Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

by Sarah Hepola

  “I’d love one, thanks.” Her apartment was very Architectural Digest. The first floor had a glass ceiling, and if you looked through it, you could see the second-story skylight, and beyond that the stars. I wondered how many reality hosts I’d have to interview each month to afford a place like this.

  I sat on the midcentury modern couch, rocking the snifter back and forth. I took a sip, and flames ripped down my throat. Goddamn. Why hadn’t I been drinking this all my life? The buzz was warm and total. Cognnnnnnaaac. I liked the voluptuous sound. Two syllables, so much music. Meredith asked if I wanted another glass, and I hesitated for the briefest second. It was my last night in Paris. I had to say yes.

  We ate dinner in Montparnasse at a restaurant that had once been Fitzgerald’s favorite. Meredith worried it was a bit touristy, but I was excited to roll around in Lost Generation history. Art deco fixtures, high ceilings, white tablecloths. Meredith ordered a bottle of wine in fluent French, and I pretty much fell in love with her.

  Did I blurt this out at the table? “I’m a little bit in love with you.” I might have. I made such pronouncements all the time when I was lit, because most women walked around with their self-esteem around their ankles, and I felt a duty to help them lift it up. You are really pretty. Did I ever tell you about the time you ordered the wine in perfect French? Alcohol turned all my jealousy into buttercream.

  We ordered oysters. We ordered escargot. Everything Meredith suggested, I responded with a hell yeah. The booze made me hyper. My foot was jostling, a motor without an off switch. And I drank to calm myself, as much as I drank to keep myself revved.

  “This food is amazing,” I told her, though even Spaghetti-Os tasted good when I was drunk.

  The waiter came to offer dessert, and Meredith and I gave each other a conspiratorial look. Two more cognacs, please.

  It was well past 11 when the check arrived, and we had burned through half a pack of cigarettes. I threw my credit card on the table without even looking at the total.

  “I can’t let you pay for all this,” Meredith said, and I winked at her. “Don’t worry. I’m not.”

  We tumbled into a cab. And here is where the night starts to stutter and skip. I see Meredith in the cab, the bundle of her scarf around her face. It’s cold, and we are huddled together now, too drunk to care about our thighs pressed against each other. Good friends now. Old friends now. I see the red blur of the meter, a fuzzy dot in the corner. The baffling matter of euros. What the fuck are all these coins?

  I’m pretty sure Meredith says, “I’m going to walk home from your hotel. I need the fresh air.” We must have hugged good-bye. I had such a good time. Let’s do this again. But that’s not how it happens in my memory. In my memory, we’re standing there, talking, and then—she’s gone. Spliced from the scene. November leaves scuttling down the empty sidewalk near midnight in Paris. And I turn toward the rotating glass door, and I walk inside.

  That tall guy behind the concierge desk. I’ve seen him before.

  “How was your evening, mademoiselle?” His voice is almost comically low. A basso profundo, my mother would say.

  “Excellent,” I say. No slur in my voice. Nailed it. Slick floors like this can be dastardly in heels, and I’ve suffered a few spills in my time. Walking along, perfectly upright, and then boom. Face against the floor. I wave to the concierge, a good-night parting. Nice people here. Look at that: I made it all the way through the lobby without a slip.

  And then the curtain descends. You know what happens next. Actually, neither of us does.

  I USED TO have nightmares I was thrust onstage in the middle of a play, with no clue what I was supposed to say. In another version of the dream, I memorized lines for the wrong play, and nothing I said synced up with the characters onstage. I would wake up in my bed, collarbone slick, sheets in a noose around my legs. Later I discovered these were textbook anxiety dreams, which made me feel comforted, but lame. Even my subconscious was a cliché.

  I used to tell myself, when I woke from those dreams, spooked and fog-brained: This could never happen. People never get to opening night without knowing the name of the play. This is just a catastrophe scenario, fired off by neurons. It isn’t real. And yet, when the curtains opened up in my mind that night in Paris, and I was in bed with a guy I didn’t even remember meeting, this is what I said:

  ME: I should go.

  HIM: You just said you wanted to stay.

  It’s strange to me how calm I remained. I was still wrapped in the soothing vapors of the cognac, no clue where I was but not particularly concerned. I’ll figure this out.

  I was pretty sure this was my hotel. I recognized the swirly brown carpet, the brushed-steel light fixtures. The bed had the same fluffy white sheets. But the oddest ideas drifted through my head. I thought maybe this guy was my boyfriend. I thought maybe he was the man I came to Paris to interview. It was like coming out of a very deep sleep and dragging the upside-down logic of dreams into real life. As though I woke up kissing a pillow, but the pillow happened to be slightly balding with kind eyes.

  The panic started when I noticed the time. It was almost 2 am.

  “Shit, my flight leaves in a few hours,” I said.

  Actually, the flight wasn’t until 11 am, but I understood there was not nearly enough time between then and now. The awfulness of my circumstances began to dawn on me.

  I dug my tights out of a ball at the foot of the bed and slapped my bra on so fast the eyeteeth were crooked. I hopped and stumbled as I zipped up my boots. I was knocking over things, shit clattering behind me. Sensation was returning to me in stages. Strange body parts felt sore. Later, it would sting when I peed.

  “This was fun,” I said.

  He was lying in bed, one arm stretched out as though I were still in the cradle of his arms. His hand lifted in the casual, shrugging gesture of a person who hasn’t been given a choice.

  “Good-bye, I guess,” he said.

  I closed the door, and the click of the lock’s tongue in the groove brought me such relief. The sound of a narrow escape.

  I was on my way to the elevator when I realized: I did not have my purse.

  WHEN I SAY I did not have my purse, I didn’t give a shit about my actual purse, a black vinyl bag with stitching that had already started to unravel. But I did not have my wallet. I did not have my passport. I did not have my money, my driver’s license, my room card, the keys to my loft back in Brooklyn.

  I did not have my way back home.

  I turned around and stared at the line of doorways behind me. Shit. They all look the same. Which one? It was powerfully unfair. Forgetting something that just fucking happened.

  It made no sense. A woman can spend half her life haunted by a sixth grader’s taunt that took place in 1985. But she can have absolutely no idea what happened 20 seconds ago.

  Stop. Stay calm. Think. I retraced my steps. Had I passed five rooms on my way to the elevator? Or four? I searched for pointy heel indentions in the red carpet, which was covered with whorls like the forked tongue of a snake. I found nothing, but I kept searching for any trail of string. Did I pass that Emergency sign? What about this room service tray sitting by the door?

  Deductive reasoning suggested I had come from the corner room, because his window was larger than mine and the room more of an L shape, so I walked back down the hall. I took a deep breath and knocked on the door. Mine was the tentative knock of the thoroughly unconvinced. The “pardon me” knock. The “I know you’re busy” knock.

  Nothing happened. No one came.

  I looked at the door beside it. On second thought, maybe it was this one. Perhaps the room wasn’t L-shaped, so much as the furniture was rearranged. Another knock, louder this time.

  Nothing, no one.

  I wondered if he was in the shower. Maybe he had already passed out, snoring in the same position I left him. People who’ve been drinking can be so hard to rouse.

  I went back to the original door. I took a d
eep breath, and I pounded on it. I pounded with both fists, and I tried very hard not to think about what might happen if I had the wrong door. A guy staring through the fish-eye while his wife asks, “Who is it, honey?”

  Nothing happened. No one came.

  I looked down the hallway, at the doors lined up before me. Was it me, or did they stretch into infinity? I clutched my hair, then doubled over in a silent scream.

  I slumped down the wall and sat in the patch of space between two doors. I closed my eyes and stayed still for a very long time. I wanted so many things in that moment. I wanted to call Anna. I wanted to call my boyfriend, but he wasn’t my boyfriend anymore. I wanted Bubba, and the calming way he curled up on my chest, paws barely touching my neck, so I could feel the tiny patter of his heart and the boom in my own rib cage. Almost like our hearts were having a conversation with each other.

  I don’t know how long I sat in that hallway. Ten minutes, ten years.

  When I finally stood up, I had a plan.

  IN COLLEGE, WE joked about the “walk of shame.” It was the term for the bleary-eyed stagger of Sunday morning—when you had to pass coeds who raised their eyebrows at your tangled hair and your one broken heel. The great thing about a term like “walk of shame” is that its cleverness leaches the embarrassment from the act. To endure a walk of shame was not shameful anymore, because you were participating in a rite of passage, familiar to any well-lived life. Like so much of our vernacular—wasted, smashed, obliterated, fucked up—I never thought much about it.

  But heading down to the concierge desk in the middle of the night was a true walk of shame. I swiped a knuckle under each lid as I rode down in the elevator. I straightened my wool skirt. I tried to look like a woman who had not just emerged from a hole in the ground.

  “Bonjour,” I said to the concierge. My voice was chased by those hollow echoes that come in the wee hours of the night.

  “Good evening,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  Above the desk, a series of clocks kept time around the world. It was only 8:30 pm back in New York, which sounded so safe and far away.

  “I left my purse in someone’s room,” I said.

  “Not a problem,” he said, and began tapping on the computer. “What room was it?”

  I shook my head. I traced a figure eight on the counter with my index finger. “I don’t know.”

  “Not a problem,” he said. More tapping. “What was the guest’s name?”

  A tear slipped down my cheek, and I watched it splat. “I don’t know.”

  He nodded, his mouth an expressionless line. But I could see the pity in his eyes. He felt sorry for me. And somehow this pebble of sympathy was enough to shatter my fragile reserve. I crumpled into tears.

  “Don’t cry,” he said. He took my hand. His fingers were dry and cold and they swallowed mine. “It’s going to be OK,” he said.

  And I believed him, because I needed to.

  People talk about the horrible things strangers do to you when you are drunk, but my experience has mostly been the opposite. I have been the recipient of so much unsolicited kindness. The bartender who helps me track down the shoes I threw under a table. The woman who slips the glass of water under the bathroom stall where my head hangs over a toilet rim with a fishing line of drool stretching from my lips to the water. Honey, I’ve been there.

  And then there were my friends, my actual friends, who would walk me up the stairs to my bedroom. Who poured me into taxis and texted with me until I was home. They did it for me, and I would do it for them. The golden rule of a lush’s life. Be kind to drunk people, for every one of them is fighting an enormous battle.

  “Is it possible this gentleman is the one you were talking to at the bar tonight?” the concierge asked.

  And there it was, finally. My first clue.

  OF COURSE. OF course I’d gone to the hotel bar. It was located directly off the lobby. Pass the concierge and veer to the right. It’s where I’d gone after my interview on the first night, when I got back to my hotel and wasn’t ready to concede the good times just yet.

  Did the guy pick me up? Did I pick him up? Was “picking” even the right verb? The bar was small, a few leather booths and a smattering of wooden tables. Striking up a conversation in a place like this would be exceedingly easy. There’s an hour when finding someone in a bar to sleep with doesn’t require a clever line so much as a detectable pulse.

  HIM: Come here often?

  ME: You bet.

  HIM: Wanna fuck?

  ME: You bet.

  HIM: Should I tell you my name first?

  ME: That’s OK. I won’t remember it.

  I was embarrassed by my aggressive sexuality when I drank. It didn’t feel like me. And after a blackout, I would torture myself thinking of the awful things I might have said or done. My mind became an endless loop of what scared me the most.

  At the concierge desk, I didn’t have time to indulge in such fantasy. I pretended to remember the guy. Anything to bluff my way out of this mess.

  “Yes,” I told him, clapping my hands together. “That is definitely the guy. So you saw me with him tonight?”

  He smiled. “Of course.”

  Hallelujah. I had a witness.

  He handed me a new key to my room. He told me he would figure out the guy’s name but that he might need an hour or two. “I don’t want you to worry anymore,” he said. “Go rest.”

  “Hey, what’s your name?” I asked.

  “Johnson,” he said.

  “I’m Sarah,” I told him, and I took his hand with both of mine. A double-decker handshake. “Johnson, you’re the hero of my story tonight.”

  “Not a problem,” he said, and flashed a smile.

  As I headed toward the elevator, I felt like a new woman. I had a chance to restore order, to correct the insanity of the night. Johnson would find the guy’s name. I would meet the guy downstairs, suffer the indignity of small talk, then take my stuff and bolt. No, better yet, Johnson would knock on the guy’s door and retrieve the purse himself. I didn’t care how it happened, just that it happened. It was all going to be OK.

  I walked back into my room. And there, to the left of the entrance, on an otherwise unremarkable shelf, was a sack of vinyl, openmouthed and drooping. Holy shit: my purse.

  A WOMAN TOLD me a story once about folding her clothes in a blackout. She woke up, and her room was clean. How bizarre is that? But I understood how, even in a state of oblivion, you fight to keep order.

  I had lost so many things that fall in New York. Sunglasses. Hats, scarves, gloves. I could have outfitted an orphanage with the items I left behind in taxicabs. But what amazed me was how many things I did not lose, even when my eyes had receded back into my skull. I never lost my cell phone. I never lost my keys. I once woke up with the refrigerator door flapping open but my good pearl earrings placed neatly beside the sink, their tricky backs slipped back onto their stems.

  Part of this was simple survival. You could not be a woman alone in the world without some part of you remaining vigilant. I was a woman who tripped over sidewalks and walked into walls, but I was also a woman who, at the end of the evening, held on to her valuables like they were a dinosaur egg.

  How did my purse get in my room? This new evidence was forcing me to reevaluate the story I’d already settled on. I suppose I might have dropped the purse off on my way to the guy’s hotel room. But a side trip like that was a serious break in the action that didn’t track with a drunk’s impulsive style. The more likely scenario is that I went upstairs first, decided my room was entirely too quiet, and then headed back to the bar for company, leaving my purse behind. A woman locking up her diamond ring before she leaps into the sea.

  I called the front desk. “You’re never going to believe this,” I told Johnson. “My purse is in my room.”

  “I told you this would work out,” he said.

  “And you were right.”

  I changed into my pajamas and cu
rled into a fetal position under the covers. An empty bed had never been so divine. Maybe I should have been relieved, but I had the haunted shivers of a woman who felt the bullet whiz past her face. Now that my crisis was resolved, I could start beating myself up for the ways I had failed. All that I could have lost.

  This was a familiar crouch—staring at the ceiling at 3 am, lashing myself. Such a wretched place to be. Alone in the dark, with your own misery.

  The phone rang.

  “I found a leather jacket in the bar,” Johnson said. “Do you think it’s yours?”

  And here comes the part of the story I wish I didn’t remember.

  JOHNSON STANDS IN my doorway. He’s so tall. He must be six two. My leather jacket is draped over his arm like a fresh towel. I stand there with my hand on the door and wonder how much to tip him.

  “Can I come in?” he asks, and there is not an ounce of me that wants him inside my room, but he was so helpful to me earlier, and I can’t scheme quickly enough to rebuff him.

  I step back from the door and give him entry. I’m still thinking about the tip. Would five euros be enough? Would a hundred?

  He closes the door and walks to my bed. It’s not far from the entryway, but each step breaches a great chasm. “You broke my heart when you cried earlier tonight,” he says, sitting down on the mattress. He’s only a few feet from me, and I remain with my back pressed against the wall.

  “I know, I’m sorry about that,” I say, and I think: Who is manning the desk right now? Are we going to get in trouble?

  He leans forward on the bed, resting his elbows on his knees. “I was thinking, a beautiful woman like you should not be crying,” he says, and puts out his hand for me to take. I’m not sure what to do, but I walk over to him, as if on autopilot, and let my hand hang limply against his fingertips. “You are very beautiful,” he says.