A Taste of Freedom

I’m laying on the bathroom floor in my dorm. The cool linoleum feels soothing on my head, which is next to the toilet. I have locked myself in the bathroom because my friends threw me in the shower and tried to get me to change my clothes. I can’t remember what triggered the trip to the shower, but now I realize I must have thrown up. What I do remember is being carried down the stairs with my feet barely touching the steps, treading air to my apartment.

“I’m fine,” I say as I fly down the staircase. But nobody hears me because they are to busy trying to help me stand up.

I have never had this much to drink. I have never been drunk. It seemed like a good idea a few hours ago. We drove to the Alpha Beta on the corner and bought every kind of fruit and every type of alcohol we could find. As an afterthought, we picked up some snacks: chips and salsa, Twinkies and DingDongs, and maybe we also bought carrots and ranch dip. When we got back to my friend Carrie’s apartment, she pulled out the blender and started whipping up a variety of concoctions worthy of being served in coconuts at the beach on a tropical island: Pina Coladas, Peach Daquiris, Strawberry Banana Margaritas, Strawberry-Pineapple-Peach-Melon-Colada-Daquiri-Margaritas. She poured me cup after paper cup of every possible combination, and I drank every one of them. Or at least I think I did. I don’t remember much after the first couple of drinks. We danced and played Jenga for a while beside the blender, which by the way is really hard when the blender is jiggling the countertop, and even harder when you are dancing and have had a couple of drinks. I think there was more potluck food. There definitely must have been more food and music.

It was my first week at college, and my first taste of freedom. I had begged my parents to let me go away to school. After two years of junior college in my hometown, my parents finally gave in. I will always be grateful that my brother-in-law had gone to this university before me, paving the way for me to go “away” to school about 70 miles from home. The first day I moved in, I met Carrie, who would become my best friend for years. We sat side by side at the registration “help” desk, and I listened as she quietly cussed out the endlessly complicated registration process. Since I had spent what seemed like a year at the help desk, I had developed some false confidence in myself, and I thought I knew how to wade through the jungle of forms and schedules. I asked her if she needed help. She did, and we found out that we lived right across the sidewalk from one another. We spent the rest of the week setting up our dorm “apartments” at the University Village, which mostly meant shopping for towels, scrub brushes, dish drainers, pots, pans, blenders, shot glasses, and everything else we needed but hadn’t pilfered from our parents. I provided the transportation, a 1965 Ford Mustang, while Carrie, a self-proclaimed neat-freak, provided the firsthand knowledge of what we “needed” to set up our subsequent households. For weeks, and for all three of the following years we spent in the dorms, every time we arrived home our arms were loaded with as many plastic bags as we could carry. There were so many things we “needed”: foil, paper plates, ice cube trays, cups. We became fast and furious friends and began gathering our neighboring students for parties and potlucks, assembling what would become our new urban family.

”So this is college!” we would toast to our newfound luck at finding such wonderful people to hang out with. Since school hadn’t yet started, we had a get-together every night that first week. Most of our friends couldn’t really cook, so a party was necessary if any of us was going to eat or drink anything. This night I remember, we went to the lobby for a resident meeting. After the meeting we danced to the Stray Cat Strut which played over the intercom and walked back across the field to our campus apartments arm in arm. Most of us were away from home for the first time. I was finally free to do what I wanted and what I wanted to do most was to be free. I was 19 years old and ready to party.

Of course, “party” means different things to different people, and since I was a sheltered and inexperienced party-goer, I didn’t know what to expect. In a clash of my worlds, my new friends and old friends were sort of blurring together. The party was at Carrie’s apartment and she and her new boyfriend of two days played bartender. Two guys I knew from high school came up from West Hollywood, where they were working as extras or stunt men or some other impressive title. They were light drinkers who preferred beer, and left early, before I arrived on my bathroom floor. I remember Carrie’s next door neighbor, Harry a biology major, who was nice in a really creepy way. (Did he really want to by a gynecologist?) And his roommate Fred, who was a PE major and also a diabetic. There was Sarah, Carrie’s roommate, who was a vampiress from the valley just like my roommate Beth from Encino. Sarah didn’t drink, but Beth had obviously been drinking her whole life. From around the other side of the building, Matt and his roommate Tim came in as we were mixing the first blender full of drinks. They supplied baked beans and pot, which I will later come to learn were the only things they ever brought to a potluck. My other two roommates, Tammy and Ginger hadn’t moved in yet. But I had arrived, the greenest and therefore most eager party-goer.

I don’t remember how many different drinks I tried. They were all so frothy and beautiful and tasted so good. Now I am looking at my friends’ feet under the crack in the bathroom door. I wish they would go away. I appreciate their help, but I am sure that I am just fine. After they carried me down the stairs to my apartment, someone tried to stuff a slice of bread in my mouth. Matt held my hair the first time I threw up. I think it was the first time. Then Carrie and Jenny pushed me into the shower. I know my clothes are wet, but I am not sure what happened to them. (I am not naked, am I?) All I can see are the soles of my friends’ shoes walking back and forth by the sink on the other side of the bathroom door.

“Are you OK, Jen? Open the door,” say the feet.

“I’m fine,” I say out loud, but they ask again.

“Jen, you need to open the door. Are you all right?” At first there is a polite knock on the door, then someone bangs a little harder. I don’t know why they can’t hear me.

“Yes. I’m OK,” I say when the banging stops, but apparently my voice doesn’t travel through bathroom doors.

The feet disappear and it’s quiet for a while. The pattern on the linoleum is so subtle and bland. It is very soothing. I am busy admiring the way that the little beige squares rise and fall like tiny geometric mesas from the toilet to the moulding under the sink, when I see a piece of paper come under the crack under the door toward my nose. It’s a note. Evidently, my friends believe that I am in such a drunken state that I can not hear them through the door. Yet somehow they also believe that I might be able to read a note. Not wanting to disappoint them, I open the folded sheet of notebook paper and stare at the letters, which appear to be dancing on the little blue lines of the page. They come into focus for a minute. “Are you OK?” it says. I think I recognize Carrie’s writing, or maybe I think it’s her writing because I just saw her shoes. I am thinking about whether or not I am OK, when a pen comes toward me under the door. I pick it up and try to decide what to write. It could have been a minute or an hour before I finally get the pen to the paper.

“I’m fine,” I write, “You can go now.” It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it must have appeased them because their shoes move away from the door and it is quiet for a long time.

After a while, I get up. This is hard because I have been on the floor for hours, but pushing on the toilet seat helps me get my balance. I look like shit. The mirror in the bathroom is huge and still clean because it’s only been a couple of days since we moved in. My hair is plastered to my head because it is still wet from the shower. I have little diamond-shape imprints on one side of my face from being one with the lineoleum. I am not wearing my clothes, but I have on my robe so I am not naked after all. The pen and the paper are still on the floor. I leave them there. Someone else might need them. Slowly I open the door and look around. I can hear the party in the distance, but I am looking for my bed. Just as I am about to give up on making it that far, I hear a voice.

“There you are, Jennifer," says Matt, as he puts his arm under my elbow and leads me to bed. He pulls back the covers and tucks me in. He disappears for a second and I think he is just an illusion, like a mirage in the desert when you need it most. I am almost asleep when I hear him put the wastebasket by the side of my bed.

“Sweet dreams,” he says and kisses me on the top of my head. It is probably the nicest thing that anyone has ever done for me. Actually, the whole night has filled me with warm feelings, and despite the spinning room, I am able to settle into a deep untroubled sleep for the first time in a long time. I feel safe, and very far away from what I knew as home and family. I have friends, some old, but many more new friends. There is food and drink, and plenty of it. And when I can’t walk on my own, I am carried, and kissed, and cared for. I feel loved.