Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

had never read this book. But I understood Thompson’s work to be a locus of debauchery and
creative nonfiction, the intersection where I planned to build my bungalow.
I slummed around the nickel arcades on the low-rent side of the Strip that night, and I won $200 at
a machine that was clearly broken, so all you had to do was mash the same button over and over
again, winning every time. A brunette in a French maid skirt brought me a check, but there were no
flashing lights on the arcade. No coins clinking into my bucket. It’s weird how you can hit the jackpot
—and still feel a little robbed.
The sky was dark when I got to Anna’s place, and she was standing on the corner when I pulled
up, doing her jokey little happy dance in the beams of my headlights, biting her lower lip and
swaying.
“What does a girl have to do to get a drink around here?” I asked, and we smiled like two people
who have crossed great distances to find each other. But when she pulled my bags out of the car,
something sank in her and never reappeared. Was she mad about how late it had gotten? Was she
disappointed to see I’d gained so much weight? Best friends have a spooky voodoo. We’re like cats
on airplanes, who can feel each dip in cabin pressure, and at that moment, Anna and I took a
nosedive.
The way Anna tells it, she came to my car and saw a bunch of empty beer cans clattering around in
the backseat. It was her epiphany moment. I’d been alone on that trip. I’d been immersed in solo
adventure and the majesty of the outdoors, and yet I could not let go of my cheap silver crutches from
7-Eleven. The funny truth is that I drank less on that trip than I usually did. Even now there’s a defiant
part of me that wants to correct her observation. Like I was being punished not for my indulgence but
for a commitment to recycling.
Anna knew other stories, though. Troubling episodes that had accumulated. On my visit to New
York, I got so drunk I fell down a flight of stairs and ended up in the hospital with a concussion. One
night in Austin, I went out to karaoke with friends, and I was so loaded I jumped onstage and wrestled
the microphone from some poor guy in the middle of “Little Red Corvette.” When I went to get a
drink afterward, the bartender said, “I’m sorry, you’ve been cut off.” Cut off? Why? For nailing that
fucking Prince song?
There were stories about questionable men, and trips to Planned Parenthood the next morning, and
a stubborn refusal to use condoms followed by a terrible guilt. And once I told Anna these secrets, I
felt purged and hopeful. But I’d laid a heavy heap of jagged worry in her arms.
After I got back to Texas, Anna sent me another letter. Her voice did not have the hop-skip this
time. I read it with a thunderstorm rolling in my belly, the words of rejection leaping out as if a
yellow highlighter had been dragged across them: “worried about you.” “can no longer watch.”
“please understand.” She did not demand that I quit drinking, but she told me she couldn’t be the safe
place for my confessions anymore. It was a love letter, the hardest kind to write, but I did not see it
that way. It felt like a bedroom door slammed in my face.
A YEAR LATER, I quit drinking. Not forever, but for 18 months, which felt like forever. And in that
stretch of sobriety, much of my happiness came back to me. Weight dropped off my hips. My checking
account grew heavy with unused beer money. I took off the hair shirt of my own entitlement and began
reaching for the life I wanted. One day, I walked into the editor-in-chief’s office, closed the door