Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (40 page)

The men I vaguely remember from the night before have dis-appeared into some other cavern in this massive piece of real es-tate. Through the bedroom windows, I can see Central Park from what looks like fifty stories up, and the whole verdant mass of it smiles, foggy and green. I can see that the closet door is pulled open to reveal the limp arms of suit jackets. The pillow-cases, which are soft in an expensive way, stink like cologne. It is a fruity scent that reminds me of schnapps and makes me breathe

through my mouth. Down the long, white corridor, I hear a cof-feepot gurgle. Silverware clinks as someone pulls kitchen drawers open.

I finally poke Vanessa in the armpit and let my finger wiggle there, until she opens her eyes with the startled look of someone who just heard a loud noise. But the halls have gone still and silent. Whoever was moving around has gone out for a jog or climbed back into bed. The first thing Vanessa says is, “Where the fuck are we?”

I roll back over to face the window. There’s dew on the glass. Through it, I can see the park’s band shell, a crescent-shaped pond, and green slopes with flecks of faraway people. The cold weather has turned the green trees yellow around the edges, like old broccoli. The view looks static like a stage backdrop, which it might as well be. We are the same characters in the same comic drama. Only the setting has changed.

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The great thing
about the information age is it allows me to seek help in the most passive and anonymous way possible. Email is a bottle I can fold my SOS into. I can chuck it into the vast ocean of humanity and hope some sympathetic soul will read it and lob back a response.

And at the same time, seeking help is made difficult by the ambiguity of my relationship with alcohol. There are plenty of resources for alcoholics in search of addiction care. Web sites ex-plain the subtleties of motivational enhancement therapy and supportive-expressive psychotherapy, plus the differences between inpatient, outpatient, and residential treatment. But there aren’t any resources for young people who, in the fallout from

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college, have been adversely affected by alcohol but are not physically addicted to it. I don’t know how to name that kind of drinking. I can’t think of a thing to type into the blank box of an Internet search engine.

I do my research during downtime at work, and I find plenty of self-screening tests for alcoholism online. I spend my lunch hour in my unkempt cubicle, discreetly stooped over my key-board, answering questions like: “How often have you felt re-morse after drinking?” And “What is the greatest number of drinks you’ve had at any one time?” My results put me in a gray zone, defined as problematic drinking. Web sites tell me to seek further evaluation, but they don’t say where. They advise seeking help, but they won’t say what form that help ought to take. What I want is someone who will confirm what I have al-ways suspected, and always allowed friends and adults to nul—

lify: This drinking is wrecking me.

Vanessa doesn’t think our Fifth Avenue sleepover was a wake-up call. She can’t see why it was a big deal that we slept in a house without knowing whose name was on the lease. Whereas I obsess on what could have happened—the fact that we could have been abused in any number of foreseeable ways, all the while not even

having an address to give to a
911
operator—she fi on the

fact that nothing
did
happen. She arches her eyebrows the way she does when she thinks I am being hysterical. And when she fi says, “I see your point,” it is with an air of aloofness. She only says it to appease me.

While I’m frustrated by Vanessa’s indifference, I understand why it is difficult for her to understand my concern. For the most part, the change is in my head. Drinking in New York is neither more nor less dangerous than drinking in college. And,

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by the same token, the owners of the Fifth Avenue co-op were neither more nor less menacing than the college boys I’m accus-tomed to.

Only the location was alien. In college, I blacked out in fa-miliar settings. Even if I didn’t recognize where I was when I opened my eyes, I didn’t think there was any real risk if I woke up and saw milk crates filled with records, spiral notebooks stacked on a desk, or a half-dead spider plant suspended from a hook in the ceiling. Just as watching a bullfighter take a horn makes you realize that the threat of a mauling has always been present, that Fifth Avenue apartment—in its urban opulence— made me see that my drinking has been tearing me apart all along. Perhaps I should have realized it with my first blackout, or my first drunken tumble, or my first stomach pumping. But these occurred at home or at college, where my drinking felt insulated, and I had the illusion of safety.

I feel that this event is significant, and yet I’ve never trusted the validity of my feelings. I go hunting for an expert to confirm them.

On one
of the alcohol-screening Web sites, I find the email address of an addiction counselor and decide to write to him. I don’t want his advice per se. I don’t want to know whether he thinks I should cut back or quit drinking entirely. I just want him to classify me. I’m not sure how to address the email in the subject portion, so I leave it blank, which always gives the impression of wordless despondency. Before I click the
send
button, I double-check to make sure he is headquartered in a different time zone. I don’t want to risk the prospect of an in-person evaluation.

A few days later, I receive this response:

Dear Ms. Zailckas, In answer to your questions:

1. I would classify your situation as alcohol abuse, and not alcoholism, from what you have told me. Abusers find the volition to stop when the reasons for abuse stop (such as graduating from college and getting a job, or getting away from a miserable situation) or when the conse-quences of the abuse make them realize they need to change.
   

2. Everyone should practice sobriety, which is not the same as abstinence. Sobriety is making important decisions based on reason and consideration. Alcoholics need to practice abstinence because they have a genetically based reaction to alcohol that makes them lose control and cause havoc in their lives. Abusers do not have that reaction, and so they can drink “normally” if they choose to do so.
   

3. I would recommend AA for anyone in an abusive drinking pattern because twelve-step programs are helpful for anyone trying to build a good life. If, after one has developed a good life, she discovers that she is not really an alcoholic, who cares? The good life is not going to be retracted.
   

I do want a good life. More than anything, I want to be one of those people I see at sundown on weekdays. I want to be as laughing as the women who window-shop with their girlfriends after the boutiques have lowered their steel security gates, or as lovely as the women who curl their hands into their lovers’ coat pockets, or as self-possessed as the women who lope behind their sprightly black Labradors. I want their sound friendships, their

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romances, and their swollen self-confidence, and yet I don’t know how to achieve these things without alcohol. These are the wants I always drank to fulfill.

I decide to take the doctor’s advice and try an AA meeting. I call Alcoholics Anonymous, where I am referred to New York Intergroup, where a pleasant young operator reads me meeting times like movie times. I request AA groups in the East Village, which is more than seventy blocks from my apartment, so I won’t have to worry about encountering alcoholics in the neighborhood post office or the produce aisle of the grocery store. Downtown, I also expect to find a younger crowd than the group of crusty old men that smoke Marlboro Reds in front of a meeting on East Eightieth Street.

Still, a curious thing happens when I show up at a church on Lafayette Street after work. The night is mild and the sidewalks are empty, save for the mass of people dallying under a sallow streetlight. They are all young, blue jeaned, pink cheeked, and tousle haired. As I approach them, I can see they are calling out to one another and embracing. Some are dancing. More are blowing over the mouth holes of their deli coffee cups. The scene is so kindly I panic. I don’t know what I will say to this confed-eracy of cat-eyed extroverts wearing army jackets and plastic earrings. When I reach the church entrance, I keep walking to the corner bookstore. I go inside and pretend to scan the racks for a rare volume of poetry.

After I chicken out of the AA meeting, I decide I have found the volition to stop drinking myself into blackout mode, and therefore can try to drink “normally.” In my mind, this means drinking one glass of beer or wine when it is expected of me on a date, at a corporate function, or during a holiday dinner. It also means I will look for new ways to bond with Vanessa because as

long as we are drinking together, I’m afraid we will never drink moderately.

I don’t realize that something will shift when Vanessa and I stop drinking together. A fault opens itself in the floor space between our bedrooms, and it gradually becomes harder to cross. I don’t explicitly tell her that I am trying to get a handle on my alcohol abuse. Instead, I start to invite her to bookstores and flea markets and tea shops rather than bars. Only our new outings don’t function the same way our martini nights did: In the fic-tion aisle, she hears my false enthusiasm for choices; amid the boxes of old boots and belt buckles, I sense she is attacking my personal style. Together, we fall into vast lulls of silence over kettles of peach oolong tea.

I think back six months to college and try to remember some activity, aside from drinking, that Vanessa and I enjoyed doing together. But I can only remember beer while we bowled or wine while we cooked. Or else there was some residual hangover to talk about during the gray afternoons that we roved the trail around Green Lakes State Park. We don’t like the same movies or bands or stores. We’ve been inseparable for the past ten months, but we don’t have a damn thing, aside from alcohol, to talk about.

Eventually, our interaction drops off altogether. Vanessa camps out at her boyfriend’s house for weeks at a time, and I close myself off in my bedroom with a tall stack of overdue library books. She still goes to bars with the waitress from her old job, or with her boyfriend from Brooklyn, who shoulders her up the stairs some nights. Sometimes I recognize her voice, drunk and

baying, when I get three
a.m.
prank calls. When we are home

together, our apartment reverberates with waves of passive aggression. Our only form of communication is about the out-

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standing electric bills we keep taped to the refrigerator; we are at constant odds about how much we owe each other.

I start
dating a boy. Actually, he’s a man. At least that’s what April says, when she meets us at a sushi joint on Bleecker Street. She pulls my ponytail while we’re conspiring in the ladies’ room and says, “K, you’ve found a real man this time.”

By the same token, I immediately know Matt is the type of man that I should have been dating all along. He is an intern at the magazine, and the sales reps fan themselves when he glides past our row of cubicles, purring and saying he has “bad-boy” ap-peal. I guess I can see that. Matt has the rock-star good looks that strangers regularly compare to Mick Jagger or Jim Morrison, any-one who is all eyes and hair. Women, particularly, have the idea that he smokes hand-rolled cigarettes and shoves over drum kits. But the truth is just the opposite; Matt will prove to be the kindest man I’ve ever known. As I get to know him, I’ll fi he’s never had a cigarette or a cavity. He’ll confess that he’s only had three hangovers, ever, and two of them will follow nights out with me. And yet Matt, in the beginning, tosses me right back into vo-racious drinking. He does it because I am faced with the same old romantic problems when I’m in his presence: I try to break the ice and steady my breathing, and I work to be bright and entertaining.

Alcohol facilitates our first date. At an Irish pub near my apartment, we sit under a blackboard where draft beers are spelled out in chalk, and I drink the first blond pint, which stops my nervous shivering. Then we hail a cab to an East Village bar, where I sip a tall vodka drink that enables me to pull a plastic rose from a vase and stuff it into Matt’s shirt pocket as a bouton-niere, my joke about first-date formality. Then we link arms

and trip to the garden lounge on Avenue C, where we drink red wine and I lean against him amid the candles and throw pillows without feeling silly. Much later, Matt will admit it was four rounds of drinks that gave him the courage to lean over and kiss me while the cab bumped back up First Avenue, and I’ll admit I was drunk enough to lose my cell phone between the cab seats. Second and third dates follow. In windowless bars, where the weather inside feels overcast, Matt and I drink enough beer to get jelly kneed and tug on each other’s sleeves. I can’t stick to a couple of bottles, nor can I restrict myself to beer or wine when hard alcohol is so alluringly disarming, when it gives me the

courage to air sentiments like “You’re wonderful.”

But the pattern of drinking and confessing is just as confus-ing as it was in college. In graffitied bars, Matt calls me “sweets” and lets me mess up his hair, and I believe it when he tells me he wants to keep seeing me even after he goes back to a Philadel-phia university for his senior year. But that certainty burns off the next morning, with my blood-alcohol level. Matt is quiet in his hangovers, and I wonder if his affection for me is wavering. Our nights might continue in this cycle, but Matt leaves for college. On a Sunday in September, he drives over to say good-bye in a car bulging with boxes. We hug in front of the corner luncheonette. People are jetting onto the sidewalk after brunches of Bloody Marys, and the scene feels too busy and public. He says