All That You Leave Behind: A Memoir(10)
After all the stories, with all their hints of what I’d inherited, of course I would stay away from drugs. I was smart enough to avoid repeating the same mistakes. That path had been worn out, and I was going on the straight and narrow. Or so I believed.
7
Rites of Passage
After a stint in D.C., my dad accepted his dream job at The New York Times. Over the course of fifteen years, he had gone from editing at the Twin Cities Reader to working on the film, culture, and media beat at one of the most esteemed newspapers in the world. He had arrived. I, in turn, was attending a tiny, all-girls Catholic high school outside of New York City, pulling okay grades, and spending most weekends loading up on Monster energy drinks while watching Dawson’s Creek.
During the summer of my sophomore year of high school, my friend Jenny and I invited our small cohort over to watch Ryan Phillippe bamboozle the ingénue Reese Witherspoon in Cruel Intentions. Buzzed on the underlying sexual tension, we were looking for something to do next.
“I know my parents keep a bottle of vodka around here somewhere, we could take turns,” Jenny offered as she left the room in search of a bottle of lemon-flavored Ketel One. She came back with a bottle, and we traded swigs, all the while grimacing at how “gross” it tasted.
But in truth, it didn’t taste gross to me; it tasted like pure magic. My head started to hum, my smile felt easier. The night devolved into YouTube videos and fits of laughter until we all passed out. Later that night, I stole to the basement one more time to take additional swigs. I pressed the bottle to my mouth until it was empty and promptly threw up all over the basement floor. The next morning, Jenny wondered aloud why I got so sick when we only had a couple of sips. I didn’t have the courage to admit that I drank more by myself. Instinctively I knew that was something that should be kept secret.
The remainder of high school passed without further incident, as far as drinking went. I drank on a few occasions, but I never reached the stupor of that first time. While it held some allure for me, I was able to keep my desire for alcohol at bay, for the most part.
Eventually it came time for me to pursue higher education. Almost a decade after we left the Midwest, my family and I made the drive back—this time from New Jersey to Madison, Wisconsin, where I would be attending college. We pulled up in our Ford Explorer to the dorm that would be my home for freshman year; I was sweaty from days in the car with my dad, Jill, and Meagan. I was also sweaty from nerves. Did I look the part of a hip but edgy college freshman? I had dyed my hair an auspicious color of fire-engine red and cut it short. I rocked a Rolling Stones T-shirt and red-and-black-striped skinny jeans from the cult-kid-wannabe chain store Hot Topic. Years later, my dad teased me that it seemed like my mission was to go to college as ugly as possible.
Before he left me at the dorm he told me to have fun but to practice caution; he knew that college would be a time of high jinks. And as always he told me how desperately proud he was of me. A couple of tears leaked out of my eyes as he hugged me. I was ready, but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt to say goodbye.
It took a while, but I started to get the hang of the whole college thing. I logged some serious time in the library, but I also devoted quite a few hours to drinking amber liquids at the famed Wisconsin student union with my beloved gang of miscreants. I felt like I found my people in college—weirdos like me who laughed loudly and stood out among the preppie Wisconsinites that lived for football Saturdays. Sure, we went to football games, but it was mostly just an excuse to drink.
Once, on a night before my dad was due to arrive for one of our biannual visits, my roommate Jamie clumsily elbowed me in the face while drinking. As a result, my Monroe piercing (a stud above the lip) became infected. It. Was. Not. Pretty.
When my dad stepped off the plane the next day, he took one look at me and said, “What the fuck?” It looked like someone had punched me in the mouth with a fake-diamond nail.
Instead of dropping off his luggage at the Best Western downtown, we headed straight for the piercing place on State Street. The Monroe had to go. I protested, albeit weakly, because in truth the throbbing in my face was getting to me. I kept my head down as we sat in the waiting room. My dad jumped on his phone and paced around, not paying his surroundings much mind. A cute guy with gauges called me over, and I reluctantly identified the man with me as my father. My dad made some deeply inappropriate joke about my roommate knocking me around as, in one swift motion, the cute guy removed my piercing.
Afterward, my dad told me he needed ten minutes to make another phone call. We walked outside. “What is it about you that trouble just sort of follows you around?” he asked, his expression one of bewilderment tinged with disappointment as he ducked away to make his call. When he was done, he walked back over to me on the sidewalk. I expected him to crack wise but was met with silence. He looked at me and said, “I have to say I am a little worried about you….Did this happen while you were drinking?”
The question hung in the air. While my dad had been sober for most of my childhood, my mom had not. I knew what addiction looked like. The disorder ran in my genes. I tried to push that feeling to the far reaches of my brain whenever it surfaced, with moderate success, but I saw the disease infect the people in my life. Some would recover. Others, like my mother, would not. The warning was there when I took my first drink.