Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

by Sarah Hepola

  The problem—one of the many problems—is that I had very little knowledge of my own body and what might be pleasing to me, which made it impossible to give instructions to anyone else. It’s like my vagina was someone else’s playground. I’d never masturbated, and I don’t know if that’s because I was afraid, or ashamed, or simply uninterested. I guess I thought masturbation was for sad old divorcees who couldn’t find anyone to finger-bang them. I was 25 when I finally bought a vibrator. The first time I came, the sensation was unmistakable. Like a long, ecstatic sneeze. And afterward, I felt so stupid. Wait a minute, this is an orgasm? Jesus Christ, no wonder everyone makes such a fuss about it.

  But in college, what I knew best about my body was which parts other people liked. My boobs were like tractor beams on my chest, and I enjoyed being the source of awe and admiration, so I liked to flash my brights once in a while. Plus, I liked that my rack moved attention away from my thighs and my ass. My genetic curse: short, Irish, potato-picking peasant thighs. Not the long, elegant gams of those girls in jean cutoffs, one pencil leg over the other. My skirts came to the knee.

  And I kept my giant flannel shirt tied around my small waist, so that it covered my lower half. A casual kind of camouflage. It’s a little hot in here, I think I’ll just completely block your view of my ass.

  Alcohol helped. Oh my God, it helped. Behind my fortress of empty beer cans, I was safe from fear and judgment. Alcohol loosened my hips, and pried open my fists, and after years of anxious hem-tugging, the freedom was incredible. It felt good to pee in alleyways, letting my bare feet sit there in the splash. It felt good to face-plant in a patch of grass or on the plush gray carpet of our apartment. It felt good to jump up on the couch and whip the flannel shirt from around my waist and lasso it over my head.

  Booze gave me permission to do and be whatever I wanted. So much of my life had been an endless loop of: “Where do you want to go to dinner?” / “I don’t know, where do you want to go to dinner?” But if I poured some of that gasoline in my tank, I was all mouth. I want Taco Bell now. I want cigarettes now. I want Mateo now. And the crazy thing about finally asking for what you wanted is that sometimes—oftentimes—you got it.

  Did I think Mateo and I were going to get serious? Oh, please. I knew better than that. Which is to say: Yes, I wanted that, but I kept my teenage longing in check. I knew we weren’t “dating,” whatever that meant (a word from an earlier era, like “going steady” or “getting pinned”). We didn’t even have the phrase “hooking up” then. It was just, you know, something. Mateo and I had something. Until it was nothing again.

  The night after we had sex, Mateo showed up at my door. I was wearing striped flannel pajamas that swallowed me. Hangover clothes, a wearable blanket. I sat cross-legged on the couch as Mateo paced in front of the fish tank. He kept tugging on his poof of curly hair. He needed to say something, and he wasn’t sure how to say it, but it needed to be said. OK, here it is: There was this other girl. A girl we both knew. A Winona Ryder type, with Bambi eyes and Converse sneakers. He and the other girl might be kinda-sorta seeing each other at the moment. And he wanted me to know that I was so great, and last night was so great, but the thing is. The problem is.

  “I get it,” I told him. “I totally understand.”

  “You do?” And he looked so grateful, and I was so happy to see him so happy. The easy extension of my hand at this moment punctured ten kinds of awkwardness between us, and I could feel the old rapport of the dressing room again. Everything was cool.

  After he left, I called Anna, and I burst into tears.

  I STARTED HANGING out with a guy named Dave. He was one of the many male friends I never slept with, and I couldn’t tell if this was a tribute to our closeness or evidence of my supreme unfuckability. I loved being close to men and counseling them through their ill-advised one-night stands and teetering romances, but part of me wondered: Why not me? Am I just not hot enough for you to imperil our amazing friendship?

  Dave and I liked to get drunk together and make each other laugh. Our nights were a game of comedic one-upmanship. How far can we push this moment? What never-before-seen trick can I invent? I was using a lot of moves from Showgirls, a terrible film about a dancer who becomes a stripper (or something). The movie was my favorite, because the dialogue was criminally heinous. Oh, the cheap high of youthful superiority: so much more fun to kick over sand castles than to build your own.

  One night Dave and I were walking across the near-empty gardens of an Oktoberfest. I was drunk. (Of course I was drunk. I was always, always drunk.) A 70-year-old man in lederhosen approached us, bent like a candy cane, and I lifted up my shirt and flashed my bra. No warning, no prompting. Just: So wrong.

  Dave almost fell to the cement he was laughing so hard. I got so high capsizing him this way. Because if I couldn’t be the girl he loved—that would be my roommate, Tara—then I needed to be the girl who brought him to his knees.

  Tara was a sweet roommate. She sang daffy little nonsense songs while she cooked eggs and bacon for Dave and me on a hungover Sunday. She decorated the apartment with sunflowers and flea-market knickknacks. She opened the curtains, and Dave and I hissed like vampires, but Tara knew the light would lift our moods. That’s how I thought of her—as sunshine that spilled onto darkness. Nevertheless, one morning, she sat me down and gave me one of Those Talks. “You kept calling me a bitch last night,” she said, and I thought: No way. You’re such a sweetheart.

  There was only one explanation for my behavior. It was the bourbon’s fault.

  Dave had turned us on to bourbon. Jim Beam. Maker’s Mark. Evan Williams. He walked around our ragers with a tumbler, drinking his Manhattan. He was into that masculine romance: fast cars and cowboy boots and the throb of a blues song so old you could still hear the crackle in the recording. He referred to bourbon as a “real drink,” which pissed me off so much I had to join him.

  I had never cared much for liquor. To be honest, I was afraid of it. I liked the butterfly kisses of a light lager, which whisked me off into a carefully modulated oblivion, and bourbon was like being bent over a couch 20 minutes into your date. But Tara started drinking bourbon, and so obviously I had to follow.

  My group made fun of girls who couldn’t hold their booze. Girls who threw up after two drinks. Girls who needed to spike their cocktails with fruit and candy, turning their alcohol into birthday cake. I prided myself on a hearty constitution. So I sauntered up to those amber bottles, and I learned to swallow their violence. Do that enough, and you will reorient your whole pleasure system. Butterfly kisses become boring. You crave blood. Hit me, motherfucker. Hit me harder this time.

  We were on a road trip to Dallas for the Texas-OU football game when I went off the rails. I never liked football. I hated the rah-rah gridiron nonsense that defined my alma mater and my home state. But Tara and Dave didn’t share my grump. They had insignia clothes and koozies and all that shit. One Friday afternoon, they loaded into a friend’s Ford Explorer, and I had little choice but to go with them. The only fate worse than football was being left behind.

  Dave was sitting in the passenger seat, controlling the flow of music and booze. He mixed Jim Beam and Coke into plastic cups big enough to swim in.

  “Don’t drink this too fast,” he told me, because Dave was like that. A protector. He’d been a lifeguard in high school, and he still surveyed every party for anyone in danger of drowning.

  “I won’t. I promise,” I said, which was not true. I couldn’t help drinking fast, because that’s how I drank. I was a natural-born guzzler. I was already on my second giant cup when we stopped at a gas station 45 minutes outside Austin, and when I stood up, all the booze whooshed through my system. I was like one of those poker players in a Western who gets up from the table and then keels over. The last thing I remember is standing outside the bathroom unable to light a cigarette and some helpful person pointing out that it was in my mouth backward.

  The next four hours are go
ne. Flushed down the toilet. My parents were out of town that weekend, thank God, since I woke up in their house in Dallas, snuggled up in my childhood bed, naked and shivering, with a poster of James Dean pulled off the wall and covering me like a blanket. Something had gone badly wrong.

  Tara was the one who told me. She called the next day, and she had a frost in her voice. “People are a little upset right now,” she said, and I twirled the phone cord tightly around my index finger, watching the tip turn red, then white. It was no small feat, turning a group of binge-drinking tailgaters against you.

  The story I could not remember would be told many times. We had just reached the city limits of Dallas when I decided to moon people. The mooning scene is a staple of ’80s sex comedies—the Animal House genre of films about prep school boys busting out of their conformist youth. And I’d like to think I was paying tribute to those classic films. Except I botched a few key details. One is that I was surrounded not by like-minded brothers but irritated college friends who were not nearly so cross-eyed with drink. Another is that the mooning scene in those films took place while the boys were hurtling along a highway at night, and mine took place in five o’clock traffic. Yes, I mooned cars in a bumper-to-bumper snarl down the interstate, which is a little bit like mooning someone and then being stuck in a grocery line with them for the next ten minutes. Hey, how’s it going? Yeah, sorry our friend is mooning you right now, she’s really drunk. Excited about the game?

  But the third and most critical difference is that I was a girl. And for a girl, there is good nudity (boob shaking, leg spreading) and then there is bad nudity (sitting on a toilet, plucking hairs from your nipple). Pressing your wide white ass up to the window of a vehicle in broad daylight is definitely in the column of bad nudity.

  The next week was a humiliation buffet. There are times when you want to die. And then there are times when one death is simply not enough. You need to borrow other people’s lives and end them, too. All death, everywhere, seems like the only way to extinguish your agony, and while this story would become funny in time, I can assure you that in the moment, I believed I only had two options. Destroy everyone in the car. Or never drink bourbon again.

  I quit brown liquor that day. Never again, I told myself. Not every catastrophe can be solved so easily, but this one only took a simple snip, and I was allowed to stay on the party train for many more years. Everyone forgave me, which is the grace of college. We all had dirty pictures on each other.

  But still, I wondered: Why was I like this? College is a time to discover yourself—and alcohol is the Great Revealer—but I was more corkscrewed than ever. What did it mean that I hid when I was sober, and I stripped off all my clothes when I was blind drunk? What did it mean that I adored my roommate, but I lashed out at her after seven drinks? What did it mean that I didn’t love Dave (or maybe I did), but I would slay dragons to win his approval? I needed to expose the deeper meaning here. I needed to workshop this fucker.

  I FINALLY GOT a boyfriend near the end of college. And the weirdest part was: He didn’t drink. This was unbelievable to me. He used to drink, but he no longer drank. By choice. We met at a party, where he was dressed like he’d stepped out of a 1960s gin ad. He pulled out a gold Zippo and ignited it with a magnificent scratch, lighting two Camels at once before handing me one. Like he was Frank Sinatra.

  Two weeks later, we took a road trip and slept in a tent under the stars somewhere in northern New Mexico. I hadn’t done such a thing since I was a girl. It had never occurred to me camping was something you’d do on purpose. As I marveled at the red-rock canyons of the Southwest, I thought: Where did this beauty come from? Has it been here all along?

  Patrick was a professional cook. He would come home from work after midnight, his clothes smelling of wood-burning ovens, his fingertips marked by burns in the shape of purple crescent moons. His friends were cooks and fellow hedonists, who drank fine wine and had serious thoughts on plating, and for a while, I wondered what he saw in me. But unlocking the world for someone else can bring such pleasure. He gave me Tom Waits, Pacific oysters, and a knowledge of the shiver that might run through me when a man traced one index finger across the tender spots of my back.

  We hung out in pool halls. I liked billiards—such a dude’s sport, such a hustler’s game—but before I met Patrick, I had no idea how to play, and so I simply imitated power. My shots were all random thrust, because I enjoyed the clink of the balls scattering around the table like buckshot. But Patrick showed me finesse. He knew how to move.

  “Slow down,” he teased me, positioning himself behind me, and he taught me how to sink my body in order to level my gaze, how to drag the cue stick across the cradle of my fingers, slow and gentle, like I was drawing back a bow. He taught me how to torque a ball with English, wrap the cue behind my back if I needed to, and tap the ball with just the right amount of force so that it slid across the green felt and dropped into the trickiest corner pocket with a quiet thump. “Only use force when you need it,” he would say, cigarette dangling from his lips, and then he’d hammer a shot right into the corner. Bam. Sunk.

  I was not wearing my father’s jeans anymore. I was wearing tight pencil skirts and black dresses that hugged my curves. I dyed my hair auburn. Patrick was with me when I took my first legal drink. He brought me to a cigar bar called Speakeasy, a trendy Prohibition throwback that had recently opened in the burned-out warehouse district. I ordered a vodka martini. “You’ll like it dirty,” Patrick told me, and once again, he was right.

  But booze became an argument between us. The more I drank, the more I wanted him, and the less he wanted me.

  “You’re lit again,” he would say, pushing me away as I barreled toward him, having finally drunk myself into a place of unbridled wanting. Maybe it sounds odd that a recovering alcoholic would take up with a problem drinker, but we were familiar to each other. We beckoned from forbidden sides. In me he saw his past decadence. In him I saw my future hope. And it worked. For a while.

  Six months after we started dating, Patrick turned to me one night and told me he didn’t love me anymore. The best way to explain how I took this news is to tell you I didn’t date anyone for seven years.

  But I beat a lot of men at pool. I watched out of the corner of my eye as their nostrils flared, and they stamped their cue on the ground, and their eyes tracked me around that table. Were they gonna get beaten by a girl? At least two of my one-night stands began this way. Most of the others? It’s hard to remember how they began.

  FOUR

  DRINK MORE AT WORK

  I wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl. Actually, I wanted to be a writer-actress-director (and, for a brief and confusing time, a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader-writer-actress-director). But I made up my own worlds; I didn’t report on real ones. I never even considered journalism until my roommate Tara became the head of our college daily and invited me to contribute. I walked down into a dingy basement where pale chain-smokers argued about school vouchers. A sign hung at the entrance. Welcome to the Daily Texan —where GPAs go to die.

  I found a home in the entertainment section, which allowed me to cover any theater production in town, while boys in ratty concert T-shirts grappled for the latest Pavement album. It hadn’t occurred to me I could write a story today, and it could show up on your kitchen table tomorrow. What a rush. There are wonderful reasons to become a journalist. To champion the underdog. To be professionally curious. Me? I just wanted to get free stuff and see my name in print.

  And I was charmed by the companionship of the newsroom. Writing had always been a solitary pursuit, but winding my way alongside those cubicles full of keyboard clatter felt like being backstage before a show. I had stopped acting, in part because I’d grown uncomfortable with people looking at me. Journalism offered a new kind of exposure, like performing on a stage with the curtains closed.

  At 23, I landed a gig at a beloved alt weekly called the Austin Chronicle, and I couldn’t have bee
n more ecstatic. A real-live salary. Something called “health benefits.” I felt like I was standing on the first step of a staircase that stretched all the way to—why not?—the New York Times. Then again, the Chronicle was the kind of place a person wouldn’t mind staying forever. Staffers wore flip-flops and arrived after 10 am. A group got stoned by the big tree each afternoon, and production halted at 5 for a volleyball game. Each morning, a woman appeared in the lobby to sell breakfast tacos for a dollar, one of a million reasons Austin was amazing: random people showing up out of nowhere to hand out hangover food.

  My desk was in front of a brick wall that I decorated with a giant poster from the musical Rent. I’d bought the poster on my first trip to New York City, where I visited my brother, who was in grad school there. He’d taken me to a Broadway show, and I sat in those squeaky seats watching a vision of bohemia I hoped might one day be mine: documentarians with spiky gelled hair, drug addict musicians, lipstick lesbians in black catsuits.

  A week after I started at the paper, a scruffy guy from production stopped in front of the poster, pointed to it, and shook his head. “Seriously?” he said, and moved on.

  I didn’t know Rent had become a punch line of ’90s sincerity and manufactured edge. I didn’t realize AIDS victims singing in five-part harmony about seasons of love could make some of my colleagues want to punch an old lady in the neck. But that day I learned my first lesson in pop-culture tyranny: Subjective tastes can be wrong.

  That Saturday, when no one was around, I took down Rent and replaced it with Blade Runner, a film beloved by sci-fi nerds and cinephiles, although I wasn’t certain why. I’d only seen it once, and fallen asleep.