Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (21 page)

“You’re stronger than you realize,” my pink-haired yoga instructor told me one day, as I wobbled my way through a handstand, and I started thinking she might be right.

I turned on physical exercise a long time ago. I was a kid who loved the slap of dirt on her hands, but middle school gym was a reminder of my early puberty and late-round draft pick status. I withdrew indoors, into films and books and fizzy bottles. I hissed at organized sports and hid from any activity that broke a sweat, and what I mostly thought about my body is that I wished I didn’t have one. I preferred virtual realms. Email, phone, Internet. To this day, I love writing in bed, covered in blankets. Like I’m nothing but a head and typing fingers.

So I started inhabiting my own body again, because it was
not going to go away. I rode my sea-foam green bike along the wide tree-lined avenues of my neighborhood. I took long walks, in which my mind dangled like a kite string.

People noticed when I lost weight.
You look so healthy. You look so great.
And as much as I enjoyed these compliments, I feared them as well: that they would go away, or that I was too greedy for them in the first place. It made me uncomfortable how much my weight loss changed my perceived value. After I quit drinking, I saw the world differently. But after I lost weight, the world saw
me
differently.

It was like I’d suddenly become visible, after years of camouflage I didn’t know I was wearing. There is something undeniably attractive about a person who is not hiding—in clothes, under extra weight, behind her addictions. My mother and Anna were right all along: There was great beauty in nature.

I
N THE EVENINGS,
I pulled out a leash for Bubba so we could walk outside in the buzzing summer night. The cat had been sick for a while. He was 15 years old. I didn’t know how much longer he had, and if I wasn’t careful, I could spend a whole day freaking out about this.

When I met Bubba, he was an outdoor cat. But one day he came back to my ex-boyfriend’s apartment with incisor bites in the side of his cheek, like two toothpicks through raw dough. There was a series of expensive surgeries. A long stretch of recovery time. He became an indoor cat after that.

It was a miserable power struggle to break him. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to win an argument with a cat, but good luck with that. He would slip out when we weren’t looking, settle scores in some back alley near midnight, and return two days
later like Don Draper crashing through the front door after a bender.
What? What are you looking at?

I loved him for all of this. I, too, was drawn to places that would destroy me. I, too, came home with bruises, and it never stopped me. The cat was an appealing mix of strapping adventurer and cuddle bug. People say cats are aloof, but they are just very, very discerning about whom they trust. I liked caring for that cranky little guy. Women can be very good at ladling their love into the unsmiling mouth of a creature who nonetheless needs them.

I come from a long line of nurses on both sides of my family. We give gentle strokes and change bedpans and wipe up vomit splashed on the floor while cracking vaguely inappropriate jokes. When I think about my own failure to take care of myself, I wonder sometimes if I wasn’t unconsciously waiting for someone like me to come along. Pay off my credit cards, clean up my oopsies. Other people’s messes can be so much more interesting than our own.

Maybe that’s why I needed the cat so much. This may sound absurd, but cats are caretakers. They will kill your mice and curl up at your side when you’re ill. One night in Brooklyn, I became fluish and had to lie on the cold tile floor of the bathroom with my pillow and a duvet. It was one of those moments when my loneliness ached like a broken bone. And the cat padded into the bathroom and lay down beside me, and we slept like this, both of us curled against the warm side of the other.

Now it was my turn to take care of him. The sickness required pills, popped into his mouth twice a day. X-rays, constant experimentation with his food. Jennifer was a veterinarian now; the child who once saved wounded birds had grown up to be a woman who saved people’s pets. When Bubba got sick, she was the person we both needed.

My new house was mere blocks from where Bubba had once prowled, and when he started meowing at the door again—after years of remaining silent on the issue—I wanted to do something for him. Let him roam his home turf again, before he died. I wanted to find some compromise where he could venture into the lusty outdoors that called to him—but stay tethered to me.

The leash was my big idea. Jennifer swore up and down it wouldn’t work. Leashes were against a cat’s nature, she insisted, and for a long time, she was right. Then one day, I put on his harness—blue vinyl ropes along his haunches, like he was about to jump out of an airplane—and he discovered this simple act of surrender led to the outside world.

He inched through the doorway with his nose twitching. When his paws touched the familiar dirt, his whole body went electric. This. All of this. The breeze in his fur. Those feral smells. A blade of grass dragged along the side of his mouth. He rolled around in the dirt. He sniffed the grille of my car like it contained all the decadence of the world.

He tugged too hard, then I tugged too hard, but eventually we found our rhythm. We got so good at this nightly routine, we could stay out there for an hour at a time, exploring grassy corners and wandering into the undiscovered country of the driveway. He lay with his fur against the cool gravel, and I stared up at the sky, two animals finding their way into the wild on a short leash now.

M
y first date in sobriety was with a guy I knew from college. When I saw him at the restaurant, he was more attractive than I remembered, though he was wearing jeans that either marked him as above fashion or distressingly behind it.

“I don’t mind if you drink,” I lied to him.

“I know,” he said, and ordered a Coke.

I was getting to the place where I needed to date. (Not
want
, mind you, but need.) In the cocoon of my crooked little carriage house, I watched documentaries back to back and unspooled fantasy lives with men I’d never met. The tattooed waiter who read Michael Chabon. The handyman with Paul Newman eyes. I could see myself losing years this way, living nowhere but between my ears.

So I forced myself out the front door with trembling hands and burgundy lip gloss. All dating is an unknown country, but as far as I knew, mine was uninhabitable. Even friends who didn’t struggle with raging booze problems were unclear how I was going to date without alcohol. “I don’t think I’ve ever kissed
a guy for the first time without drinking,” said my 27-year-old coworker Tracy. And she was a
professional sex writer
.

How did this happen? We were worldly twenty-first-century women, who listened to sex podcasts and shared tips on vibrators and knew all the naughty peepholes of the Internet. And yet somehow we acquired all this advanced knowledge of sex—threesomes, BDSM, anal—and zero mastery over its most basic building block. The idea of kissing unmoored me. Touching a man’s lips to mine without the numbing agent of a three-beer buzz sounded like picking up a downed wire and placing it in my mouth.

After dinner, my old college friend took me to a coffee shop, where I drank hot chocolate on a breezy patio. I liked him. (Mostly.) He was a doctor. He remembered the oddest details about me from college, which was flattering, like he’d been thinking about me all along. I told him a poignant story about my past, because I sensed this was the scooching-closer portion of the evening, and he took my hand, which was resting on the table. Such a simple gesture: four fingers slipped into the crook of my own. But with that subtle and natural movement, my arm became encased in a block of ice.
Oh God, the panic.
I was afraid to pull away. I was afraid to invite him closer. I was like a doe who had spied the red laser sighting of a gun on my chest.
Do not move.

They say drinking arrests your emotional development at the age when you start using it to bypass discomfort, and nothing reminded me of that like sex. In the year and a half since I’d quit, I had confronted so many early and unformed parts of myself, but sex continued to make me downright squeamish. I was horrified by the vulnerability it entailed. Sometimes I walked around in disbelief about blow jobs. Not that I’d given them, but that anyone had, ever.

As I sat on the patio with my frozen robot arm, I kept flashing to an alternate version of this date. The one where I poured rocket fuel down my throat and went barreling toward him with a parted mouth. Instead, when he dropped me off, I darted from his front seat so fast I practically left a cloud of dust.
Thankyounicetoseeyougoodnight.
I climbed into my bed and pulled the duvet up to my chin, and I understood that I was probably never going to have sex again. Because if you only know one road into town, and the road collapses, what can you do?

Alcohol was the beginning of sex. It was there the first time I kissed a guy, at the age of 13. It was there the last time I slept with a guy I’d only just met, two months before getting sober—a bartender at Lisa’s fortieth birthday party who spoke just enough English to convince me to leave with him. In the nearly quarter century that spanned those two points, alcohol let me be and act however I wanted. One of my favorite ways to have sex was right before a blackout, when I was still there but I’d gone feral, and I could let all those low and dirty words spill out of my mouth.
Do this. Do that.
But now I wasn’t sure if I liked sex that way because it felt good or because guys dug it when I got wild. That’s what I wanted more than my own pleasure. To make myself irresistible. To blow his freaking mind.

I was worried men wouldn’t like dating a sober woman. After all, drinking was a part of our erotic social contract. It was a long-standing agreement that we would all drink away our nervousness and better judgment. I’d heard about men who got frustrated when their dates weren’t drinking. “How am I going to take advantage of you now?” one guy asked my friend, which was a joke, but a lot of uncomfortable truth was beneath the punch line. Alcohol is the greatest seduction tool ever invented,
and to order a seltzer with lime is to take that shining scimitar out of a man’s hand and toss it in the nearby Dumpster.

I went to dinner again with the doctor. I was torn about him. He made me laugh. He was a great listener. But he cussed out some dude who cut him off in traffic. He told this overinvolved story about his ex and described her with various synonyms for “psycho.” The jeans: Was it shallow that I cared? That old pendulum swung in my mind the entire evening.
I’m going to kiss him / Oh hell no, I’m not.
I couldn’t tell if the tics that bothered me about him were red flags or convenient excuses to stay in my hidey-hole. I’d lost touch with my own gut instinct.

And I thought: If I could take a shot of Patrón, I could kiss him. If I could suck down the beer (or five) that he does not order on my behalf, then we could do this the way it is done. We could find ourselves wrapped in sheets, clothes in a heap near the foot of the bed, my tricky Grecian top in a tourniquet around my forearm because I was so frantic to rip it off, to be unloosed, to be free. And afterward we could evaluate. Do we work? Is this a thing? We could exchange flirtatious glances over brunch, or we could scatter to other corners of the galaxy and avoid each other in grocery stores. Either one was fine. But at least something would happen.

Something else happened instead. I sent him an email that took way too long to write.
I can’t be more than friends with you.
The drawbridge, which for a brief moment lowered, snapped shut again. I was so relieved.

When I said I would never have sex again, that probably sounded dramatic. The kind of grandiose proclamation a teenager makes before slamming the door to her room. It’s not as though every intimacy in my entire life had been warped by booze. I’d had quiet sex, and giggling sex, and sex so delicate it
was like a soap bubble perched on the tip of my finger. I knew such joy could exist between two people, but I had no clue how to get to it anymore. My only directions involved taking a glass of wine to my lips and letting the sweet release show me the way.

Clearly, I needed a new map.

I
KNEW ONLINE
dating would come for me someday. It was the fate of all single women in their late 30s to stare down a personal profile, and as far as punishments go, this was fairly benign. Once, my type faced spinsterhood and destitution. Now I had to walk into the gallows of OK Cupid and drum up a good attitude about emoticons.

Online dating was not a bad move for me. It allowed me to inch toward intimacy with built-in distance. It granted me the clarity that “hanging out at the bar” often lacked. One of the great, unheralded aspects of Internet dating was that the word “dating” was in the title, thus eliminating any ambiguity. Were we dating? Was this a date? The answer was yes.

It also allowed me to say up front:
I don’t drink.
I’d worried so much about how to reveal this. I didn’t want to watch some guy’s face fall when I ordered a Diet Coke and then endure the pecks of his curiosity. So my “ABOUT ME” statement began “I used to drink, but I don’t anymore.” I’ve had stronger openings, but this one was good for now.

I understood that not drinking—and
not drinking
to such an extent that it was the first detail I shared about myself—would turn off certain guys. I saw them sniffing around my profile. Those bearded eccentrics with their fluency in HBO shows and single-malt Scotch. How I missed those beautiful, damaged men, but we kept our distance from each other. Occasionally I would
email one of them, and they never wrote back, and I got it. Back when I was drinking, I wouldn’t have responded to me, either.

My first weeks on the site were choppy, but I soon became accustomed to the routine. The endorphin blast of attraction. The coy banter that allowed you to tease out someone’s personality. Flirting was like any exercise: It got easier the more you did it.

This wasn’t the first time I had tried online dating. About six months after I moved to New York, I signed on to Match.com. I did it for Anna. She’d logged so much time listening to me complain about my ex. “Just try it,” she said, which is a very hard argument to win.

I bought a bottle of sauvignon blanc that night and sipped my way onto a plateau of cleverness. I didn’t want a profile that was drab and ordinary. I wanted a personal statement that grabbed every guy by the collar and whispered each word into his mouth. I swear I was in love with myself by the time I finished, a bottle having morphed into a six-pack of beer, and I posted the hottest picture of myself I had: a close-up taken by a professional photographer in which I appeared 20 pounds lighter than I was. I woke up the next day to a kitchen clogged with cigarette smoke, and the memory surfaced in pieces:
I think I joined a dating site last night.

I got several messages on the site that day, but two stood out. One was from a successful businessman with silver hair. The other was from an indie-rock type who frequented a burger shop less than two blocks from my front door. Those two men had nothing in common, but their notes had a similar sincerity. They wanted to meet. This week. Tomorrow. Now.

I called my friend Aaron in a panic. “What do I do?”

He spoke slowly. “You write them back, and maybe you meet them.”

“But I can’t,” I said. Having portrayed myself as the overthinking hedonist’s Marilyn Monroe, I could not bear to disappoint them. There was not a pair of Spanx in the world big enough to bridge the distance between the woman on that site and the woman who stood in my kitchen, pacing in jogging pants.

“If you’re worried about misrepresenting your weight, there’s an easy fix for that,” Aaron told me. “Put up a full-body picture of the way you really look.”

“You’re right, you’re right. Of course you’re right.”

I pulled my profile down the next day.

This story was one of a thousand reminders that dating was never easier when I was drinking. Alcohol may have turned me into Cinderella for a few radiant hours, but I would wake up in dishrags again, crying about the messes I’d made.

This time, the process of finding the right person on the site was more honest, but it was also slow. A lot of dead-end conversations. A lot of dudes in camo posing in front of their giant trucks. I was growing antsy. Some days I thought about finding a random dude and just banging him.

What was wrong with me? Why did I think sex was something I needed to get over with?

M
Y FIRST ONLINE
date was with a divorced father who was an immigration lawyer. He was nice, but not for me. No chemistry. When he offered to make me a lavish meal on Valentine’s for our third date, I knew the only proper response was to gently fold up the tent on our time together. He deserved to spend that holiday with someone who felt differently about him. I was starting to learn one of the most important lessons of online dating: the wisdom of saying no.

All my life I fought to say yes. I was shy and ambitious, a terrible mix, and so I tried to dismantle my isolationist tendencies. Yes to this party I don’t want to go to, yes to this person I don’t want to date, yes to this assignment I’m afraid to botch, because saying yes was the path to a remarkable life. I needed to say yes, because I needed to push myself off the couch and into the swift-moving stream of hurt and jubilation. But saying yes to everything meant repeatedly saying no to my own better judgment, or drinking myself to the point I had none. Now my job was to sort out the possibilities with more caution: which risks are not worth it, and which ones deserve a jump.