Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

you to imperil our amazing friendship?
Dave and I liked to get drunk together and make each other laugh. Our nights were a game of
comedic one-upmanship. How far can we push this moment? What never-before-seen trick can I
invent? I was using a lot of moves from Showgirls, a terrible film about a dancer who becomes a
stripper (or something). The movie was my favorite, because the dialogue was criminally heinous.
Oh, the cheap high of youthful superiority: so much more fun to kick over sand castles than to build
your own.
One night Dave and I were walking across the near-empty gardens of an Oktoberfest. I was drunk.
(Of course I was drunk. I was always, always drunk.) A 70-year-old man in lederhosen approached
us, bent like a candy cane, and I lifted up my shirt and flashed my bra. No warning, no prompting.
Just: So wrong.
Dave almost fell to the cement he was laughing so hard. I got so high capsizing him this way.
Because if I couldn’t be the girl he loved—that would be my roommate, Tara—then I needed to be the
girl who brought him to his knees.
Tara was a sweet roommate. She sang daffy little nonsense songs while she cooked eggs and
bacon for Dave and me on a hungover Sunday. She decorated the apartment with sunflowers and fleamarket
knickknacks. She opened the curtains, and Dave and I hissed like vampires, but Tara knew the
light would lift our moods. That’s how I thought of her—as sunshine that spilled onto darkness.
Nevertheless, one morning, she sat me down and gave me one of Those Talks. “You kept calling me a
bitch last night,” she said, and I thought: No way. You’re such a sweetheart.
There was only one explanation for my behavior. It was the bourbon’s fault.
Dave had turned us on to bourbon. Jim Beam. Maker’s Mark. Evan Williams. He walked around
our ragers with a tumbler, drinking his Manhattan. He was into that masculine romance: fast cars and
cowboy boots and the throb of a blues song so old you could still hear the crackle in the recording.
He referred to bourbon as a “real drink,” which pissed me off so much I had to join him.
I had never cared much for liquor. To be honest, I was afraid of it. I liked the butterfly kisses of a
light lager, which whisked me off into a carefully modulated oblivion, and bourbon was like being
bent over a couch 20 minutes into your date. But Tara started drinking bourbon, and so obviously I
had to follow.
My group made fun of girls who couldn’t hold their booze. Girls who threw up after two drinks.
Girls who needed to spike their cocktails with fruit and candy, turning their alcohol into birthday
cake. I prided myself on a hearty constitution. So I sauntered up to those amber bottles, and I learned
to swallow their violence. Do that enough, and you will reorient your whole pleasure system.
Butterfly kisses become boring. You crave blood. Hit me, motherfucker. Hit me harder this time.
We were on a road trip to Dallas for the Texas-OU football game when I went off the rails. I
never liked football. I hated the rah-rah gridiron nonsense that defined my alma mater and my home
state. But Tara and Dave didn’t share my grump. They had insignia clothes and koozies and all that
shit. One Friday afternoon, they loaded into a friend’s Ford Explorer, and I had little choice but to go
with them. The only fate worse than football was being left behind.
Dave was sitting in the passenger seat, controlling the flow of music and booze. He mixed Jim
Beam and Coke into plastic cups big enough to swim in.
“Don’t drink this too fast,” he told me, because Dave was like that. A protector. He’d been a
lifeguard in high school, and he still surveyed every party for anyone in danger of drowning.