Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

DRINK MORE AT WORK
I wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl. Actually, I wanted to be a writer-actress-director
(and, for a brief and confusing time, a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader-writer-actress-director). But I
made up my own worlds; I didn’t report on real ones. I never even considered journalism until my
roommate Tara became the head of our college daily and invited me to contribute. I walked down into
a dingy basement where pale chain-smokers argued about school vouchers. A sign hung at the
entrance. Welcome to the Daily Texan —where GPAs go to die.
I found a home in the entertainment section, which allowed me to cover any theater production in
town, while boys in ratty concert T-shirts grappled for the latest Pavement album. It hadn’t occurred
to me I could write a story today, and it could show up on your kitchen table tomorrow. What a rush.
There are wonderful reasons to become a journalist. To champion the underdog. To be professionally
curious. Me? I just wanted to get free stuff and see my name in print.
And I was charmed by the companionship of the newsroom. Writing had always been a solitary
pursuit, but winding my way alongside those cubicles full of keyboard clatter felt like being backstage
before a show. I had stopped acting, in part because I’d grown uncomfortable with people looking at
me. Journalism offered a new kind of exposure, like performing on a stage with the curtains closed.
At 23, I landed a gig at a beloved alt weekly called the Austin Chronicle, and I couldn’t have been
more ecstatic. A real-live salary. Something called “health benefits.” I felt like I was standing on the
first step of a staircase that stretched all the way to—why not?—the New York Times. Then again, the
Chronicle was the kind of place a person wouldn’t mind staying forever. Staffers wore flip-flops and
arrived after 10 am. A group got stoned by the big tree each afternoon, and production halted at 5 for
a volleyball game. Each morning, a woman appeared in the lobby to sell breakfast tacos for a dollar,
one of a million reasons Austin was amazing: random people showing up out of nowhere to hand out
hangover food.
My desk was in front of a brick wall that I decorated with a giant poster from the musical Rent. I’d
bought the poster on my first trip to New York City, where I visited my brother, who was in grad
school there. He’d taken me to a Broadway show, and I sat in those squeaky seats watching a vision
of bohemia I hoped might one day be mine: documentarians with spiky gelled hair, drug addict
musicians, lipstick lesbians in black catsuits.
A week after I started at the paper, a scruffy guy from production stopped in front of the poster,
pointed to it, and shook his head. “Seriously?” he said, and moved on.
I didn’t know Rent had become a punch line of ’90s sincerity and manufactured edge. I didn’t
realize AIDS victims singing in five-part harmony about seasons of love could make some of my
colleagues want to punch an old lady in the neck. But that day I learned my first lesson in pop-culture
tyranny: Subjective tastes can be wrong.
That Saturday, when no one was around, I took down Rent and replaced it with Blade Runner, a
film beloved by sci-fi nerds and cinephiles, although I wasn’t certain why. I’d only seen it once, and
fallen asleep.