by Una LaMarche
It’s all very emotionally taxing. And that’s not even taking into account four-stall models—which require a game plan worthy of a Division A college football team—or those vast airport bathrooms with literally endless rows of stalls that give them the feel of an M. C. Escher lithograph, albeit one that reeks of ammonia and urine.
Betty Friedan totally should have devoted a chapter in The Feminine Mystique to this.
Gullible’s Travels
I like the idea of travel, but actually moving from one place to another has never been my favorite thing. As a child, I devoted a lot of time to designing an alternative mode of transportation I called “zapping.”* Zapping would literally zap you into tiny invisible particles that would move you from wherever you happened to be to wherever you wanted to go with no physical effort on your part; the only rules were that you couldn’t suddenly manifest in someone else’s private space, and that there needed to be some physical indicator that a zapped person was about to appear so that people could move out of the way accordingly and not get into accidents. I decided that zapping time would depend somewhat on the distance traveled—zapping down to the kitchen would take a second, but zapping to Hong Kong from New York might last five minutes, and so for longer trips I designed a small vessel that resembled a private train car stocked with up-to-date magazines and candy. This was the beginning of the end. My overthinking spiraled out of control: hurtling through space at the speed of sound would probably take a toll on the body, so a special suit might be necessary. And how many zaps at the same time could the universe accommodate without imploding? There would have to be a zap limit, or perhaps a zap tax. Zap insurance, for my own legal protection. Finally, I decided to just get off the couch and climb the twelve steps to the bathroom using my legs.
Unsurprisingly, given all this, I’m not the greatest companion for long-distance journeys. I get stressed out—possibly because no one has asked me to sing show tunes—and make bad decisions, like picking a fight with my husband in a fancy foreign restaurant, accidentally setting fire to curtains by placing them on a halogen lamp, trying to flush a poop-covered onesie down an airplane toilet, or using weird hotel soap on my vagina, which subsequently swells to four times its normal size.
But in the late spring of 2000, before I had a husband to fight with or a child whose bowels could explode at thirty-five thousand feet, I flew across the Atlantic to visit my friend Charlie in Regensburg, Germany, where he was taking a semester abroad. I emerged from that experience with a patch of electric orange hair and some valuable travel tips, such as the following.
Do Not Design an Entire Vacation Around the Ridiculous Hope That Your Gay Best Friend Will Make a Pass at You
This might seem obvious, but I suffer from a little-known condition called “reverse gaydar,” in which I am powerfully attracted to men who prefer genitalia I do not possess. Also, this trip took place post–fake virginity loss but pre–actual virginity loss, so I was starting to feel desperate.
Study the Metric System in Advance
Two liters of anything is a lot to drink in one day, but if the thing you are drinking is beer, and the only things you are using to soak up the beer are half of a soft pretzel and forty light cigarettes, you will fall down. And if you are one of the only women in a gay dance club, and you are short and it is dark, no one will notice.
Don’t Buy Hair Dye Abroad If the Instructions Are Not in Your Native Language; Also, Don’t Bleach Hair While Intoxicated
Again, seems obvious until you have consumed two liters of beer and listened to a lot of Euro-trance sung by people who look like that little claymation elf Hermey from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Don’t Assume Your Whimsical Zest for Life Will Find You a Hotel Room
Charlie and I decided it would be fun to travel seven hours to Amsterdam by train in order to get really high. Our plan was to arrive in the afternoon, party through the night, and return the next day, sleeping only on the train. We thought this was an incredibly crafty way to save money on a hotel room, so we could use that money to buy more drugs.
Our first and perhaps most fatal mistake was forgetting that the drug we were planning on using was marijuana, more famous for inducing lethargy and increasing Pringles consumption than for its use as an energy booster. After the first “coffee shop” we stopped in, where we smoked two joints, we started to yawn. It was, after all, four p.m.
Next, we had neglected to consider the fact that even Amsterdam’s bars had a last call. This fell at three a.m. I was already curled up on a banquette at the time, drifting in and out of consciousness, fantasizing about crawling into a bed, any bed, even one made of hay bales or previously slept on by Bret Michaels. Finally, Charlie stumbled over and dragged me upright.
“I’m tiiiiiiiiiiiired,” I moaned.
“You’re a little cupcake with feet,” he said brightly. (Charlie was on magic mushrooms.)
“Can we find a hotel, please?”
“I saw one right outside!” He led me onto the dark cobblestone street and proudly gestured to a wooden bench littered with cigarette butts.
“That’s not—” I started to say, but Charlie was already asleep.
We stayed there for about an hour, until the police came and yelled at us in Dutch.
Don’t Try to Use European Bathroom Fixtures for Purposes They Were Not Designed For
By six thirty a.m., when we finally found a diner that was opening, I was exhausted and reeked of pot, well liquor, and sweat. So while Charlie ordered pancakes, I alighted to the bathroom to change clothes and try to take what is commonly called a “whore’s bath,” but which my mom always referred to as a “P.T.A.,” which stands for “tits,” “ass,” and a word I would prefer not to hear my mother utter ever again. I added my hair to the menu of things to be washed, since it smelled like a night I never wanted to relive. So, half-naked, I bent my head into the tiny sink and drenched my scalp in freezing water. When I stood up to get some hand soap, I hit my head so hard on the underside of the faucet that I got vertigo and fell backward into the bidet.
Don’t Smuggle Illegal Drugs Between Countries
As we were finishing our breakfast, Charlie suddenly remembered that he had promised to buy a brick of hash for his friend Ben, back in Germany. Now, I am someone who is made uncomfortable by taking empty seats with a better view at a baseball game, so the idea that I would be trafficking drugs across an international border sent me into paroxysms of anxiety. But I was too defeated to fight, and besides, Charlie suggested that since we’d be going to a “coffee shop” anyway, we might as well smoke some for the road. We were just full of great decisions.
Don’t Let a High Person Hide the Drugs
Charlie had heard that stuffing marijuana into a jar of Nutella was a good tactic to avoid detection, since the thick, chocolate-hazelnut paste camouflaged any scent that might be picked up by a drug-sniffing dog. We purchased our Nutella, followed by the hash, followed by a few joints, and Charlie went into the men’s room to do the deed. Twenty minutes later, he emerged looking like an outhouse had exploded on him.
“What happened?” I asked, blotting the remainder of the blood from my damp, stringy hair.
Charlie just shrugged and grinned. “I’m being pulled back by the universe,” he said. (He had taken more mushrooms.)
We departed for the train, the very picture of stealth.
Amazingly, we made it back to Regensburg without killing each other or getting arrested, although Charlie reported that a German family had watched me sleeping with my mouth open and speculated that I might be mentally retarded.
Still, the unconsciousness made that the uncontested highlight of the trip.
Drinks on Me—No, Literally, on Me
Potential Pitfalls in the World of Potables
I have vomited into two purses, which, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t seem like that many.
After all, I’ve owned probably thirty purses since the brown LeSportsac bag I bought in tenth grade, which means that I’ve only vomited into one-fifteenth of my purses. This strikes me as respectable, probably somewhere in between Queen Elizabeth and Courtney Love.
I’d like to state for the record that both times I sacrificed handbags to the contents of my stomach I was in fact making clumsy attempts at politeness. The first time I was in a cab going over the Brooklyn Bridge after a particularly strenuous night of naive and irresponsible tequila-pounding when I felt that unmistakable wave of vertigo and bile. I quickly realized two things: throw-up was imminent and there was no way we could pull over. Somehow, even through the acrid fog of my inebriation, I decided that the only way to preserve (a) my hardworking driver’s leather interior and (b) a single shred of dignity was to calmly remove my wallet and keys from my purse and then discreetly puke inside of it.
The second incident took place a few years later, on the subway after an evening of Jameson on the rocks and swimming in my underpants. Still wet and listing to one side, I boarded a packed downtown Q train at Times Square and got about two stops when I realized what was about to happen. My options were: to projectile vomit into the center of the car, thus realizing a lifelong nightmare of becoming the dreaded “sick passenger” who causes a service delay; to get off the train at the next stop and heave into a conveniently located garbage can; or, finally, to use my imitation Marc Jacobs satchel as an emergency trash bag.
At the time, I really thought that, despite the fluorescent lighting and dozens of other people watching, no one could tell I was vomiting and not just rooting around in my purse for my keys with my entire face. I rode for another twenty minutes clutching my bag of throw-up with a smug smile, and then breezily tossed it into the garbage as I skipped home, as if to say, Take that, world! I am a strong, independent woman who can have her cake and regurgitate it into her accessories, too!
Despite the opinion of me you may be forming based on the above paragraphs, I came late to controlled substances. My idea of a crazy Saturday night in high school was to crack open a family-size bag of Starbursts and watch a bad bootleg videotape of the Broadway musical Into the Woods while applying a stinging layer of Jolen cream bleach to my upper lip. I don’t remember ever even wanting to drink, although I did eye the kids who hung out under the archway at school, smoking cigarettes and sipping from bottles encased in paper bags, with a certain amount of envy. Mainly I just wanted to be noticed.
I had always sort of floated along, not cool enough to be embraced by the popular crowd nor pitiful enough to be singled out for their mockery, apart from occasional unibrow jokes. Social invisibility wasn’t necessarily bad, but it did give me false hope that if I changed just a little, I could improve my status. This belief led to a number of identity crises, which were confusing both for me and everyone else in my life. In ninth grade, I wore baby barrettes and Doc Martens and traded in my Madonna and Whitney Houston tapes for Ani DiFranco and Liz Phair. In tenth grade, I wore sweatshirts and baggy jeans and became the manager of the varsity women’s basketball team, a title that for some reason I thought came with street cred. In eleventh grade, I caked on Cover Girl foundation, spent all my Christmas money on clothes from the Limited, and got a modified version of the Rachel from my dad’s tattooed barber. Still, I never got invited to the parties that I knew took place in apartments abandoned by trusting parents every weekend. I’m sure if I had been included, I would have just planted myself by a bowl of broken Fritos and smiled nervously off into the middle distance. But it would have been an honor just to have been nominated.
My breakthrough occurred on the last night of high school, at our graduation after-party, where everyone snuck off into Riverside Park to drink copious amounts of liquor, and eventually people got drunk enough to offer some to me. I was handed a can of Coke and a giant handle of Bacardi and, knowing absolutely nothing about drinking, I mixed them roughly half and half.
The world got slow and sparkly. I felt weightless. At one point, I skipped down Broadway arm in arm with two guys on another liquor run and leaned against the sweaty glass with my forehead while they got more beer. Then we were back under cover of trees, and I was sitting on the wall that separates the park from the sidewalk, laughing, laughing, and then, suddenly, puking all over myself.
I decamped to a bench, where I lay facedown and vomited through the cool wooden slats. At some point, someone threw water on me. Then they called an ambulance. I had to step over some other passed-out people to get to the curb, and that sobered me up right away. Suddenly I was belligerent. When I got to the hospital, I recited my social security number to the intake nurse and fixed her with a sloppy glare. She threw me in a cold shower and then discharged me into the care of my best friend, Anna, who was only slightly less drunk.
“Everyone is so worried about you,” she slurred as we stumbled into a cab back to her house, where I had already been planning to spend the night.
“Like who?” I asked, my stomach turning over again as the driver shot out into traffic.
“Like, everyone,” Anna said. “They can’t believe it. It’s all anyone is talking about.”
I lay back against the seat, my damp hair sticking to my cheeks, my mouth still tasting like battery acid, and thought, Finally. I’ve made it.
That was my one and only flirtation with alcohol poisoning, and I do not recommend it as a means to social climbing. Now that I’ve learned how to do it in moderation, I enjoy drinking, and the occasional toke on a joint, which generally leads to the consumption of an entire bag of chips and two hours’ worth of old Sesame Street clips on YouTube. But the path to responsible self-poisoning* has not been graceful.
For example, one bucolic afternoon during the fall of my freshman year of college, my friends Charlie and Carolyn and I decided to drive out to a movie theater in a suburban Connecticut town to see Little Voice, a British musical dramedy starring Michael Caine and Ewan McGregor. It was a Friday and we were eighteen, which seemed to us as good a reason as any to get drunk. Carolyn wisely abstained, but Charlie and I mixed up a truly vomitous concoction we called “the Grasshopper.” It consisted of Dubra vodka (which cost only seven dollars for a giant plastic jug), Mountain Dew, and cherry Kool-Aid. We poured the mixture back into the soda bottles and smuggled them into the theater.
According to IMDb, Little Voice is the story of a shy, reclusive woman who spends her downtime listening to old records and belting out Judy Garland hits to her dead father’s ghost. I had to look this up because I remember literally nothing about the movie except for the fact that, at some point, something catches on fire. This detail sticks with me because it prompted me to burst into hysterical sobs. The Mountain Dew bottles were twenty ounces, the cocktail tasted like Hawaiian Punch, and so I chugged it like it was a soda. As I wept, Charlie and Carolyn ushered me out of the theater and drove me home, and to thank them I threw up the vile red menace all over the backseat of Charlie’s Toyota Land Cruiser. (I was not carrying a purse at the time.)
Like every other college freshman, as part of my orientation I memorized the singsong rhyme that has guided many an amateur drinker through their first fratty weeks of hedonism:
Beer before liquor, never sicker;
Liquor before beer, you’re in the clear.
I don’t really drink beer, so I’ve never been able to put this mantra to the test. However, I suspect that it’s fallible based on the fact that it makes no stipulations as to the quantity of either beer or liquor consumed. For instance, will one Michelob Light followed by a vodka cranberry really wreak more havoc than three shots of grain alcohol chased with a case of Guinness? College kids take rules literally, and we need to come up with more specific guidelines if we want to keep them safe. Here, based on my years of experience, are a few alternative rhymes:
Cilantro-sage-infused cocktail
Marks the bartender’s betr
ayal.
Tequila shooters seem so naughty
’Til you’re hunched over the potty.
Five bottles for four friends: This math
Leads you straight down Satan’s path.
Milk is healthful and nutritious
But pairing it with booze is injudicious.
Lonely drinking gone awry:
Sob while eating week-old Thai.
Each of these lessons was gleaned in the decade between twenty and thirty, as I checked one boozy rite of passage after another off my list: first legal drink; first refusal of well liquor out of self-respect; first dinner party thrown with wine not made by Carlo Rossi; first time getting into a bar without ID based solely on crow’s-feet; first regression back to binge-drinking Jose Cuervo based on bouncer’s comments about crow’s-feet . . . everyone’s is personal to some extent, but you can count on a slow but steady increase in the quality of the alcohol you drink, coupled with a change of location. One minute you’re shouting over the din to fifteen friends in a packed bar on a Friday; the next, you’re settling in for a Tuesday night of DVR with you, yourself, and a fishbowl-size glass of wine. Which, for me, was the sweet spot I had been searching for ever since my face hit that bench in Riverside Park. I was never cut out for serious drinking. Wine and cheese is much more my speed. And slippers. And a humidifier. And expensive eye cream, because that bouncer still haunts my dreams.
As I entered my thirties, I felt good about my drinking. I always had a decent bottle of red in the pantry, a husband to share it with, and friends with a similar distaste for trance music and being humped by strangers. Me and my liver, it seemed like we had our whole lives ahead of us.
