One night Dave and I were walking across the near-empty gardens of an Oktoberfest. I was drunk. (Of course I was drunk. I was always, always drunk.) A 70-year-old man in lederhosen approached us, bent like a candy cane, and I lifted up my shirt and flashed my bra. No warning, no prompting. Just: So wrong.
Dave almost fell to the cement he was laughing so hard. I got so high capsizing him this way. Because if I couldn’t be the girl he loved—that would be my roommate, Tara—then I needed to be the girl who brought him to his knees.
Tara was a sweet roommate. She sang daffy little nonsense songs while she cooked eggs and bacon for Dave and me on a hungover Sunday. She decorated the apartment with sunflowers and flea-market knickknacks. She opened the curtains, and Dave and I hissed like vampires, but Tara knew the light would lift our moods. That’s how I thought of her—as sunshine that spilled onto darkness. Nevertheless, one morning, she sat me down and gave me one of Those Talks. “You kept calling me a bitch last night,” she said, and I thought: No way. You’re such a sweetheart.
There was only one explanation for my behavior. It was the bourbon’s fault.
Dave had turned us on to bourbon. Jim Beam. Maker’s Mark. Evan Williams. He walked around our ragers with a tumbler, drinking his Manhattan. He was into that masculine romance: fast cars and cowboy boots and the throb of a blues song so old you could still hear the crackle in the recording. He referred to bourbon as a “real drink,” which pissed me off so much I had to join him.
I had never cared much for liquor. To be honest, I was afraid of it. I liked the butterfly kisses of a light lager, which whisked me off into a carefully modulated oblivion, and bourbon was like being bent over a couch 20 minutes into your date. But Tara started drinking bourbon, and so obviously I had to follow.
My group made fun of girls who couldn’t hold their booze. Girls who threw up after two drinks. Girls who needed to spike their cocktails with fruit and candy, turning their alcohol into birthday cake. I prided myself on a hearty constitution. So I sauntered up to those amber bottles, and I learned to swallow their violence. Do that enough, and you will reorient your whole pleasure system. Butterfly kisses become boring. You crave blood. Hit me, motherfucker. Hit me harder this time.
We were on a road trip to Dallas for the Texas-OU football game when I went off the rails. I never liked football. I hated the rah-rah gridiron nonsense that defined my alma mater and my home state. But Tara and Dave didn’t share my grump. They had insignia clothes and koozies and all that shit. One Friday afternoon, they loaded into a friend’s Ford Explorer, and I had little choice but to go with them. The only fate worse than football was being left behind.
Dave was sitting in the passenger seat, controlling the flow of music and booze. He mixed Jim Beam and Coke into plastic cups big enough to swim in.
“Don’t drink this too fast,” he told me, because Dave was like that. A protector. He’d been a lifeguard in high school, and he still surveyed every party for anyone in danger of drowning.
“I won’t. I promise,” I said, which was not true. I couldn’t help drinking fast, because that’s how I drank. I was a natural-born guzzler. I was already on my second giant cup when we stopped at a gas station 45 minutes outside Austin, and when I stood up, all the booze whooshed through my system. I was like one of those poker players in a Western who gets up from the table and then keels over. The last thing I remember is standing outside the bathroom unable to light a cigarette and some helpful person pointing out that it was in my mouth backward.
The next four hours are gone. Flushed down the toilet. My parents were out of town that weekend, thank God, since I woke up in their house in Dallas, snuggled up in my childhood bed, naked and shivering, with a poster of James Dean pulled off the wall and covering me like a blanket. Something had gone badly wrong.
Tara was the one who told me. She called the next day, and she had a frost in her voice. “People are a little upset right now,” she said, and I twirled the phone cord tightly around my index finger, watching the tip turn red, then white. It was no small feat, turning a group of binge-drinking tailgaters against you.