, we drink to relieve anxiety, and we drink to feel less depressed.
Drinking was a magic trick that took me outside myself. I loved that first lightning bolt of pain that tore through my chest when I chugged from a warm bottle of Jim Beam, and I loved that a tall plastic cup filled with ice cubes and Captain Morgan made me feel like I belonged wherever I was. I loved the thrill of getting away with something, and the instant camaraderie that came on when my friends and I got loaded. Sober, I was awkward and shy; tipsy, I could play whatever role I wanted from the limited roster available to teenage girls at the time—from the mean girl making fun of other girls who tried to break into our circle to the flirty vixen who flung her bare legs acro
ss boys’ laps as we listened to Pearl Jam and the Smashing Pumpkins on Jennie’s CD player. Sometimes Chris or Robert would come over and drink with us, or smoke cigarettes and watch us, amused, while we mixed up vodka and Crystal Light, but the times I liked best were when it was just me and Jennie, taking pulls on her stepdad’s bottles, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” blaring, and venturing barefoot into the steamy afternoon to smoke our Marlboro Reds brazenly on the sidewalk. Jennie was beautiful, waiflike, and effortlessly cool, and I thought that if she liked me, I might start to be those things myself. I started drinking to feel like I was in Jennie’s league; I kept drinking to belong there.
Three
People Make Their Own Problems
Drinking took me out of my body, which was not a territory I especially cared to inhabit. It didn’t matter if I was wearing a screaming-pink miniskirt with spangled leggings or a triple-XL T-shirt over jeans I stole from Dad’s closet, something about my appearance seemed to impel men in trucks to scream out the window—“Hey, Mami!” or “Lemme see that ass!”—as they drove by. By now, I had developed a thick skin. “Chinga tu madre!” I would yell back, or “Fuck you, I’m thirteen!” With kids I knew from school, though, my bravado evaporated. One afternoon as I walked home from middle school, a small crowd of older boys overtook me on the sidewalk that wound through a playground where I used to swing on the monkey bars. “Ugly skank!” one yelled. “Is your pussy tight like I heard it was?” another demanded. I was supposed to say something clever, but I had forgotten my lines. I stared at the boys wordlessly for several seconds until I regained control of my body, pushed past them, and fled. I still hadn’t found my voice.
Jennie—perfect, skinny, confident Jennie—was never at a loss for words. Something about her kept catcallers at their distance. Something about me made me a magnet for guys with smart mouths and wandering hands.
I spent that summer before high school worshipping her, and living in terror that she would turn on me. When she told me she had a crush on the same boy I did, I crumpled his name in a mental ball and tossed it aside. (Roberts were for the Jennies of the world.) When we were walking through the grocery store and she casually said, “Hey, go steal us some cigarettes,” I palmed a pack of Reds like it was a deck of cards. When she informed me that my favorite band from childhood was lame, I hid my case of Monkees tapes in the back of my closet next to the Cabbage Patch dolls and Legos.
And when she said, “Let’s try acid,” I said, “Sure!” It was easy to get your hands on drugs in the suburbs in those days, especially if you were a girl. And none of us were too worried about the consequences. It was the era of Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Research Center and “This is your brain on drugs” and Drug Abuse Resistance Education, and ridiculous rules about how we could dress and what we could say and when it was okay to have friends of the opposite sex. We certainly weren’t allowed to even talk about “experimenting” with drugs. All the rules seemed equally arbitrary, the product of some capricious council of elders charged with preventing us from having fun. Listening to metal didn’t make us worship Satan, and watching A Clockwork Orange didn’t turn us into violent sociopaths, so why should we believe that drugs would fry our brains like the egg in that stupid commercial?
Everyone in my new circle of friends smoked weed, using bongs made out of Coke cans and ten-dollar screw-apart pipes we bought at head shops and concealed in our cavernous tooled-leather purses. But pot didn’t do much for me. I wanted something that would blow my mind wide open.
I bought a few tabs of acid from Jeff, a high-school dealer who sold drugs from his locker. The following weekend, Jennie and I slipped the tiny squares of green blotter paper—such innocent-looking things—onto our tongues, and waited. Half an hour went by, then an hour. And then, as chemicals circulated along pathways and wedged into receptors in my brain, the piece that had been missing during all those drunken afternoons finally clicked into place. Here was the explosion of stars, the feeling of connection, the missing ingredient that stole dull time away and imbued every observation with significance. I had started to dabble in painting, and I discovered that acid was amazing for making art—what it took away (verbal acuity, the ability to stifle giggles, a linear sense of time) it more than made up for in visual creativity, and I spent hours sketching, refining, and eventually creating murals of intricate 3-D spirals, bright Pop Art portraits, and vivid abstract patterns in spiral notebooks, and later, on the walls of my bedroom.
Before long, I was dropping acid in the shower before school, slipping it under my tongue in the backseat as my parents drove Jennie and me to see the Butthole Surfers at a Houston amphitheater, taking it at night after my parents went to bed. I knew, from my pile of books about the sixties, all about Woodstock burnouts, hippies who went on a trip and never came down, and the apocryphal story about the guy who freaked out and drove his motorcycle off a cliff on Highway 101. But aside from a few panicky moments—like the time when the giant purple eye I had painted in the corner of my bedroom started blinking messages at me in Morse code, or the time when I was lying on a hotel bed, several years later, and the world lost its vertical hold—I never had a “bad trip.” LSD made me feel like I had special access to the secret world behind the visible one, where the connections between events and beliefs and, especially, people were obvious and undeniable. I couldn’t articulate the experiences while I was having them, nor remember them clearly afterward, but I never really lost that sense that the perceptible world is only a fraction of what’s really going on.
My parents, strict and suspicious as they could be, never seemed to figure out that I soared through much of high school high as a kite. (Maybe I was a better actor than I thought.) While I was marveling at the patterns in my ceiling or stumbling through the Palais Royal department store after an afternoon-long bender at Jennie’s house, they were worrying about my reading material, confiscating books like The Doors of Perception and the trashy Jim Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive because they glamorized the drugs I was already doing. (Dad’s hiding place for contraband literature—tall dresser, top drawer—was even easier to find than his Playboy stash.) If they suspected anything was out of whack, they never let on (and letting on was kind of their thing). And since, in classic teenage-girl fashion, I was barely talking to Mom anymore, it was easy enough to pass off being drunk or high as status-quo sullenness—just glare, don’t giggle, and try to stand up straight. My biggest argument with my parents wasn’t about whether I was getting into drugs and alcohol; it was whether my preferred all-black wardrobe (a color still associated, in the late eighties and early nineties, with satanic death cults and ritual abuse) made me “look like death.”
Besides, I was a good kid, the kind who made straight As, practiced piano before my lessons, signed up for newspaper and theater club, and never skipped school or snuck out of the house. School came easy to me, and I enjoyed learning. I was a high-school freshman, a total overachiever, and a hard-core drug user.
My friends, on the other hand, were starting to fall off the map. Chris, who was repeating his freshman year and could barely be bothered to show up for class anyway, got kicked out of school for smoking pot in the bathroom and became a full-time bag boy at the local Kroger. Charles, who had a shitty home life and could barely read, started lashing out at everyone around him, including me; I finally cut him off for good after he tried to tear off my bikini top at the end of a long summer afternoon spent chugging Captain Morgan at the bayou behind our houses. Robert stayed in school but eventually developed a taste for heroin—a habit it would take him years to beat. And Jennie didn’t make it through freshman year.
In our first two months at sprawling, windowless Clements High School, Jennie’s problems at home became more serious, and we started to drift apart as her parents kept her at home more and more. But even when she wasn’t allowed out of the house, she told me what was going on by writing notes—stacks of notebook paper, int
ricately folded and passed from hand to hand across the classroom—and they piled up in shoeboxes under my bed, forming a disjointed autobiography of a life in chaos. To hear Jennie tell it, her mom was constantly calling Child Protective Services on her when she ran away, forcing her to come back to the house where her leering stepdad would smack her around for a while before passing out on the couch. I was well into adulthood before I realized that CPS wasn’t an Orwellian acronym for an agency whose job was rounding up children and sending them back to abusive homes.
I have no way of knowing how much of what Jennie told me about what went on behind the stained-glass front door of her ordinary suburban house was literally true, and how much was true enough. What I do know is that she was depressed enough to be on Prozac—the most prescribed antidepressant in the country at the time—and to have cycled in and out of a local mental hospital, which she described as a holding pen for the kind of catatonic crazies we had seen in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the previous summer.
Jennie and I kept this last blip in her biography from my parents, because Mom already thought Jennie was a bad influence and had been reluctant to let me invite her to my fourteenth birthday party. (If anything, I was a bad influence on her.) The photos from that day, taken a few days after Jennie returned from a stay at the loony bin, show the two of us on the floor, laughing hysterically, identical peroxide-blond streaks in our hair. But it was hard to hide Jennie’s troubles. She would call at all hours of the day and night—hysterical over the latest crisis, begging me to come over to her house. I always did. I had no idea how to comfort her, but I could listen.
Quitter Page 3
