I know that I don’t want to be bell jarred by alcohol. I don’t want to spend the next ten years waiting for alcoholism to fall like an ax, nor do I want to spin through any more cycles of hard drinking followed by abstinence, in which every lap picks up speed and tailspins me into more depression, aggression, and accidents. I have no desire to sacrifice more years to rebuilding and recovering. I refuse to watch life-as-I-know-it dissolve into a series of disasters transcribed into memoirs. I won’t be a case in point for any more issues of self-ruin, or have solidity that’s that cheap and flimsy.
OVER THE course of writing this book, I’ve learned that if any of us, girls and women, want true strength born of stability, we need to find a more productive outlet. Drinking, like all forms of self-destruction, isn’t a valid art form because it allows the world to rejoice in our weakness, the inferiority that it has always expected of us. Rather than turning our dissatisfaction inward, allowing ourselves to be thwarted by gender stereotypes and the burdens to achieve feeble feminine goals like thinness, rather than allowing our frustrations to be wasted and to waste away inside of us, I think we should use them as ammunition against the world they were born of. We will never really free ourselves of our inhibitions in dank bars. But I believe we can shed them in our projects. In our music, in our films, and on our canvases, we can be wildly immodest.
By the same token, I think it’s time that we allow ourselves to experience real anger as women. And I don’t mean that passive-aggressive dance that we’ve employed for too many years. It’s not real anger if it is implied or a few degrees removed, if it takes the form of whispering, or cold shoulders, or silent treatment. Real anger is what popular culture would have us be afraid of, based on the fact that it is not courteous, elegant, or feminine. Since I stopped drinking, I’ve been perpetually angry: I am enraged by the alcohol industry, which alternates between pandering to women and using us to bait men. I’m sick of ad campaigns by Svedka vodka, which picture women kneeling to support trays of men’s martinis, or holding glasses of vodka between their naked breasts. I’m sick of Wet gin by Beefeater (surely a liquor that was named with women in mind), the print ads of which read, “Your head is telling you to stay dry but your heart is shouting Wet! Wet! Wet!” as though alcohol were a necessary lubricant, the very ingredient that makes desire possible for women. I am insanely tired of Anheuser-Busch, which insults women’s intelligence by playing to cultural stereotypes about body consciousness. I hate the fact that they think they can sucker us by marketing low-carb, low-calorie beer.
I’ve also had it with Girls Gone Wild producer Joe Francis, and with the thousands of aspiring home-movie makers he seems to have spawned: the men who linger on the sidelines of nightclubs like vultures, watching for the girl who totters on her feet and slurs her words, before luring her to pull up her skirt. In a 2002 Rolling Stone interview, Joe Francis actually said of the typical girl he persuades to flash her chest, “It’s like the girl who says she’s not going to have sex with you and then does. She goes, ‘I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t,’ but you know she’s going to,” seemingly oblivious to that sentiment’s date-rape logic. And I’m frightened by the thousands of abusive men this Mardi Gras culture has made way for, the ones who actively seek out drunken girls for smash-and-grab sex.
I’m pissed at the government that would, through its allocation of dollars, have us believe that drug abuse is either a bigger issue or a more worthy one than underage drinking, neither of which is the case. And I’m sick of the ignorance that that lack of funding has generated, of the fathers who approach me at dinner parties with their four-year-old girls clasped to their pant legs and say, “Yeah, but studies say kids can buy drugs more easily than they can buy alcohol.” To which I always respond, “I guess that means you keep heroin in your liquor cabinet?”
I’m tired of the world that won’t rescue girls until we’re long past the point of saving. We live in a culture that expects teenaged girls to cry for help by acting out in ways that girls are conditioned not to. Too many people rely on outward signs of aggression to indicate their daughters or girlfriends or sisters have problems with alcohol. They wait for fights, or D.U.I. charges, or destruction of property, when girls who drink are far less apt to break rules in overt ways. As a gender, we are far more likely to turn our drunken destructiveness inward, to wage private wars against ourselves, to attempt suicide, to be pinned down by fear and depression.
More than anything, I’ve had it with a world that has created a generation of women who are emotionally dependent on alcohol, and then demonizes us for our lack of feminine control.
TODAY, IT occurs to me that there is one thing that can bond women more than a tray of cocktails: It is the way all these forces have splintered us.
Our first step is to stop being ashamed of our missteps. There are too many of us, women and young women and girls who are too dependent on liquor, for any one of us to be wholly at fault. While I was writing this book, women emerged in astounding numbers to tell me their stories. I’ve heard about the sixteen-year-old girl in an alcohol-induced coma, whose parents had to switch off her respirator. I’ve heard from grown women who, in their youth, hid dozens of empty bottles in bins under their beds, and nightly slept over them like Hans Christian Andersen’s princess on the pea. There have been parents who have driven through the night to be with college-aged daughters who got drunk and broke arms or legs. Every new story makes me think of Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms.” It finds me marveling, “So many of us!”
The devastating hours that women share with me bond me closer to them than happy hours ever would. I want to know them all because they make me think Plath’s words might apply to us, too: “Our kind multiplies: / We shall by morning / Inherit the earth.” In retelling our stories, our foot’s certainly in the door.
This first occurs to me one night at a Midtown hotel. I’m forty-five minutes late for a corporate party in the hotel lounge. I’ve taken the wrong bus. The people I work with have left multiple messages on my cell phone, asking “Where the F are you?” And by the time I’m slipping up the steps to the bar, I’ve been walking in the rain for ten blocks, and my umbrella has blown inside out. My shirt is clinging to my ribs, and my hair is wisping out at weird angles.
It’s a bizarre pageant upstairs, where most of my coworkers are already worse for wear. They have formed a tight circle, the way girls used to at recess to play slap-clapping games. They are whispering, raising glasses of champagne, and swiveling their hips to lounge music. People are drunk enough to quit whining about diets and eat what appeals to them; everyone is carting around cocktail napkins loaded with pork crepes, deep-fried shrimp, and crackers coated with garlic dip. The sales rep who flew in from California is on his fourth mojito, saying he’s still on Pacific time and asking “Where’s the closest strip club?”
On a corner banquette, the other assistants drink cautiously, or not at all. For the most part, they look bored or mortified, like drinking with these regional directors of advertising is about as appealing as drinking with relatives. Their chins are in their hands. They stealthily eye the time on their inner wrists.
I sit beside one of the twenty-year-old interns in my department. She is sweet and outspoken, with a bouncing gait that makes men peek out their office doors when she bounds down the halls with her arms full of packages to be messengered. Before I quit drinking, we had many wild nights together, during which we sipped cups at downtown performance spaces, got lit enough to keep drinking after the bands had packed their equipment, skipped up Second Avenue to dive bars, shared cigarettes and halves of Xanax, met impossibly handsome men who wore women’s T-shirts, felt our eyelids get heavy, hugged, and staggered home to our respective neighborhoods.
Tonight, she has a stunned look about her. She’s sitting with her feet tucked under her in a way that reminds me of a bird warming an egg. When the waitress comes by to say, “Anyone need anything?” she orders club soda, but lets the glass sit on her thigh and
hiss lime-twisted bubbles. Without prompting, she says, “I promised my mom I wouldn’t drink tonight.”
No one has asked her why she isn’t drinking vanilla-infused vodka or Tanqueray Ten; the people we work with are too busy supporting one another on their feet. Many of them have disappeared down the steep incline of industrial stairs, and the rest are shouldering into their overcoats and making plans to share cabs. The caterers are clearing the hors d’oeuvres table of nibbled strawberries, moist napkins, and lipstick-smudged stemware. Someone has dimmed the lights so the room has a gauzy, gold glow. I am the only one to notice she isn’t drinking because, in my early abstinence, I’m like a starving woman on a diet: I make mental notes of what’s in everyone’s glass.
When she sees that I’m not drinking, either, she lowers her voice to say, “I’m recuperating. I was really messed up last night.”
All the executives we work for have vanished, and our little roped-off corner of the room has given way to hotel guests, mostly businessmen and their hookers. The bar is windowless, but I’m certain it is nighttime outside, the dense dark of midwinter. Here and there, I can make out women scrutinizing the leather-bound drink menus, and see one who is dabbing her shirt where she dripped a white-chocolate martini.
I ask her if she is okay.
She tells me she had her stomach pumped last night. She confesses it like a crime of passion, a murder she hadn’t known she was capable of. She’d been downtown, nodding out time while a band played, drinking no more than usual, and then, who knows? She came to lying on a cot at the hospital, still queasy with a hangover, or maybe because of the onslaught of the suction pump.
For an instant I am sixteen again. I remember everything from the morning in September: my breakfast poker face, the aches in my arms, and the vacuous space in my head. It occurs to me that this is what so many people say recovery is. Through the exchange of war stories, we learn that our failings aren’t only personal, they are cultural.
Once I start to pay attention, I overhear women everywhere telling my story. The woman folding T-shirts in the back of the thrift shop is saying, “Alcohol just makes me want to say what I mean.” The girls walking in front of me on the sidewalk are talking about their weekend plans to “drink their way down the Lower East Side.” Women on the F train are debating the best first-date drink. I’ve had these conversations a dozen times before. I could finish their sentences for them.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to put a face to drinking. I’ve scrutinized too many beer commercials and liquor ads, trying to decide who personifies the way alcohol looks in my head, whether it’s someone male or female, young or ridiculously young, thin or voluptuous, fair or bronzed, model-like or real-looking.
In the end, I see alcohol like a man who has courted us all. Alcohol has been the first love of so many of us; it had us believing we were desirable and challenging in its presence alone. It let us think it would take us away from small towns, stressful studies, tedious jobs, or unproductive relationships. We have been terrifyingly devoted to it, and it’s left too many of us heart sore.
Tonight, in the hotel lounge with another young woman who’s known the hand of vertigo, the dead space of the overdose, the smell of self-induced sickness, I feel a fellowship with her that’s more happy than sad. It’s the privileged information that bonds women over all types of assholes. I’m thinking of women who find one another’s phone numbers balled up in their boyfriend’s sock drawers, who meet over tea to compare notes on various provocations—his dysfunctional family or bad sweaters or sexual inadequacies. Maybe that’s just the stuff of movies. But even so, I’d like to think it’s possible that ex-mistresses make the best friends. I love the idea that that’s the valuable union—it just might be our exquisite revenge.
As we gather our purses, I slide my arm through her hinged elbow and say, “That happened to me, too.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK wouldn’t have been possible without Erin Hosier, my agent at The Gernert Company. Thank you for seeing the possibilities, for reading every word, and for guiding me every step of the way. You helped me find my story and, by extension, myself.
Molly Stern, my editor at Viking, taught me how to write a book when I was just a girl who wrote poems, and it’s been the greatest gift of my life. Alessandra Lusardi, also at Viking, has been a smart voice and a reassuring presence throughout.
I owe everything to Mary Karr, “goddess.” Thank you for being the Midas of inspiration, for touching everyone and turning all of us into writers. Thank you for saving me from the life I thought I wanted, from stale jobs and a hard heart. Without you, I would never have tried.
Thanks to Shari Smiley at Creative Artists Agency for the chat about books and drinking and music. You helped me find an end to this book before I’d even begun it.
I will always be grateful for the day I met Kevin Martinez. Thanks for being a wise voice, a kind boss, and an electric personality. Thank you for bringing me to New York, forgiving my slip-ups, and giving me math lessons.
Thanks also: Jody Kivort, for bearing my camera shyness. Michael Pirrocco, for making my manuscript look most photogenic. Dave Itzkoff, for the advice you gave me on the fire escape. James T. Hamilton, M.D., for the diagnosis. The Media Education Foundation makes the smartest media documentaries in existence; I am thankful they loaned me Spin the Bottle. Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study has given the issue of college alcohol abuse the analysis it deserves, for which I am grateful. I have to thank everyone at Tinkle who made Sunday the most blessed day of the week. Windows 95 has been indestructible. Thank you Carl Barât and Peter Doherty for songs that pull my heartstrings and keep me company every workday.
I’d be a really rotten person were it not for my first writing teachers, Donna Lanza, Amber Smith, Judith Mandelbaum-Schmidt, and William Glavin, Jr.; thank you for the lifeline. My first editors, Molly English and Jill Johnson, never kept me on the bench.
I’d be lost without: David and Joan Lehmann, thank you for the long, scenic walks, for joking about “another chapter,” and for always making me smile. Matt Chamberlain has given me unshakable support; you have been my mouse catcher, my week planner, my ass kicker. Thank you for choosing me. My sister, Nikki Zailckas, is the love of my life; thank for your candidness, for your monologues, for your mania, and for being my little muse.
Most important, my parents have spent the last year answering my questions, quieting my panic attacks, reminding me to wash my hair, and FedExing my manuscript when I forgot it in their kitchen sink. I couldn’t have made it without your courage and trust. Your love has been my oxygen tent.
*Devon Jersild, Happy Hours: Alcohol in a Woman’s Life, 96.
*Newsweek—April 18, 1994, “The Poet of Alienation” by Jeff Giles.
*The 2003 National Youth and Anti-Drug Media Campaign.
*In 1999, S.U. administrators sincerely thought this campaign was the best allocation of the $88,435 the school received from the U.S. Department of Education under its Alcohol and Other Drug Prevention Models on College Campuses grant competition.
*The 2001 Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study.
*Sixty-one percent of students who live on campus and don’t binge drink say they’ve been interrupted sleeping or studying; 50 percent say they’ve had to take care of a drunken student; 29 percent say they’ve been insulted or humiliated by one (Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study).
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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2005
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the library of congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Zailckas, Koren.
Smashed : story of a drunken girlhood / Koren Zailckas.
p. cm.
MSR ISBN 0 7865 6846 1
AEB ISBN 0 7865 6847 X
Designed by Carla Bolte • Set in Granjon
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