Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (16 page)

that sealed off, but open.

As we walk, we compare life stories. Adult strangers do this by giving an inventory of their careers, their spouses, their children’s schools; by trading names of decorators and personal trainers, recipes, and favorite brands of driveway sealant. And as girls, we do it, too, by quantifying experiences. Even as strangers, our conversations drift back to the personal stuff of drinking, sex, and drugs. Within an hour of meeting Tess, I may not be able to tell you the last book she read, what she does for exercise, or if she eats or skips breakfast; I may not even know her last name (in college, I’ll end up knowing almost everyone by first name only), but I know how many boys she’s slept with, whether she prefers beer or liquor, and if she does speed to study.

We don’t necessarily flaunt these facts because we’re
proud
of

our delinquency; we do it because the confessions represent our only milestones and emotional investments as of yet. They are the only way we can think to distinguish ourselves. None of us have jobs or degrees. Many of us still live in the cities where we were born, with the families to whom we were supernaturally assigned. Without our dirty little accolades, we are the same sex, the same age, the same
kind.
In the dorm, we sleep in identical beds, in identical rooms, like rows of saplings staked in a nursery.

• • •

The party
itself would not be memorable if it was not our first. At the back door we pay five dollars for red plastic cups, the big ones that I guess were manufactured for the sole purpose of serving alcohol because I can’t imagine why anyone would want to drink that much of anything else. The keg is in the basement, where the music is muffled from public-safety officers who patrol the avenue on their weekend rounds. In the coming months, I will learn that the drains in the foundations make beer-sticky floors easier to hose down. The ceiling is outlined with strands of Christmas lights, which in college will qualify as atmosphere.

We each drink three beers.

The boldness that Bud Light sends rolling back to me is just what I’ve been missing the past few days. When I talk to Tess, thoughts diffuse through me without any of the hesitation that so often trips me up. I speak without rehearsing the words in my head beforehand, and she listens, clapping her hands and agree-ing with her whole heart. When I laugh, the hum of my own happiness is astonishing.

By my fourth cup, I have decided to sit on the basement’s washing machine in order to escape the brush of too many bod-ies hurling for a space around the keg. Nearly a hundred freshmen who, in this first week, are overcome by the novelty of a five-dollar beer binge, have crammed themselves into the con-fines of the basement’s concrete walls. The air is as moist and misted as it is in the dorm showers.

I am planning a path through the bodies to the bathroom when the basement lights blow out like candles. In the absence of music, the three boys who live here appear in the doorway with flashlights to say, “We’ve blown a fuse. Everyone has to go.

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Everyone has to go
now.
” And I follow the throng of people that inches up the basement stairs, by the light of Tess’s cigarette lighter, which she holds up like someone at a concert expecting an encore.

Outside the street is blind dark: no house lights, no head-lights, streetlights that I only notice now in their powerlessness. The three miles back to the dorm is a spun-out shadow. There is a drop of rain and then two, and then water plummets from the sky like an overturned bucket, soaking us through. The sky claps and ignites deep purple. Far off, I hear a sound like a chain saw cutting through wood. Branches break themselves off tree trunks. Garbage cans wheel themselves down the street.

After a few beers, I am usually only mildly tipped. But this time, I feel deeply drunk, like I’m in a free-fall. I am Dorothy snapped up by the tornado, and the Wicked Witch is whizzing by on a stick. I inch forward, huddling together with Wendi and Tess, and it’s almost fun. The gusts of wind that drive against my back feel violent enough to launch me into orbit.

When we finally pull open the dorm’s front door, all three hundred residents are crouched on the floor of the lobby. A few people are praying.

Beer is still pushing into my system, and the feeling is power-ful and fluid, like a river emptying itself into an ocean. Under its ether, I am insensitive to panic. My head is the quietest it has been in months. I sit cross-legged on the floor, with my back to the broad wall of student mailboxes, and let Tess lean her head against my shoulder. She is crying, and I put one hand on her rain-soaked pant leg, to tell her it is going to be okay.

The world outside is bust, but I have been salvaged. From the junk of my character, I have pieced together some courage to pull around me. I feel like a quilt made from scraps.

• • •

The local
newspapers call it a microburst, a cold Canadian air mass that rolled into a slack system of hot summer air. They say fall met summer with a bang. The world outside my window is a mess of live wires, toppled steeples, overturned tractor trailers, and twisted highway signs. On TV, reporters interview a succession of victims, one person whose chimney collapsed on her leg, another whose toolshed blew through a McDonald’s. Roofs are blown off campus apartments, and six hundred students are homeless.

The university takes four days to clean up the wreckage. With classes canceled, we take the four-day weekend to recover and booze.

The long weekend is an unexpected delight. It is the colle-giate version of a snow day, which we will never be granted at

S.U. because it snows every day. I am thrilled by the idea of spending nights drinking with Tess in our dorm rooms, and days recuperating in flannel pajamas, eating sugary cereal and watching Jenny Jones reform girls like me.

As the semester progresses, I will come to depend on this cycle. A rhythm will come to pass, whereby afternoon classes will unroll into evenings of swilling cups over card games, singing along to records, and barreling down the hallways of the dorm until I stub a toe or run out of breath. Then evenings will unroll into morn-ings, to ear ringing, nausea, and hard-sleeping afternoons.

Drinking, which was once a novelty, will become the usual. Its repetition will structure my days once I realize that college, which looked like a premier destination in high school, is just another static period of time biding. Drinking will give college a circular configuration, like a holding pattern I can navigate while I await clearance in the real world.

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My class schedule accommodates the cycle of my drinking. Monday through Thursday, I have Spanish class at
8:30 a.m.
, which is a ghastly hour, but allows for no classes on Friday. In the coming semesters, I will learn to design my schedules with this aim in mind. I will comb the course catalog exhaustively, weighing my requirements, trying this and that combination of classes. I will happily have four, even five, ninety-minute lec-tures in one day if it frees up another day for pure, unadulter-ated slothfulness. My craftiest friends will devise hangover-free schedules, meaning no classes before
11 a.m.
and fixed four-day weekends.

Tess has Fridays off, too, and together we start our weekends on Thursday nights. Tess has a friend, an older boy she knows from home, who buys us wine coolers at the One Stop conve-nience store. We drink the way Jana instructed us: In Tess’s room, behind a locked door, we sit opposite one another on the carpet, hands curled around full bottles of hard lemonade, ash-ing our cigarettes into empty bottles of sparkling pineapple breeze. Halfway through a bottle of the sweet stuff I feel a head-ache coming on. After one, I chatter maniacally. After two, Tess tells me to keep my voice down; I am yelling bloody murder.

Sometimes, when the mini-mart runs out of Wild Island wine coolers, Tess’s friend buys us tallboys of beer, and we attempt what Tess calls “power hour,” which is doing a single shot of beer every minute for one hour. We usually last only thirty minutes, after which we are cockeyed and burping like sailors. In those first few months, getting drunk is the real amuse-ment. Like a road trip to some arbitrary place, the real fun takes place along the way, and once we get there, there is nothing to do. We usually get drunk and push bottle caps into the ceiling panels in an effort to fill every square inch, making a roof we

can sleep under, the way some girls adhere glow-in-the-dark star stickers. Some nights, we get drunk and sit on the concrete ledge outside our dorm windows, where we can listen to the booming sounds of trucks on the highway overpass. Others, we ride the elevator to the second floor, where the boys buy cigarettes by the carton, or to the seventh floor, where the boys drink Aftershock and Slip N’ Slide in the hall.

A big night consists of getting drunk and stealing a couch from the dorm lobby while the security guard is outside on his cigarette break. Tess is too unsteady on her feet to carry her end, and we strip the paint off the walls in a futile attempt to jam the length of it into her dorm room.

Though our
Thursday nights are uneventful, they make my roommate distinctly jealous.

When Tess and I perform our cigarettes/wine coolers rou-tine, Wendi shuts herself in the lounge alone, cracking pista-chios, flipping pages in a notebook, and watching
Change of Heart
on the fingerprint-flecked TV screen. Occasionally she’ll appear in Tess’s doorway to see what we’re up to (her knocks al-ways send us into a fury of window opening and bottle hiding), the way a babysitter might check up on her charges only to find them engrossed in a game she can’t fully understand. Her smile shivers, and she says, “You girls are insane,” before she swivels like a jewelry-box figure and leaves.

In the beginning, it never occurs to me that my drinking might bother her. After all, I don’t drink with her, or even near her. I don’t look at her with bloodshot eyes or breathe on her with musty breath, and I never bring bottles into our room. For that matter, I’ve never been loaded enough to say anything mean to her face. (Which is not to say I don’t think mean things;

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later, my mom will remind me that I referred to my room as “theater of the absurd,” and to my roommate as “an acting ma-jor bound for big roles in low-budget porn.”)

Three-quarters of students may report having bad experiences due to someone else’s drinking;* but from where I stand, Wendi isn’t one of them. On the nights that I don’t drift off to sleep on the inflatable armchair in Tess’s room, I don’t even flip the light switch when I come in. I feel through my drawers in the dark and change clothes quietly, so as not to wake her.

Later, I will realize that what I see as self-sufficiency, Wendi sees as exclusivity. At first, I don’t think my drinking concerns her so much as it makes her feel rejected. Wendi, who has had little experience drinking before college, is just now learning that alcohol is the tie that binds. I think she’s envious of the way that drinking allies Tess and me. It secures our bull sessions, ca-pers, and absurd inside jokes.

Wendi could join us, of course. We have certainly invited her. But every time, she says no, on account of a Friday-morning theater history class. But the excuse isn’t ironclad; she could go to class hungover, the way Tess and I sometimes do, in sweat-pants and a ponytail, hands trembling, eighteen-ounce cup of coffee like a paperweight on the desk.

Her inexperience, I think, keeps her at bay. The following year, the university will release an alcohol-and drug-use survey of more than three hundred students, mostly freshmen and sophomores, and more than half will say we began using alcohol sometime between ages fourteen and seventeen. Wendi is in the

*Sixty-one percent of students who live on campus and don’t binge drink say they’ve been interrupted sleeping or studying;
50
percent say they’ve had to take care of a drunken student;
29
percent say they’ve been insulted or humiliated by one (Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study).

other half. She got drunk once in high school, which I suspect is like having sex once in high school: You don’t enjoy it the first time, you endure it.

However, there is one area in which Wendi’s experience sur-passes my own: men. Wendi has had sex, and she knows that I haven’t, and soon enough she is lolling in Tess’s room on Thursday nights, bent over the pages of
Cosmopolitan,
discussing It: getting It, getting into It, the best way to have It standing up. Her maneuver works. Tess, who has a twenty-eight-year-old boyfriend, prefers sex talk with Wendi to drinking with me, a partiality that seems almost illogical, in the same way that in the game “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” paper wins out over rock. After

all, sex talk is just talk, whereas power hour is brute action.

I shrink away from our competitive little threesome, regard-less, and chalk up the loss to a fascination that just doesn’t serve me.

As a testament
to my uninterest in sex, I decide to break up with Reed.

Sometime in October, Reed decides he can’t see enough of me, and every few days I get an unexpected ring from the dorm security guard, saying I have a visitor and could I come sign him in? Most often, I feel too guilty to send him home after his five-hour drive, so I let him sleep over despite the fact his mere presence breaks the continuity of my drinking cycle. I let Reed cocoon on the floor in his Polar Shield sleeping bag even though his shadow makes Wendi sigh and huff.

To complicate matters, I spent a Saturday night drinking Du-rango tequila with a boy from the eleventh floor and kissing him on the tall steps outside the law building, which is the only height on campus from which the city looks pretty, where the

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