Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

DRESSING IN MEN’S CLOTHES
I started wearing my dad’s clothes in the fall of my sophomore year. I had raided his closet over the
summer, plucking out a gray flannel shirt and a pair of Lee jeans, flecked with paint.
“Can I have this?” I asked.
And my father, confused. “What are you going to do with it?”
It must have been strange, to find his pint-size daughter rummaging through his battered old work
clothes. But in the fall of 1993, the accidental lumberjack look was a uniform. I liked the drape of that
flannel and how those jeans slid down my hips. I had to keep yanking them up, like a tiny girl in a
giant’s clothes.
I wore two of my dad’s undershirts as well, which were thin and nearly transparent from multiple
washings, so they had this luxurious softness. I liked that you could see straight through to my bra,
which makes no sense, given the insecurity about my body that had dogged me since adolescence. But
the shirt points to some essential conflict. A desire to flaunt and be masked at once. The undershirt
was like a side door to exhibitionism. I had to be careful not to look too deliberate. That was the
worst sin of all: trying too hard.
Sometimes I wore those undershirts inside out. I have no idea why I did this, except that it seemed
daring to show a disregard for propriety.
“Your shirt’s on inside out,” a guy told me at a party.
“Your life’s on inside out,” I snapped back.
And he smiled. “You’re right.”
I had a crush on that guy. Mateo. He had a poof of curly hair like John Turturro in Barton Fink,
and he was gruff and unsmiling like so many 19-year-olds. But if you nudged him right, he could be
adorable and silly. I have a picture of him sitting in my apartment wearing my silky Victoria’s Secret
bra over his T-shirt and another of him paging through an old Teen Beat magazine with mock
excitement.
My off-campus apartment was the party hub that year. The place was named the Casbah, so we
were almost contractually obligated to rock it. My drink was Keystone Light. You could buy two sixpacks
of tall boys for five bucks at the Fiesta Mart—the equivalent of 16 beers for the price of a
Wendy’s value meal, which turned Keystone into the unofficial sponsor of our ragers.
That’s what we called our parties: “ragers.” A word associated with anger and weather systems,
which is appropriate given the state of our living room the next day. Halogen lamp kicked over, beer
bottle floating in the fish tank. What the hell raged through here last night? Oh, yes. It was us. We
raged.
It was during one of these ragers at my apartment that Mateo and I had sex. At the time, we were in
a play together, and we would sit in the dressing room before and during the show, knees brushing
thighs. The flirtation had been building for weeks, but I needed some inciting incident. A match
thrown on our diesel fuel. We were outside on the walkway of my crumbling cinderblock complex. I
was chain-smoking, one cigarette lit on the tail end of another. And I said to him, with the confidence