Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (13 page)

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.

O
F COURSE
. O
F
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.

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 curled 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.

J
OHNSON 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.

I blink and breathe deeply through my nostrils. Fucking Christ. It is a compliment that makes me want to wither away. I have spent years chasing after compliments, with the ridiculous hope that every man in the universe would find me beautiful.
And now a man arrives at 3:30 am to tell me I have succeeded in my pathetic, girlish hopes and dreams, and I want to crush him. I want to scream.

“Thanks,” I say.

“I saw you Saturday night when you came in,” he says. I stare at the floor, wondering how to get my hand back. I’m not sure what makes me angrier: that he will not leave, or that I will not ask him to. For the millionth time, I’m enraged by a man’s inability to read my mind.
Look at how I’m standing here. Can’t you see how revolting I find you?

“I’m glad I could take care of you,” he says, and he brings my hand to his lips.

“Johnson, I’m really tired,” I say. “It’s been a really long day.” I want him to leave so badly my stomach aches.

I think:
If tell him to go, he’ll probably stand up politely and walk out of the room without saying more than a few words.
So why don’t I? Do I feel I owe him something? That I can’t turn him away? That he’ll be mad at me?
What do I feel?

He pulls me toward him, and we kiss.

The kiss is neither bad nor good. I consider it a necessary penance. I can’t explain it. How little I care. Zapping back to my life in the middle of sex with a stranger seems to have raised the bar on what I can and cannot allow. All I keep thinking is:
This doesn’t matter.
All I keep thinking is:
It will be easier this way.

He tugs me toward the bed, and my body moves before my brain tells it differently. I let him run his hands along me, and he strokes my hair. He kisses my nose, now wet with tears he does not ask about. He moves his large, rough hands over the steep slope of my fleshy sides, up along my breast, nudging down my top and gently sucking on my nipple.

And the confounding part is how good this feels. It shouldn’t
feel this way. My skin should be all bugs and slithering worms. But the truth is I like being held. I like not being alone anymore. None of this makes sense in my mind, because I don’t want to be here, but I can’t seem to leave. I don’t understand it. What accumulation of grief and loneliness could bring me to this place, where I could surrender myself to the hands of a stranger? Who is this person in the hotel room? And I don’t mean Johnson. I mean me.

We lie in the bed, and he strokes my face, my body. I can feel him hard against me, but he never asks for more.

At 4 am, I push Johnson out the door. I climb into my bed and cry. Huge howling sobs, and I feel a small amount of comfort knowing the story exists only in my memory bank and that I do not need to deposit it in anyone else’s. This whole episode can stay a secret.

R
EAL DRUNKS WAIT
and watch for the moment they hit bottom. Your face is forever hurtling toward a brick wall, but you hope that you can smash against it and still walk away. That you will be scared but not destroyed. It’s a gamble. How many chances do you want to take? How many near misses are enough?