Later, I’ll wonder if my childhood friends have always awakened my wholehearted desire to be comatose. I can feel the Yalies in the living room eyeing me as they molest bowls of bean dip. A girl whose name I can’t remember studies my haltered pantsuit and describes it in two mouthed syllables that I can make out from clear across the room: Uh-gly. An ex–English teacher’s daughter tumbles over to give me a hug, and to apologize for that time in high school when she wrote KOREN IS A HO-BAG SLUT on the wall of the locker room. I feel that if I were wasted immediately, it still wouldn’t be soon enough.
Drunkenness doesn’t creep up on me softly; it comes up behind me and shoves. When I look up from my glass, it’s midnight already. The TV is all snow, and our countdown lacks any degree of precision; 2002 begins when some tin-hatted jock howls “Happy New Year.” I have funhouse-mirror vision, in which people look like squiggly lines. Their features bulge outward or cave inward, depending on the angle from which I look at them. Party hats are hitting the ceiling. Boys are lifting girls up by their waists. People are making moves to hug me.
He appears behind me when someone switches on the stereo. He is the hostess’s brother: older by a few years and handsome, if you like that type. I suspect he is very drunk, too, but I am at the vanishing point where I can’t gauge how far gone anyone else is. In ten years, he has never breathed a word to me, unless you count a ski trip I took with his family when I was ten, when he leaned over during dinner to tell me that my sweater, which was stitched with yarn-haired horses, was gay. I’m confused by the fact that he has now pulled me into him. I have no clue why he is trying to dance with me with both hands cupped tight around the contours of my ass.
I don’t want to dance, for two reasons. First off, I feel woozy. Odds are my head is wobbling around on my neck, the way Vanessa always tells me it does when I am a real wreck— bobble-headed, she calls it, after the sports figurines with spring necks that make their heads wiggle and nod. Second, every time this boy tries to pull me close to shimmy and shake, the Yalies shit themselves laughing. Even half shot, I am aware of people judging me. I won’t be humiliated.
And so it goes like this: I start to break away, and he grabs me by one hand and snaps me back into him like a yo-yo. In my head, it looks choreographed that way, like salsa dancing, like the moment the woman turns away from her partner and then spins, toplike, into his chest. But I know, fucked up as I am, it can’t possibly look that civil or smooth.
Later, friends will tell me that I wobbled up to them repeatedly to say, “Please rescue me” or “Please make him leave me alone.” But they also say that the moment he scuttled up behind me and caught me around the waist, I collapsed in his arms and seemed more than content to let him kiss me. I never had a chance. Even my girlfriends, God love them, thought like date rapists. They thought I said no and meant yes.
THE NEXT thing I know, I am lying on his daybed. In retrospect, I’ll know it’s almost morning because the room has a weird light about it. Sun must be coming in through the pores of the red curtains, and as a result, everything looks dark and orange, the way I imagine things must look in the womb. The light makes me think of the album art on Nirvana’s In Utero, the anatomic illustration of a winged woman, looking wide open with arms outstretched.
I’m naked, even though I don’t want to be. I let my halter suit slide off the bed because he promises that I won’t have to do anything. Without clothes on, my body feels cold and snaillike. It always feels this way when I’m drunk. The sensation of bareness usually sobers me right up. Usually, it’s like a cold shower that sets me turning over bedspreads to find my underthings.
Tonight, though, I can’t feel nakedness anywhere near that intensely. In fact, as time passes, I can’t really feel anything at all. It’s like my body just dissolves below my neck. My body parts seem to exist independent of each other, like there’s nothing stringing them together. I, as a person, don’t seem to exist anymore. I feel like a car that’s been scrapped for parts.
They are parts I am only aware of when the boy taps at them, first with his fingers, like a metal pointer, and later with the half-slack slug of his dick. I’m just lying there, thinking about that sketch on the Nirvana cover. I know I’m saying, “No, I really don’t want to,” and trying to say, “You said we didn’t have to,” though it only comes out “You said, you said,” the way a kid reminds you that you said she could have an ice-cream sundae after some boring errand, like a trip to the furniture store.
But for everything I say, I can’t physically unload him from his space on top of me. Tonight, my drunkenness is heavy. I feel as though I am lying under the lead apron the dental hygienist pulls over me every time she photographs my wisdom teeth. All I can do is implore him to dig a condom out of the nightstand drawer, and then lie quietly for a few more minutes before getting up to put on my clothes.
Standing up is not an improvement. All those syrupy glasses of Malibu have transformed the approaching hangover into something like an insulin crash. It’s not the usual headache I feel, which is a low, aching pain behind my forehead. No, this is a sharp, light-headed pain, like the one you would get after hanging your head between your knees for twenty minutes, and then suddenly sitting up. I almost can’t make it down the two flights of stairs to my car, which has taken it upon itself to change location during the night. My knees give out and my ears buzz, and I’d probably sit down to take a rest were the boy not walking with me.
When I sink into the driver’s seat, he says the words that will stick with me. It’s an apology that will be there every time I wonder if I really was wronged, if maybe I was too dazed to remember things accurately. Before I turn the key in the ignition, he leans down to kiss me on the cheek. And to say, “Sorry about the whole sex thing.”
At home, I lie in bed, facedown, and my skin feels prickly. I can’t let myself feel abused. He was drunk, which makes him less blameworthy; and I was drunk, which makes me more so. I don’t need anyone to explain this equation to me. I just know it, the same way that people just know how to grieve. My stomach bucks. My head thwacks. In its hangover, my body reminds me that I am at fault.
BACK AT SCHOOL, it is a particularly brutal winter. The snow is so continual that we can’t help but feel like the sky is pushing in on us. Sometimes it flutters down so hard that the clouds buckle and split open with lightning. From a distance, it’s hard to tell the snowbanks from the slush-colored sky.
There are reminders everywhere that the end is near. On TV, car commercials are set to the tune of “Pomp and Circumstance.” The campus bulletin boards are all pinned with flyers auctioning off extra tickets for commencement. And instead of making my great escape feel more imminent, it only makes my jaw lock up in a panic attack.
I can’t believe I am about to graduate, and that isn’t yearbook rhetoric. I don’t mean it in the wistful where-has-the-time-gone sort of way. I literally mean that I don’t think I am going to fulfill the requirements that are compulsory to earn my bachelor’s degree. Even on the day a woman draws a tape measure around the crown of my head to fit my mortarboard cap (broadcasting an impossible girth of twenty-three and a half inches), I have to go home and reexamine the registrar’s letter that I’ve taped to my refrigerator. It is the semesterly memo we have all come to live by, which keeps an ongoing countdown of requirements: one more foreign-language class, one intensive writing, two more natural science and mathematics. Only this time, on the line for remaining credits, the office staff had drawn a flat, blank-faced “zero.” That zero has the gravitational field of a black hole; in a matter of weeks it will be the plug pulled out of my cosmic bathtub drain; it will suck down life-as-I-know-it.
In the months after New Year’s, I have been blinking drunk almost every night. I no longer know whether I’m drinking to generate new stories or to forget old ones. And in a way, it doesn’t even matter; the quality of my drinking is that dreary. It has all the daily excitement of cooking spaghetti or washing my face.
If ever the slogan “I drink, therefore I am” was applicable, it is to describe me now. I drink because I always drink. I drink to feel the liquor vapor clear out my sinuses, or to hear the smoothed-over sound of my own voice. These have become the sensations that convince me I’m still here. I drink now for the dullness of it. There’s no passion or exhilaration left. Taking a shot of vodka is like kissing a lover I’ve touched lips with for seven straight years.
IN THE throes of daily rum withdrawal I am racked with anxiety. In addition to nightmares that a failed term paper costs me my diploma, I have recurring dreams that I’ve stolen cars, robbed grocery stores, or committed some other act of treachery and have SWAT teams pursuing me. Nights that I come home stupefied on what the bartender calls “Bloody Brain” shots (a testament to just how many brain cells the drink seems to kill), I dream I hear helicopters and see searchlights. I imagine that a hundred uniformed officers wait outside, their pistols aimed at my apartment’s sad little door.
It began in late February with something I saw on Dateline. A federal judge had overturned the murder conviction of Paul Cox. Paul had been convicted of a double murder in White Plains in 1988, when in the midst of an alcoholic blackout, he broke into his childhood home and stabbed the new tenants to death while they slept. At an AA meeting, he’d confessed that he’d woken up with blood on his clothes after a bizarre dream about killing his parents. And though the judge ultimately ruled that the information was privileged, like coming clean to a priest, it was the first time AA had ever broken its code of anonymity.
I was sorely hungover while I watched it. I’d dragged my pillows and bedspread onto the floor in the living room, where I liked to create my own recovery unit. The Brita pitcher was on the floor near my head, along with a box of saltines, which I had taken to buying in bulk at Sam’s Club. The dog, having long since decided my sick days were his favorites, had wadded himself up under my armpit.
The music on Dateline has always terrified me. It’s the same synthetic chiming used on Unsolved Mysteries. It used to make me bury my head under the blanket on the nights I slept over at my nana’s house, when I could hear Robert Stack’s voice down the hall, narrating how police had uncovered the body of a girl just like me. But when I heard the Paul Cox story, my head was still hissing. I still had to force myself to drink water because its clear color made my mind drift back to vodka. That day, the tinkling music set my spine shivering for a whole new reason. It occurred to me that Paul was living in an eternal state of hangover, just like me.
For the first time ever, I felt an affinity for the killer as well as the victim. It occurred to me that, like the suicides in Dante’s Inferno, Paul’s crime was committed in a single moment of blind passion. And I was willing to bet he’d repeat the hell of it every moment to eternity. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could go on living after that kind of murderous bender. I imagine that the memory of life before the incident must hang daily in front of you, like the carrot that taunts the donkey. It must be a lasting reminder of the good life you’ve cast away.
I’VE STARTED driving everywhere I need to go, mostly because the sidewalks outside my apartment aren’t shoveled, and the only way to walk to campus is in the ruts left by cars swerving down University Avenue. I can’t make the hike. My almost-daily drinking has brought me to new depths of sluggishness, in which any task short of brushing my teeth physically exhausts me.
So I drive everywhere. When I go to class, I park illegally in Thornden Park, digging one of my parking tickets from the glove compartment and pinning it to the windshield as a lame decoy. When I go to the campus bars, I parallel park the station wagon amid the stretch of open meters on South Crouse Avenue.
It is a four-block drive from the campus bars to my apartment, but most mornings when I wake up, I can’t recall making it. I have to part the bedroom curtains to make sure my car found its way to the parking lot. Some mornings it turns up missing, and it takes me some time to remember that I walked home because a bartender insisted on it.
After a night like that, I circle the wagon as inconspicuously as possible before I drive it again. If the lot attendant sees me, he probably thinks I’m dusting off the night’s snowfall. But I am actually hunting for evidence of a gruesome, life-altering accident I might not remember. I push the inches off the headlights and rearview mirrors with the fists of my sweatshirt; my fingers are balled up and shaking in the sleeves, probably as much from nerves as from cold and withdrawal. I’m panicky at the thought of uncovering a dented fender from a run-in with a parking meter, or worse, the remains of someone’s house cat on the tires.
Coincidentally, I pick up a job driving my poetry teacher’s teenage son home from school on the days she teaches graduate classes. Rent, combined with big bar tabs, has left me flat broke. Plus, I failed miserably at my previous part-time job as a beer vendor at the Carrier Dome (I was meant to carry water bottles, but a sleazy manager decided that having a young gal sell beer would be more profitable). I walked out the first day, still wearing my change apron and Michelob Light hat, once I realized that my unformed biceps couldn’t possibly lug thirty cans up and down hundreds of bleachers.
On the days that I pick him up at school behind a line of yellow buses, I accelerate slowly, as though the road I travel is a perpetual school zone. It is a relief to be carrying “precious cargo,” which was the term my parents always used with the people who carted me around in high school. It’s a sensation I don’t get when I am driving alone, flying down Route 5 like I’m trying to break the sound barrier, having long since stopped caring if a car wreck claimed me, and often hoping for it. Often, as the kid sits in my passenger seat, I get a weird sensation that he’s older than I am, like even as he studies algebra and prepares for PSATs, he understands more. Other times, he just scans the alternative radio stations like any other teenage boy, as likable and levelheaded in person as he is in the poem my teacher publishes in The New Yorker.
I make a mistake the day I tow Vanessa along.
I agree to drive her to Peter’s Groceries after I drop the son off at home because her parents confiscated her car after seeing the dents she drunkenly put in it. She is sitting in the backseat next to his book bag, and through the rearview mirror, I can see that she is wearing her hangover sunglasses, the really opaque ones through which you can barely make out the outline of her eyelashes. The current of air howling through the open window has her red hair fanning her face. Neither the son nor I are a big talker, and the trip is generally silent while we watch traffic or tap our fingers in time to the radio. But Vanessa is a socializer, and I can see that the silence is killing her. Eventually, she leans between the front seats to ask my teacher’s son what grade he’s in, what sports he plays, and whether he dates. He politely responds, saying “Ninth, lacrosse, no.”
I am still driving with DMV-test precision, stopping for a full ten seconds at STOP signs and the like. But I almost veer into oncoming traffic when she asks him, “Do you drink?” I’ll wait until we are wandering through the store’s cereal aisle to ask what in the hell compelled her to bring up alcohol in front of a boy who was only fifteen. And she’ll respond by saying “What’s the big deal? We started drinking at fourteen.”
But the boy is unfazed. He might even be intrigued by the question’s honesty. He twists around in his seat to look at her, and chronicles three generations’ worth of addiction as briefly as he can before the car turns his street corner, ignoring the fact that she would know all this had she read his mother’s books. Before he clicks the car door closed, he says, given his family history, trying alcohol is just too risky. He runs the chance that he might get addicted.
It will forever be the most informed argument against underage drinking I’ve ever heard. And it’s far more honest than all the bullshit kids get dished about drunk driving and peer pressure, or even drinking moderately and responsibly. At the time, this is lost on me. I am six years older than he is, and neither my friends nor I think of alcohol as an
addictive substance. To us, dependence is pinned only to drugs, like cocaine (maybe even pot, if you buy those public service announcements that say, “It’s a lot more dangerous than we thought”), and cigarettes, which we resolve to stop smoking postgraduation.
I won’t know until much later that a quarter of all college students have family histories of alcoholism, or whether I find myself among that demographic. Who would think to approach their parents to ask how much or how often they, or their parents’ parents, drank, and whether they experienced hardships as a result of it? I have no idea whether the women my mother keeps framed in our living room, yellowed photos of great-aunts and great-great-grandmothers wearing lace bonnets, might have a bearing on my present. Nor can I see how close my own addiction looms. I already need alcohol, not physically but certainly emotionally; my relationships, self-image, and ability to cope fluctuate with my blood-alcohol content.
GRADUATION FALLS on a weekend that’s inconvenient for everyone. My dad flies in alone on Friday night, coming directly from a business meeting in Miami. My mom and sister wait to drive in at four A.M. the next day because my sister has her junior prom on Friday night.
Like everyone else wearing a black, polyester poncho, I’ve long since accepted the fact that the ceremony is for my parents’ sake, not mine. If I had it my way, I would have gone home a week ago and waited for my diploma to arrive in the mail. Still, that obligation to my parents doesn’t make the slow procession onto the football field any less agonizing. I am severely hungover, and when the tassels ahead of me move forward at a snail’s pace, I start to wonder if I can make it to a folding chair without fainting. My hands are shaking even as I lace them in front of me. And when I catch my family hanging over the dome’s third-tier railing, it takes all my energy to look happy and accomplished, to wave one hand high above my head and blow my mother a kiss.
The smell coming off the robes all around me is flammable. As I enter a row, an usher stops me short and scolds me for entering the aisle from the wrong direction. (No one I know attended the graduation rehearsal because it fell during happy hour.) I plant myself beside my old roommate, April, and her boyfriend, and they are the only people in the immediate area who don’t smell of tequila. Everyone else looks as sallow and nauseated as I do, as anxious to get the hell out of Dodge, to throw their caps up into the rafters and run out before the black mass hits the Astroturf.
Smashed_Story of a Drunken Girlhood Page 27