Chapter 9
1982 - Janet Fowler -- Fitzgerald
Twenty-four-year-old Janet Fowler's brown hair was tied back in a pony tail. Her face was soft and round, with pink cheeks, a small nose, and an overbite that almost looked comical, but emphasized her very full, pink lips. Her brown eyes were hidden by sunglasses. She wore a formless blue sweatshirt, which obscured her smallish, but beautiful naturally pear-shaped breasts. She more than compensated for this by showing off her eye-popping ass by wearing the tightest jeans on campus, or so her girlfriends readily conceded, when pushed.
Janet had two goals remaining for her senior year at UNCW, to learn how to drive a stick shift, and drink a guy under the table. The pert advertising major was just about to master one of them -- as she adroitly darted around the campus in her bright red Volkswagen Beetle.
"You've just about got it, Jan," Flossie her paid instructor said as they roared past the library. "Pull over, let the campus police pass you, they're about a block behind you."
Janey did as she was told, pulling to the curb and putting the bug in neutral as the campus police drove by without so much as a second glance at her.
"Hey, fuck 'em, they can't take a joke," she said, and shook her head clearing her hair out of her eyes.
Janet had a foul mouth, and put most guys to shame on the many holidays students used as excuses for binge drinking. Flossie ignored her, having heard her express herself in this manner more often than not.
"Let's see if you can get us around campus one more time without screwing up the gears."
"Hey, I've done it twice now, what the fuck do you want from me?"
"Perfection, girl, I want no grinding of gears, that's all. Is that so . . . fucking much?" she added thinking the foul language would drive home the point she was making.
"And what did we agree on earlier?"
"No fucking drinking and driving," Janet said, with an impish grin.
"Right, let some cowboy drive you home. They'd be happy to wreck their daddy's car with you in it. But don't let them speed."
"Makes sense to me," Janet said agreeably. "They can't drink; they sure as hell can't drive. But then if they can't drive, why the fuck am I letting them drive me?"
"Because you don't want your insurance rates going through the roof and you want to keep this little bugger pristine for the rest of the semester."
"Oh, yeah," she replied as if understanding Flossie's rationale for the very first time, when in fact, Flossie drummed it into her on a daily basis.
Flossie knew very well that Janet had a tendency to go wild after downing a couple pitchers of beer on a Friday night. Only the week before she'd gotten into an argument with two guys after fucking the both of them, and put her fist through the passenger window of their car.
But that incident did not deter her from going out the following night and flashing her bandaged hand to anyone showing the slightest interest and would follow by recounting the incident, embellishing the fact that she'd fucked them both and had broken the window when they couldn't get it up any longer.
Janet managed to drive the Bug around the campus, not once, but twice more without grinding the gears. Flossie pronounced her a successful driver of stick-shift vehicles, kissed her on the cheek and bade her goodbye. They would meet at church on Sunday. Janet then drove the few blocks to her little apartment off campus; showered, shaved her legs, and put on a fresh pair of jeans and T-shirt, before going out to join her girlfriends at Paddy's Hollow, nestled downtown just off the Cape Fear River.
***
It was a fairly blustery Friday night, and Janet and two of her girlfriends, dressed in unseasonable short sleeved T-shirts with sexy slogans printed on the front, downed cocktails and took shots of "buttery nipples," a syrupy blend of butterscotch schnapps and Baileys Irish Cream. It was a weekend smack dab in the middle of midterms, but they closed down the bar anyway.
Janet was seriously telling Joan, who sat next to her that, "You don't want to be that dumb girly girl who looks wasted, you know...and can't hold her liquor. I know it's juvenile, but I've had boys comment how impressed they are at the amount of alcohol I've consumed."
"Yeah," Joan replied, her words only slightly slurred, "S'like a badge of hon...honor or something."
"Absolutely right!" Janet said agreeably, "To be able to drink like a guy
is
kind of a badge of honor. And for me, it's a feminism thing."
Lizzie, the girl sitting on the other side of Joan, leaned in and stamping out her cigarette said, "They had a keg stand over at Bobby's fraternity last night."
"What the fuck's a keg stand?" Janet asked.
"You know," Lizzie said haughtily, "Ya get two guys to hold you over a keg of beer by your ankles and you guzzle as much beer as fast as you can." Lizzie beamed at Joan and Janet. "There was a girl there went longer than one of the guys!"
"Only one of them?" Janet asked.
Confused by Janet's question, Lizzie said, "Yeah... just one of them. Ain't that enough?"
Janet took a sip from her glass and asked, "I wonder...was she wearing a skirt?"
Lizzie pondered this, and then let out a lewd laugh. "Well I hope it wasn't her polka dot panties under it."
Ignoring Lizzie's comment, Janet sneered and said, "Fucking pricks, I wanna drink them all under the table."
Knowing Janet could turn into a nasty bitch, but not really fearful of her, Lizzie said," Well, the guys thought she was awesome. Two of them actually fought over her to see who'd take her home."
"You mean who was gonna fuck her," Janet said.
"Well...maybe," Lizzie conceded.