Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (5 page)

I wanted to be like her: tough and foxy. I wanted to borrow her brassiness.
What are you looking at? Who gave you permission to look at me?
How exciting to barge through the world, never apologizing for your place in it but demanding everyone else’s license and registration.

But the summer of 1984 wasn’t like the ones before it. I was nearly 10 years old, and Kimberley was 14. When I arrived, she greeted me in a tight magenta leopard-print tank top. Her eyes
were lined with electric blue, and she wore hypnotic pink discs in her ears that swirled when she shifted. Men watched her as she crossed a room. She didn’t smile much anymore.

She’d transformed, like Olivia Newton-John in the last scene in
Grease
, though she wasn’t nearly as bubbly and fun. I was afraid of that leopard-print shirt. It was a costume change I didn’t request. But on afternoons when Kimberley was gone, I would slip it off the hanger and onto the frightening curves of my own body, and I would admire myself in the mirror, enjoying the electricity of high school before I’d even started fifth grade.

S
OMETHING ELSE TERRIBLE
happened that year.

A few days into fifth grade, I was on the living room floor with my legs splayed open like any girl who is young and unencumbered. Mom and I were laughing about something, but she went silent when she saw it: a dime-size dot of rust on the crotch of my favorite shorts.

There was a rush to the bathroom. And an inspection over the toilet. And my mother’s hands, smoothed along my ruddy cheeks.

“This is all very natural,” she said, although we both knew that wasn’t true. I’d just turned ten. I stared at the drain in the bathtub and watched my childhood go down it.

My precocious puberty had been coming on for a while, but the changes had been manageable. When breasts bubbled up on my chest in fourth grade, I smushed them down again under heavy cable-knit sweaters. When hair began to appear on my privates, unwelcome as the first whiskers of a werewolf, I ran my
mother’s razor along the skin to keep it smooth and untarnished. But bleeding once a month required a new level of hiding.

My fifth-grade teacher called my mother at home one night after becoming concerned about my slouch. “Sarah should be proud of her body,” she said. “She’s blessed to have such a shape.” What the hell? She was supposed to be grading my math quizzes, not my posture. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that adults might also have opinions about my body, which meant everyone did, and I hated feeling so powerless. You could hunch and smother yourself, you could shove all your shame into unlit places, but somehow, some way, some gray-haired lady could still spot your secrets from across the room.

My mother came into my room later that night. She thought it might be time to shop for a bra. And I tried to be patient with her, but didn’t she understand? That was the worst idea in the world. Fifth grade was a torture chamber for any girl who dared to confirm her development. Boys would sneak up behind me and snap my bra. Girls would whisper behind my back. I might as well show up to school wearing a bull’s-eye on each areola. I might as well take a Sharpie and draw an arrow to my crotch:
now bleeding.

So my mother smoothed my hair and kissed my forehead. My mother’s hand is still my favorite hand.

That was the year I started encouraging girls at sleepovers to sneak sips from the liquor cabinet. I wanted to make them tough, too. And I liked playing ringleader in our coterie of spelling bee champions. I taught them dirty jokes and cusswords I’d learned from watching Eddie Murphy films at my cousins’ house. I got the genius idea to pass notes in class and archive them in a plastic index cardholder inside our desks, which is
such a boneheaded girl thing to do. It’s not enough to break the rules. Apparently you need to scrapbook the evidence.

We returned from P.E. one afternoon to find our teacher sitting behind a desk piled with a mountain of our misdeeds. I was a real show-off in the notes. I called her a bitch. I talked about how goddamn nosy she was. It was a grudge I’d nursed since she had called my house.

“I really thought you liked me,” she said.

“I
do
like you,” I said, because what was I going to say? She was the one who started it?

Every one of those girls got grounded except me. My parents didn’t believe in grounding.

I was in bed when my mom came into my room. She had one of the notes in her hand, and I hated that she was seeing me like that.

“Help me understand why you’re so angry,” she said.

But I wasn’t the one smashing dishes and arguing with my father after the kids went to bed. My parents’ fights were bad that year. I turned up the radio to drown out the sound. I listened to the Top 10 countdown every night, and I tracked the movements of songs by Madonna, and Michael Jackson, and Prince the way other children might count sheep.

“I’m not angry,” I told her.

“Then what are you?” she asked.

I thought maybe I was bad. A lot of crazy things were building up inside me, and the more they accumulated, the stronger the suspicion that I was messed up and wrong. I shrugged my shoulders. Tears dripped down my cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” my mother said, pulling me into her, and I was so confused. My family made no sense to me. I had screwed up, but somehow she was apologizing.

I
GOT DRUNK
for the first time in the summer of my sixth-grade year. Kimberley was 16 and working at an arcade so epic it was called Star World. Dark rooms lit by neon, full of clinking machines and 25-cent shots at redemption. A bar for people who can’t drink yet.

My self-consciousness had become overpowering by then. I couldn’t stop dreaming about those shaggy-haired boys playing Galaga, but words were staple-gunned to the back of my throat. I hung around the arcade all day, but I never said a word. Someone actually asked Kimberley, “Is your cousin mute?”

The staff of Star World threw an end-of-summer party in a house by the lake. For the first two hours, I stayed in my usual spot on the sidelines. Teenagers played quarters on the table and drank potions I understood to be off-limits: peach schnapps and orange juice, rum and Coke.

But then the pudgy assistant manager handed me a beer. He must have felt sorry for me: Kimberley’s little cousin, watching from the benches again. Or maybe he had reached the euphoric point in your buzz when stupid ideas seem brilliant. Let’s pee our names in the snow. Let’s get the dog drunk. He grabbed a Budweiser out of the fridge and handed it to me, like he was sliding me a winning lottery ticket.
Hey, you’re cool, right?

I was two weeks shy of my twelfth birthday, but I had been practicing for this moment for years. I knew how to pop open the can with a gratifying
pfffffft
that sprayed like the lightest afternoon shower on my face. I knew how to tolerate the zap on my tongue and the way my glands squeezed like a fist. I knew how to sip, and I knew how to glug. Yes, sir. I was cool.

I drank the beer. Then I drank another. And the evening began to glow in my veins. Words rolled out to me on red carpets. The perfect comeback. The fastest burn. And I kept drinking: a syrupy mixed drink, a shot of clear liquor like a grenade down my gullet. That shit tasted awful, but who cared? I was transformed. Pierced by divine light. Filled by a happiness I’d longed for all my life.

I threw up seven times. Hunched over the toilet, Kimberley at my side. The Star World manager tucked me into bed in a room upstairs. “You’re too young to be drinking like this,” he said. He was a sweet guy, with a hangdog face, and I nodded in agreement. He was wise and ancient, twice as old as me. He was 22.

The next morning I was so shaky I could barely force blueberry yogurt in my mouth. And Kimberley was asking me weird questions. “Do you remember when you took your pants off last night?” And I laughed, because I knew that couldn’t have happened. I wouldn’t even undress in Kimberley’s room when she was there. I sure as hell didn’t strip off my clothes at a Star World party.

But she had the unsmiling voice of a state’s witness. “You sat at the bottom of the steps, crying, and you said everyone loved me more than you. You don’t remember that?”

I did not.

It’s such a savage thing, to lose your memory, but the crazy part is, it doesn’t hurt one bit. A blackout doesn’t sting, or stab, or leave a scar when it robs you. Close your eyes and open them again. That’s what a blackout feels like.

The blackout scattered whatever pixie dust still remained from the night before, and I was spooked by the lost time. I had no idea this could happen. You could be present and not there
at all. Those first few drinks gave me hope for escape. But I knew from Stephen King stories how hope could boomerang on a person and what looked like an exit door turned out to be the mouth of a more dangerous maze.

So I swore I’d never drink like that again. And I kept the promise for many years. I kept drinking, but not
like that
. Never
like that
. I assured myself it was a first-time drinker’s mistake. Instead, it was a blueprint.

O
ne of the curious aspects of middle school is how extraordinary the pain feels, even when the affliction is quite mundane. The wrong pair of jeans, your unpronounceable last name, a paper wad thrown by a popular boy that hit your back during an assembly.
Has anyone ever suffered like this?
My mother used to tell me all kids were struggling. Even the bullies. “It’s such a tough time for everyone,” she would say, and get a tsk-tsk look, like she was talking about Ethiopia. A nice perspective, I suppose. But I was pretty sure my unhappiness was worse than everyone else’s.

In sixth grade, I walked home alone every day. In the quiet hours before my brother returned from football and my parents returned from work, I rooted around our cabinets for new kinds of comfort. Graham crackers. Chunks of cheddar cheese melted in the microwave for exactly seven seconds, the moment the sides began to slump. Sips of occasional beer weren’t enough anymore. I needed the numbing agents of sugar and salt.

Becoming a binge eater in a house like mine wasn’t easy. You
had to get creative. My mother bought natural, oily peanut butter, but if you swirled a spoonful with molasses, you had something approaching a Reese’s. Four tubes of cake icing sat on the fourth shelf of the pantry, and I squirted a dollop in my mouth each day.

But my new comfort also brought a new pain. “You’re getting fat,” my brother told me one day, as I watched
Oprah
on the couch. He and I didn’t speak much anymore. He stuck to his room and his Judas Priest. But he had an older sibling’s homing device for sore spots. “Fat” was the meanest word you could call a girl. The absolute worst thing in the world.

My first diet started in seventh grade. My cafeteria lunch shrank to iceberg lettuce dribbled with low-cal ranch dressing. I loaded up on Diet Cokes. Three, four a day. After school, I grape-vined to Kathy Smith’s aerobic workout. I confined myself to frozen Lean Cuisine dinners. Cheese pizza. Cheese cannelloni. Cheese lasagna. (The same three ingredients, rolled up in different shapes.) The diet craze of the 1980s was a nationwide tornado that left leg warmers and V-hip leotards in its wake. Even my food co-op mother bought a book listing calorie counts, and I memorized those entries like Bible passages. I couldn’t tell you much about John 3:16, but I knew Blueberry Muffin: 426.

The misery of calorie restriction is well documented, but what people rarely mention is that it’s also a bit fun. How much hunger can I tolerate? How much joy can I withhold? What a perverse pleasure, to be in charge of your own pain.

My extreme dieting became a power struggle with my mother, just like the extreme amount of Wet N Wild makeup I wore or the extreme number of sitcoms I watched every afternoon.
I
was the dish thrower in our house now. The good part about weight obsession, though, is how it bonded me with other girls. Quite a
few of us were sweating in unitards by then. Two of my friends told me about lying in bed one afternoon in their bathing suits, circling trouble spots on each other’s body with a permanent marker. And when I heard that story, I thought:
That is love.

B
Y EIGHTH GRADE,
I had discovered a surprisingly dependable revenue stream for adulation. I wrote morbid little tales inspired by Stephen King books. Teachers and classmates cooed over my twisted imagination and PSAT vocabulary. Writing made school an opportunity instead of a fear parade. Of course, English was my favorite subject.

I met one of my first great loves in my English class. Jennifer had big brown eyes, long brown hair, and a bohemian beaded necklace that suggested an older sister who taught her about Pink Floyd. She sat directly in front of me, and we bonded over our liberal politics and
Helter Skelter
, required reading for curious teens dabbling in darkness.

One day she slipped me a note on a torn piece of paper.
Do you want to spend the night on Friday?
Later, she told me she spent the entire class holding the tiny scrap of hope in her hands, trying to talk herself into passing it my way.

That Friday night, we sat in her bedroom and ate an entire gallon of Blue Bell ice cream. That’s how nervous and excited we were. We swapped stories of our own personal hells and discovered they weren’t so personal after all. Is there any bonding agent like shared pain? We spent most Friday nights together after that.

I thought I had delicate sensibilities, but Jennifer was the most sensitive girl I’d ever met. We once passed a bird with a broken wing as we walked to NorthPark Mall. He was tipped over on the sidewalk near the highway, claws scrambling for
purchase, and she scooped him up in her hands and redirected us back to her house, where she nestled him in a shoe box padded with cotton balls. I just wanted to go to Limited Express.

“You can’t go around rescuing any dumb bird,” I said to her in a tone I’d borrowed from Kimberley. My babysitting money was heavy in my pocket, and I was itching to turn my bounty into a bubble skirt.

I was the dominant in our duo, but in the green-carpeted hallways of middle school, we were equals. Two artsy honors kids, stranded in the vast flyover territory between cheerleader and nerd, and drawn to both coasts. We wrote each other notes every day, which tracked the movements of boys we liked as though we were anthropologists in the bush. (“Claude was wearing a red shirt today. He sat in a seat close to the door.”) We folded the notes into simple origami shapes, and I kept every one she gave me in a Payless ShoeSource box in my closet. I liked to watch those notes pile up, a tangible measure of my value to another human. The notes were creamy with praise, as if self-esteem were a present you could give another person.
You are beautiful and sweet. I love you so much. You are the best friend I ever had.
So much clinging and drama. We sounded like parting lovers fleeing the Nazis, not two kids bored in American History.

We bought silver best friend rings from James Avery, the equivalent of engagement rings in our junior high. Flashing that ring meant you belonged to someone. And if we couldn’t belong to the boys we liked, then at least we could belong to each other. The ring was two hands entwined so you couldn’t tell where one hand ended and the other one began, a fitting symbol for our enmeshment. We were BFFs, almost sisters. But then high school came along—and our unraveling began.

I arrived in ninth grade eager to catch the eye of some
upperclassman, but it was Jennifer they saw. They scooped her up only to drop her again, but at least they knew she was alive. The baby fat had melted off her round cheeks, and she wore tight miniskirts displaying her long, shapely legs. She developed a scary case of anorexia that year. If she chewed a stick of sugar-free gum, she would run around the block to burn calories. And I knew she was acting crazy, but I was so jealous of how much more successful her eating disorder was than mine.

It was also dawning on me, with horror, that I was short. To some girls, being short meant “petite” and “dainty.” To me, it meant being “squat” and “puny.” Height was authority. Height was glamour. I knew from magazines that supermodels were at least five nine but I flatlined at five two, while Jennifer rose to an attractive five seven, and I grew accustomed to tilting my head upward as I spoke. Jennifer once caught me climbing onto their kitchen countertop to reach a high shelf. “Aww, that’s cute,” she said.

“No, it’s not,” I snapped at her. What was so adorable about a person whose body had been cheated?

On Friday nights, in her bedroom, we didn’t discuss these frictions. We giggled and gossiped. Jennifer stole beer from her father’s stash of Schaefer Light for me. I would drink it while we talked, letting the alcohol work out the kinks in my system, the part of me that couldn’t stop staring at Jennifer’s thighs and hating her for them.

Jennifer didn’t like beer, but she had other vices. She liked to sneak out the back window of the house in the middle of the night and take out her parents’ Oldsmobile. We glided down the streets of her neighborhood in that gray boat, our hearts booming louder than the radio, and then coaxed it back into her driveway. I could not have cared less about driving a car. But I played accomplice to her minor crime, same as she did for me,
because we were good girlfriends like that. Always taking care of the other one’s needs.

I
WAS A
sophomore when the whispers began.
Did you know so-and-so drinks? Did you know so-and-so can buy?
Nobody needed to explain what the person was drinking and which substance they could buy. It was like the teenage version of the mafia. You just knew.

Ours was a conservative religious community. At pep rallies, a “prayer warrior” spoke before the big game. Youth ministers from the behemoth Presbyterian Church milled around the cafeteria at lunch. Popular girls wore silver cross necklaces and signed their notes “In His Grip.” But these kids were destined for the sanctioned debauch of fraternities and sororities, so high school was a slow seduction from one team to the other. I kept a running list in my head—who had gone to the devil’s side.

For a while, drinking was an underground society. I would show up to a fancy house on the old-money side of town, where the parents had gone on vacation (Aspen? Vail?), and I’d end up in some deep conversation with a stoner from my Racquet Sports class. When people asked later how we’d become friends, I had to remain vague.
Oh, you know, some thing.
Drinking forged unlikely connections. It dissolved the social hierarchies that had tyrannized us for so long. Like a play-at-home version of
The Breakfast Club
.

Jennifer had started to drink, too. Grape wine coolers and sugary concoctions. Girlie drinks. She had taken up with an older crowd, the ones who smoked on the corner across from the school. I hung out with the drama kids and slipped my best friend’s ring in a drawer; that was baby stuff now.

Theater was my new love. My energy shifted from academics to performance. I appeared in every play. I joined not one but two choirs. I had to keep my weight down for the stage, which meant at parties, I never allowed myself more than three Coors Lights, 102 calories each. My body obsession was not pretty, but at least it kept my drinking in check.

My new companion was Stephanie, a fellow drama geek. She and I took long aerobic walks after school. Afterward, we smoked Marlboro Lights at the Black-Eyed Pea while picking at our vegetable plates and talking about our future fabulous selves in New York. God, we had to get out of this town.

Stephanie was blond, poised, and gorgeous. She was also five nine. She actually glided down the hallway, her full lips in a pout, the indifferent stare of the runway on her face. I’d known Stephanie since sixth grade, when she was a sweet and bookish beanpole, but in our sophomore year, her body announced its exceptional status: boobs, graceful arms, legs to forever. Guys came up to me in class to ask if I knew her, as though she were already famous.

So much of high school is a competition for resources—attention from boys, praise from peers and teachers, roles in the school play—and it’s a dicey gamble to position yourself alongside one of the most breathtaking girls in the class. I’m not sure if this shows masochism on my part, or grandiosity, or both. I’ve never been devoured by envy like I was with Stephanie. To watch her enter a room in knee-high leather boots, her long, straight hair trailing behind her was to practically taste my peasant status. But I also saw her as my kind. I wrote my notes to her now. They were in the form of Top Ten lists, because we worshipped David Letterman and needed to hone our joke-writing skills. The path seemed obvious. Go to college, then join the cast of
Saturday Night Live
.

I never meant to leave Jennifer behind. There was never a ceremony in which Jennifer handed a baton to Stephanie for the next leg of the relay, but female friendships can be a swap like this. Only a certain number of runners on the track at once.

I threw a hotel party with my new theater companions and invited Jennifer. By the time I got to the La Quinta, she was already wasted. She began spewing compliments in a dangerously slushy state.
You’re so pretty. I miss you.
She stirred up all kinds of drama when she made out with a friend’s boyfriend. The next day I could barely look her in the face.