Later, Elle will tell me her father was awakened by three cops who said they were there investigating a drug overdose. His denial was so earnest that, even after it took him twenty minutes to shake Elle awake, he still believed her when she said it was a friend’s sick hoax.
I, too, make midnight phone calls. My friends and I call it “drunk dialing” because some nights when you’re drunk enough, your phone seems to dial the numbers on its own—especially calling ex-boyfriends with whom your subconscious secretly wants to make contact. One night I drunk dial my mother, sobbing with an anxiety attack. I tell her I can’t breathe, my throat feels as tight as a tourniquet, and the walls of my dorm room are lurching out at me.
It will be the only time of emotional turmoil in which I remember asking her for help, rather than snapping at her defensively and running off like a wounded animal. It is probably a testament to how frightened I am. Lately, charging along the sidewalk in the rain on my way home from work, feet slipping around in my sandals, I feel as unstable as my umbrella—I get the feeling I could be blown inside out at any second. The wind might break me in half.
My mother must sense it, too, because she books an express flight to La Guardia the very next weekend.
EVEN THOUGH I know my mom is coming, I’m still surprised by the shrill eerrrr of the intercom. It’s been three hours since I made it home from my promoter friends’ party, a ridiculous affair at which I remember drinking thirteen-dollar drinks called “red devils,” and burning a woman with a cigarette while I was trying to persuade her to go on a date with Josh. In the VIP room, I’d introduced myself to the man who was on the cover of a recent Rolling Stone as though I were someone worthwhile. I’d called home from a pay phone to say I might be hungover when my mom arrives.
Still, the damage is worse than I thought. Through the fog of a hangover, I can see that I am sleeping fully naked, which has been happening a lot lately, when I pass out before I can finish changing for bed. When I knock into the bathroom, there is red-stained vomit all over the sink, the hand towels, the toilet seat. It looks like the scene of a homicide. In the mirror, my face is bloated and yellow. My eyes are half moons of smeared mascara. My hair is knotted, matted, and sticky with liquor and puke. I try as fast as I can to wet my face and wipe down the bathroom. I hide the dirty clothes, ashtrays, and empty bottles that have been lying in piles on the desks and the beds ever since my roommate moved out.
When I finally take the elevator downstairs to meet my mom, both she and the female security guard cry “Good God” as I round the corner. There is no denying that I am a wreck. But my mother humors me. She makes up the spare double bed with sheets that she brought from home, while I shower. She pages through my stack of Village Voices while I run the water in the sink to muffle the sound every time I throw up.
My mother is a creature of habit, content always to stay at home with her tea, her dogs, and her cable TV, and I feel deeply guilty for being fucked-up enough to make her come to New York. Later, the thought of her that day, struggling with my dad’s rolling suitcase, stepping out of a cab with no idea whether she was on Washington North or South, wearing the flowing black dress she specifically wore because she heard me say, “Everyone in Manhattan wears black,” will always make my eyes well up.
My eyes do well up as I walk her down the street, past the park. I am describing landmarks in fits and starts, and I trail off every time I try to tell her about Henry James’s house, or the chess shops, or the dog that sometimes sits in the fountain and bounces tennis balls off its nose. We sit at an open-air table at The Grey Dog’s Coffee, and I drink strong coffee and eat hummus on toast, and then I toss it all up in the toilet of the charming, dried flower–filled bathroom.
As we continue to walk it becomes clear that my system is intensely out of whack. Every few blocks a buzzing noise starts in my ears, and my stomach cramps. I have to tell my mom, “Give me a minute.” I say, “I just need a minute to rest here on the steps of the Angelika.” Or “against the doorway of Mercer Kitchen.” Or “on the curb.”
My mom tells me the story about how she once threw up in the bushes the day after a big party in Texas. I know she’s trying to make me feel better, but it only makes me feel worse, knowing it was the only time she’s ever been hungover, and I feel the same headaches and nausea every weekend.
At a corner grocery my mom buys me the only hangover medication she knows, which is aspirin and bottled water. It doesn’t help. I can’t keep the water down. I have to stoop over the sidewalk and vomit all the way down West Broadway, in front of all the high-end boutiques my mother and I are too intimidated to go into to browse. She keeps asking if I need to go back to the dorm and rest. And I keep assuring her, after every spit-up, that I feel much better. I tell her, “This was definitely the last time.”
When I throw up on the corner of Canal Street, some of it splashes my mom’s shoes, and a man walking by shouts out, “Rough night, eh?”
It is too much for her. She shoots her arm up from the shoulder to hail a cab, saying, “We will go back to the dorm, and you will sleep this off.”
Back in the dorm, we curl up in identical double beds, pulling down the shades, though the room is still as hot and bright as the August afternoon. I sleep until six o’clock at night, dimly aware of the sound of my mother hanging up my clothes and scrubbing the bathroom with the only cleaning supplies I have: Febreze and toilet paper.
A few times she comes over to stroke my head or put a glass of water on the nightstand. She tends to me like a sick person. Which, it’s becoming clear to both of us, I am.
ABUSE
ASCENT AND DESCENT
THE LIFE OF a young drunk is not a continual fall into the pit of abject alcohol abuse. It is a herky-jerky evolution. You slip, you trip, and you tumble into the habit of drinking when you are afraid, or enraged, or heartsick, and every so often, you hit a ledge from which you can see how deep into dependence you are. Every so often, you feel so lost in the hollow of your own need that you decide to try to hoist yourself out of it.
And you think you should be able to clamber out. You should be able to rise above your voracity for vodka because there are people everywhere, reminding you that this is a life-stage behavior that every girl eventually outgrows. But that kind of climb is not easy, it is not even possible, when you have no other reserves of strength. When all of your endurance is tied up in drinking, there is nothing else that can hold you. Without it, you tire in no time. You get scared, you surrender, and you slide even deeper into drinking.
I BEGIN junior year with a neat little pack of birth-control pills that, lengthwise, look like candy dots, sorted as they are into rows of whites, greens, and blues. They were prescribed to me by my Dorothy Hamill–looking, chronically pregnant pediatrician (yes, at age twenty I still see a pediatrician), after I burst into tears during the depression-screening bit of my yearly physical, when she asked me if I felt “hopeless about the future.” She’d wheeled her stool up too close, and said, “That’s your menstrual cycle talking.” She wrote a prescription for the oral contraceptives meant to harness my hormones and give my black moods the dependability of modern medicine. It mattered little to her that I’ve never—that I remember—had sex. She didn’t ask me how often I booze.
I also move into the sorority house, which statistically ups the likelihood that I will pickle myself, since studies have found that nearly three-fourths of sorority-house residents are binge drinkers.
My dad drives to Syracuse to help lug my boxes up three floors to my bedroom, which I will share with two other girls. The room is shaped like a bottle: It is rectangular with a windowed enclave, like a bottleneck, that is wide enough for a bed. Since I am the first to arrive, I set up camp there. I position the head of my mattress so it looks out over Comstock Avenue, so that even in my sleep, I will hear the sounds of people staggering home from the campus bars. They will be fighting, singing, shrieking, and knocking into things. Here, I will be surrounded by pe
ople who drink as much and as often as I do.
I start the semester off hopeful. Pictures show me still gaunt and muscled from the summer, in combat boots, dilapidated jeans, belts made of chrome bullets, and the boys’-sized T-shirts I picked up at thrift stores. My hair is stick straight and blond from a bad dye job that I embraced, hoping it would help me lighten up. There is a soldierlike resolve about me, like I came back prepared for a fight.
I start picking up assignments from the entertainment editor at The Daily Orange. He is a boy with whom I exchanged vows at a wedding-themed party last year, although we never acknowledge the fact that we got drunk on tequila, kissed, and woke up on the couch the next morning, flecked with thrown rice.
I start to forgo nights at the campus bar in exchange for nights of researching stories at the city courthouse, for interviewing HIV bug chasers I’ve met online, or a local coven of witches who let me sit in during their ceremonies downtown. On the days that my stories run in the newspaper, I feel as happy as I do at any bar’s happy hour. I turn up at the student center at seven A.M., when the papers are delivered in stacks. I trip around campus, joy filled at the prospect that someone, somewhere, is reading something I’ve written.
Drinking also shifts to my mind’s periphery when I enroll in a reporting class with an adjunct professor. She is a health reporter from the city newspaper who looks motherly but is tough as nails, and she likes me for no reason at all. When the state fair comes to town, she gives me an assignment to write about the professional BMX riders who spend days somersaulting their bikes over a cement half pipe, and I approach it with a surge of ambition that I haven’t felt since eighth grade. I spend the day drinking plain old iced tea. I fill notepads with bits of conversation, and ride fearlessly over potholes in my seat on the backs of their bikes.
For the first month of school, writing is its own upper. Pounding on my computer keys feels like playing the piano, like arranging words into harmony that sings back to me. I can work for thirty minutes on a single sentence, reading it aloud and listening to how one word can change the whole tune, making it sadder, or sweeter, or more melodic. Sometimes, my roommate April asks me what I’m working on. And when I read the words out loud to her, I am filled with an inner heat that feels almost like pride. It feels almost as good as the cinch of confidence that I get from alcohol.
Alas, the buzz won’t last.
I blame the house. Summer drops off into fall almost immediately, and the off-campus atmosphere has Gothic terror. The trees around campus seem to skip the foliage part completely, and in the light of the lampposts their bare branches reach out, broken and skeletal. At the fraternity next door, the boys roast the corpse of a pig for what they call their annual “home cumming party,” and the smoke from the charred meat slithers in through our closed windows. Sigma Alpha Epsilon stakes crosses painted with girls’ names on the lawn of every sorority, which is their way of acknowledging who has been invited to their yearly Paddy Murphy event, but it looks like three blocks’ worth of gravestones of girls who are already dead.
In Zeta, things start to break. In the middle of the night, someone turns over all our patio furniture and smashes beer bottles against the side of the house. The kitchen door is mysteriously splintered. Our drinking glasses vanish as people carry them up to their rooms to mix drinks or to use them as ashtrays, so we have to eat in shifts. The chef starts coming to work drunk and has to be fired. Our housemother, a woman whom we used to see once a semester when she passed out room keys, meets a man and disappears altogether. The sisters walk around with the stunned eyes of the stoned.
Even by college standards, the house teems with erratic behavior. For starters, the sisters don’t eat, ever, unless they do. There are always girls leaning over the industrial counters in the kitchen, hollowing out bagels with spoons and mixing liquid diets in the blender, screaming at the new cook that “there is too much fucking oil in everything.” And yet they are back there at three in the morning, drunk and high, devouring meat loaf, egg salad, and pizza doused with salad dressing, leaving the floors streaked with peanut butter and empty bags of cookies. Someone is always getting ready to go out to the bars, or roosting on the fire escape, smoking the joint that our president forbids on the basis that the administration can revoke our charter if we’re caught with drugs. Plus, there is always someone who has gotten too drunk, who is bawling in the house phone booth or passed out on the floor of the bathroom, who needs to be tucked into bed.
My room is particularly weird. Even though my roommates and I are all oddballs, we have nothing in common. April stays awake all night by the glow of a book light, smoking cigarettes, praying the rosary, typing in frenzied bursts on her laptop, and then sleeping for days at a time. Selene does tai chi every morning while French records chirp in the background, and she teaches English as a second language to middle-aged students, whom she brings back to our room to smoke pot.
And then there’s me. I start plastering the ceiling and the walls around my bed with disturbing photos from art magazines, and with handwritten passages that I’ve copied from books. I work with manic energy until I’ve cleaned the school store out of poster putty. People who visit our room gasp with disbelief when they see my psychotic scrapbook: the layers of photographs, fabric, newspaper, clumped paint, and poetry scratched onto scrap paper. At the time, I don’t know why I am preoccupied with the project. But years later, I will think it was because I needed something immoderate to compensate for the fact that I wasn’t drinking excessively. I’ll think I worked wildly to fill my vacant walls because I suddenly had vacant needs.
I CAN’T pinpoint the exact moment that I slip back into hard drinking. I know it has something to do with the house, which is always stirred up. There are a million activities that I feel obligated to mix myself into. The owners of the campus bars dream up new drink specials, and the girls I live with start going out Tuesday and Wednesday nights, too. The door dings with boys delivering invitations to date parties. The house’s phone line rings with sports teams calling to schedule a party. The fraternities next door are spinning records and playing kickball on their front lawns every afternoon. Every night, some sister I barely know is knocking on my door, pleading with me to go with her to a party because she doesn’t want to show up alone.
The month I took off doesn’t slow down my drinking at all. Pretty soon, I am grappling with the security keypad every night. I am staggering up the stairway while I grip the railing with both hands, watching the oriental patterns on the stairs recede and wobble under me, until I make it to my floor, my door, and pass out in my clothes on my bed.
In the morning, there is too much absence to define my blackouts by the events that are missing. There are more things I can’t remember than things I can. A night is no longer a solid sheet, interrupted by fissures. Instead, it is a gaping hole, scattered with fragments of conversations and episodes, like a night sky punctuated by planes disguised as stars.
BIRTH-CONTROL pills have an adverse affect on me; they always will. In the years to come I will repeatedly try them in what the doctor assures me is the lowest possible dosage, and they will bring me to depths of anxiety and depression that I have never known. But in the fall of junior year, the combination of oral contraceptives and liquor unglues me.
For starters, the drinking weight I never put on before starts to amass, and I can feel it bubbling out over the waistband of my pants and under my chin. In pictures, I look like my own stunt double. I am a tough and meaty version of me, with shoulders that roll forward and a mouth that never smiles, unless it is in the accidental flush of drunkenness, when my cheeks are as round and red as hothouse tomatoes. My eyes, when they are not relaxed into a state of rolling, squint in disdain. I look mean.
I start to act mean, too. After a few cups of something hard, combativeness, which is something I haven’t felt since Elle and I raided Skip’s frat house, comes back to me. Only this time, my anger is completely irrational. Nothing external provok
es me. I can be lying on the tiles of Zeta’s bathroom, my head can be swimming with half a liter of Smirnoff, and I am still overcome by the urge to punch something, even if it’s just the toilet-paper roll. This time, I am beating off the lances of my own thoughts. I am fighting an invasion that is coming from my own head.
Eventually, I find something material to duel. I find out the boy I was dating during the summer was also dating a girl in the sorority next door. And, as a couple, they give me a target at which to throw the sharp darts of disappointment inside me. When I see them together, I feel a hatred that curls my toes. It is a tension in my chest like a wire tugged hard from both ends. I have contempt not just for her, but for her whole sorority. I don’t detest only him, but men everywhere. When I drink it all comes unhooked and takes flight like a shot rubber band.
One night at a campus bar, the girl is fingering her hair in the bathroom mirror while I am dabbing at the grenadine stain on my jeans with a wet wad of toilet paper. I can see her glancing at me through the bathroom mirror, and my scorn is biting. I’ve never hit anyone before, but I clench my free fist and promise myself that I’ll imprint my knuckles in her jaw if she doesn’t stop staring at me. I’m a liquor-crusted mess and I know it, and the fact that she is here to see it only makes me want to pulverize something. When I start wavering toward the exit, she says, “Bye.” She is smiling, and the corners of her mouth draw into an effortless bow, like she has such a surplus of smiles that she can give them away to just anyone, for any reason; she can give them away to me. Before I swing out the bathroom door, I reply, “You’re boring,” and the words taste like vinegar.
What I really mean to say is, she has a stark elegance that I envy. We had a poetry workshop together a year ago, and we will again a year from now, when I’ll realize that she is really fantastic. Every day, she wore headbands and pea coats and checkered scarves that didn’t smell like liquor, or cigarettes, or vomit. She sat tall in her chair, unlike those of us whose hangovers gave us curvature of the spine. And when she spoke to say, “I love the way this poem captures both the inane and the deep,” her voice was crisp and unshakable.
Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood Page 23
