Nice Recovery

by Susan Juby

  “You’re crazy,” breathed Darcy. She sounded impressed.

  The boy in the driver’s seat glanced over at me, an appraising look in his eye, and said, “I think you should have another drink.”

  I nodded decisively. “I guess I am crazy. And I guess I will have another drink.”

  The next thing I remember was waking up at home the next morning. I’d been sick next to my bed. I felt like someone had scooped out my insides, let them rot for a while in the hot sun, and then put them back. My brain was fevered and images of my performance at the gravel pit flashed before my eyes, causing searing embarrassment. The cure for shyness was also the disease. I knew one thing: I would never, ever get drunk like that again.

  3

  Flashdance and

  the Leg Warmer Blues

  AS SOON AS MY HANGOVER FADED, so did my resolve to never drink again. In fact, the nausea and shame were hip-checked out of the way by a burning desire to try again. I’d loved the feeling of being confident and unselfconscious, even for a few minutes. It was as though alcohol gave me the break from myself that I’d been craving. For years I’d felt as though I was allergic to myself: alcohol was my EpiPen. Now all I needed was to learn how to drink properly. Luckily, drinking was a core activity among my new friends. We stole booze from our parents and mixed it together in Mason jars to create noxious but powerful potions that we drank out in the woods. Then we would stagger around and sometimes throw up. And after each episode, I’d find myself sick to death and humiliated, even if I hadn’t done any singing or dancing or even much talking, which always got me into trouble. I suffered remorse of the damned every time I drank but it lasted only as long as the hangover.

  In some cultures adolescents come of age in well-established ceremonies. They take sojourns in the wilderness or undergo purification rituals involving corporal punishment. In my town, as in many Western societies, one prime coming-of-age ritual was to host a drinking party. Soon after I became a card-carrying member of the party nation, my friends and I decided we were ready to graduate from staggering around in the bush by ourselves to staggering around with other people in a house. Being precocious in all things related to partying, my wild friend Darcy decided she wanted to have a party at her house. She had an older brother, which meant we had ready access to alcohol. We were set.

  She invited us over to her place on a Friday night when she knew her parents would be out. It was to be my first real party, meaning one with older boys, drugs, and booze, and I was entirely, one hundred percent stoked. The fact that it was going to be held at the home of my new friend made me feel that great things were possible and even likely.

  At this point, I wasn’t completely sure what would constitute a great thing. A lot of beer was a great thing and so was weed. The possibility of getting a boyfriend was perhaps the greatest thing of all. The minute I picked up my first drink I jettisoned childish dreams of becoming a doctor or an astronaut or even a Zamboni driver. Instead I aspired to be like some of the tough older girls I saw who dated men who drove trucks or to be like the lead character in Flashdance. The movie had recently hit the theatres and, like almost every other girl (and quite a few guys) who saw it, I became obsessed with dancing like Jennifer Beals (or to be strictly accurate, Beals’s stand-in). Not that I practised dancing or anything. I wanted to wake up one day and discover that extreme dance ability had descended on me from above. The idea of being the hot, misunderstood quasi-stripper who was also a welder was exciting. Somewhere along the line I decided that what a person needed to dance like Jennifer Beals was leg warmers. I surmised that nice warm calves were what enabled her to perform the essential moves, including peeling off the (in my case unnecessary) bra without removing the off-the-shoulder sweatshirt, and pulling a chain to unleash the torrent of water onto one’s head while seated in the middle of an empty but nicely lit stage.

  When I heard about the party, I was nervous, as always when faced with a social situation. I knew that I could get loaded at the party and that would take care of my nerves. But what about the four or five days between the announcement and the party itself? I decided a new article of clothing would get me through the rough patch. So I went to the local jeans store and was thrilled to find they’d begun to carry leg warmers. I was in such a hurry to get a pair that I didn’t even wait for Darcy to steal them and instead paid full price.

  They were light grey, machine-knitted, acrylic tubes, and when I put them on over my jeans they made my lower legs look like those of a juvenile elephant with water retention issues. They also made me feel capable of breaking into an extremely demanding dance routine at a moment’s notice, though not while I was sober, obviously. Dancing, even with leg warmers, was best left until after I’d had a few drinks and was ready for my inner flashdancer to emerge.

  After an hour and a half of intense curling iron work to get my hair to feather so that it met at the back like two buttocks coming together, and elaborate full-coverage application of black eyeliner and blusher and concealer, I was ready to face my public at the house party. Maybe that motocross guy who looked like Danno would be there!

  Off I went, down the lake road toward Darcy’s house in all my leg-warmed glory. It was not quite five o’clock in the afternoon. We were too young to party at a more fashionable hour. My mother wasn’t home from work yet, so she wasn’t there to stop me or ask any inconvenient questions about where I was going.

  I was the first guest to arrive. Darcy and I sat on her front steps, the ones her father had built out of plywood and pushed up against the trailer to serve as a porch. We smoked Player’s Light cigarettes and shared a Mason jar full of Sambuca, Malibu, Crown Royal, gin, and vermouth. It knocked me into a stuttering blackout almost immediately. At some point, we were joined by many of the other middle school wild ones. It was still light outside. I was pleased to see that I was the only one wearing leg warmers. We turned on the record player and danced. And when we finished, it seemed that the trailer had magically filled up with boys. High school boys. Darcy’s brother’s friends. They were dressed in lumber jackets and smelled like pot and they carried cases of beer.

  By this time, my confidence had kicked in. It wasn’t just the alcohol and the weed. The leg warmers had done something to my sense of personal importance. In addition to bestowing upon me the power of dance, those leg warmers seemed to have given me the longed-for gift of gymnastics! When I wasn’t dreaming about having an older boyfriend and being a terrific dancer, I had fantasies in which I was an immensely talented gymnast who could perform death-defying tumble routines. This in spite of the fact that, even as a toddler, I had never been able to touch my toes.

  I swanned around the party, feeling Beals-erized and lithe. Cutting-edge and limber. In truth, I was hammered beyond all hope of redemption.

  It didn’t take me long to figure out that someone besides me was admiring my action. He was, I thought, the best looking of the older guys at the party, stocky, with a handsome, lightly freckled face. His teeth were straight. At that time my teeth were trussed up like unruly mental patients in order to cure my overbite, so I always took note when people had nice teeth.

  My recollection of our conversation is fuzzy. I think it went something like this:

  Him: Hey. Nice leg warmers.

  Me: Thanks.

  Him: Want a beer?

  Me: Yes.

  A pause as he watched me guzzle the beer in a very welder-ish fashion.

  Him: Hey, why don’t you come with me for a minute?

  Me and my leg warmers followed the handsome older boy to my friend’s bedroom.

  Considering that I was already a committed drinker and had been for a few months, I was also still kind of naïve. I knew that it probably wasn’t an excellent idea to disappear into a room with a boy I’d only just met. I assumed he would try to kiss me and that would be a good thing. Because then he’d be my boyfriend and I would be the first leg-warmer wearer in grade seven who was dating a high school man.
<
br />   Sweet!

  So I happily kissed him on my friend’s small, unmade bed. But then he did something strange. He pushed me off the bed in front of him. I thought maybe he’d dropped something and needed me to help him find it. I was glad I had my leg warmers on, but also a little worried that they might get dirty. My friend’s room was a sty. There were clothes and tapes and stuff all over the floor.

  Then he stood in front of me and pulled down his pants.

  I gaped at him in astonishment.

  This was even worse than Henry Miller had led me to believe! In my drunken state, I struggled to think through my options. I didn’t want to be rude or embarrass him by saying no, even though what he seemed to be proposing was very, very low on my list of things I wanted to do. Probably just a few spots below “Cut off finger with rusty axe” and “Fall down and break arm in three places so the bone protrudes through the skin.” I tried to gather my thoughts. My stomach, however, couldn’t wait for me to come up with excuses.

  The lethal mixture of booze and dope, dancing and smoking and unexpected pantslessness was too much and before I could warn him, I’d thrown up all over his footwear and legs. Like a threatened squid, my body had released the perfect defensive diversion.

  “Oh man!” he said. “Are you puking?”

  “No,” I said, staring at the vomit dripping down his front.

  “Fuck,” he said, staring down at himself with his hands in the air. “Gross!”

  And that’s pretty much all I remember from my first house party and what was, technically speaking, my first date. I woke up the next day, sick with remorse and shame and the realization that quitting drinking wasn’t just a good idea, it was a complete and total necessity. I wasn’t the only one who had an early drinking experience like that. In fact, my experience was relatively mild. I kept hearing about girls going to parties, getting drunk, passing out, and waking up to find strange boys having sex with them. People whispered about these events and the people involved. The blame floated around, waiting to be assigned.

  That evening was also the first in a series of notable vomiting incidents, something for which I became quite famous, especially after a projectile puking episode that occurred at my first concert (Trooper at the Civic Centre). In that case I nearly hit the band from one of the top bleachers. But I digress.

  The party also marked the beginning of a shift in my relations with the wild ones. The next Monday at school Darcy walked up to where I was standing with some other girls who’d been at the party.

  “Did someone get sick in my room?” she asked, staring at me.

  “Uh, no,” I said. I was pretty sure most of the barf ended up on the guy rather than the carpet or bed, so that was a little bit true.

  “My parents smelled it,” she said. “And now I’m in trouble.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I hate liars,” she continued, still staring at me. The other girls nodded in agreement. “And sluts,” she added.

  When they walked away, I was left with a feeling that my life was spinning out of control. The blame for this one was landing square on me. I realized that none of it would have happened if I hadn’t been drunk. The only solution was to quit drinking for real this time. Or at least work harder at learning to drink properly.

  4

  Some Bad News about

  Your Lower Companions

  THERE ARE STAGES to blowing up your life, even when your life is still pretty new and doesn’t have a lot of square footage to be destroyed. I was methodical about how I obliterated my old self in the same way that a stick of dynamite is methodical. Okay, methodical is the wrong term. I was thorough. Let’s put it that way.

  Along with airborne pregnancy, another thing my mother warned me about was a class of people she called “bad news.” We’d be talking about the kid down the road, the one with the limp and the motorcycle that got pushed more than ridden. “Oh, him,” she’d say. “He’s bad news.” As though the kid were a piece of correspondence dipped in something foul and contagious; the human embodiment of doom. I thought it would be the worst possible thing to be labelled bad news. Once you were bad news in my mom’s books, you weren’t worth the motorcycle you pushed over, as my older brother discovered when he began to hang out with a couple of guys my mother didn’t like. Her laments against some of his friends were prolonged, enthusiastic, and often loud. But my older brother has integrity. He hung out with whomever he wanted, no matter what kind of news they were. He remained friends with people for life. And my mother got over her concerns.

  I, on the other hand, was made of weak and easily influenced stuff. Once my mother suggested someone was bad news I couldn’t forget it for even one second. As I began my revolution I was terribly bothered by the knowledge that Darcy and most of my new wild friends seemed to be the bad news my mother had warned me about. Something in me protested against the idea that I was now on the bad-news team. Sure, “out-of-control, possibly slutty teen with a drinking problem” seemed to be my new identity, but that wasn’t quite the same as being bad news, was it?

  Oddly, the more I worried that my friends were bad news, the more I tried to prove to them that I was as bad as they, if not worse, the same way that I pretended to have poor grammar around people with poor grammar. I felt like if I behaved badly, then they wouldn’t feel so bad about themselves.

  The truth is that I was more than a little scared of the stealing and violence that marked my friends’ progress through middle school. In fact, I was more than a little scared of them. I was too nervous to do crime and not a good fighter, so I tried to fit in by acting like an ass in school and by drinking.

  Convincing my teachers at middle school that I was a rotten egg wasn’t difficult. They didn’t know about all the academic awards I got in elementary school. All they saw was my increasingly disruptive behaviour and all they heard was my foul language.

  Swearing was the foundation stone of my attempt to gain middle-school street cred. “Fuck off,” I’d say when another girl asked if I had the homework from Mrs. Whatever’s class. “Eat shit,” I’d say in the pause where other people might use “No way?” or “Really?” The problem was that I had extremely bad timing. The vice-principal of the school, a man you’d think I would have noticed occasionally given that he was approximately eight feet tall, always seemed to be hovering nearby when I used my swears. I’d come out with a stream of the foulest language I could muster and would be waiting for my classmates to giggle at my hilarious potty mouth and a second later a voice would boom from just over my left shoulder.

  “Ms. Juby! Do you use that foul language at home?”

  Shame would swamp my shallow vessel and I’d slink off. Only kids who were bad news got caught swearing in front of the vice-principal, Mr. Dundurn. And even though I was doing my best to fit in with the bad newsers, I didn’t want to actually be one. The wild ones, though, loved my schtick unreservedly. They thought my swearing and my total inability to get away with swearing was the funniest thing ever. It even made up for my rumoured sluttiness and tendency to barf. At least for a while.

  The thing was, I did use that language at home. We all did. One time, my older brother thought it would be amusing to teach my youngest brother some swear words. That was fine when it was just us kids, but then came the day my mother was pushing my youngest brother, who was three or four at the time, around the supermarket. My youngest brother was a taciturn child, and he often wore a stern look on his face that was unusual on such a small kid. His severe expression caught people’s attention and caused them to condescend to him even more than they would to a regular, smiley child. On this visit, the produce man came over and, using his best sing-song, talking-to-a-baby voice, said, “And do you like fruit, young man?” To which my youngest brother, scowl firmly in place, replied, “Fuck off, cocksucker.”

  So in a way, swearing was part of a family tradition.

  The day I got suspended for the first time it wasn’t for drinking or swearing,
but was related to the overhaul that my standards were undergoing at the time. I’d become a serious and, I thought, seriously stylish smoker almost right away. I blew my first fully formed smoke ring in the first week. At first I hid my smoking from my mother (who remained unaware of it for a while because she was so saturated in cigarette smoke herself it was impossible for her to smell the evidence), and I spent long hours smoking with other wild ones in various wooded locations, as well as littletravelled alleys and unused parking lots.

  Then I got the bright idea that it would be less work to smoke just off school property. I was always in favour of anything that saved walking. I started smoking at the far edge of the playing field and convinced some of my friends to join me. The playing field was more or less directly in view of Mr. Dundurn’s office, which, unfortunately for us, was equipped with windows.

  He spotted me acting suspiciously, hauled me into his office, intimidated a confession out of me, and promptly suspended me. My memory here is a bit shaky, but I think he also suspended some other people. Word spread that I was an informer. As the Beat Up Susan Juby movement gained steam so did the impetus to change friends. But who would have me now that I was bad news, or at least so-so news?

  That’s when I noticed Charmagne, Nan, and Brenda. They were three of the prettiest girls in school and they always seemed to be laughing (in a condition my mom used to describe as “spinny”) and were several orders of magnitude less scary than the wild girls. They did sports, but not too seriously, and were popular with almost everyone, including the good kids, the wild ones, and the jocks. I’d seen them at a couple of parties, and they definitely weren’t opposed to having a good time.

  I can’t remember how I went about ingratiating myself with them. The lines between social groups weren’t as hard and fast in middle school as they became in high school. To fit in with them I tried to tone down the eyeliner use, wear jeans that were one size larger, and work on my jokes. Keeping them laughing was key.