Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (22 page)

I said no to the smart guy who wasn’t attractive to me. I said no to the cocky guy who was. I said no to the graphic designer who tried to kiss me one night. Our date was fun. I ran the pool table (twice), and his eyes roamed along my ass as I lined up my shot, and I was surprised to find I liked that. But he slurped down three bourbons in 90 minutes, and when he leaned forward to kiss me, I was grossed out by the sour smell of his breath, the slump of his eyes, and I ducked. Like in a sitcom, I literally ducked.

It was a revelation to me how unappealing men were when they were drunk. Back when I was dating my college boyfriend Patrick, who was sober, he would pull away from me when I was buzzed and handsy. “You smell like a brewery,” he’d say, and I didn’t get it. I
felt
so sexy in those moments; it only followed I must have
looked
that way. Now I realized what a sadistic game drinking played. It built up your confidence at the very moment you were looking your worst.

After the comical way I ducked the graphic designer’s kiss, I was certain I’d never hear from him again. But he texted me the next day. Turns out, I accidentally inflamed his desire. I went out with him again, but something crucial was lacking. “I don’t
think this is going to work,” I told him, which was a phrase I was learning to say. It felt foreign on my tongue.

“I have never broken up with anyone in my life,” I used to tell people, as though it marked me as kind, as though it granted me broken-heart status. In truth, it was evidence of my passiveness and my need. I had never ended a relationship, but that was another way of saying I’d never found the courage. I’d let someone else do the dirty work. The dating site was good practice for me. Wind sprints in proper boundary setting.

I went out with a guy named Ben. He showed up in jeans and a ’70s ringer shirt pocked with holes and said, “Look, I dressed up for you,” and already I liked him. He had brown eyes that caught the light.

We sat in a bar that was delightfully sleazy, and he drank a beer and I drank water, and nothing was forced or uncomfortable about this arrangement, which was shocking in itself. He asked me why I quit drinking, and I told him. I asked why he and his wife split, and he told me. We both baby-stepped toward each other, one refusal to lie at a time. When he walked me to my car, he said, “So I’m unemployed, I’m broke, and I still live with my ex. I understand if you never want to see me again, but you should know all that.”

I saw him the next week. What the hell, he was different. We sat outside a gelato store with our feet kicked up on the railing, and we talked about pornography. I can’t remember now who opened the door in the conversation leading to the hallway that contained beaver shots, but he told a story about the first dirty picture he ever saw.
Hustler
magazine, the hard-core stuff. All these women spreading their labias, six of them stacked on the page like bricks in a wall, and he felt a little ruined by it. Because after that, he needed so much just to get the same scorpion sting.
He’d gone to college during a wave of antiporn sentiment in the late ’80s, and he’d learned to be ashamed of his desires. Then he got married. Then the marriage caved. Now all he wanted was to dig himself out of the rubble and figure out who he was.

I let him kiss me that night. A lovely, soft, and unfrightening kiss. “I’ll call you,” he said, but he didn’t, and that was fine, too, because some relationships are good to say yes to for a very short time. It was nice to learn that rejection didn’t have to burn.

I thought about Ben sometimes. I thought about the photo of all the labias, because some part of his description reminded me of the pretty boys I used to cut out of teen magazines and plaster over every inch of my fifth-grade bedroom. Maybe this was my own version of a beaver shot: all those puppy-dog eyes staring at me, boring into me. I wondered why women like me complained about pornography setting up unrealistic expectations for men, but we rarely talked about how romantic comedies—and the entire bubble-blowing industry of teen magazines and obsessive pop songs—set up unrealistic expectations for us, and I wondered if I was a little ruined, too.

Maybe we all were ruined. Porn and Hollywood clichés were like the wooden framework that built dating sites. The women wanted walks on the beach, exotic trips, someone to talk to after a long day at work. The guys claimed to want that, too, and then they would show up in your in-box, demanding a tit shot.

The more I hung around the dating site, the more I suspected a few of those guys could use a little more shame about their desires. I couldn’t believe the things men would ask of a woman they’d never met.
I’m in town for a weekend away from my wife. Would you like no-strings-attached sex?
Or:
I really can’t meet for coffee, but I am willing to fuck.
And so I practiced saying no, because clearly these guys weren’t hearing that word enough.

A 23-year-old sent a flirty message one day, and I wrote back, telling him I was flattered, but he was a little too young for me. “Nonsense,” he replied. “Age isn’t nothin’ but a number. All it means is that I have more to cum in your face.”

First of all: He needed to double-check his science. And second of all: No. Noooooooo, young sir, no way in any time or temperate zone. What happened? What warp of etiquette and eroticism had conspired to result in such a blisteringly wrong sentence?

These guys were way too enabled by the false intimacy of the Internet, which allowed you to toss out come-ons you would never utter if you were staring into another person’s eyes. The frightening reality of another human being, the frightening reality of our imperfect and stuttering selves. How much technology has been designed to avoid this? We’re all looking for ways to be close at a distance. Alcohol bridged the gap for me, the way the Internet bridges the gap for others. But maybe everyone needs to stop trying to leap over these fucking gaps and accept how scary it is to be real and vulnerable in the world.

One night in April, I went out with a guy who was studying psychology. We ate at a fried chicken restaurant, one of those trendy places where they served comfort food that used to be trashy. The guy talked fast, and I enjoyed the thrill of trying to keep up. “You’re a contrarian,” I told him, licking grease off my fingers.

“Is that good?” he asked. “I want to be the thing that you like.” And it was the first time someone had said this to me, but I recognized it as my driving motto for the past 25 years. It was nice to be on the other side for a change.

“It’s good,” I said. “I like hearing your mind tick.”

He intrigued me. We talked about bike lanes and Elvis Costello. For months, I’d been going on dates, wondering if something was wrong with me. Why was it so rare to be attracted to a person
who was also attracted to you? But maybe it works this way so when it happens, it feels special. What I felt for the guy that night was unmistakable.

We sat in front of my house in his car, both of us staring forward.

“I don’t know what to do next,” he said. “I don’t know if you want me to kiss you, or…” His words trailed off, and I leaned over and pecked him on his cheek before anything more could happen. I was so unnerved by this newfound chemistry, I dashed out of his car, but I regretted my timidity. Later, in the safety of my own pink bedsheets, I could not stop thinking about him. My body alighted imagining what might have happened if I’d been bolder, if I’d opened up again. What good was caution if you couldn’t chunk it into the breeze?

I texted him. “I should have let you kiss me.”

The double beep of his response was fast.

A
WEEK LATER,
I drove out to his place, and we had dinner, and as we sat on the mattress of his messy bedroom, he turned to me and said, “Do you want to fuck?”

This was my first clue I was not exactly in a Lifetime movie. There would be no soft stroking of my hair. No spray of rose petals across the bed. But in fact, I did want to fuck. I’d gone nearly two years without sex. Two years without drinking, or smoking, or fucking, which was a long spell without the company of your favorite vices. And so I said, “Yes.”

If you were hoping my first time in sobriety would be meaningful and tender, or at least hot and exciting, then we were wishing for the same thing. But it was fast, and efficient, and that was OK. Sometimes it’s best not to wait for the perfect movie moment; those can leave you checking your watch for a long time.

Afterward, we stared up at the ceiling of his bedroom as though it contained a moon. “I always think of the worst things to say after sex,” he said.

I know there is a woman who would have left that invitation alone, but I was not her. “What are you thinking?” I asked.

“I’m thinking: Well, that was free.”

It was a joke. (I guess?) Maybe he thought the sex was lousy, and he was joking that at least he didn’t pay for it. Or the sex wasn’t lousy, but he was joking about what a horrible, self-sabotaging thing that would be to say. Honestly, I didn’t understand the joke, so I won’t parse it on his behalf, because what I discovered over the next week was that the psychology major had some major psychology issues. He was twisted up like a tornado inside. (Also, he was a dick.) A few days after this incident, we had a conversation in which he displayed such casual cruelty I walked away knowing—possibly for the first time in my life—that it was nothing I did. Some people are so brimful with misery they can’t help splashing everyone else.

So there it was, my big chance to get sex right again, and I went and screwed an asshole. Maybe I should have felt crestfallen, but I didn’t. I chalked it up to a learning curve. It was fine. I never saw him again, and no one was worse for the experience. Actually, I was glad for the experience, because it taught me that good sex wasn’t a function of sobriety, any more than good sex was a function of being drunk. Good sex was about the person you were with and, maybe more important, the person you could be while you were with them.

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.