Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

“I won’t. I promise,” I said, which was not true. I couldn’t help drinking fast, because that’s how I
drank. I was a natural-born guzzler. I was already on my second giant cup when we stopped at a gas
station 45 minutes outside Austin, and when I stood up, all the booze whooshed through my system. I
was like one of those poker players in a Western who gets up from the table and then keels over. The
last thing I remember is standing outside the bathroom unable to light a cigarette and some helpful
person pointing out that it was in my mouth backward.
The next four hours are gone. Flushed down the toilet. My parents were out of town that weekend,
thank God, since I woke up in their house in Dallas, snuggled up in my childhood bed, naked and
shivering, with a poster of James Dean pulled off the wall and covering me like a blanket. Something
had gone badly wrong.
Tara was the one who told me. She called the next day, and she had a frost in her voice. “People
are a little upset right now,” she said, and I twirled the phone cord tightly around my index finger,
watching the tip turn red, then white. It was no small feat, turning a group of binge-drinking tailgaters
against you.
The story I could not remember would be told many times. We had just reached the city limits of
Dallas when I decided to moon people. The mooning scene is a staple of ’80s sex comedies—the
Animal House genre of films about prep school boys busting out of their conformist youth. And I’d
like to think I was paying tribute to those classic films. Except I botched a few key details. One is that
I was surrounded not by like-minded brothers but irritated college friends who were not nearly so
cross-eyed with drink. Another is that the mooning scene in those films took place while the boys
were hurtling along a highway at night, and mine took place in five o’clock traffic. Yes, I mooned
cars in a bumper-to-bumper snarl down the interstate, which is a little bit like mooning someone and
then being stuck in a grocery line with them for the next ten minutes. Hey, how’s it going? Yeah, sorry
our friend is mooning you right now, she’s really drunk. Excited about the game?
But the third and most critical difference is that I was a girl. And for a girl, there is good nudity
(boob shaking, leg spreading) and then there is bad nudity (sitting on a toilet, plucking hairs from your
nipple). Pressing your wide white ass up to the window of a vehicle in broad daylight is definitely in
the column of bad nudity.
The next week was a humiliation buffet. There are times when you want to die. And then there are
times when one death is simply not enough. You need to borrow other people’s lives and end them,
too. All death, everywhere, seems like the only way to extinguish your agony, and while this story
would become funny in time, I can assure you that in the moment, I believed I only had two options.
Destroy everyone in the car. Or never drink bourbon again.
I quit brown liquor that day. Never again, I told myself. Not every catastrophe can be solved so
easily, but this one only took a simple snip, and I was allowed to stay on the party train for many
more years. Everyone forgave me, which is the grace of college. We all had dirty pictures on each
other.
But still, I wondered: Why was I like this? College is a time to discover yourself—and alcohol is
the Great Revealer—but I was more corkscrewed than ever. What did it mean that I hid when I was
sober, and I stripped off all my clothes when I was blind drunk? What did it mean that I adored my
roommate, but I lashed out at her after seven drinks? What did it mean that I didn’t love Dave (or
maybe I did), but I would slay dragons to win his approval? I needed to expose the deeper meaning
here. I needed to workshop this fucker.