Good Things Happen to People You Hate

by Rebecca Fishbein

  College cemented my tween thesis that alcohol makes things happen. My first night on campus, I drank four beers and kissed a boy at a fraternity party—a rare occurrence in high school, but apparently easy in a place where alcohol made me brave around strange men. Not long into my first semester, I developed a crush on someone in my friend group and convinced him to hook up with me one booze-soaked October night.

  He told me he wasn’t into me, but after nights out drinking together, we tended to end up fooling around. Sometimes I pretended I was drunker than I was so he’d have to take care of me, like all good romcom protagonists. Was this plan stupid? Absolutely, but it also worked. Alcohol made me not me, or maybe it made me a better me, it was hard to know. Either way, it made me a me he occasionally wanted to see naked. Intoxication was the key to our “romance,” a fact made all the more evident one night when we made out in his room sans booze.

  “I know we hooked up sober, but I don’t want to confuse you,” he texted me later that night. I guess I won’t be sober next time, I thought. And I wasn’t. In the end, he still dumped me, probably to date someone he didn’t have to watch puke in a dorm room trash can. I spent the rest of college drinking with men I liked a lot less.

  * * *

  Somewhere in adulthood, I went from being a bad drunk to a worse one. The rampant tears, vomiting, and memory loss that plagued me as a drunk teen seem to return from time to time now that I have allegedly grown up. It is possible this is because I drink less now. It is possible it’s because I drink more. Whatever the case, this is not my best quality. It is way less cute to act like an intoxicated idiot when you’re nearing thirty, not that it was adorable when I was fifteen. On a good day, the worst thing I’ll do in public when I drink too much is announce that I want to have sex with Ted Cruz. On a very bad one, my brain will go dark right before I tell a present male body I love him, and I’ll regain consciousness in the midst of throwing up out a cab window.

  New York is not a place to learn to cut back. Here you can drink every single day, mostly at all hours, and though bartenders claim they’ll kick you out if you pass out with your head on a table, experience has taught me that’s not the case. I worked evenings my first year out of school and didn’t drink much, but when I was twenty-three and lived in Bushwick, my apartment was directly across the street from a very popular bar, which was the death of me. I used to go out drinking elsewhere, come home tanked, meet more friends for more beers across the street, stay out until four, make out with a mistake, and somehow make blogs in the morning, because youth is a gift.

  Things started going downhill for real when I began working regularly for the internet. I am four-eleven and 108 pounds, and as you’ve probably surmised, alcohol in vast quantities turns me into a destructive force. But if I manage to get the measurements just right—the amount of booze, the quantity of food, some semblance of emotional stability—alcohol makes my life a little easier. I am a socially anxious person, so much so that even calling a doctor’s office to make an appointment makes my ribs sweat. It turns out drinking is a great way to combat that kind of social anxiety.

  A few glasses of wine or sixteen beers lubricates the part of my brain that otherwise screams when a stranger asks me a question, and also convinces me that I am a fascinating person to talk to, even if everything I say is slurred and I can’t remember it later anyway. And so when I started drinking with the staff writers at the blog that wouldn’t give me a full-time job—all of whom were older than me and seemed like real grown-ups, not fake ones who managed to burn pasta and did not own window shades—I tried to keep up with them, to prove I deserved a place among them, the Real People.

  As was the case with my high school compatriots, the more I drank with these writers, the more cohesive we felt, as if we were real friends and colleagues, like I wasn’t just playacting Adult, but had finally become one. We all hated our jobs, we all hated New York, but we all loved us, and we always would, until morning, when we had to fight hangovers and one another over the good story pitches.

  The drinking didn’t stop when I was finally hired full time. If anything, it got worse, now that I’d earned my spot. We took shots at five p.m. We kept Fireball in our desks. Happy hours were abundant. I mixed whiskey with tequila, weed candy, and PBR. The blackouts started rolling back in, like the time I drank a cup of Scotch in our Brooklyn office after work and came to eating dumplings somewhere in Chinatown. Another time, I spilled my beer on a stranger in a bar and threatened to fight him. Or so I was told later, as I sobered up in the cab home.

  * * *

  A six-four dude with at least a hundred pounds on me recently asked me what it’s like to black out, since his body mass and possibly less destructive relationship with booze seems to prevent him from having this kind of intermittent nightmare. “Do you remember anything?” he said. “Do you see snippets, or is the night just gone?” I imagine it’s different for everyone, but for me, it’s a little bit of both. Memories of a blackout are like scenes from a student film, with no words and bad cuts, the tape crinkled and looped in weird places. I end up in the middle of a conversation I don’t recall starting, in rooms I can’t remember walking into, on the street on my way home when I am certain I was just on someone’s roof. Chunks of the night flit in and out of my brain like a dream, but I’m awake and in public and everyone else just saw me drop a full glass on the ground.

  The pieces that are missing, though, are gone. According to scientists, blackouts likely occur when alcohol suppresses the hippocampus, making it very difficult or impossible for the brain to create a coherent record of events. The brain no longer makes memories, and so while you might be functioning and talking and breathing and walking and making out with a stranger as if all is well, when you play the tape back later, sections show nothing but dead air.

  Each time I’ve blacked out, I begged my friends not to tell me what I did or said. Maybe it would be better if they did—maybe it would scare me into permanent sobriety or at least convince me to binge-eat pasta before my own birthday parties—but blacking out is a bit like being under hypnosis. Someone once took a video of me explaining the intricacies of the G train after I had five martinis at a vodka-related press event, and when he showed it to me later, I needed a full three days to recover. Sure, it was my voice making sounds and my face making shapes, but the part of me that lives inside and makes choices about the sounds and shapes that come out didn’t seem to be there at all.

  * * *

  Lest you think that all I do with my drinking life is pass out at the First Avenue L train stop, note that that has happened ONLY ONE TIME. In my many years of drinking, I have learned to do certain things to spare myself humiliation and two-day hangovers. I eat dinner now. I alternate booze and seltzer. I drink Pedialyte at weddings. I drink less. For the most part, I am a charming drunk, more sociable than when I’m sober, more unrestrained than when the brain cells that make fear are firing at full capacity.

  What I love about alcohol is that it takes me out of my own head, a place in which I do not recommend people spend a lot of time. In addition to the hippocampus, alcohol impairs the frontal lobe, which is basically the brain’s control panel and is in charge of making choices about everything from whether you should take your clothes off and go skinny-dipping in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, to whether you should have sex on the literal street with a tourist you met at a pub crawl in Prague. Not saying I’ve done either! But if I have, it’s because booze made the part of my brain that’s afraid of everything afraid of nothing. (That part of the brain, says science, is the amygdala, and yep, booze impairs it, too. And yes, I should have gotten at least a B in cognitive psych.)

  While the two aforementioned examples (that may or may not have really happened!) might be extreme, it is true that drinking has gifted me with some adventures, perhaps because when I drink I’m not me, or maybe I’m the real me. It’s hard to know which one of me is who I am.

  If the drunk me is the
real me, though, she is also terribly unhappy. I blacked out on my twenty-eighth birthday and cried. I blacked out at a work holiday party once and cried. I blacked out at a fake work holiday party and cried. I blacked out in my own apartment while eating a burrito in the bathroom, then threw up on the floor and cried. Even when I stay conscious, the alcohol’s depressive properties have me sobbing on trains and street corners and wondering in my darker moments if it’s worth it to keep going on.

  * * *

  I thought losing my job would take me from serious problem drinker to full-blown alcoholic, but somehow it spurred me to cut back. Not in the immediate aftermath of my layoff—I’m not actually sure the last two months of 2017 even happened—but by midwinter I started going days and weeks without booze. It turns out drinking makes me pretty stupid, and I enjoyed the extra brain space that came with temperance. Words started coming to me faster, I had more energy, and I shed at least a small bit of the depression that had followed me around for a decade. I was also extremely well hydrated, thanks to all the soda waters I drank at bars so I’d have something to hold while everyone around me pounded Miller High Lifes, the champagne of unemployed journalists. My skin looked great.

  You’d think all that clearheadedness would inspire me to stop drinking forever, but quasi-sobriety was boring. I am not me if I’m not an occasional intoxicated mess. Last month I got drunk and slept with someone who has a girlfriend. Last week I skipped dinner, blacked out on a friend’s rooftop, and hit on at least several attendees (I probably also cried).

  I know I’m an addict. I’m not literally addicted to booze. I am a hard and functional worker. I am not stashing airplane bottles of Jack Daniel’s in my bedroom. I can go weeks without drinking and not feel any withdrawal effects save for clarity. But I’m addicted to how I feel when I drink—like I’m not me or I’m a better me, or at least I’m more alive than the sober me who’s too afraid to ask the world for what she wants. When I’m drunk, I take it, even if I take it too far.

  Am I embarrassed? Certainly. Do I hate myself? Usually. Do I wish I were someone who could be exciting on her own, without a shot or six of liquid courage to aid her in inevitable self-destruction? All the time. But this is who I am. Or at least it’s who I think I am. I’m not sure, at this point, that there’s a difference.

  Misery Loves No Company at All

  My two favorite sex positions are missionary and sleeping alone.*

  One might argue that sleeping alone is not in fact a sex position, but it gives me almost as much pleasure as sex itself. Sometimes it gives me more, because sexual experiences, like men in general, tend to be disappointing. It is a luxury to sleep alone. I shared a room with my sister for our entire childhood, in part because we lived in a small apartment, and in part because my mother claimed it would “make it easier” for us when we grew up and had to share space with a romantic partner. My mother is not in any way a professional child psychologist, and this tactic backfired big-time. The day I got my own room, I swore I would never share another, and I have mostly held true to this, much to my ovaries’ chagrin.

  It is great to sleep alone. When you sleep alone, no one makes noise but you. You can sniffle and snore and rustle and pass gas all you want. When you sleep by yourself, nobody breathes in your ear or shakes you awake or cares if it takes three hours of Buffy the Vampire Slayer YouTube fan videos to put you to bed. Every time I spend the night with someone or someone spends the night with me, I end up hoping my bed buddy will stop breathing in his sleep, and I can only assume it’s the same for them. This extends beyond romantic partners. A few weeks ago, a friend and I shared a bed at a wedding in Boston. Neither of us slept much, we each snored when we did, and in the morning everyone was cranky.

  I’m not the only person who knows the joys of solo sleep. According to the U.S. census, unmarried men and women make up 47.6 percent of total households in the United States, totaling about 110.6 million Americans. Sixty-three percent of those single Americans have never been married. And for women seeking men, the odds aren’t good—there are 88 single men for every 100 single women. Back in Charles Dickens’s time, spinsters were invisible undesirables whose fathers got stuck supporting them because they were too plain or picky or unusual, or because one treacherous lover rendered them clad in their doomed wedding dress for life. Now women can support themselves; skyrocketing divorce rates have shattered the myth of One True Love, of Happily Ever After, of Happy as a goal you hit at the altar and attain forever.

  So we seek solace in friendships—long-term friends, friends born out of convenience, friends we bonded with last week on the bathroom line and will probably forget about in three days. And we seek solace in ourselves, because no matter how many group dinners you plan and brunches you eat and parties you attend, it is still possible that everyone around you will disappear.

  * * *

  The truth is, I am often alone now, not just when I sleep. Once upon a time, though, I was almost never alone. I had coworkers and happy hour buddies and weekend friends with whom I spent way too much money at the Meatball Shop. I had roommates who spent whole days and evenings marathoning bad movies and episodes of Friday Night Lights with me. I had men who “stopped by” on Saturday nights to steal my attention, then later summarily dumped me. I had confidantes who met me at bars to share stories about the men who stole our attention and later summarily dumped us. I was very busy.

  Even when I had all these friends and coworkers clamoring to clog up my calendar, I feared that I would lose them. I worried all the time that my girlfriends would find boyfriends, that my man friends would find girlfriends, that the men I liked would find other women to fill their heads—that each and every one of my acquaintances would abandon me for better options. In my solitary future, I would become that sad woman who ate alone at restaurants while the happy people pointed at her and laughed. I would die in my apartment, carpet beetles nibbling at my decaying flesh, while everyone else was at brunch.

  As luck would have it, that paralyzing fear of abandonment did in fact come to fruition. When I was young—you know, like two years ago—people told me the good times would come to an end. “You lose friends as you get older,” they said. “Also, no one will date you after you turn thirty.” I still have one more fuckable year to waste, but I have already noticed a precipitous drop in friends. Some of my old go-tos did find serious partners and, in folding these partners into their lives, tumbled out of mine. Some moved to Los Angeles. Some just moved uptown, but they might as well have moved to Los Angeles.

  Some disappeared on their own, because once we didn’t work together or live together or commute on the same train line, we didn’t have all that much tying us to one another. When we met up on occasion, we’d reminisce about our old connections, but beyond that and a superficial catch-up, hangouts were too pitted with awkward silences to warrant second attempts. It is strange when a friend becomes a stranger. You’ve grown too distant to share with each other the warts and vulnerabilities that make a person real, but you remember what it was like when you saw them unpeeled.

  Sometimes these friends disappear without your noticing, until one day they reappear and you realize how far you’ve drifted from each other. A few years ago, I went to a party hosted by a former college classmate. We’d been close at school, sharing our crushes and heartbreaks and unending insecurities; but once we left the nest, the real world was for us to compete. When we’d meet up, it was just an opportunity to measure our successes, or maybe it was just me with something to prove. We stopped being real friends, and soon ceased seeing each other in general.

  I can’t remember why exactly I decided to go to this particular party. I was in the middle of one of my many romantic crises, and when that happens, I say yes to invites as a rule in case I manage to meet someone I can use to make the object of my affection jealous. Perhaps that was my reasoning. Whatever the deal, I went.

  She was surprised to see me. “Oh, hello!” she said, eyes wide, when she
opened the door. “You came!” I smiled and started to tell her I missed her, when she squealed and brushed past me to hug someone she liked better.

  I recognized some people at the party—other folks I went to school with but no longer really knew, and friends of this friend I’d spent time with when our lives were intertwined. And there were a lot of people I didn’t know. They had inside jokes, secrets, stories, and questions for my former friend that I did not share and could not understand. I spent most of the night alone by the cheese. It was weird to witness firsthand that I did not know her anymore. When your life moves on from a job or a place or a kind of person you were, someone else keeps living and changing and experiencing without you. It’s not bad or good, but it is.

  There are lots of friends like that—the ones you lose slowly because it no longer makes sense to stay friends. And there are the friends who throw you out, which happens fast. One of my best friends from college dumped me over email a few years ago. We had a fight over something stupid—veganism, maybe, or the color she should dye her hair—but the important thing was that my insecurities and self-flagellation were toxic to her, and she did not want to put up with it anymore.

  I dismissed it at first. She’s the crazy one, I thought, writing her an email outlining all the reasons she was wrong. But she was right. At that moment in time I was selfish, self-obsessed (shocking, truly), and toxic to her, and in her efforts to mitigate the toxicity, she became toxic to me. I don’t miss her, not because she was a bad friend (though I think I might have been) but because when someone exits your life like that, you have to let them go.

  * * *

  This is not to say I have no friends. For some reason, people still want to talk to me, though perhaps they will feel less inclined now that they know how many times I’ve had bedbugs. But friendships are different when you are no longer afraid of being alone. When I was twenty-two, I clung to the people around me, because without them there was only me, and I wasn’t much company. There was safety in numbers. It wasn’t just you who got dumped or freaked out over money or feared all the time that life wouldn’t turn out the way you wanted it to, but all of you, who navigated the madness hand in hand. To spend an evening alone meant I was alone, and I’d have way too much time to think about how I always might be.