Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget
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DRESSING IN MEN’S CLOTHES<br />
I started wearing my dad’s clo<strong>the</strong>s in <strong>the</strong> fall of my sophomore year. I had raided his closet over <strong>the</strong><br />
summer, plucking out a gray flannel shirt and a pair of Lee jeans, flecked with paint.<br />
“Can I have this?” I asked.<br />
And my fa<strong>the</strong>r, confused. “What are you going <strong>to</strong> do with it?”<br />
It must have been strange, <strong>to</strong> find his pint-size daughter rummaging through his battered old work<br />
clo<strong>the</strong>s. But in <strong>the</strong> fall of 1993, <strong>the</strong> accidental lumberjack look was a uniform. I liked <strong>the</strong> drape of that<br />
flannel and how those jeans slid down my hips. I had <strong>to</strong> keep yanking <strong>the</strong>m up, like a tiny girl in a<br />
giant’s clo<strong>the</strong>s.<br />
I wore two of my dad’s undershirts as well, which were thin and nearly transparent from multiple<br />
washings, so <strong>the</strong>y had this luxurious softness. I liked that you could see straight through <strong>to</strong> my bra,<br />
which makes no sense, given <strong>the</strong> insecurity about my body that had dogged me since adolescence. But<br />
<strong>the</strong> shirt points <strong>to</strong> some essential conflict. A desire <strong>to</strong> flaunt and be masked at once. The undershirt<br />
was like a side door <strong>to</strong> exhibitionism. I had <strong>to</strong> be careful not <strong>to</strong> look <strong>to</strong>o deliberate. That was <strong>the</strong><br />
worst sin of all: trying <strong>to</strong>o hard.<br />
Sometimes I wore those undershirts inside out. I have no idea why I did this, except that it seemed<br />
daring <strong>to</strong> show a disregard for propriety.<br />
“Your shirt’s on inside out,” a guy <strong>to</strong>ld me at a party.<br />
“Your life’s on inside out,” I snapped back.<br />
And he smiled. “You’re right.”<br />
I had a crush on that guy. Mateo. He had a poof of curly hair like John Turturro in Bar<strong>to</strong>n Fink,<br />
and he was gruff and unsmiling like so many 19-year-olds. But if you nudged him right, he could be<br />
adorable and silly. I have a picture of him sitting in my apartment wearing my silky Vic<strong>to</strong>ria’s Secret<br />
bra over his T-shirt and ano<strong>the</strong>r of him paging through an old Teen Beat magazine with mock<br />
excitement.<br />
My off-campus apartment was <strong>the</strong> party hub that year. The place was named <strong>the</strong> Casbah, so we<br />
were almost contractually obligated <strong>to</strong> rock it. My drink was Keys<strong>to</strong>ne Light. You could buy two sixpacks<br />
of tall boys for five bucks at <strong>the</strong> Fiesta Mart—<strong>the</strong> equivalent of 16 beers for <strong>the</strong> price of a<br />
Wendy’s value meal, which turned Keys<strong>to</strong>ne in<strong>to</strong> <strong>the</strong> unofficial sponsor of our ragers.<br />
That’s what we called our parties: “ragers.” A word associated with anger and wea<strong>the</strong>r systems,<br />
which is appropriate given <strong>the</strong> state of our living room <strong>the</strong> next day. Halogen lamp kicked over, beer<br />
bottle floating in <strong>the</strong> fish tank. What <strong>the</strong> hell raged through here last night? Oh, yes. It was us. We<br />
raged.<br />
It was during one of <strong>the</strong>se ragers at my apartment that Mateo and I had sex. At <strong>the</strong> time, we were in<br />
a play <strong>to</strong>ge<strong>the</strong>r, and we would sit in <strong>the</strong> dressing room before and during <strong>the</strong> show, knees brushing<br />
thighs. The flirtation had been building for weeks, but I needed some inciting incident. A match<br />
thrown on our diesel fuel. We were outside on <strong>the</strong> walkway of my crumbling cinderblock complex. I<br />
was chain-smoking, one cigarette lit on <strong>the</strong> tail end of ano<strong>the</strong>r. And I said <strong>to</strong> him, with <strong>the</strong> confidence