The guy who pulled me inside has me in the type of wrestling hold that they never make girls learn in high school gym class. His elbows are hooked under my armpits, and his palms are pushing hard against the back of my head. I am immobilized and woozy. My chin has been driven to my chest, and it is impossible to focus on anything above my shoelaces. I can’t see the brothers who are filtering downstairs as they hear the commotion, but I can hear them. They sound like bellowing whales in my ringing ears.
The pressure on my neck is so great that it drives me to my knees.
It’s hard to say what happens next. The hose from the kitchen sink is spraying me hard and cold in the face, and with my hands trapped behind my back, I can’t reach up to push the strands of wet hair out of my eyes. I can hear Elle alternating between laughing and screaming. It is the sound that my mother outlawed when my sister and I were young, on the basis that she couldn’t tell if we were hurt or playing. Similarly, I can’t tell if we’re playing. The boys are smiling like the whole thing is a joke as they slap me across the cheeks, tickle my sides, and spank me. And I am feeling the biting frustration that comes from being restrained, from shouting “TIME OUT,” and having it fall on deaf male ears.
Whoever has been pushing his thumbs into my elbows finally lets me go. He is a short, red-haired senior in boxer shorts and a tight undershirt that clings around the muscles of his chest. He moves into my line of vision to say, “You’re the girl Skip had sex with.”
His words are the ipecac that instantly makes me feel like I’m going to be sick. It doesn’t mean anything conclusively; I know that boys lie all the time about their exploits. I can still mentally “whatever” it. But it causes me the kind of hurt that makes me want to hurt someone else. I move a little to my left, to a bucket of varnish I’ve had my eye on. I grab the handle of the brush that’s been stewing in it and shove the bristles as deep as I can into the redheaded boy’s ear.
Someone tosses us our sweatshirts and instructs us to “Get the fuck out.” Elle and I put our heads through our sweatshirts as we move for the door. The fabric fuzz of them is wet, we think, with kitchen water. Tomorrow, we will realize that a brother emptied his bladder on them.
IT DOESN’T end there. I am crying, and Elle’s telling me, “Goddamn it, don’t cry.”
Instead of going home, we trudge in the rain to a campus bar, where the owner seems pleased to see us. We sit with him in a corner booth and tell him the whole story. He nods and says, “You have to get them back.”
It’s a slow night. On campus, everyone knows that only people with alcohol problems go out on Monday nights. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, even Sundays are fine. Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays are universal. But there’s no getting around the fact that drinking on Monday is desperate. Only a handful of people teeter on bar stools, spinning quarters and lighting cigarettes. The owner gives us free glasses of wine. The table is a clutter of smudged glasses, emptied of everything but ice. I feel myself drifting in and out of consciousness like someone going under ether.
Elle and I will piece together the rest in the morning. We will be sitting opposite each other on her bed, where I spent the night because I was too down and out to go home, and doing our best to fill in the blanks from the piles of clues that are scattered around us. We cover our mouths with our hands when we realize just how humiliating they are.
We did go back to Skip’s fraternity to “get them back,” as the bar owner had suggested. Sometime after two A.M., after the bars had closed, we circled the house three times, testing every locked door and latched window. It was during a thunderstorm; because our clothes are still streaked with wet dirt. The light blue sweater I have on has a muddy footprint across the chest.
While we were skulking in the bushes, Elle found an unlocked basement window and dove through it. It was a four-foot drop from there to the floor of the basement, which was the same space where my blackout had happened three months before. Elle stood underneath with her arms spread wide open to catch me.
From there, we proceeded to clean them out. I don’t exactly remember snatching books from the bookshelf, and balls from the pool table, and picture frames off the walls. But I know we did because it is all here on Elle’s floor in a massive heap. There are plaques and trophies, a stuffed animal, a television remote, an alarm clock, an umbrella stand, kitchen mitts, an oil painting, candlesticks, and three 40" X 30" picture frames. It is thousands of dollars’ worth of junk, and I have no idea how we could have carried it all between the two points. I ask Elle if she remembers making multiple trips.
It gets worse. When Elle spots a thirty-pack of beer on the floor, we start to remember the rest. Our raid on Skip’s fraternity had not satisfied our appetite for destruction, so we crossed the street to Chris’s fraternity, where the brothers and their dates were passed out upstairs after a date party. Elle popped open one of the house’s front windows, and we proceeded to wreak havoc there, too, picking up the leftover beer, along with a few more plaques and baubles. We found our way to the basement, where we discovered a can of Benjamin Moore paint, and overturned the whole can onto the floor. We lay in the spill and made snow angels.
Anxiety usually accompanies a hangover. It is just part of the equation: Your stomach turns over, your head beats itself like a drum, your hands jitter, your muscles feel drained, and you feel nervous. But this is a whole other level of panic. There is campus security to worry about, plus Zeta’s president. But more than that, we are ashamed of our anger, and what appears to be superhuman strength. It means we are not well behaved or well adjusted. Normal women would be more composed, far less seduced by an excess of booze or emotion.
As for the plunder, Elle “borrows” Brianne’s car, without asking, and we unload the whole rain-damaged cargo on the fraternity’s driveway. We pull down the sun visors to hide our faces as we peel away.
ELLE AND I lie low for the rest of the semester. We stop trying to compete with men when we’re drunk because Skip’s fraternity has taught us that men are brawnier, that they can hurt us in ways we will never be able to hurt them. Men have the shut out; we will never beat them.
We try to stop getting drunk so much. We try to stop being so much in general. We tone down the P.D.E., meaning public displays of emotion. Elle loses herself between the musty stacks in the physics library, in an ongoing chain of extra-credit assignments and study groups, where she and ten men sit bent over graph paper and calculators, arguing and laughing and jotting things down. My transfer papers go through, and I delve into the required classes for my new journalism major. I spend whole evenings in the school graphics lab, fiddling with newspaper layouts in QuarkXPress, with the clip art and dummy text that refuse to line up.
I also start dating a photography major who fills my blank nights. He is perfectly arrogant, another twig-armed, potty-mouthed meth head. And after Skip, I am extra afraid to let him touch me.
SPRING COMES again to Syracuse, and it isn’t easy. There are girls everywhere, still tan from spring break, sunning their legs on the quad, sipping Chardonnay in the outdoor cafés on Marshall Street (they switch from beer to wine come bathing-suit season). Girls are wearing ridiculous sunglasses with pastel-colored lenses, puckering their lips while they smoke light cigarettes. Painted toenails curl over their sandals. Cleavage heaves out of their sundresses. Everyone is exquisitely happy.
On the other hand, I want to knock them all off, execution style. I can’t help but think about my favorite part in The Bell Jar: when Esther Greenwood is sitting around a conference table at a New York fashion magazine with a dozen other nineteen-year-old interns, thinking, I’m so glad they’re going to die. In fact, I think that image is what makes me start to work on my own exit plans. Not plans to take my own life, but to take a summer internship. It is an almost-desperate measure.
People with substance-abuse issues like to think that changing physical states is the equivalent of changing emotional states. We like to think that removing ourselves from the crazin
ess of the city, the suburbs, the house, the workplace, the campus, will remove the craziness from us, too. And why wouldn’t we? Everywhere we look, instant gratification is alive and well. It is the concept that drives consumerism, manifest destiny, and the American dream. Somewhere inside all of us, particularly women, lies a ruby of hope. It is faith that once we find the right skin product, or piece of real estate, or cocktail, or car, or lipstick or diet, we will, at last, feel good about ourselves. The void will fall away and we will feel complete. We are willing to pay out the ass for it. And I am willing to spend the summer alone in New York, where I expect to find it.
MY PARENTS seem almost happy that I won’t be spending the summer at home.
Years from now, they’ll admit just how much I ruptured their routine during the summers I stayed home. My mom was working fifteen-hour days, constructing department-store displays. My dad was doing consulting work from home. And my sister, who was obedient then, was earning Girl Scout badges and memorizing vocabulary words at the kitchen table.
When I was home on break, they had to worry about me. At night, they had to listen for the whir of the garage door, a sign that I had made it home safely from a party. Midnight would come and go. So would two A.M. Then five A.M. My father would drive over to the party in his slippers, spot my car still parked in the driveway, and sigh a breath of relief that I hadn’t wrapped it around a tree on Route 117, that I’d only passed out and stayed the night. He would scrawl a note on my windshield that said, We were worried, call when you wake up, and drive home.
Summers in a small town are sweet. There is iced tea, and black-eyed Susans. Kids still buy penny candy the way they did some fifty years ago. There are sparklers and group hikes. The dog pokes at a suspicious toad in the driveway, and deer creep up to the house to rub their heads against the dining-room window. All this is lost on me, so I take an internship at a small trade magazine in New York City.
NEW YORK is the ideal destination for the drunk and the downtrodden.
Even four years from now, after I’ve worked hard to shake both depression and booze, summers in the city will still make me sad. The urban landscape is a paragon for the one inside. The increased sunlight just distills the grayness. Everything looks bleached out. Inside, lobbies smell like sweat. Outside, garbage is more putrid. Sidewalks marinate in the smell of urine and warm beer.
When I arrive in May 2000, I think it will be the other way around. Clomping down Sixth Avenue on my first day of work, I think, This is a vast improvement. Here, in a city of eight million, I think whatever temporary afflictions I am experiencing will feel scaled down. I expect to evanesce in the rush-hour crowds, to feel dwarfed by the tall buildings and tall women, teetering on their four-inch-tall heels.
And if not, I think I will feel commiseration.
New York is like the crisis hot lines that tell potential suicides, “You are never alone.” Here, you really aren’t ever alone. Everywhere you look, there is someone to remind you they are there. There they are, crossing against a light. And there, catching your hair in the corner of their open umbrella. And there, letting their fluffy, white poodle crap in the middle of the sidewalk. Everywhere you turn, there is someone else to remind you just how miserable they are, too.
I find out quickly that this doesn’t help. If anything, it only reminds me how disconnected I am. After a few weeks, I can ride eight stops on the number 6 train with one person’s hand on my ass and another person’s sour armpit two inches from my face, and still emerge through the sliding glass doors unruffled because I’m troubled by something bigger. Even in Midtown, amid the throngs of people that shoulder by me, I feel the thump of loneliness. From the outside, it’s hard to imagine life can exist inside the mirrored skyscrapers, when I walk by and all I can see is my own pained little face staring back.
When I feel sad after work, and I usually do, I call Josh, a friend from a summer I spent at Columbia University during high school, who has a summer sublet a few blocks away on Carmine Street. Josh spends his days earning five times the wages that I do, reading biographies about Virginia Woolf for the founding editor at one of New York’s top publishing houses, and calling me to say how much I remind him of her (in terms of psychosis, not talent). Together, we drink vodka tonics at cavernous bars in Chinatown and argue through half-open eyes about which one of us is more hopeless.
Plus, I make new drinking buddies. My next-door neighbors in a Washington Square dorm are boys who live there year-round. They are the privileged city boys I’ve heard rumors about. Half of them are the sons of screen actors, in town for the summer to make up the classes they failed and to hunt for East Village lofts. They never rest from drinking. Their compartment-sized rooms are packed with guitars and amps and turntables, gourmet food they ordered from errand-running services, jugs of wine, bottles of Jim Beam, upside-down Frisbees heaped with cigarette butts. They tell me that I come visit them at four A.M. some mornings, drunk as a skunk after a night out with Josh, to smoke cigarettes, do more shots, and share intimate details about my life. I tell them I don’t remember stopping by at all.
At work, I throw up in the bathroom so often that a coworker asks if I’m bulimic. But I’m never the only one who is hungover. At work on Friday mornings there are dozens of people, from assistants to managers, who look haggard after launch parties. They congregate around a dripping coffeepot, smoothing their unwashed hair and cracking jokes about how wasted they got last night. Looking back, it should have been my first indication that excessive drinking doesn’t automatically stop after college—you don’t just quit relying on alcohol as a mode to connect you to people.
I meet a twenty-three-year-old advertising assistant named Glynn. She is my kind of girl, a former literature major who rents a tenement on Avenue B. We spend a few nights together after work, smoking a joint in her apartment or bar-hopping below Houston, drinking beer at Brownies and nodding along to the chords of a friend-of-a-friend’s band.
There are yuppie friends to make, too. The dot.com bubble hasn’t burst yet and media layoffs, while always at hand, aren’t as frequent and vicious. It is three months after New York magazine published a feature about Manhattan’s poverty elite: the twentysomething media planners who make $24,000 in annual salary, but $100,000 in corporate perks, like cruises on the Forbes yacht and all-expenses-paid ski trips, tickets to the MTV Movie Awards, and all the drinks they can drink. I make friends with two of the male club promoters who are featured in the story, and every weekend they put Josh and me on their parties’ guest lists.
The boy I was dating back at S.U. is spending the summer at NYU, too, in one of the one-bedroom apartments on Union Square that the school manages to pack kids into in fours. We go on a few forgettable dates before he stops returning my calls. I can only remember one of them: We went to a Creole restaurant in the Village, where he ordered melon balls, and the owner’s cats freely wandered the tables, turning loops through our legs. Even topped on vodka and melon liqueur, I was as mute as a stone, and about that animated.
When the boy stops calling, I quit eating. It seems like the natural thing to do, partly because I’ve picked up on the fact that I’m ugly, and partly because food turns my stomach, which is already squirming with sadness and nerves. For a month, I eat two bananas and a carton of yogurt per day. Sometimes I’ll eat the frozen, low-fat, low-calorie chemicals that pass for ice cream. In a flash, I’ve lost ten pounds. At work, my pleated skirts slide down off my hips. Josh drags me to dinner on Spring Street, in an attempt to force-feed me. But I ignore my thirty-dollar plate of pasta and suck down red wine by the glass.
I also quit my weekend job and quit going to night class, instead wandering for hours through the East Village, sweating through clothes that are too heavy and black to wear in the summer. One day, I meet a French photographer. I drink cold beer with him at a bar called The Library, follow him down to Pitt Street, and pose for his photos. I lean against door frames with my jeans unbuttoned while he snaps the
shutter and calls out, “Look drunk,” and I let my face slacken into a look that I know well.
Drinking becomes my full-time summer occupation. I devote increased hours to it. I give it increased effort.
THE WEIGHT I’ve lost makes up for the tolerance I’ve gained. Pretty soon I am lying down in the backseat of a cab every time I go out, telling Josh, “I’m going to throw up,” while the driver speeds faster down Second Avenue in an effort to get me out quick. Every hungover morning, I am sitting on the ledge of the window overlooking East Fourth Street, smoking a cigarette with the screen up, trying to decide if I’d break my legs or my neck if I jumped.
And I’m not the only one who has these destructive thoughts while I’m wrecked. My phone hums constantly at four in the morning. One of my drinking buddies is always on the other end, stewed to the gills and sobbing hysterically. One says she just dragged a knife too deep across her shin, and she’s scared because it won’t stop bleeding. Another girl, who is at S.U. for summer sessions, says she just walked over to Lawrinson Hall, the twenty-one-story dorm, for the explicit purpose of jumping off the roof. It seems that alcohol, which has always given us the courage to dance in public or be close to men, is giving us the fearlessness to abuse ourselves, too.
Elle’s self-batter is the most terrifying. She calls at ten P.M. one Saturday to say she is lying in a hammock in her backyard. She has downed eight beers and ten sleeping pills, and she can’t move her legs. Her parents are at a party, and there is no one to check on her, so I make a frantic phone call to the poison control center to find out if ten is a lethal number. A frosty operator tells me, “Anyone who swallows ten of anything needs to go to a hospital.” I don’t know Elle’s address, or the name of her town, so I call the state police and leave her phone number.
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