Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (15 page)

It doesn’t take long. I rejoin the pack when an eleventh-grade girl, drunk on whiskey, puts a cigarette out on her ex-boyfriend’s face. It allows me to sneak back into the game like someone who has been tossed out of dodgeball, in spite of being pronounced of-ficially “out.” I do it while the world is distracted, hurling its am-munition at somebody else.

ALL YOU CAN DRINK
‌

There couldn’t be
a better name for freshman year of college. Every year,
2.5
million Americans sally forth for their first semester, an experience that isn’t just foreign, it’s unsullied, like a brand-new T-shirt to push their heads through.

Four years later, when graduation impels us into some obliged nostalgia, many of us will say our first year was our favorite year of college because the fabric of experience was still vivid. Freshman year has a freshness that will be absent later, when campus life feels thick with impurities and the novelty of self-sufficiency has faded. The small acts of sovereignty that exhilarated us during those beginning months, like wearing

slippers to class or eating Lucky Charms for dinner, will be old hat by graduation. Like the desktop computers we bought be-fore we left home, it will be hard to believe there was ever a time these things looked new.

Drinking is particularly fresh at the beginning. Even if you drank every weekend in high school, to the point where you were all but sick of those frothy cups of Bud Light, college will renew your enthusiasm for them—namely because there will be an overwhelming sentiment that underage drinking is now okay. The adult universe may not extol the nights we’ll spend swallowing enough rum to pass out on the tile floor of the dorm bathroom, but they accept it as a part of the college experience, a life-stage behavior as inevitable as bad eating habits and casual sex. Administrators at the University of Colorado have gone so far as to propose “drinking permits,” which would allow students to drink even if they’re not yet twenty-one.

As a freshman, I will quickly discover that even when I’m not drunk or hungover, adults will assume I am anyway. During a particularly silent Friday-morning class, a teacher will say, to the rows of students drooping over the kidney-shaped surfaces of their school desks, “It looks like you all started the weekend early.” When I go to the emergency room with a gut-wrenching stomach virus, the doctor, refusing to believe some natural sick-ness landed me on his collapsible cot, will repeatedly ask, “Are you sure you’re not drunk?” followed by, “Are you sure you’re not pregnant?”

When Robert Frost said, “College is refuge from hasty judg-ment,” he was undoubtedly referring to the infinite hours of class time spent debating one topic or another, but the quote can easily be used to describe the way college insulates students in

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regard to alcohol abuse. Before and after college, drinking one-self into a state of blissful oblivion requires a degree of secrecy. In high school, it needs to be hidden from parents. In the working world, it must be downplayed to bosses, or concerned friends, or lovers. But in college, we can wear our alcohol abuse as proudly as our university sweatshirts; the two concepts are virtually synonymous.

We arrive
at Syracuse University in two cars. My dad and my sister ride in one, and my mom and I take turns driving the other. The backseats are piled high with things that are mine alone: a computer, a desk lamp, bed linens, flip-flops for the shower, hiking boots for the
115
annual inches of snow, a yellow parka that will always look too hopeful to wear. My assets are spanking-new and still creased from the box. Still, when upperclassmen, unloading freshmen luggage for credit, pile my boxes onto the sidewalk, it looks like the Pyramid of Giza, and I am disturbed by how much of the past I am carting in with me.

I didn’t want
to go to S.U. But, then, I didn’t want to enroll in any of the schools that would have me. Years of academic am-bivalence had caught up with me. Of the six schools I applied to, I was waitlisted by three and rejected outright by one. I was accepted to S.U., the school my parents were pushing for, and to a neo-hippie liberal arts school in the Finger Lakes, the one that I preferred. I waited until the night before the deadline to decide between the two. For an hour, I sat at the kitchen table with slick pamphlets spread out in front of me, comparing pictures of grin-ning students in lab goggles. Later, I’ll suspect the university re-cycles these coeds; they bear a curious resemblance to the ones

pictured on campus flyers that read,
most s
.
u
.
students don
’
t binge drink
!*

I finally chose S.U. for what my mom calls “the total college experience”: for community darkrooms, club snowboarding, and Big East basketball tickets—things that, in four years, I will never see or do or buy.

Everything about the city of Syracuse is gray: the ancient six-story candle factories, the slate slab of monument in Clinton Square, the fog standing fast over Lake Ontario, the pale asphalt

trail of Interstate
81
. Even in August, everything has the color

and smell of salt, residuum from the tons the city dumps on the streets and sidewalks in a vain attempt to break the ice that will never thaw away. Syracuse’s official motto is “A City for All Seasons,” but during the months that I’m there it will be perpet-ual winter.

S.U. resides, like Goblin City, above the city’s duplexes and one-way streets, state fairgrounds, a Native American reserva-tion, a metastasizing mall, and a few neighborhoods that you don’t want to get lost in but do anyway. Locals refer to it as “the hill” because its Romanesque halls sit on a slope overlooking the state psychiatric hospital and a stretch of federally funded hous-ing, exerting their out-and-out massiveness. A bird’s-eye view of the city shows the six-and-a-half-acre roof of the Carrier Dome like a giant bleach stain on a gray T-shirt. The sports sta-dium was named after its benefactor, Carrier Air Conditioning, but we will later joke it is because it “carries” Michelob during games.

Nestled less than one mile away, in the valley below, are

*In
1999
, S.U. administrators sincerely thought this campaign was the best allocation of the

$
88,435
the school received from the U.S. Department of Education under its Alcohol and Other Drug Prevention Models on College Campuses grant competition.

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thirty-two bars, six liquor stores, and twelve mini-marts that sell beer cans in brown-paper lunch bags.

I have
immediate trouble making nice.

My room is on a girls-only floor of Brewster Hall. The floor is an L-shaped configuration of rooms: two corridors of doors, each trimmed with daisies cut from orange construction paper

and lettered with each girl’s name and hometown—
carey w
.,

parkersburg
,
or
.
rose f
.,
laurel
,
md
.
tanya c
.,
avenel
,
nj
.
I have a roommate named Wendi P., a snarl-mouthed theater major who has already traveled the length of the L, knocking on doors and shaking hands with just about everybody.

I, on the other hand, sit on the extra-long bed that my mother fussily made just a few hours ago, shielding my face behind a paperback and reading the same paragraph over and over because I can’t seem to concentrate. The door to the room is open, so I won’t seem overtly antisocial, and through it, I can hear half a dozen stereos clamoring in a way that strikes me as territorial. In the hallway, I can also hear acquaintances being made. Girls are speaking in the chirping tones of false enthusiasm, and I hold my breath for a moment of closer listening, to see if I can match the voices to the names I’ve read on the doors. I know I could, and maybe should, poke my head into the hallway and introduce myself, but I haven’t the faintest idea what I’d say be-yond giving my name.

Within a few hours of our arrival, our resident adviser, Jana A., calls the floor’s thirty residents to the lounge for an orientation meeting. I sit on the charcoal-colored carpet, cuddling my knees and trying to figure out how the twenty-nine other girls appear to be good friends already. They have paired off into cliques of five or six, based on the proximity of their dorm

rooms. While Jana reviews the rules about quiet hours, fire drills, and how to handle roommate disputes, the lounge hums with the undertones of girls joking among themselves.

But by the time she gets to the drug and alcohol policy, the room is mum. The girls stop murmuring and sit upright in a solemn moment of silence. Jana says, “Oh,
now
I have your full attention.” She reads aloud from the student handbook. It’s the full deal about how the university is “deeply committed to pro-viding a safe and healthy learning environment,” and how “abusing alcohol interferes with one’s ability to fully participate in the academic community.” The doctrine is roughly as follows:

• Do not buy, drink, or hide alcohol in your desk drawers, if you are under
  21
  .
  

• Do not be publicly shit-faced.
  

• Do not drink and drive.
  

• Do not make, use, or sell fake IDs.
  

• If you are caught in the act of any of the aforementioned sins, you will be subject to extreme brutality, also known as weekly meetings with an addiction counselor.
  

When Jana finishes reading, she closes the handbook and hugs it to her chest. Her arms are tan and sturdy. She is the type of girl I expect to find at S.U., but in the end will meet very few of. She has a comic, honest face that looks wholly practical. Everyone watches her with the distinct feeling that she will say more. “Look,” she says, lowering her voice and leaning down the way people do when they speak to children. “I know what goes on. I was in your shoes just one year ago. Believe me, I’m not go-ing to go out of my way to get you into trouble. I don’t want to report you any more than you want to be reported. If you drink,

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keep your voices down and your doors closed. What goes on be-hind closed doors is your business.”

Someone in the back of the room makes a crowing noise that turns into a war cry. More girls clap. Jana’s eyes go as big as quarters, and she looks over both her shoulders like she’s check-ing to make sure the resident director hasn’t crept up behind her. She presses her index finger to her lips and breathes a fierce
Shhh.

With that, we establish our own understanding of the university alcohol policy. The guiding principle is
Out of sight, out of mind.
That is to say, as long as we keep our drinking out of sight, the administration won’t mind if we do it.

I go to
my first party two days after I go to my first class, which feels deviant but statistically isn’t, since half of all freshmen find their first binge-drinking opportunity within the first week of college, often before they’ve even purchased any textbooks.*

In truth, I don’t even care to go. Sometime after I had my stomach pumped, alcohol, the powers of which I once held as supernatural, was pushed to my mind’s periphery when puppy love materialized in the form of a boyfriend named Reed. Reed nearly repulsed me at first, with his wool sweaters, unwashed hair, and the scent of sweat and pot he wore like eau de cologne. But he came into my life like a bowling ball tossed into a bird-bath, which is to say, my adoration for him displaced my passion for everything else. When Reed appeared, my desire to drink— along with my desire to spend time with family and friends— sloshed out of my consciousness in one swell.

Of course, the appearance of Reed seems unrelated to the

*The
2001
Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study.

abrupt disappearance of alcohol. It will take more accidents and more men before I can discern the pattern. Only then will I be able to see that every time the consequences of drinking leave me too shaken, I break from it and bury myself in the safety of some schoolboy’s arms.

For now, I am rapt with Reed, and he is six hours away at the University of New Hampshire. Instead of going to a party, I’d rather be in my dorm room, draining a calling card of untold minutes during one of our nightly talks.

I only agree to go because when Wendi and a girl named Tess invite me to go along with them, it is the first bit of dialogue I’ve had in three days. I go because I am already a week ahead in my class reading. I have already eaten five meals alone in the cafeteria. I have already called two other universities to inquire about transferring. I go because I have been pulled from sleep the past three nights by girls’ laughter, which sang through the cinderblock walls of my room like notes played in soft repetition. I go because already I feel isolation I swear I could die from, loneliness and panic so stifling they might asphyxiate me as I sleep.

I go because a party is the only way I can think of to make friends.

The party is in the basement of a house at the far end of Eu-clid Avenue, which is a residential street west of campus where upperclassmen rent time-ravaged duplexes, a good three miles from my new address.

Tess got the street number from junior boys distributing flyers in the freshmen dorms, which is a weekly occurrence we will come to look forward to. The weekly barrage of pamphlets ad-vertising off-campus parties will arrive more often than takeout menus, and in the beginning months, we will spend much of our

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time comparing their bills of fare, debating the merits of Jell-O shots versus mixed drinks, kegs versus all the cans you can drink. En route to the party, we amble up the sloped sidewalks of North Campus, past the domed roof of the chapel, the university bookstore, and the alumni center, which was once a frat house. Tess shares her cigarettes with me. Wendi doesn’t smoke and, I’ll find out later, hardly drinks. The stroll through campus reminds me of the time I walked through a carnival after all the rides had shut down; everything looks just that ghoulish, just