Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood

by Koren Zailckas

  As I sit through the speeches, I think It is time for this madness to end. In the rows ahead of me, there are too many ex-Xs to name. There are boys I’ve cried in front of and passed out next to on couches. There are boys who have backed me into a corner in someone’s apartment, seized my arms hard enough to leave marks, and refused to loosen their grip when I tried to wriggle away. There are too many reminders of sticky kisses that have not blossomed into real romance, despite my most heartfelt affections. There are boys I have told afterward, in no uncertain terms, to “go fuck themselves.”

  There are girls, too, standing on their chairs in order to get a clear view of the stage. In the rows, I can make out so many of them whom I once slugged wine with. They are girls who sat rolling drunk with me at three A.M. in Walnut Park, sharing drags off a joint and telling stories that I swiftly forgot. They are girls who meant the world to me, and then, after a time, meant nothing. A few, in these final months, have reeled up high on Heineken to say “I’ve missed you” (like Elle), or “I want you in my life” (like April). More have cornered me in bar bathrooms, loaded and angry, looking to throw a drink. Some (like Hannah) have called in the early hours of the morning to say they saw me drinking Bacardi with their ex-boyfriends, and to kindly ask me to stay away.

  Perhaps my only consolation is the fact that I made it.

  I think of graduation the way the devout think of the Apocalypse. For months, people have talked about this day like the fiery flames of hell engulfing the planet. Graduation will absolve us of our sins. After today, our addictions will drift away like all the world’s islands. We will stop drinking, stop dieting during the day and eating pizza at three A.M., stop relying on pot with TV and cigarettes with coffee. Our drunken abuses, like mountains, will fade away and never be found, and we will only have the stories to recap. We will tell of our near misses with wonder and gratitude.

  Yes, when the chancellor says, “Allow me to present the class of 2002,” we will fly clean out of our robes and ascend to our destiny. We’ll find paradise in the “real world,” where there are men seeking meaningful relationships, jobs in media, and cheap and spacious lofts in major cities.

  THE END HAS NO END

  I MOVE TO Manhattan two weeks after graduation. Everyone I know does, with the exception of the people who grew up there, who instead migrate west, to Los Angeles. Everyone regards her sixth-story walk-up as a triumph, regardless of its sludge-streaked windows, the alien insects in the bathtub cracks, and the flickering light fixtures, which turn everything the blanched color of oatmeal. Everyone feels redeemed by urbanism, as if change were as simple as getting a new zip code. No one expects the past to run into the present. We don’t know it will seep down on us like leaks from an apartment upstairs.

  I move because my old boss has a new job as the publisher of a men’s magazine, and when I call him on my twenty-second birthday, he says that, eerily enough, his assistant quit ten minutes ago. Two days later, I am taking typing tests in the human resources department. Two days after that, Vanessa and I are wheezing up the stairwells of a dozen Upper East Side apartment buildings before we land ourselves in a roach-infested prewar building in the East Seventies.

  Vanessa moves to New York with me because, she says, she doesn’t want our friendship to ebb under the stress of new jobs and so many miles. She doesn’t want our nightly cocktail hours to give way to weekly emails. I suspect I am also the springboard that catapults her closer to her latest boyfriend’s Brooklyn loft. They broke up not more than an hour after we returned our graduation gowns to the rental company, on the basis that he didn’t want a long-distance relationship.

  We don’t unpack for a month. Our CDs and desk lamps and scented candles stay snarled in the wastepaper baskets we used to transport them. Our clothes stay crumpled in our suitcases. A box filled with books stays in the alcove that we call a living room, and we’ll use it as a coffee table, a cardboard surface on which to rest drinks.

  Between interviews at TV production companies, Vanessa picks up a job waiting tables at a neighborhood café. She works the night shift. Most nights, when I turn the key to the apartment, the only traces of her are nail polish bottles on the windowsill, T-shirts hung to dry on the shower rod, and refrigerator shelves filled with the foam take-out containers she brings home from work. In order to see her, I have to walk down to the restaurant and sit at its bar, where she sneaks me martinis so I will stay long enough to distract her between customers.

  Before I moved to New York, I’d never had a martini in my life. And even though the V-shaped glasses Vanessa brings me are free, I hate the yuppie cliché of them. I hate that the hangovers they cause feel like heroin withdrawal, that the dry vermouth makes my mouth feel mucusy, and that I can force them down only when I am already drunk. I drink them because shots no longer get me sufficiently drunk, the way that before shots, sugary rum drinks didn’t get me sufficiently drunk, and before those, beer, then wine coolers, then wine. I don’t like martinis, but I succumb to them, the way drug users who hate needles succumb to mainlining because they need a stronger, new high.

  On martini nights, I teeter out onto the street when Vanessa’s dinner crowd picks up, into the overlong summer light. The sidewalk always tilts. I feel extra impaired, weaving between strollers and leashed collies and couples linking arms. I have always hated being drunk in the daylight, which gives the sun the sick glare of a fluorescent bulb. It makes the simple fact of being drunk look much uglier.

  THE UPPER East Side is college-town Manhattan. Compared with other parts of the city, its rents are among the cheapest, and as a result, recent college graduates pack fourfold into its one-bedroom apartments. In the months that I live here, not a day goes by that I don’t run into someone I knew in college: In a booth at Ellen’s Stardust Diner, an old campus bartender eats pancakes; on the number 6 train, a boy who once backed me against a bar’s pinball machine ducks behind his copy of the Post; at a corner on Eightieth Street, a sorority sister wants to play with my hair and relive past parties. I can’t scuttle past a neighborhood bar without spotting a familiar pack of frat boys streaming out of a cab like circus clowns.

  There is something like three bars on every block outside our apartment. Every night of the week, I can hear the sounds of alcohol abuse from my window. My dreams are filled with shrieking, with base lines, with names shouted long and loud down Second Avenue. The smell of beer and cigarettes that rises from the sidewalk pervades my bedroom and gets into my sheets. Within a month of moving in, Vanessa has made our introductions with every bartender in a one-mile radius, and they are all friendly with her parents’ not-yet-canceled platinum card.

  We have not yet implemented the plan to curb our drinking. We’ve postponed it because it is summer, and what is summer if not for picnics of lousy wine and crackers, beach coolers gorged with beer bottles, a ten-speed blender pulverizing ice cubes and vodka for frozen lemonade? We can’t afford cable or Internet access or air-conditioning fixtures on my starting salary and Vanessa’s tips, and we are too hot and hesitant to invent new ways to pass the half-lit hours after work. We don’t know about free films on rooftops in Brooklyn. We don’t know Friday nights’ admission is “pay-what-you-wish” at the Whitney Museum, just four blocks away. We don’t yet know to pay attention to bills and flyers, to stand at newsstands while we thumb The New Yorker, to run our fingers over The Village Voice’s club listings until they come up blackened. Instead, we drink, and vow to cut back in September, which still feels like the start of a school year.

  During the week, I am limited to a couple of glasses of beer or wine after work, when I sit in a warped lawn chair on the apartment’s tar roof with whatever college drinking buddy stops by to visit. Sometimes we stay up there past sundown, pitching cards and looking through the lit windows of a nearby high-rise, trying to figure out what’s on TV. I suddenly understand why so many people pour drinks after work: A bit of alcohol is enough to make me feel less defeated and lightly sleepy.
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  While I am enslaved to my alarm clock, which is fine-tuned to account for morning rush hour, Vanessa still tours bars with other waitresses after they cash out for the night. She befriends brusque women with oddly spelled names like Hollee and Kym, and I start to feel as though I am losing her to them, to the blueberry martinis they drink and the bars with red-draped ceilings where they kill time. When Friday nights come, I want to reassert my friendship, which makes my drinking determined and frenzied.

  An average weekend finds Vanessa and me in whiskey bars where the air is dank and the light is grainy, or in dive bars where the walls are papered with pinups, or in college bars with fenced-in patios that waft beer breath onto the street. We drink budget beer or matter-of-fact shots, or, sometimes, chichi cocktails with offensive names (one night a man offers to buy me a drink called “a miscarriage,” which I kindly refuse). I spend every last dollar in my wallet, no matter how much cash I bring out.

  After the bars close at four A.M. and the owners begin sweeping the sidewalks, I trail Vanessa and her latest love interest into all-night diners. I sit with them at counters while they eat omelets and I knock over sugar shakers. My head bows forward, my eyes burn with the strain of staying open, and I know that if I let myself, I could pass out on my swiveling stool. Still, these greasy spoons are crowded with people as drunk as I am, a faint beer vapor hangs over the smell of burned toast, and the owners seem to appreciate our business. One night, I find myself nodding as the mustached manager tries to teach me Portuguese; I parrot words that Vanessa shrieks and says translate to “I am a drunken little whore.”

  Weekend afternoons are consumed by my hangovers, which are among the most violent I’ve known. Summer sun streams through my windows like light through a magnifying glass, and I toss and kick down the sheets, writhing like an ant doused in lighter fluid. I vomit most mornings, but sometimes, I also spit up black specks that remind me of coffee grounds, and I don’t know they are symptomatic of stomach bleeding. Sometimes, my feet are muddy when I catch them poking out of the covers, and I realize I walked down Third Avenue with my shoes in my hands.

  ALL AT ONCE, the sun cools and stops filtering down side streets. A breeze kicks up and pulls discarded newspapers into traffic. The dogs start wearing sweaters; the mannequins in window displays are stripped naked and redressed in tweed; and the downtown bus is crowded with mothers transporting their children to school. It occurs to me that it’s fall, and I still haven’t cut back on alcohol.

  It doesn’t take me long to realize that the adult world will never present me with a good reason to stop drinking. If anything, it invents new incentives. At work, my email is jammed with appeals to “save the date” of a going-away party or a department happy hour. At home, my answering machine blinks with half a dozen messages, all of which are alike: Five seconds of shapeless music and conversation, followed by a bumping sound like the phone is being juggled, and then a vaguely familiar voice coming on the line, shouting, dispatching me to a dive bar downtown.

  I do save dates, obsessively, in the day planner that I tote around in my big, brown satchel. The agenda eases me. The more I have scrawled in the column marked IMPORTANT MATTERS the less I worry that my college friends will recede into the city’s millions and leave me alone. I remember from past summers how easy it is to feel isolated in New York, what with large laughing parties at outdoor cafés, women gossiping on the subway, and old friends blocking the sidewalk with unexpected reunions. I attend every party because I fear missing one will cut me out of the program. If I missed one, my message machine might fall mute, traumatized.

  Even if I wanted to abstain at these postcollege get-togethers, I’m not sure I could muster it. Even if a hard drink wasn’t the only thing that could comfort me upon seeing old pals wearing the wounded expressions of aspiring-screenwriters-turned-mailroom-clerks, I don’t think I could pass on the rounds of tequila shots that are always circulating. Someone I know always ends up groaning, “Come on, Koren, come on.” Someone is always holding a shot glass a few inches from my face, like the childhood bullies who held their palms just far enough from your skin to sing, “Not touching, not touching.”

  Drinkers are a tribal gang. We have our own lexicon, our own nicknames, and our own list of virtues that we drink to. If we are pounding mimosas at brunch, we expect everyone else to pummel them, too, because there’s nothing worse than having someone lucid in the presence of our third chorus of “Peace, Love and Understanding.”

  Abstinence is particularly hard in New York because there is no ironclad excuse for it. The city is awash with designated drivers, so you don’t have a potential D.U.I. charge to fend off whatever friend or colleague is moving in to fill your glass. Here, as long as you can slur your address to a cabdriver, you can’t escape generous refills. Unless you’re pregnant, or nursing, or taking medication that has fatal side effects when it’s taken with booze, it’s hard to explain why you won’t have a drink.

  In the postcollege world, I notice an overwhelming assumption that everyone wants to drink. At twenty-two, the age when you can responsibly make it to work on time and pay bills almost on time, people assume you know how to drink responsibly, too, as though we can all find that balance with the same degree of precision. As a result, we look with astonishment at the person who abstains. I know because I’ll experience it constantly after I quit drinking; someone will hold a bottleneck the way a butcher holds a dead chicken, and ruffle their brows as they say, “Koren, are you sure you don’t want any?” When people are of legal drinking age, we assume that they want to drink, and look for a reason why they don’t, rather than assuming that they don’t want to drink and probing for reasons why they do. We assume that the person who won’t accept just one glass of wine has a “problem,” like alcoholism, a reason that they can’t drink, even though they want to.

  Also after college, alcohol transforms into a status symbol. All at once, I become aware of the way people look at me in the liquor store when I veer directly for the wall of cheap wine. I notice the faces that waitresses make when I don’t order a drink with my pasta; they are pitiful looks that suggest I can’t afford one. Like everything else in New York, drinking is dictated by brands. People are conscious about drinking the best wine and the most premium vodka, about ordering liquor by the bottle instead of by the glass. The change is disheartening. Alcohol feels like an old friend that’s begun to act too good for me.

  Of course, drinking has been a symbol of fashion and taste since the Roaring Twenties; that is, since long before TV celebrities started pulling open their refrigerator to display two-hundred-dollar bottles of Kristal champagne. But I’ve never thought about it that way—at least, not until I landed myself in a city that served fifty-dollar cocktails topped with liquefied gold. Now I am at bars among drunken investment bankers and advertising executives. I meet men who don’t just stagger, swear, and say “bitch” to the woman standing in their way of the bar, but also feel proud and justified in doing so. Their benders, in addition to being symbols of their masculinity, are markers of their affluence. I meet men who boast that their bar tabs are equivalent to my one-month’s rent.

  AT WORK, more of my expectations for the real world burn out and die hard.

  For starters, women are just as catty as they were in high school. I’ll be clipping down the long hall from my desk to reception, my worn-down heels clicking on every patch of hardwood floor, when, for no reason, a woman from another department will turn and narrow her eyes like I just stole her boyfriend.

  I notice the other twentysomething assistants are an organized clique. They have marked off a windowside table a few feet from my cubicle, where they convene to gossip and eat lunch. While I type spreadsheets, I can hear them whisper about my new haircut’s curious wisps or the eyesore that is my old, moss-colored cardigan. Together, they awaken my deepest social anxieties, the ones that only the highest-proof whiskey can quell. I walk around wearing a worried and apologetic expression. I leave inter
office voice mails that start, “I’m sorry to ask you” or “If it isn’t too inconvenient . . .” I spend a lot of time trying to figure out which one of them I offended, and what exactly I did that was wrong.

  The decorum that so many professors had me coming to expect doesn’t exist beyond the executive level. There are few neckties at work, and no panty hose. Instead, everyone has dirty hair and nicotine-stained fingers. Most of the office twenty- and thirtysomethings blow into meetings wearing rumpled jeans and suede sneakers. They curse constantly, even passionately, because every task is urgent and fuck is the most urgent expletive. Every day, the lunchroom is filled with girls tallying their daily Weight Watchers points and talking of cutting food calories for the sake of drinking more booze.

  I am an advertising assistant. This means it is my job to aid the magazine’s mostly female sales reps, and it is their job to go to product launch parties after work, to sample the latest brands of flavored vodka and sweet talk brand managers who might buy ads in the September issue. The women for whom I photocopy things are all blond, and striking in their caramel-colored pantsuits and five-hundred-dollar heels. They swallow diet pills that they disguise in vitamin bottles and store in their desk drawers. They break for bikini waxes between appointments. These are women for whom martini lunches still exist. After lunch with executives from a liquor company, they skip in with flushed cheeks and collapse into their chairs; they push their bangs off their foreheads and say, “Whoa, I’m tipsy.” The associate publisher, also female, laughs often and praises them for their drinking stamina, for their ability to keep up with male executives from a Scotch whiskey company.