Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (3 page)

I
T WAS SPRING 2010
when I heard the term “rape culture.” I was 35, and editing a story for an online magazine, and strapped to my desk all the time, because I had to be.

“I honestly don’t understand what this word means,” I wrote to the author, in the blunt and slightly irritated language of a frazzled editor. The feminist blogosphere where she was a leading voice could get jargony, and I took a grammar snoot’s delight in reminding writers their first duty was clarity.

“I bristled at the term at first, too,” she responded, and sent me a link to a story called “Rape Culture 101.” My eyes scanned a long list of ways that male sexual aggression was favored over women’s safety, from movies that glamorize violent sex to the act of blaming a victim’s behavior for her own rape.

It was one of those moments when I felt adrift from the feminist conversation. I’d only recently started calling myself a feminist. Writers at the magazine urged me to look past the baggage and the bickering around the term and address its core meaning: a belief that both sexes deserve equal opportunity and equal treatment. Back in high school, I’d been obsessed with the civil rights movement. My notebooks were emblazoned with Martin Luther King quotes. But it had never occurred to me to
fight for my own gender. Maybe fishes don’t know they’re in a fishbowl, or maybe it’s easier to identify another kid’s short stick than to see the one you are holding.

Anyway, “rape culture” didn’t track for me. Here I was, an editor at a magazine, run by a woman, working almost exclusively with female writers who wrote voluminously about female topics, and yet, we were being straitjacketed by a “rape culture”? I figured the term would sink back into the quiet halls of academic doublespeak. It spread like mad instead.

Over the next years, “rape culture” became one of the central issues around which smart, young women rallied online. And because this corner of the Internet was my neighborhood, the clamoring grew quite loud. A quick scan of personal essay pitches I received during this time: confronting my rapist; the rape I never reported; why won’t my college students stop writing about their rapes?

In 2011, I watched the media coverage of “SlutWalks,” a more provocative version of the old “Take Back the Night” candlelit vigils in which solemnness had been replaced by rage and a kind of punk aesthetic. Torn fishnets and f-bombs. The catalyst had been a police officer in Toronto suggesting that to avoid rape, women “should stop dressing like sluts.” The response was a roar.
We can dress however the fuck we want.

I marveled at their conviction. I mean, SlutWalks. How unambiguous is that? The organizers had clearly learned the lessons of social media and search engines, where language must have thrust. The participants were my kind of women—strong women, defiant women—though I felt a queasy mix of envy and alienation when I watched them. Maybe I missed the tigress growl of my own college years. Or maybe it’s the curse of every generation to look at those behind them and wonder how they got so free.

The more I read about “rape culture,” the more sense it made. Rape culture was a mind-set: the default view that a woman existed for a man’s pleasure, that his desires somehow superseded her comfort in the world. I began to see it more and more. The construction workers at the Marcy stop on the JMZ train, who told me they wanted to titty-fuck me.
That was rape culture.
The guy on the subway who took a creepshot of my cleavage on his phone, making nausea spill over my insides.
That was rape culture.

This younger generation seemed to understand—with a clarity I never possessed—that they didn’t have to tolerate so much bullshit in the world. And I felt a little foolish, and a little complicit, that I spent so many years accepting this barbed wire as the way things are only to watch those women barreling into it, middle fingers raised.

By 2014, the term “rape culture” had made its way to
Time
magazine, which ran a cover story on campus sexual assault illustrated by a university sports banner emblazoned with the words “rape.” Meanwhile, another media narrative was unfolding, this one about women and alcohol. CNN: “Why are more women drinking?”
USA Today
: “Binge drinking is a serious problem for women, girls.”

To publicly connect these two narratives was to waltz into a very loaded minefield. Every once in a while, a columnist would come along and suggest women should drink less to avoid sexual assault. They contended if women didn’t drink as much, they wouldn’t be so vulnerable to danger. And those columnists were disemboweled upon arrival into the gladiator arena of public discourse. The response was a roar.
We can drink however the fuck we want.

I understood the pushback. For way too long, women had been told how to behave. Women were sick of altering their behavior to please, to protect, to safeguard—while men peed
their names across history. The new motto became “Don’t tell us how to act, teach men not to rape.” The entire conversation offered a needed corrective. Women are never to be blamed for getting raped. Women are never “asking for it” because of the way they dress or what they do.

And we women
can
drink however the fuck we want. I certainly did, and I’m not interested in taking away anyone’s whiskey sour. But reading these salvos from entrenched battlegrounds made me feel kind of alone. In my life, alcohol often made the issue of consent very murky. More like an ink spill and nothing close to a clear line.

I knew why the women writing on these issues didn’t want to acknowledge gray zones; gray zones were what the other side pounced on to gain ground. But I kept longing for a secret conversation, away from the pitchforks of the Internet, about how hard it was to match the clarity of political talking points to the complexity of life lived at last call.

Activism may defy nuance, but sex demands it. Sex was a complicated bargain to me. It was chase, and it was hunt. It was hide-and-seek, clash and surrender, and the pendulum could swing inside my brain all night: I will, no I won’t; I should, no I can’t.

I drank to drown those voices, because I wanted the bravado of a sexually liberated woman. I wanted the same freedom from internal conflict my male friends seemed to enjoy. So I drank myself to a place where I didn’t care, but I woke up a person who cared enormously. Many yeses on Friday nights would have been nos on Saturday morning. My consent battle was in me.

I
HAD WANTED
alcohol to make me fearless. But by the time I’d reached my mid-30s, I was scared all the time. Afraid of
what I’d said and done in blackouts. Afraid I would have to stop. Afraid of a life without alcohol, because booze had been my trustiest tool.

I needed alcohol to drink away the things that plagued me. Not just my doubts about sex. My self-consciousness, my loneliness, my insecurities, my fears. I drank away all the parts that made me human, in other words, and I knew this was wrong. My mind could cobble together a thousand PowerPoint presentations to keep me seated on a bar stool. But when the lights were off, and I lay very quietly in my bed, I knew: There was something fundamentally wrong about losing the narrative of my own life.

This book might sound like a satire of memoir. I’m writing about events I can’t remember. But I remember so much
about
those blackouts. The blackouts leveled me, and they haunt me still. The blackouts showed me how powerless I had become. The nights I can’t remember are the nights I can never forget.

I
grew up in Dallas, Texas, wondering why. In the novels and buttery teen magazines I read, people of consequence lived in California and the East Coast, the glittering cities where a Jay Gatsby or a John Stamos might thrive. When I became obsessed with Stephen King books, I nursed fantasies of moving to Maine. Things happened in Maine, I told myself, never understanding
things happened in Maine
because Stephen King made them happen.

My father was an engineer for DuPont Chemical in 1970, but a crisis of conscience changed our family’s entire trajectory. The environmental movement was getting started, and my dad wanted to be on the right side of history—cleaning up the planet, not pumping more toxins into it. He took a job with the burgeoning Environmental Protection Agency, which was opening up branches across the country, and in 1977, when I was three years old, we moved from a quaint Philadelphia suburb to the wilds of Dallas, a city so far removed from what we knew it might as well have been Egypt.

I’ve often wondered how much of my life would be different if we’d stayed where we sprouted. What part of my later troubles, my sense of estrangement could be traced back to this one simple set change—swapping the leafy and sun-dappled streets surrounding our apartment in Pennsylvania for the hot cement and swiveling highways of Big D?

My parents rented a small house on a busy street in the neighborhood with the best public school system in Dallas. The district was notorious for other things, too, though it took us a while to catch on: $300 Louis Vuitton purses on the shoulders of sixth graders, ski trips to second homes in Aspen or Vail, a line of BMWs and Mercedes snaking around the school entrance. Meanwhile, we drove a dented station wagon with a ceiling liner held up by staples and duct tape. We didn’t have a chance.

Parents often try to correct the mistakes of their own past, but they end up introducing new errors. My father grew up in a public housing project in Detroit. My mother wondered what she might have achieved if she hadn’t downshifted her intelligence through school. They wanted better opportunities for their two children. And so they moved into an area where all the kids went to college, an area so cloistered from the dangers of the big city it was known as the Bubble.

The neighborhood was a real slice of old-fashioned Americana: two-story redbrick homes and children selling lemonade on the corner. My brother and I rode our bikes to the shopping center a mile away to buy gummy worms and magic tricks, and we made As on our report cards, and we were safe. In fact, the only thief I ever knew was me.

I was a small-time crook. In middle school, I slipped lipstick and powder compacts into my pocket at the Woolworth’s and smiled at the clerk as I passed. Every kid pushes boundaries, but
something else was going on: Surrounded by a land of plenty, I couldn’t shake the notion that what I had been given was not enough. So I “borrowed” clothes from other people’s closets. I had an ongoing scam with the Columbia Record & Tape Club that involved changing the spelling of my name each time I joined. But the first thing I remember stealing was beer.

I was seven when I started sneaking sips of Pearl Light from half-empty cans left in the refrigerator. I would tiptoe into the kitchen in my cotton nightgown, and I would take two long pulls when no one was looking, and I would spin around the living room, giggling and knocking into furniture. A carnival ride of my very own.

Later, I would hear stories of girls this age discovering their bodies. A showerhead positioned between the thighs. The humping of a pillow after lights off. “You didn’t do that?” people would ask, surprised and maybe a little bit sad for me.

I chased the pounding of my heart to other places. A bottle of cooking sherry under the sink. A bottle of Cointreau, screw top crusty with lack of use. But nothing was as good as beer. The fizz. The left hook of it. That wicked ka-pow.

In high school, girls would complain about beer—how gross and sour it was, how they could barely force themselves to drink it—and I was confused, as though they were bad-mouthing chocolate or summer vacation. The taste for beer was embroidered on my DNA.

T
HE MOVE TO
Dallas was hard on everyone, but it might have been toughest on my mom. She was catatonic for a week after our arrival. This was a woman who had traveled alone in Europe and was voted “most optimistic” in her high school class, but in
the first days of our new life, she sat on the couch, unable to retrieve even a lampshade from the garage.

She was too overwhelmed. She’d never been so far from her big, noisy Irish brood, and though some part of her longed for distance, did she really want this much? My mother was also not what you’d call a Dallas type. She wore no makeup. She sewed her own empire-waist wedding dress, inspired by characters in Jane Austen books. And here she was at 33, with two kids, stranded in the land of rump-shaking cheerleaders and Mary Kay Cosmetics.

I was happy in those early years. At least, that’s the story I’m told. I shimmied in the living room to show tunes. I waved to strangers. At bedtime, my mother would lean down close and tell me, “They said I could pick any girl baby I wanted, and I chose you.” Her glossy chestnut hair, which she wore in a bun during the day, hung loose and swished like a horse’s tail. I can still feel the cool slick of her hair through my fingers. The drape on my face.

I clung to her as long as I could. On the first day of kindergarten, I gripped her skirt and sobbed, but no amount of begging could stop the inevitable. Eden was over. And I was exiled to a table of loud, strange creatures with Play-Doh gumming their fingertips.

The first day of kindergarten was also a rocky transition for me, because it was the last day I breast-fed. Yes, I was one of those kids who stayed at the boob well past the “normal” age, a fact that caused me great embarrassment as I grew older. My cousins dangled the tale over my head like a wriggly worm, and I longed to scrub the whole episode from my record. (A bit of blackout wished for but never granted.)

The way my mother tells it, she tried to wean me earlier, but I threw tantrums and lashed out at other children in frustration. And I asked very nicely.
Just once more, Mommy. Just one more time.
So she let me crawl back up to the safest spot on earth, and she didn’t mind. My mother believed kids develop on their own timelines, and a child like me simply needed a few bonus rounds. She wanted to be a softer mother than the one she had. The kind who could intuit her children’s needs, although I can’t help wondering if I was intuiting hers.

These were the hardest years of my parents’ marriage. Nothing was turning out the way my mother expected—not her husband, not her life. But she and I continued in our near-umbilical connection, as diapers turned to big-girl pants and long-term memories formed on my developing mind. Was she wrong to let me cling like this? Did she set up unrealistic expectations that the world would bend to my demands? Was this a lesson in love—or codependence? I don’t know what role, if any, my protracted breast-feeding plays in my drinking story. But I know that whatever I got from my mother in the perfect little cocoon of ours was something I kept chasing for a long, long time.

I was in first grade when my mom went back to school, and much of the following years are defined by her absence. She disappeared in phases, oxygen slowly leaking from the room, until one day I looked around to find my closest companion had been relegated to cameo appearances on nights and weekends.

She became a therapist, the go-to profession for wounded hearts. She wanted to work with children—abused children, neglected children, which had the unintended consequence of pulling her away from her own. She cut her long brown hair into a no-nonsense ’80s do. She stored her ponytail in a hatbox on a
high shelf in her bedroom closet, and sometimes I would pull it down, just to run my fingers over it again.

E
VEN THOUGH
I was seven when I first stole beer, I was six when I first tasted it. My father took care of me and my brother in the evenings, and he spent most of the hours in a squishy chair in the living room, watching news reports of weather and death. I often saw him with his eyes closed, but he swore he wasn’t napping, which made me curious where he had gone, which alternate reality was better than ours.

He nursed one beer each night. Sometimes two. He poured the beer into a glass, and I could smell the hops dancing in the air as I passed. Few scents crackle my nerve endings like beer. As gorgeous as campfire, as unmistakable as gasoline.

I sidled up to him.
Can I have a sip?

Just one.
I placed my nose in the glass, and I could feel stardust on my face.

I don’t know if parents still let their kids taste beer, but it wasn’t uncommon at the time. The bitterness was supposed to turn us off the stuff, but that one sip lit a fuse in me that burned for decades.

My parents weren’t big drinkers back then, but thirst ran in our bloodlines. My mother’s Irish heritage requires no explanation. My father’s background is Finnish, a nationality fabled for its shyness and its love of booze (two qualities that are not unrelated). To be both Irish and Finnish is to be bred for drinking—doomed to burst into song and worry later what everyone thought about it.

My dad was self-conscious like me. He was self-conscious about his ears, which he thought stood out funny, and the
vitiligo that looked like spilled bleach across his arms and shins. He was a handsome man, with a beaming smile, but he carried himself like someone who didn’t want to be noticed. He wore a lot of beige.

My father’s EPA office was in the flashy downtown skyscraper where J. R. Ewing swindled his fortunes on the TV show
Dallas
. But the two men couldn’t have been further apart. My father was a diligent government worker who scanned our bills at Steak and Ale to flag any item accidentally left off the tab. He took me to a movie every Saturday, and he let me choose the film (a luxury no second child forgets), but he was so anxious about arriving on time we often showed up before the previous movie had ended. We’d linger in the lobby for 20 minutes, the two of us sitting on carpeted stair steps, not talking.

As much as my father was there during my childhood, he was also not there. He had an introversion common to Finns, and to engineers. He avoided eye contact. If he was growing up today, I’m curious what a psychiatrist would make of him. He had a boyhood habit of stimming, rocking back and forth to soothe himself. In his 20s, he had a compulsive blinking tic. In his middle age, he kept a notebook listing every winning Dallas lotto number, recorded in his careful, geometrically precise block lettering. A futile attempt at charting randomness.

Perhaps these were coping mechanisms of a childhood harsher than mine. His father was sent to a mental institution when my dad was 15—a breakdown brought on by mental illness, drinking, or both. But most of my dad’s past, like my dad himself, was a mystery to me. All I knew was that my father was not like those loud, wisecracking fathers on sitcoms who tousled your hair and tickled you till you snorted. He communicated in his own rhythms. If I said, “I love you, Daddy,” he would
sometimes pat my head and say, “OK. Thanks.” So I learned that fathers were very loyal and dependable people who existed behind glass.

My mother was full of passion and conversation. I sometimes marveled these two people ever came together, but I was charmed by tales of their courtship. In lieu of an engagement ring, my father gave her money to study in Germany, an act of gentle nonconformity and global discovery that shaped my worldview. But at night, in our cramped house, their fights curled like smoke underneath their bedroom door. And as tender as my mother could be, an Irish fire lurked in her, too. I could hear her voice each night, bitten by frustration. The tone that always made the veins on the side of her neck stand up like cords.
Why can’t you do this right, John? Why can’t you listen, John?

For a while, my brother and I were allies on this battleground. Josh was my hero, a swashbuckling little boy who could find excitement in any dusty corner. He turned blankets into royal capes and wicker chairs into spaceships from a galaxy far, far away. He was four and a half years older than me, with a precocious mind forever solving the Rubik’s Cube of how the world worked. Of course, he solved his actual Rubik’s Cube. I gave up, and changed the stickers.