I didn’t even know when guys were into me. Matt and I were on-again, off-again, and I was flirting with guys at work like—well, like an insecure twenty-year-old who wants everyone to like her and hasn’t learned about things like “boundaries” or “mixed signals.” On my first night out with Kevin, a 31-year-old copy editor at the Chronicle, it didn’t dawn on me that we were on a date until he invited me to his place, a tiny garage apartment near the UT campus, and offered me a glass of wine. “Um, I’m okay,” I said. His face fell. “Do you not drink wine?” he asked. “Oh, I do, of course,” I lied, “but you know what? I actually think I might be getting sick. I’d better go. Sorry!” But then, a few months later, while we were both taking a break from the Chronicle to campaign for the Democratic candidate for state attorney general, Kevin asked me out again, and this time I said yes.
I avoided drinking during those late-teenage, early-adulthood years, turning down glasses of wine at parties or nursing a half pint of beer until it got warm in the glass. I just don’t like to drink, I thought. But there was another reason: Something about it scared me. Years of dating boys and men who chose, for personal reasons, to be sober as Mormons had had their effect, but I also worried about losing control. I saw the way people got at parties—sloppy and unfocused, telling the same stories again and again—and I knew I didn’t want to be like them. I wanted to keep my edge.
By the time I graduated the following year, my relentless usefulness had paid off. At twenty (twenty-three as far as anybody at the Chronicle, including Kevin, knew), I was an editor, hired to help edit the news section and cover the statehouse and city hall for the unfathomably generous sum of twenty-four thousand dollars a year. I hadn’t had to go to Killeen or Lampasas. I had jumped the line.
* * *
—
It wasn’t long, though, before I started to see the drawbacks of working in a place without clear boundaries or schedules.
Wednesday nights at the Chronicle went like this:
“Jesus, when will they finish up at the tree?”
“I don’t know—maybe if it ever gets dark?”
“Geez Louise, man, I want to get out of here!”
“Not gonna happen—looks like they’re getting ready to play volleyball again.”
My boss, Amy, and I—she’s the one who said things like “Geez Louise”—had formed a rhythm over the year or so I’d been working at the Chronicle, and part of that rhythm was bitching about the tree. The tree was where all the guys who worked at the paper, including our ostensible bosses, Nick and Louis, got high on production nights—also known as the nights when we were supposed to be putting out the paper. To get to the tree, you had to walk across the volleyball court (located where, at a normal office, the parking lot might be) and into a secluded area behind the construction trailer that housed South by Southwest, a scrappy but ambitious music festival the guys at the Chronicle had started as a side project back in the late eighties. Visits to the tree often segued into long, boys-only volleyball matches or mass excursions to the HEB grocery store across the street, and inevitably slowed production to a crawl. Even today, it makes me clench my jaw just a little to think about all the nights Amy and I sat in that overrefrigerated office, waiting for the publisher, Nick, to sign off on a piece of clip art (“Hmmm. I’m not sure which of these windmills really communicates ‘wind power’”), or for the editor, Louis, to put the finishing touches on his crotchety stream-of-consciousness column, “Page Two.”
If you’re sensing a pattern here—men in the top jobs, making the decisions, women doing the grunt work at the bottom of the pyramid—so was I. Most of the newsrooms I’ve worked in have been led by men, with women in subordinate and administrative roles—section editors at best, junior reporters in charge of picking up public records at worst. In a dozen years in the alt-weekly business, I worked under just one female editor-in-chief, and she was pushed out after less than a year on the job, to be replaced by—you guessed it—an older white guy.
Back then, though, I still thought it was possible to be one of the guys—or, failing that, a cool girl, the kind who could match the boys round for round and didn’t bitch about getting stuck at work because work itself was one constant party. I didn’t know much about office politics, but I could tell that being a guy in journalism beat being a woman: No one ever made Hunter S. Thompson ride herd on a bunch of deadbeat production staffers or rewrite a higher-ranking male reporter’s slapdash piece about police accountability. I couldn’t play volleyball with the guys, but I could drink with them, and so, shortly after I turned twenty-one, I did—tagging along, practically unnoticed, whenever I heard the vaguest intimation of an after-work get-together, like a kid sister pleading, “Can I come with you?” to her teenage brother and his friends. For a while, I was the kind of drinker who would literally pour the rest of her glass of wine into a potted plant when no one was looking—that’s how much I disliked the way drinking made me feel—but it wasn’t long before I realized the power that alcohol had to untie the tongue, to blur social boundaries between successful, sexy, well-adjusted adults and awkward imposters, which is what I considered myself to be.
It didn’t occur to me that the last time I drank with any regularity was in high school, and that my goal then was to get obliterated. It didn’t even occur to me that people like me could have drinking problems. Why would it? Everyone drank, and if everyone drank, it must be normal.
The grown-up world replicates high school in ways we don’t always recognize or acknowledge. I wanted to fit in with my older, sophisticated coworkers (most of them all of twenty-five), and drinking seemed to help. A few Mexican martinis (Patron, Cointreau, and lime juice, shaken and strained) brought out a sparklier version of my regular self—more gregarious, less judgmental, more flirtatious. Experts say that one of the warning signs of alcoholism is the ability to “hold” your liquor better than other people—to drink more, and faster, while acting less drunk—and by that standard, I was a textbook case. Maybe that should have given me pause, but no one had ever told me to worry about drinking; it was normal, something adults did as a reward for having hard, stressful lives. Alcoholics were middle-aged men with red, gin-blossom noses and three-day stubble, not pretty young women doing shots with the boys and calling out cheerfully for another round. Drinking offered a provisional entry into the boys’ club, and I considered the fact that I could drink most guys under the table a point of pride. Tequila, sangria, vodka martinis—all were self-confidence, distilled. Two drinks in, I could turn off the critical voice in my head that insisted, These people are way cooler than you, or, Everybody here thinks you’re an incompetent child. Four drinks in, I could silence the one that nagged, These people are trite and annoying. And six drinks in? Good-bye to the voice that said, You have a boyfriend, or, Come on, this guy is beneath your standards.
Guys seemed to like me better drunk than sober, and who could blame them? Sober me was impatient and critical and never talked to strangers; drunk me was brassy and confident, flirting with guys I wasn’t attracted to and tottering off just before they could try to invite me home. There was always some reason to go out for a drink—it was a long production night, or an unexpectedly short one, or someone’s getting married, or we’re all about to go on a three-day weekend, let’s get it started early! Dos Equis for everybody, bottoms up, shots all around.
Finally, I’d found my people.
The night I had my first blackout started much like any other—a quick bottle of wine over dinner with Kevin at Mother’s Café, one of those college-town places that serve veggie burgers and tofu enchiladas in a glassed-in “garden” with a waterfall and hanging plants. After dinner, we drove over to Trudy’s, a fajitas-and-margaritas place with a comfy back patio, where we met up with some friends from the paper and settled in for the night. The Mexican martinis at Trudy’s came in chilled glasses, with the “extra” served in an ice-cold shaker on the side
. One turned into two turned into tequila shots and closing-time beers. My final memories of that night are oddly vivid: a quick walk to the car, parked a block away on the wide street facing Hemphill Park. Kevin unlocking the door of his old blue 280ZX. The heavy coffin-lid sound of the door slamming shut.
And then, darkness.
My memory wasn’t erased. It never existed.
Blackouts, if you’ve never experienced one, are profoundly disorienting; they can obliterate entire afternoons, convert whole conversations into static, by short-circuiting the brain’s ability to record short-term memories. When you talk to someone who’s in a blackout, they may seem almost normal, if a little loopy—until they start repeating the same stories over and over, or start the same argument again and again, because they can’t remember what they said five minutes ago. Talking to a person in a blackout can be like talking to someone with dementia. There’s no reasoning with them, because they’ve forgotten what you said before, and they’re going to forget what you’re saying right now, and so on, until time clicks back into place.
When time blinked on again for me, it was the following morning, and I was naked, sprawled sideways on my bed with Kevin snoring quietly at my side. I never let Kevin, or anyone, sleep over—insomnia, my old friend, made it next to impossible for me to share my bed—and yet, indisputably, here he was. So what the hell had happened last night?
I nudged him awake. “What did we do last night after we left Trudy’s?” I asked.
He looked sheepish, and a little confused. “Um . . . I think we were fooling around, and then I think we both kind of . . . passed out.” I had no earthly idea what he was talking about. Driving home, unlocking the door, getting naked, passing out on top of the sheets—none of it tracked. I didn’t doubt that I had done all those things. I just couldn’t remember a single minute of it. “Are you sure? We were making out? I don’t remember that at all,” I said. “I’m almost positive,” Kevin responded, “but we were both pretty wasted.”
I stayed home from work that day with my first real hangover, grateful for seltzer water and the Chronicle’s liberal sick-day policy. (Compared to the music guy who sometimes stayed out for days on a bender, my one-day absence was too minor to register.) By afternoon, I was feeling better, and I decided to put those missing hours out of my mind. It happens, I told myself. Just be more careful next time.
And I was. I kept on saying yes to drinks, kept matching the guys shot for shot, but I usually left before things got too blurry and headed home to basic cable and bed. I made sure to eat before I drank, and dialed back on nights out—top-shelf tequila was expensive anyway, and it was cozier to drink wine over dinner with Kevin in his new apartment, which occupied the upper half of a building designed to look exactly like a barn. It would be years before I had another blackout, years before I had trouble saying no, years before my “off” switch—the one that says, “You’ve had enough, it’s time to stop drinking”—broke for good.
In the meantime, Austin was starting to make me itch. Two years earlier, writing for the alt-weekly in my college town had seemed like a chance to be big woman on campus—like going back to your high school as an adult, only now you’re the principal—but increasingly, Austin felt like a festival wristband I couldn’t take off. Living there, in the years before the tech boom brought high housing prices and deadlocked traffic, was just so easy; if I stayed, I would never have to build up a new circle of friends, learn the rhythm and politics of a different city, or think twice about what I was doing for the holidays. (Thanksgiving: Sugar Land, two and a half hours down Highway 71; Christmas: Meridian, another nine hours east on I-20 in Dad’s old Volvo.) It didn’t help that the summer of 2001 was hot—not the tolerable heat of a Mississippi scorcher, where you could get some relief by sitting in the shade with a sheet of stiff paper folded into a fan, but hot like a Russian steam room, the kind that sucks the breath from your lungs. The bank signs displayed numbers I’d never seen before—109 degrees, 111, 116.
Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was just that we were ill-suited for each other from the beginning, but Kevin and I had been fighting—not in the normal, bickering way that long-term couples do, but screaming, chair-throwing fights, the kind that make you wonder if maybe you just aren’t built for relationships. I felt threatened by how much time he was spending with his roommate, and the fact that they went out all the time without me. He thought my politics were naïve and that I would see things differently once I’d grown up a little. I was insecure about my age and inexperience. He was insecure about his career, which seemed to be stalling just as mine took off. And both of us were ill-prepared to deal with conflict. My tactic was to fight until I wore out, then run away; his was to hold his breath until he exploded, which sometimes meant grabbing the nearest serving dish or lamp or folding chair and flinging it at the nearest wall.
Without asking Kevin what he thought of moving across the country, I started applying for jobs out of state, anywhere that would get me far enough away from Texas that I wouldn’t be tempted to drive right back. Baltimore seemed like a promising option until I flew out for an interview, which included a drive through some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods, whole blocks boarded up and abandoned to junkies and squatters. The problem wasn’t the city or the job, it was me—I had only imagined I was fearless. “I guess I really am a sheltered suburban kid at heart,” I told my mom from the airport on the way back to Austin, shivering at the memory of all those windowless, dead-eyed houses.
A few weeks later, I landed an interview with Seattle Weekly—a paper I knew little about, in a city so remote it might as well be in Canada. Two days before I flew across the country, after another interminable editors’ meeting in the Chronicle’s dank, practically subterranean conference room, I traced the path from Texas to Washington with my fingers on the big map on the wall, marveling at the prospect of living somewhere so foreign. Seattle was perched on the edge of the country, three thousand miles away from any home I had ever known.
Summer had started unseasonably early when I landed in Seattle in late June, and the sky was the kind of blue you see in travel magazines, or cartoons—three shades darker than the washed-out sky that hung over Austin that year, without a single cloud to ruin the postcard effect. The air was warm enough to go sleeveless but not so hot you’d want to run for the nearest air-conditioned space, and the day stretched on forever, light still streaming through the curtains in my downtown hotel room at 9:30 that night. My interviews had gone smoothly—so smoothly, in fact, that they’d offered me the job that morning and taken me out for a celebratory lunch at a café overlooking Elliott Bay and the Olympic Mountains—and I was sitting on my king-size bed, savoring a bottle of red wine and an enormous slice of chocolate cake from room service, when I decided to call Kevin with the news.
“We’re moving to Seattle!” I announced excitedly. The line was silent, so I tried again. “I’m moving, and you can come with me if you want.”
“Well . . . Um . . . Seattle, huh?”
“I’m getting back tomorrow. Talk to you about it then?”
“Sure. Well, congratulations, I guess!”
Giddy with excitement, I polished off the bottle and fell into the soundest sleep I’d had in months.
Seven
Jumping Ship
As much as I liked to pretend that I was impulsive and carefree, moving to Seattle threw me for a loop. In the South, people practically go out of their way to interact with each other on the street—my mom, famously, will say hello to a homeless person passed out on the sidewalk until she gets an affirmative greeting back—but in Seattle, it’s just the opposite. Strangers would cross the street midblock to avoid eye contact, and even in the middle of the summer, they pulled the hoods of their sweatshirts tight to create a physical shield between themselves and the world. Even my coworkers, most of them a decade or more older than me, seemed to vanish after 5:00 P.M., whiske
d off by express bus to one of the many picket-fence neighborhoods in this oddly suburban city. The closest the Weekly crowd ever came to socializing was at the Friday wine tastings, which is what the drinkers did before it was time to go out drinking. I was desperate for something to do after work besides hitting the gym, so I was usually one of the last to leave, which meant that I got to hang out with the paper’s hard-core lushes—brassy broads who impressed me with their ability to put away a whole bottle of wine at a sitting. Years later, I would see one of these women in the checkout line at the grocery store, and avoid eye contact while we paid for our identical bottles of cheap 1.5-liter Chardonnay.
If Seattle’s social cues were weird, its political scene was ass backward from anything I’d ever seen. In Austin, liberals dominated the city council and not much else; the state legislature was the bastion of right-wing Republicans, and developers were cartoon villains that wanted to pave over the aquifers that supplied the region’s drinking water. But in Seattle, it seemed, the “conservatives” were actually all liberals, and the “liberals” were actually socialists. (The right-wingers were all across the mountains in Eastern Washington, and nobody paid much attention to them.) The notion of a one-party city was hard to wrap my mind around, and I was confused by how much the city’s left seemed to hate certain local leaders, just because they supported one form of transit over another or had a different view on how to house the city’s working poor. In Austin, where everyone had a car, riding a bike on the street—as I did—was a political statement, and drivers were as likely to nudge you off the road as give you an inch to maneuver between the windows of their F-150s and the curb.
In Seattle, owning a car was a political act, a subtle fuck you by the NIMBY (“Not in My Back Yard”) reactionaries who ran the city to the wave of density-loving newcomers who were just moving in. I blew in to the city, knowing none of this, and immediately wrote a cover story about how much I loved my car (the unsubtle cover image: a license plate emblazoned “BUS SUX”), followed by a series of pieces lambasting the city’s transit agencies. I wanted to be a smart out-of-towner with a fresh perspective, but my first acts as a writer in what turned out to be a very small town pegged me as a clueless, entitled jerk.
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