Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (18 page)

About a week after the delivery, Anna finally called. I was reading in bed one lazy Saturday with Bubba curled up alongside me when I saw her name on the phone. My breath hitched as if the call were from a long-lost boyfriend.

“I’m sorry I haven’t called you before now,” she said. Her voice was soft. She sounded exhausted and maybe a bit scared. But I heard a tenderness, too, and it assured me the long, cracked desert I’d just crawled across was a punishment that existed entirely in my mind. “Do you have a minute?”

“Yeah,” I said, sitting up. “I have about a thousand.”

It was one of those fragile moments when I didn’t want to move, for fear any sudden commotion might cause one of us to flutter away. But I also had a desire to escape the pain cave of my apartment and walk in the open air. As we spoke, I tippy-toed down the creaky stairs and made my way along the quietest of the tree-lined avenues to the benches along the Hudson, where I could sit and stare at New Jersey and feel the sun on my shoulders before it slipped behind the horizon once more.

We talked for a long time. She told me how painful and frightening that delivery was. How glorious and uncertain the first
days of motherhood were. So much she didn’t know. She watched people she barely knew cradle a child she had created but had not yet learned to hold. I didn’t tell her about the explosion of anguish set off by my dumb text message. I didn’t mention the text message at all. I tried to be a good friend, and just listen.

But I worried that I was waking up to my own life just in time to watch people slip away. The word “recovery” suggests you are getting something back. How come the only thing I felt was loss?

I wanted to apologize to Anna. Dealing with myself honestly for the first time was starting to make me realize what she’d been shouldering all these years. The hours absorbing my catalog of misery, gluing me together only to watch me bust apart. But how many times can you apologize to one person? I was also reluctant to make this another conversation about me. She was moving into a new phase of life—marked by worry, fear, fatigue—and I stood there, mute and blinking, stranded in the mistakes of my own past.

I wanted the gift of forgetting. Boozy love songs and brokenhearted ballads know the torture of remembering.
If drinking don’t kill me, her memory will
, George Jones sang, and I got it. The blackouts were horrible. It was hideous to let those nights slide into a crack in the ground. But even scarier was to take responsibility for the mess I’d made. Even scarier was to remember your own life.

D
RINKERS AND FORMER
drinkers have this in common: They seek each other out in the night. In the loneliest hours, I often reached out to writers I knew had quit. Emails intended to look casual, like I wasn’t asking for help, but what I really wanted to know was: How did you do it? How can I do what you did?

Strange currents lead us to each other. Back when I was in
my late 20s, a guy typed into the search bar “I fucking drink too much,” and it brought him to a post where I’d written those exact words, and I was so proud. Through the magic of the Internet, and Google search function, and my WordPress blog—his little message in a bottle found my shore.

Whenever I wrote my own random emails to other people, I was often awed by the attentiveness of their responses. These people barely knew me. We live in an age when most of us can’t be bothered to capitalize emails or spell out the words “are” and “you,” and yet, these letters were often expansive, full of honesty and care. Maybe it’s easier to be our best selves with strangers. People we’ll never know long enough to let down.

Often they said:
I was like you once. I used to think that program was bullshit, too.
And hearing they were wrong made me suspect I was wrong, too.

AA was a humble program. A program of suggestions, never rules. It was a place of storytelling, which operated on the same principle as great literature: Through your story, I hear my own.

I was also beginning to realize that getting sober wasn’t some giant leap into sunlight. It was a series of small steps in the same direction. You say “I’ll do this today,” and then you say the same thing the next day, and you keep going, one foot in front of the other, until you make it out of the woods.

I can’t believe I’d once thought the only interesting part of a story was when the heroine was drinking. Because those can be some of the most mind-numbing stories in the world. Is there any more obnoxious hero than a dead-eyed drunk, repeating herself? I was stuck in those reruns for years—the same conversations, the same humiliations, the same remorse, and there’s no narrative tension there, believe me. It was one big cycle of Same Old Shit.

Sobriety wasn’t the boring part. Sobriety was the plot twist.

M
y friend Charlotte met me for lunch on a sparkling day in fall.

“So you’re not drinking,” Charlotte said. “How’s that going?”

A fair question. It was, perhaps, the only question I cared about. But I could not take the emotional splatter paint in my chest and translate it into words for her benefit. What could I possibly say? That I could sense every drinker in the room, and I hated every one of them? Drinkers had started to throb from every patio and sidewalk. A few days before, I’d gotten a whiff of a drunk homeless guy in the subway and my mouth watered.
Like a vampire.

“Good,” I told her, and stared at the floor for a long time, which is always superconvincing.

Charlotte is my friend Stephanie’s younger sister. As teenagers, we met on back porches with domestic beer in our hands and shared the frustration of standing in Stephanie’s shadow. As adults, we met at smoking windows with purple mouths to
complain about the ways the world still placed us second. She was one of my best friends in New York. We used to share rooms on girls’ weekends—two days of binge drinking and sisterly bonding—and I would go home feeling so understood, my stomach sore from laughing.

Now we sat at the table with nothing but awkwardness and salted butter between us. My glass of Perrier was such flimsy compensation—all the fizz of champagne and none of its deliverance.

Why couldn’t I tell Charlotte the truth that I was miserable without drinking? Isn’t that what friends provide—a soft landing for your complicated pain?

But I relied on the alcohol to loosen my tongue.
Actually
, I would say, leaning in after the second glass,
I’m a wreck
.

I’m a wreck, too!
the woman would say, because every female was hoarding some secret misery.

I couldn’t achieve such pliability at noon on a Saturday, though. And I didn’t want to bore Charlotte with lame stories of 12-step meetings and day counts. (One of the many downsides of my snarky attitude toward “recovery people” was the mortifying discovery I was
one of them
.) I felt sorry for Charlotte, confined to sit across from such a wretch. Sobriety could be so isolating. Sometimes I felt like I was living on an island, where all I did was hope a friend would float by, and when they finally arrived, I began to wonder when they’d go away.

I was a fire starter once. I could talk to anyone when I was drinking. I played therapist, devil’s advocate, clown. I actually used to brag I could be friends with Stalin. And it never occurred to me to ask:
Who the hell would want to be friends with Stalin?

But the woman who threw open her arms to despots had become the woman who couldn’t meet the eyes of an old friend.
I felt judged and evaluated by Charlotte. Not because of anything she said, or any look she’d given me, but because judging and evaluating is what the old me would have done in her place.

I used to hate it when a friend wasn’t drinking.
Good for you!
I’d say, but inside, I was steaming. Drinking was a shared activity, and one person’s abstinence was a violation of protocol. I measured a friend’s loyalty by her ability to stay by my side. Could she go another round? Would she take a shot for me? My friends didn’t necessarily drink as much as I did, but they were often the women who stuck around till the lights came up. We remained in the foxhole as long as our comrades needed us.

Lisa and I used to joke that we couldn’t leave the bar till at least one of us cried. What were we crying about? It’s hard to say. We were both editors, and we got tired and worn down. Our napkins would be smudgy with mascara by last call, and I’d pat her on the back as we left.
I think we did some good work today.

A few months after I quit drinking, I went out with Lisa, and she
didn’t even order a beer
. I hated that my sobriety had become her punishment.

My therapist didn’t understand my objection. “Is it possible Lisa
likes
supporting you?”

Maybe. But the arrangement didn’t seem right. I had a lot of vegetarian friends, and none of them took away my bacon.

I think some part of me felt guilty for quitting. Drinking was central to our connections. A necessary prop of companionship and commiseration. As a friend, I considered myself clutch. Forever willing to split a bottle (or three) and play midwife to your sorrows.

But my drinking had not brought me closer to these women. In fact, the opposite happened. The last time Charlotte and I drank together, I met her and some friends at a nice restaurant.
I arrived late, and the waitress was slow to bring my wineglass, so I grabbed the bottle from the middle of the table and took a slug. My dress was on inside out. (“I got dressed in the dark,” I explained to Charlotte, though I neglected to add,
after three margaritas
.) At a bar later, we started talking about female orgasms, and nobody was listening to me, so I kept having to yell. Charlotte gave me $20 for the cab ride home, and I wrote her an email the next day to thank her profusely. It took her two days to respond, which was probably my first sign she was choosing her words.

I love you so much,
she wrote me.
But sometimes when you are drinking you act irrationally. You were a little hostile on Friday, and it was extremely uncomfortable for the group.

My eyes skipped over the parts where she said how great I was and stuck on the other words instead.
Hostile. Extremely uncomfortable. For the group.

Women are so careful with each other’s feelings. We know the world shoots poison daggers into our egos—and we shoot them into ourselves—and so we rush to each other’s sides for triage:
Yes, you were fine last night; yes, you are perfect exactly as you are
. (Classic
Onion
headline:
Female Friends Spend Raucous Night Validating the Living Shit Out of Each Other
.) We become such reliable yes-women that any negative feedback is viewed as a betrayal, and the only place we feel comfortable being honest is behind each other’s back.
Did you hear what she said last night? Did you see what she wore?
These are the paths of least resistance—the unswerving praise, the gossip dressed up as maternal concern—and it can be very tricky to break rank and say, out loud, to each other: No, you weren’t fine at all.

There is no good way to confront a friend who is drinking too much, although doing it when you’re not drunk is a good
start. Anything you say will cause pain, because a woman who is drinking too much becomes terrified other people will notice. Every time I got an email like the one Charlotte sent, I felt like I’d been trailing toilet paper from my jeans. For, like, ten years. I also burned with anger, because I didn’t like the fact that my closest friends had been murmuring behind cupped hands about me, and I told myself that if they loved me, they wouldn’t care about this stuff. But that’s the opposite of how friendships work. When someone loves you, they care enormously.

Now I was four months sober—in part because of exchanges like the one with Charlotte. I made this lunch date with her, in part to prove how together I was. I hadn’t seen her since the night I grabbed the wine off the table in front of her friends, and I wanted to replace the unseemly memory with a better one.

“I’m sorry I’m not very interesting,” I told her.
I’m sorry.
Two words I said so often I wanted to hire a skywriter to emblazon the blue horizon with my regret.
I’m sorry for everything.
After lunch, I walked Charlotte to the subway, and we hugged for a long time, and neither of us knew what to say, so we said nothing.

Some recovering alcoholics believe you need to distance yourself from your old friends. They’re triggers and bad influences. But what if your friends were the ones who saved you? Who closed out your bar tab and texted with you until you made it home safely? What if your friends were the ones who noticed when you disappeared, who rummaged around their own insides until they could find a compassionate way to say:
Enough
? Was I supposed to cut them out now? When I needed them more than ever?

A
FEW MONTHS
later, I walked out of Whole Foods holding heavy paper bags only to discover it was sprinkling. I spent
30 minutes trying to hail a cab, and when I picked up the bags, their bottoms had turned soggy and started sagging out. The absurd contortions required to carry those suckers into a cab and up four flights of stairs to my teensy-tiny apartment was a tragedy of errors that left me demoralized and wondering, once again:
Why the hell am I living in New York?

I’d been debating the question for years. The city was too expensive. Cold, crowded, miserable. Then again, maybe the city was the greatest on earth, and
I
was the one who was miserable. For a long time, my unhappiness was a smear in which offending colors were hard to tease out. What was the source of my sadness, and what was its collateral damage? Removing one element from my life—alcohol—rendered my problems into black and white. The city may have been the greatest on earth, but it didn’t feel like me. Not the new me, anyway. I was ready to move back to Texas.

My sponsor cautioned me to wait a year, because people who quit drinking are desperate to parachute out of difficult feelings. Alcoholics are escape artists and dopamine fiends. They will dive into strenuous exercise, wanton sex, obsessive hobbies, impulsive moves across the country to live with people they’ve just met. The only thing I was diving into in those days was work and red velvet cupcakes. But I took my sponsor’s advice anyway and waited a year. My long exile in relapse-land made me question my own good judgment.

For a long time I didn’t understand the role of a sponsor. I thought of her like a teacher keeping an invisible score sheet. “You should raise your hand more in the meetings,” she told me, and I nodded, and then I never did it. This was how I often operated. I said yes to please you, and then I did whatever I wanted. I thought of it as “being nice.” Now I think of it as “being manipulative.”

I apologized when I “forgot” to call her or when a suggestion she made “slipped my mind.” But I was starting to realize this routine was bankrupt. This routine got me here.

My sponsor pushed me to be honest. Don’t make excuses. If I didn’t want to talk in the meetings, tell her why. If I didn’t feel like calling her that day, admit as much. This approach made me tense. What was I supposed to say? “Hey, it’s Sarah. I didn’t call you yesterday because I didn’t want to call you.” But my sponsor said, sure, I could tell her that. It would be a great start. The point was: Own your own feelings, skepticism, irrational rage. Stop pretending to be someone you aren’t, because otherwise you have to go into hiding whenever you can’t keep up the act.

I didn’t think of myself as someone who didn’t own her own feelings. I had a few years when feelings were about the only things I
did
own, along with three Hefty bags of clothes, deodorant, and the sound track to
Xanadu
. I was all feeling, baby. Pour that Grenache down my throat and the emotion oozed out like vanilla soft-serve. But there’s a difference between blurting out every feeling you’ve ever had and simply acknowledging the relevant ones. I had two speeds, which often varied with my blood-alcohol level: fine with whatever, and never, ever satisfied. Where was the balance between these?

Although I was incredibly good at having feelings—inflaming them with drink and torch songs—I was incredibly lousy at doing anything about them. I kept flashing back to an argument I used to have with my ex. Every time I vented about work, he rushed to handcraft a solution, which was an irritating habit.
All you want to do is
fix
me
, I spat at him once. But I never thought to ask—Why do I have such a high tolerance for being broken?

OK, so: solutions. In late May, I gave notice at my job. My boss was quite generous about this. He asked if I wanted to work
part-time from Texas, an offer I eventually took him up on, but on the day I gave notice, I only felt relief. Freedom. All those days of swallowing the urge to leave, and I finally got the satisfaction of coughing it up.

That afternoon, I left our drab office and walked into the weird no-man’s-land of the Garment District. I texted Anna. “Holy shit. I just quit my job!” I was standing in front of a strange window display made entirely of old-timey hats. I walked back and forth, jacked on adrenaline as I awaited her response. I paced a long time. No response ever came.

Didn’t she understand I was taking a victory lap right now and she was being very chintzy with her garlands? I knew her job was draining. She helped run a legal aid office in West Texas, and anyone in the business of saving the world can tell you it requires a rather long to-do list. But this had never been a problem before. Why had everything changed, the moment I needed everything to go back?

I went to a meeting, and instead of performing rehearsed lines, I spoke in a flood. “It’s like my best friend abandoned me,” I said. “I understand that she’s a new mother”—and when I said these words, an older woman in the front row let out a guffaw, which left me very confused. It’s humbling not to understand your own punch line.