Smashed by Koren Zailckas

Author:Koren Zailckas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

LOVE IN THE TIME OF LIQUOR

WHEN IT COMES to romance, my drinking is almost fetishistic. For years it will be the third wheel in every one of my romantic liaisons. Like the blonde bombshell in a passionate threesome, booze, in its near presence, will always make me feel sexier. Alone with a man, I’ll get used to liquor’s company. After a time, it will be hard to manufacture any affection without it. Sober, I won’t be able to squeeze a man’s hand or say “I’ve missed you.” I won’t be able to divulge the slightest hint of endearment.

Back at school sophomore year, my yearning for Chris persists with or without alcohol. But liquor makes it swell like one of those sponge capsules that flower in warm water. Sometimes my tenderness for Chris has a breadth so wide that I can’t see around it while I’m sober. That is the case when he stops by my dorm room on a whim, or invites me over to watch A Clockwork Orange with our shoes off, or drives me to the bus station to meet Kat, who is in from Cornell for a visit. Without alcohol, his glance alone can rattle me. Just hearing someone call his name across a room makes the fluff on the back of my neck stand up.

One damp Sunday in October, Chris invites me to be his date for his fraternity’s date party. It’s an affair that isn’t all that different from a junior-high make-out party. But instead of playing Yahtzee, we gulp Martini and Rossi. And instead of “seven minutes in heaven,” it’s more like seventy.

When I call Hannah with the news, she runs directly over in her cotton pajamas, toting a bottle of Skyy vodka and four little black dresses, which I try on in frenzied succession, even though they’re almost exactly like the five that I own. She stays even after I settle on a ruffled black one, and together we pour vodka into a carton of lemonade we find in the mini-refrigerator. Each sip from its cardboard lip tastes strong and bitter, but it slows my stomach jitters, so I keep drinking. Tess, who is my sophomore-year roommate, ties a red velvet bow in my hair and outlines my eyes with a kohl pencil. Hannah tucks a Durex condom into my purse’s inner pocket because she thinks I ought to carry one, “just in case.”

Throughout college, my friends carry condoms defensively, in stark contrast to some boys, who carry them offensively. It’s part of a warped female thought process: When we’re gutter drunk with some boy we just met, we like to think that if we can’t fend off danger, we can at least beseech safety. We learned this outrageous mode of prevention in part from the public-health officials who visit once a semester to lecture sororities on the dangers of excessive drinking. In 2002, a public safety slogan from the University of Colorado at Boulder will actually advise female students: “When you’re drunk, you’ll have sex with someone you wouldn’t have lunch with, so bring a condom.

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