Ali in Wonderland: And Other Tall Tales (5 page)

A rusty Buick pulled over to the side of the road, and as Suzanne sprinted toward it, I followed like a needy little sister. She jumped into the front seat and pulled me next to her. The driver was a bearded man in his late twenties (think Jim Morrison in his tubby years). His ashtray was overflowing with cigarette butts, and the car reeked of B.O. and beer.

The driver swerved back and forth over the middle grid as he asked perfunctory questions about who we were and where we were from. Suzanne answered like a pro; we were EMT nurses leaving our night shift. The driver didn’t seem to question the fact that Suzanne was in a lacy nightgown, fluffy robe, and leg warmers. But he didn’t strike me as someone who knew what EMT stood for anyway.

All I remember is the car flipping over, not monster truck–show style, but fluid and in slow motion. The driver had swerved to avoid the side of a bridge. Next thing I knew my face was pressed against the soft roof. We sat there for what felt like hours. Finally I crawled out, pulling Suzanne with me, and ripping my nightgown on a jagged piece of rusty metal above the tire. When I looked at the car, it resembled a tin cockroach on its back. Stumbling backward from the wreckage, we heard from inside the Buick, “Holy shit!” followed by fits of laughter. Yes, kind sir, Holy shit.

We ran back to the dorm without stopping, talking, or catching our breath. I panted in my bed most of the night and had never felt so relieved to be on my bumpy mattress, alone in my dorm room. Why couldn’t I have stayed in bed with my Raggedy Ann and
Scarlet Letter
CliffsNotes like everybody else?

Chapter Six

Hugs Not Drugs

T
here are good drunks, and there are bad drunks. I wouldn’t say I was a bad drunk—I’m fun, I’d take my top off—I’m just a bad drinker. I physically cannot chug. I’m a sipper. And I inherited a very low tolerance to alcohol from my mother. She once drank a glass of white wine and performed the entire second act of
The Pirates of Penzance
in our kitchen. To a standing ovation. For me, one glass of white wine and I wake up in a Hyatt with a group of Persian businessmen.

Drinking was a big part of prep school—at least, it was at mine. I didn’t like the taste of booze and dreaded the post–spring-break ritual of gulping the mini liquor bottles stolen off the plane. Sometimes I pretended to glug and faked drunk; I became very good at faking. A couple of years ago I was dirty dancing at a friend’s Labor Day party. I was provocative and flamboyant as I jumped on the shoulders of my equally flamboyant and openly gay dance partner and had him mop me all over the floor. The next day a woman asked my friend, the hostess, Who was the crazy drunk on the dance floor? I consumed two ginger ales that night.

It wasn’t easy charting the social waters of prep school. There was your compulsive liar, Scarlett, who told everyone she was the heir to the Tiffany and Co. fortune. Anyone who refers to Tiffany’s as “Tiffany’s and Co” is probably not the beneficiary of all that is inside those robin’s-egg-blue boxes. She also claimed to be the daughter of J. Paul Getty and Diana Ross. Were they ever together? And my favorite—she shot her father for having a bastard out of wedlock, and her mother took the rap for her and fled to France. Needless to say, Scarlett had never heard of public records. And then there was the latent lesbian who always wanted to brush people’s hair and could tell fortunes by reading belly buttons. And as always, your standard psychotic.

I met Karen when we were sophomores. She was a jock from Chatham, Mass.; cute, with a button nose and a smattering of freckles. We didn’t have much in common; I couldn’t sink a three-pointer if my life depended on it, and the idea of drinking rum and Cokes in a rowboat all night (the East Coasters’ version of cow-tipping) was about as exciting to me as waiting in line at the DMV. But we tolerated each other for the sake of social sustainability. One weekend Karen invited me to spend the weekend at her house in Cape Cod. I was always desperate to leave school, the way a turtle scrambles for footing on the glass side of his terrarium, so I accepted. I imagined clambakes and round-robin tennis with her family; after all, she had a sister named Beetle. Her parents seemed nice enough, for elitist drunks who drove around in golf carts in Gilligan hats.

Friday night Karen’s parents were going to a potluck, Beetle to a school dance, and her brother Archer to a lacrosse championship. Karen decided to invite some local boys she had grown up with over to the house; she had a crush on one of them (the one who could have been her brother’s twin, gross). I was hoping for a movie and a few pints of Mint Oreo ice cream, but figured I could delay all that until after the boys left. They were what I expected—gray U. Mass hoodie sweatshirts, braces, and nonstop talk about where to find some beer (pronounced “be-ah”). They drank room-temperature Bud Lights while I perused her mom’s
Architectural Digest
. I would insert a comment now and again just to keep myself awake. One of the boys, Skip or Scooter, kept asking me why I didn’t want a be-ah. “AA,” I nonchalantly answered. It shut him up.

And then, without warning, Karen snapped. “Why are you all over him?” she screamed at me. I looked up from the magazine. “Huh?” She had walked around the counter into the kitchen. “You’re a slut! And I’m going to kill you!” I froze and prayed the little bout of crazy would pass quickly, or the beer buzz would kick in. Karen pulled the spray hose out from the sink and pointed it at me like it was a gun. “You try, you just try to take him, you bitch!” And then she pulled the trigger. I was soaked in water and disbelief. The boys got the hell out of Dodge, taking the rest of the be-ah and a bottle of bourbon from the liquor cabinet while I went to change my clothes.

I was left alone with a drunk lunatic somewhere near Bucks Creek marshes. I could either swim across the Atlantic toward Nantucket in the hopes of hitching a ride on an oil tanker, or risk hiding in the laundry room until dawn. I went to Karen’s room, which was covered in Nadia Comaneci clippings and basketball medals, to find my knapsack of clothes. As I pulled off my wet shirt, I noticed a stack of music books on her desk; the covers were completely covered in scribbles. I took a closer look. (Cue the horror-film sound track.) Scrawled all over these books was my name. My name written in script, block letters, graffiti style, slanted to the right, slanted to the left, with hearts, with stars, my name WRITTEN OVER AND OVER HUNDREDS OF TIMES! I tried not to throw up as I debated whether to call the Greyhound bus terminal or the police. I snuck out of the house, assuming Karen was in the garage looking for an ax, got to a local inn called Ye Olde something, and called a cab.

Back at the dorm that night, I dashed off a thank-you note to Karen’s parents on my Crane stationery, explaining how I had forgotten about a geometry test and, being a high achiever, needed to get back and study. And thank them for the Bloody Marys. I couldn’t write what I really wanted to: “Dear Mr. and Mrs. You Need Betty Ford, thank you for a surreal stay at your house of dysfunction and key parties! Your daughter needs shock therapy, and I feel like she may gun down some innocent bystanders in an Arby’s one day if she isn’t locked up. And I was so grateful not to be a victim of one of those jocks heading towards Riker’s after he commits a series of preppy murders. Again thank you and sorry I couldn’t stay for the full night of horrors, but I have some self-preservation and knew my life wouldn’t end at the hand of a disturbed lesbian psychopath. See you at the book fair! Love, someone who will forever avoid you.” Karen and I never discussed that night, nor was I ever alone with her again. Every once in awhile when I’m watching
20/20
, I keep thinking she’ll turn up in a segment.

O
ne of the many invaluable lessons I learned from preparatory school was that psychopaths come in all shapes and sizes. Abigail was an anemic blonde from Winnetka, Illinois. Abigail was light on the outside, but dark on the inside. She had a face like a fetus and wore Fair Isle sweaters, knee socks, and clogs. I met her in the library, where she was passing around a can of Sprite to random people. “There’s something wrong with this soda, try it,” she offered. Finally a Pakistani girl, who was just thrilled someone had spoken to her, took a sip. She examined the can and took another sip. “It’s bad,” she said, wiping her hand across her pierced mouth, and handed it back to Abigail. Abigail smiled, threw the can in the garbage, and walked back to the spot on the floor where she’d been trying to carve her initials into the side of a mahogany bookcase.

“What was wrong with the Sprite?” I inquired.

Without missing a beat, she looked straight at me and said nonchalantly, “Nothing, I just peed in it.”

Abigail was sent to boarding school to try to exorcise the Lizzie Borden out of her. She was an albino Wednesday Addams who had no boundaries when it came to mischief and chicanery. You know, the kind of girl who was to blame when cutlery went missing? Shortly after we met, Abigail asked me if I wanted to walk into town to buy Doritos, the kind of jaunt that constituted the pathetic highlight of my adolescent imprisoned days. Abigail needed cash, so we stopped at the local bank. I sat by the window trying to spot other students who had made the trek to town for necessary sundries like tampons and low-fat cottage cheese. Suddenly an alarm went off, and two obese Irish guards converged on Abigail. I was escorted with her to the back room of the bank, where we were detained for four hours. I watched Abigail masterfully explain how she hadn’t written the note that said, “Put all your cash into a large envelope and nobody will get hurt.” She blinked her pale blue eyes. “Somebody must have already written it on the deposit slip. I just happened to pick it.” Finally, we were allowed to leave without the bank calling the headmistress. We shared a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos on the way back to school, and with the corners of her mouth packed with bright orange crumbs she said, “I should have written ‘I have a gun’ instead of ‘nobody will get hurt,’ then that bitch wouldn’t have hit the alarm.”

A
bigail always had cash in bricks, the way a gangster does in the movies, and it wasn’t from a part-time job or allowance from her parents. She was a player always looking for game. Every time she flew back from Chicago she would take only her backpack, which she would check. Then at baggage claim she’d pull off the tag and act as though the backpack was her carry-on. She would then complain to passenger services that they’d lost her bag. She would be compensated for her lost Nikon camera, diamond earrings, and couture dresses. She scammed every airline, and by the end of junior year she could have bought a fleet of private jets.

Abigail would have been better served by joining a satanic cult or the Israeli army, but instead decided to fraternize with some of the girls from South America. There’s only one thing Abigail was conspiring to get from Valeria and Blanca, who traveled from Boston to Cochabamba on long weekends, and it wasn’t a command of the Spanish language. Blanca’s father had bought her an apartment in Chestnut Hill so she would have a place to go when the rigors of academic life got to her and she felt “
loca
in her
cabeza
.” She could practice her math at the Framingham mall with her platinum American Express and work on her physics by measuring grams of uncut cocaine.

Abigail invited me to go with her to Blanca’s Scarface condo one weekend. Again, I never needed an excuse to feel unfettered and alive. So Abigail had one of her many outside friends call and pretend to be her Aunt Boots, inviting us to her home in Cambridge for a chance to see the Krokodiloes, Harvard’s premiere a cappella group. Blanca had a cinnamon red Mustang stashed in a garage in Dedham. So we didn’t have to ride the T, Boston’s subway, which was riddled with pale college students who looked like vampires and unkempt older men in ratty tweed jackets who once believed they were a shoo-in for a Pulitzer, only to end up teaching at Bunker Hill Community College.

The apartment was mauve and nondescript. A king bed in the master, a stained cream-colored pleather sofa, a glass coffee table and huge TV in the living room, and a banana tree. There were no utensils in the kitchen or toilet paper in the bathroom. But there was a large ziplock bag of blow tossed on the Formica counter. There was no ritual involved; most of the time Blanca would be on the phone, screaming in Spanish to one of her many lovers south of the equator, as she dumped the snow on the table, cut, lined, and snorted. Abigail did the same while rapidly underlining our American history textbook with a yellow highlighter and screaming about how the Hitler Youth were just promoting nationalism and didn’t deserve the bad rap.

I had never tried drugs, not even allergy medication. All I knew was Diet Coke made me shake, and excessive amounts of chocolate made me weep. I have always preferred to be lucid in life. My fear with drugs has always been that I’ll eat the brownie laced with LSD and drive into the ocean. On a bicycle. And drown. Very slowly. I don’t even take Sudafed for fear I’d have a bad reaction and stab an ex-therapist.

The only time I experimented with marijuana was right before a dinner party at the Porcellian Club at Harvard. My boyfriend Josh was a student there and was desperate to be admitted into the antediluvian establishment. Josh’s roommate was one of those math geniuses who was always stoned. He was heavy, bearded, and seemed to only own one T-shirt, which read, “You are here,” with an arrow pointing to a dot in the solar system. I think the dude ended up ruling Silicon Valley. As I sat awkwardly on Josh’s bed while he showered, the roommate (sporting corduroys covered in bong water) handed me a joint. I only took two drags, but that was enough to make me believe I had permanently morphed into Bob Dylan. Everything I looked at was seen through a kaleidoscope lens, like in those films when people are laughing maniacally and their faces are out of focus and swirling around in a prism sequence. At the club’s black-tie dinner, I opted not to speak, a strategy that would serve me well at future social events like the White House Easter egg roll. The waiters placed a large red snapper on the table, and for the rest of the night I was convinced the fish was staring at me. And sending me telepathic messages, like “Help.” When the fish head was severed with a silver poisson cutter and its body filleted in half, I fainted. Lay Lady Lay, Lay across that big lace table.

That was the extent of my drug repertoire up to that point. So Abigail and Blanca, dressed like Miami hookers in Spandex jumpsuits, went off to a Euro-trash disco club to dance off the speed the coke was cut with. I passed on the prospect of being molested by a group of Polish car salesmen. Instead, I chose cable TV.

I lay on the leather—ah, pleather—sofa and watched the film
Mannequin
twice, imagining how amazing it would be to have a body made out of plastic. Much like Hollywood today. Blanca had said as she pulled on her red cowboy boots, “Mira, if ju want some Coca, ees okay.” I held the baggie up to the light, bounced it on my knee, and shifted the mountain of white snow from one side to the other. It was two in the morning, and I was bored. I tapped a spoonful onto the glass table. I’d spent my life blowing things out of my nose and it seemed against nature to snort in a foreign substance. I tried a little, but felt nothing but a medicinal drip in the back of my throat. So I snorted more and more. I snorted nose candy throughout the entire movie
Valley Girl
(for which Nicolas Cage should have been nominated for an Academy Award, in my opinion).