Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (37 page)

In the
throes of daily rum withdrawal I am racked with anxi-ety. In addition to nightmares that a failed term paper costs me my diploma, I have recurring dreams that I’ve stolen cars, robbed grocery stores, or committed some other act of treachery and have SWAT teams pursuing me. Nights that I come home stupefied on what the bartender calls “Bloody Brain” shots (a tes-tament to just how many brain cells the drink seems to kill), I dream I hear helicopters and see searchlights. I imagine that a hundred uniformed officers wait outside, their pistols aimed at my apartment’s sad little door.

It began in late February with something I saw on
Dateline.
A federal judge had overturned the murder conviction of Paul Cox. Paul had been convicted of a double murder in White

Plains in
1988
, when in the midst of an alcoholic blackout, he

broke into his childhood home and stabbed the new tenants to death while they slept. At an AA meeting, he’d confessed that he’d woken up with blood on his clothes after a bizarre dream about killing his parents. And though the judge ultimately ruled that the information was privileged, like coming clean to a priest, it was the first time AA had ever broken its code of anonymity. I was sorely hungover while I watched it. I’d dragged my pil-lows and bedspread onto the floor in the living room, where I liked to create my own recovery unit. The Brita pitcher was on the floor near my head, along with a box of saltines, which I had taken to buying in bulk at Sam’s Club. The dog, having long

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since decided my sick days were his favorites, had wadded him-self up under my armpit.

The music on
Dateline
has always terrified me. It’s the same

synthetic chiming used on
Unsolved Mysteries.
It used to make me bury my head under the blanket on the nights I slept over at my nana’s house, when I could hear Robert Stack’s voice down the hall, narrating how police had uncovered the body of a girl just like me. But when I heard the Paul Cox story, my head was still hissing. I still had to force myself to drink water because its clear color made my mind drift back to vodka. That day, the tin-kling music set my spine shivering for a whole new reason. It occurred to me that Paul was living in an eternal state of hangover, just like me.

For the first time ever, I felt an affinity for the killer as well as the victim. It occurred to me that, like the suicides in Dante’s
In-ferno,
Paul’s crime was committed in a single moment of blind passion. And I was willing to bet he’d repeat the hell of it every moment to eternity. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could go on living after that kind of murderous bender. I imagine that the memory of life before the incident must hang daily in front of you, like the carrot that taunts the donkey. It must be a lasting reminder of the good life you’ve cast away.

I’ve started
driving everywhere I need to go, mostly because the sidewalks outside my apartment aren’t shoveled, and the only way to walk to campus is in the ruts left by cars swerving down University Avenue. I can’t make the hike. My almost-daily drinking has brought me to new depths of sluggishness, in which any task short of brushing my teeth physically exhausts me.

So I drive everywhere. When I go to class, I park illegally in Thornden Park, digging one of my parking tickets from the

glove compartment and pinning it to the windshield as a lame decoy. When I go to the campus bars, I parallel park the station wagon amid the stretch of open meters on South Crouse Av-enue.

It is a four-block drive from the campus bars to my apartment, but most mornings when I wake up, I can’t recall making it. I have to part the bedroom curtains to make sure my car found its way to the parking lot. Some mornings it turns up missing, and it takes me some time to remember that I walked home because a bartender insisted on it.

After a night like that, I circle the wagon as inconspicuously as possible before I drive it again. If the lot attendant sees me, he probably thinks I’m dusting off the night’s snowfall. But I am actually hunting for evidence of a gruesome, life-altering acci-dent I might not remember. I push the inches off the headlights and rearview mirrors with the fists of my sweatshirt; my fingers are balled up and shaking in the sleeves, probably as much from nerves as from cold and withdrawal. I’m panicky at the thought of uncovering a dented fender from a run-in with a parking me-ter, or worse, the remains of someone’s house cat on the tires.

Coincidentally, I pick up a job driving my poetry teacher’s teenage son home from school on the days she teaches graduate classes. Rent, combined with big bar tabs, has left me flat broke. Plus, I failed miserably at my previous part-time job as a beer vendor at the Carrier Dome (I was meant to carry water bottles, but a sleazy manager decided that having a young gal sell beer would be more profitable). I walked out the first day, still wearing my change apron and Michelob Light hat, once I realized that my unformed biceps couldn’t possibly lug thirty cans up and down hundreds of bleachers.

On the days that I pick him up at school behind a line of yel-

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low buses, I accelerate slowly, as though the road I travel is a per-petual school zone. It is a relief to be carrying “precious cargo,” which was the term my parents always used with the people who carted me around in high school. It’s a sensation I don’t get when I am driving alone, flying down Route
5
like I’m trying to break the sound barrier, having long since stopped caring if a car wreck claimed me, and often hoping for it. Often, as the kid sits in my passenger seat, I get a weird sensation that he’s older than I am, like even as he studies algebra and prepares for PSATs, he understands more. Other times, he just scans the alternative radio stations like any other teenage boy, as likable and levelheaded in person as he is in the poem my teacher publishes in
The New Yorker.

I make a mistake the day I tow Vanessa along.

I agree to drive her to Peter’s Groceries after I drop the son off at home because her parents confiscated her car after seeing the dents she drunkenly put in it. She is sitting in the backseat next to his book bag, and through the rearview mirror, I can see that she is wearing her hangover sunglasses, the really opaque ones through which you can barely make out the outline of her eyelashes. The current of air howling through the open window has her red hair fanning her face. Neither the son nor I are a big talker, and the trip is generally silent while we watch traffic or tap our fingers in time to the radio. But Vanessa is a socializer, and I can see that the silence is killing her. Eventually, she leans between the front seats to ask my teacher’s son what grade he’s in, what sports he plays, and whether he dates. He politely responds, saying “Ninth, lacrosse, no.”

I am still driving with DMV-test precision, stopping for a full ten seconds at
stop
signs and the like. But I almost veer into on-coming traffic when she asks him, “Do you drink?” I’ll wait until we are wandering through the store’s cereal aisle to ask what in the hell compelled her to bring up alcohol in front of a boy who was only fifteen. And she’ll respond by saying “What’s the big deal? We started drinking at fourteen.”

But the boy is unfazed. He might even be intrigued by the question’s honesty. He twists around in his seat to look at her, and chronicles three generations’ worth of addiction as briefly as he can before the car turns his street corner, ignoring the fact that she would know all this had she read his mother’s books. Before he clicks the car door closed, he says, given his family his-tory, trying alcohol is just too risky. He runs the chance that he might get addicted.

It will forever be the most informed argument against under-age drinking I’ve ever heard. And it’s far more honest than all the bullshit kids get dished about drunk driving and peer pressure, or even drinking moderately and responsibly. At the time, this is lost on me. I am six years older than he is, and neither my friends nor I think of alcohol as an addictive substance. To us, dependence is pinned only to drugs, like cocaine (maybe even pot, if you buy those public service announcements that say, “It’s a lot more dangerous than we thought”), and cigarettes, which we resolve to stop smoking postgraduation.

I won’t know until much later that a quarter of all college students have family histories of alcoholism, or whether I fi myself among that demographic. Who would think to approach their parents to ask how much or how often they, or their parents’ parents, drank, and whether they experienced hardships as a result of it? I have no idea whether the women my mother keeps framed in our living room, yellowed photos of great-aunts and great-great-grandmothers wearing lace bonnets, might have a

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bearing on my present. Nor can I see how close my own addiction looms. I already
need
alcohol, not physically but certainly emotionally; my relationships, self-image, and ability to cope fluctuate with my blood-alcohol content.

Graduation falls
on a weekend that’s inconvenient for everyone. My dad flies in alone on Friday night, coming directly from a business meeting in Miami. My mom and sister wait to drive in at four
a.m.
the next day because my sister has her junior prom on Friday night.

Like everyone else wearing a black, polyester poncho, I’ve long since accepted the fact that the ceremony is for my parents’ sake, not mine. If I had it my way, I would have gone home a week ago and waited for my diploma to arrive in the mail. Still, that obligation to my parents doesn’t make the slow procession onto the football field any less agonizing. I am severely hungover, and when the tassels ahead of me move forward at a snail’s pace, I start to wonder if I can make it to a folding chair without fainting. My hands are shaking even as I lace them in front of me. And when I catch my family hanging over the dome’s third-tier railing, it takes all my energy to look happy and accom-plished, to wave one hand high above my head and blow my mother a kiss.

The smell coming off the robes all around me is flammable. As I enter a row, an usher stops me short and scolds me for entering the aisle from the wrong direction. (No one I know attended the graduation rehearsal because it fell during happy hour.) I plant myself beside my old roommate, April, and her boyfriend, and they are the only people in the immediate area who don’t smell of tequila. Everyone else looks as sallow and

nauseated as I do, as anxious to get the hell out of Dodge, to throw their caps up into the rafters and run out before the black mass hits the Astroturf.

As I sit through the speeches, I think
It is time for this madness

to end.
In the rows ahead of me, there are too many ex-Xs to name. There are boys I’ve cried in front of and passed out next to on couches. There are boys who have backed me into a corner in someone’s apartment, seized my arms hard enough to leave marks, and refused to loosen their grip when I tried to wriggle away. There are too many reminders of sticky kisses that have not blossomed into real romance, despite my most heartfelt affections. There are boys I have told afterward, in no uncertain terms, to “go fuck themselves.”

There are girls, too, standing on their chairs in order to get a clear view of the stage. In the rows, I can make out so many of

them whom I once slugged wine with. They are girls who sat rolling drunk with me at three
a.m.
in Walnut Park, sharing drags off a joint and telling stories that I swiftly forgot. They are

girls who meant the world to me, and then, after a time, meant nothing. A few, in these final months, have reeled up high on Heineken to say “I’ve missed you” (like Elle), or “I want you in my life” (like April). More have cornered me in bar bathrooms, loaded and angry, looking to throw a drink. Some (like Hannah) have called in the early hours of the morning to say they saw me drinking Bacardi with their ex-boyfriends, and to kindly ask me to stay away.

Perhaps my only consolation is the fact that I made it.

I think of graduation the way the devout think of the Apoca-lypse. For months, people have talked about this day like the fiery flames of hell engulfing the planet. Graduation will absolve us of our sins. After today, our addictions will drift away like all

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the world’s islands. We will stop drinking, stop dieting during the day and eating pizza at three
a.m.
, stop relying on pot with TV and cigarettes with coffee. Our drunken abuses, like moun-tains, will fade away and never be found, and we will only have the stories to recap. We will tell of our near misses with wonder and gratitude.

Yes, when the chancellor says, “Allow me to present the class of
2002
,” we will fly clean out of our robes and ascend to our des-tiny. We’ll find paradise in the “real world,” where there are men seeking meaningful relationships, jobs in media, and cheap and spacious lofts in major cities.

I move to
Manhattan two weeks after graduation. Everyone I know does, with the exception of the people who grew up there, who instead migrate west, to Los Angeles. Everyone regards her sixth-story walk-up as a triumph, regardless of its sludge-streaked windows, the alien insects in the bathtub cracks, and the flickering light fixtures, which turn everything the blanched color of oatmeal. Everyone feels redeemed by urbanism, as if change were as simple as getting a new zip code. No one expects the past to run into the present. We don’t know it will seep down on us like leaks from an apartment upstairs.

I move because my old boss has a new job as the publisher of a men’s magazine, and when I call him on my twenty-second

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birthday, he says that, eerily enough, his assistant quit ten minutes ago. Two days later, I am taking typing tests in the human resources department. Two days after that, Vanessa and I are wheezing up the stairwells of a dozen Upper East Side apartment buildings before we land ourselves in a roach-infested pre-war building in the East Seventies.