Girl Walks Out of a Bar

by Lisa F. Smith

“OK, OK. Read what you can of the registration statement. Try to get familiar with the company.” He eyed the red voicemail light now blinking on his phone, and added quickly, “I’ll see you at the airport and we can talk more on the way down,”

  “Wait, you’re going to Orlando, too?”

  “Well, yeah. You didn’t think we’d send you down there alone? Some other associate, James, is going down, too. I think he’s a second year. I’ll stay down for a day, get you guys started.”

  “OK, great. See you at the airport,” I said standing up.

  Steve sat next to me in the first-class cabin. Shortly after takeoff, he pulled out Forbes. I reached past the Rolling Stone in my bag and pulled out a securities law handbook. How fast could I reverse the fact that I was embarrassingly uneducated in the business I was being flown a thousand miles to execute?

  “What are you doing?” he asked as if I were trying to clean my ear canal with a fork.

  I tried to sound defiant, “I’m trying to learn about what we’re going to do in Florida?” The Valley Girl had reappeared.

  Steve let out a sigh. “Put that away.” He paused for a second and asked, “Do you drink martinis?”

  Halle-fuckin-lujah. Not only did he speak my language, we were about to start drinking. “Of course,” I answered.

  “Excuse me, ma’am?” he held up his index finger toward the first-class cabin flight attendant. Did he have a manicure? “Can we please have two vodka martinis? If you have Absolut, that would be great.”

  That would have been my order exactly. Why did this guy have to be married? It doesn’t matter, I thought. Vodka is on its way.

  “Of course, sir,” she answered and promptly returned with the drinks.

  “OK,” he said to me, holding up his glass to clink. “You don’t need that book. Here’s what you need to know about working on this side of the street … ”

  By the time we finished our first martinis, I had learned that in Florida we’d be painstakingly reviewing thousands of documents, looking for “red flags,” that our investment bank client would want to know about. By the time we finished our second martinis, Steve had taken off his tie and I had kicked off my high heels. I had also learned the important facts about the Corporate Finance group, as in, who was good to work with, who couldn’t be trusted, and who was incompetent. I longed to reach for my legal pad to take notes, maybe even create a diagram, but I resisted. Steve would have shut that down right along with my handbook.

  After the three-martini flight, we reconvened with James at baggage claim and headed to the hotel. With a bloodstream full of alcohol, I was able to fall right to sleep. It was the first night since Friday that I hadn’t cried before passing out.

  Catering to type A business travelers, the hotel gym opened at 5:00 a.m., and on Tuesday morning I was the first person to climb aboard an elliptical machine. I was obsessive about exercise, and there was no moderation in sight. Forty-five minutes of cardio followed by thirty minutes of weights was my version of slacking, which I did only if I got to the gym late. And Gina, my personal trainer-by-day, stripper-by-night, had told me once that toxins from drinking would “sweat right out of my body” if I pushed hard enough, so I pushed hard.

  Afterward, I met Steve and James in the lobby. James was a standard-issue corporate junior associate with his sharp suit, slick hair, and the nervous excitement of a spaniel. Briefcases in hand and looking as serious as CIA agents carrying state secrets, we set off.

  At 8:30, we arrived at the client’s offices, which were housed in a little white box of a building off a busy highway. Two lawyers from the company’s firm in New York were already waiting. Beth was an unkempt woman with stringy blonde hair and Daniel was a guy about my age with curly red hair and a straight-backed formality. She seemed to be the older of the two, likely Steve’s counterpart.

  After introductions, we went inside the bleak structure that appeared to have been designed to thwart all evidence of the bright light and fresh air just outside its walls. A square-jawed woman with a permed, brown mullet and floral pants set us up. She smelled like cigarette smoke, and I was sure she went somewhere dark at lunch for strong cocktails and a game of darts. I wished I could grab her for lunch as soon as possible, but she soon disappeared and I was relegated to the document room.

  Steve left late on the first afternoon while the rest of us worked long days all week. At around 9:00 p.m., Perky Beth would say, “Let’s just see if we can get through these four boxes before we call it a night.” She sounded like a second grade teacher trying to excite her class about clean up time. Let’s not, I thought. Those four boxes were keeping me from the strong drink I needed badly. Then James would add, “That sounds great! We can grab a late dinner after!” Jesus. I’d rather down a six of Miller Lite and two Slim Jims at the mini-mart than spend two hours in a Bennigans.

  “I think I’ll skip dinner,” I’d say, visions of my room’s minibar sloshing through my mind. Maybe I could call ahead and have housekeeping swap out the gins for extra vodka. “I have an early wakeup call for the gym.” At least that wasn’t a lie.

  Document review complete, the others left on Saturday morning, but the hotel had a rooftop pool with a bar, so I changed my return flight to Sunday morning and yanked my bikini out of the suitcase. The setting was about as sexy as a strip mall Starbucks, but a full day of poolside drinking in front of me meant relief.

  From behind my sunglasses, I watched the other hotel guests come and go. Families, couples, and single people—they all seemed relaxed and content, just drinking sodas and iced teas. It made no sense. There was a bar ten yards away—why wouldn’t they choose to work on a buzz in the afternoon sunshine? In my striped bikini, sipping from icy cold bottles topped with limes, I felt sexy and sophisticated by comparison. Except for the fact that I was alone, mission drinking at two o’clock on a roof in corporate Florida.

  At 5:00 p.m. I was sunburned, woozy, and ready to go back to my room, so I packed up my unopened book, my suntan oil, and an almost empty pack of cigarettes. “Can I close out my tab?” I asked the bartender, who seemed to have gotten better looking over the course of the day.

  “You sure you don’t want to tell me once more about your miserable week reviewing documents?” he sniffed, tallying up the damage.

  Shut up, buddy and just give me the bill. “Ha, no, that’s ok,” I said. I opened the leatherette billfold and did a double take. Twelve Corona Lights and a Caesar salad. Holy shit. Did he pad this? I would have guessed, say seven, maybe eight at most. “Um, let’s not put this on the room,” I said, handing him my American Express card. I’d happily stick the firm with the room-service bill for the dinner and wine I planned to order that night, but I didn’t want to set off any alarms with an all-day bar bill. People could be so judgmental.

  After the Florida trip, I began drinking every day and went far beyond slamming just two beers at night in front of my refrigerator. I might start with the beers, but those were followed by wine and more wine. I always preferred getting together with a friend or two to provide the cover of “social drinking,” but that wasn’t always possible.

  My cocktail hours at home were nothing like those of my parents when I was growing up. There were two of them, so that took care of any need to drink alone. Also, there was ritual attached to their drinking. The state courts closed at four o’clock, but after my father got off the bench he usually played tennis with friends, spent extra time in his chambers, or stopped after work for a drink with the other judges before getting home around six or six-thirty each night.

  After my brother and I attacked him at the door, Dad headed straight upstairs to change out of his suit, and this was Mom’s cue to prepare cocktails. No matter where she had been in the house, she would soon appear at the bottom of the stairs and call up, “Harv! What are you drinking?” Most of the time his answer was, “Scotch!” Then she’d retrieve the huge green jug of J&B from the liquor cabinet. The booze cabinet was home not only to the frequen
tly tapped standards, J&B scotch and Smirnoff vodka, but also to obscure libations like Galliano, the yellow liqueur in its long-necked bottle. Galliano was a key ingredient in one of my father’s specialty cocktails, the Harvey Wallbanger. I knew this by the time I could read because there was a full-size poster hanging in our garage that included the recipe for the drink below a cartoon version of its namesake descending to Earth in a parachute that read, “HARVEY WALLBANGER IS THE NAME AND I CAN BE MADE.”

  To accompany the weekday cocktails, my mom would pull out a heavy orange dinner plate with a dark brown ring around its rim. She would carefully arrange Triscuit crackers in a semicircle around a slab of perspiring, yellow Jarlsberg cheese, and she’d finish the arrangement with two cheese knives pointing at each other like fencing épées. I often volunteered to fill two heavy rocks glasses with ice for my parents. Still in my single-digit years, I wasn’t allowed to pour the scotch or cut the lemon for the twist.

  Once my dad reappeared downstairs in either belted dad jeans or sweatpants with a t-shirt tucked in, my parents would give each other a “welcome home” kiss and clink glasses with a “Good health!” toast that felt like a brief but serious prayer. Their ritual complete, my parents would then sit at the kitchen table in their respective chairs and rehash the day over one drink, maybe two. Sometimes I would stick around and listen to them talk, but usually after the official toast I was back in front of the TV watching reruns of The Monkees. The entire family was together at that time of day and I felt safe.

  There was nothing ritualistic or comforting about the private cocktail hours in my New York apartment. The most they had in common with my parents’ was that they were nightly. I struggled to stick to no more than two glasses of wine because that sounded like what a reasonable person might drink. But soon the “have another glass” devil on one shoulder began brawling with the “stop after two” angel on the other. That little angel never stood a chance. After three glasses, there wasn’t much left in the bottle, so why not finish it? After that, there was another bottle waiting to be opened.

  I hit different liquor stores in the neighborhood so that no single proprietor would recognize me as a nightly visitor. One Monday evening I was in a liquor store on First Avenue, considering the display on a shelf of cheap cabernets and hesitating, as if I knew a difference among the vineyards. It would have been tacky to stroll in, grab the first bottle of red wine under $10, and head for the register, so I lingered, acting as if I hadn’t been obsessing about drinking all day. I was thinking there should be wine stores for drunks—no bother with labeling anything about vintages or varietals—just list the alcohol percentage. “Wine–12.5%” or “Wine–14%,” that’s all we need. Eventually, I stopped buying by the bottle, stopped going to liquor stores altogether, and started having cases delivered to my apartment. So I’m an alcoholic, I admitted to myself. But so are a lot of people; our culture practically encourages it. So maybe I could figure out how to just be a really good alcoholic and not end up in the gutter. It’s not as if I were a drug addict.

  “Coming out” clean to myself—and definitely only to myself—gave me a kind of relief. My condition had a name, and saying it out loud meant that I understood what was going on with me. And I knew that alcoholism would probably mean an early death, but that was a hell of a lot better than life without booze. That would be an early death.

  No one close to me could learn my secret or they’d try to force me to change. So the secret helped me to develop even more skills. I became so good at sneaking and lying that it should have scared me, but I reminded myself that I was just doing what had to be done. One of the things that had to be done was to navigate the daily internal dialogues that began the second I woke up every day. Six o’clock, the alarm blasts.

  Fuck! I don’t want to get up. I want to call in sick. You called in sick the other day. Get up.

  My head hurts. I’m tired. I don’t want to go to the gym. Go to the gym. You’re gaining weight. You’re fat.

  I hate this. I hate my job. I hate my life. People would kill for your job and your life. Shut up and go to work.

  I can’t. Yes, you can. Then you can come home to a nice bottle of wine and make it all go away.

  OK. But why do I have to think about drinking just to get out of bed? You’re a High-Functioning Alcoholic. Emphasis on the “High.”

  Maybe I’d be happier if I quit drinking. That’s hilarious.

  The dialogues continued and so did I. I worked hard and got great performance reviews. I went to the gym regularly and stayed in terrific shape. I took fancy vacations with my friends to places like Paris and the Caribbean where I danced and drank in the best clubs and sunbathed and drank on the best beaches. I dated other lawyers, investment bankers, and even a couple of artsy types, and almost every date involved getting nicely drunk. On weekends, I partied with my friends and made lots of happy faces for my family.

  I was a vision of young adult success and joy. If I were the topic of a biopic, my friends and colleagues would tell the interviewer: “She’s living the dream!” “That girl has it all!”

  But I was starting to spend more and more nights home alone, drinking and then crying myself unconscious.

  7

  It is 2:00 a.m. on a Saturday night in August 1994. Devon, Jessica, and I are on the dance floor at the Kismet Inn, our favorite bar on Fire Island. We’ve gone in on a summer rental, an A-frame beach house just steps from the ocean. With all of us working big city jobs, the house stands empty all week and overflows by Friday when we’re ready to shoot the lights out.

  Tonight the band is the Blue Scoobies, a local rock group we love. We’re in top summer form, deeply tanned in baby doll dresses and Keds, loaded up on Lemon Drop shots and Absolut vodka with a splash of club soda. We dance like crazy as the Scoobies play “Kodachrome.” The bar is packed with raucous people who have been drinking since noon. With no cars on Fire Island, the worst accident usually involves somebody riding a bicycle shitfaced and veering off into a bush. Our house is close enough to the bar to walk.

  I have a serious crush on the lead singer, and I’m trying to get his attention, as usual. He calls me “Carly Simon” and makes friendly small talk, but otherwise he doesn’t bite. I hear he has a girlfriend, which makes me want him even more. Dammit—I want the rock star boyfriend who stays loyal even though girls try to paw him! Our housemate Danny knows the Scoobies and hops onstage to sing “The Breeze.” Everybody knows Danny and the crowd goes wild.

  Russell, Jerry, and a bunch of other guys we know aren’t into dancing, so they hang around the long wooden bar. They wear jeans or long shorts and polos or tshirts. Some sit on stools and some just lean, all with their backs to the bar so they can watch the revved up girls who shake their hips on the dance floor. The band takes a break, and we join the guys, some of us still dancing as we make our way to the bar. “Lisa! Shots!” my friend James calls out. We order a long line of tequila shots for the crew, lick salt off our hands, clink shot glasses, throw back the booze, and then suck limes and wince. Some of us let out a screech and slam the shot glass down on the bar. My eyes burn and I gag a little, but I feel great. We light cigarettes and laugh.

  This is what I live for.

  During the next five years at the firm, I worked my way into a subgroup of the Corporate Finance team, working for one counsel, a senior lawyer named Charles. He represented international investment banks starting up their U.S. affiliates. It was still Corporate Finance, but at least I was no longer dissecting technical clauses in underwriting agreements.

  Charles had a wicked sense of humor and a head-back, cackling laugh. And after twenty years with the firm, he knew the intense pressures of our office. Like many of us, he had a reverence for the firm’s prestige and enjoyed being part of the huge deals that crossed our threshold. But despite the heady environment, Charles was warm and humble.

  Every night when Charles left to go home to his family in New Jersey, he’d stand in my office doorway,
button up his trench coat, adjust his wireframe glasses, and say, “I’ve had enough of this chicken-shit operation for one day. See you in the morning.” Then with a laugh, he would give me a salute and walk out.

  I think that what kept Charles going was the challenge and importance of the work. What kept me going was Charles. For years, he was the reason I showed up and threw every perfectionist impulse I had into the job. By the time I entered my fifth year of practice, my starting class of ninety junior associates firm-wide had dwindled to ten. Without Charles, it would have been nine. Still, as closely as we worked together, he had no idea of the wine soaked truths I hid. If he had seen me on a stumbling Saturday night, I would have collapsed with shame.

  As much as I adored Charles, I knew I couldn’t keep up the pace in his department given the amount that I was drinking. I was always on the lookout for a possible change. Then in 1996, opportunity knocked. The firm wanted an associate to switch out of practice and into its newly formed Marketing Department. I jumped. The job promised better hours and less demanding work, so just like that, I stopped practicing law. But I rationalized the move by telling myself that with less stress, I might even slow down my drinking.

  Devon called during my first week in the new department. “Hey! How’s it going over there?”

  “Good!” I said. “It’s low key and damned easy on the brain. And check it out: the other lawyers in the department insist that I leave at 5:30 p.m. like them. Isn’t it still light at five thirty in the evening?!”

  Fewer hours at work meant more hours to drink. I loved leaving the office and heading straight into the city’s happy hour crowd. After a couple hours of energetic drinking in a bar, I’d sometimes meet a pal in a restaurant for dinner and more drinks. Then, on many nights, I’d go home and drink. So as it went, the post-work schedule included bar drinks followed by dinner with drinks followed by drinks at home. Or just bar drinks followed by drinks at home. My routine was nicely simple. It wasn’t the effect I had hoped the job change would have on me, but it was workable.