Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood
Read Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood Online
Authors: Koren Zailckas
The New York Times Bestseller
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STORY OF A DRUNKEN GIRLHOOD
KOREN ZA
I
LCKAS
S
mashed
KOREN ZAILCKAS
|
Penguin Books
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2005
Published in Penguin Books 2006
Copyright © Koren Zailckas, 2005 All rights reserved
the library of congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Zailckas, Koren.
Smashed : story of a drunken girlhood / Koren Zailckas.
p. cm.
MSR ISBN 0 7865 6846 1
AEB ISBN 0 7865 6847 X
Designed by Carla Bolte • Set in Granjon
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For my mother,
who first made me mindful of women’s issues
First Taste |
3
First Waste |
27
First Offense |
55
Coma Girl |
85
You’re Pretty When I’m Drunk |
157
Love in the Time of Liquor |
181
Beer Tears |
211
This is the
kind of night that leaves a mark. When I surface, its events and the shame of them will be gone from my head, cut away as though by some surgical procedure. I will not miss the memories that were carved out of me: when my father carried me in his arms through the sliding glass doors, my head lolling the way it used to when I was the little girl whom he carried to bed. When a friend, being interviewed by the doctor treating me, had to answer “vodka,” which is like a curse word, in the fact that we exploit it in private but don’t dare utter it in the presence of adults. When a row of people looked up from their laps because the scene of a girl, dead-drunk at sixteen, momentarily distracted them from their midnight emergencies.
xi
I won’t remember the chair that wheels me down the hospi-tal’s hall, or the white cot I am lain on, or the tube that coasts through my esophagus like a snake into a crawl space. Yet I will retain these lost hours, just as my forearms will hold the singes of stranger’s cigarettes in coming years, as my back will hold the scratch of a spear-point fence, as my fingers will hold griddle scars from a nonstick grill. This is the first of many forgotten in-juries that will imprint me just the same.
When I surface, there won’t be any spells of shivering or gut purling, any percussion between my temples. I won’t need to follow the doctor’s orders: “Tylenol for discomfort.” There will be no physical discomfort. My body will be still and indifferent, but mentally, the soreness of the overdose will linger.
It’s strange the way the mind remembers forgetting. The fact of the blackout won’t slip away like the events that took place inside of it. Instead of receding into my life’s story, the lost hours will stand out. Something else will move in to fill in the holes: dread and denial that thickens with time like emotional scar tis-sue. In the absence of memory, the night will be even more memorable. The blackout will stay with me, causing chronic, psychic pain, a persistent, subconscious thrumming.
My intention,
in telling this story from the very beginning, is to show the full life cycle of alcohol abuse. I did not begin by drinking from steep glasses, viscous concoctions of rum, gin, vodka, and triple sec, and I did not start off blacking out or vom-iting blood. Like most abiding behaviors, my drinking was an evolution that became desperate over time: I found alcohol dur-ing my formative years. I warmed to it instantly. Like a child-hood friend, it aged with me.
xii
Preface
I grew up in the Northeast, a white, middle-class teenager among other white, middle-class teenagers, which plunks me down in one of the highest demographics of underage drinkers. I am also Catholic, a faith that some researchers find increases the odds that teenagers—particularly girls—will drink, and drink savagely.
I started drinking before I started high school. I had my first sips of whiskey not more than a year after I first went to a gym-nasium dance or first dragged a disposable razor over one knee, balancing myself on the edge of the bathtub. I had just bur-geoned the new breasts I needed to shop for blouses in the ju-niors’ department. I had only just crammed my blinking dolls and seam-split stuffed animals into a box in the attic.
I drank throughout high school, but not every weekend, not even every other weekend. It was the promise of drinking that sustained me through all of high school’s afflictions: the PSATs and the SATs, report cards and driving tests, and presidential fitness exams.
In high school, I sought out booze the way boys my age sought out sex. At parties, I leered when girls unzipped their backpacks, hoping to catch the glint of a bottle; and my own sly glances reminded me of the boys who leered when girls bent forward, hoping to glimpse their breasts through the necks of their blouses. The brief encounters fed me. For weeks, I’d relive swilling rum in a graffitied bathroom stall during a Battle of the Bands, vodka in the wooded perimeters outside of a football game, tequila at a sleepover after somebody’s mom fitted a nightlight into the wall and announced she was going to bed. I drank through college, too, with an appetite that had me drinking rum by the half-liter bottle, until I couldn’t squelch the
impulse to unload my secrets to strangers, or sob, or pass out wherever I happened to be standing. I drank until I’d forgotten how much I had already drunk, and then I drank more.
For four years, I drank aimlessly when I might have been do-ing things that were far more gratifying. I might have been forming real friendships, the kind that would have stretched into adulthood, and had me in ill-fitting bridesmaid dresses at half a dozen best friends’ weddings. I might have been writing stories or taking pictures. I might have been sleeping a full six hours a night, or eating three square meals a day, or taking multivita-mins. I might have been learning the language of affection: how to exchange glances or trace a man’s fingertips with mine. I might have been reading the top hundred books of all time.
I drank after college. I drank through my first real move, my first job as an executive assistant, my first insurance forms, my first tax filing, and my first apartment where rent was due on the first of the month. I drank after the real world revealed itself to me like a magic trick, after I saw the method of adulthood, the morning commutes and mindless jobs, which shattered the illusions I had about it.
And at age twenty-three, I gave up drinking altogether once I realized how much it had cost me.
Still, I
am not an alcoholic. As far as I can tell, I have no fam-ily history of alcoholism. I am not physically addicted to drinking, and I don’t have the genetically based reaction to alcohol that addiction counselors call “a disease.” In the nine years that I drank, I never hid bottles or drank alone, and I never spent a night in a holding cell awaiting DUI charges. Today, one glass of wine would not propel me into the type of bender where I’d
xiv
Preface
wind up drinking whole bottles. While I have been to AA meet-ings, I don’t
go
to them.
I am a girl who abused alcohol, meaning I drank for the ex—
plicit purpose of getting drunk, getting brave, or medicating my moods. In college, that abuse often took the form of binge drinking, which for women means drinking four or more drinks in a row at least once during a span of two weeks. But frequently, before college and during it, more time would pass between rounds, and two or three drinks could get me wholly obliterated.
I wrote this book knowing that my alcohol abuse, though dan-gerous, was not unprecedented. Nor were the aftereffects I experienced as a result of it. Mine are ordinary experiences among girls and young women in both the United States and abroad, and I believe that very commonness makes them noteworthy.
In the past decade alone, girls have closed the gender gap in terms of drinking. I wrote this book because girls are drinking as much, and as early, as boys for the first time in history, because there has been a threefold increase in the number of women who get drunk at least ten times a month, and because a
2001
study showed
40
percent of college girls binge drink.
When you factor in increased rates of depression, suicide, alcohol poisoning, and sexual assault, plus emerging research that suggests women who drink have greater chances of liver disease, reproductive disorders, and brain abnormalities, the consequences of alcohol abuse are far heavier for girls than boys.
I also wrote this book because I wanted to quash the miscon-ceptions about girls and drinking: that girls who abuse alcohol are either masculine, sloppy, sexually available, or all of the above, that girls are drinking more and more often in an effort
to compete with men, and that alcohol abuse is a life-stage behavior, a youthful excess that is not as damaging as other drugs. You can find girls who abuse alcohol anywhere. We are everywhere. Of the girls I’ve known over the past nine years, the ones who took shots, did keg stands, toppled down stairs, passed out on sidewalks, and got sick in the backseats of cabs, there have been overachievers, athletes, dropouts, artists, snobs, nerds, runway models, plain-Janes, and so-called free-thinkers. Some wore oversized sweaters and lacerated jeans; more wore ballet flats and rippling skirts and fine-spun jewelry that glimmered. Even holding a pint of the headiest beer, they retained the qual—
