Girl Walks Out of a Bar (7 page)

By fifteen, my friends and I binge drank on weekends, usually sucking down 24-packs of Budweiser while listening to Zeppelin in smoky, wood-paneled basements. We scored pot and cocaine from dealers that all the local high schoolers knew, and we passed the drugs around on mirrors and album covers. The drugs were fun, but alcohol was my first love. I would gladly trade a mirror full of coke for an oversized jug of Riunite Chablis. Coke did make me feel like Wonder Woman—wide awake in the moment as I yammered on about nothing—but with alcohol, my brain became peaceful, quiet. Nothing ever seemed urgent. It was the closest I could come to disappearing. And the trick to maintaining this inebriated social life as a teenager? Never miss a curfew and never argue with parents.

By eighteen, I was a straight-A student, editor of the high school yearbook, and accepted early to Northwestern University. I was also a blackout drunk.

4

I entered my freshman year
at Northwestern assuming that by accepting me the school had somehow made a mistake. I didn't expect to make it through my first semester because clearly I wasn't as capable as all the other kids who spilled out of station wagons loaded with clothes, bedspreads, and albums in milk crates. But behold! Alcohol was available every day and every night in this thrilling new society called the Big Ten. Northwestern was far from a “party” school, but that just meant looking a little harder to find a drinking buddy during finals. There was always somebody happy to close a book and jump into a bottle of vodka, a 12-pack of Old Style, or some other cheap swill. After-study drinking was often followed by early morning pizza—and in between, there was always plenty of junk food to stuff in our faces. From cookie-heavy care packages loaded with brownies, hunks of cheese “product,” and smoked sausage, to the classic in-room stash of Doritos, sour cream and onion Pringles, and Pop Tarts, we were stocked and ready to feed our munchies at any hour. But there was no such commitment to exercise.

Northwestern's campus is sprawling, and I considered an eight-minute walk to class a workout, even though I smoked a
cigarette along the way. My waistline grew at the speed of Miller Lite, and my breasts seemed to be in a race to grow even faster. After hitting a peak of 183 pounds on my five-foot-five frame, I decided that the answer to all of my problems was a breast reduction.

My mother dutifully found me the best surgeon in our area. Dr. Martha MacGuffie, a little slip of a woman with short, gray hair, oversized glasses, and a personality that entered a room before she did.

“I'm going to do a little drawing on you now,” Dr. MacGuffie said, holding my gown open and staring at my giant bare breasts. She spoke directly to me, as if my mother weren't sitting in the corner of the exam room. “This is what the operation would look like.” She drew on each breast with a black magic marker, showing where the incisions would be. She circled my nipple, which she explained would need to be nearly removed, drew a line from the bottom of my nipple to my ribcage, and then drew a smile-shaped curve around the lower half of my breast.

“There will be a good amount of scarring, you know, Lisa. Are you going to be OK with that?” she asked.

“Absolutely. I don't care.” I said.

“OK. You're a good candidate for surgery, but I won't schedule you until you lose at least thirty pounds.” She waited for me to react.

I stammered, “Of course . . . yes—of course . . .”

“Lisa, your new breasts are going on the body you're going to want to keep, not the body you have now. It's much better to lose the weight first.” Her bluntness was jolting at first, but in short time I felt good about it. Being talked to so directly by a woman so accomplished made me feel adult. My poor mother looked jolted as well. She could never have spoken so boldly to me about my weight.

Thirty pounds?
At least
thirty pounds. Fuck. How do you lose thirty pounds? And how do you do it without giving up booze? How was I supposed to skip the nightly cocktail hours and the feeding frenzies that followed?

I looked at my mother. “Sounds fair,” she said.

“Excellent,” Dr. MacGuffie said. “You lose the weight and get healthy and I'll give you a pair of beautiful, firm breasts.”
Yes, fairy godmother
.

My mom and I looked at each other in the car. “Guess we're not going to Dairy Queen on the way home,” she said.

“I have to go on a fucking diet, like today,” I said staring out the window.

“Only if you want new boobs,” she answered with a smirk. I wanted a drink and a cigarette, badly. Immediately I started thinking about which drinks contained the fewest calories. No more margaritas, no more cosmos, no beer, no wine. Maybe I should just do shots.

When I got back to campus I ate salads for lunch and dinner. Joining a gym for the first time, I discovered that running could make me feel good, not unlike a thick slab of chocolate cake. The process of physically exerting myself was far less enjoyable than lying on a couch and sucking down a milkshake, but as I watched those one-tenth of a mile markers add up on the treadmill, I felt something close to high. On top of the endorphin rush, there was the satisfaction of setting a goal and reaching it. It gave me control. I became obsessive and went to the gym six times a week.

Despite continuing to get drunk regularly, I lost thirty pounds in five months. So in the summer of 1987, just before I entered my senior year in college, Dr. MacGuffie gave me a pair of beautiful, firm breasts.

The weight loss thinned my face which seemed to crank me up a couple of notches in attractiveness, at least judging
by the looks I started getting in bars. Was this what it was like to be kind of cute? Even hot? I let my curly brown hair grow long and streaked it with blonde highlights. And I started wearing clothes to show my body rather than hide it. Maybe I was becoming someone the hot guys would want to sleep with when they were sober.

When I returned to Northwestern that fall, evidence of my transformation exploded all around me. I was getting looks, whistles, and even compliments right to my face. One night, my roommates and I went to a party at an off-campus apartment where we drank keg beer out of giant red cups and yelled at each other over the blare of R.E.M. I wore tight jeans and a low cut V-neck shirt that showed plenty of cleavage, which looked good for the first time in my life. All night my friends and I held up shot glasses full of Jack Daniels and made toasts to my new chest.

Then from behind me, I heard a familiar voice. “Wow. Lisa. Is that you? Wow.” Oh God. It was Rob Johnson, a notorious slut who was once the object of my obsession. He was the ultimate example of my penchant for skinny, androgynous guys who could pull off a nice application of eyeliner. Rob had mile-high cheekbones, bright blue eyes, full red lips, and carefully sculpted hair. A friend had set us up for one of my sorority formals a couple of years earlier.

“Yeah, of course it's me. What's up?” I tried to sound casual, even though my heart was trying to pound its way out of my body. I let my long curls dance on one side of my face, while I pushed the hair on the other side behind my ear.

The last time Rob and I had spoken was after that formal. Rob had cried in my bed during sex. I was at my fattest back then, and I knew that my best chance of getting anywhere with him that night would be through steady, massive infusions
of alcohol—into both of us. We started at the pre-party in the downtown Chicago hotel that was hosting the formal, tossing back only a few mixed drinks that I poured less aggressively than my usual. But once we got to the massive ballroom filled with big hair, big music, and big energy, it was time to really start drinking. Double mixed drinks, shots of tequila, more double mixed drinks, more shots of tequila—I made sure it kept coming. My ability to hold my liquor was astonishing, and I could outdrink every guy I knew. Rob couldn't have weighed more than 140 wet, so he was no match.

We were both smashed by the time we fell into my bed late that night. I couldn't believe my luck. I had played the cool girl all night and managed to get the cool guy home. I needed to take full advantage of this one-time opportunity.

In my room at the sorority house, I didn't even turn on a light because I couldn't bear to have him see me naked. I knew that if he got one unobstructed look at my bare body, it would be over before we started. Kissing, groping, dropping clothes to the floor, I wanted us stripped and under the sheets as quickly as possible. And it worked. We were having sex.
Rob Johnson and Me!

Everything seemed great until I heard a strange kind of whimpering. Was he
crying
?

“Are you OK?” I asked, splayed on my back, trying to find the least unattractive position for my giant naked breasts. “What is it?”

“I don't want to talk about it,” he said, still inside me.

“Talk about what?” I wasn't sure I wanted to hear the answer. Was I so unattractive that I had literally brought him to tears?

“It's just—”
Oh God, he's actually going to tell me
, I thought. I had been so excited just to get him home. Why did he have to ruin it? I wished I could pull on a sweatshirt, a t-shirt, his dress shirt—anything to feel un-naked.

“It's just that, I know I'm such an asshole, and I didn't think I was going to like you so much. You know, actually like you.” Wait,
what
? He didn't think he could like a fat girl? Or he didn't have sex on the first date with people he liked? “It's . . . I know I'm going to blow you off and it's not you. I do it all the time. I don't know what's wrong with me.”

He was already giving me the old “It's not you, it's me,” and we were still joined between our legs! Couldn't he just reject me
after
sex like a normal person?

I eased him off me and rolled to the side of the bed. I almost told him that fat girls like me didn't have expectations with guys like him but instead said, “It's your choice to be an asshole or not. I'm not going to tell you it's cool to be a dick, if that's what you're looking for.”

He had no reply, but at least he stopped whimpering. Then, realizing that I wasn't going to give him my blessing to be a dismissive prick, he put his clothes on and left, looking like an idiot in his rumpled tuxedo with the bright red bowtie sticking out of the jacket pocket. I rolled over into the fetal position.

The memory of that debacle somehow disappeared as Rob stood in front of me, trying to strike up a conversation. “You . . . you really look great,” he said. “It's amazing.” Articulate as ever, I thought, and just as insulting. “You know, about that night—” I couldn't believe he was bringing it up. “I just—I made a really big mistake.”

“It was a long time ago,” I said, surprised by how calm I sounded.

“What are you up to later?”
Oh my God
, I thought.
Oh my God! Rob Johnson is trying to take another run at me.

With exquisite timing, my roommate Kellie appeared out of nowhere, handed me a drink, and grabbed me by my upper arm. “She has plans!” She snorted at him as she led me across the party.
Yeah!
I thought.
Sorry, Rob Johnson, but I have plans. Dismissive prick.

Guys everywhere started paying attention to me and I soaked it in. Before I became a serial monogamist, I was a happily single party girl, and pursuing guys became like a game. I'd get drunk and try to go home with whichever guy my Jagermeister-impaired vision had honed in on that night. It was never romantic or heartfelt. It wasn't even safe.

One summer Saturday night before my first year of law school, I was out with friends at a cheesy bar in Paramus, New Jersey, and spotted a dirty-sexy looking guy standing alone. He had shoulder-length, messy brown curls and looked as if he hadn't slept in days. His expression was bored, as if he'd mistakenly landed in Yuppie Town but decided to stay for a drink anyway.