Read Online Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola - Free Book Online
Authors: Sarah Hepola
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nights we drove around in his 1972 Chevy Nova. The lies allowed me to continue doing what I wanted, but they also shielded my folks from guilt and fear. Kids lie to their parents for the same reason their parents lie to them. We’re all trying to protect each other.
My dad wasn’t quite convinced. “Look me in the eye, and tell me that’s not your beer.”
I leveled my gaze with his. “That’s not my beer,” I said, without a tic of doubt in my voice. And I thought:
Holy shit. Is it really going to be this easy?
It was. I wasn’t displaying any of the classic distress signals. I was on the honor roll. I had a boyfriend everyone liked. I beat out Stephanie for the lead in the senior play. On Sundays, I ran the nursery at my parents’ progressive, gay-friendly church, and I even landed my first job, at a center for Children of Alcoholics, because I was the sort of kid who helped other kids—whether they were toddlers I’d never see again or baseball stars vomiting in the bushes and crying about the mother who never loved them.
By senior year, a bunch of us would gather on Friday nights in a parking lot behind an apartment complex. Not just drama kids, but drill team dancers, band nerds, jocks, Bible bangers. We’d all gone to the devil’s side now.
And the more I drank with them, the more I realized mymother was right. We really were all the same. We’d all struggled, we’d all hurt. And nothing made me feel connected to the kids I once hated like sharing a beer or three. Alcohol is a loneliness drug. It has many powers, but to a teenager like me, none was more enticing. No one had to be an outsider anymore. Everyone liked everyone else when we were drinking, as though some fresh powder of belonging had been crop-dusted over the Commons.
I WENT TO college in Austin. All that big talk of getting the hell out of town, and I only made it 180 miles south on the highway.
For years, people assured me I was a “college girl,” which is what adults tell smart girls who fail to be popular. I assumed the transition would be a cinch. But I lived in a sprawling dorm that was more like a prison. I stood at social events in my halter top and dangly earrings, looking like the preppies my fashionably rumpled classmates abhorred. “You’re so
Dallas
,” one guy told me, which I understood to be an insult. (My first lesson in college: Hate the place you came from.) Other kids wore torn jeans and baby-doll dresses and clunky Doc Martens. I’d spent four years in a back bend trying to fit in at an upscale high school. Now I was going to have to contort myself all over again.
The first month was a terrible solitude. I took walks around the track behind the dorm, trying to lose those last stubborn pounds. I woke up early to apply makeup before my 8 am German class. Every once in a while, I ran into my high school boyfriend, Miles, on campus. We’d broken up over the summer, but we’d both come to the same state university, which was a bit like attempting a dramatic exit from a room only to discover the door was locked. Some nights, I lay in my prison bed and listened to U2’s “One” on my CD Discman—the same anguishedsong, over and over, because I liked to curl up inside my own suffering and stay for a while.
Luckily, I found Anna. She was my peer advisor, which meant it was in her actual job description to help me out of my misery. She was a year older, with tastes I recognized as sophisticated. She drank her coffee black. She read Sylvia Plath, required reading for college girls dabbling in darkness, and Anne Sexton, whose very name told me something crazy was going on there. I’d only worshipped male artists—not on purpose so much as default—but Anna was drawn to the women. The secret diary writers, the singer-songwriters who strummed out their heartbreak, the girls splintered by madness. She had an Edward Hopper painting called
The Automat
over her desk. Nothing was happening in the picture, but it
My dad wasn’t quite convinced. “Look me in the eye, and tell me that’s not your beer.”
I leveled my gaze with his. “That’s not my beer,” I said, without a tic of doubt in my voice. And I thought:
Holy shit. Is it really going to be this easy?
It was. I wasn’t displaying any of the classic distress signals. I was on the honor roll. I had a boyfriend everyone liked. I beat out Stephanie for the lead in the senior play. On Sundays, I ran the nursery at my parents’ progressive, gay-friendly church, and I even landed my first job, at a center for Children of Alcoholics, because I was the sort of kid who helped other kids—whether they were toddlers I’d never see again or baseball stars vomiting in the bushes and crying about the mother who never loved them.
By senior year, a bunch of us would gather on Friday nights in a parking lot behind an apartment complex. Not just drama kids, but drill team dancers, band nerds, jocks, Bible bangers. We’d all gone to the devil’s side now.
And the more I drank with them, the more I realized mymother was right. We really were all the same. We’d all struggled, we’d all hurt. And nothing made me feel connected to the kids I once hated like sharing a beer or three. Alcohol is a loneliness drug. It has many powers, but to a teenager like me, none was more enticing. No one had to be an outsider anymore. Everyone liked everyone else when we were drinking, as though some fresh powder of belonging had been crop-dusted over the Commons.
I WENT TO college in Austin. All that big talk of getting the hell out of town, and I only made it 180 miles south on the highway.
For years, people assured me I was a “college girl,” which is what adults tell smart girls who fail to be popular. I assumed the transition would be a cinch. But I lived in a sprawling dorm that was more like a prison. I stood at social events in my halter top and dangly earrings, looking like the preppies my fashionably rumpled classmates abhorred. “You’re so
Dallas
,” one guy told me, which I understood to be an insult. (My first lesson in college: Hate the place you came from.) Other kids wore torn jeans and baby-doll dresses and clunky Doc Martens. I’d spent four years in a back bend trying to fit in at an upscale high school. Now I was going to have to contort myself all over again.
The first month was a terrible solitude. I took walks around the track behind the dorm, trying to lose those last stubborn pounds. I woke up early to apply makeup before my 8 am German class. Every once in a while, I ran into my high school boyfriend, Miles, on campus. We’d broken up over the summer, but we’d both come to the same state university, which was a bit like attempting a dramatic exit from a room only to discover the door was locked. Some nights, I lay in my prison bed and listened to U2’s “One” on my CD Discman—the same anguishedsong, over and over, because I liked to curl up inside my own suffering and stay for a while.
Luckily, I found Anna. She was my peer advisor, which meant it was in her actual job description to help me out of my misery. She was a year older, with tastes I recognized as sophisticated. She drank her coffee black. She read Sylvia Plath, required reading for college girls dabbling in darkness, and Anne Sexton, whose very name told me something crazy was going on there. I’d only worshipped male artists—not on purpose so much as default—but Anna was drawn to the women. The secret diary writers, the singer-songwriters who strummed out their heartbreak, the girls splintered by madness. She had an Edward Hopper painting called
The Automat
over her desk. Nothing was happening in the picture, but it
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