Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

by Sarah Hepola

  “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost,” Henry James wrote. I first heard the quote in an interview with Pete Hamill, author of the 1994 memoir A Drinking Life. As an old-school newspaper reporter growing up among the free-clinking bottles of postwar America, Hamill built his identity on booze. But ultimately he quit, because it was bad for business.

  It was bad for mine, too. So much was lost on me when I was drinking. What we did last night, what was said. I stopped being an observer and became way too much of a participant. I still introduce myself to people, only to receive the brittle rejoinder of “We’ve met, like, four times.” Memory erodes as we age. Did I really need to be accelerating my decline?

  I’m not saying great writers don’t drink, because they certainly do, and some part of me will probably always wish I stayed one of them.

  I sometimes read stories by women who are using, and they speak in a seductive purr. They have the intoxicating rhythm of a person writing without inhibitions. Those pieces can trigger a toxic envy in me. Maybe I should do drugs, I think. Maybe I should drink again. How come she gets to do that—and I can’t?

  Mine are childish urges, the gimme-gimme for another kid’s toys. The real problem is that I still fear my own talent is deficient. This isn’t merely a problem for writers who drink; it’s a problem for drinkers and writers, period. We are cursed by a gnawing fear that whatever we are—it’s not good enough.

  If I stew in that toxic envy too long, I start to teeter. Those are the days when my eyes can get pulled by a glass of champagne, throwing its confetti into the air, or the klop-klop of a martini being shaken in a metal cup. What a powerful voodoo—to believe brilliance could be sipped or poured.

  I read an interview with Toni Morrison once. She came into the literary world during the drug-addled New Journalism era, but she never bought the hype. “I want to feel what I feel,” she said. “Even if it’s not happiness.”

  That is true strength. To want what you have, and not what someone else is holding.

  ABOUT THREE YEARS after getting sober, I decided to learn guitar, something I’d been saying I would do for years. My author’s bio used to read “Sarah Hepola would like to learn how to play guitar,” as if this ability came from Mount Olympus. I bought an acoustic from my friend Mary, and I holed up in my bedroom, and then I figured out why I never did this in all the years of floating on the booze barge. It was incredibly difficult.

  Strumming looked easy, but it was awkward and physically unpleasant at first. It took hours to even form the finger strength to make a handful of chords.

  “I think something’s wrong with my hands,” I told my teacher, one of the best guitarists in town. He assured me that no, my hands were fine. Learning guitar was really that hard.

  “You don’t think my hands are too small?” I asked.

  “I teach eight-year-old girls to play guitar,” he said. “You’re fine.”

  But I bet eight-year-old girls don’t writhe with the humiliation of being a middle-age beginner. I was confronting the same poisonous self-consciousness and perfectionism that had kept me from speaking Spanish when I was in Ecuador, that kept me from dancing in public when I was sober, that kept me locked up all my life. I hated feeling stupid.

  “Your problem is that you step up to every plate and expect to hit a grand slam,” a friend told me, and I said, “Yes, exactly!” as though I were simply grateful for the diagnosis. Drinking had fueled such impatience and grandiosity in me.

  Addiction was the inverse of honest work. It was everything, right now. I drank away nervousness, and I drank away boredom, and I needed to build a new tolerance. Yes to discomfort, yes to frustration, yes to failure, because it meant I was getting stronger. I refused to be the person who only played games she could win.

  The first time I played a song in its entirety—“Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses—I felt like I’d punched a hole in the sky. I blew off work that day, shut down my phone. I sat in my bed and played the song over and over again, till my hands were cramped and red-purple grooves ran like railroad tracks across my fingertips.

  The feeling was so immaculate I didn’t want to taint it with the anxiety of performance. The next week, during our lesson, I kept my instructor talking, hoping I could burn out the entire hour with questions before we got around to playing. About 30 minutes in, he turned to me and said, “OK, let’s hear you.”

  The ache of those words: Let’s hear you. It put a plum in my throat to be the person who wanted to play but could not bear to play. To want the microphone but to stand in the back. To know there is a book in you but to never find the nerve to wrestle it out. I was so screwed up on the issue of performance. It’s like I didn’t want anyone to hear me, but I couldn’t shut up. Or rather, I wanted everyone to hear me, but only in the way I wanted to be heard, which was an impossible wish, because nobody ever followed instructions.

  My hands shook when I strummed through the song, but my teacher strummed along with me, like a father with his hand barely holding the bicycle seat. We sang together, sometimes finding the harmony parts, and afterward he said, “You’re a natural.” He probably said that to everyone, but I liked that he said it to me.

  “This is more like a portable karaoke machine for me,” I told him, smoothing my hand along the gloss of the dreadnought.

  “That’s cool,” he said.

  “I’m not going to be a good guitarist,” I told him.

  “You never know,” he said.

  What mattered was that I was doing something I wanted to do instead of merely talking about it. Later, in the safety of my bedroom, my fingers started to find their way. Sometimes I could make chords without even looking at the strings, and I began to develop a kind of faith, a reaching without fear. The afternoon could slip away when I was like this: three hours, gone without looking once at the clock.

  I loved being reminded that losing time didn’t have to be a nightmare. It could also be a natural high.

  IT’S CRAZY I used to think all writers drink. When you quit, you notice how many don’t drink anymore, or never did. This is true for every creative field. Throw a stone in Hollywood, and you’ll hit a sober person. Rock stars, comics, visual artists—they learn sobriety is the path to longevity. Any tabloid reader knows that walking into certain AA rooms can be like stumbling into a Vanity Fair party, which helped kick the fame delusion out of me.

  I was a child who worshipped celebrities—Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, River Phoenix—each of them was a hero to me. I spent way too many of my younger years grasping for whatever fame I could get my fingers around. But in the battle for a better life, fame is a flimsy weapon. Those rooms were not divided into famous people and nonfamous people. Just people who had all reached for the same fix.

  Sobriety helped to knock a few false prophets out of me. Alcohol. Other people’s approval. Idealized romantic love. So what should I worship now? I didn’t care to find the answer, honestly, but the program kept placing one word back in front of me, even after I pushed it away. God.

  The word made me squirm. Like so many people, I resisted AA, in part, because of the words “higher power.” Even the major work-around of a “God of my understanding” was way too much God for me. I was raised around conservative Christians who did not always strike me as charitable. I was puzzled by the demented winner-takes-all spirit of traditional religion: I go to heaven, and you do not. College taught me religion was the opium of the masses. God was for weak people who couldn’t handle their own lives, and it took me a long time to understand that, actually, I was a weak person who couldn’t handle my own life, and I could probably use all the help I could get.

  The “higher power” idea came to me in increments. Like sobriety itself, it was not a spectacular, flailing jump but a tentative inching in the same direction. I thought a lot about storytelling. That was a power way bigger than me. When I listened to someone’s story, when I met the eyes of a person in pain, I was lifted out of
my own sadness, and the connection between us felt like a supernatural force I could not explain. Wasn’t that all I needed? A power bigger than me?

  I needed to be reminded I was not alone. I needed to be reminded I was not in charge. I needed to be reminded that a human life is infinitesimal, even as its beauty is tremendous. That I am big and small at once.

  I worship the actual stars now, the ones above us. Anna lives out in West Texas, where the night sky burns electric, and her back patio is the first place I understood the phrase “a bowl full of stars.” The stars tilt around you, and you can feel the curvature of the earth, and I always end up standing on my tippy-toes out there, just to be two inches closer to the rest of the galaxy.

  My spiritual life is in its infancy. But the major epiphany was that I needed one. A lot of my friends are atheists. We don’t talk much about belief, and I wouldn’t presume to know theirs, but I think their stance comes from an intellectual allergy to organized religion, the great wrongs perpetrated in the name of God, the way one book was turned into a tool of violence, greed, and bigotry. I don’t blame them. But I wish belief didn’t feel like a choice between blind faith and blanket disavowal. I’m a little freaked out by the certainty on either side. No one has an answer sheet to this test. How we got here, what we are doing—it’s the greatest blackout there is.

  Whether God exists or not, we need him. Humans are born with a God-shaped hole, a yearning, a hunger to be complete. We get to choose how we fill that hole. David Foster Wallace gave a commencement address at Kenyon College, a speech that is a bit like a sermon for people who don’t want to go to church:

  In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

  I worshipped alcohol, and it consumed me. I worshipped celebrity and the machines of external validation, and it cratered me. To worship another human being is to set yourself up for failure, because humans are, by their nature, flawed. I worshipped David Foster Wallace once. In some ways, I still do. His suicide is another reminder that all the knowledge and talent in the world will not stop your hands from tying the noose that will hang you.

  I seek all the sources of comfort I can find. Music. Old friends. Words that leave my fingers before the sun rises. My guitar, strummed in an empty room. The trees as they turn, telling me that I am not a towering redwood but another leaf scraping the ground. I also hit my knees each morning and bow to the mystery of all I don’t know, and I say thank you. Does anyone hear me? I don’t know. But I do.

  TWELVE

  THIS IS THE PLACE

  A few months before my cat died, he started sleeping in the closet. I would search the house for him and find those green eyes staring back at me from the corner, underneath the jackets and behind the boots. I knew exactly why he’d chosen that spot, the far-back place where harm couldn’t reach. One night, I pulled my duvet off the bed and lay down beside him to let him know I would stay at his side. About a minute into this routine, he bolted downstairs and hid behind the sofa. What part of “I want to be alone” did I not understand?

  I was overwrought about my cat dying. I knew this would be the scariest loss I’d experienced since I gave up drinking. I worried about the incoming grief: when I would lose him, how it might rearrange my heart. But here’s the problem with worry—it doesn’t actually do anything.

  A cancerous mass was growing on the side of his face. He looked like a squirrel hiding nuts in one cheek. I measured the growth with my fingers each morning. From a nut to a lime to a baseball. I would meet his eyes before we went to sleep. You have to tell me when it’s time, I would say, knowing full well he could not.

  One afternoon, I kissed his nose, and only half of his little face squinted. That’s odd. I ran one hand over his eyes, and his left eye refused to close. It had turned glassy. I called Jennifer at her vet clinic, and her soft voice told me what I already knew. The next morning, she came to my house in her blue scrubs and sat cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom and let me hold Bubba as she inserted the IV into his tiny orange paw.

  “This will be fast,” she said. “Are you ready?” And I was not, but I was as ready as I was going to be.

  She pushed the plunger on the first syringe, and he made a purr like an engine coming to a stop. His body slumped in my arms. I don’t remember the second syringe. What I remember is opening my eyes, and Jennifer leaning over him with a stethoscope, and the way she met my gaze to tell me he was gone. His body was warm against my face.

  My mind couldn’t keep pace with the change. I carried Bubba to Jennifer’s car and lay him gingerly in the front passenger seat. As I walked back into my carriage house, tears dripping off my chin, what I expected to find, more than anything, was him at the top of the stairs to help me through this ordeal.

  The pain of his loss was enormous, but I never once thought: Drinking would make this better. You know what this horrible day calls for? Booze. I finally understood alcohol was not a cure for pain; it was merely a postponement.

  I don’t know when it happened, but I stopped longing for the drink. I’m not saying I never miss drinking, because I do on occasion, but the craving and the clawing is gone. Happy hour comes and goes, and I don’t notice. A foamy pint no longer beckons to me like a crooked finger. Bar signs lit up with blinking neon look exactly like what they are: beautiful distractions.

  This shift seemed impossible at one time. The woman hiding in the closet knew her life was over, and she was on some artificial lung now. I wish I could have known how much easier it would be on this side.

  For so many years, I was stuck in a spin cycle of worry and questioning. Am I an alcoholic? Is alcoholism a “disease”? What if this, or that, or the other thing? Overthinkers are the most exhausting alcoholics. I have left a trail of soggy Kleenex that could stretch to the sun, but the equation is simple. When I cut out alcohol, my life got better. When I cut out alcohol, my spirit came back. An evolved life requires balance. Sometimes you have to cut out one thing to find balance everywhere else.

  I watch women at bars sometimes. I watch them holding the wineglass in their hands, the wet curve of the lip forever finding the light. I watch them in their skirts small as cocktail napkins and their skyscraper heels, but I don’t envy them anymore. Maybe at some advanced age, we get the gift of being happy where we are. Or maybe where I am right now got a whole lot easier to take.

  A woman I know told me a story once, about how she’d always been the girl in the front row at live shows. Pushing her way to the place where the spotlight burned tracers in her eyes and the speakers rattled her insides. When she quit drinking, she missed that full-throttle part of herself, but then she realized: Sobriety is full throttle. No earplugs. No safe distance. Everything at its highest volume. All the complications of the world, vibrating your sternum.

  I go to meetings, and I can’t believe the grief people walk through. Losing their children, losing their spouse. I can’t believe how sheltered I’ve been. Here I am, undone by the loss of my 17-year-old cat.

  “I wish I was tougher,” I complained to my friend Mary.

  “Well, you’re not tough,” she told me, and I laughed. “Tough is a posture anyway. You’re something better. You’re resilient.”

  I still cry most mornings when I awake and he’s not there. I hate looking up in the second-story window where he will never sit, breaking into excited noise when I come through the gate. But I know how to start over now, which means I can start over as many times as I need. I’m all too aware that the biggest challenges of my life are still in front of me. And I feel a little worried about that. Mostly, I feel prepared.

 
; It’s funny how I used to think drinking made me a grown-up. Back when I was a little girl, I would slip a crystal wineglass off the shelf of my parents’ cabinet, and the heft of it felt like independence. I played cocktail party, not tea party, because that’s what glamorous adults on TV did. But drinking was actually an extended adolescence for me. An insanely fun, wonderfully complicated, emotionally arrested adolescence. And quitting drinking was the first true act of my adulthood. A coming-of-age for a woman who came of age a long time ago.

  EACH YEAR, I drive out to see Anna. It takes ten hours to get to her West Texas home from Dallas, but I don’t mind. The rumble of the tires is like a meditative hum. The perpetual motion shuts down my brain. The sky is a blue that contains many blues: the milky blue of the prairie, the electric blue of the desert.

  I listen to pop songs in the car, three-minute blasts of feel-good, a buzz that never fails. My Honda is like a portable ’70s disco: ELO, the BeeGees, Queen. As I drive across the empty roads, I sing with the surrender that booze used to bring, and I wonder if it would ever be possible to take this starlit feeling and somehow stretch it across the rest of my life.

  Anna and I have had 20 years of these reunions. Twenty years of hugs and how-was-the-drives, and both of us politely disagreeing over who is going to carry the bags to the doorstep. And whenever Anna and I feel far apart, even as we are sitting next to each other on the couch, I tell myself 20 years was a good run.

  The distance of these past years has spooked me. A couple years ago, I came out to visit, and we had a tense disagreement in her car. It was nighttime, and we were stopped at the railroad that cuts through town, the red light flashing as the boxcars hurtled past. I said to her, with too much grit in my voice, “I don’t think you know how hard it is to be single and alone.”