Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

drank myself to the place where I was clattering all over the keyboard with my eyes drooped to halfmoons,
free as Ray Charles over his piano, and you’d think this would result in reams of nonsense,
and sometimes it did. Other times, I’d find myself reading over the words later and thinking: Wow,
this is pretty good. I didn’t even know I thought that. Those pages were full of typos and run-ons,
but they had the hypnotic clickety-clak of a train barreling across the high plains. They had the lastcall
honesty of someone pulling the listener close. We only have a few more minutes. Let me tell you
everything.
People sometimes ask me how someone can drink so much and still keep her job. But drinkers find
the right job.
After drawing my name for Secret Santa, the editor-in-chief gave me a hat with beer holders on
either side. “So you can drink more at work,” he said.
ON MY TWENTY-FIFTH birthday, I drove out to visit Anna. She had moved to San Francisco, where she
wrote me long letters from a café near Golden Gate Park, and her voice had the lightness of a girl in
constant hop-skip.
But I don’t think I’ve ever felt as bitter and depressed about a birthday as I did at 25. This may
sound strange, given how young that is, and given how great my job was, but 25-year-olds are experts
at identifying what the world has not given them, and that birthday was like a monument to everything
I hadn’t achieved. No boyfriend. No book deal. Only the flimsiest kind of fame. “I saw your name in
the paper,” people said to me. Why did they think this was a compliment? I saw your name. Oh,
thanks. Did you bother to read the next 2,000 words?
My friends had escaped to grown-up jobs in coastal cities, and I chided myself for lacking the
gumption to follow. Anna was out in California seeking social justice through a series of impressive
nonprofit law gigs. My old roommate Tara was a reporter in Washington, DC. My friend Lisa, hired
at the Chronicle alongside me, had ventured to Manhattan and gotten a gig at the New York Times.
“You should move out here,” she would tell me, on our phone dates, and I told her I couldn’t
afford it. The more accurate reason: I was scared.
My high school drama friend Stephanie wasn’t. She had been living in New York for a few years
and already become one of those rare creatures, a successful actress. She landed a role as an attorney
in an NBC crime drama also starring ’80s rapper Ice-T. SVU, it was called, though I liked to call it
“SUV.” She had made it in the big city, just like we said we would, and I watched her ascend in a
gilded hot air balloon, as I stood on the ground and counted the ways life had failed me.
I was particularly burned up on the boyfriend issue. I thought having a byline in the Austin
Chronicle would bring cute, artistic men to my doorstep, but it really only brought publicists. Years
of Shiner Bock and cheese enchiladas had plumped me by at least 40 pounds, which I masked in
loose V-necks and rayon skirts scraping the ground, but I also spied a double standard at play. Male
staffers dressed like slobs, but they still found pretty girls to wipe their mouths and coo over their
bands. Meanwhile, I was nothing but a cool sisterly type to them. Where were my flirty emails? My
zippy office come-ons? How come nobody wanted to fuck me for my talent?
So I needed that road trip to California. Five days by myself through West Texas, New Mexico,
across the orange Creamsicle of the Nevada desert at sunset. In Las Vegas, I booked my room at the
demented-circus hotel Hunter S. Thompson wrote about in Fear and Loathing. It pains me to admit I