Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (22 page)

I’m lying on my side, facing the blank white wall, when Milton comes in. I can tell he is wasted by the way he falters onto the bed, clasping me from behind and wiping his wet mouth on my collarbone. I can feel his penis pressed between my shoulder blades like I’m being robbed at knifepoint.

I feel stalled between consciousness and sleep, the way I used to on the mornings when my mother used to wake me up for high school. In my dreams, I’m saying
Go away go away go away,
but in reality I’m not sure I’m exhaling a damn word. My jaw feels too stiff to speak through.

Milton is kneading my rib cage like a ball of dough, hard enough to make me glad I’m this drunk—otherwise, his hands would hurt. Tomorrow, when I’m inspecting the bruises, I’ll think I should have quoted the poet Milton, who said, “He who overcomes by force overcomes by half his foe.” But in the mo-ment, I can’t think at all. Liquor has strained my mind. It has exhausted my heart. My only defense is my vacancy. I hope if I play dead, he’ll leave me alone.

But he won’t leave me alone. Instead, he continues the post-mortem, and on top of it, he starts yelling. It’s not intimidating, exactly, because Milton doesn’t have the blustering roar of a man. He sounds more like a little boy throwing a tantrum in the supermarket checkout aisle. He keeps squealing, “What the fuck is
wrong
with you?”—not because I’m dead drunk, but because I won’t let him touch me.

I gain a little consciousness when I hear an empty rattling and realize Milton is punching the headboard with one fist. In the triangle of light that spills out of the bathroom, his eyes look like two thumbprints.

I squint to focus my gaze, while I try to concentrate on the power in my fingers. I feel like any woman in any movie that has, in order to save herself, willed her drugged or deadened

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digits to move. With enough meditative oomph, I finally complete the Jedi mind trick. My hand makes a swatting motion, and I hear a sloppy, smacking sound that says I’ve made contact. Milton rolls off the bed like a log, more because he’s drunk than because of any real muscle on my part. I am finally left alone, permitted to curl back up with my drunkenness, hugging my own torso like a lover. From here on out, when anyone asks what happened, I’ll say he’s a brute, and he’ll say I’m a prude. For a few minutes in the early morning, I’ll wake up prema-turely and see Milton still sleeping on the floor where he fell, with the faded blue comforter wrapped around him like a torn fishing net. Sunlight will finger the room, and the bureau will be cluttered with cigarette butts and cigarette butt–filled bottles, and the carpet will hold the long, brown stain from somebody’s rum and Coke. My lips will feel achy and swollen, and the

sealed air will smell as musty as death.

I will decide I want to check out of all of this, maybe even for good.

Two weeks
before finals, winter starts to break. Suddenly I am experiencing spring for the first time, the way you can only wholly experience something once you’ve forgotten it ever existed. The sun brightens like a lamp that’s been screwed with a higher wattage of bulb. For once, the city looks less anemic.

In the quad, the snow melts to mud. I sit there in the grass between classes, beside the boys throwing Frisbees and the girls tonguing frozen-yogurt cones. We wear Tshirts, even though the temperature lags, and our skin blushes like it is shocked by its nudity.

For the past few months, I’ve been more interested in going to parties than in fixing my ongoing gymnastics glitches, which

puts me in a less than desirable position when I have to try out for next year’s cheerleading team. It is the absolute last thing I want to do given the weather and the fact that my coach has re-assigned Joe to Hannah.

My new partner is a three-hundred-pound grad student named Ramon, whose main job on the team up until now has been to run the length of the Carrier Dome with the twelve-foot-tall flag that all the other boys are too small to hold. After the very first stunt I do with Ramon at tryouts, my clothes are streaked with his sweat and hair gel. To make matters worse, I fall midway through a back handspring, and rather than getting up, I lie on the mat like a crushed beer can.

I can’t say I’m surprised when I don’t make the team, but the elimination stings anyway. I cry on the floor of the locker room shower for forty minutes, grinding my nails up my shins and against the grout between the floor tiles. Then I decide to coun-tervail the pain by getting drunk.

I go out with one of my sorority sisters, a girl named Grace, to a rock club on Westcott Street, which is the only stretch of Syra-cuse that could ever pass for cool. It is the old hippie part: a few blocks of thrift shops and pagan bookstores, acupuncturists, tapas bars, a community center walled with life-sized mosaics. Among students, the venue is famous for lousy music and acces-sible beer, proving that for two-dollar bottles of Labatt we’ll en-dure untold agony.

When we get there, the club is under new management, and since we don’t have fake IDs, a man at the door marks our hands with gigantic Xs. The marker is black and pervasive, the type that makes your pores look like a game of connect-the-dots and won’t wash off for days. Grace and I storm the bathroom, where ten other girls are huddled at the sink, scrubbing their

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stubborn Xs with hand soap. The best we can do is to fade them to gray. When we leave, the counter is awash with ink-stained paper towels.

We twice try to order beer, but the bartender sees our black-ened hands and threatens to
86
us. I feel despair that’s even worse than the anguish of being eliminated from the team. It’s

worse than romantic rejection. Without a bottle to hold, I feel incomplete, the way Plato says we are each born only half a circle, and we spend our lives seeking out our other half. A drink is my beloved. Without it, I am wanting; I feel half finished.

Fortunately a cigarette company is there, passing out free packs, which seems like a far bigger no-no than serving beer to minors. But I grab a pack, and feel happy to have something to occupy my hands. Without a public project, I am painfully aware of my detachedness. It is a sensation like riding the sub-way without gripping the handrail: Without a beer or a cigarette, something to hold on to, I feel doomed to fall over.

With my free pack, I sulk at a back-most table with Grace, running my fingers through my hair and
click-click-click
ing a disposable lighter. I smoke in a hungry sequence, lighting one cigarette with the tip of another until my throat feels as red as raw steak.

The minimum drinking age is an incomprehensible thing when you’ve been drinking for four years already. Your mind keeps coming back to the past, to the bygone beers that should make you more than eligible to drink in the present. It’s like ap-plying for a job when you have no degree but loads of experience. You tell the bartender, “But, but.” And he says, “If buts were horses, then beggars would ride.” You pine for a taste. A bottle is an old lover mocking you; it’s across the room, being

held by somebody else. Nothing else will ever hold you by the heartstrings. No man could ever fever your chest the same way, or awaken that kind of beauty in you.

Near the speaker, a boy is staring at me. It’s undeniable. He is parked in reverse, with his back to the stage. His gaze spills toward me. I push my hair in front of my face every time I meet his eyes. His stare tears through me like a cleaver. It isn’t the way men stare at women on the street, when they mentally strip them bare and weigh their proportions like lunch meat. Instead, it reminds me of the expression on my mother’s face when I step out at the airport arrival gate. It is that tender look of recogni-tion, the kind that makes me skittish.

Later tonight, when I am washing my face before bed, I’ll de-cide that this boy is shockingly handsome, with sound features and eyes that hold light like a child’s. But in the moment, I’m still lonesome for beer. I decide I can’t stand him.

When a guitarist with dreadlocks tucked under a kerchief croons, “I want to fuck you in
3
-D,” I decide I can’t stay another miserable minute. I kick out my chair and kiss Grace on the

cheek. En route to the door, the phantom man dogs my foot-steps. He is a lanky silhouette that leans down to say something. No words pass through me. I move around him the way I’d by-pass a downed branch in the street.

From what
I can tell, S.U. hasn’t ranked on a list of top party schools in over thirteen years. I know because one day, Tess and I do an Internet search on the subject. Rumor around campus is S.U. made the
Playboy
list in
1987
. But the truth is, out of forty schools listed, mine didn’t even earn a mention. And every year for the next four years, when
The Princeton Review
publishes its own list

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of the top twenty-fi they’ve been doing since
1992
, and something the American Medical Association has called for them to remove on account of its glorifi of binge drinking— someone I know will sigh and say, “We didn’t make the cut.” No doubt the omission relieves school offi But within the circles in which I travel, it is a blighted hope, a defi .

This is because college, like most life experiences, doesn’t look as good in real life as it looks on TV. Specifically, it doesn’t look as good as it does on MTV. The network’s coverage of spring break first premiered when I was five, from which time I hon-estly believed that college was what I saw in their ninety-second promo spots. I thought it was all body shots and wet-T-shirt contests, girls shimmying on life rafts, and paranormally hot folks swapping underwear. I imagine that other people still do think

this. Because in May
1999
, when MTV brings its “Campus Inva—

sion” to S.U., smack in the middle of the study days that precede finals, the mood on campus goes from stirred-up to manic.

It’s strange the things the university does to celebrate its own year-end windup. Not only does the administration permit the MTV idiocy, the condom expo and video-game booths and second-rate performances by third-rate pop stars, it also sponsors carnivals on the lawn outside the underclassmen dorms, complete with ring tosses, animal balloons, and cotton candy circu-lating on sticks. Outside my dorm window, the dining-hall cook flips hamburgers on a hibachi. Freshmen are bucking on a thirty-foot-high inflatable castle, the kind the rental company won’t let you jump on without taking your shoes off. The envi-ronment on campus looks totally age inappropriate, like the site of an eight-year-old’s birthday party. All the girls on my floor get drunk or high, and hop on the castle in the name of irony.

• • •

That night
I go with Hannah to the school year’s real finale, an annual block party on Livingston Avenue, which students call Livingstock. It’s a haphazard series of off-campus parties hosted by upperclassmen. Many of them are in houses we’ve haunted throughout freshman year, when we’d drop three dollars in a vase at the door in exchange for tapping the keg. But tonight’s festivities are more or less complementary; anyone is free to fill a cup.

Kegs are proudly displayed on front stoops and street corners, the way plastic Santas are set out at Christmas. No one appears to be afraid of repercussions from campus security. Half of us are finished with finals, and the school year feels as unalterable as our blue exam books and bubble sheets full of ink-shaded circles. Whether we’re passing or failing or just getting by, our fate seems sealed.

Livingston Avenue is a stubby little road, less than half a mile long. And tonight, every square foot seems to be filled with hu-man bodies. Tomorrow, the city newspaper will tally the head count at over a thousand. Hannah and I bound through them all, recognizing no one and saying hi to everyone, drifting in and out of houses, lifting Jell-O shots off kitchen counters, al-lowing guys to pry the caps off our beers. For a change, there is live music. Behind the balustrade of a front porch, a girl with a halo of white-blond curls coos into a microphone. Her face undulates. Her syllables, thick with breath, swell like rainwater in the street.

Normally, I keep track of how many drinks I have, if not in the interest of charting how punchy I am, then for the sake of comparing hangovers with Tess the morning after, when we sit in the dining hall, heads throbbing, and say, “I can’t believe I

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drank five (or six or seven); I didn’t know I could physically do that.” But tonight I can’t work out how much I’ve tossed back. I can’t even pin it to a crude estimate. The night is warm and the beer is warm, and I feel starry-eyed. Everything I look at has a ripple to it.

Somewhere there is the sound of glass breaking against the sidewalk. In a second, I spin around and see that Hannah is gone to the crowd, to white lights and dim wailing and faces all bleeding together. I feel the way I did at age six when I lost hold of my father’s hand in the L. L. Bean factory store. I’m alone at the road bend. If I wasn’t past gone, I’d be panicked. I reach out for the first arm I can grab hold of. It’s attached to my phantom man, the one from the rock club.

Under normal circumstances, this would be a coincidence of catastrophic proportions. But phased and plenty drunk, standing arm in arm with him feels like the most natural cosmic course of events.

I lean into him and say, “I saw you on Westcott Street.” He says, “I saw you, too.”

As we stand, stock-still, there is confusion going on all around us. Flames surge up from lawn chairs piled in the street. People on the roof of a house are chanting, “Hell, no, we won’t go.” More are running through the broad spray of a hose, the way my sister and I used to run through sprinklers in our front yard when we were young. Men in uniforms force themselves through doorways. Airborne bottles are everywhere, whizzing by us like paper airplanes.