Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

I FINALLY GOT a boyfriend near the end of college. And the weirdest part was: He didn’t drink. This
was unbelievable to me. He used to drink, but he no longer drank. By choice. We met at a party,
where he was dressed like he’d stepped out of a 1960s gin ad. He pulled out a gold Zippo and ignited
it with a magnificent scratch, lighting two Camels at once before handing me one. Like he was Frank
Sinatra.
Two weeks later, we took a road trip and slept in a tent under the stars somewhere in northern
New Mexico. I hadn’t done such a thing since I was a girl. It had never occurred to me camping was
something you’d do on purpose. As I marveled at the red-rock canyons of the Southwest, I thought:
Where did this beauty come from? Has it been here all along?
Patrick was a professional cook. He would come home from work after midnight, his clothes
smelling of wood-burning ovens, his fingertips marked by burns in the shape of purple crescent
moons. His friends were cooks and fellow hedonists, who drank fine wine and had serious thoughts
on plating, and for a while, I wondered what he saw in me. But unlocking the world for someone else
can bring such pleasure. He gave me Tom Waits, Pacific oysters, and a knowledge of the shiver that
might run through me when a man traced one index finger across the tender spots of my back.
We hung out in pool halls. I liked billiards—such a dude’s sport, such a hustler’s game—but
before I met Patrick, I had no idea how to play, and so I simply imitated power. My shots were all
random thrust, because I enjoyed the clink of the balls scattering around the table like buckshot. But
Patrick showed me finesse. He knew how to move.
“Slow down,” he teased me, positioning himself behind me, and he taught me how to sink my body
in order to level my gaze, how to drag the cue stick across the cradle of my fingers, slow and gentle,
like I was drawing back a bow. He taught me how to torque a ball with English, wrap the cue behind
my back if I needed to, and tap the ball with just the right amount of force so that it slid across the
green felt and dropped into the trickiest corner pocket with a quiet thump. “Only use force when you
need it,” he would say, cigarette dangling from his lips, and then he’d hammer a shot right into the
corner. Bam. Sunk.
I was not wearing my father’s jeans anymore. I was wearing tight pencil skirts and black dresses
that hugged my curves. I dyed my hair auburn. Patrick was with me when I took my first legal drink.
He brought me to a cigar bar called Speakeasy, a trendy Prohibition throwback that had recently
opened in the burned-out warehouse district. I ordered a vodka martini. “You’ll like it dirty,” Patrick
told me, and once again, he was right.
But booze became an argument between us. The more I drank, the more I wanted him, and the less
he wanted me.
“You’re lit again,” he would say, pushing me away as I barreled toward him, having finally drunk
myself into a place of unbridled wanting. Maybe it sounds odd that a recovering alcoholic would take
up with a problem drinker, but we were familiar to each other. We beckoned from forbidden sides. In
me he saw his past decadence. In him I saw my future hope. And it worked. For a while.
Six months after we started dating, Patrick turned to me one night and told me he didn’t love me
anymore. The best way to explain how I took this news is to tell you I didn’t date anyone for seven
years.
But I beat a lot of men at pool. I watched out of the corner of my eye as their nostrils flared, and
they stamped their cue on the ground, and their eyes tracked me around that table. Were they gonna get