Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (20 page)

My heart thrashes in my chest like a drowning man, until someone figures out that the drivers are alumnae. They are Ze-tas who graduated two and three years ago. The apartment they take us to belongs to two more former Zetas, both grad students. It is much more grown-up than the off-campus apartments where we go to house parties, which are usually a mess of neon beer signs, cigarette butts in the sink, and bookshelves con-structed from police barricades and raw lumber. Even in the dark, the whole room is a rainy green. There are kiwi-colored walls and pesto-colored futons. Jute rugs line the hardwood floors. The only light comes from the stairway, where there is a lit candle on every step. We sit where we’re told to, around a cof-fee table, on velvet floor cushions the verdant shade of aloe vera. A girl in a black ski cap carries out a tray of two dozen beer bottles and explains the rules. They are going to turn on the stereo, and every time we hear The Police sing “Roxanne” we are going to drink. One pledge cries, “Are you kidding? They repeat it a bajillion times!” In reality, I think it works out to

about twenty-five gulps in two minutes.

The music kicks in like a thunderclap. I don’t have time

to acknowledge the gyre of nerves in my stomach before it’s
Roxanne
over the bottles clinking on and off the table,
Roxanne
over the slow giggles of the alumnae who are reclining on the futons and playing along even though no one’s forcing them.
Roxanne. Roxanne. Roxanne.
I usually consider myself pretty good at this, but I find myself “putting on the red light,” and missing a few refrains until an alumna warns me to pick it up. Every gulp makes my stomach flop like a sunfish.

By the time the song fades out, I’ve drained only one Miche-lob, and we can’t leave for the next destination until we each fin-ish two. The alumnae make me sit on the floor, drinking until both bottles are empty, the same way my parents used to keep me at the dinner table until I swallowed every last pea.

Tonight will turn out to be the only time we will ever be hazed by being forced to drink. The following year, Zeta will scratch the big-sister scavenger hunt for good when the house elects to make its pledge period totally dry, meaning no drinking whatsoever for new members because the implications are just too risky. Ironically enough, for the next three years, pledges will beg for the drinking in its absence. They’ll ap-proach sisters over and over again to say: “We
want
to be hazed.
Make
us drink.
Please,
funnel gin down our throats.”

It’s hard to say why so many of us crave this type of humiliation by intoxication. Maybe it’s because, for some girls, drinking is a scarily intense need: if not a physiological need, then certainly a mental and emotional one.

Usually, if you
need
alcohol you can’t admit it, unless you are

in AA, at which point you can’t proceed
without
first admitting it. And usually, once you do own up to the fact that you’re powerless over Bud Light, some gruff-faced addiction counselor

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makes it clear that you can’t have it ever again. Being hazed, however, is one of the few times you can actually admit you are powerless
while
you coat your insides with light beer. You can lean back into defenselessness, into the voices chanting “Drink, drink, drink.” For a solitary moment in time, you can claim you aren’t responsible for your own disasters. You have the elbow room to say: “Of course I’m a mess. I didn’t have a choice in the matter.”

The alumnae cart us from one off-campus apartment to another, driving despite the fact that they’ve been drinking right along with us. When they get loaded enough, they give in and let us smoke in the car, even though they first warned us it would mean our asses. In the backseat, we fall into each other at every turn. Embers tumble everywhere, and smoke curls around us like halos.

In the future, I will come across many people who don’t understand hazing. They don’t understand why anyone would want to endure humiliation in order to be a part of a team, or why, for that matter, they would desire the company of such sadists to be-gin with. For me, hazing is more about masochism than peer pressure. For me, the alumnae feel like the only friends that have the guts to say, “Yes, your ass looks gigantic in those jeans.” On the inside, I feel like a real shithead. And on the outside, they confi that I am. I respect them for that, the way Sylvia Plath says, “Every woman adores a fascist, the boot in the face.”

For some of us, fear and humiliation feel honest. They ensure devotion more than reverence, more than love. The damned loves the hand of the executioner. And compassion holds more weight when it follows ruthlessness. Frankly speaking, “You’ve got to be cruel to be kind.”

• • •

We stop
at a Tudor, where an older girl shows me how to smoke from a ceramic water bong shaped like a serpent, and then pushes me to fill my lungs again and again. We go to a frat house where the brothers make us down screwdrivers and read
Penthouse Letters
aloud (Maya tells me later that the porn was the boys’ personal touch). And then we go to a sublevel apartment on Lancaster Avenue, where boys tie our hands behind our backs and force us to eat pot brownies off the kitchen floor, which, it’s worth noting, is
not
clean enough to eat from.

By the time we make it to the beanbag chairs in somebody’s attic, everyone, including the hazers, the hazees, and the hosts, is drunkity-drunk. An alumna brings home a pledge who is passed out and puking.

The rest of us are dropped off at Forty-Fours, an S.U. sports bar that got its name because eleven of the university’s football players have worn that number, and three of them have earned all-American honors. The sign on the outside of the bar is

printed with the slogan
a syracuse tradition
,
though it will

always be unclear to me whether the owners mean to say that the jersey or the drinking is traditional.

I’m admitted with a fake ID that has appeared in my pocket from nowhere.

Maya is smack in front of me as I shoulder through the door. I don’t have the faculties to put two and two together, to even no-tice that she’s got a lei on, too. Instead, I just fall into her. Even if I hadn’t already suspected that she was my big sister, one of the boys who forced me to read the sentence “Her fi danced over the material and she began unbuttoning his jeans” had told me out-right. I can’t even pretend to be surprised. Drunk and stoned, I’m like a turtle without a shell, just that soft and demented.

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• • •

I already had
a rapport with Maya. I like the stream-of- consciousness messages she leaves on my answering machine, the way she can wind around what she is trying to say for a full ten minutes. I like her windswept hair, and her one-armed sweaters, and her motorcycle boots. I like the way she calls out my name across the quad, no matter how many people are circulating between classes or how far away I am when she spots me.

But the evening’s hazing has secured our union. It has bonded us the same way physical fights with my real sister brought us closer when we were young, when I would acciden-tally knock her hard enough to make her bottom lip bleed, and if she agreed not to tell our mom, I’d feel so thankful that I wouldn’t deck her again for at least a week. Maya and I have the same kind of trust in torture. I keep the confidence of the haz-ing, and she keeps me as her graceless namesake. She even lets me make her a wooden paddle painted with our names, the age-old Greek symbol of our sadomasochistic connection.

At Forty-Fours, someone takes a picture of the whole lot of us while we lean together, looking stunned by the flash of the bulb. I have my head on Maya’s shoulder, eyes drooping. My mouth is bent into an eerie smile, lips smeared with the garish red lipstick I forgot the alumnae put on me. Tomorrow, I won’t remember much about this bar, which is the first I’ve ever been in. I will remember only how it felt to be someone’s little sister, how good it felt to be relieved of the terrible burden of good judgment. I am relieved, for that matter, of the ability to make choices at all.

Already in college, the inability to be defenseless is the thing that makes me homesick. It kills me to think of all those years in high school when I lived for the idea of being on my own. The

reality is exhausting and lonesome. Already, I’m finding it takes too much energy to do the things that people do to pass for com-petent adults. Walking in the snow to a study group, or to the student store to buy a new toothbrush, requires a valiant effort. Some days, so does getting dressed; that’s why the vast majority of us go to class wearing pajamas.

Even when I’m drunk, my nights will almost always be marred by the indecision of my days. I will spend fifteen stag-gering minutes trying to figure out what drink to order, which knob to pull on the cigarette machine, whether or not to let some boy from my sociology class walk me home.

Tonight it is a great comfort to have Maya telling me what to do. In some ways, from here on out, alcohol will act as my power of attorney. I will drink to incapacitate myself, and then let sisters or friends decide things for me. I will enjoy delegating my authority. I’ve never been one to mind not having a mind of my own.

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By the time
I am initiated into Zeta as a full-fledged member, excess is my main objective for any night. When I drink, I aim to exceed a state of being just drunk, and enter instead into a state of consciousness that is more like annihilation of brain waves.

Of course, that word,
excess,
won’t occur to me until years later. It isn’t possible to exceed normal when my drinking feels normal to begin with, when geography makes it acceptable, when everybody is doing it, and when
too much
never seems to be sufficient, anyway. I won’t realize until much later that every sorority function resembles a five-day meth binge in a Kansas City RV park: For however long they last, I live in my own filth. I am united with strangers solely by my interest in getting high,

talking about getting high, and doing everything I can to main-tain that high.

Of course, Coors isn’t crank or coke or crack. And Heineken isn’t heroin. And vodka isn’t Valium. And nothing that’s mixed with cranberry juice will score you respect with the folks who cop drugs in the public bathroom in Tompkins Square Park. But don’t tell that to my brain because when I’m drunk, it purrs with the ecstasy of being thoroughly
high.

By the time I am initiated into Zeta, I am like any other junkie left alone with her drug of choice. Amstel Light is my upper and my downer, it is my euphoric bump, my sweet nod into vagueness, the hallucinogenic that contorts my world into one that’s worth living in. After two beers, there is no question as to whether I should have two more. After four, my world is the first forty minutes of a movie so moving I can’t bear for it to end, or a cake so sweet I can’t help but cut another, and then another, sliver. My reality is a climax so close I can’t bear to pull away.

I am formally
initiated into Zeta at four
a.m.
on a Wednesday in March.

The ceremony proves to be the most disorienting experience I will ever undergo while sober. Sisters in hockey masks and black robes tackle and blindfold me the moment I step through the door. The soundtrack from
2001:
A Space Odyssey
is screaming from a tape deck in the foyer, and someone is clanging pots and pans so loud that the neighbors call the police.

I’m dazed throughout most of the process. Zetas are covering my eyes or my ears. My skin feels weirdly wet. My senses are all discombobulated. The only part I’m really lucid for is when I’m made to drink with Maya from a ceremonial chalice, which is

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filled with spiced cider that tastes alcoholic but isn’t. Afterward, someone pushes me down onto a folding chair inside a shower stall. I sit there for an hour, staring at the drain and cradling my elbows, until the Zetas pull back the vinyl curtain, toss me a sweatshirt stitched with the sorority’s letters, and offer hugs of congratulations.

The best part about being a full sister is that, for a while, it really does give me more to do. Every Sunday night, we have “chapter,” which is the Greek term for the mandatory weekly meeting at which we discuss recycling the house’s milk cartons, redecorating the rec room, bake sales for elder care, Frisbee tosses for fibromyalgia, Greek Week, alumnae luncheons, and other incidental babble. Zeta’s secretary takes a role call and I get to cry out “Oy coy,” meaning “here,” when she reads my newly given Greek name, “Alcina,” after the sorceress who turned her friends and lovers into trees and stones after she tired of them. Chapter closes with announcements from Zeta’s social director, Robin, who plans our parties.

Robin plans a party for most weekends, and during chapter, we struggle to scribble down the dates in our day planners. Most of the parties have a theme, lest drinking until we see double gets dull. There’s a kindergarten party with Gamma Psi, to which we all wear Catholic-school uniforms and suck on baby bottles filled with gin-milk punch. There’s a pajama party at Sigma Tau, where the boys wear silk pajamas and serve “sleepers,” and a pil-low fight leaves the den littered with stray feathers and slippers. One Saturday night, we have an “Anything for Money” party with Phi Chi Omega, where the goal is to earn as much Monop-oly money as you can by lapping whipped cream off other people’s navels, and performing other sex acts for currency. The girl who has the biggest bankroll when the party ends wins a