The College Months
WHEN MY FLIGHT landed in Toronto, I was greeted by a slender, soft-focus blond woman. She worked for the fashion design college I’d enrolled in, and simply being in her company while I waited for my inexpensive but brand new suitcases made me feel good. This, I thought, was the new me. The urban me. The me who was greeted at the airport by nicely appointed blond ladies.
As she drove us along Highway 401 to the student cooperative where I’d be living, I could practically feel myself changing, growing, and getting better and better. I knew no one in this city of two and a half million people, and I’d never felt more alive to the possibilities of life. I stared, exhilarated, at the high-rises that crowded the freeway and at the endless lanes of traffic streaming around us. I was going to start fresh. This wasn’t going to be like the time I moved to Salmon Arm.
There are probably people in the witness protection program who feel less relieved to get out of town than I did when I moved from Smithers to Toronto. I knew I wouldn’t make the same mistakes again. I was going to be a better person. Maybe even all I could be. I was going to fulfill my inner destiny, which was to be a cutting-edge fashionable person who lived in a major city. No longer would I be the girl who drank too much at parties. The girl who’d been flailing from one crisis to another since she was thirteen. The problem had been my environment. It hadn’t allowed me to flourish. But in Toronto all things were possible. Heck, after I got my fashion design career underway, I might even start writing again. Probably get another horse and start to compete and probably go to the Olympics. I would start drinking like a lady or at least not like a guttersnipe. Surely, being in a world-class city like Toronto would do the trick. During a stopover in Calgary, I’d bought myself some wide-legged plaid pants and had my hair spiral-permed. I was already different!
I experienced a moment of fear when we pulled up to the house and knocked on the door. No one else was home. I took the keys that had been mailed to me and opened the door. The lady helped me carry my luggage into the Victorian brownstone. The grand old house had been carved up into sixteen separate bedrooms. There was a kitchen (dirty) on the main floor and bathrooms (also dirty) on the second and third floors. It was, I thought, the nicest house I’d ever seen. There were very few brick buildings in the northern interior of British Columbia. I’d never seen a house so solid. And so old! The floors were hardwood rather than linoleum or carpet. There were mouldings! Never mind that the hardwood floors were scratched and little nails popped out here and there and the mouldings were covered in flaking paint. I took a few steps and knew instantly I was meant to walk on hardwood floors, even if there were quite a few silverfish underfoot.
“Are you going to be okay here by yourself?” asked the nice lady as I stood in the middle of the foyer staring around me with wonder-filled eyes.
I nearly laughed out loud. If I hadn’t been so overwhelmed by the classiness of my new situation I might have. I wanted to tell her that I was going to be fine for the first time in my life. Instead I simply thanked her. When she left, I went upstairs to my new room, on the third floor. It had a sloping ceiling and two beds. I would have a roommate, which was going to be a great novelty and adventure like in those books about boarding schools that I loved to read. My roommate wouldn’t know any more about me than anyone else in Toronto. She wasn’t going to know about my tarnished reputation. She was going to see a girl from B.C. with an undeniable vivaciousness that matched her wicked new spiralpermed curls. We were probably going to become best and lifelong friends!
Once I’d decided which bed to take, leaving my new roommate the good one because I was now a thoughtful person who did that sort of thing, I decided to explore the neighbourhood. A smalltown resident from birth, I was not a natural urban navigator, so I proceeded cautiously. I left the house, making sure the door was locked behind me, and walked around one block. I was relieved to find myself back in front of the right house after four left turns. Next, I ventured two blocks, then three. Each time I found myself back in front of the house, my confidence grew. I was walking around a major city!
On one of my circuits, I noticed that I’d been passing a liquor store. I’d been so focused on not getting irretrievably lost that I hadn’t paid attention, but on that trip the store seemed to leap out at me.
What if guests stopped by my new room? I should have something to offer them. What if I got invited to a party? I couldn’t show up empty-handed. For all I knew, there might be an official cocktail hour before dining hall.
I ducked into the liquor store and looked at the shelves. I could get a six-pack of beer. But a full case was really a better deal. I picked up a box of Labatt Blue, showed my ID, which the clerk examined very carefully because I looked approximately twelve, especially with my enormous head of fake curls and new clown pants. Then I struggled to carry the beer out of the store and the rest of the way home. The case was heavy and didn’t match my outfit, but I persevered.
When I opened the front door, fighting to maintain my grip on my beer, I noticed someone behind me. Another student. Finally.
I held open the door for him while I stared at the floor. (My new confidence didn’t extend to meeting a stranger’s eyes.) Then I climbed the stairs to my third-floor bedroom. About halfway up the first landing, I realized the man I’d let in was right behind me. Nearly touching me. A glance back told me a few things at once. The man was probably not a student. If he was, he was an extremely mature older student, aged fifty-eight or so, and it looked as though he’d spent his summer vacation sleeping under a park bench. By averting my eyes when I let him in, I’d missed the long, tangled beard, the unkempt and filthy hair under the toque, and the layer upon layer of reeking clothing, complete with bits of newspapers sticking out here and there. The man was a homeless person! I’d heard about those!
I gave a little scream and accelerated up the stairs, the case of beer banging against my legs. I made it up two flights of stairs in about four steps, as though I had a jet pack on my back. Another few leaps and I was at the door of my new room and working the locks. With superhuman dexterity, I let myself and my beer inside, slammed the door, and locked it behind me. I stood panting and listened for noises from the homeless invader or very mature student on the other side. When I heard nothing, I put the case of beer down on my desk.
After trying for a few minutes to think what to do, I decided that the best course of action was to have a drink. I opened one of the bottles and drank half of it. Then I went over to the window and leaned out. A couple walked along the sidewalk below.
“Excuse me,” I shouted. “There’s someone in the house. I mean, I think there’s a homeless man in here.”
The couple looked up to where I was leaning out of the window.
“Can you see if he’s still here?” I asked.
“Well,” said the young man, “I guess we could.”
“Why don’t you call the police?” asked the woman.
The two of them were remarkably unfazed by this third-floor request for assistance.
“I don’t have a phone. I’m not from here,” I shouted down. My enormous spiral perm was probably evidence of that.
As I watched, the couple walked to the front door and disappeared from view. A few seconds later, their heads reappeared. The man looked up at my window.
“We can’t get in,” he said. “The door’s locked.”
“Oh,” I replied. “That’s right.”
“Can you let us in?”
It dawned on me that I didn’t know these two any better than I did that homeless guy who was probably hiding outside my room right now, thinking of all the things he’d like to do to an out-of-towner in plaid pants. I’d read literally dozens of books about serial killers. I knew the score.
Who to trust?
I ducked back into the room and quickly finished off the beer. Then I returned to the window.
“Never mind,” I said. “I’m fine.” Then I belched, loud and wet.
I nodded down at them. Finally, they walked off down the street and I sat on my bed to wait. I reflected that it had been a stressful day so far. A person, even an urban one, might need a second drink to take the edge off. So I had one. Then, because I was trapped in my room by a possible serial killer, I had a third.
Half an hour later, or maybe longer, I heard voices and footsteps outside in the hall.
“Hello?” I said, from behind my locked door.
“Hello?” It was a young man’s voice. Either the homeless guy sounded much younger than he was or some other students had arrived.
“Hi?” I said.
“Hi?”
I didn’t know whether to keep shouting hello through the door. The sounds of laughter increased. Music began to play. Guns N’ Roses. I decided to risk it. I opened the door and peeked out. In the room next door, I could see a few guys about my age milling around. They did not appear to be street people.
One poked his head out of the room and saw me staring. “Hey,” he said. He had a nice smile, short black hair, and freckled dark skin. “Are you the girl from B.C.?”
“Susan,” I said.
“Cool,” he said. “I’m John. The house manager.”
I felt like throwing myself into his arms with relief.
A red-haired boy poked his head out from John’s room.
“I’m Bart. You want a beer?” he asked.
Did I? After what I’d been through! I decided not to mention that I’d had a few drinks in my own room already and that I had hidden the rest of the beer under my bed.
Fifteen minutes later, after I’d shared a couple of drinks with them, I finally remembered to call my mother to let her know I’d arrived.
John lent me his phone.
“Hi, Mom. Yeah, I’m fine. No, it’s great here. I love it. I’m totally at home already.”
And I was.
AT FIRST COLLEGE LIFE seemed like it was designed with me in mind. Or at least with heavy drinking in mind. I had the great good fortune to end up living in a house with a group of committed drinkers. John and Craig (business at U of T) and Bart (forestry at U of T) spent a lot of time devising elaborate drinking rituals. These included Gin and Tonic Tuesdays and Sticky Wicket Wednesdays (ten-cent wings and cheap draft at a local pub). My housemates were very welcoming and seemed to find my northern drinking habits refreshingly unfeminine and easy to relate to.
“Wow,” they said after our first night out when I matched them two for one. “You drink like a guy!”
The admiration in their voices was unmistakable. Some of the other girls who went out with us drank, but none with the avidity I did. John was from a small suburb on the outskirts of Toronto. He was into heavy metal. I knew plenty of metal guys back home, but they hadn’t been university-bound. I had no idea the two things were compatible. In Toronto I discovered the suburban, brainiac metalhead. Nice boys who loved loud music and certain aspects of the metal lifestyle. They were into the music, but they maintained some perspective on the whole scene. When we saw metal groupies at clubs, squeezed into Day-Glo tube tops, huge hair teased to impossible heights, hoping to get close to the musicians, these boys knew enough to find it funny. John, especially, was always getting embarrassed on other people’s behalf. But drinking was part of the metal scene that they embraced wholeheartedly.
In addition to my excellent drinking skills, my new friends appreciated my taste in music. I made John a mix tape and he couldn’t contain himself. He said it was the kind of mix he might have made himself.
I basked in his praise. Later, after I’d given him a few more tapes, his enthusiasm was tempered by the realization that I basically made the same tape over and over in different combinations, a practice I continue to this day.
Fashion school became something I did when I wasn’t drinking with my new friends.
The first indication that I was an outlier came from Ed, a selfpossessed Italian-Canadian from Montreal and the most mature member of our campus co-op crew. He watched me eat takeout instead of what was on offer at the dining hall, shop for clothes, and switch halfway through the night from cheap draft beer to pricey hard liquor. One day he said, “You’re going to run out of money if you keep spending like that.”
I looked at him like he was crazy. A few rye and Cokes weren’t about to exhaust my enormous student loan. So what if I was attending a college notable for its low barrier to entry and high tuition fees, which were over twice as much as my housemates attending university paid? In addition to the loan, my mother was sending me a small allowance each month. I was rich! I had never been allowed to handle any significant amount of money before and it went directly to my head. I found the prime shopping districts in Toronto and showed no restraint. One memorable afternoon, I bought an all-green outfit of paisley rayon blouse, matching short skirt, thigh-high socks, green velvet slippers with a fake family crest on the toe, and green cardigan. The outfit cost more than my monthly expenses and made me look like a giant zucchini, but I convinced myself that as an aspiring fashion designer, it was important that I develop a signature or brand, if you will. Mine was going to be all-one-colour outfits.
And as the weeks wore on and I made the switch from draft to hard liquor earlier each evening, my money seemed to evaporate. So did the illusion that I fit in with my new friends and that I was just another high-spirited social drinker.
After a pleasant interlude in which I acted like a cheery drunk, I started undergoing the personality changes that had always marked my drinking. After a few drinks I’d get nasty and aggressive.
I was strongly attached to the idea that I was just a wild and crazy college student like everybody else, but that image became harder to maintain when I started doing things like falling down, dead drunk, on a busy sidewalk on Bloor Street in the middle of the afternoon, while wearing my all-green outfit. I’ll never forget the sensation of people walking by me and, in some cases, over me. The few that looked at me wore expressions of pity tinged with revulsion. Not the sort of looks a vivacious (if slightly wild) college coed hoped to produce.
One night we were running down Bloor Street on a pub crawl, and Ed made some teasing comment about my not-exactly-Ivy-League educational institution. I was seized with a rare school spirit. I couldn’t let him get away with the slur! The stores and bars had just put out their garbage for the collectors to pick up the next morning. Possessed by alcohol-induced strength, I hoisted up a black garbage bag and pitched it at Ed. My aim was not true. The bag went sailing out into the street and exploded like a bomb onto a passing car. It turned out that the bag had been full of bottles. Worse news was that the vehicle I’d hit was black and white and had a rack of lights on top. Stunned (and drunk), I froze.
In an instant, my companions scattered and took off running. Everyone else on the street, students and bar crawlers mostly, cried out as one.
“Oooooh shit!”
I waited for a good five minutes while the cops turned the car around in the heavy traffic and came back. I walked unsteadily toward the car. Instantly, we were surrounded by every drunken asshole in a four-mile radius.
“Don’t arrest her!”
“Arrest me!”
“Police brutality!”
The cops were so surprised that I’d waited, swaying gently like some upended sea cucumber, that they didn’t seem to know what to do with me.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to, uh, hit your car. The bag slipped.”
The officer was steamed, but perhaps because I was young and had hair that looked like a bad wig and wore an outfit that made me look like a garden vegetable, he took pity.
“Nice friends you got. Ran away and left you.”
I didn’t reply because I was trying not to vomit down the side of the car. I’d never spent a night in the drunk tank, and had no desire to start now.
“Sorry,” I said.
The cop leaned further out the passenger-side window. He ignored the crowd and spoke directly to me.
“Maybe you should think about drinking a bit less.”
I blinked, startled as though he’d clapped the handcuffs on me.
“Police brutality!” shouted a drunk guy from across the street at no one in particular.
Police brutality indeed.
BY THE TIME Christmas break rolled around, I was almost as uncomfortable in Toronto as I’d been in Smithers. I was doing very badly in school. I didn’t have the worst marks, because a few of the people in my program spoke almost no English, but I was near the bottom. I’d made myself unpopular with many of my housemates with my unpredictable behaviour and tendency to come home drunk and make so much noise I woke everyone up.
“Thoughtlessness, thy name is Juby,” a student of classics muttered in my direction one morning.
My drinking had completely outstripped that of my heavy metal friends. They cut back in order to focus on classes. Cutting back was an impossible dream for me. Moving to Toronto and going to fashion design school hadn’t fixed what ailed me. My drinking was worse than ever. At least at home, I’d been surrounded by other people who drank like it was an Olympic sport. In Toronto, surrounded by productive, functional, clear-minded, and middle-class students, I felt completely alone. Still, I wasn’t willing to face the reality that I couldn’t pull off normal no matter where I lived or what I did. I clung on to the last scraps of the college dream like Kate Winslet gripping that piece of the Titanic. Only less cutely, obviously.
Rather than assess the fact that my drinking had made yet another place hideously uncomfortable, I focused on the idea of going back to Smithers at Christmas and playing the part of the triumphant urbanite. I would show everyone that I was no longer a slightly out-of-control piss tank, but rather a successful fashion design student and big city dweller. I hadn’t always been the most popular person in my hometown, but that was because the people there had not understood that I was suffering from fish-out-of-water syndrome. The big city was my water. Smithers just didn’t get me. Et cetera.
As soon as I arrived, I started making the rounds of old friends and hitting every Christmas party I could find. I wore my new Toronto clothes, including my clown pants and zucchini outfit, and tried to show by word and deed that I was a more sophisticated woman. I was no longer the train wreck I’d been when I left.
By New Year’s Eve I’d been drunk almost every night for almost two weeks. I found that my friends who’d stayed behind had committed themselves wholeheartedly to the party life and were embroiled in the kinds of incredibly messy relationships nineteen- and twenty-year-olds excel at. Everybody was cheating on everybody and I felt kind of sorry for myself that I’d missed it all. The only time I felt slightly vindicated in my life choices was when people told me they admired my bravery in wearing such strange clothes.
Looking at pictures taken that Christmas, I can see that I didn’t look quite so much the stylish college girl as I’d hoped. There’s a shot of my mother and me standing outside her new apartment. She’d moved into it after divorcing my stepfather the year before. The two of us had gone out to get a “Christmas branch” to make things look more festive. I’m standing against a snowy backdrop, which serves to make my face look even more sallow and bloated. My spiral perm is half grown out. I look ten years older than I was and more haggard than collegiate.
I was due to return to Toronto on New Year’s Day, so I felt it was important that I go out with a bang. Leave them with their mouths hanging open. Show how it’s done when you live in Toronto. Et cetera.
I hit the bottle of Crown Royal early and hard. When the coke came out, I was first in line. Coke had a tendency to make me violent, but it also allowed me to drink more and for longer, so I snarfled up as much as I could.
By the time we hit the bar, a decrepit old cabaret populated mostly by the local rubbies and young drinkers “slumming it,” I was flying. We were confronted by the girlfriend of one of the boys one of my friends was sleeping with. Names were called. Threats were uttered. As a fashion design student I felt it was my duty to intervene.
I inserted myself between the combatants and when the cheated-upon girlfriend complained, I lobbed a few wobbly, cokefuelled punches at her. Next thing I knew I was being carried, none too gently, off the sticky dance floor by a bouncer. He was not swayed by my beauty or the urbanity of my clothing.
As I was being dragged past the stage, I saw the musicians glance at each other as they kept playing. Something told me they weren’t thinking, “Wow. She must be from Toronto!”
A moment later I was on my hands and knees on the frozen sidewalk.
After that, I remember nothing. The blackout lasted until my mother woke me up the next day to inform me that I had a phone call. It was early afternoon and I tried not to notice when my mother wrinkled her nose at how I smelled. In our family, we don’t go stating the obvious about people’s problems, so she said nothing about the alcoholic off-gassing.
I took the receiver from her with a trembling hand.
“Is this Susan Juby?” asked a girl’s voice.
“Yes,” I croaked.
“You’re fucking dead, you bitch.”
My heart began to race like I’d never stopped doing coke.
“I am going to kick your ass. Meet us behind the Civic Centre at six tonight or you’ll be sorry.”
I hung up the phone. My mother stared at me with a quizzical expression.
“Who was that?”
“Just a friend,” I said.
Four hours later, I was huddled in my seat on a tiny plane that was battling its way through a terrible snowstorm on its way from Smithers to the Vancouver Airport, where I was supposed to catch my connecting flight to Toronto. I imagined the caller waiting to beat me up behind the Civic Centre. She’d be surrounded by shivering spectators. Nineteen years old, a fashion design student living in Toronto, and entire crowds of people still wanted to beat me up. I was going to be forty-four and still getting into fights every weekend. Why did these things keep happening to me?
As the plane bucked its way through the storm, the flimsy curtain that separated the eight or so passengers from the cockpit rose and fell. Sometimes the curtain flapped high enough that I could see dark sweat circles through the young pilot’s white dress shirt.
If we survive this flight, I promised myself, I’m going to do better this term. I’m going to stop spending money and I’m going to cut back on my drinking. This time, I’m going to pull it together. I will never do cocaine again, and I will focus on my school work. I will be good.
Of course, as soon as I got back to Toronto, I picked up where I left off, drinking myself into a blackout a couple of nights a week and racing through the scant remains of my student loan. Later, I heard that not long after my escape from Smithers, the same little plane I’d taken crashed flying the same route and killed everyone on board.