by Susan Juby
“Hello?” I said, from behind my locked door.
“Hello?” It was a young man’s voice. Either the homeless guy sounded much younger than he was or some other students had arrived.
“Hi?” I said.
“Hi?”
I didn’t know whether to keep shouting hello through the door. The sounds of laughter increased. Music began to play. Guns N’ Roses. I decided to risk it. I opened the door and peeked out. In the room next door, I could see a few guys about my age milling around. They did not appear to be street people.
One poked his head out of the room and saw me staring. “Hey,” he said. He had a nice smile, short black hair, and freckled dark skin. “Are you the girl from B.C.?”
“Susan,” I said.
“Cool,” he said. “I’m John. The house manager.”
I felt like throwing myself into his arms with relief.
A red-haired boy poked his head out from John’s room.
“I’m Bart. You want a beer?” he asked.
Did I? After what I’d been through! I decided not to mention that I’d had a few drinks in my own room already and that I had hidden the rest of the beer under my bed.
Fifteen minutes later, after I’d shared a couple of drinks with them, I finally remembered to call my mother to let her know I’d arrived.
John lent me his phone.
“Hi, Mom. Yeah, I’m fine. No, it’s great here. I love it. I’m totally at home already.”
And I was.
AT FIRST COLLEGE LIFE seemed like it was designed with me in mind. Or at least with heavy drinking in mind. I had the great good fortune to end up living in a house with a group of committed drinkers. John and Craig (business at U of T) and Bart (forestry at U of T) spent a lot of time devising elaborate drinking rituals. These included Gin and Tonic Tuesdays and Sticky Wicket Wednesdays (ten-cent wings and cheap draft at a local pub). My housemates were very welcoming and seemed to find my northern drinking habits refreshingly unfeminine and easy to relate to.
“Wow,” they said after our first night out when I matched them two for one. “You drink like a guy!”
The admiration in their voices was unmistakable. Some of the other girls who went out with us drank, but none with the avidity I did. John was from a small suburb on the outskirts of Toronto. He was into heavy metal. I knew plenty of metal guys back home, but they hadn’t been university-bound. I had no idea the two things were compatible. In Toronto I discovered the suburban, brainiac metalhead. Nice boys who loved loud music and certain aspects of the metal lifestyle. They were into the music, but they maintained some perspective on the whole scene. When we saw metal groupies at clubs, squeezed into Day-Glo tube tops, huge hair teased to impossible heights, hoping to get close to the musicians, these boys knew enough to find it funny. John, especially, was always getting embarrassed on other people’s behalf. But drinking was part of the metal scene that they embraced wholeheartedly.
In addition to my excellent drinking skills, my new friends appreciated my taste in music. I made John a mix tape and he couldn’t contain himself. He said it was the kind of mix he might have made himself.
I basked in his praise. Later, after I’d given him a few more tapes, his enthusiasm was tempered by the realization that I basically made the same tape over and over in different combinations, a practice I continue to this day.
Fashion school became something I did when I wasn’t drinking with my new friends.
The first indication that I was an outlier came from Ed, a selfpossessed Italian-Canadian from Montreal and the most mature member of our campus co-op crew. He watched me eat takeout instead of what was on offer at the dining hall, shop for clothes, and switch halfway through the night from cheap draft beer to pricey hard liquor. One day he said, “You’re going to run out of money if you keep spending like that.”
I looked at him like he was crazy. A few rye and Cokes weren’t about to exhaust my enormous student loan. So what if I was attending a college notable for its low barrier to entry and high tuition fees, which were over twice as much as my housemates attending university paid? In addition to the loan, my mother was sending me a small allowance each month. I was rich! I had never been allowed to handle any significant amount of money before and it went directly to my head. I found the prime shopping districts in Toronto and showed no restraint. One memorable afternoon, I bought an all-green outfit of paisley rayon blouse, matching short skirt, thigh-high socks, green velvet slippers with a fake family crest on the toe, and green cardigan. The outfit cost more than my monthly expenses and made me look like a giant zucchini, but I convinced myself that as an aspiring fashion designer, it was important that I develop a signature or brand, if you will. Mine was going to be all-one-colour outfits.
And as the weeks wore on and I made the switch from draft to hard liquor earlier each evening, my money seemed to evaporate. So did the illusion that I fit in with my new friends and that I was just another high-spirited social drinker.
After a pleasant interlude in which I acted like a cheery drunk, I started undergoing the personality changes that had always marked my drinking. After a few drinks I’d get nasty and aggressive.
I was strongly attached to the idea that I was just a wild and crazy college student like everybody else, but that image became harder to maintain when I started doing things like falling down, dead drunk, on a busy sidewalk on Bloor Street in the middle of the afternoon, while wearing my all-green outfit. I’ll never forget the sensation of people walking by me and, in some cases, over me. The few that looked at me wore expressions of pity tinged with revulsion. Not the sort of looks a vivacious (if slightly wild) college coed hoped to produce.
One night we were running down Bloor Street on a pub crawl, and Ed made some teasing comment about my not-exactly-Ivy-League educational institution. I was seized with a rare school spirit. I couldn’t let him get away with the slur! The stores and bars had just put out their garbage for the collectors to pick up the next morning. Possessed by alcohol-induced strength, I hoisted up a black garbage bag and pitched it at Ed. My aim was not true. The bag went sailing out into the street and exploded like a bomb onto a passing car. It turned out that the bag had been full of bottles. Worse news was that the vehicle I’d hit was black and white and had a rack of lights on top. Stunned (and drunk), I froze.
In an instant, my companions scattered and took off running. Everyone else on the street, students and bar crawlers mostly, cried out as one.
“Oooooh shit!”
I waited for a good five minutes while the cops turned the car around in the heavy traffic and came back. I walked unsteadily toward the car. Instantly, we were surrounded by every drunken asshole in a four-mile radius.
“Don’t arrest her!”
“Arrest me!”
“Police brutality!”
The cops were so surprised that I’d waited, swaying gently like some upended sea cucumber, that they didn’t seem to know what to do with me.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to, uh, hit your car. The bag slipped.”
The officer was steamed, but perhaps because I was young and had hair that looked like a bad wig and wore an outfit that made me look like a garden vegetable, he took pity.
“Nice friends you got. Ran away and left you.”
I didn’t reply because I was trying not to vomit down the side of the car. I’d never spent a night in the drunk tank, and had no desire to start now.
“Sorry,” I said.
The cop leaned further out the passenger-side window. He ignored the crowd and spoke directly to me.
“Maybe you should think about drinking a bit less.”
I blinked, startled as though he’d clapped the handcuffs on me.
“Police brutality!” shouted a drunk guy from across the street at no one in particular.
Police brutality indeed.
BY THE TIME Christmas break rolled around, I was almost as uncomfortable in Toronto as I’d been in Smithe
rs. I was doing very badly in school. I didn’t have the worst marks, because a few of the people in my program spoke almost no English, but I was near the bottom. I’d made myself unpopular with many of my housemates with my unpredictable behaviour and tendency to come home drunk and make so much noise I woke everyone up.
“Thoughtlessness, thy name is Juby,” a student of classics muttered in my direction one morning.
My drinking had completely outstripped that of my heavy metal friends. They cut back in order to focus on classes. Cutting back was an impossible dream for me. Moving to Toronto and going to fashion design school hadn’t fixed what ailed me. My drinking was worse than ever. At least at home, I’d been surrounded by other people who drank like it was an Olympic sport. In Toronto, surrounded by productive, functional, clear-minded, and middle-class students, I felt completely alone. Still, I wasn’t willing to face the reality that I couldn’t pull off normal no matter where I lived or what I did. I clung on to the last scraps of the college dream like Kate Winslet gripping that piece of the Titanic. Only less cutely, obviously.
Rather than assess the fact that my drinking had made yet another place hideously uncomfortable, I focused on the idea of going back to Smithers at Christmas and playing the part of the triumphant urbanite. I would show everyone that I was no longer a slightly out-of-control piss tank, but rather a successful fashion design student and big city dweller. I hadn’t always been the most popular person in my hometown, but that was because the people there had not understood that I was suffering from fish-out-of-water syndrome. The big city was my water. Smithers just didn’t get me. Et cetera.
As soon as I arrived, I started making the rounds of old friends and hitting every Christmas party I could find. I wore my new Toronto clothes, including my clown pants and zucchini outfit, and tried to show by word and deed that I was a more sophisticated woman. I was no longer the train wreck I’d been when I left.
By New Year’s Eve I’d been drunk almost every night for almost two weeks. I found that my friends who’d stayed behind had committed themselves wholeheartedly to the party life and were embroiled in the kinds of incredibly messy relationships nineteen- and twenty-year-olds excel at. Everybody was cheating on everybody and I felt kind of sorry for myself that I’d missed it all. The only time I felt slightly vindicated in my life choices was when people told me they admired my bravery in wearing such strange clothes.
Looking at pictures taken that Christmas, I can see that I didn’t look quite so much the stylish college girl as I’d hoped. There’s a shot of my mother and me standing outside her new apartment. She’d moved into it after divorcing my stepfather the year before. The two of us had gone out to get a “Christmas branch” to make things look more festive. I’m standing against a snowy backdrop, which serves to make my face look even more sallow and bloated. My spiral perm is half grown out. I look ten years older than I was and more haggard than collegiate.
I was due to return to Toronto on New Year’s Day, so I felt it was important that I go out with a bang. Leave them with their mouths hanging open. Show how it’s done when you live in Toronto. Et cetera.
I hit the bottle of Crown Royal early and hard. When the coke came out, I was first in line. Coke had a tendency to make me violent, but it also allowed me to drink more and for longer, so I snarfled up as much as I could.
By the time we hit the bar, a decrepit old cabaret populated mostly by the local rubbies and young drinkers “slumming it,” I was flying. We were confronted by the girlfriend of one of the boys one of my friends was sleeping with. Names were called. Threats were uttered. As a fashion design student I felt it was my duty to intervene.
I inserted myself between the combatants and when the cheated-upon girlfriend complained, I lobbed a few wobbly, cokefuelled punches at her. Next thing I knew I was being carried, none too gently, off the sticky dance floor by a bouncer. He was not swayed by my beauty or the urbanity of my clothing.
As I was being dragged past the stage, I saw the musicians glance at each other as they kept playing. Something told me they weren’t thinking, “Wow. She must be from Toronto!”
A moment later I was on my hands and knees on the frozen sidewalk.
After that, I remember nothing. The blackout lasted until my mother woke me up the next day to inform me that I had a phone call. It was early afternoon and I tried not to notice when my mother wrinkled her nose at how I smelled. In our family, we don’t go stating the obvious about people’s problems, so she said nothing about the alcoholic off-gassing.
“Phone,” she said.
I took the receiver from her with a trembling hand.
“Is this Susan Juby?” asked a girl’s voice.
“Yes,” I croaked.
“You’re fucking dead, you bitch.”
My heart began to race like I’d never stopped doing coke.
“I am going to kick your ass. Meet us behind the Civic Centre at six tonight or you’ll be sorry.”
I hung up the phone. My mother stared at me with a quizzical expression.
“Who was that?”
“Just a friend,” I said.
Four hours later, I was huddled in my seat on a tiny plane that was battling its way through a terrible snowstorm on its way from Smithers to the Vancouver Airport, where I was supposed to catch my connecting flight to Toronto. I imagined the caller waiting to beat me up behind the Civic Centre. She’d be surrounded by shivering spectators. Nineteen years old, a fashion design student living in Toronto, and entire crowds of people still wanted to beat me up. I was going to be forty-four and still getting into fights every weekend. Why did these things keep happening to me?
As the plane bucked its way through the storm, the flimsy curtain that separated the eight or so passengers from the cockpit rose and fell. Sometimes the curtain flapped high enough that I could see dark sweat circles through the young pilot’s white dress shirt.
If we survive this flight, I promised myself, I’m going to do better this term. I’m going to stop spending money and I’m going to cut back on my drinking. This time, I’m going to pull it together. I will never do cocaine again, and I will focus on my school work. I will be good.
Of course, as soon as I got back to Toronto, I picked up where I left off, drinking myself into a blackout a couple of nights a week and racing through the scant remains of my student loan. Later, I heard that not long after my escape from Smithers, the same little plane I’d taken crashed flying the same route and killed everyone on board.
12
When the End Is Nigh
HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED when I returned to Toronto. I failed to pay my tuition on time and was asked to leave my fashion design college. They said I should think about exploring “other avenues for my talents.” To celebrate the end of my college career, I got very drunk with some unsuspecting classmates and dragged them to a male strip club. After I finished impressing everyone with my ability to guzzle multiple nine-dollar Long Island iced teas in just over an hour, I tripped and fell down two flights of stairs and rolled out onto Yonge Street. I think I may have attacked one of my companions when she came back to my house, where she was supposed to be staying. This is only the dimmest of memories. She was gone when I got up, and I never heard from her again.
When I awoke I found three small plastic flasks of vodka, one hidden in my purse, one in my coat pocket, and another tucked into my winter hat. I had no recollection of buying them. This was happening more and more. When I came to after one of my binges, I would find alcohol stashed everywhere. There would be stray cans of beer in my dresser drawers, airplane bottles in my shoes, and mickeys in random pockets of my knapsack. I was terrified that I’d have to stop drinking once I’d started. For some reason, this booze hoarding didn’t strike me as unhappy housewife/bad dad alcoholic behaviour, because I was drunk when I bought the backup bottles and so it didn’t count. Also, judging from the untouched evidence, I never seemed to remember them after I tucked them away. I was like a sm
elling-impaired dog burying a bone, not like a true alkie.
Having washed out of a not terribly demanding college, an amazing feat on its own, I began drinking alone and going out by myself with no money in my pocket. The alternative was to stay home, alone and sober, and that would have forced me to acknowledge that I was an unemployed fashion school dropout, basically hiding out in my student co-op, waiting for someone to realize that I was no longer a student. There had always been at least one part of my life I could control. I might be a mess on weekends, but during the week I was as tightly wound as a new Slinky. I made sure my shoes matched my shirt and my purse. But even that control was slipping. There were fewer and fewer functional moments.
I started coming out of blackouts (it felt like suddenly sobering up) in strange, dingy bars in unfamiliar parts of the city surrounded by people I didn’t know. Usually sketchy-looking men. I’d seen The Accused. I knew this was a pretty terrible idea.
Another unwelcome development was that I’d started trying to off myself almost every time I got drunk. My attempts usually involved giving my wrists a close shave with a plastic razor while sitting slumped on the bathroom floor, tears running down my face as I cried silently. I also took to wandering into the little park across from my house and waiting for the Scarborough rapist (later revealed to be the horror show called Paul Bernardo) to come and get me. The park was about the size of a large area rug, and I would stagger outside and lie on the single bench plunked down in the middle. When sober, I, like many women in the Toronto area, was afraid to go out after dark. But drunk, I was capable of anything.
I proved totally incompetent at suiciding myself, but when I sobered up I started to worry that by some unlucky fluke I might actually succeed.
This drastic escalation in my drinking took its toll. When my housemates would go out for breakfast the morning after a party, they usually asked if I’d like to go along. I never did because I couldn’t. While they were eating cheap eggs benedict and talking about their escapades from the night before, I would be huddled out on the third-floor fire escape, smoking, every muscle shaking independently and uncontrollably, and doing my best to ignore the mild DTs that I’d started experiencing every time I sobered up from a binge. I ignored the flashes of movement that darted in and out of my peripheral vision; the dark figures descending the walls and swooping flashes of birds in the hallways. None of it was real.