Deep down, I’m glad for Paris, for the same reason that I’m glad for all party girls, especially Jenna and Barbara Bush: Drunk, they are uninhibited, often sexually, which makes me feel intrigued, then repulsed, then superior. Their atrocities allow me to call them “the world’s biggest assholes,” and momentarily remove myself from the very same list.
ON THE night of Chris’s date party, I wish I had a party girl’s sexual spontaneity.
All the fraternity’s usual party games have been cleared out for the occasion. The pool table has been repositioned against a far wall. The black lights and neon beer signs are absent, as is the rocking-chair-like contraption that the brothers manufactured for taking shots.
It’s pretty obvious that the main floor has been outfitted to be romantic, which is another word that disquiets me. I will never get over the feeling that there is too much pressure to feel affectionate in formal attire, or in a restaurant with courses, or in proximity to candlesticks or flowers. It will always be nearly impossible for me to feel an affinity for someone unless we’re both wearing unwashed jeans and unwashed hair, unless we’re eating dinner at the corner diner, by the glow of a neon-blue aquarium light.
Tonight, even the furniture looks like it is canoodling. Someone has pushed the wingback chairs and leather sofas into a semicircle around a wood-burning fire. There are tea candles on coffee tables, vases wadded up with baby’s breath, and Eva Cassidy’s dumb devotion spilling out of surround speakers. I want to snatch my coat from the coatroom and hightail it home before anyone can tell me that I clean up nice. And I would, were it not for Chris’s psychic pull. I would leave, if my want wasn’t a force strong enough to tie me into a chair.
Chris goes upstairs to help a brother move a table, and when he comes back down to find me, I’m in the kitchen drinking tequila with a sorority sister named Elle. We are swallowing shots from the type of thimble-sized plastic cups nurses use to serve pills at the student health center. Chris comes up behind me, so that Elle sees him first and smiles sheepishly.
When he lays his big palm flat in the hollow between my shoulder blades, I feel a fluttering spark like the moment a moth collides with a bug zapper. I take it as proof that my synapses still need stunning. It is an electrical surge, and I know that I need to take the rum drink he’s brought me, plus a few more shots with Elle, before I’ll be senseless enough to let him touch me.
It’s not that I don’t like Chris’s fingertips on the back of my neck; it’s just the opposite. My desire for him is like my desire to drink: Privately, I want, enormously. I want in heaps and dizzying doses, and I want many times over; I want overkill. But publicly, I don’t want my desire to look excessive. So I drink to get a handle on my hot cheeks, my jitters, and my speechlessness. The next time Chris puts an arm around me, I want to be as serene as the surface of a lake: something pretty and reflective that doesn’t dare ripple.
ELLE AND I spend the next half hour in the downstairs bathroom. As far as we’re concerned, it’s the best damn room in the whole house, a white mausoleum where we can sit on the edge of the claw-foot tub and smoke her French cigarettes. Chris is allergic and makes faces when I light up in front of him, but when I drink, I can’t stand not smoking. A cigarette is the olive in my martini, the garnish waiting for me at the bottom of every glass.
At one point, Elle teeters backward into the belly of the tub and knocks her head against the soap dish. When I offer her my hand, she pulls me in, too, and the white room rings with our laughter. When I stand up and look down at my legs, there are all manner of snags and holes in my tights, and I don’t care. I slide my fingers under the tinted nylon and tear wider gashes. Elle whoops. The tiles underneath my feet rock back and forth in a way that feels pendular, and it reminds me that Chris, my center of gravity, is upstairs.
By the time I clomp up the spiral stairway, I’ve quit feeling anxious and choked. Six cups of cheap liquor have washed away my outer layer, the cold surface of fear, under which there is an emotional stratum of lightness, gladness, and love. I coil beside Chris where he’s sitting on a sofa in front of the fireplace, the way a cat attempts to reconcile after a hasty decision to hate you. I let my head tip onto his shoulder and watch his mouth move from close up, the same way I’d watch a movie from the front row. Every word he exhales lets my flickering fondness catch fire.
Someone snaps our photo while we’re sitting side by side. It is a picture that I’ll keep for too long, carting it with me through too many cities between the pages of Of Human Bondage, until the edges are bent and the matte is smudged and covered with crud. For a long time, I will see the illusion of emotional connection in the way we are sitting, totally tangent: shins touching, my arm sleeping quietly on his thigh, his cheek grazing my forehead, his arm folded entirely around me and clasping me as tenderly as any man ever has. It will take me years to notice the miserable truth in our body language, the fact that while he looks as wide open as a sunflower, I am closed as tight as a clam. My legs are tangled around each other. My chin darts down, and my chest crumbles inward. The only thing I’m grasping lovingly, with both hands, is a cup of rum and Coke.
ALCOHOL IS a manipulative bitch. If she was a person, I think she’d be a telemarketer or a used-car saleswoman, the type of woman who could persuade you to do just about anything. I think this because when my mind is stewing in alcohol, it prompts me to do things that I’d normally oppose, like take my bra off under my coat in the corner convenience store because I’ve suddenly decided it pinches. Drunk, I can seduce myself into any course of action. I can always come up with motivation to draw that proverbial line in the sand back one more inconsequential inch.
That’s how I convince myself on the night of the date party that I want to lose my virginity to Chris.
The party doesn’t slowly thin out, it goes directly from jam-packed to vacant, as some girls disappear to the campus bars and others sneak away behind the plywood doors of the brothers’ bedrooms. Once girls follow their dates up to bed, they’re gone for good, the way that once Lucy steps through the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis’s books, she’s vanished into the forests of Narnia.
I, TOO, TRAIL Chris up the spiral staircase to his room. It feels like a sleepwalk. My eyes ache under the weight of their lids, my feet take cautious, little strides. Thoughts rattle in my skull like odd dreams that have their own percussion.
I’m thinking, as I grip the staircase with both hands, that I ought to dig Hannah’s Durex from my purse when I reach the landing. I’m thinking that there are party girls behind every door that I pass, girls who are unashamed and uninhibited, girls who are stark naked, their small voices warbling. I think of them, and I decide that I am, as always, being too square under the circumstances. I am attributing too much to sex, which in my well-liquored state suddenly means little.
I always hoped I’d have sex for the first time with a real boyfriend. I thought I’d do it with someone who took me to the three-dollar movie theater, or to the New York State Fair, where we’d buy snow cones, ride the Mind-Scrambler, and make fun of the sculpture that a local dairy company carves every year out of butter. Plus, I wanted to be clearheaded when it happened because I sense a hangover could make anyone feel extra defiled the next day.
But that ideal looks antiquated to me now, and I’m too hopelessly unlike the shiny liquor-ad girls who just go with the flow, who drink Sauza because “The tequila is pure, so your intentions don’t have to be,” and Frangelico because “fate” is “what happens when the unexpected becomes pleasure.” These are the girls who know that you don’t have to have a detailed plan for the evening, you can just drink Smirnoff Ice and “See where it takes you.” I think, I will let liquor take me to Chris’s room. There is no one to stop me; unlike my car keys, no one can take away my desire because they think I’m too far gone to control it.
But I don’t stay conscious long enough to initiate so much as a kiss. Moments after Chris hoists me up the ladder to his loft bed, liquor sings its l
ullaby. The moment goes dark, and I fall into a bottomless, fairy-tale sleep.
The next day I wake up at noon, in my frilly party dress. My hair is matted against my cheek, and my head is positioned on one corner of Chris’s pillow. My face is inches from his. His open eyes are watching me, honest and blue, and I can’t tilt in the few inches to kiss him even though I ache to.
I am sober and therefore don’t have the prowess to trigger even the smallest act of intimacy. I lie that way for over an hour, frozen, even after Chris has me pulled to his chest the way a kid clasps a teddy bear. In the throes of withdrawal, I feel like one of those ratty childhood bears that smell like spit-up and have one eye popping off.
But my hang-ups are even worse than my hangover. I feel like a field mouse caught in a glue trap. I am stuck fast in the sentiments I can’t express without booze.
IF YOU buy the notion that alcohol improves the way you feel about yourself, you can’t help but buy the message that alcohol improves the way you feel about, and during, sex. That’s because the alcohol industry has spent a considerable amount of time tweaking its image of the sexy drinking woman. If you pay close attention to the alcohol ads of the past ten years, you’ll notice that the women in them aren’t nearly the passive objects of desire they used to be. These days, for every Miller Light girl who mud wrestles in an itsy-bitsy bikini, there’s another girl in spike heels and a sleek skirt-suit who is apt to take the beer and leave the guy who bought it for her.
With women drinking a quarter of the beer sold in the United States, it is as if the industry finally figured out the formula that attracts us: It’s no longer enough for the alcohol-ad girl to look sexy; she needs to act sexy. She needs to be the sultry product of her sassiness and excessive self-confidence, the woman men want to be with and women want to be. Alcohol advertisers have learned that sex as an image doesn’t sell anymore, that the mud-wrestling Miller girls were actually responsible for a slump in sales (including a 19-percent drop in Texas, the brand’s most popular state).
What does sell, especially to women, is sex as an idea. Even more than men, we buy the concept that sex is a tricky proceeding. We understand that interacting on the coed level is a struggle for dominance, one that involves a million fouls and false starts, where the playing field is never level, and where one player almost always has the advantage. That’s why Anheuser-Busch advertises Tequiza using the brazen taglines “Actually, size does matter” and “They’re not real, so what?” And on the Captain Morgan rum Web site, there is a “blow-off-line generator,” which is presumably for women, right alongside a “pickup-line generator,” which is presumably for men.
Pay close attention to the next TV beer ad you see, particularly for the light beers and malternative beverages that are marketed to women, and you’ll notice that the guy hardly ever scores the babe anymore. In recent years the alcohol-ad guy has become a calculated douche bag. He is so simple that he is simpleminded, so horny that he is actually hamstrung. He is the guy epitomized by Bud Light’s “Real Men of Genius” campaign, which salutes every schmuck from “Mr. Way Too Much Cologne Wearer” to “Mr. Silent Killer Gas Passer.” He is the kind of man-child who says and does everything all wrong. These days, women brush him off as often as they brush up against him.
This is because the alcohol industry would have us believe that beer-ad Barbie is a modern-day gal. She doesn’t have time to slow down, to sit still for too long in one place with just one guy. She is the woman embodied in Baileys commercials, the one with enough sense to laugh when a man spills a drink on her chest, but too much self-worth to let him wipe it off. We root for this girl because she seems smart but not snobby, sexy but not slutty, receptive to men’s advances and yet completely in control of them. We need to believe that whatever she is seeking—be it a next great love or a next great lay—is just a few drinks away.
Really, why else would there be some seventy-odd drink recipes with the word sex in the title? Not to mention twenty with screw, and thirty with orgasm. Altogether, there are roughly a hundred and twenty recognized ways to solicit sex from a bartender. Just ask for a “Shuddering Orgasm” or a “Passionate Screw.” You can demand a “Blow Job,” “Hot Anal Sex,” or “Oral Sex on the Beach,” not to mention “Sex in a Parking Lot,” “Sex on the Ceiling,” “Sex on a Pool Table,” “Sex with Todd,” or “Sex with the Captain.” You can literally ask for “Sex Anywhere,” and have it with just about anyone.
Like everyone else ordering “Hot Sex” at the bar, the connection between drinking and dating has been hardwired into my system. Even five years from now, once I have quit relying on booze as a mechanism to make friends or feel okay about myself, it will be nearly impossible to interact with men in the absence of liquor. A first date will feel too stiff without a drink at the table, and I will be too blank for conversation, too mortified when a fork falls off the table with a deafening clunk.
I SPEND THE rest of the semester drinking at a bar called Chubby’s with Elle. In fact, we are there so often that the owner starts to call us “the twin birds” because we’re always at the bar, holding shot glasses, with our heads bent together, swanlike.
“Basketball shots” become our new favorite drink. These are the flaming shooters the bartender turned us on to, though he never revealed the exact ingredients. I know only that he fills a sherry glass with a bile-colored liquid and lights it on fire. And there is something mystic in the vapors rising off the blaze that suctions the rim of the glass to his palm, so he can dribble it in midair without using his fingers, the same way someone bounces a basketball. When he slides his hand off the rim, we lean down to inhale the gaseous stuff before we swig the actual liquid.
The result is a lot like huffing household cleaning products. After just one, I look like TV news footage of mad cow disease; my eyes roll back in my head, and when I try to get up off my stool, my legs collapse under me. After two, I throw up in my bedsheets. After three, on the fateful night of November 1, I can’t hoist my head off my pillow the entire next day. My head aches like I nose-dived onto it from three stories up. It’s the first time that I’m old enough to elect a president, and I physically can’t go to the polls. I don’t need an MTV news anchor to tell me: I’m not a chooser, I’m an utter loser.
Part of the reason I start going out four nights a week is that I can’t bear to stay in my room. The partial wall that splits my dorm room in half can no longer divide my mess from Tess’s. Together, we live in turmoil, like animals or addicts, maintaining only enough free space to satisfy our immediate needs. Clothes blanket my floor, my desk, and my bed, and I am always too exhausted to undertake the big job of picking them up. Instead, I transfer them from station to station, depending on what I need to accomplish. I push them aside to write a paper. Sometimes I sleep on them. I pick them up to try them on, and then I take them off again. Everything I own smells like the floor of a bar.
The other reason I spend more hours at the campus bars than I do at the gym, the library, or the dining hall is that it’s my only hope to run into Chris. Alcohol has set us into a cycle whereby we only get together when we’re drinking. Even then, we don’t sit and talk as we play cards and hold beer bottles. I usually mark time until he careens through a crowd to find me and follow me back to my dorm room. We are stuck in neutral, and alcohol has made it increasingly impossible to switch gears.
On the nights when I make a concerted effort not to get too drunk, I notice that Chris passes out as often as I do. I’ll be nuzzling against his collarbone when I’ll realize his chest is rising and falling too heavily, and breath is escaping from his mouth with a hiss. When I whisper his name a few times and he doesn’t stir, I snatch back the covers. I’m always half relieved and half pissed.
To make matters worse, Chris starts leaving in the mornings before I wake up. At nine A.M. on a Wednesday, when I click awake with a hangover, he’s as gone as the ancient Mayans. Books are stacked on my desk. Dirty T-shirts are heaped in the hamper. I’m lying
diagonally, like a backslash, across the whole bed. I ask Tess if she heard the door close. When she says no, we dangle our heads off the edges of our beds, scanning the carpet for rolls of mints or stray socks, any artifact that might prove that he’d been there.
ONE THURSDAY night in November, Elle and I go to the Tropics, a downtown bar that’s a short bus ride from campus. It is one of our favorite places to get sunk: a big split-level space with walls painted orange, tables shaped like sand dollars, and a giant aquarium teeming with googly-eyed fish. There, for seven dollars, we order gallon-deep, plastic fishbowls filled, I think, with a combination of strawberry and peach schnapps, Midori, Malibu rum, pineapple, and orange juice. The truth is, half the time we don’t know what we’re really ingesting. We just suck it down fast, through foot-long plastic straws.
In my experience, there is a bar and a drink for every mood. Sorrow has a certain taste, and joy has a certain atmosphere. You can’t indulge your gladness anywhere that has cement floors, where people watch infomercials on the bar’s lofted TV, or where two dollars buys you a shot of tequila and two tallboys. Similarly, you can’t coddle your blues anyplace that has tables or single-sex bathrooms. You need to piss and get pissed with the dregs of humanity. You and your grief have to be on display, on a stool at the bar, digging through the pretzel bowl that the bartender keeps on filling, like reparation.
The Tropics is my happy space. It is predicated on denial. With the vintage sunscreen ads tacked on the walls and the red lightbulbs in beach-bucket fixtures, not to mention the fact that the furnace is cranked up so high that the front window fogs over and the bartenders have to wear tank tops, it’s easy to forget that outside it is twelve degrees below zero. Here, it’s easy to forget that I’m missing another study group for statistics class. I forget life can conceivably suck as much as it does.
Elle is striking and blowing out a succession of matches. I am caught up in trying to sneak maraschino cherries from the bartender’s plastic tackle box, which is stocked with cocktail napkins and orange wedges. A crowd of people is milling around and holding their bottles like Academy Awards, and when it parts, I see Chris mouth to mouth with some other girl, who clearly has no problem expressing affection. Even flat drunk, I can feel something strain inside me. It is a wrenching pang that can only be my detonating heart.
Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood Page 18