by Scaachi Koul
This was our routine for more than two years, but the unsustainable part of our plan was that Jeff never stopped at one or two or three drinks, he always needed to get to ten or fifteen or twenty. When he drank like that, he’d stop singing and sit in his bedroom, slumped over in old clothes, near tears. Baby Braga would try to drag him to Wing Machine to eat something, sober up a little, and when that failed he’d try again the next day. Because this was the point, right? You can always start over the next day.
By the time we were in our third year, Jeff started to forget things, started to shrink. His shoulders were more sloped. He lost so much weight that he was punching new holes in his belts to keep his pants up, and his T-shirts looked like parachutes. He drank faster and harder than us, getting too drunk to walk me home like he used to. Once, I walked home alone at the crack of dawn and was grabbed by a man who tried to throw me to the ground. A passerby chased him off and escorted me the rest of the way, but when I called Jeff in tears, he didn’t answer. The next day, he apologized profusely, saying his girlfriend had been over and they were fighting and he didn’t have his phone. “I don’t know about that,” Baby Braga told me. “I mean, he passed out while I was still there. He was pretty drunk.” I didn’t want to be his burden, his responsibility, because fun girls aren’t needy. We had been doing this for years, consequence-free, and being a woman never changed how I drank around these boys. Baby Braga sometimes walked me home, or texted me to make sure I got back okay after long nights. We were still okay.
But sometimes, Jeff would climb back onto his roof and threaten to kill himself—Braga and I were never sure whether he meant it—and I’d reach my hand up to try and grab his withering arm. “Come on,” I’d say. “Come inside. Let’s make martinis. Let’s have some wine. We can play a drinking game. Come into the kitchen.” He’d nod and smile and swing his legs down but he never really came back to us. He circulated through his own party like a ghost, too drunk to play and too sad to stop.
Jeff chipped his tooth one evening in a series of mysterious events Baby Braga and I couldn’t sort out. He came to class smelling like old cigarette smoke, and the tips of his fingers were turning grey. During breaks, he’d go outside to smoke and glare at the pavement in silence. We watched him from the windows, surly and disconnected, rubbing his eyes and tensing his jaw. At Thanksgiving, he tried to get in a fist fight with all the people he’d invited over for lasagna and gutter wine. I left early, one of the first times a party didn’t interest me as much as being away from it did. Baby Braga texted me that Jeff ripped his shirt off and fell off the roof. But it was okay, because Jeff was our friend, he was just a lot of fun! He would be okay because he had us. Of course a troop of teenagers had the cure for what was possibly a young alcoholic spinning out of control. We would be fine!
I wondered if other people noticed, but how could they not? We were noticing. It was the only thing Baby Braga and I talked about now. Our pal, our passport into a good party, was increasingly a liability. While everyone else we knew was starting to shake off the near-nightly drinking, the back-alley smoking, the endless hot-boxing of bedrooms and bathrooms, Jeff was still there. “Come over,” he’d text me on a Tuesday night. “Let’s have a few.” I’d say no because I had class the next day and I just wanted to stay home. He wouldn’t talk to me for a day or two after, and when he’d eventually come around, he was still angry. “I can’t believe you didn’t come over!” he said. “You missed so much fun.”
By then, most of us were legal drinking age, so the conceit of drowning our evenings and weekends (and sometimes, days) in alcohol appealed to Baby Braga and me less and less. He started calling me—on the phone, something no other nineteen-year-old has ever done barring a physical emergency—to see what I was up to. “Do you want to have dinner?” replaced “What bar are we going to?” Braga and I met for towering sandwiches and weird burgers and simmering plates of cheap Thai food and we talked instead of screamed. We drank coffee. “Jeff’s okay, right?” I’d ask him, and he’d shrug, saying, “How would we even know?”
Baby Braga and I pleaded with Jeff to sober up, just go cold turkey. You can do it, we told him, we’ll help you. Braga talked to him Like A Man, whatever that means, and tried to reassure him that we’d still be around, even when the party was over. I told him that our lives would open up, that maybe the three of us could get an apartment and live together and it would be weird and delightful. Jeff was always drunk when we had these conversations, so he’d hang his head and nod and quietly let a tear drop from his lashes onto his sock. Baby Braga and I kept hanging out with him all the same, kept going to the parties, trying to keep our little world from combusting. Except now, Braga walked me home much earlier.
After nearly three years of being together, our chaos at first joyful and later, muted, Jeff returned from a brief vacation and met me at a frat party. I ran at him and threw myself into his arms for a hug, because it was just us this time. Baby Braga wasn’t around, so it was up to me to keep him alive, keep him bright. He was already drunk, but he was at that perfect place where he wasn’t sullen and dark but gregarious and friendly. He picked me up, just barely, because he wasn’t as strong as he used to be. “Missed you, kid,” he said, because I was always little when we were together.
We didn’t know anyone else at the party, so we drank together. But his mood shifted, because his mood always shifted, and he sat in a leather armchair in the corner and refused to talk. I had plenty of watery beer and lost my temper—one of the many things girls aren’t allowed to do when they drink—and started yelling at him over the music. “What is wrong with you?” I asked. “Just stop drinking. No one’s making you do this. No one’s asking you to come out for this.” The frat had changed all their light bulbs to red, making everything look like blood and panic. “You have a problem,” I cried. He refused to speak to me until I dragged him to an empty room, a quiet place to talk away from the party.
We fought more, him mostly listening and me mostly yelling. But eventually Jeff rose from the thin mattress he was seated on, reminding me that he was a good foot taller than I am. He grabbed me with the hands he always did, the ones that cracked open twist-offs or shoved other men away from me or wrapped around my own to pull me through a crowd when I got lost, but this time, he gripped and shook my body like he hadn’t before. I closed my mouth and watched his face twist with unknown rage and then fall, his eyes widened, welling with tears, his face flushing a deeper shade of red than the lighting already made it. I felt exposed, rattled, his body hanging over me like a threat I always knew loomed. I was scared. It was too intimate a transgression, a clear violation that I could finally read. It was the least fun we had ever had together.
Women can’t be fun all the time, can’t drink without consequence. Frankly, few people can, but who feels the consequences of their otherwise harmless actions quite like women? People told me countless times how dangerous it is to be a woman and drink near men, how careful you have to be, how it’s your fault if you let something happen. Papa hates hearing stories about my alcohol consumption, certain that it speaks to my lack of safety away from him. Maybe he’s right. But I didn’t wrap his fingers around my arm, I didn’t rattle my own frame. I had moved out of my parents’ house years ago, but when I returned to my apartment later that night, and walked into my closet and closed the door—something I did as a kid when I got in trouble, a way to feel shame in private—I was homesick. I cried and wished my mother was in the other room, ready to run her long nails across my scalp to calm me down.
A week later, I stormed into his apartment with the key he had given me and took all the booze from his apartment—some of it not even his—and threw it in the dumpster outside his house. I threw the key at him and cried and he begged me to stop screaming and said he would try to be a better person. “I just need one more weekend,” he said. He wanted one more bender for his birthday.
I cut him out on the night of his twentieth.
—
It’s amazing what you can convince yourself of when you think everyone else is beneath you. I felt great during the first week of my cleanse. I wasn’t drunk, which meant I wouldn’t buy a nacho-poutine at three in the morning, drop it on my kitchen floor, and try to eat it before having to fight my cat for it. I was absorbing all my essential nutrients from my own inflated sense of superiority. “Want a glass of wine?” Hamhock asked that first Saturday. “No thanks, sweetheart,” I said, smiling demurely as I slipped into my luxurious weekend sweater-smock. “I’m trying to be kind to my body.” He sucked back half the bottle while I nursed a litre of Diet Coke and thought that, yes, this would be a good time to go raw vegan. I was doing great!
But when you start to feel morally superior, it’s natural to start thinking about people who don’t have your perseverance. People who don’t try as hard as you, people who are not as capable. People you’re still mad at for fucking up so royally. I quietly dedicated my first sober week of the year to thinking about how much better I was than Jeff. I’m doing it, why couldn’t you? As if getting sober was merely a case of mind over matter and the matter wasn’t an addictive and readily available substance, or wasn’t masking some deeper hurt he felt that he never let me see. Intellectually, I knew it wasn’t the same thing, self-servingly comparing my four weeks of abstinence to the trials of a struggling (possible) alcoholic, but try telling me that as I gleefully bought fresh organic vegetables and let them rot in the fridge while I licked cherry Fun Dip off my sticky fingers.
Your life’s greatest heartbreaks are so often your friends: dating isn’t always built for permanence, but friendship often is. You lose a lot of friends after university, more if you take an active stance against someone who used to be in the group. Worse is when those friendships are the ones you make when you move somewhere new and try on a new identity for a while, something that you think will fit better, will make people like you, and it still doesn’t work. After you shoot out into the world and build a community, and people leave, you feel the loneliest you’ve ever been in your life. The formula doesn’t work, and the people you think you’ll love forever when you’re eighteen and you’ve had too much to drink are rarely around when you need them. The University Friend exists in only one ecosystem, a relationship that requires the confines of a school, of a space in time where you are lost and digging for belonging, where your identity is so scattered you’re just happy to be loved. Drinking is fun, but it’s also the glue that holds you and your most tenuous connections together.
Jeff was more fun than me, so when we stopped speaking, plenty of other people stopped talking to me. Baby Braga and I watched our friends forget my birthday but never miss one of Jeff’s ragers, screen my texts but go for late-afternoon brunch at Jeff’s house, ignore us on New Year’s, Halloween, St. Patrick’s Day—the early-twenties holiday starter pack—to see him instead. When they heard about what had happened at the frat party, they asked me if I was sure, if I was drinking too, if I was maybe being too hard on him. Aren’t I typically hysterical, don’t I have tendencies towards dramatics? Baby Braga, meanwhile, came with me in the divorce, another untouchable by association. We didn’t host parties and we didn’t have fun follow us. I reminded them that their fun friend would eventually be thirty—old!—and his drinking would soon look less like a glamorous scene and more like an unfixable calamity. I reminded them how sad our little world was, but the ecosystem won out.
A year after I stopped going to the parties and stopped taking Jeff’s calls, Baby Braga invited me to his new apartment for mac ’n’ cheese and his preferred type of beer: bitter, hoppy, almost undrinkable, sure to send me into an inconsolable rage. (“This tastes like twigs!” I’ll say and he’ll say “I like it!” and I’ll ask “But why?” and he’ll say “Well, I’m sorry it’s not a gin and tonic” with this very precise derision where he extends all the vowels and raises his eyebrows above his glasses and then I will try to strangle him.)
“You know,” I told him, “we don’t hear from anyone anymore.”
“I know,” he said. “They all just disappeared. What happened?”
“I left.”
“I guess I did too.”
Baby Braga shovelled pasta shells filled with creamy cheese into a bowl for me while I started to cry on his couch, something I did all the time, almost every weekend, because I was alone.
“I don’t think you should feel bad about it,” he said, putting a warm bowl in my lap and handing me a napkin for my face and for the food I would inevitably spill on his couch. “I mean, I’m still around.”
—
The second weekend of Dry January, I came home on Friday night after a trying week of yet again aggressively emailing my editor, “You are such a fucking asshole,” intended for an unnecessary fight with Hamhock. I thought again about Jeff, this idiot who broke up our triad. I had a choice between dealing with his drunken memory bashing itself against the walls of my sober brain, or meeting Baby Braga for a drink at a nearby bar. I wanted to make it through the month sober, but I missed Jeff—even at his most destructive—like a dull ache I couldn’t soothe. I still take Braga with me almost everywhere I go, refusing to go through any significant life changes or emotional turmoil without his presence, but Jeff was our third. It had taken us years to recalibrate. When we left him for good, I considered it his punishment. He would be alone, karmic payback for the night he grabbed me. He’d understand that he didn’t deserve us. Maybe he’d feel so bad about it that one day he’d get his shit together and call me and we’d all try again. I was so angry, years later, again, angry like I was when he first rattled me with his paws, proof positive that there were no truly safe spaces.
I drained my fury by filling up with liquid poison. I’d made it sixteen days without a drink. While watching Braga force a pulled pork sandwich into his tiny rabbit mouth, I drank three beers in forty minutes and noticed, somehow for the first time, just how often I use alcohol to drown out regret.
The morning after I failed Dry January, I woke with a headache and my mouth like a desert, a hangover as punishment for fucking up my one sober month. I thought about emailing Jeff to say I was sorry for being so harsh, that I’d failed him, and that I hoped he was okay, whatever that means. I wanted to yell at him, too, blame him for hurting me and ruining our bubble, even if it was impossible to maintain forever. I knew his aggression wasn’t just about drinking but about something more primal in his brain, something that lashed out at a woman he said he loved. And yet, I felt guilty for not trying even harder than I already had. Maybe I abandoned him, maybe we abandoned him. I had been angry for myself for such a long time that I forgot to be sad for him.
But Baby Braga called me first, so instead, I listened to him chirp about ice skating and being at the grocery store, reminding me that today, like all days, wasn’t the day before. I didn’t ask about Jeff because it didn’t matter: that world was long dead and I missed it only in hindsight, where the things you lost clutter up your head on bad days. Braga and I dragged each other out of our old microcosm, enough of a victory for me. “What day is it?” he asked me. I could hear him crinkling a bag in the background while I restarted my process of shaking off the night before, pulling the covers off my head and taking a deep drink of water. “These bagels go bad in, like, seven days. I love bagels. They are my one true vice. It’s fine, I’ll buy them next week. Are you free this—ooh, Sriracha—are you free this week? Let’s hang out. We’ll get sandwiches and tea and catch up properly. It’ll be fun.”
Scaachi
my boss called me competent today
Papa
That warms the coccles of my heart.
Were his lips a bit curled when he said this. I do not trust anybody.
Hunting Season
Recently, like on so many of my best weekends, I went out with a few friends for a couple of drinks that instead ended up turning into about ten drinks eac
h. We had all attended an awards ceremony earlier in the evening, where I had, deservedly, lost, so we went to a nearby bar and drank warmly with each other. Baby Braga put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Heeey, paaaal,” his marquee greeting for, “I am too drunk to say anything else.” Jordan was there too, and let me lean on his tall frame as I teetered on heels that pinched my toes but made me feel older than I was. By two-thirty in the morning we were all drunk, and it was drunkenness that I wore on my face: I was laughing at my own jokes and my eyelids were dipping and the pincurls I had done earlier that night were starting to sag.
The boys and I stood by the bar and talked. Two men sitting near us looked over at me periodically and laughed to each other. They were talking louder than they realized, discussing how drunk I seemed, how I was clearly out of my mind. They talked about how many more drinks I might need before I could be approached, before one of them could take me home to sleep with me. They posited how many drinks I’d need to put out.
I tugged at Jordan and Braga and tried to explain what was happening, but it was clear I wasn’t making any sense to them: Jordan just frowned at me, and Braga, properly imbibed himself, just groaned, “Paaaaaaal.” So instead of continuing to try to explain, I begged them not to leave me alone, not to go to the bathroom, not to go outside for a cigarette without me. We stayed together for the rest of the night, and my friend Danny escorted me right to my front door, twenty-piece chicken nugget meal tucked under my arm, fifteen sweet-and-sour sauce packets hidden in my bra.