Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

ISN’T THERE ANOTHER WAY?
I’ve never liked the part of the book where the main character gets sober. No more cheap sex with
strangers, no more clattering around bent alleyways with a cigarette scattering ashes into her
cleavage. A sober life. Even the words sound deflated. Like all the helium leaked out of your pretty
red balloon.
In the first few weeks, though, I didn’t actually know I had gotten sober. Have you ever broken up
with a guy, like, 15 times? And each time you slam the door and throw his shit on the lawn and tell
yourself, with the low voice of the newly converted: No more. But a few days pass, and you
remember how his fingertips traced the skin on your neck and how your legs twined around him. And
“forever” is a long time, isn’t it? So you hope he never calls, but you also wait for him to darken your
doorway at an hour when you can’t refuse him, and it’s hard to know which you would prefer. Maybe
you need to break up 16 times. Or maybe—just maybe—this is the end.
That was my mind-set at 14 days. I kept a mental list of the order my friends would forgive me if I
started drinking again. I called my mother when I got home from work every night. A way to tie
myself to the mast from six to midnight.
“How are you doing?” she asked in a voice I deemed too chipper.
“Fine,” I told her in a voice suggesting I was not. Our conversations were not awesome. I could
feel her sweeping floodlights over the ground, searching for the right thing to say.
“Are you writing?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Have you thought any more about going back to the meetings?” she asked.
“No,” I said. See, Mom didn’t get it. This moment didn’t get a silver lining.
I was sick of stupid AA meetings. For the past two years, I had been in and out of the rooms,
crashing one for a few months, then disappearing to drink for a while, then finding another place
where I could be a newcomer again. (Getting sober might be hell, but it did give me the world’s best
underground tour of New York churches.)
I would arrive five minutes late and leave five minutes early, so I could avoid the part where
everyone held hands. I thought death lasers were going to shoot out of my fingers if I heard one more
person tell me how great sobriety was. Sobriety sucked the biggest donkey dong in the world. One
day, a guy just lost it during his share: I hate this group, and I hate this trap you’ve put me in, and
you’re all in a cult, and I hate every minute I spend in here.
I liked that guy’s style.
WHAT WAS ODD about my aversion to AA was that it had worked for me once before. When I was 25,
I ran into a drinking buddy who had gotten sober. I couldn’t believe he’d quit. He and I used to shut
down the bars. “One more,” we used to say at the end of each pitcher, and we’d “one more”
ourselves straight to last call.