Blackout

by Sarah Hepola

  I’d always considered myself fluent in pop culture, but the Chronicle was a crash course in acceptable indie tastes. I kept a mental list of artists I needed to become familiar with, much like the vocab words I used to memorize in middle school to casually drop into conversation. Jim Jarmusch, François Truffaut, Albert Maysles. The Velvet Underground, Jeff Buckley, Sonic Youth. The spirit of an alt weekly, after all, was to be an alternative. Our mandate dictated that the most important stories lived outside the mainstream. And also: Top 40 sucked.

  Every Thursday afternoon, the staff gathered in a cramped meeting room that looked more like a bomb shelter and lined up stories for the week. Debates were always breaking out, because those people could argue about anything: the most overrated grunge band, the notion of objective journalism, black beans or refried. I sat with my hands in my lap and hoped to God the conversation wouldn’t drift my way. But when the meeting ended, and nobody had called on me, I’d feel weirdly crestfallen. All that anxious buildup for nothing.

  I’ve always been mixed up about attention, enjoying its warmth but not its scrutiny. I swear I’ve spent half my life hiding behind a couch and the other half wondering why no one was paying attention to me.

  On the weekends, coworkers and I started going to karaoke, which was the perfect end run around my self-doubt. I would sit in the audience, drinking beer after beer, filling myself up with enough “fuck it” to take the microphone. Karaoke was a direct line to the parts of our brains unburdened by aesthetics, the child who once found joy in a Journey song. No singer was bad, no taste was wrong—which was pretty much the inverse philosophy of the paper, but my coworkers still loved it. I guess even people who judge others for a living can secretly long for a world with no judgment.

  At our holiday karaoke party, I blew out my vocal cords with an over-the-top version of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” I was in that sparkling state of inebriation where the chain comes off your inhibitions and your voice grows so bold.

  The following Monday, our cranky editor-in-chief kicked off the staff meeting. “I have one thing to say about the holiday party.” He turned toward me, and his eyes lit up. “Sarah Fucking Hepola.”

  You could’ve seen my glow from space. Before that, I wasn’t even sure he knew my last name.

  GROWING UP, I saw journalism as a serious profession. I never anticipated how much damn fun it would be. Music festivals, interviews with celebrities, parties where Quentin Tarantino showed up. Dot-com money was pouring into our flophouse hamlet, and the city’s growth made the paper fat with advertising. We got bonus checks and open-bar celebrations. Coming to the Chronicle a year after college was like leaving a five-year house party only to plunk down on the ripped couches of never-never land.

  Swag. That was the name for the promotional items that arrived with alarming abundance. T-shirts, tote bags, novelty toys. For a year, a beach ball with the words “There’s Something About Mary” roamed through the hallway like a tumbleweed.

  We got free movies and free CDs and free books. Complimentary bottles of Tito’s Vodka lived in the kitchen. Shiner Bock popped up in the fridge (we paid for that). Each Wednesday night, we put the paper to bed—and those were the words we used, like the paper was our toddler—and I stayed late on the picnic table out back drinking with the proofreaders and the guys from production. We played games of “Who Would You Rather?” sorting the entire staff into people we would like to bang, careful to never mention each other.

  I didn’t write much at first. I ran the listings section and contributed third-string theater reviews with unnecessary adjectives. The young, hotshot music critic wrote with such wild metaphors, paragraphs like jazz riffs. I asked him once how he got so good, and he told me, “I did acid.” But he also had what every writer needs: his own voice.

  I did not. My writing was a kind of literary karaoke. I aped the formulas and phrasings of older critics whose work I admired. I sometimes borrowed friends’ opinions for theater reviews, because I was certain theirs were more accurate than my own. I’d sit each week in the meeting, listening to the lineup of cover stories, wanting that spotlight so badly. But what did I have to say?

  In college, I never read newspapers, which made it a tiny bit awkward to be working for one. What did people want from their news? The Chronicle offered two primary channels, criticism and reporting. But I had neither the deep knowledge nor the training for either. My colleagues slung their authority around the room, while I became afraid to botch any answer. Black or refried: Which are the superior beans?

  As for my artistic tastes, I wasn’t sure about them, either. We had entered the Age of Irony. Low culture was high culture, and the difference between loving something and hating it was razor thin. People like me disguised our true feelings in layers of detachment, endless pop-culture references, sarcasm. Because no one can break your heart if they don’t know it.

  I pulled down the Blade Runner poster and put up a picture of the Backstreet Boys, and I forced everyone on staff to vote on their favorite member.

  “I don’t fucking know,” the cranky editor-in-chief said when I stopped him in the hallway. “The blond one, with the nice smile.”

  About nine months after coming to the paper, I got my first big assignment. I went undercover to high school prom. The mass shooting at Columbine had taken place a few months prior, leading to a glut of paranoid articles about “teens today,” and my story was the kind of goofy, first-person escapade almost guaranteed to wind up on the cover.

  There was one problem. I was so freaked out by the pressure I couldn’t write a word. I spent hours staring at a blinking cursor, typing words only to erase them again. The night before the piece was due, desperate for any fix, I opened a bottle of wine. Fuck it. Maybe this will help.

  Before then, I never drank while I was writing. I might have downed a few beers while I waited on page edits. But writing and drinking were two fundamentally opposing activities—like eating and swimming. Writing required hush and sharpness of vision. Drinking was roar and blur.

  The wine turned down the volume on my own self-doubt, which is what a blocked writer is battling: the bullying voices in her head telling her each thought is unoriginal, each word too ordinary. Drug users talk about accessing a higher consciousness, a doorway to another dimension—but I just needed a giant fishhook to drag my inner critic out of the room.

  That night, I drank myself into the writing zone. Words tumbled from my fingers like they’d been waiting to get shaken loose. I couldn’t believe how well it worked. After the story came out, staff members stopped me in the hall to quote their favorite lines.

  So, of course, this became a common practice. A couple glasses to prime the pump. Sometimes, in the privacy of my funky little garage apartment, I would drink myself blind. I purposefully did this—drank myself to the place where I was clattering all over the keyboard with my eyes drooped to half-moons, free as Ray Charles over his piano, and you’d think this would result in reams of nonsense, and sometimes it did. Other times, I’d find myself reading over the words later and thinking: Wow, this is pretty good. I didn’t even know I thought that. Those pages were full of typos and run-ons, but they had the hypnotic clickety-clak of a train barreling across the high plains. They had the last-call honesty of someone pulling the listener close. We only have a few more minutes. Let me tell you everything.

  People sometimes ask me how someone can drink so much and still keep her job. But drinkers find the right job.

  After drawing my name for Secret Santa, the editor-in-chief gave me a hat with beer holders on either side. “So you can drink more at work,” he said.

  ON MY TWENTY-FIFTH birthday, I drove out to visit Anna. She had moved to San Francisco, where she wrote me long letters from a café near Golden Gate Park, and her voice had the lightness of a girl in constant hop-skip.

  But I don’t think I’ve ever felt as bitter and depressed about a birthday as I did at 25. This may sound strange, given how young that i
s, and given how great my job was, but 25-year-olds are experts at identifying what the world has not given them, and that birthday was like a monument to everything I hadn’t achieved. No boyfriend. No book deal. Only the flimsiest kind of fame. “I saw your name in the paper,” people said to me. Why did they think this was a compliment? I saw your name. Oh, thanks. Did you bother to read the next 2,000 words?

  My friends had escaped to grown-up jobs in coastal cities, and I chided myself for lacking the gumption to follow. Anna was out in California seeking social justice through a series of impressive nonprofit law gigs. My old roommate Tara was a reporter in Washington, DC. My friend Lisa, hired at the Chronicle alongside me, had ventured to Manhattan and gotten a gig at the New York Times.

  “You should move out here,” she would tell me, on our phone dates, and I told her I couldn’t afford it. The more accurate reason: I was scared.

  My high school drama friend Stephanie wasn’t. She had been living in New York for a few years and already become one of those rare creatures, a successful actress. She landed a role as an attorney in an NBC crime drama also starring ’80s rapper Ice-T. SVU, it was called, though I liked to call it “SUV.” She had made it in the big city, just like we said we would, and I watched her ascend in a gilded hot air balloon, as I stood on the ground and counted the ways life had failed me.

  I was particularly burned up on the boyfriend issue. I thought having a byline in the Austin Chronicle would bring cute, artistic men to my doorstep, but it really only brought publicists. Years of Shiner Bock and cheese enchiladas had plumped me by at least 40 pounds, which I masked in loose V-necks and rayon skirts scraping the ground, but I also spied a double standard at play. Male staffers dressed like slobs, but they still found pretty girls to wipe their mouths and coo over their bands. Meanwhile, I was nothing but a cool sisterly type to them. Where were my flirty emails? My zippy office come-ons? How come nobody wanted to fuck me for my talent?

  So I needed that road trip to California. Five days by myself through West Texas, New Mexico, across the orange Creamsicle of the Nevada desert at sunset. In Las Vegas, I booked my room at the demented-circus hotel Hunter S. Thompson wrote about in Fear and Loathing. It pains me to admit I had never read this book. But I understood Thompson’s work to be a locus of debauchery and creative nonfiction, the intersection where I planned to build my bungalow.

  I slummed around the nickel arcades on the low-rent side of the Strip that night, and I won $200 at a machine that was clearly broken, so all you had to do was mash the same button over and over again, winning every time. A brunette in a French maid skirt brought me a check, but there were no flashing lights on the arcade. No coins clinking into my bucket. It’s weird how you can hit the jackpot—and still feel a little robbed.

  The sky was dark when I got to Anna’s place, and she was standing on the corner when I pulled up, doing her jokey little happy dance in the beams of my headlights, biting her lower lip and swaying.

  “What does a girl have to do to get a drink around here?” I asked, and we smiled like two people who have crossed great distances to find each other. But when she pulled my bags out of the car, something sank in her and never reappeared. Was she mad about how late it had gotten? Was she disappointed to see I’d gained so much weight? Best friends have a spooky voodoo. We’re like cats on airplanes, who can feel each dip in cabin pressure, and at that moment, Anna and I took a nosedive.

  The way Anna tells it, she came to my car and saw a bunch of empty beer cans clattering around in the backseat. It was her epiphany moment. I’d been alone on that trip. I’d been immersed in solo adventure and the majesty of the outdoors, and yet I could not let go of my cheap silver crutches from 7-Eleven. The funny truth is that I drank less on that trip than I usually did. Even now there’s a defiant part of me that wants to correct her observation. Like I was being punished not for my indulgence but for a commitment to recycling.

  Anna knew other stories, though. Troubling episodes that had accumulated. On my visit to New York, I got so drunk I fell down a flight of stairs and ended up in the hospital with a concussion. One night in Austin, I went out to karaoke with friends, and I was so loaded I jumped onstage and wrestled the microphone from some poor guy in the middle of “Little Red Corvette.” When I went to get a drink afterward, the bartender said, “I’m sorry, you’ve been cut off.” Cut off? Why? For nailing that fucking Prince song?

  There were stories about questionable men, and trips to Planned Parenthood the next morning, and a stubborn refusal to use condoms followed by a terrible guilt. And once I told Anna these secrets, I felt purged and hopeful. But I’d laid a heavy heap of jagged worry in her arms.

  After I got back to Texas, Anna sent me another letter. Her voice did not have the hop-skip this time. I read it with a thunderstorm rolling in my belly, the words of rejection leaping out as if a yellow highlighter had been dragged across them: “worried about you.” “can no longer watch.” “please understand.” She did not demand that I quit drinking, but she told me she couldn’t be the safe place for my confessions anymore. It was a love letter, the hardest kind to write, but I did not see it that way. It felt like a bedroom door slammed in my face.

  A YEAR LATER, I quit drinking. Not forever, but for 18 months, which felt like forever. And in that stretch of sobriety, much of my happiness came back to me. Weight dropped off my hips. My checking account grew heavy with unused beer money. I took off the hair shirt of my own entitlement and began reaching for the life I wanted. One day, I walked into the editor-in-chief’s office, closed the door behind me, and told him I was moving to Ecuador.

  The travel part of my story is one of the greatest times of my life. Scary, but thrilling: Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia. I read books half the day and spent the rest of the hours however I wanted.

  But be careful when you finally get happy. Because you can become greedy for the one thing you don’t have.

  I missed drinking. This new world was grand, but I didn’t feel complete without that foamy abandon. I thought about drinking all the time. If only I could drink again, then I could lose myself to this handsome stranger and not be hobbled by my own nagging insecurities. If only I could slurp down those pisco sours like the other students at the Spanish school, I could let foreign words spill out of my mouth like divine prophecy instead of being so scared to speak in Spanish that I ducked eye contact. I was 27 years old, and I had everything—except the delicious communion of two beers, maybe three. I wanted so badly to dip a toe in that river again. Dip a toe, or maybe fall in.

  My fever grew stronger, and I began to itch for the drama of drinking. You know what I miss? A hangover. You know what I want? A night I regret. My shins covered in eggplant bruises, some unshaven backpacker at the book depot, his hands all over me.

  Three months into my trip, Ecuador qualified for the World Cup for the first time in history, and I didn’t give a rip about soccer, but I needed to celebrate. A party broke out in the square. I cracked open a 20-ounce beer, took a swig, and felt a loosening that traveled down to my toes. Two hours and two beers later, I was crazy-dancing to Shakira, the Spanish-language version, on the front patio of my lodge alone. Fuck judgment. Fuck discretion. I was back.

  When I returned to the States, I struggled to explain to my friends why I had started drinking again. After all, not much time had passed since I explained to them why I quit. But I told them I was healthier now. I would be careful. My friends mostly nodded and tried to figure out which reaction would be supportive and which would be naive. “People come in and out of sobriety all the time,” I said, and as we rambled into our late 20s, these were the bumpy roads we had to navigate: Marriages fail, lesbians start dating men again, dreams turn out to be the wrong dreams.

  A few weeks later, I had another blackout. This time in front of 300 people.

  I HAD BEEN hanging out with a trio of comedians, and their ability to extemporize dazzled me. Each time they unhinged their subconscious, hilarity fell out. W
hen one of them asked me to perform at an event he was hosting, I wanted to be bold enough to join them. Take a chance. Risk failure. As Elliott Smith sang: “Say yes.”

  So I said yes, but to what? I had no improv skills and couldn’t play an instrument. We settled on what we called a “Drunken Q&A.” I would get buzzed, and audience members could ask me anything they wanted. Easy, right? I had no idea hundreds of people would show.

  I also didn’t expect the guy I’d been seeing in Dallas to come. Lindsay and I had been dabbling in a relationship for two weeks, long emails and after-hours phone calls, and I was wrestling with how serious we should be. I liked him, but did I like him enough? He surprised me that night—driving three hours to watch me perform in Austin, a grand gesture that made me nervous and spazzy. I was excited he wanted to be there but worried I couldn’t match his enthusiasm, or the adoring way he looked at me, and the answer to this pinwheel of anxiety was to drink. A lot.

  By the time the show started, I was stumbling across the open grassy area, stopping people who passed. “Have you met my new boyfriend?” I asked, one hand in his and another around a cup of wine. “He’s cuuuuuute.”

  I made it to the stage soon after, and people asked their questions. But the only part I remember is telling a very disjointed story about Winnie-the-Pooh.

  When I woke the next morning, I felt shattered. I’d spent the past two years on a path of evolution—but here I was, crawling back under the same old rock. Lindsay and I walked to a coffee shop, where a guy on the patio recognized me. “Hey, you’re the drunk girl from last night,” he said, and my stomach dipped. “You were hilarious!”

  I’ve heard stories of pilots who fly planes in a blackout, or people operating complicated machinery. And somehow, in this empty state, I had stood on a stage, opened my subconscious, and hilarity fell out.

  I turned to my new boyfriend, to gauge his response. He was beaming. “You’re famous now,” he said, and squeezed my hand.