My Body Is a Book of Rules. Elissa Washuta
B in gym class that my teacher paired with the report card comment, “Works to ability.” School was my job, homework was my overtime, and my delayed payoff would be a hefty scholarship to the University of Maryland. First, I had to sit for an interview. I wondered, what was so special about me that the adults in suits around the interview table would want to hand me a sack filled with money? Not my poems about gorging myself on NyQuil and caffeine pills, not my miniature clay sculptures of the members of Nirvana, and not my gleaming transcripts—all the other students packing the wait ing room put up equally brilliant numbers. When the smiling committee asked me to make myself special, I told them I was passionate about Indian issues. I was thousands of miles away from my nation of enrollment, the Cowlitz Tribe, but I had been reading a lot, and I said I wanted to use my education to work on problems in Indian country. I had just read this book that blew my mind and I told the nodding adults all about poverty and tradition and alcohol and loss.
I didn’t know how to talk about the histories embedded in my bones, my great-grandmother’s half-silence, the damming of our language that coincided with the damming of the Columbia River, my wordless conversations with the towering petroglyph woman and unmarked rocks by the water, my belly’s swell that my mother told me was an Indian thing while I battled it with Weight Watchers point counts. I thought that if I told them all this, they would think all the Indianness had evaporated from my family line, leaving me pale and dry. So I told the adults, “I want to do something for my people,” as I thought they wanted to hear, and two weeks later, I received a thin letter thick with the promise of more money than I could imagine: four years of tuition, room, board, and books.
Not long after installing my bell-bottom jeans and rainbow shower tote into my cinderblock closet freshman year, I told the kids on my floor of the honors dorm that in order to keep my scholarship, I’d have to obsess over every grade point. That money never went to white kids, I was told—it was practically a secret minority scholarship, so I must be an undercover genius. I’m not all white, I said. I’m Native American. “What’s your SAT score?” they asked. “What was your GPA? What were your extracurriculars? How much Indian are you?” My parents taught me not to brag about matters of the brain. The first thing I learned in college was that white boys don’t care if you’re legitimately enrolled Cowlitz if they think you robbed their college education coffers of the hundred thousand dollars they worked toward through countless hours holding a tuba on a high school football field. They wanted me bundled as a sachet of sage, but they had no sense of the smell of it.
Next lesson: to make friends, drink. I didn’t make friends for a long time.
By senior year, though, I was worked over into a new piece of woman. Even on weekends, I would sit at my desk, sipping on a screwdriver while cutting arguments out of my skull, until I would hear my friends shout to me through my open windows, telling me that they had come to rescue me: it was time to go out and get fucked up.
I would gulp down my drink, pull a dress out of my closet and shove it over myself before running out into the dark, starting below baseline lucidity, skipping in throwback Jordans toward the bars, certainly too far gone to consider that DRINKING IMPAIRS YOUR JUDGMENT, wanting nothing but more of it until the bars closed, at which point, if I wasn’t busy trying to get anyone’s number, I needed to make a run for the twenty-four-hour convenience store and clean out their supply of cheese-filled pretzels before the masses hit—that drunken indulgence, coupled with the mixed drinks, might be my only intake some days.
That year, while I worked toward leaving Maryland, my body, never a temple, became a haunted house. I tried to reduce the number of rooms I carried, shutting the doors on my love handles, narrowing the hallways of my loose upper arms, and collapsing the great hall of my gut. If I made myself into a tiny studio apartment, I reasoned, I might banish all the ghosts that clung to my bones. If only I had known that as the fat dissolved, the ghouls hiding in it would wake up and begin their rampage. I would get skinny, yes. Some days I would try so hard you’d think I was trying to burn this motherfucking house down.
I didn’t care, though, that ALCOHOL CONTAINS CALORIES, and I cared even less that my pill bottles had told me every day for months DO NOT DRINK ALCOHOL WHILE YOU ARE USING THIS MEDICINE. Even though all three of the bars just off campus smelled like bleach and feet and offered little more than the chance to press into dark rooms full of unfamiliar bodies, we always lined up outside on weekend nights to get inside. During the summer, the bars were packed on weeknights, too, and we waited, hoping our pre-game intoxication wouldn’t break while we stood. Rachel and Freda were my go-to girls for weeknight drinking, the perfect wingwomen, eternally up for pre-gaming, always effortlessly stunning, and always willing to lend a flask. Stick and I were poor wingmen for one another, because our opposite genders made us look like a couple, but we had a cross-gender bro-mance for the ages, completely platonic, so we would sometimes make separate laps around the bars before reuniting. Colin would appear from time to time, looking like an archival photo of an esteemed mid-century poet in his youth, trudging across blacktop in busted Top-Siders, sleeping-bagged in his worn khaki and flannel. He was enough of a partier that he had symptoms I couldn’t attach to a particular poison, like regular morning blood loogies.
I came to know so well that VIRTUALLY EVERY ORGAN SYSTEM IS AFFECTED BY ALCOHOL. I made myself one rule for Cornerstone, Santa Fe, and Bentley’s, our trifecta of destination drinking: no plastic cups of corrosive liquor from bottles beneath the bar. I stuck with beer or Stoli, or else my internal organs would dissolve into a coating in my mouth. YOU ARE THE ONLY PERSON WHO CAN KEEP YOURSELF SAFE, I knew.
From the moment I stepped into freshman orientation, I was told that COLLEGE LIVING CAN UNDOUBTEDLY BE EXCITING, but the truth, I came to learn, was that IT CAN ALSO BE A TIME OF UNSPEAKABLE TERROR, and though they told me so many times, DO NOT WALK ALONE AT NIGHT, in the middle of a meltdown, skittish and desperate to move, a 4 a.m. campus walk is safer than a drive, safer than hiding the knives, even if they’re only put to use to make the little wake-up scratch that tempers the mood. NEVER HESITATE TO CALL UNIVERSITY POLICE, they said, but we all knew about what happened to kids who were honest with the people in charge about the severity of their problems: they were told to get the fuck out of college until they got their shit together. At least, that was what people said about my sensitive friend Henry, who collected perfume, top-shelf liquor, and cigars and wore his hair long so that he could keep curtains around his face. Supposedly, Henry was a suicide risk during his freshman year, and he was sent home for the remainder of it—too risky to keep him around. After I left, as he tried to wrap up his degree, he killed himself by combining alcohol and benzodiazepines, his final act of mixology, while alone in his on-campus apartment.
I never had any intentions to off myself—the doctors still ask me whether I ever did, and whether the thought crosses my mind now—but I did have to enlist the help of the campus mental health clinic during my last year of college, finding that too many mornings, I’d wake to find myself weighed down by dread and dolor. I would talk myself into getting out of bed by promising myself that, since I’d had an optimistic morning a few days before, one had to be coming soon, so I’d just have to work through this shitty day to reach it. I never missed work, rarely missed class. The only professors who knew about my stomach full of grubs were the ones to whom I bashfully passed doctor’s notes requesting deadline extensions. My doctor simply wrote that I was under his care for treatment of major depressive disorder; he didn’t tell them about my specific flavor of crazy, or that we were quickly working through drug changes to find one that would snap me into place.
I often wondered whether those people in charge really wanted to know the truth about our pain. I wondered whether their questions about how we were doing, what we were thinking, and whether we were holding up okay were just recitations. Those counselors and rulebook-wielding resident assistants said they wanted to help us, but we knew that all they wanted was to rinse their hands with their warnings. How could they help us if we told them the truth about the knots in our brainstems? I made my own way. I will tell you that the dread is long gone, a youthful buzz in my ears, something I worked through like a big girl, but know that it still hovers beyond the reaches of my eyeglasses and dusts every shot glass in my cupboard, waiting for me to relax.
A Cascade Autobiography