by Sarah Hepola
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.
STEPHANIE 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.
ONE 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.
INTERLUDE
BEGINNING
The 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 smoo
th 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?
PART TWO
SEVEN
ISN’T THERE ANOTHER WAY?
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.
WHAT 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.