The story I could not remember would be told many times. We had just reached the city limits of Dallas when I decided to moon people. The mooning scene is a staple of ’80s sex comedies—the Animal House genre of films about prep school boys busting out of their conformist youth. And I’d like to think I was paying tribute to those classic films. Except I botched a few key details. One is that I was surrounded not by like-minded brothers but irritated college friends who were not nearly so cross-eyed with drink. Another is that the mooning scene in those films took place while the boys were hurtling along a highway at night, and mine took place in five o’clock traffic. Yes, I mooned cars in a bumper-to-bumper snarl down the interstate, which is a little bit like mooning someone and then being stuck in a grocery line with them for the next ten minutes. Hey, how’s it going? Yeah, sorry our friend is mooning you right now, she’s really drunk. Excited about the game?
But the third and most critical difference is that I was a girl. And for a girl, there is good nudity (boob shaking, leg spreading) and then there is bad nudity (sitting on a toilet, plucking hairs from your nipple). Pressing your wide white ass up to the window of a vehicle in broad daylight is definitely in the column of bad nudity.
The next week was a humiliation buffet. There are times when you want to die. And then there are times when one death is simply not enough. You need to borrow other people’s lives and end them, too. All death, everywhere, seems like the only way to extinguish your agony, and while this story would become funny in time, I can assure you that in the moment, I believed I only had two options. Destroy everyone in the car. Or never drink bourbon again.
I quit brown liquor that day. Never again, I told myself. Not every catastrophe can be solved so easily, but this one only took a simple snip, and I was allowed to stay on the party train for many more years. Everyone forgave me, which is the grace of college. We all had dirty pictures on each other.
But still, I wondered: Why was I like this? College is a time to discover yourself—and alcohol is the Great Revealer—but I was more corkscrewed than ever. What did it mean that I hid when I was sober, and I stripped off all my clothes when I was blind drunk? What did it mean that I adored my roommate, but I lashed out at her after seven drinks? What did it mean that I didn’t love Dave (or maybe I did), but I would slay dragons to win his approval? I needed to expose the deeper meaning here. I needed to workshop this fucker.
I FINALLY GOT a boyfriend near the end of college. And the weirdest part was: He didn’t drink. This was unbelievable to me. He used to drink, but he no longer drank. By choice. We met at a party, where he was dressed like he’d stepped out of a 1960s gin ad. He pulled out a gold Zippo and ignited it with a magnificent scratch, lighting two Camels at once before handing me one. Like he was Frank Sinatra.
Two weeks later, we took a road trip and slept in a tent under the stars somewhere in northern New Mexico. I hadn’t done such a thing since I was a girl. It had never occurred to me camping was something you’d do on purpose. As I marveled at the red-rock canyons of the Southwest, I thought: Where did this beauty come from? Has it been here all along?
Patrick was a professional cook. He would come home from work after midnight, his clothes smelling of wood-burning ovens, his fingertips marked by burns in the shape of purple crescent moons. His friends were cooks and fellow hedonists, who drank fine wine and had serious thoughts on plating, and for a while, I wondered what he saw in me. But unlocking the world for someone else can bring such pleasure. He gave me Tom Waits, Pacific oysters, and a knowledge of the shiver that might run through me when a man traced one index finger across the tender spots of my back.
We hung out in pool halls. I liked billiards—such a dude’s sport, such a hustler’s game—but before I met Patrick, I had no idea how to play, and so I simply imitated power. My shots were all random thrust, because I enjoyed the clink of the balls scattering around the table like buckshot. But Patrick showed me finesse. He knew how to move.
“Slow down,” he teased me, positioning himself behind me, and he taught me how to sink my body in order to level my gaze, how to drag the cue stick across the cradle of my fingers, slow and gentle, like I was drawing back a bow. He taught me how to torque a ball with English, wrap the cue behind my back if I needed to, and tap the ball with just the right amount of force so that it slid across the green felt and dropped into the trickiest corner pocket with a quiet thump. “Only use force when you need it,” he would say, cigarette dangling from his lips, and then he’d hammer a shot right into the corner. Bam. Sunk.
I was not wearing my father’s jeans anymore. I was wearing tight pencil skirts and black dresses that hugged my curves. I dyed my hair auburn. Patrick was with me when I took my first legal drink. He brought me to a cigar bar called Speakeasy, a trendy Prohibition throwback that had recently opened in the burned-out warehouse district. I ordered a vodka martini. “You’ll like it dirty,” Patrick told me, and once again, he was right.
But booze became an argument between us. The more I drank, the more I wanted him, and the less he wanted me.