kitten and boo boo

I do actual creative writing outside of the content I write here, and I wasn’t ever planning on sharing it on this blog but after sharing it in my last post I thought why the fuck not? Here’s something I wrote about my experience as a student at UMASS Amherst freshman class of 2005. Again all that is written below is mine, feel free to quote but please reference me. This kind of writing has a different tone than my usual posts but I think it’s decent. Let me know if you also like this kind of content from me. ❤

The UMASS Amherst frat party circa 2005, a primer.

If you are a freshman girl you must wear a denium mini skirt, your cutest flip flops and a going out tank. If you are a bro, you will be wearing either UMASS apparel and American Eagle jeans or possibly multiple polo shirts layered together. If you are neither female or a bro, you will most likely be in Greenough smoking some dank weed. Female or male you will all be on a combination of the following: adderall, corona beer bought with your fiends roommates fake id, cocaine, the best weed in the valley and maybe if you get lucky a little oxy. You blow your lines on the backs of text books in dorm rooms decorated heavily with Ikea influences. You also blow lines in the bathrooms, the FAC con the way across campus to southwest and pretty much anywhere with a clean surface. You will all know someone who can get what you think is “anything” you want, but hard hard drugs stay out of the picture for the most part besides a little blow or molly. Water bottles come filled with vodka and you chase that with coke zero. The music is being fist pumped to, we are stoked because Kanye is playing the bowl for the spring concert and generally life is good. The party doesn’t start until your pregaming at the dorms around 9pm, followed by a march to the now destroyed Frat Row, and you end the night in puffton village ordering Antonio’s chicken quesadilla pizzas.

If you are me you do all this but you have also been drunk since 9am Tuesday before bio class (but then again what good UMASS student isn’t am I right?). You will begin the morning with your chroniclly stoned and recovering roommate not speaking and listening to apple music on your dell, each in a state of dripping mascara and messy buns. Actually if you are me you just skip most classes all together except for your film classes, where you are so wired on addy that you answer every single question the professor poses to the chagrin of your fellow lecture students. You have a consistent blue rim of powder on your right nostril and a constantly runny nose. You will walk the campus at five in the morning because you don’t sleep or eat and you will blast your ipod so loud the PVTA drivers will repeatedly ask you to turn that shit down.

But back to the party, so you’ve been drunk for a few days or a week or a semester and maybe this is where the addiction begins and why UMASS tried so hard to reform it’s image after my dismissal from campus. We are all drunk and fucked up and having a wicked pissa time and it’s never going to get fucking better than this- and trust me, the drinking doesn’t. Back then there were no consequences besides the possibility of academic suspension, and perhaps your parents cutting off access to the ATM card. This is a very particular time in UMASS history. It’s the year before the frats are destroyed, the campus begins even more expansion and seven semesters before you completely loose your mind. I don’t mean to glamorize it, ok a little, but come the fuck on, this was the golden age of UMASS party days. This is before your drinking buddies all get some kind of real job, before you start shooting heroin and before you leave the valley for good only to return to CT and land in New Haven where a much more degrading life awaits. If I told you I was thin and pretty and I had a lot of fun, you should believe me. If I told you I’ve been an addict and an alcoholic since that first party you should also believe me because your time might be coming.

UMASS was a major decision, a great state school where I’d study a number of ever changing majors but land on film studies (focus interpretation with an emphasis in documentary). I will also learn here how to roll a joint, tap a keg, blow and chop lines and why you don’t go to Holyoke- hint it’s where the real drugs are and nice little white UMASS girls are not wanted there unless you’ve got the money or the pussy to put out. I was part of the radical student union for a semester which I found stupid as we had nothing worthwhile to actually be radical against, a two year resident of Thatcher house and one of the worst hot messes of my class. I mean, come on, I was bringing bottles of Andrea to lecture halls and keeping adderall and oxy in a locket around my neck at all times.

If you are at UMASS and as lucky as I was you will:

Become a raging alcoholic drug addict bulimic self harmer, watch a lot of cool movies, end up in random house basements where you know both no one and everyone and hopefully not land in rehab more than 10 times like this winner. If you are lucky you will meet friends who will shortly come to hate you, marry a man who was all wrong for you but was manic so he seemed cool at the time, try to fuck a few Tas and not end up getting kicked out with one semester left because your always drunk and high and puring or cutting in your dorm room.

If you are also especially lucky as a UMASS student you will start out seeing someone at the campus mental health serivices but graduate to a private doctor and outpatient rehab program by your junior year. You will spend a lot of your parents money, try your hardest to never come home on break and do a few cool internships. You will get to eat the best Mexican food in MA (Bueno Y Sano) and have the worst beer on tap at every kegger. You will not know yourself. You will come to actually hate yourself and see something in yourself that terrifies you each morning looking in the bathroom mirror trying to do your eyeliner just right and survive the walk to class without vomiting or withdrawing.

You will blow coke in southwest during a campus riot, where walking through you are so high and confused that you think it is a celebration of something much more fabulous than a lost sports game. You will smoke weed in central and o-hill, blow adderall in north east and avoid sylvan like the plague because only those weird students concerned with academia and no social life dorm there. Also you will get to- shop lift extensively from the Hampshire mall, the shops downtown, the shops in Northampton. You will eat in very expensive restaurants where even in 2005 coffee cost as much as Starbucks now. You will break a tooth opening a bottle of beer with your mouth. You will slit your wrists for the first time first semester senior year and you will become intimate with every toilet on campus (best to do drugs in, best to throw up in, best to fuck in).

As I said this is a special time in history- Obama will become president your senior year which gives the campus a legitimate reason to celebrate on a weekday, the frats will soon be torn down from the main track into both campus and town called frat row, the tattoo ink will be flowing like wine through Dionysos’s fingertips. At this time we film students were all hipsters and druggies if we were cool and worse wore flared jeans after 2006 if you were not.

You will attend your first AA meeting at the Newman center where you will be terrified by the vulnerability and the reality of waking up at noon to do anything life changing. You will have your first bought of alcohol poising, your first drug overdose and your last experience with stable relationships.

You will abuse the campus dining plan. With unlimited swipes at the dining commons you can basically binge and purge rent free, though your parents will also generously help with your food bill from local delivery places. You will drop from a healthy 126lbs-89lbs by your last semester and because you are also petite have to resort to buying clothing from the kids department. This at the time will make you arrogantly proud but in retrospect just makes you sad and it hurts knowing that you got so emotionally and physically low. You will master the art of laxatives and purging with a toothbrush shoved down your throat because you don’t want your fingers to smell of puke all day. You will learn that getting better is a life long process and there are much lower lows than waking up in someone’s bed or bathtub in clothes and shoes that are not yours, vomit in your hair.

You will learn the ins and outs of alcoholism, your first true substance abuse addiction. You will learn how to swallow Smirnoff cotton candy shots with no chaser, not even realizing this is primer for drinking half pints of Majorska on a stoop in a crumbling city. You will always drink too much, from the first party to the last you are the last one raging, the last one balling out. You will think that heroin is cool, until you’re just a local and not a student and you’re coping in the birthplace of volleyball. Smoking Marlboro light 100’s will become a full time job that pays nothing but costs a lot. You will wear the right clothes and do the right things and look the right way and always feel like an outsider because you are never sober and even the frat boys take exam day off.

You will get to experience your first mental health meltdown, breakdown, rebuilding and subsequent steady decline. You will begin to be prescribed psychiatric medication which you will still be on some form of 20 years later. You will become firmilar with individual, group and progressive therapies like singing bowl rituals and acupuncture to heal the mind and spirit simultaneously. Every week there will be a breakdown, a great revelation, a coming to sober and a relapse. You will pick up a manor of speaking that infuriates non MA residents to this day.

If you are an addict or anything like me you will:

know from that very first beer that this is both salvation and damnation in a bottle. Know from the very first joint you can’t stop with just that and know that the first line up your nose in 2005 lead to the first needle in your arm in 2010 and the first and last rock in 2026. You will know you’re a different breed. You are feral even then, though you will not be living in a near crack house on Elm st in downtown New Haven. You will know you are feral even then, when you have your first threesome, have your first non consensual sexual encounter but don’t say anything.

You will spend a lot of money- both your own and mostly your parents. You will humor yourself poor at the time but not be as bad off as the student blowing a guy in a Northampton alleyway for a dime. You will feel infiniatly stupid and like a Road’s scholar. You will rub noses with the students from Amherst and Smith and those seedy kids from Hampshire on the local PVTA. You will trade your printer for an eight ball, you will trade vitamin waters you buy with your student id card that doubles as a debit card for adderall. You will learn how to manipulate any doctor into giving you almost any prescription you want. You will learn the medical symptoms of every psychiatric diagnosis that offers a fun prescription fix.

You will develop other addictions, food among them. You will learn how to shove a metric ton of food down your throat and bring it all back up with class and aplomb. You will learn about the various types of generic and prescription and natural laxatives and at least once shit yourself in a lecture hall. You will not be happy or content, you will not love yourself.

If you are very very lucky you will also strengthen your skills in self harm. You will start with cutting yourself with dull scissors and graduate to razor blades, then to cigarettes and then to lighters and hot oil. You will earn your scars on your thighs and stomach first and then move to your arms and calves because you ran out of room elsewhere. If you are truly lucky you will get stitches and infections, a collection of medical ointments and dressings. You will begin to tattoo your body and try to reclaim it as beautiful and your own but you will never really succeed.

If you are a financial aid student but not particularly poor you will feel out of place but know you’re not as bad off as the students taking out the semester $200 loan available to needy students. You will think you do not come from a place of privilege but you will quickly realize you do when you find yourself getting your last high ever and noting the fact that the other crackheads smoking with you have never heard of a film interpretation major with a focus in documentary or what the fuck the PVTA is. You will always be able to afford cute clothes and beer and takeout but when you become a full blown addict you will learn the joys of malt liquor and heroin. You will be “kicked” out of school but really just completely stop attending class because the scholarships and FAFSA run out, and the credit cards default, yet still not be poor like the financial aid students who can’t even afford to live on campus or in a cool off campus apartment. You will spend your last semester holed up in a shitty student apartment, trade your books for pills and tell yourself it’s decadence and not dependency.

If you are a true addict or alcoholic like me you will graduate to harder liquor and drugs, you will begin to not buy but cop. You will find yourself loosing everything and everyone around you and at the time you will not give a fuck- because you are still telling yourself that you’re young and it’s what people do. But normal people don’t guzzle 13 four loko’s a day and put a needle in their arm or a pipe to their mouth. If you are an addict or an alcoholic like me your bottom will sink lower and lower. Your highs will become increasingly disappointing and your drunks will never last long enough. If this is something you look forward to by all means do exactly what I did, or more. But if you’re not a fucking idiot and a piece of trash get some fucking help, because this shit is not ok, it’s not cute and it’s going to kill not just everyone around you but also you one day. If you’re ok with that then I am- what the fuck does your life matter to me anyway?