Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (6 page)

“What is wrong with you?” I asked her as we drove away from the hotel. “Have you completely lost your mind?”

She didn’t answer, because she couldn’t remember. She had blacked out and—just like we both would in years to come—poured herself into whatever hands wandered her way.

That night fractured our friendship for good. Jennifer graduated a year early. And I got a boyfriend. I belonged to him now.

I
WAS A
junior in high school when my parents finally busted me. I came home from school to find a half-empty 12-pack of Coors Light sitting in front of my bedroom door, with a note that read:
We’ll talk about this when your dad gets home.

The beer was a gift from my boyfriend, Miles, a funny guy with delicate features and an equal fluency in Monty Python and David Bowie. He gave me the Coors Light for my sixteenth birthday, along with a $25 gift certificate to the Gap, a reflection of my hierarchy of needs at the time. I stored the 12-pack in the back of my closet, underneath dirty clothes, and I would sneak a can out of it from time to time. Three were smuggled in my woven bucket purse and slurped with friends before a dance.
Another was shoved between my cleavage underneath a mock turtleneck as I paraded past my father in the middle of the day, just to prove I could. I drank one of them on a lazy Saturday, sipping it in my bedroom, because I liked the casualness of the gesture, a high school girl playing college.

But my clever ruse fell apart when my mother dug through my closet to recover a shirt I’d borrowed. She couldn’t miss the silver glint of contraband in the dim light.

I couldn’t predict how my parents were going to react to this discovery. They were so different than other parents. Half my friends’ folks had divorced by then. Jennifer’s father lived in an undecorated apartment across town. Stephanie’s mother moved the girls into a duplex, while her dad began a slow drift that would take him out of her life completely. All those shiny, happy families, splintered into custody arrangements and second marriages. And yet, somehow, my parents stayed together. My mom was happier, less volatile now—a result of her intensive therapy, four times a week. We used to joke that for the price of a new home, we got a healthy mother. My parents may have argued their way through my elementary school years, but by the time they sat me down in the living room that night, they were united.

“Your father and I would like to know where you got this beer,” my mother said.

I wasn’t sure how to spin this episode. How much reality could they handle? I’d been drinking for years at this point with such assurance that playing dumb would be an insult to my pride. At the same time, my folks were on the naive end, and most of what they knew about underage drinking came from 60
Minutes
–style segments where teenagers wound up in hospitals. Of course, things really did spin out of control at some of our parties, and even I was uncomfortable with the level of
oblivion. A friend had recently crashed his car while driving drunk. I was worried about him—but it gave me an idea.

“I know it’s upsetting to find something like this,” I told my parents. “But what you don’t realize is that I’m holding the beer for a friend, who has a drinking problem.”

I hated lying to them. They were so earnest. I felt like I was kicking a cocker spaniel in the teeth. But the lie was necessary, the same way I had to tell them Miles and I were “just talking” during all those late nights we drove around in his 1972 Chevy Nova. The lies allowed me to continue doing what I wanted, but they also shielded my folks from guilt and fear. Kids lie to their parents for the same reason their parents lie to them. We’re all trying to protect each other.

My dad wasn’t quite convinced. “Look me in the eye, and tell me that’s not your beer.”

I leveled my gaze with his. “That’s not my beer,” I said, without a tic of doubt in my voice. And I thought:
Holy shit. Is it really going to be this easy?

It was. I wasn’t displaying any of the classic distress signals. I was on the honor roll. I had a boyfriend everyone liked. I beat out Stephanie for the lead in the senior play. On Sundays, I ran the nursery at my parents’ progressive, gay-friendly church, and I even landed my first job, at a center for Children of Alcoholics, because I was the sort of kid who helped other kids—whether they were toddlers I’d never see again or baseball stars vomiting in the bushes and crying about the mother who never loved them.

By senior year, a bunch of us would gather on Friday nights in a parking lot behind an apartment complex. Not just drama kids, but drill team dancers, band nerds, jocks, Bible bangers. We’d all gone to the devil’s side now.

And the more I drank with them, the more I realized my
mother was right. We really were all the same. We’d all struggled, we’d all hurt. And nothing made me feel connected to the kids I once hated like sharing a beer or three. Alcohol is a loneliness drug. It has many powers, but to a teenager like me, none was more enticing. No one had to be an outsider anymore. Everyone liked everyone else when we were drinking, as though some fresh powder of belonging had been crop-dusted over the Commons.

I
WENT TO
college in Austin. All that big talk of getting the hell out of town, and I only made it 180 miles south on the highway.

For years, people assured me I was a “college girl,” which is what adults tell smart girls who fail to be popular. I assumed the transition would be a cinch. But I lived in a sprawling dorm that was more like a prison. I stood at social events in my halter top and dangly earrings, looking like the preppies my fashionably rumpled classmates abhorred. “You’re so
Dallas
,” one guy told me, which I understood to be an insult. (My first lesson in college: Hate the place you came from.) Other kids wore torn jeans and baby-doll dresses and clunky Doc Martens. I’d spent four years in a back bend trying to fit in at an upscale high school. Now I was going to have to contort myself all over again.

The first month was a terrible solitude. I took walks around the track behind the dorm, trying to lose those last stubborn pounds. I woke up early to apply makeup before my 8 am German class. Every once in a while, I ran into my high school boyfriend, Miles, on campus. We’d broken up over the summer, but we’d both come to the same state university, which was a bit like attempting a dramatic exit from a room only to discover the door was locked. Some nights, I lay in my prison bed and listened to U2’s “One” on my CD Discman—the same anguished
song, over and over, because I liked to curl up inside my own suffering and stay for a while.

Luckily, I found Anna. She was my peer advisor, which meant it was in her actual job description to help me out of my misery. She was a year older, with tastes I recognized as sophisticated. She drank her coffee black. She read Sylvia Plath, required reading for college girls dabbling in darkness, and Anne Sexton, whose very name told me something crazy was going on there. I’d only worshipped male artists—not on purpose so much as default—but Anna was drawn to the women. The secret diary writers, the singer-songwriters who strummed out their heartbreak, the girls splintered by madness. She had an Edward Hopper painting called
The Automat
over her desk. Nothing was happening in the picture, but it pulled me in anyway: a woman by herself, eyes cast downward, in an empty restaurant at night. Meanwhile, I decorated my work space with snapshots from high school dances where I clutched a gaggle of friends smiling on cue. I don’t think I’d ever realized how beautiful a woman alone could be.

Anna and I became close that fall while acting in a shoestring production of a Chris Durang play. (Neither of us studied drama in college, but our small liberal arts program was the type where kids put on shows for the hell of it.) We were walking home from a rehearsal when she asked if I wanted to smoke a cigarette in her friend’s dorm. He was out of town for a few days, and we would have the whole 100-square-foot cell block to ourselves.

It was one of those nights when a casual conversation unfolds into a fateful conversation. One Marlboro Light turned into a whole pack. Two Diet Cokes turned into half a dozen and a cheese pizza. We laid out the sad tales of our past like a Shinsu knife collection.
And here on the right, please admire my awkward first sexual experiences. Oooh, and have I shown you my bitter regret?

I talked a lot about Miles that night. He and I had an ideal high school romance (except for the part where I cheated on him). He was hilarious and tender, a John Cusack of my very own (except for the part where he broke up with me after I cheated on him). The mature side of my brain knew our relationship had found its natural end. But my girlish heart kept getting tugged back to him. Sometimes I saw him on campus, walking with a girl who wore combat boots and a motorcycle jacket, and I felt like I’d been cattle-prodded.
Who the hell is she?

To make it more confounding, Miles wasn’t the same person I once dated. College was like a phone-booth identity swap for him. He wore a rainbow knit beret now and grew his cute floppy bangs into long spiraling curls. His goatee came to a point, like a billy goat, or Satan. As if he were daring me not to love him anymore.

But I couldn’t stop, I explained to Anna as she nudged a box of Kleenex my way. I couldn’t let go of him, even though I didn’t know him anymore. College girls weren’t supposed to be like this. We were supposed to be cool. Unencumbered. Free. Instead, I’d become one of Those Girls—the ones who drag their high school romance across the first year of college like a teddy bear on the ground. As for the actual teddy bear Miles gave me, I still slept with it every night.

Anna didn’t have a boyfriend in high school. She was the valedictorian, and her closest companions had been novels. She knew books the way I knew pop songs, and listening to her sometimes made me wonder what I might have learned if I’d actually tried in my classes.

Anna was also proof that not all teenagers drink. She told me about this time when she was 18. She had gone to a bar and seen two cute boys. She wanted to impress them, so she picked up
someone else’s beer can and gestured with it while she spoke. When the cops walked in, the guys darted for the exit, while Anna got her first ticket. Anyone who got caught by the police said the same thing. “But, Officer, it’s not mine.” And Anna might have been the first kid in history to be telling the truth.

We talked till dawn that night, and I was exhausted and exhilarated by the time I returned to my thin foam mattress. Sometimes I call this evening “the night Anna and I fell in love,” and sometimes I call it “the first night of our lives together,” but I can’t call it “the night we chain-smoked and ate cheese pizza in Mark’s dorm room,” because that happened pretty often.

In the later years of college, she and I would drink wine on friends’ porches and sit together at picnic tables messy with tortilla chips and margarita spills. Anna knew how to knock back drinks by then. But in the first year we spent together, our adventures were limited to a 14-story dorm. We made each other mix tapes. We wrote each other handwritten letters and dropped them in the post office slot, even though we lived 150 feet apart, because we both understood the rush of getting mail. And through our long and loping conversations, I began to discover Anna had an industrial-grade memory. She could recall the most mundane details of my past. The make and model of Miles’s car. The names of my cousins. It goosed me each time, like she’d been reading my journal.

Back in high school, an impeccable memory had been
my
superpower. I had archives of useless knowledge: the number of singles released from
Thriller
(seven), the actor who played the villain in
The Karate Kid
(Billy Zabka). Friends used to rely on me to fill in the backstory about our shared past. This was before the Internet, when the very act of remembering could make me feel like a whiz kid bound for a
Jeopardy!
championship.
What
was the name of our freshman-year health teacher again? Where was that concert we went to in ninth grade?

And I would think, “How can people forget their own lives?”