Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (16 page)

I
’ve never liked the part of the book where the main character gets sober. No more cheap sex with strangers, no more clattering around bent alleyways with a cigarette scattering ashes into her cleavage.
A sober life.
Even the words sound deflated. Like all the helium leaked out of your pretty red balloon.

In the first few weeks, though, I didn’t actually know I had gotten sober. Have you ever broken up with a guy, like, 15 times? And each time you slam the door and throw his shit on the lawn and tell yourself, with the low voice of the newly converted:
No more.
But a few days pass, and you remember how his fingertips traced the skin on your neck and how your legs twined around him. And “forever” is a long time, isn’t it? So you hope he never calls, but you also wait for him to darken your doorway at an hour when you can’t refuse him, and it’s hard to know which you would prefer. Maybe you need to break up 16 times. Or maybe—just
maybe
—this is the end.

That was my mind-set at 14 days. I kept a mental list of the order my friends would forgive me if I started drinking again. I
called my mother when I got home from work every night. A way to tie myself to the mast from six to midnight.

“How are you doing?” she asked in a voice I deemed too chipper.

“Fine,” I told her in a voice suggesting I was not. Our conversations were not awesome. I could feel her sweeping floodlights over the ground, searching for the right thing to say.

“Are you writing?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Have you thought any more about going back to the meetings?” she asked.

“No,” I said. See, Mom didn’t get it. This moment didn’t get a silver lining.

I was sick of stupid AA meetings. For the past two years, I had been in and out of the rooms, crashing one for a few months, then disappearing to drink for a while, then finding another place where I could be a newcomer again. (Getting sober might be hell, but it did give me the world’s best underground tour of New York churches.)

I would arrive five minutes late and leave five minutes early, so I could avoid the part where everyone held hands. I thought death lasers were going to shoot out of my fingers if I heard one more person tell me how great sobriety was. Sobriety sucked the biggest donkey dong in the world. One day, a guy just lost it during his share:
I hate this group, and I hate this trap you’ve put me in, and you’re all in a cult, and I hate every minute I spend in here.

I liked that guy’s style.

W
HAT WAS ODD
about my aversion to AA was that it had worked for me once before. When I was 25, I ran into a drinking buddy who had gotten sober. I couldn’t believe he’d quit. He and
I used to shut down the bars. “One more,” we used to say at the end of each pitcher, and we’d “one more” ourselves straight to last call.

But his once-sallow cheeks were rosy. “Come to a meeting with me,” he said, and I did.

What I remember best about that first meeting is a jittery reluctance to brand myself with the trademark words. I’d seen the movies, and I knew this was the great, no-backsies moment:
I’m Sarah, and I’m an alcoholic.
For weeks, I’d been kicking the sheets, trying to get square on that issue. What did it
mean
to be an alcoholic? If I said I was one, and I turned out to be wrong—could I change my answer?

Alcoholism is a self-diagnosis. Science offers no biopsy, no home kit to purchase at CVS. Doctors and friends can offer opinions, and you can take a hundred online quizzes. But alcoholism is something you must know in your gut.

I did, even if I was reluctant to let the words pass my lips. I’d read
The Big Book
, AA’s essential book of wisdom, and experienced a shock of recognition that felt like being thrown into an electric fence.
Other people cut out brown liquor, too? Other people swear off everything but beer?
Even the way I came into AA was textbook. It was, indeed, the origin story of the group. Bill Wilson spent an evening with a drinking buddy who was clean, and their meeting became the first click of an epiphany.
If that guy can get sober, so can I.
AA had been shrouded in mystery to me, but it can be boiled down to this: two or more drunks in a room, talking to each other.

After that first meeting with my friend, I decided to give it a try. I did not have the most winning attitude. I would sit in the back with my arms crossed and sneer at the stupid slogans. “One day at a time,” “Let go and let God,” which was clearly missing
a verb at the end. I had mental arguments with nearly everyone who spoke. (I usually won.)

It worked anyway. I stayed sober for a year and a half, which is like dog years to a 25-year-old. I heard unforgettable tales in those rooms. I was moved in ways that startled me. Still, I never settled in. A few members took me to brunch one afternoon, all eager hands and church smiles. I sat in that diner—the same diner I used to frequent with my college friends on hangover mornings, when we showed up with cigarette smoke in our clothes and casual sex in our hair—and I hoped to God no one saw me with these middle-age professionals. I shoveled gingerbread pancakes into my mouth and forced myself to laugh at their jokes, and I worried this would be sobriety: a long series of awkward pancake lunches with people who made me feel old and ordinary. I preferred feeling young and superior.

When I decided to start drinking again at 27, nothing could have convinced me to stay. No persuasive case could have been launched to keep me out of the churning ocean once I decided to swim in it again. For a woman who has hope, logic is the flimsiest foe. Yes, I had admitted I was an alcoholic, and I knew in my heart I didn’t drink like other people. I also thought: If I play my cards right, I could get ten more years.
Ten more years of drinking is a long time!

As more time passed, I began to wonder if I’d overreacted with that whole AA business. This is one of the most common strains of alcoholic doublethink, and it is especially pernicious, because there is no objective way to sort out which person actually
did
overreact and which person is crotch deep in denial. I was the latter, but I was also 27. I spied a window of opportunity and zip-bam-boom. I was headed into the waves once more.

“I’ll probably be back one day,” I told my friend, but I’m not
sure I meant it, because ten years almost did pass, and then I was like: Screw that.

Screw that.
For years, this was my attitude toward AA, the place that reached out its hand to me when I was on my knees. But becoming a professional drunk demands you distance yourself from the girl in the foldout chair who was once soul sick and shivering. I never spoke ill of AA after I left. But I could only recommend the solution to someone else. Like telling my friend to cut out dairy while shoving a fistful of cheddar cheese in my mouth.

During that next decade of drinking, I gravitated toward any book or magazine article about a person who drank too much. Nothing pleased me like tales of decadence. I read Caroline Knapp’s
Drinking: A Love Story
three times, with tears dripping down my cheeks and a glass of white wine in my hand. White wine was Knapp’s nectar of choice, which she described with such eloquence I needed to join her, and I would think, “Yes, yes, she gets it.” Then she quit and joined AA, and it was like:
Come on. Isn’t there another way?

Another way. I know there is now, because I have heard so many stories. People who quit on their own. People who find other solutions. I needed to try that, too. I needed to exhaust other possibilities—health regimens, moderation management, the self-help of David Foster Wallace and my Netflix queue—because I needed to be thoroughly convinced I could not do this on my own.

By the way, the guy who got me into AA started drinking again not long after I did. He got married and had a kid. His mid-20s revelry didn’t drag into his middle age, which sometimes happens. If you look at the demographics, drinking falls off a cliff after people have children. They can’t keep up. “You wanna curb your drinking?” a female friend asked. “Have a baby.”

I held on to those words into my mid-30s. I knew some speed bump of circumstance would come along and force me to change. I would get married, and
then
I would quit. I would have a baby, and
then
I would quit. But every opportunity to alter my habits—every challenging job, every financial squeeze—became a reason to drink more, not less. And I knew parenthood didn’t stop everyone. The drinking migrated. From bars into living rooms, bathrooms, an empty garage. The drinking was crammed into the hours between a child going down to bed and a mother passing out. I was starting to suspect kids wouldn’t stop me. Nothing had.

And I was
so pissed
about that. It wasn’t fair that my once-alcoholic friend could reboot his life to include the occasional Miller Lite while he cooked on the grill, and I had broken blood vessels around my eyes from vomiting in the morning. It wasn’t fair that my friends could stay at Captain Morgan’s pirate ship party while I was drop-kicked into a basement with homeless people chanting the Serenity Prayer. The cri de coeur of sheltered children everywhere: It isn’t fair! (Interestingly, I never cursed the world’s unfairness back when I was talking my way out of another ticket. People on the winning team rarely notice the game is rigged.)

Three weeks into this sobriety, though, I finally went back to the meetings. I found one near my West Village apartment where they dimmed the lights, and I resumed my old posture: arms crossed, sneer on my face. I went to get my mother off my back. I went to check some box on an invisible list of Things You Must Do. I went to prove to everyone what I strongly suspected: AA would not work for me.

Please understand. I knew AA worked miracles. What nobody ever tells you is that miracles can be very, very uncomfortable.

W
ORK WAS A
respite during that first month, although that’s like saying being slapped is a respite from being punched. What I mean is I didn’t obsess about alcohol when I was at my job. I didn’t tell anyone I’d quit, either, probably for the same reason pregnant women wait three months before announcing their baby. Nobody wants to walk that shit back.

Our office in Midtown became a demilitarized zone for me. What was I going to do, drink at my desk? There was nothing festive about that place. In the depth of the recession, we had moved from an airy loft with brushed-steel fixtures to a bleak cubicle farm with gray carpets and dirty windows. A tube sock sagged the end of an aluminum slat on the Venetian blinds, a bizarre artifact from the previous tenants, and we were all so demoralized and overloaded that it was months before anyone thought to simply reach out and pull the thing down.

The work kept my hyperactive brain buckled in for a spell, though. A friend described her editing job as being pelted to death by pebbles, and when I think back to that summer, all I see are rocks flying at my face—contributors whose checks were late, writers growing antsy for edits. I spent half of the workday combing ridiculous stock pictures to illustrate stories.
Woman with head in her hands. Woman staring out rainy window. Woman tearing out hair.
A montage of the personal essays I was running, and also my life.

Around noon, I’d reach out to my deputy editor Thomas. “Lunch?” I’d type.

He’d type back, “Give me a sec.”

“This is bullshit,” I’d type with mock impatience. “You are so
fucking fired right now. FUCKING FIRED, DO YOU HEAR ME?”

“Ready,” he’d type back.

We’d walk to a chain restaurant in the ground floor of the Empire State Building, where I ate a burrito as big as a football, and Thomas calmly explained to me why I was not going to quit my job that day.

Sober folk have a phrase for people who quit drinking and float about with happiness.
In the pink cloud.
I was the opposite of that. I was in a black cloud. A storm cloud. Each day brought new misery into focus. New York: When did it get so unbearable? People: Why do they suck so bad? Sometimes, when I was riding the subway, I would think about burying a hatchet in a stranger’s skull. Nothing personal, but: What would it feel like? Would their head sink in like a pumpkin, or would I have to really yawp and swing the hatchet to get it in?