Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

passed. “Have you met my new boyfriend?” I asked, one hand in his and another around a cup of
wine. “He’s cuuuuuute.”
I made it to the stage soon after, and people asked their questions. But the only part I remember is
telling a very disjointed story about Winnie-the-Pooh.
When I woke the next morning, I felt shattered. I’d spent the past two years on a path of evolution
—but here I was, crawling back under the same old rock. Lindsay and I walked to a coffee shop,
where a guy on the patio recognized me. “Hey, you’re the drunk girl from last night,” he said, and my
stomach dipped. “You were hilarious!”
I’ve heard stories of pilots who fly planes in a blackout, or people operating complicated
machinery. And somehow, in this empty state, I had stood on a stage, opened my subconscious, and
hilarity fell out.
I turned to my new boyfriend, to gauge his response. He was beaming. “You’re famous now,” he
said, and squeezed my hand.
I moved to Dallas to live with Lindsay and became the music critic at the Dallas Observer.
Another stint on the good-times van. Club owners floated my tab, label owners bought me drinks. I
was barely qualified for the job, and I faked my way through half my conversations, but the alcohol
cushioned my mistakes. So did my boyfriend. Lindsay was a closet artist, who spent his evenings
fiddling with song mixes and his days building databases. My new gig was an all-access pass to a
world he’d only seen from a middle row. “I feel like the president’s wife,” he told me one night, after
we spent the evening drinking with musicians. It didn’t even occur to me that might be a bad thing.
My stories were gaining traction. I began writing in a persona that was like me, only drunker,
more of a comedic mess. I made jokes about never listening to albums sent by aspiring bands, which
was neither that funny nor that much of a joke. But people told me I was a riot. Maybe they liked
being reminded we were all screwed up, that behind every smile lurked a disaster story. I began
contributing to a scrappy online literary magazine called The Morning News. And in this tuckedaway
corner of the Internet, where I could pretend no one was watching, I began to write stories that
sounded an awful lot like the real me.
People were watching, though. An editor at the New York Times sent me an email out of nowhere.
She wondered if I’d like to contribute a piece sometime. They were looking for writers with voice.
LINDSAY AND I made a good pair. He cooked elaborate dinners—lamb souvlaki, Thai lemongrass
soup—as I dangled my feet from the kitchen counter, sipping wine from balloon glasses that were like
fishbowls on a stick. He liked taking care of me, although we both liked not taking care of ourselves.
Our lives felt like a Wilco song: The ashtray says you were up all night. Our lives felt like an Old
97’s song: Will you sober up and let me down? Those were the songs we listened to while chainsmoking
out a window, songs assuring us if you’re hurting and hungover, then you’re doing it right.
On Saturdays, we would heal ourselves with a greasy Mexican breakfast. Eggs, cheese, chorizo.
Sometimes we wondered aloud if ours was the right path. Weren’t we supposed to be building
something of meaning? We were 29 years old, the same age my mother was when she had me.
Lindsay talked about his father, who had moved all the way from Australia and started his own
business. What had we done?
But then we’d go to the bar and just repeat what we’d done the night before. The bartender poured