by Sarah Hepola
I STARTED SEEING a musician. He was gone too much of the time, and it was never going to work, but I wanted to try. When we sat together, he made me feel light-headed. When he looked at me, I had the giddy feeling of a three-beer buzz.
“You have these drunken, dreamy eyes right now,” he told me, and I could feel it, too. Bliss. Until I got sober, I never understood the phrase “weak in the knees.” I thought it was an old-timey cliché that women like my mother used. Then my knees spaghettied underneath me as he walked toward me once, and I realized: Oh my God, this actually happens.
The first time he and I had sex, I barely remembered it. The whole afternoon was white light and the dance of tree shadows through the windows. He kissed me on the couch, and then he kissed me on the stairs, and then I took him to my bed. And then time stopped.
In the years that followed, I would have more sex like this. Sex that felt good and right. And I noticed when I was with a person I felt comfortable with, I could walk across the room without smothering myself in a blanket. I could let myself be seen. And I noticed when I stopped worrying so much about how I looked, I could lose myself more in how I felt.
I always thought good sex without alcohol would be sharp with detail, saturated with color, but instead it was more like a 4 pm sun flare. Pleasure shuts down the recorder in the brain. The flood of serotonin and dopamine creates a white-hot burst of ecstasy. For decades, I drank myself to reach that place of oblivion. Why hadn’t I known? The oblivion could come to me.
ONE AFTERNOON, JENNIFER showed up at my front gate, holding a Fuji cassette that was dated in her small, careful script: August 23, 1988.
“I can’t believe you still have this,” I told her.
She smiled. “It’s yours now.”
I knew what was on the tape. It was a story I didn’t like. One that explained a lot about my mixed-up history with drinking, men, and sex. I recorded it two days shy of my fourteenth birthday, when I sat in Jennifer’s bedroom with a jambox on my lap, sharing details that would haunt me for decades.
“It probably won’t even work anymore,” I said, as Jennifer slotted the tape in the deck of an old creaky jambox, once so familiar to us and now quaint as an abacus. She pressed rewind, and the tape chugged backward violently, like an unsteady aircraft preparing to take off.
She pressed the play button, and there was a buzz, followed by a loud clunk. And then, my voice floating back to me from more than a quarter century ago.
“Hi. I’m over at Jennifer’s house. It’s August 20 -something or the other.” I do not sound two days away from being 14. My voice sounds more like 17. “There’s really not much to say here. I can’t wait for my birthday. I got a sweater.”
On the tape, Jennifer says something from across the room I can’t quite make out. It sounds like, “Tell our friends about your summer.”
“It was the best summer of my life,” I start. “I went down to visit my cousin in Michigan. I met this guy named Brad. He was wonderful. A wonderful person.”
Brad was a sweet stoner type with feathered blond hair and a nod that was about two beats slower than everyone else’s. He was 18. The night I met him, he said, “So you’re Kimberley’s older cousin,” and I laughed and corrected him. Younger. For weeks, whenever I ran into him, he would pantomime picking his jaw off the floor. “No way you’re 13,” he would say.
I’d smile, blush. Yup, really 13. One afternoon, he kissed me in Kimberley’s room, and I couldn’t believe it: He had picked me. It was everything the movies had promised.
My last night in town was not. We went to a party, had a few drinks, and things got much more confusing.
The story that follows is one I’ve thought about countless times over the years. I’ve wrestled with its meaning, rewrote its nuance, tried to erase it from memory. But this was the first time in 25 years I’d sat down and listened to myself tell it:
We were in this vacant apartment. There was no furniture whatsoever. There were chairs. A beanbag. Foldout chairs. We went into this bedroom. I forgot to close the door. I thought we were just going to talk for a while, but the first thing he did when we got in the room was to take my shirt off. He got down on the floor to take his shoes off, and I guess he noticed the door was open, and I thought he was going to leave. And I was like, Oh my god, what did I do? Do my feet stink? [Jennifer laughs]
So he closes the door, and I go, “Oh I’m sorry,” and he goes, “Oh it’s no problem.” He took off his shoes. I don’t know how my pants came off. I never figured it out. I was on the ground somehow. I don’t know how I got there, either. He took my underpants off, and he took his underpants off. He was on top of me, and he was trying to do it, but it just hurt so much. It was like a bowling ball stuck up your nostrils. I mean, that is the analogy that I have come to be at one with. I mean, it really, really hurt. I started breathing really, really drastically. And I started making noises, and he told me to be quiet. Well, he didn’t tell me to be quiet. He said “Shhhh.” And I couldn’t exactly be quiet, because when someone’s doing that, you don’t want to just go, “Oh yes, this is nice, real nice.” I mean, he was like, “Shh, be quiet,” and I go, “It hurts,” and he goes, “I know, I’m sorry,” and I’m like, “You don’t know. You could never know.”
But he wasn’t hard enough. I don’t know if that’s a personal insult to me, or to him, whether he’s impotent or not, I don’t know. But he wasn’t hard enough, so he turned over and I gave him a hand job, and I guess he liked that, and he tried again, but I couldn’t. I mean, not that I physically couldn’t, but first of all, it hurt, and second of all, he didn’t have protection, and I didn’t want to get pregnant, and I didn’t know if he had AIDS or whatever. I mean, I’m sure he didn’t have AIDS. But I didn’t want to lose it that early.
So he never came. I mean he never went that deep in, and then he asked me to give him a blow job, and at first I didn’t, but he kept asking me, and I thought, poor guy, he’s not going to get it tonight, I guess I’ll give him some head. So I did, and that was really gross. It gagged me. In a big way. I was like, “Oh, this is real fun.”
And then we had to get up and go. I left the room, but I had to come back for my shoes. And when I came back he kissed me, which made me feel good. Because that made me feel like he didn’t regret anything. And then I left, and I’ve never seen him since, or heard about him. This has got to be boring for anyone who is listening, and this tape is almost out.
I could spend a lifetime unwinding what I heard on the tape. From the fact he had trouble getting hard to the part where he told me to be quiet, to the way I couldn’t recall key details of how I wound up on the floor.
I’d had three wine coolers before we went into the room, not enough to black out but enough to have a warm buzz. I remember feeling grateful for the drinks, because otherwise my heart might have punched out of my mouth. I remember lying on the floor, his bare shoulder shifting back and forth in my line of vision, and the voice screaming in my brain: Am I having sex right now?
The part that kills me is near the end, when he kisses me. Because that made me feel like he didn’t regret anything. It was all I cared about at 13. That I wouldn’t be someone he’d regret.
There are reasons for statutory rape laws. One is that 18-year-olds have very different expectations of dark and empty rooms than 13-year-old girls. But I was the kind of 13-year-old girl who didn’t want to be protected. Forget your laws and your conventions. I was ready for the “best summer of my life.” And I wanted to seem unfazed by what was happening. I didn’t want him to know how utterly inexperienced I was. I wanted to look cool.
My underpants were bloody when I got home. I spent years wondering if I’d lost my virginity, and if I’d consented, just as I would spend years wondering how I ended up in that Paris hotel room, and why I let Johnson stay in mine.
Was it rape? I don’t think so, though part of me still doubts my interpretation. I know some people will read it another way. But one of the great pow
ers we have is the ability to give meaning to our own experience. To me, this was a bad and fumbling early sexual episode that has many meanings. But the one that stands out to me is how I quashed my feelings for the sake of someone else’s. His pleasure was important, not mine. His regret was important, not mine. It was a pattern I repeated for years. And every time I did, alcohol was there.
ABOUT THREE YEARS into my sobriety, I was on a plane from DFW to New York. The guy beside me was 23. Rumpled and exhausted from staying up all night. He slumped beside me and flashed the sideways grin of a boy who gets what he wants. “I’m moving to New York,” he said. “Have you been before?”
“I have,” I said, and left it at that.
He was moving there to be an actor. Oh baby, you are screwed, I thought, but I didn’t say this. Instead, we talked about leaps of faith. We talked about Denzel, his favorite actor. I tried to prepare him for disappointment, as I’m sure everyone did: Don’t make fame the measure of success, I told him; make this move about learning something.
It was an early morning flight, and around us, heads tilted back with eyes closed and mouths open, so we whispered like two kids talking behind the teacher’s back. We talked so long that a three-and-a-half-hour plane ride felt like 30 minutes. I noticed all the times he touched my knee.
I was nearly 40, used up in some corners of history, and men my age were often chasing women with luscious rumps and tits that had yet to sag. I wasn’t looking for younger guys, but they seemed to find me anyway, and I wondered why. Maybe they sensed I was not interested in commitment yet. Or maybe they liked the grooves of a hand that knew its own strength. I was done trying to be anyone else.
“Do you think the mile-high club really exists?” he asked, raising his eyebrow.
“I hope not,” I said. “Fucking in an airplane bathroom sounds terrible.”
He wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, you’re right.”
Our plane landed, but we were not ready to part. It was his first day in New York, and it was only 11 am, which meant we had time to spray paint the town before we parted. I paid for the cab ride to the Ace Hotel in Midtown, a place where musicians and writers often stayed, and I treated him to lunch at the restaurant, full of downtown charm and bustle. “You are giving me one hell of a story,” he said, and I smiled, because he was doing the same for me.
We sat on the couch in the lobby, my legs on his lap. We were surrounded by strangers typing on their laptops, headphones on. Did they notice us? What did they see? He fiddled with my hair, which fell across my brow. He traced his fingers around mine as my hand rested on his knee. Have you ever noticed how astonishing it can be, holding hands with a person? Such an everyday thing, such a nothing gesture. But two hands, barely touching each other. It can feel like flying.
He kissed me then. Right in front of all those people. I didn’t care. They were too busy with Twitter and Facebook to pay attention. “I want to put down my credit card and take you upstairs right now,” he said. I smiled, and ran my fingers over his sweet face, that face that had taken him so far in the world, and I said, “Not this time.”
His body fell back in the couch. “So that’s it? You’re going to leave now?”
I smiled. That’s right. I was going to leave now. But I gave him my number, and I told him to text me if he ever needed me, and I walked out to the bustling sidewalk feeling so light.
It’s a fine day when you finally figure out the right time to leave the party.
ELEVEN
POWER BALLAD
People who quit drinking become terrified they will lose their power. They believe booze makes them the people they want to be. A better mother. A better lover. A better friend. Alcohol is one hell of a pitchman, and perhaps his greatest lie is convincing us we need him, even as he tears us apart.
I needed alcohol to write. At least, that’s what I believed. I had no idea how people wrote without alcohol, which is a bit like wondering how people construct buildings without alcohol or assemble watches without alcohol. I’m sure it happens all the time, but I’d never done it.
Years ago, when I worked at the Dallas paper, I used to sit at the bar with the other writers, and we’d elbow each other out of the way to reach the punch lines. Writers are often insecure by nature, but in those hours I felt indomitable. We could disagree about music, politics, the use of the serial comma, but we never disagreed about drinking.
Writers drink. It’s what we do. The idea made me feel special, as though I got a pass on certain behaviors, as though self-destruction were my birthright. The bar also made me feel like real work was getting done, even if the real work turned out to be arguing the merits of Saved by the Bell.
I liked talking about writing much more than actually writing, which is an unspeakably boring and laborious activity, like moving a pile of bricks from one side of the room to the other. Talking about writing was exciting. It was all possibility. Let’s talk about the story at the bar! Kick it around over a few drinks, brainstorm that bad boy. And in those sinking moments when I realized two hours had passed, and no one had brought up the story we were supposed to fix, I had the perfect antidote in front of me. Another glass of guilt-be-gone.
But booze wasn’t merely a collective procrastination tool. It was the tool I took home with me when I needed to sit by myself and get the words out onto the page. Writing is a lonely profession. Nobody wants to walk in darkness alone.
Alcohol was an emancipator of creativity. It silenced my inner critic. It made me bigger and smaller, and my writing required both delusions: to believe everyone would read my work, and to believe no one would. I even loved writing hungover, when I was too exhausted to argue with myself, allowing words to tumble onto the page.
If I ever grew anxious about the empty bottles my work required, I could wrap myself in an enabling legend. Writers drink. It’s what we do. As long as the work gets done, you can coast on these words for a very long time.
But the dynamic pivoted for me. The drain and the time suck of my habits became too much to tolerate. I was no longer a writer with a drinking problem. I became, as Irish author Brendan Behan once said, “a drinker with a writing problem.” Something had to go, and given how conjoined my writing and drinking were, I figured it had to be both.
Well, actually, I did have a history of writing without alcohol. It was called childhood. Kids are wizards of imagination, and I was one of those youngsters scribbling all day long. Children are not hobbled by an awareness of others or the fear of people’s judgment. Children don’t have to face professional failure, public disinterest, the criticism of colleagues, lacerating Twitter commentary, the scorn of strangers. They skip through a grassy meadow where every picture they paint is important, every story worth telling, whereas today’s online writer traverses an enemy territory where any random dude with a Tumblr account can take you down.
Perhaps I was using alcohol not to spark my creativity but to blunt my sensitivity. I needed someone to hold my hand.
After I quit drinking, I didn’t write for six months. I was too fragile. I spent that time editing personal essays for Salon. I loved reading stories of other people’s lives, extraordinary things happening to ordinary people. One woman met her dream guy only to watch him die of an aneurysm that very day. One woman was trapped under the rubble after the earthquake in Haiti. She was saved, but the other woman in the house wasn’t. It was mind-blowing what could unfold in the course of a life.
The stories got me out of myself, but they also stoked my writer’s envy, which isn’t necessarily bad. Envy can be an arrow that points to the things you want. The more I read those stories, the more I thought: I could do that. That might feel good. I should join them.
The first thing I wrote in sobriety was an essay about quitting drinking. It felt like insurance for a person prone to relapse. I wanted to be on record. I wanted to double down on public humiliation to keep me from backsliding. The story wasn’t easy to write, but it wasn’t that hard, either. When I was
done, it sounded like me. The me I remembered.
After the piece published, writers I admired responded with kind words and strangers in the comments responded with a warm stream of urine down my leg. But I was starting to realize this online anger wasn’t about me. It was a by-product of garden-variety powerlessness. Usually when I reached out to one of those people, they would say similar things. Oh, I didn’t think anyone was listening—which suggests the true source of their rage.
I kept writing. I began waking up at 6:30 and writing for the first four hours. No procrastinating. No rearranging the furniture. Just wake up and stare down. The work was never easy, but it became easier. Less like a geyser I kept waiting to blow and more like a faucet I could turn on and off.
We ascribe such mystery and magic to the creative process, but its essence is quite basic. Moving a pile of bricks from one side of the room to the other requires strength. Time, discipline, patience.
Writers write. That’s what we do.
“The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time,” Stephen King wrote in his memoir and instruction manual about creativity, On Writing. King is one of the many heroes I’ve had who turned out to be an addict. He was a serious beer binger, who admits he could barely remember writing his novel Cujo.
When I read the stories I wrote during my heaviest drinking years, I don’t think they’re bad. I am a little appalled, though, at how frequently alcohol intrudes. Interviews take place in bars. Entire narratives revolve around drinking. Jokey asides are made about hangovers and blackouts. A beer or a glass of wine sits in the corner of nearly every piece, like some kind of creepy product placement.
A friend of mine is a music teacher, who says pot helped him truly hear music for the first time. “But if you smoke too much pot,” he said, “you get that Jamaican high. Everything turns to reggae.” Whatever creative growth alcohol and drugs might offer at first, it doesn’t last. You stop learning and noticing.