Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (39 page)

The decorum that so many professors had me coming to ex-pect doesn’t exist beyond the executive level. There are few neckties at work, and no panty hose. Instead, everyone has dirty hair and nicotine-stained fingers. Most of the office twenty-and thirtysomethings blow into meetings wearing rumpled jeans

and suede sneakers. They curse constantly, even passionately, because every task is urgent and
fuck
is the most urgent exple-tive. Every day, the lunchroom is filled with girls tallying their daily Weight Watchers points and talking of cutting food calo-ries for the sake of drinking more booze.

I am an advertising assistant. This means it is my job to aid the magazine’s mostly female sales reps, and it is their job to go to product launch parties after work, to sample the latest brands of flavored vodka and sweet talk brand managers who might buy ads in the September issue. The women for whom I photo-copy things are all blond, and striking in their caramel-colored pantsuits and five-hundred-dollar heels. They swallow diet pills that they disguise in vitamin bottles and store in their desk drawers. They break for bikini waxes between appointments. These are women for whom martini lunches still exist. After lunch with executives from a liquor company, they skip in with flushed cheeks and collapse into their chairs; they push their bangs off their foreheads and say, “Whoa, I’m tipsy.” The asso-ciate publisher, also female, laughs often and praises them for their drinking stamina, for their ability to keep up with male executives from a Scotch whiskey company.

It doesn’t take me long to realize how much business is done over drinks. Of course, no one would dare say that outright. No boss could reprimand you for not attending a staff party where

the magazine’s music editors smoke a joint in the boardroom and the soon-to-be director of marketing downs enough
7
&
7
s to do a red-faced rendition of the general manager. But when the

stomach flu forces me to miss an office party, my bosses assure me I missed a hell of a time. In a way, I feel left out as a result of it. I can tell margaritas bonded the people that sit in adjacent cubicles. They are gossiping over email, discussing in the pop-up

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boxes of their computer screens the magazine’s celebrity founder, who got drunk and fell off the stage during his speech.

I find out that I will never get promoted without networking, and networking is what happens when the women I work with are drunk off their saucers. The few times that I clink glasses with my colleagues, they tell me about the magazines they’ve worked for before and the interviews they’re going to on the sly. They confi in me about their ex-boyfriends and ex-roommates, and they look to commiserate about the people who make waves for them at work.

Still, in the year that I work at the magazine, I’ll go to just one corporate party.

It is a celebration for the advertising and marketing depart-ments, held at the Connecticut home of one of the magazine’s publishers. Work ends promptly at five on the Thursday of the party, which is rare, and the whole staff piles into three buses for the drive up the Bruckner Expressway. During the ride, we lamely discuss clients, ad pages, and overdue deadlines.

But something changes once we arrive and begin ordering cocktails from starch-shirted caterers. Each glass of liquor loosens some collective tension, which I think I can chart by the slipping knots of men’s ties. By the time the sun plunges into the tree line and the mosquitoes come out, the office’s notorious control freak is twirling in front of the band and keeping time on a tambourine. One of the male sales reps grabs me by the hip and slurringly asks if I like Led Zeppelin. I sip two glasses of white wine with ice cubes, which is not enough to make me any less anxious. The women I work with shake their hips and make wafting gestures that mean
come and dance with us,
but I only last for a few minutes of tambourine thumping before I get embarrassed and scuttle back to my lawn chair.

I suppose I should feel relieved by the prevalent drinking cul-ture at work. Hanging about at the bar across the street from the office, I ought to be in my element. I ought to drink Cabernet and let it unfix me enough to play darts with my bosses, or let the IT technician tell me jokes, or feed compliments to the assistants who hate me. Instead, I drink very little, or not a drop. And after a time, I start inventing doctors’ appointments and dinners with aunts. I make up reasons why I can’t go out at all after work.

I surprise myself this way.

Years later, I’ll think I avoided drinking with colleagues because alcohol had been my private passion, and it was charged with an eroticism that felt highly intimate. I’d never gotten drunk with adults, older people, relatives, even men. Those people always made me feel self-conscious and silly, as though I were drinking as a child or a female, or, as my women’s studies professors always said, an Other.

Or I might shrink from it because I know I am at a high risk for humiliating myself. I don’t want to suffer the same fate as the young female assistants at other companies. I don’t want to be like the girls who puke or pass out in front of clients. They end up being the jokes of interoffice emails, until they get fired or their scandals end up on Page Six.

Either way, I only come unglued with my female friends, when our excess can’t be pinned to a stage or an age. Mostly, I still drink with Vanessa because our alcohol abuse still has a comfortable symmetry.

In September
, Vanessa gets a job as a production assistant at a cable network, and we get the idea to throw a celebratory party. My old roommate April helps us post our invitation on a Web

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site. Our apartment is too small to house the people that RSVP yes, so we decide to throw the party on the roof. Vanessa goes to a hardware store to buy long-burning deck candles and strands of Christmas bulbs so we’ll have light outside. I go to the grocery store to buy strawberries, obscene-looking shrimp, long ropes of French bread, and wedges of rank gourmet cheese. Even as I buy it, I know the spread will look shabby and sad on the chipped pink plates that we use for platters. But it feels good to labor over a project outside of work at the magazine, where tasks occupy my hands but not my head, which wanders toward questions of romance or career, concepts that are deeper and more troubling.

On the day of the party, the only thing left to worry about is liquor, which Vanessa and I run to buy at The Bottle Shop. We spend a long time in the store, scrutinizing labels, unable to de-cide. If we buy vodka, we have to buy juice or tonic water. If we buy rum, we have to buy Coke. When Vanessa asks the salesgirl for recommendations, she suggests we buy Blue Curaçao and Sambuca to make drinks called “Blue Smurfs.” We chip in to buy the bottles, even though the drink name is dumb and redundant. Before anyone arrives, we try out the recipe in the fat flower vase we use for a pitcher, and pour it into martini glasses we got as party favors at a Zeta formal. The drinks are the color of

Windex, and they stain our tongues.

April is the first person to arrive. When she swings open the dented door to the roof, Vanessa and I are leaning over the lip of the building and looking for people we recognize on the street. I’ve already swallowed two Smurfs, and Second Avenue looks like an arcade game from six stories up. Cabs shoot by in both directions, charging on cars like Pacmen eating whatever it is that they eat. All at once, I feel a surge of vertigo. The cigarette I’m holding slides through my fingers and over the side.

Normally, two glasses of anything wouldn’t waste me. Plus the shallow glasses that I drank from held liquor in piddling amounts. But I haven’t eaten in two straight days. Vanessa gave me a Phentermine pill that she ordered online from a foreign pharmacy, saying it would speed me through a long day at work. The diet pill stayed with me, turning my stomach at the taste of everything from toast to water, and without food in my system, the blue liqueur must have been absorbed instantly. I am crouching on the tar roof, shuddering with my head between my knees.

The next thing I see is the emblem on the toilet that reads

crane plumbing
. Above the words is a blue cartoon heron that I watch while I vomit blue drinks. My precision is minimal and leaves stains that no grout cleaner will ever get out. Either April or Vanessa is holding my hair, and trying to stop laughing. I am leaning so far into the bowl that the sides clear my shoulders. It probably looks like a portal I am trying to escape through.

The party starts at nine-thirty. Friends and acquaintances and love interests come from all over the city, plus New Jersey and Long Island. People bring snapshots from graduation and bottles of wine tied off with ribbon. A boy I like sits in one of the chairs on the roof, drinking beer in the glitter of the Christmas lights and eating my shoddy hors d’oeuvres. He tells Vanessa that he came specifically to see me, but it’s been two hours since she tucked me, passed-out, into bed.

There is
no point to meeting men anymore. I’ve learned that no substantial romance can come from the bartender at a Green-wich Village taproom who scrawls his phone number between the pages of my journal. I don’t expect real endearment from the graphic designers, booking agents, and freelance photographers

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who introduce themselves in bars; I particularly hate the way they slip me their business cards, which makes the transaction feel like one.

Whereas Vanessa continues to have spellbinding three-week relationships with the men she meets in pubs—imagining that each one is
the one
and picturing the princess-cut engagement ring, the Amsale gown, the ceremony at St. James the Less, and the sunset reception at Sunningdale Country Club—all romantic optimism is gone from me. I don’t trust men, don’t believe in them. And while I’ll still find myself sitting on the lap of some principal dancer I just met, letting him nuzzle my ear and tell me there’s elegant choreography in the way I hold a wineglass, I don’t trick myself into thinking he likes me. Rejecting the concept of romance is almost as freeing as renouncing God. It means I can forget conscience, and do whatever I feel like.

I treat men more like anthropological specimens than love interests. I don’t give out my phone number or make movie dates. I don’t want their kisses or their false compliments. I just want their stories. In bars, I let men brush my hand because I want them to tell me about their hometowns and high school teach-ers, their punk-pop revival bands and dead-end day jobs, their abusive fathers, drug-addicted mothers, and sisters in bacterial comas. I am only interested in men as voyeuristic opportunities. In public, I pay attention to the watches they wear, the books they read, and the food they pitch into their grocery carts. I study them because I want to understand them. I want to decide if they are the adversaries I think they are.

That is my goal when I agree to share a cab with two strange men after a three-martini night.

It’s three
a.m.
and Vanessa and I are tottering out of a bar in

the meat packing district. I have decided to wear the strap of my

purse around my neck, and she is trying to hail a cab with both hands held out in front of her, like someone groping through a thick fog. When one finally swerves to the curb, two men in black dress shirts cut us off and slide into its backseat. They have the sense of entitlement that I hate in men, and I thump the win-dow with the palms of my hands. I am the brave kind of drunk, where I can feel my adrenaline rising, my heart pumping vodka. I decide I have no problem dragging them out by the stays in their shirt collars. Vanessa, however, doesn’t have any male-specific scorn. She asks them to drop us off at home on their way uptown.

I sit up front with the driver, enjoying the reckless, late-night speed with which cabs always thrust up Park Avenue. When I turn around to face Vanessa, she is kissing one of them; her cheeks puff and contract like some slime-sucking fish. When the cab stops short in front of their apartment she wants to ac-cept the men’s invitation to go upstairs. And while I have no de-sire to spend time with either of them, I know I will have ample opportunity to study their bookshelves, DVD cases, and kitchen cabinets.

I realize how drunk I am when I swing open the cab’s door. For a moment, the sidewalk is a raft that glides away from me as I step onto it, and I have to flap my arms to catch my balance. The building’s lobby is a blur of plant leaves and lampshades that I lope through to catch up to Vanessa and the men. By now, I know better than to let her out of my sight. I don’t trust strange, drunken men. Or any men at all, for that matter.

When we reach the apartment, the man Vanessa has been kissing wants to take her to his bedroom. But I say, “No way are you taking her anywhere, unless I come along as a chaperone,”

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and so all four of us lean back on a brown suede bed with our heads on the pillows.

I rest my eyes while everyone around me talks. My body feels vegetative. I can feel someone’s hand rubbing my calf but I don’t care enough to move it. Vanessa is balled up next to me, kicking me in the ribs and saying, “Let’s have a group back rub,” and giggling. The last thing I remember is one of the men licking my foot and the other kneading the side of my thigh with the heel of his hand. Then my eyelids drop like the curtain at the end of a play.

The next morning, in that Fifth Avenue co-op, I hit my ver-sion of rock bottom. It isn’t on a park bench, or behind a waste receptacle, or under the Triborough Bridge, but what can I say, except, to each her own?

I wake up in my clothes and feel thankful for them. I’m lying on my side, on that brown suede comforter, with no idea whose master bedroom I’m in. Vanessa is a few feet away from me on the king-sized bed, lying with her back to me. No matter how many times I hiss into her ear, she refuses to lift her head from the trough of the pillow. My own voice sounds amplified in my head, like I’m wearing earplugs. I would trade my firstborn child for an aspirin.