Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (23 page)

O
NE AFTERNOON
, J
ENNIFER
showed up at my front gate, holding a Fuji cassette that was dated in her small, careful script: August 23, 1988.

“I can’t believe you still have this,” I told her.

She smiled. “It’s yours now.”

I knew what was on the tape. It was a story I didn’t like. One that explained a lot about my mixed-up history with drinking, men, and sex. I recorded it two days shy of my fourteenth birthday, when I sat in Jennifer’s bedroom with a jambox on my lap, sharing details that would haunt me for decades.

“It probably won’t even work anymore,” I said, as Jennifer slotted the tape in the deck of an old creaky jambox, once so familiar to us and now quaint as an abacus. She pressed rewind, and the tape chugged backward violently, like an unsteady aircraft preparing to take off.

She pressed the play button, and there was a buzz, followed by a loud clunk. And then, my voice floating back to me from more than a quarter century ago.

“Hi. I’m over at Jennifer’s house. It’s August
20
-something or the other.”
I do not sound two days away from being 14. My voice sounds more like 17.
“There’s really not much to say here. I can’t wait for my birthday. I got a sweater.”

On the tape, Jennifer says something from across the room I can’t quite make out. It sounds like,
“Tell our friends about your summer.”

“It was the best summer of my life,”
I start.
“I went down to visit my cousin in Michigan. I met this guy named Brad. He was wonderful. A wonderful person.”

Brad was a sweet stoner type with feathered blond hair and a nod that was about two beats slower than everyone else’s. He was 18. The night I met him, he said, “So you’re Kimberley’s older cousin,” and I laughed and corrected him.
Younger.
For weeks, whenever I ran into him, he would pantomime picking his jaw off the floor. “No
way
you’re 13,” he would say.

I’d smile, blush. Yup, really 13. One afternoon, he kissed me in Kimberley’s room, and I couldn’t believe it: He had picked
me
. It was everything the movies had promised.

My last night in town was not. We went to a party, had a few drinks, and things got much more confusing.

The story that follows is one I’ve thought about countless times over the years. I’ve wrestled with its meaning, rewrote its nuance, tried to erase it from memory. But this was the first time in 25 years I’d sat down and listened to myself tell it:

I could spend a lifetime unwinding what I heard on the tape. From the fact he had trouble getting hard to the part where he
told me to be quiet, to the way I couldn’t recall key details of how I wound up on the floor.

I’d had three wine coolers before we went into the room, not enough to black out but enough to have a warm buzz. I remember feeling grateful for the drinks, because otherwise my heart might have punched out of my mouth. I remember lying on the floor, his bare shoulder shifting back and forth in my line of vision, and the voice screaming in my brain:
Am I having sex right now?

The part that kills me is near the end, when he kisses me.
Because that made me feel like he didn’t regret anything.
It was all I cared about at 13. That I wouldn’t be someone he’d regret.

There are reasons for statutory rape laws. One is that 18-year-olds have very different expectations of dark and empty rooms than 13-year-old girls. But I was the kind of 13-year-old girl who didn’t want to be protected. Forget your laws and your conventions. I was ready for the “best summer of my life.” And I wanted to seem unfazed by what was happening. I didn’t want him to know how utterly inexperienced I was. I wanted to look cool.

My underpants were bloody when I got home. I spent years wondering if I’d lost my virginity, and if I’d consented, just as I would spend years wondering how I ended up in that Paris hotel room, and why I let Johnson stay in mine.

Was it rape? I don’t think so, though part of me still doubts my interpretation. I know some people will read it another way. But one of the great powers we have is the ability to give meaning to our own experience. To me, this was a bad and fumbling early sexual episode that has many meanings. But the one that stands out to me is how I quashed my feelings for the sake of someone else’s. His pleasure was important, not mine. His regret was important, not mine. It was a pattern I repeated for years. And every time I did, alcohol was there.

A
BOUT THREE YEARS
into my sobriety, I was on a plane from DFW to New York. The guy beside me was 23. Rumpled and exhausted from staying up all night. He slumped beside me and flashed the sideways grin of a boy who gets what he wants. “I’m moving to New York,” he said. “Have you been before?”

“I have,” I said, and left it at that.

He was moving there to be an actor.
Oh baby
,
you are screwed
, I thought, but I didn’t say this. Instead, we talked about leaps of faith. We talked about Denzel, his favorite actor. I tried to prepare him for disappointment, as I’m sure everyone did: Don’t make fame the measure of success, I told him; make this move about learning something.

It was an early morning flight, and around us, heads tilted back with eyes closed and mouths open, so we whispered like two kids talking behind the teacher’s back. We talked so long that a three-and-a-half-hour plane ride felt like 30 minutes. I noticed all the times he touched my knee.

I was nearly 40, used up in some corners of history, and men my age were often chasing women with luscious rumps and tits that had yet to sag. I wasn’t looking for younger guys, but they seemed to find me anyway, and I wondered why. Maybe they sensed I was not interested in commitment yet. Or maybe they liked the grooves of a hand that knew its own strength. I was done trying to be anyone else.

“Do you think the mile-high club really exists?” he asked, raising his eyebrow.

“I hope not,” I said. “Fucking in an airplane bathroom sounds terrible.”

He wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, you’re right.”

Our plane landed, but we were not ready to part. It was his first day in New York, and it was only 11 am, which meant we had time to spray paint the town before we parted. I paid for the cab ride to the Ace Hotel in Midtown, a place where musicians and writers often stayed, and I treated him to lunch at the restaurant, full of downtown charm and bustle. “You are giving me one hell of a story,” he said, and I smiled, because he was doing the same for me.

We sat on the couch in the lobby, my legs on his lap. We were surrounded by strangers typing on their laptops, headphones on. Did they notice us? What did they see? He fiddled with my hair, which fell across my brow. He traced his fingers around mine as my hand rested on his knee. Have you ever noticed how astonishing it can be, holding hands with a person? Such an everyday thing, such a nothing gesture. But two hands, barely touching each other. It can feel like flying.

He kissed me then. Right in front of all those people. I didn’t care. They were too busy with Twitter and Facebook to pay attention. “I want to put down my credit card and take you upstairs right now,” he said. I smiled, and ran my fingers over his sweet face, that face that had taken him so far in the world, and I said, “Not this time.”

His body fell back in the couch. “So that’s it? You’re going to leave now?”

I smiled. That’s right. I was going to leave now. But I gave him my number, and I told him to text me if he ever needed me, and I walked out to the bustling sidewalk feeling so light.

It’s a fine day when you finally figure out the right time to leave the party.

P
eople who quit drinking become terrified they will lose their power. They believe booze makes them the people they want to be. A better mother. A better lover. A better friend. Alcohol is one hell of a pitchman, and perhaps his greatest lie is convincing us we need him, even as he tears us apart.

I needed alcohol to write. At least, that’s what I believed. I had no idea how people wrote without alcohol, which is a bit like wondering how people construct buildings without alcohol or assemble watches without alcohol. I’m sure it happens all the time, but I’d never done it.

Years ago, when I worked at the Dallas paper, I used to sit at the bar with the other writers, and we’d elbow each other out of the way to reach the punch lines. Writers are often insecure by nature, but in those hours I felt indomitable. We could disagree about music, politics, the use of the serial comma, but we never disagreed about drinking.

Writers drink.
It’s what we do. The idea made me feel special,
as though I got a pass on certain behaviors, as though self-destruction were my birthright. The bar also made me feel like real work was getting done, even if the real work turned out to be arguing the merits of
Saved by the Bell
.

I liked talking about writing much more than actually writing, which is an unspeakably boring and laborious activity, like moving a pile of bricks from one side of the room to the other. Talking about writing was exciting. It was all possibility.
Let’s talk about the story at the bar! Kick it around over a few drinks, brainstorm that bad boy.
And in those sinking moments when I realized two hours had passed, and no one had brought up the story we were supposed to fix, I had the perfect antidote in front of me. Another glass of guilt-be-gone.

But booze wasn’t merely a collective procrastination tool. It was the tool I took home with me when I needed to sit by myself and get the words out onto the page. Writing is a lonely profession. Nobody wants to walk in darkness alone.

Alcohol was an emancipator of creativity. It silenced my inner critic. It made me bigger and smaller, and my writing required both delusions: to believe everyone would read my work, and to believe no one would. I even loved writing hungover, when I was too exhausted to argue with myself, allowing words to tumble onto the page.

If I ever grew anxious about the empty bottles my work required, I could wrap myself in an enabling legend.
Writers drink.
It’s what we do. As long as the work gets done, you can coast on these words for a very long time.

But the dynamic pivoted for me. The drain and the time suck of my habits became too much to tolerate. I was no longer a writer with a drinking problem. I became, as Irish author
Brendan Behan once said, “a drinker with a writing problem.” Something had to go, and given how conjoined my writing and drinking were, I figured it had to be both.

Well, actually, I did have a history of writing without alcohol. It was called childhood. Kids are wizards of imagination, and I was one of those youngsters scribbling all day long. Children are not hobbled by an awareness of others or the fear of people’s judgment. Children don’t have to face professional failure, public disinterest, the criticism of colleagues, lacerating Twitter commentary, the scorn of strangers. They skip through a grassy meadow where every picture they paint is important, every story worth telling, whereas today’s online writer traverses an enemy territory where any random dude with a Tumblr account can take you down.

Perhaps I was using alcohol not to spark my creativity but to blunt my sensitivity. I needed someone to hold my hand.

After I quit drinking, I didn’t write for six months. I was too fragile. I spent that time editing personal essays for
Salon
. I loved reading stories of other people’s lives, extraordinary things happening to ordinary people. One woman met her dream guy only to watch him die of an aneurysm that very day. One woman was trapped under the rubble after the earthquake in Haiti. She was saved, but the other woman in the house wasn’t. It was mind-blowing what could unfold in the course of a life.

The stories got me out of myself, but they also stoked my writer’s envy, which isn’t necessarily bad. Envy can be an arrow that points to the things you want. The more I read those stories, the more I thought: I could do that. That might feel good. I should join them.

The first thing I wrote in sobriety was an essay about quitting drinking. It felt like insurance for a person prone to relapse.
I wanted to be on record. I wanted to double down on public humiliation to keep me from backsliding. The story wasn’t easy to write, but it wasn’t that hard, either. When I was done, it sounded like me. The me I remembered.

After the piece published, writers I admired responded with kind words and strangers in the comments responded with a warm stream of urine down my leg. But I was starting to realize this online anger wasn’t about me. It was a by-product of garden-variety powerlessness. Usually when I reached out to one of those people, they would say similar things.
Oh, I didn’t think anyone was listening
—which suggests the true source of their rage.

I kept writing. I began waking up at 6:30 and writing for the first four hours. No procrastinating. No rearranging the furniture. Just wake up and stare down. The work was never easy, but it became
easier
. Less like a geyser I kept waiting to blow and more like a faucet I could turn on and off.

We ascribe such mystery and magic to the creative process, but its essence is quite basic. Moving a pile of bricks from one side of the room to the other requires strength. Time, discipline, patience.

Writers write.
That’s what we do.

“The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time,” Stephen King wrote in his memoir and instruction manual about creativity,
On Writing
. King is one of the many heroes I’ve had who turned out to be an addict. He was a serious beer binger, who admits he could barely remember writing his novel
Cujo
.

When I read the stories I wrote during my heaviest drinking years, I don’t think they’re bad. I am a little appalled, though, at
how frequently alcohol intrudes. Interviews take place in bars. Entire narratives revolve around drinking. Jokey asides are made about hangovers and blackouts. A beer or a glass of wine sits in the corner of nearly every piece, like some kind of creepy product placement.

A friend of mine is a music teacher, who says pot helped him truly hear music for the first time. “But if you smoke too much pot,” he said, “you get that Jamaican high. Everything turns to reggae.” Whatever creative growth alcohol and drugs might offer at first, it doesn’t last. You stop learning and noticing.

“Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost,” Henry James wrote. I first heard the quote in an interview with Pete Hamill, author of the 1994 memoir
A Drinking Life
. As an old-school newspaper reporter growing up among the free-clinking bottles of postwar America, Hamill built his identity on booze. But ultimately he quit, because it was bad for business.

It was bad for mine, too. So much was lost on me when I was drinking. What we did last night, what was said. I stopped being an observer and became way too much of a participant. I still introduce myself to people, only to receive the brittle rejoinder of “We’ve met, like, four times.” Memory erodes as we age. Did I really need to be accelerating my decline?

I’m not saying great writers don’t drink, because they certainly do, and some part of me will probably always wish I stayed one of them.

I sometimes read stories by women who are using, and they speak in a seductive purr. They have the intoxicating rhythm of a person writing without inhibitions. Those pieces can trigger a toxic envy in me. Maybe I should do drugs, I think. Maybe I should drink again. How come she gets to do that—and I can’t?

Mine are childish urges, the gimme-gimme for another kid’s
toys. The real problem is that I still fear my own talent is deficient. This isn’t merely a problem for writers who drink; it’s a problem for drinkers and writers, period. We are cursed by a gnawing fear that whatever we are—it’s not good enough.

If I stew in that toxic envy too long, I start to teeter. Those are the days when my eyes can get pulled by a glass of champagne, throwing its confetti into the air, or the klop-klop of a martini being shaken in a metal cup. What a powerful voodoo—to believe brilliance could be sipped or poured.

I read an interview with Toni Morrison once. She came into the literary world during the drug-addled New Journalism era, but she never bought the hype. “I want to feel what I feel,” she said. “Even if it’s not happiness.”

That is true strength. To want what you have, and not what someone else is holding.

A
BOUT THREE YEARS
after getting sober, I decided to learn guitar, something I’d been saying I would do for years. My author’s bio used to read “Sarah Hepola would like to learn how to play guitar,” as if this ability came from Mount Olympus. I bought an acoustic from my friend Mary, and I holed up in my bedroom, and then I figured out why I never did this in all the years of floating on the booze barge. It was incredibly difficult.

Strumming looked easy, but it was awkward and physically unpleasant at first. It took hours to even form the finger strength to make a handful of chords.

“I think something’s wrong with my hands,” I told my teacher, one of the best guitarists in town. He assured me that no, my hands were fine. Learning guitar was really that hard.

“You don’t think my hands are too small?” I asked.

“I teach eight-year-old girls to play guitar,” he said. “You’re fine.”

But I bet eight-year-old girls don’t writhe with the humiliation of being a middle-age beginner. I was confronting the same poisonous self-consciousness and perfectionism that had kept me from speaking Spanish when I was in Ecuador, that kept me from dancing in public when I was sober, that kept me locked up all my life. I hated feeling stupid.

“Your problem is that you step up to every plate and expect to hit a grand slam,” a friend told me, and I said, “Yes, exactly!” as though I were simply grateful for the diagnosis. Drinking had fueled such impatience and grandiosity in me.

Addiction was the inverse of honest work. It was everything, right now. I drank away nervousness, and I drank away boredom, and I needed to build a new tolerance. Yes to discomfort, yes to frustration, yes to failure, because it meant I was getting stronger. I refused to be the person who only played games she could win.

The first time I played a song in its entirety—“Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses—I felt like I’d punched a hole in the sky. I blew off work that day, shut down my phone. I sat in my bed and played the song over and over again, till my hands were cramped and red-purple grooves ran like railroad tracks across my fingertips.

The feeling was so immaculate I didn’t want to taint it with the anxiety of performance. The next week, during our lesson, I kept my instructor talking, hoping I could burn out the entire hour with questions before we got around to playing. About 30 minutes in, he turned to me and said, “OK, let’s hear you.”

The ache of those words:
Let’s hear you.
It put a plum in my throat to be the person who wanted to play but could not bear to play. To want the microphone but to stand in the back. To know
there is a book in you but to never find the nerve to wrestle it out. I was so screwed up on the issue of performance. It’s like I didn’t want anyone to hear me, but I couldn’t shut up. Or rather, I wanted
everyone
to hear me, but only in the way I wanted to be heard, which was an impossible wish, because nobody ever followed instructions.

My hands shook when I strummed through the song, but my teacher strummed along with me, like a father with his hand barely holding the bicycle seat. We sang together, sometimes finding the harmony parts, and afterward he said, “You’re a natural.” He probably said that to everyone, but I liked that he said it to me.

“This is more like a portable karaoke machine for me,” I told him, smoothing my hand along the gloss of the dreadnought.

“That’s cool,” he said.

“I’m not going to be a good guitarist,” I told him.

“You never know,” he said.

What mattered was that I was doing something I wanted to do instead of merely talking about it. Later, in the safety of my bedroom, my fingers started to find their way. Sometimes I could make chords without even looking at the strings, and I began to develop a kind of faith, a reaching without fear. The afternoon could slip away when I was like this: three hours, gone without looking once at the clock.

I loved being reminded that losing time didn’t have to be a nightmare. It could also be a natural high.