Contents
PREFACE
INITIATION
FIRST TASTE
FIRST WASTE
FIRST OFFENSE
COMA GIRL
THE USUAL
ALL YOU CAN DRINK
GREEK MYTHOLOGY
EXCESS
YOU’RE PRETTY WHEN I’M DRUNK
LOVE IN THE TIME OF LIQUOR
BEER TEARS
ABUSE
ASCENT AND DESCENT
LIQUID HEART
THE END HAS NO END
THE STILL-TO-LEARN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2005
Published in Penguin Books 2006
Copyright © Koren Zailckas, 2005
All rights reserved
the library of congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Zailckas, Koren.
Smashed : story of a drunken girlhood / Koren Zailckas.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-1011-9139-2
Designed by Carla Bolte • Set in Granjon
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For my mother,
who first made me mindful of women’s issues
PREFACE
THIS IS THE kind of night that leaves a mark. When I surface, its events and the shame of them will be gone from my head, cut away as though by some surgical procedure. I will not miss the memories that were carved out of me: when my father carried me in his arms through the sliding glass doors, my head lolling the way it used to when I was the little girl whom he carried to bed. When a friend, being interviewed by the doctor treating me, had to answer “vodka,” which is like a curse word, in the fact that we exploit it in private but don’t dare utter it in the presence of adults. When a row of people looked up from their laps because the scene of a girl, dead-drunk at sixteen, momentarily distracted them from their midnight emergencies.
I won’t remember the chair that wheels me down the hospital’s hall, or the white cot I am lain on, or the tube that coasts through my esophagus like a snake into a crawl space. Yet I will retain these lost hours, just as my forearms will hold the singes of stranger’s cigarettes in coming years, as my back will hold the scratch of a spear-point fence, as my fingers will hold griddle scars from a nonstick grill. This is the first of many forgotten injuries that will imprint me just the same.
When I surface, there won’t be any spells of shivering or gut purling, any percussion between my temples. I won’t need to follow the doctor’s orders: “Tylenol for discomfort.” There will be no physical discomfort. My body will be still and indifferent, but mentally, the soreness of the overdose will linger.
It’s strange the way the mind remembers forgetting. The fact of the blackout won’t slip away like the events that took place inside of it. Instead of receding into my life’s story, the lost hours will stand out. Something else will move in to fill in the holes: dread and denial that thickens with time like emotional scar tissue. In the absence of memory, the night will be even more memorable. The blackout will stay with me, causing chronic, psychic pain, a persistent, subconscious thrumming.
MY INTENTION, in telling this story from the very beginning, is to show the full life cycle of alcohol abuse. I did not begin by drinking from steep glasses, viscous concoctions of rum, gin, vodka, and triple sec, and I did not start off blacking out or vomiting blood. Like most abiding behaviors, my drinking was an evolution that became desperate over time: I found alcohol during my formative years. I warmed to it instantly. Like a childhood friend, it aged with me.
I grew up in the Northeast, a white, middle-class teenager among other white, middle-class teenagers, which plunks me down in one of the highest demographics of underage drinkers. I am also Catholic, a faith that some researchers find increases the odds that teenagers—particularly girls—will drink, and drink savagely.
I started drinking before I started high school. I had my first sips of whiskey not more than a year after I first went to a gymnasium dance or first dragged a disposable razor over one knee, balancing myself on the edge of the bathtub. I had just burgeoned the new breasts I needed to shop for blouses in the juniors’ department. I had only just crammed my blinking dolls and seam-split stuffed animals into a box in the attic.
I drank throughout high school, but not every weekend, not even every other weekend. It was the promise of drinking that sustained me through all of high school’s afflictions: the PSATs and the SATs, report cards and driving tests, and presidential fitness exams.
In high school, I sought out booze the way boys my age sought out sex. At parties, I leered when girls unzipped their backpacks, hoping to catch the glint of a bottle; and my own sly glances reminded me of the boys who leered when girls bent forward, hoping to glimpse their breasts through the necks of their blouses. The brief encounters fed me. For weeks, I’d relive swilling rum in a graffitied bathroom stall during a Battle of the Bands, vodka in the wooded perimeters outside of a football game, tequila at a sleepover after somebody’s mom fitted a nightlight into the wall and announced she was going to bed.
I drank through college, too, with an appetite that had me drinking rum by the half-liter bottle, until I couldn’t squelch the impulse to unload my secrets to strangers, or sob, or pass out wherever I happened to be standing. I drank until I’d forgotten how much I had already drunk, and then I drank more.
For four years, I drank aimlessly when I might have been doing things that were far more gratifying. I might have been forming real friendships, the kind that would have stretched into adulthood, and had me in ill-fitting bridesmaid dresses at half a dozen best friends’ weddings. I might have been
writing stories or taking pictures. I might have been sleeping a full six hours a night, or eating three square meals a day, or taking multivitamins. I might have been learning the language of affection: how to exchange glances or trace a man’s fingertips with mine. I might have been reading the top hundred books of all time.
I drank after college. I drank through my first real move, my first job as an executive assistant, my first insurance forms, my first tax filing, and my first apartment where rent was due on the first of the month. I drank after the real world revealed itself to me like a magic trick, after I saw the method of adulthood, the morning commutes and mindless jobs, which shattered the illusions I had about it.
And at age twenty-three, I gave up drinking altogether once I realized how much it had cost me.
STILL, I am not an alcoholic. As far as I can tell, I have no family history of alcoholism. I am not physically addicted to drinking, and I don’t have the genetically based reaction to alcohol that addiction counselors call “a disease.” In the nine years that I drank, I never hid bottles or drank alone, and I never spent a night in a holding cell awaiting DUI charges. Today, one glass of wine would not propel me into the type of bender where I’d wind up drinking whole bottles. While I have been to AA meetings, I don’t go to them.
I am a girl who abused alcohol, meaning I drank for the explicit purpose of getting drunk, getting brave, or medicating my moods. In college, that abuse often took the form of binge drinking, which for women means drinking four or more drinks in a row at least once during a span of two weeks. But frequently, before college and during it, more time would pass between rounds, and two or three drinks could get me wholly obliterated.
I wrote this book knowing that my alcohol abuse, though dangerous, was not unprecedented. Nor were the aftereffects I experienced as a result of it. Mine are ordinary experiences among girls and young women in both the United States and abroad, and I believe that very commonness makes them noteworthy.
In the past decade alone, girls have closed the gender gap in terms of drinking. I wrote this book because girls are drinking as much, and as early, as boys for the first time in history, because there has been a threefold increase in the number of women who get drunk at least ten times a month, and because a 2001 study showed 40 percent of college girls binge drink. When you factor in increased rates of depression, suicide, alcohol poisoning, and sexual assault, plus emerging research that suggests women who drink have greater chances of liver disease, reproductive disorders, and brain abnormalities, the consequences of alcohol abuse are far heavier for girls than boys.
I also wrote this book because I wanted to quash the misconceptions about girls and drinking: that girls who abuse alcohol are either masculine, sloppy, sexually available, or all of the above, that girls are drinking more and more often in an effort to compete with men, and that alcohol abuse is a life-stage behavior, a youthful excess that is not as damaging as other drugs.
You can find girls who abuse alcohol anywhere. We are everywhere. Of the girls I’ve known over the past nine years, the ones who took shots, did keg stands, toppled down stairs, passed out on sidewalks, and got sick in the backseats of cabs, there have been overachievers, athletes, dropouts, artists, snobs, nerds, runway models, plain-Janes, and so-called free-thinkers. Some wore oversized sweaters and lacerated jeans; more wore ballet flats and rippling skirts and fine-spun jewelry that glimmered. Even holding a pint of the headiest beer, they retained the qualities that people call feminine.
Girls don’t drink in the name of women’s liberation, for the sake of proving we can go drink for drink with the boys. We don’t drink to affirm we are “sassy” or “self-confident,” which newsweeklies have lately suggested. Nor is our drinking a manifestation of “girl power” or “gender freedom” or any of the other phrases so many sociologists interchange with happiness. On the contrary, most every girl I’ve known drank as an expression of her unhappiness. I too drank in no small part because I felt shamed, self-conscious, and small.
To me, it is no surprise that underage drinking has spiked, given the fact that so much of it is dismissed as experimentation or life-stage behavior. Parents tend to brand alcohol abuse as the lesser evil, as a phase that is far less actionable than drug abuse. As a drinking girl, especially a college-aged girl, I assigned happy hours and the subsequent hangovers to behavior that was expected of those my age. I believed the people who romanticized those years, the ones who told me to embrace irresponsibility before I was slapped with the burdens of corporate adulthood.
For many girls, alcohol abuse may be a stage that tapers off after the quarter-life mark. Many will be spared arrests, accidents, alcoholism, overdoses, and sexual assaults. A whole lot of them will have close calls, incidents they will recount with self-mocking at dinner parties some fifteen years later. Some of them will have darker stories, memories or half memories or full-out blackouts, that they will store in the farthest corners of their mental histories and never disclose to their families or lovers. But I fear that women, even those women who escape the physical consequences of drinking, won’t escape the emotional ones. I fear some sliver of panic, sadness, or self-loathing will always stay with us.
I HAVE always loved Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “The Grown-Up,” which speaks of a girl who stands bravely before the world’s fear and grace. We’re assured she “endured it all: bore up under / the swift-as-flight, the fleeting, the far-gone, / the inconceivably vast, the still-to-learn, / serenely as a woman carrying water moves with a full jug.” I could recite that poem in my sleep, and yet I recognize that I have never been that girl. Instead of shouldering adulthood with all my young courage and strength, I dropped it after the first impossible hoist, when it all felt too unmanageable. I wrote life off as heavy cargo, and accepted it could only be mastered by masterful men. I was a coward. I grasped on to alcohol, which was the first available escape.
Nine years after I took my first drink, it occurs to me that I haven’t grown up. I am missing so much of the equipment that adults should have, like the ability to sustain eye contact without flinching or letting my gaze roll slantwise to the floor. At this point in time, I should be able to hear my own unwavering voice rise in public without feeling my heart flutter like it’s trying to take flight. I should be able to locate a point of conversation with the people I deeply long to know as my friends, like my memoirist neighbor or the woman in my reading group who carries the same tattered paperbacks that I do and wears the same footless tights. I should be able to stop self-censoring and smile when I feel like it. I should recognize happiness when I feel it expand in my gut.
Some of the most interesting research findings in substance abuse involve women who began drinking regularly in their preteens. Clinicians report some of these women, who seek treatment for alcoholism in their mid- to late twenties, not only look younger, but act younger, too. Some turn up at clinics wearing kids’ clothing and cradling teddy bears. Some still play the way children do, by twirling hula hoops and blowing bubbles. When faced with conflict, they just totter away. It seems some women’s emotional development arrests as a result of alcohol. They stall at the age they were when they had their first drinks.
While this manifestation is extreme, it hits close to home.
As a twenty-three-year-old, I am mistaken daily for nineteen (seventeen if my hair is pulled into a ponytail and fifteen if I’m wearing Converse sneakers). Too many days, people make me aware of my own childishness. I am aware that the clerk behind the counter calls me miss instead of ma’am, telemarketers still ask to speak to my parents, and after years of financial independence, every handyman who turns up at my apartment still makes a snide remark about “Daddy paying my rent.” I am aware that the fourteen-year-old girl I tutor in English is a head taller than I am; and while I craft arguments that burn my cheeks because I never spit them out, she extends her opinions even when they aren’t complete. I am aware that somewhere along the line, I’ve subconsciously turned down the pitch
of my speech, like a silencer of a gun that softens the sound of its firing. Now, even when I yell, I don’t feel like I am using my full voice.
I MIGHT have waited to quit drinking. I might have kept abusing alcohol for at least five more years at the pace I was moving. I might have waited for alcoholism to fall like an ax. Or I might have tried my best to “drink responsibly,” even though setting responsible limits is complicated by my physical smallness; plus the sheer fact that I’m female means the same amount of alcohol affects me differently every time.
In the end, I quit drinking because I didn’t want to waste any more time picking up the pieces. I decided smashed, when it’s used as a synonym for drunk, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
When I stopped drinking, I never experienced the high-on-life sensation that so many people say consumes them like the Holy Spirit in their first months of abstinence. I never felt the buzz that people report feeling once they discover they can thrive without alcohol, once they dust off their sober faculties and realize everything still works. Abstinence did not help me rediscover the world with childlike awe. I never felt inspired by the simplicity of nature, by the dependability of sunup, or spring’s yawning blossoms.
I didn’t feel the ecstasy of returning to a life that was unaltered by alcohol because no such life ever existed for me. For nearly a decade, alcohol was the mold that shaped me. Once it lifted, I felt the immediate terror of having no framework. Without drinking, there was nothing to structure my weekends, my relationships, or my self-image. I felt my confidence cave in on itself.
For me, abstinence has been nothing but growing pains. It has meant starting from scratch, reliving my awkward phase, and learning all over again what it means to be adult. It’s meant I will act like less of an asshole, but feel much more like one. It’s meant learning that drinking will always be more socially acceptable than abstaining. It’s meant discovering I am more cautious and introspective than I ever allowed myself to be, and I will never again dance in public, which is probably preferable.
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