My Russian friend Nini and I are toasting vodka, a shake of pepper in the bottom of the shot glass. We drink two bottles, quart bottles. A lot of alcohol for two little pixies. Some boys arrive, friends of hers, Russian guys who hardly speak any English. They're all over us, they're not picky, they want to get laid. The cute one pushes the hair out of Nini's eyes when she pours. She gets to pouring at a whole new pace. The glass bounces on the floor. Fling, that bottle's done, fling, another one's gone. I realize at one point that the conversation is happening entirely in Russian, and yet I'm yelling and being yelled back at.
      "You'll frighten the cat!"
      Yobba dobba dobba. I don't know what they're saying. Click of the shot glass against my teeth, I'm full, my skin's still brown from the summer. I feel their eyes upon my lips, my chest, the buttons down my front. To me, they look like hippie tourists in a waxy sixties postcard. I've been taking a prescription for a cloudy iris. It's not glaucoma, but it's similar, a genetic disease of the blood that my mother gave me. I don't have full-blown impaired vision yet. The mucous film floating across my eyeballs, the mania for liquor my mom and I share, the fact that the pills for the eyeball medication plus booze might put me in a coma — none of that is what scares me. What scares me is the way these faces, and this room that looks like a Janis Joplin album cover, and the sounds of my own forced voice ringing in my ears, are all already gone, packed away into memory so I don't have to think about them now.

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      That night, some chain of events takes place, the details are lost, but we're in Nini's bathroom, Nini and me and her roommate's brother Peter — when did he get here? People out in the living room are trying to pound down the door. The water is running and Nini and Peter and I are undressing to take a bath. Steamy dreamy. I remember the soapy smell, beautiful vodka belches. We're all scrunched up in the tub together and I'm kissing Nini.
      Some time passes and I come to. I'm alert again and Peter and I are in a puddle on the floor — in a sixty-nine! — with his willie jiggling in my face. The bathtub is overflowing. I jump up and see the sink all clogged with vomit. More blank spots and then I'm making tea, more Russians than before standing around smoking and talking. Empties in rows, cases of liquor on the table. I'm naked except for a blanket wrapped around me, walking around the party with this cup of tea. A tall guy with long hair eyes me. His beard is there to hide some third-world defect of his mouth and jaw, it's been split down the middle and sewn back unevenly; he tries to unwind my blanket so I stand between people, holding my tea cup and saucer, keeping them in the way to block him. He points at me, talking in Russian, doing this "you and me" gesture and I think, "Get away, you gross gorilla." He passes out sometime a little later in the night, face-down. I squat by his head and check to make sure it's the same guy and then relax. I would've left sooner if I could've found my clothes. They're where I left them, wet and binding and cold when I walk home.

I finished college a drunk, with four good paintings: two small ones, two murals. "Hang on for a breakthrough," my adviser said after graduation, hugging me sweatily against a wall of jagged photography equipment. I moved to New York City with no plan or idea for the future and no money and started hanging out with the people from the restaurant who were also clothing salesgirls, personal trainers, coffee drinkers, bartenders, people waiting to become something that they never would become because, let's face it, the people doing something with their lives were not drinking with us.
      I was killing those dreams as fast as I could to get away from them. I tried meditating. In my memory of that period I am always pale, always steadying things that I'd knocked over with my big hips when I walked through stores, always stunned into an insane rage that the rent was due again, that I hadn't shaved my armpits in weeks when I lifted my elbow in the shower.

Though he just said he was going to kill me, I'm caressing his neck and cheek. I don't want to appear uncool.

      Instead of meditating, I pulled pieces of my prayer shawl fringe off and rolled them into spitballs. Meanwhile, my brother, Tom, was living out his dream. These letters from him would arrive in the mailbox of my crappy apartment, letters from overseas that told me, "I'm fine. My division got voted 'Top Ranger Unit' for the second line period this deployment. We're prepared and anxious, some of us are scared, but we must test our abilities. Despite what the liberal media say, engagements are inevitable." His new address was TCA 91, Unit 60112, APO 45616-9025.
      Growing up with a dead sister and a monkey-faced little brother and a mother lit on jugs of wine and a father who moved as though he'd been recently electrocuted had been unrewarding.
      When Missy died, my brother asked if my parents could bring the coffin home. He was four, I was eight, she had been ten.
      I told him, "Missy's dead."
      Everyone reacted to her death differently. My father froze. He felt guilty, worked harder, he tiptoed away. My mother danced and painted, "She lives!", drank wine in a coffee mug, developed a dependency on substances, lied to my face. I'd come home from school and she'd be talking with spit on her lips. My brother would do 550 push-ups in a row. He had his toys and his sports. "I wonder what she thinks about us," he once said.
      "Missy's dead," I said.
      We had a family trait: none of us could put two plus two together. I wanted to be a painter but since it seemed like a stretch, I quit. My dad stubbed his toe, so he kicked the dog. My mom cried, so she went to sleep.
      My brother took karate and whumped the heavy bag in the basement until the vinyl peeled off that spot and he came up from the basement soaked, bowing. He did sports that required hitting because he was shy, because all he wanted was to have a conversation. He got passed over by West Point and enlisted anyway out of high school.
      When I moved to New York, I'd find letters from my brother in my dingy little black mailbox; every time I opened the door for my mail and then closed it, some of the soft concrete wall spilled onto my apartment lobby floor. My brother's letters told me things like, "We are transiting the helos through the Adriatic." He listed the contents of his helicopter, twin turbo thing, armored bay, three-inch bullets that could cut down a tree.
      "Over forty incidences of live fire fighting have been reported in our area. Anything with a trigger will be appreciated."
      What the hell?
      Somehow I had grouped him, his gleaming shoes, his stubbly head, his lime deodorant, the blood black creases in his neck from his high stiff polyester collar, with me, like the two of us were connected. He got to go off and fight in a mysterious, stupid but dignified manner — "I'm on the M-5 on egress," which meant it was his job to hang out the door of a helicopter with a machine gun during crowd control war games — while I had to suffer and be useless. I waited, chugging Jack Daniels by the quart, because there was only so much good luck in a family and Tom sucked it all up while I stayed here with no plan, no life, nothing, hauling my big Irish caboose around 106th Street and Lexington Avenue in New York City.
      In my most magnanimous moments, I was able to admit, I am this way, I can't stop, I might die and I need help; in my worst moments I latched onto that wordless pledge to change everything but I didn't know where to start and so did nothing.