Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (10 page)

My friends had escaped to grown-up jobs in coastal cities, and I chided myself for lacking the gumption to follow. Anna was out in California seeking social justice through a series of impressive nonprofit law gigs. My old roommate Tara was a reporter in Washington, DC. My friend Lisa, hired at the
Chronicle
alongside me, had ventured to Manhattan and gotten a gig at the
New York Times
.

“You should move out here,” she would tell me, on our phone dates, and I told her I couldn’t afford it. The more accurate reason: I was scared.

My high school drama friend Stephanie wasn’t. She had been living in New York for a few years and already become one of those rare creatures, a successful actress. She landed a role as an attorney in an NBC crime drama also starring ’80s rapper Ice-T.
SVU
, it was called, though I liked to call it “SUV.” She had made it in the big city, just like we said we would, and I watched her ascend in a gilded hot air balloon, as I stood on the ground and counted the ways life had failed me.

I was particularly burned up on the boyfriend issue. I thought having a byline in the
Austin Chronicle
would bring cute, artistic men to my doorstep, but it really only brought publicists. Years of Shiner Bock and cheese enchiladas had plumped me by at
least 40 pounds, which I masked in loose V-necks and rayon skirts scraping the ground, but I also spied a double standard at play. Male staffers dressed like slobs, but they still found pretty girls to wipe their mouths and coo over their bands. Meanwhile, I was nothing but a cool sisterly type to them. Where were my flirty emails? My zippy office come-ons? How come nobody wanted to fuck
me
for my talent?

So I needed that road trip to California. Five days by myself through West Texas, New Mexico, across the orange Creamsicle of the Nevada desert at sunset. In Las Vegas, I booked my room at the demented-circus hotel Hunter S. Thompson wrote about in
Fear and Loathing
. It pains me to admit I had never read this book. But I understood Thompson’s work to be a locus of debauchery and creative nonfiction, the intersection where I planned to build my bungalow.

I slummed around the nickel arcades on the low-rent side of the Strip that night, and I won $200 at a machine that was clearly broken, so all you had to do was mash the same button over and over again, winning every time. A brunette in a French maid skirt brought me a check, but there were no flashing lights on the arcade. No coins clinking into my bucket. It’s weird how you can hit the jackpot—and still feel a little robbed.

The sky was dark when I got to Anna’s place, and she was standing on the corner when I pulled up, doing her jokey little happy dance in the beams of my headlights, biting her lower lip and swaying.

“What does a girl have to do to get a drink around here?” I asked, and we smiled like two people who have crossed great distances to find each other. But when she pulled my bags out of the car, something sank in her and never reappeared. Was she mad about how late it had gotten? Was she disappointed to see
I’d gained so much weight? Best friends have a spooky voodoo. We’re like cats on airplanes, who can feel each dip in cabin pressure, and at that moment, Anna and I took a nosedive.

The way Anna tells it, she came to my car and saw a bunch of empty beer cans clattering around in the backseat. It was her epiphany moment. I’d been alone on that trip. I’d been immersed in solo adventure and the majesty of the outdoors, and yet I could not let go of my cheap silver crutches from 7-Eleven. The funny truth is that I drank less on that trip than I usually did. Even now there’s a defiant part of me that wants to correct her observation. Like I was being punished not for my indulgence but for a commitment to recycling.

Anna knew other stories, though. Troubling episodes that had accumulated. On my visit to New York, I got so drunk I fell down a flight of stairs and ended up in the hospital with a concussion. One night in Austin, I went out to karaoke with friends, and I was so loaded I jumped onstage and wrestled the microphone from some poor guy in the middle of “Little Red Corvette.” When I went to get a drink afterward, the bartender said, “I’m sorry, you’ve been cut off.” Cut off? Why? For nailing that fucking Prince song?

There were stories about questionable men, and trips to Planned Parenthood the next morning, and a stubborn refusal to use condoms followed by a terrible guilt. And once I told Anna these secrets, I felt purged and hopeful. But I’d laid a heavy heap of jagged worry in her arms.

After I got back to Texas, Anna sent me another letter. Her voice did not have the hop-skip this time. I read it with a thunderstorm rolling in my belly, the words of rejection leaping out as if a yellow highlighter had been dragged across them: “worried about you.” “can no longer watch.” “please understand.” She did
not demand that I quit drinking, but she told me she couldn’t be the safe place for my confessions anymore. It was a love letter, the hardest kind to write, but I did not see it that way. It felt like a bedroom door slammed in my face.

A
YEAR LATER,
I quit drinking. Not forever, but for 18 months, which felt like forever. And in that stretch of sobriety, much of my happiness came back to me. Weight dropped off my hips. My checking account grew heavy with unused beer money. I took off the hair shirt of my own entitlement and began reaching for the life I wanted. One day, I walked into the editor-in-chief’s office, closed the door behind me, and told him I was moving to Ecuador.

The travel part of my story is one of the greatest times of my life. Scary, but thrilling: Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia. I read books half the day and spent the rest of the hours however I wanted.

But be careful when you finally get happy. Because you can become greedy for the one thing you don’t have.

I missed drinking. This new world was grand, but I didn’t feel complete without that foamy abandon. I thought about drinking all the time. If only I could drink again, then I could lose myself to this handsome stranger and not be hobbled by my own nagging insecurities. If only I could slurp down those
pisco
sours like the other students at the Spanish school, I could let foreign words spill out of my mouth like divine prophecy instead of being so scared to speak in Spanish that I ducked eye contact. I was 27 years old, and I had everything—except the delicious communion of two beers, maybe three. I wanted so badly to dip a toe in that river again. Dip a toe, or maybe fall in.

My fever grew stronger, and I began to itch for the drama of
drinking. You know what I miss? A hangover. You know what I want? A night I regret. My shins covered in eggplant bruises, some unshaven backpacker at the book depot, his hands all over me.

Three months into my trip, Ecuador qualified for the World Cup for the first time in history, and I didn’t give a rip about soccer, but I needed to celebrate. A party broke out in the square. I cracked open a 20-ounce beer, took a swig, and felt a loosening that traveled down to my toes. Two hours and two beers later, I was crazy-dancing to Shakira, the Spanish-language version, on the front patio of my lodge alone. Fuck judgment. Fuck discretion.
I was back.

When I returned to the States, I struggled to explain to my friends why I had started drinking again. After all, not much time had passed since I explained to them why I quit. But I told them I was healthier now. I would be careful. My friends mostly nodded and tried to figure out which reaction would be supportive and which would be naive. “People come in and out of sobriety all the time,” I said, and as we rambled into our late 20s, these were the bumpy roads we had to navigate: Marriages fail, lesbians start dating men again, dreams turn out to be the wrong dreams.

A few weeks later, I had another blackout. This time in front of 300 people.

I
HAD BEEN
hanging out with a trio of comedians, and their ability to extemporize dazzled me. Each time they unhinged their subconscious, hilarity fell out. When one of them asked me to perform at an event he was hosting, I wanted to be bold enough to join them. Take a chance. Risk failure. As Elliott Smith sang:
“Say yes.”

So I said yes, but to what? I had no improv skills and couldn’t play an instrument. We settled on what we called a “Drunken Q&A.” I would get buzzed, and audience members could ask me anything they wanted. Easy, right? I had no idea hundreds of people would show.

I also didn’t expect the guy I’d been seeing in Dallas to come. Lindsay and I had been dabbling in a relationship for two weeks, long emails and after-hours phone calls, and I was wrestling with how serious we should be. I liked him, but did I like him enough? He surprised me that night—driving three hours to watch me perform in Austin, a grand gesture that made me nervous and spazzy. I was excited he wanted to be there but worried I couldn’t match his enthusiasm, or the adoring way he looked at me, and the answer to this pinwheel of anxiety was to drink. A lot.

By the time the show started, I was stumbling across the open grassy area, stopping people who passed. “Have you met my new boyfriend?” I asked, one hand in his and another around a cup of wine. “He’s
cuuuuuute
.”

I made it to the stage soon after, and people asked their questions. But the only part I remember is telling a very disjointed story about Winnie-the-Pooh.

When I woke the next morning, I felt shattered. I’d spent the past two years on a path of evolution—but here I was, crawling back under the same old rock. Lindsay and I walked to a coffee shop, where a guy on the patio recognized me. “Hey, you’re the drunk girl from last night,” he said, and my stomach dipped. “You were hilarious!”

I’ve heard stories of pilots who fly planes in a blackout, or people operating complicated machinery. And somehow, in this empty state, I had stood on a stage, opened my subconscious, and hilarity fell out.

I turned to my new boyfriend, to gauge his response. He was beaming. “You’re famous now,” he said, and squeezed my hand.

I moved to Dallas to live with Lindsay and became the music critic at the
Dallas Observer
. Another stint on the good-times van. Club owners floated my tab, label owners bought me drinks. I was barely qualified for the job, and I faked my way through half my conversations, but the alcohol cushioned my mistakes. So did my boyfriend. Lindsay was a closet artist, who spent his evenings fiddling with song mixes and his days building databases. My new gig was an all-access pass to a world he’d only seen from a middle row. “I feel like the president’s wife,” he told me one night, after we spent the evening drinking with musicians. It didn’t even occur to me that might be a bad thing.

My stories were gaining traction. I began writing in a persona that was like me, only drunker, more of a comedic mess. I made jokes about never listening to albums sent by aspiring bands, which was neither that funny nor that much of a joke. But people told me I was a riot. Maybe they liked being reminded we were all screwed up, that behind every smile lurked a disaster story. I began contributing to a scrappy online literary magazine called
The Morning News
. And in this tucked-away corner of the Internet, where I could pretend no one was watching, I began to write stories that sounded an awful lot like the real me.

People
were
watching, though. An editor at the
New York Times
sent me an email out of nowhere. She wondered if I’d like to contribute a piece sometime. They were looking for writers with voice.