Blackout

by Sarah Hepola

  And she said, with perfect calm, “I don’t think you know how hard it is to be married with a kid.”

  It was the full summary of the standoff we’d been having for years. The white arm of the gate lifted, and we crossed the tracks.

  This time, I want it to be different. I know that her life has changed, but I want to believe that I might still have a place in it. I turn into the gravel road that leads to her place. I pull up to find Anna doing her jokey dance, guiding me into the driveway. Alice stands behind the screen door, watching. It’s hard to imagine a world farther from New York. There’s a clothesline on her patio, an ocotillo cactus growing in her front yard.

  “You made it,” she says, and I smile. “I did.”

  The next afternoon, we drive through the red-rock mountains heading to a natural spring. The vista makes you wonder why anyone ever moved to a city. I keep feeling the urge for some monumental conversation, but Anna and I have had two decades of monumental conversations. Maybe what we need are smaller conversations now. So we talk about the latest New Yorker. We talk about films. We talk about the view outside the window, a view we share for a change.

  Best friends. For so long, those two words contained music to me, but also a threat of possession. I hung the words like pelts in my room. I had best friends for every life phase, every season. The words were meant to express love, but wasn’t I also expressing competition? There was a ranking, and I needed to be at the top. Anna’s closest friend now is a woman she works with at the legal aid office. They take care of each other’s children and giggle with the familiarity of twins. It’s exactly the kind of companionship Anna and I had once, and it stings sometimes when I feel replaced, but I wouldn’t wish anything different for her.

  I know Anna and I will never be friends like we were at 19, because we’ll never be 19 again. I also know this is nothing I did. That while drinking wrecks precious things, it never wrecked our friendship. Sometimes people drift in and out of your life, and the real agony is fighting it. You can gulp down an awful lot of seawater, trying to change the tides.

  At the springs, Anna and I lay down a blanket on the grass and splay out our imperfect bodies. I tell her about what I’m writing, and she talks about Alice’s new Montessori preschool. We don’t share the same language anymore, but we are both trying to learn the other’s vocabulary.

  I wonder if our lives will track closer after I have a baby, and she once again becomes the mentor she was to me in my younger days. Then again, I may never have a baby, and I feel all right with that. So many women my age are torn up over the question mark of motherhood, but on this topic—if nothing else—I feel a total zen. I don’t know what comes next. It’s like a novel whose ending I haven’t read yet.

  The sun is hot, and pools of sweat start dripping down our bare bellies. We walk out to the spring and touch a toe in the water. It’s bracingly cold. A short diving board leads out into the middle of the murky pool, and we stand there like kids, hunched and laughing, our skin covered with goose bumps.

  “You go,” I say, nudging her, and she says, “No, you go.” And we giggle until she gathers herself up, serious now. “OK, do you want me to go?” And I nod. So she walks out on the platform, like she always has, and jumps first.

  ONE SUNDAY MORNING, my mother and I are having coffee. We’re still in our yoga clothes, sitting on the empty patio of a café. Out of nowhere, she says, “I’m just so glad you’re sober.”

  My mom didn’t say much about my drinking for a long time, and now that the subject is out in the open, I feel uncomfortable dwelling here. The words can make me feel stuck, branded. I’m four years sober now. When do these pronouncements end?

  But I understand my mother needs to give voice to these feelings. She is an emotional blurter. In the middle of family dinner, she’ll say to me and my brother, “I just love you two kids so much,” and it’s like: OK, but can you pass the chicken?

  My mother stares at her teacup, getting a contemplative look in her eye. “I wish I could have been there more for you when you were a little girl,” she says, and her green eyes turn watery.

  “Mom, stop,” I say, waving off the emotional charge of the conversation. “Don’t you like who I am?”

  She nods that yes, she does.

  “Do you think you screwed up so badly that it requires all this apologizing?”

  She shakes her head that no, she doesn’t. She tries to explain gently, what I might not understand: the impossible hope of parenthood, the need to shelter your child from pain. It’s hard to live with the mistakes, she says. She wishes she’d been better.

  I do understand. We all live in the long shadow of the person we could have been. I regret how selfish and irresponsible I’ve been as their daughter. How many things I took for granted. My mother’s constant emotional nourishment. My father’s hard work and unwavering support.

  I have lunch each month with my dad now. He is different than the man who raised me. Looser, funnier, and more engaged, faster with his smile. He still reads the newspaper every day. Watches the evening news. There is so much more kicking around in his head than I ever gave him credit for. Just because someone is quiet doesn’t mean they have nothing to say.

  One afternoon, we start talking about drinking. My dad quit ten years ago, worrying the alcohol would interfere with his medications. Though he’d never been much of a drinker when I was a little girl, by the time I was in college, his consumption had crept into the armchair-drinker red zone. He could put away a bottle a night without realizing it.

  Because he quit so easily, and without complaint, I assumed it wasn’t a big sacrifice. But he tells me that’s not true. It had been rough. He still misses it all the time. “I would definitely say I have alcoholic tendencies,” he tells me, and I look at him. Once again: Who are you?

  In the four years of my sobriety, he has never said these words to me. Alcoholic tendencies. I continue to be startled by how much of my personality derives from him. My self-consciousness, my humor, my anxiety. I may look and talk like my mother, but I am equal parts (if not more) this man. What else has my dad not told me? How much more has he kept inside, because no one ever thought to ask? And do I have enough time to dig it out?

  I’m aware of the ticking clock. My mother loses her keys too often, and she forgets what she’s saying in midsentence. My dad loses his balance when he stands in one place too long. Neurological problems in his feet. One evening, his legs give out while we’re standing in a line, and he slumps to the ground right next to me, as though he’s been shot. I can’t help noticing the effects of aging are an awful lot like the effects of drinking. Loss of balance. Loss of consciousness. Loss of memory.

  We spend all these years drinking away our faculties and then all these years trying to hold on to them. When my friends share stories about their parents fighting Alzheimer’s, I hear echoes of my own behavior. He keeps taking off all his clothes. She won’t stop cussing. He disappears in a fog.

  A life is bookended by forgetting, as though memory forms the tunnel that leads into and out of a human body. I’m friends with a married couple who have a two-year-old. She is all grunt and grab, a pint-size party animal in a polka-dot romper, and we laugh at how much she reminds us of our drunken selves. She shoves her hands in her diaper and demands a cookie. She dips one finger in queso and rubs it on her lips. Any hint of music becomes a need to dance. Oh, that child loves to dance. Spinning in a circle. Slapping her big toddler belly. One eye squinted, her tongue poking out of her mouth, as though this movement balances her somehow.

  I recognize this as the freedom drinking helped me to recapture. A magnificent place where no one’s judgment mattered, my needs were met, and my emotions could explode in a tantrum. And when I was finally spent, someone would scoop me up in their arms and place me safely in my crib again.

  I wonder sometimes if anything could have prevented me from becoming an alcoholic, or if drinking was simply my fate. It’s a question my friends wit
h kids ask me, too, because they worry. How can they know if their kids are drinking too much? What should they do? I feel such sympathy for parents, plugging their fingers in the leaky dam of the huge and troubling world. But I’m not sure my parents could have done anything to keep me away from the bottomless pitcher of early adulthood. I was probably going to find my way to that bar stool no matter what. Addiction is a function of two factors: genetics and culture. On both counts, the cards were stacked against me. Still, I know, I was the one who played the hand.

  There is no single formula that makes a problem drinker. I’ve heard many competing stories. Parents who were too strict, parents who were too lax. A kid who got too much attention, and a kid who didn’t get enough. The reason I drank is because I became certain booze could save me. And I clung to this delusion for 25 years.

  I think each generation reinvents rebellion. My generation drank. But the future of addiction is pills. Good-bye, liquor cabinet, hello, medicine cabinet. A kid who pops Oxycontin at 15 doesn’t really get the big deal about taking heroin at 19. They’re basically the same thing. Growing up, I thought substance abuse fell into two camps: drinking, which was fine, and everything else, which was not. Now I understand that all substance abuse lies on the same continuum.

  But I’m not sad or embarrassed to be an alcoholic anymore. I get irritated when I hear parents use that jokey shorthand: God, I hope my kid doesn’t end up in rehab. Or: God, I hope my kid doesn’t end up in therapy. I understand the underlying wish—I hope my kid grows up happy and safe. When we say things like that, though, we underscore the false belief that people who seek help are failures and people who don’t seek help are a success. It’s not true. Some of the healthiest, most accomplished people I know went to both rehab and therapy, and I’ve known some sick motherfuckers who managed to avoid both.

  When I sit in rooms with people once considered washed up, I feel at home. I’ve come to think of being an alcoholic as one of the best things that ever happened to me. Those low years startled me awake. I stopped despairing for what I didn’t get and I began cherishing what I did.

  IN NOVEMBER OF 2013, I flew back to Paris. It had been seven years since I staggered into that gutter on the wrong side of 2 am, and I had left the city saying I’d never return. Classic drunk logic: Paris was the problem, not me. This is what drinkers do. We close doors. Avoid that guy. Never go back to that restaurant. Seek out clean ledgers. We get pushed around by history because we refuse to live with it.

  I wanted to go back. I wanted to find out what I could. There were only two people on the planet who could help me backfill the events of that night, and Johnson’s was the only name I knew.

  Entering the hotel again was like walking into a snapshot in the pages of an old photo album. There was the gleaming white stone of the floor. There was the plate glass window. And there was the ghostly feeling: This is the place.

  “I stayed here once, years ago,” I told the guy behind the counter. He was young, accommodating, and spoke perfect English. I asked him, “You wouldn’t be able to tell me the number of the room I stayed in, would you?”

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. The hotel had changed ownership. Its records didn’t date back that far.

  I expected as much. My story took place a mere seven years ago, but tracking down details of the Paris trip felt like trying to find the wedding jars from Cana. My old emails had been purged by Hotmail. My assigning editors had no record of where I’d stayed and no memory of the hotel’s name. I couldn’t find my credit card statements, having closed those cards years ago. I tried the bookkeeper at the magazine, who said she might be able to break into old records and find my receipts, but it required a password from someone on vacation. In this technology age, we talk about information living forever—as though an infallible archive is the burden we must bear—but we never talk about how much information gets lost. Whole chunks of our history can disappear in the blip of an HTML code.

  “There was a guy who worked at the concierge desk named Johnson,” I said to the young man. “Does he work here anymore?”

  Johnson, Johnson. He checked with a few coworkers. “Nobody here knows that name, no.”

  I figured he was long gone, but I had to ask. I was afraid to see him again, but I also wanted to hear his side of the story. How I sounded to him. What he saw in my face. He called me once. I was at a fancy Thanksgiving dinner party at Stephanie’s, a few days after I got home, and to hear his voice on the other end of the line was like a hand grabbing me around the throat. I couldn’t figure out how he got my number. What the fuck, dude? What the fuck? After I calmed down, I remembered. I gave it to him.

  “Can you think of anyone else at the hotel who might know this Johnson guy?” I asked the young clerk behind the counter.

  The kid crunched his brow. “The concierge who works in the morning,” he said. “He’s been here for 25 years. If anyone knows this man, he will.”

  I thanked him, and spent the rest of the day retracing the steps I took all those years ago, a guided tour of my own troubled past. I was relieved by how many of my memories were correct. Some details I had wrong. The sheets were scratchier than I remembered. The hotel door a revolving entryway, not an automated push.

  As I walked to the Eiffel Tower, I tested my own recall. There will be a crêpe stand two blocks from here, I told myself. There will be a road that spirals out into paved streets. And I got excited by how good I was at this game, just like I was good at the childhood board game of Memory, where twinned pictures hide on the other side of square cards. Yes, the whole scene was exactly as I remembered it. The crunch of gravel under my boots. The November wind slicing through my coat. The flickering of the Eiffel Tower on the hour, thousands of lightbulbs going off at once. The gasp of the crowd. The kisses, the children lifted onto shoulders. It happened then, and it’s happening now. It happens many times, every day, and so I don’t quite understand why it gave me such a thrill to think: I was here once. I remember this.

  I remember this. Why is a tug into the past so satisfying? Wise men tell us to live in the present. Be here now. Stand toe-to-toe with each moment as it arrives. And yet, I love to be pulled into the corridors of my past. That home where I once lived. That street I used to walk alone. Writers build monuments to our former selves, our former lives, because we’re always hoping to return to the past and master it somehow, find the missing puzzle piece that helps everything make sense.

  I woke early the next morning to speak to Guillaume, the concierge of long standing. “There was a guy who used to work the night shift,” I said.

  Guillaume listened as I explained in broad strokes, leaving out nearly all details. He shoved his glasses up the bridge of his nose a few times. “Night guys, we don’t know them much,” he said. “People come in and out of here all the time.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Thanks so much,” and I left before he could see that I was starting to cry.

  Why was I crying? Why did I feel foolish at that moment? Maybe because I knew the unedited story of how that man came into my life, and I hurt for what brought about our intersection. Perhaps the trip felt futile. I had come all this way to track down someone who could not be found. Or perhaps there was tender sense memory in the spot where I was standing. I could remember standing at the same desk seven years before. How leveled I was.

  I left the hotel, and climbed into a taxi that took me to an airport that carried me across an ocean and all the way home. I did not have the answers, but I had the satisfaction of having looked, which is sometimes the thing you need to move on.

  IT’S ABOUT 15 minutes till 8 pm, and I’m sitting on a bench near the location of a dime store where I used to steal lipstick when I was 12. I would slip the glossy black tubes in my pocket, because I had discovered I could, and because I wanted more than what I had been given. The dime store is long gone, replaced by a gourmet burger bar, where the only stealing being done is by the owners: $12 for a burger with truffle aioli.
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  Across the street is an unmarked door leading into a room where people who are not drinking gather and try to be better. I’m meeting a younger woman who reached out to me one night, over email, after finding a few of my stories online.

  “I’m sorry you have to meet me like this,” she says. She apologizes for a lot of things. How frazzled she is. How sad and confused. She apologizes when she cries, and she apologizes that I have to spend time with her, and I point out I am choosing to spend time with her.

  She doesn’t believe me, and I don’t blame her. I never believed it when people said stuff like that to me. Yeah, whatever, I would think. Why would you want to spend time with a mess like me?

  AA reminds you how much of our stories are the same. This is also what literature, and science, and religion will remind you as well. We all want to believe our pain is singular—that no one else has felt this way—but our pain is ordinary, which is both a blessing and a curse. It means we’re not unique. But it also means we’re not alone. One of the best sayings I ever heard someone toss out at a meeting: If you’ve fucked a zebra, someone else has fucked two. I haven’t seen it hung next to the other slogans yet, but I’m hoping.

  The woman draws her purse onto her lap. Her life feels clouded, she says. She’s not sure who she is, or what she wants anymore. She tells me her story, which is carved with her own particulars, but the template is familiar. We arrive at a place of reckoning as strangers to ourselves. When she starts to cry, she reaches for Kleenex in her purse, apologizing once more.

  “You should have seen how much I cried when I quit,” I said. “Insane tears.”

  “It’s hard for me to believe you were ever like this,” she says.

  I try to explain to her. The despair, the frailty, the emotional hurly-burly—I lived there once, too. And she stares at me like I’m trying to sell her something.

  “It’s just that I look at you, and it’s clear you know who you are,” she says. I am wearing sweatpants pulled from the floor, because I was running late, and no makeup. Not my most Hollywood look. But it’s also true that I am not befogged with need and wanting anymore.