Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood

by Koren Zailckas

  Normally, I keep track of how many drinks I have, if not in the interest of charting how punchy I am, then for the sake of comparing hangovers with Tess the morning after, when we sit in the dining hall, heads throbbing, and say, “I can’t believe I drank five (or six or seven); I didn’t know I could physically do that.” But tonight I can’t work out how much I’ve tossed back. I can’t even pin it to a crude estimate. The night is warm and the beer is warm, and I feel starry-eyed. Everything I look at has a ripple to it.

  Somewhere there is the sound of glass breaking against the sidewalk. In a second, I spin around and see that Hannah is gone to the crowd, to white lights and dim wailing and faces all bleeding together. I feel the way I did at age six when I lost hold of my father’s hand in the L. L. Bean factory store. I’m alone at the road bend. If I wasn’t past gone, I’d be panicked. I reach out for the first arm I can grab hold of. It’s attached to my phantom man, the one from the rock club.

  Under normal circumstances, this would be a coincidence of catastrophic proportions. But phased and plenty drunk, standing arm in arm with him feels like the most natural cosmic course of events.

  I lean into him and say, “I saw you on Westcott Street.”

  He says, “I saw you, too.”

  As we stand, stock-still, there is confusion going on all around us. Flames surge up from lawn chairs piled in the street. People on the roof of a house are chanting, “Hell, no, we won’t go.” More are running through the broad spray of a hose, the way my sister and I used to run through sprinklers in our front yard when we were young. Men in uniforms force themselves through doorways. Airborne bottles are everywhere, whizzing by us like paper airplanes.

  I’ll only know to call it a riot when I read tomorrow’s headlines: HOW ONE S.U. PARTY TURNED STREETS AFIRE AFTER A POLICE REQUEST TO CLOSE DOWN. Reporters will call it “alcohol-fueled” and “the city’s first riot in at least a decade.” All in all, it will cost the city $22,000 in damages, including $700 to fix the shattered windshield of a fire truck. Thirty-nine students will be arrested and ordered to pay $2,500 fines. Livingstock will be a thing of the past.

  I follow Chris (that’s my phantom’s name) around the corner of a duplex to a parking lot out back, where we stow away in the flatbed of a white pickup. We lie with our backs against the cargo space, kissing and watching the fray unfold like a display of fireworks. The fuss on the street has the same romantic qualities, the same loud popping and sparks of explosions.

  We have the type of immediate intimacy that is brought on only by alcohol or physical danger. It is the kind that usually happens only in movies, when men and women save the world from nuclear holocaust or escape a detonating bus.

  Up until tonight, in the bed of this pickup, I have always preferred booze to boys. For the most part, I’ve always wanted to be left alone with my buzz, to study the thoughts curving in my head like a girl admiring her own silhouette in the mirror. In the past, if I kissed boys during those drunken moments of self-wonderment, it was only because it was easier than resisting. I would let some boy put his mouth on mine because I knew no harm could come of it, because I was stoned and stony, and I felt nothing.

  For the first time, with a stranger in a strange car, I feel. From nowhere, desire surfaces, and it swirls through my insides. The want is thrumming and it is everywhere, like a hive knocked from a tree that unfixes a squall of bees. The fluttering in my chest is as unfounded and unnerving as the riot itself. And dread follows it because I know in an instant that I would, and will, do anything in pursuit of this yearning. It will not be enough to want once. I will want to want a million times over, to feel this warmth where there used to be coldness, this prickling sensation where everything was once numb.

  Chris is a prime example of why it will be hard to stop drinking: Drunk, I take bigger chances, and therefore reap bigger rewards. He is the polestar that I would never have found if I wasn’t shipwrecked, were my internal navigation not haywire. He is my temperate latitude, someone to drive me home, wearing his sweatshirt because my clothes still hold the dew of the fire hose. When I say good-bye, I write my phone number on a parking ticket. It will be void in a week, when I go home for the summer.

  THE NEXT DAY, Chris calls to invite me to a barbecue at his fraternity, and I suddenly don’t care about anything else. He is a buzz incarnate. Just like straight vodka, he has the capacity to quell my worries about everything else. When he calls, I forget about being cut from the cheerleading team, and about the final that I flat out failed. I brush off the boxes I still haven’t packed for home.

  I bring Hannah to the barbecue for moral support, but when we get there, the throng of boys drinking beer and swinging Wiffle bats is still hard to approach. It’s like the moment the door opens on a crowded elevator, and we’re not sure whether we should try to squeeze in, too.

  Chris is chasing a tennis ball across the yard, and he waves hello. A few brothers drag an armchair onto the front lawn for us, and Hannah and I sit, doubled up on it. Together, we smoke cigarettes like joints, lighting them and then passing them off. Boys pour us blended margaritas, and we turn ourselves in circles to lose the bees that trail our cups. We are less than fifty feet from campus, and the stony face of the chemistry building looks helpless to stop us from drinking.

  Sometime after my third Catalina margarita, dusk lands like a 747, and the sudden change of light makes me wobble. The fraternity’s cook calls the boys in to eat potato skins. Hannah squeezes my shoulders, then takes off for cheerleading practice, drunk as a handcart. For a moment, I sit there in the low light, pulled between the desire to stay and a compulsion to go. I breathe the sugary smell of hard alcohol and fresh-cut grass. And then Chris comes for me, the way you find your date when a slow song comes on at the prom.

  Throughout college, every time a buzz comes on like sweet music, a man will seem to sense it and grab for me.

  I FOLLOW THE back of Chris’s T-shirt up the fraternity’s stairs, all three floors of them, and then out the attic window and up a twelve-foot, wrought-iron ladder to the house roof. Three years later, a brother will attempt this climb while schloggered and break both of his legs. I feel a little like Orphan Annie climbing the train tracks at the end of the movie; my boozy-woozy feet tap-dance on every rung.

  When I make it to the height of the house, the view feels like the big picture. I can see all of campus—its green lawns, yellow hedges, and the white walkways that section it all off. I imagine myself streamlined. My mind and body are finally working in tandem, and there is no rift between what I want to do and what I actually will do. There are no stars, but I imagine I can sense them approaching, the way people can sense rain coming deep in their joints.

  I kiss Chris in a plastic lawn chair, and let him pass his hands over me, while my hair whips sideways like a flag on a pole. I know it is more than the height that makes my heart leap into my throat, the way it does in the brief moment before a roller coaster breaks over the crest of the first big hill, the ground screaming toward me, the person next to me lifting his hands up.

  ANDREA DWORKIN said most people see intercourse as a private act, but it’s actually a social act because men are sexually predatory in life, and women are sexually manipulative. I think being drunk makes men even more predatory, and women more manipulative. Too often, I find myself drifting into a decanted daze when some boy like Milton swoops down like a thunder cat, coming at me with both paws and his big, whiskered face. And lately, even more often than that, I find myself employing a weird hocus-pocus that seems to appear from nowhere. Sober, I’ll cross the street to avoid looking a leering man in the face, but drunk, I will talk him up for an hour, robbing him blind, extracting all the free drinks and free flattery he will give me. I’ll watch his mouth move like a stock ticker and pretend to be deeply interested in the quotes. I’ll even tell him that his voice reminds me of my favorite song, or that he has eyes like two blue flames, or maybe even that I’d like him to walk me home, before I’m gon
e to the refuge of the ladies’ room, never to return. Drunk, I’m quick becoming an assassin, eager to settle an ancient score, to extricate payback for a guy’s crimes, offenses I don’t know but feel certain exist.

  But tonight, my carousing with Chris feels like a wholly private act, even though it’s in a most public place. Maybe it is because he’s more timid than I first thought, or because alcohol has made me feel more like the mountain lion than the piece of dropped meat. Or maybe it’s because we are wholly self-interested, in the way that only drunkards can be.

  I once heard someone say that the concept of moderation seems a little extreme, and tonight, on this rooftop, I agree. Moderation is idiocy perpetuated by the alcohol industry, which bombards us with warnings about “drinking responsibly” in order to absolve itself from the irresponsibility that alcohol awakens in just about everyone at one time or another.

  Even years from now, once I’ve stopped drinking, I will never stop trusting extremes. I will always believe that anything worth having is worth having in excess. The good things are worth hoarding until you have a cookie-fat ass, sex-aching loins, joy that fires through you like popping popcorn, or love, the weakness at the sight of some boy that makes your chest ache like indigestion. If it’s good for you, it ought to be good for you in any amount, and you should track down every available bit of it. And if it’s toxic, if it turns your liver into a hard little rock of scar tissue, or curls your memory at the edges like something burned in a fire, or makes your stomach flop, or your mind ache, or your personality contorted, you shouldn’t buy the bullshit about temperance.

  Alcohol, like all addictive drugs, changes the chemistry in your brain in such a way that after one drink, the brain wants another. The same thing happens after one kiss from Chris—my mouth wants another. After one graze of his fingertips, my skin yearns for another. Alcohol and attraction are addictive properties on their own, but the combination makes my blood bolt through me. I am hooked.

  LOVE IN THE TIME OF LIQUOR

  WHEN IT COMES to romance, my drinking is almost fetishistic. For years it will be the third wheel in every one of my romantic liaisons. Like the blonde bombshell in a passionate threesome, booze, in its near presence, will always make me feel sexier. Alone with a man, I’ll get used to liquor’s company. After a time, it will be hard to manufacture any affection without it. Sober, I won’t be able to squeeze a man’s hand or say “I’ve missed you.” I won’t be able to divulge the slightest hint of endearment.

  Back at school sophomore year, my yearning for Chris persists with or without alcohol. But liquor makes it swell like one of those sponge capsules that flower in warm water. Sometimes my tenderness for Chris has a breadth so wide that I can’t see around it while I’m sober. That is the case when he stops by my dorm room on a whim, or invites me over to watch A Clockwork Orange with our shoes off, or drives me to the bus station to meet Kat, who is in from Cornell for a visit. Without alcohol, his glance alone can rattle me. Just hearing someone call his name across a room makes the fluff on the back of my neck stand up.

  One damp Sunday in October, Chris invites me to be his date for his fraternity’s date party. It’s an affair that isn’t all that different from a junior-high make-out party. But instead of playing Yahtzee, we gulp Martini and Rossi. And instead of “seven minutes in heaven,” it’s more like seventy.

  When I call Hannah with the news, she runs directly over in her cotton pajamas, toting a bottle of Skyy vodka and four little black dresses, which I try on in frenzied succession, even though they’re almost exactly like the five that I own. She stays even after I settle on a ruffled black one, and together we pour vodka into a carton of lemonade we find in the mini-refrigerator. Each sip from its cardboard lip tastes strong and bitter, but it slows my stomach jitters, so I keep drinking. Tess, who is my sophomore-year roommate, ties a red velvet bow in my hair and outlines my eyes with a kohl pencil. Hannah tucks a Durex condom into my purse’s inner pocket because she thinks I ought to carry one, “just in case.”

  Throughout college, my friends carry condoms defensively, in stark contrast to some boys, who carry them offensively. It’s part of a warped female thought process: When we’re gutter drunk with some boy we just met, we like to think that if we can’t fend off danger, we can at least beseech safety. We learned this outrageous mode of prevention in part from the public-health officials who visit once a semester to lecture sororities on the dangers of excessive drinking. In 2002, a public safety slogan from the University of Colorado at Boulder will actually advise female students: “When you’re drunk, you’ll have sex with someone you wouldn’t have lunch with, so bring a condom.”

  For better or worse, my girlfriends and I are products of Generation Safe Sex. As an age bracket, we were inundated with condom catchphrases before we hit puberty—misogynistic slogans like “Before you attack her, wrap your wrapper” and “If you think she’s spunky, cover your monkey.” We’ve been taught to BYOC as we BYOB. We fear HIV before the unplanned or nonconsensual sex through which it’s contracted, which is like not listing injured troops among casualties: The number of battle deaths is tragic, but it’s only a part of the carnage.

  CHRIS IS not the type of boy to make you wait, sitting on your bed for forty minutes, trying not to smear the lipstick your roommate painstakingly applied on whatever bottle you are swilling to take the edge off your tension. He turns up at ten o’clock sharp, dressed sweetly, the way boys do when they’re giving in-class presentations. He is wearing crisp oxford cloth and khaki. Mini marlins leap on his tie. His skin carries hints of mint and cologne.

  I’m too spooked to glance up at Chris as we walk from my dorm to his fraternity house, which is just down the street. He has brought a small black umbrella, which we have to huddle under to stay dry. In the cracked sidewalks, there are pools of rainwater and fat knots of worms to step over. My breath jerks when my elbow brushes against Chris’s dress shirt, when it occurs to me, I’ve never navigated these close inches without being drunk.

  I feel the same way I used to in high school, when I would have to put on my mother’s panty hose and accompany some boy to a homecoming dance. The prospect of being someone’s date embarrasses me as deeply as it did when I was fourteen. As far as I am concerned, the word date holds too much meaning. I operate in a culture that is hopelessly noncommittal. My sentences are punctuated with like and whatever, the linguistic indifference that was forged by Generation X, adopted by Generation Y, and is to every subsequent age bracket just as natural as if, and, or but. Date is too certain a word in a world that prefers vagueness. To me, it means a responsibility to be entertaining, bright, and opinionated, to adjust a man’s shirt collar and dispute Medicare over vodka martinis. Being Chris’s date feels like a terrible, terrifying burden.

  AT TIMES like this, I wish I were a party girl, a term that I’ve always loved.

  I know the designation is the stuff of amateur porn sites and bad cinema. And it’s no wonder, considering that the term was once akin to exotic dancer. (In the 1958 film Party Girl, Cyd Charisse plays a young showgirl who works as a party girl at gangster soirees.) The byword has always suggested not only that women’s fun exists solely for the benefit of men, but that it can’t exist at all without the active gaze of Joe Francis, the wildly rich producer of Girls Gone Wild, or some other pervert in an OFFICIAL PUSSY INSPECTOR T-shirt to confirm it.

  I know all of this, and yet I just can’t help myself. Party girl always makes me think of jelly bracelets, tangerine-colored tights, and high-top sneakers, not to mention 1980s cocktail dresses—the sequined ones that are basted with bows and frills, the ones that are so bad they’re good. It still makes me think of Cyndi Lauper, who was like any fantastical and slightly unnerving children’s character to me at age three, when my mom says I would turn loops in my ballet tutu whenever “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” came through the kitchen-counter radio.

  The party girl has always existed, and it appears that she will simply neve
r go away, particularly in the era of tabloid television shows in which cameramen stalk Los Angeles nightclubs in the hope of provoking a shitfaced starlet to flash the finger. The party girl will never stop running up five-thousand-dollar bar tabs, puking in the bathroom at Lot 61, or getting kicked out of Vegas nightclubs while screaming “Don’t you know who I am?” She will never stop making headlines in the New York Post for gargling champagne and lifting her skirt. Without her, Shannen Doherty or Tara Reid or Britney Spears wouldn’t have maintained some semblance of a career, and Paris Hilton wouldn’t have had one to begin with. The party gal is a sad and beautiful ingenue, who appears in photographs with tousled hair, smudged eyeliner, and a visible thong. And as long as she exists in real life, we will never cease to be interested in her.

  We’re fascinated because the party girl never stops making us feel better about ourselves. In her essay “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey suggests that films and the sexy starlets in them give our dirty thoughts free rein, which inevitably makes us feel wicked, until the only way to absolve ourselves of the guilt we feel is to blame the women onscreen. The same thing happens when I flip the channel and pause with perverse fascination while Paris Hilton pounds cocktails or pole dances, her bony legs spread like those of a newborn colt that’s trying to stand up, before I say, “That’s disgusting.”