Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (15 page)

I
HAD THIS
great idea: I should go into therapy. My parents agreed to shoulder most of the bill, and I felt guilty, because I knew the strain it would cause. But even worse would be not getting help at all.

My therapist was a maternal woman, with a nod I trusted.
Whenever I thought about lying to her, I tried to envision flushing a hundred-dollar bill down the toilet.

“What about rehab?” she asked.

Eesh.
That was a little dramatic.

“I can’t,” I said. I couldn’t leave my cat. I couldn’t leave my colleagues. I couldn’t afford it. If I was gonna do rehab, I wanted to be shipped off to one of those celebrity-studded resorts in Malibu, where you do Pilates and gorge on pineapple all day, not holed up a dingy facility with metal beds.

Still, I longed for some intervening incident to make me stop. Who doesn’t want a deus ex machina? Some benevolent character to float down from the clouds and take the goddamn pinot noir out of your hands?

I had this great idea: I should try antidepressants. And another great idea: I should toss the antidepressants and join a gym. And another great idea: What about a juice cleanse? And another, and another.

My body was starting to break down. After an average bout of heavy drinking, I would wake up in the mornings feeling poisoned, needing to purge whatever was left in my stomach. I would kneel at the toilet, place two fingers down the back of my throat, and make myself vomit. Shower, go to work.

I had to quit. I would try for a few days, but I never got further than two weeks. I became paranoid I was going to lose my job. Whenever I sat down to write, the words wouldn’t come. The pressure and the doubt and the stress could no longer be sipped away. I was completely blocked.

“I’m going to get fired,” I told my boss one afternoon, freaking out over a late deadline.

“Look at me,” she said. “You are not going to lose your job.” And she was right.

But she lost hers. The second layoff came a few weeks later, in August of 2009, and when the list of the damned was read, my boss’s name was on it, along with half the New York office. I couldn’t believe it. All those months I was convinced I’d be axed, and I was one of the only survivors.

Why did they keep me? I’ll never know. Maybe I was cheap. Maybe I was agreeable. Maybe my name never got pulled from the hat. I suspected my boss never let them see how much I was floundering. She protected me, and she got the pink slip. I was left with my job, my fear, and my guilt.

After work, I went straight to the bar. I had built up a week of sobriety at that point. But no way I was staying sober for this bullshit.

S
TEPHANIE WAS THE
one who finally confronted me. She took me to dinner at a nice little Italian restaurant in Park Slope. She adjusted the napkin in her lap with pretty hands that displayed a gargantuan diamond.

“I need to talk to you,” she said. The bugle call for a horrible conversation. She needed to talk to me because, at a gathering at her place, I burst into tears talking about the layoffs while we all smoked on the balcony. “You kind of freaked people out,” she said, which stung, because I thought everyone had bonded that night.

She needed to talk to me because, at a recent dinner, I told the story of a hideous romantic breakup with such heart-wrenching detail that one of Stephanie’s friends held my hand on the way back in the cab. That’s how moved she’d been. Meanwhile, Stephanie diverted her sigh into her hair. She’d heard the story three times before.

For the past few months, I had been hearing about girls’ dinners and group trips taken without me, and I thought, well, they probably knew I couldn’t afford it. I tried not to get my feelings hurt. No biggie, it was cool.

But sitting across from Stephanie, I began to realize it was
not
cool. Something was badly wrong between us. And it wasn’t some minor incident on the balcony, or a cab, but the long string of incidents that came before it. Discord is often an accumulation. A confrontation is like a cold bucket of water splashed on you at once, but what you might not realize is how long the bucket of water was building. Five drops, a hundred drops, each of them adding to the next, until one day—the bucket tips.

“I don’t know what you want,” she said. The words scraped her throat, which spooked me, because she was not a person whose composure faltered. “What do you want?”

And I thought: I want fancy trips and a house in the Hamptons and long delicate hands that show off a gargantuan diamond.

I thought: I want to not be having this conversation.

I thought: I want to not be abandoned by the people I love.

I thought: I want a fucking drink.

“I don’t know,” I said. She took my hand, and she did not let go for a long time. I wish I could say this was the end of my drinking. Instead, Stephanie and I didn’t see each other for about a year.

What I told her at dinner was true, though. I did not know what I wanted. Or rather, I knew exactly what I wanted, which was to never have to face a day without alcohol and to never have to face the consequences of keeping it in my life. I wanted the impossible. This is the place of pinch and bargaining that greets you as you approach the end. You can’t live with booze, and you can’t live without it.

O
NE MORE LAST
great idea: I should move to Manhattan. Brooklyn was for kids, but the city was for adults. I moved in the middle of an ice storm, on December 31, 2009, just in time for a fresh start.

My studio was 250 square feet. I misjudged its size, having first seen the place without furniture. Living in a space that small was like stacking my belongings on the middle seat of an airplane. There was nowhere to sit but my bed, so I stayed under the covers and drank with the lights out and the door chained, like a blackout curtain drawn over my entire life. I stayed home most nights, because it kept me out of trouble. Sometimes I watched soft-core porn for no other reason than I was given free Showtime. I was down to mostly beer now. Beer was good to me. I have always relied on the kindness of Stella Artois.

Anna came to New York to visit me. She slept beside me on the bed in that teensy studio and never complained. She was five months’ pregnant, with no luggage other than a small backpack, and she glowed. I felt like a bloated wreck next to her. She had great ideas, too: Maybe I could eat healthier. Maybe more activity outdoors. She found a yoga studio in my neighborhood and brought back a schedule. I promised I’d try. But I was too far gone. There is a certain brokenness that cannot be fixed by all the downward dogs and raw juice in the world.

My therapist said to me, “I’m not sure it makes sense to keep doing these sessions if you’re not going to stop drinking.” I must have looked stricken, because she refined it. “I’m worried the work of therapy isn’t going to help if you don’t quit. Do you understand why I’m saying that?”

Yes, I understood:
Fuck off. Go away. Done with you.

I did not want to give up therapy, any more than I wanted to give up my friends or the memories of my evenings, but the need to hold on to booze was primal. Drinking had saved me. When I was a child trapped in loneliness, it gave me escape. When I was a teenager crippled by self-consciousness, it gave me power. When I was a young woman unsure of her worth, it gave me courage. When I was lost, it gave me the path: that way, toward the next drink and everywhere it leads you. When I triumphed, it celebrated with me. When I cried, it comforted me. And even in the end, when I was tortured by all that it had done to me, it gave me oblivion.

Quitting is often an accumulation. Not caused by a single act but a thousand. Drops fill the bucket, until one day the bucket tips.

On the evening of June 12, 2010, I went to a friend’s wedding reception in a Tribeca loft. It was lovely. I had red wine, and then I switched to white. I was sitting at a big round table near the window with a guy in a white dinner jacket and clunky black glasses. The last thing I remember seeing is his face, his mouth open in mid-laugh. And behind him, night.

I woke up in my bed the next morning. I didn’t know how the reception ended or how I got home. Bubba was beside me, purring. Nothing alarming, nothing amiss. Just another chunk of my life, scooped out as if by a melon baller.

People who refuse to quit drinking often point to the status markers they still have. They make lists of things they have not screwed up yet: I still had my apartment. I still had my job. I had not lost my boyfriend, or my children (because I didn’t have any to lose).

I took a bath that night, and I lay in the water for a long time, and I dripped rivers down my thighs and my pale white belly,
and it occurred to me for the first time that perhaps no real consequences would ever come to me. I would not end up in a hospital. I would not wind up in jail. Perhaps no one and nothing would ever stop me. Instead, I would carry on like this, a hopeless little lush in a space getting smaller each year. I had held on to many things. But not myself.

I don’t know how to describe the blueness that overtook me. It was not a wish for suicide. It was an airless sensation that I was already dead. The lifeblood had drained out of me.

I rose out of the bathtub, and I called my mother. A mother was a good call to make before abandoning hope. And I said to her the words I had said a thousand times—to friends, and to myself, and to the silent night sky.

“I think I’m going to have to quit drinking,” I told her.

And this time, I did.

T
he closet in my Manhattan studio was just big enough to climb inside. I had to rearrange boxes and bags of old clothes, but if I cleared the ground like brush and squished my sleeping bag underneath me like a giant pillow, I could curl up in a ball compact enough to shut the closet door.

I don’t know why it took me so long to figure this out. All those years I spent on the bed as the sun stabbed me through the blinds. Seeking cover under blankets and pillows, wearing silky blue eye masks like I was some ’60s movie heroine. All those mornings I felt so exposed, but five feet away was a closet offering a feeling of total safety. My very own panic room.

I needed protection, because I had such turtle skin in those days. I knew quitting drinking would mean giving up the euphoria of the cork eased out of the bottle at 6 pm. What I did not expect is that I would feel so raw and threatened by the world. The clang and shove of strangers on the streets outside. The liquor stores lurking on every corner.

But you’d be surprised how manageable life feels when it has
been reduced to a two-by-five-foot box. Notice how the body folds in on itself. Listen to the smooth stream of breath. Focus on the
ba-thunk
of the heart. That involuntary metronome. That low, stubborn drumbeat. Isn’t it weird how it keeps going, even when you tell it to stop?

Sobriety wasn’t supposed to be like this. I thought when I finally quit drinking for good, the universe would open its treasure chest for me. That only seemed fair, right? I would sacrifice the greatest, most important relationship of my existence—here I am, universe, sinking a knife into my true love’s chest for you—and I would be rewarded with mountains of shimmering, clinking gold to grab by the fistful. I would be kicking down doors again. In badass superhero mode.

Instead, I woke up at 5 am each day, chest hammering with anxiety, and crawled into the closet for a few hours to shut out unpleasant voices.
When will I screw this up again? What failures lurk beyond these four walls?
I trudged through the day with shoulders slumped, every color flipped to gray scale. I spent evenings on my bed, arm draped over my face. Hangover posture. I didn’t like the lights on. I didn’t even like TV. It was almost as if, in absence of drinking blackouts, I was forced to create my own.

I had a few sources of comfort. I liked my cat. I liked food. I scarfed down ice cream, which was weird, because when I was drinking, I hated sweets. “I’ll drink my dessert,” I used to say, because sugar messed with my high. But now I devoured a pint of Häagen-Dazs in one sitting, and I didn’t feel an ounce of guilt, because people quitting the thing they love get to eat whatever the fuck they want.

I built a bridge to midnight with peanut butter and chocolate. Four-cheese macaroni and tins of lasagna. Chicken tikka
masala with extra naan, delivered in bags containing two forks. And if I made it to midnight, I won. Another day on the books: five, seven, eleven days down. Then I’d wake up at 5 am and start this bullshit all over again.

Back in my 20s—in that wandering place of travel and existential searching that unfolded between newspaper jobs—I briefly worked at a foster home for children with catastrophic illnesses. One of the babies did not have a brain, a fate I didn’t even know was possible. He had a brain stem but not a brain, which allowed his body to develop even as his consciousness never did. And I would think about that baby when I climbed in the closet, because when you took off his clothes to change his diaper or bathe him he screamed and screamed, his tiny pink tongue darting about. Such simple, everyday transitions, but not to him. When you moved him, he lost all sense of where he was in the world. “It’s like you’ve plunged him into an abyss,” the nurse told me once as she wrapped him like a burrito. “That’s why you swaddle him tight. It grounds him.” She picked him back up again, and he was quiet and docile. The demons had scattered. And that’s what the closet felt like to me. Without it, I was flailing in the void.

Not taking a drink was easy. Just a matter of muscle movement, the simple refusal to put alcohol to my lips. The impossible part was everything else. How could I talk to people? Who would I be? What would intimacy look like, if it weren’t coaxed out by the glug-glug of a bottle of wine or a pint of beer? Would I have to join AA? Become one of those frightening 12-step people? How the fuck could I write? My livelihood, my identity, my purpose, my light—all extinguished with the tightening of a screw cap.

And yet. Life with booze had pushed me into that tight corner of dread and fear. So I curled up inside the closet, because it felt like being held. I liked the way the door smooshed up against my nose. I liked how the voices in my mind stopped chattering the moment the doorknob clicked. It was tempting to stay in there forever. To run out the clock while I lay there thinking about how unfair, and how terrible, and why me. But I knew one day, I would have to open the door. I would have to answer the only question that really matters to the woman who has found herself in the ditch of her own life.

How do I get out of here?