Whenever I woke up on a friend's couch, it was a sign that something had gone wrong. I'd stagger off into the night: I'll show you. I sometimes bristled when people tried to take care of me, as though they were telling me I threw like a girl. In addition to being a sot, I was stubborn to boot. I wanted you to stay the night at my place." "I'm so sorry," I said to Allison, hands still shielding my face, as though I could somehow hold in the embarrassment. They have driven me up and down the same few blocks while I tried to figure out which of the blurry row houses was my blurry row house. They have ferried me safely home when I couldn't see straight - I mean, when I literally held one hand over an eye to keep from spinning. Other people can give teary testimonials to the cops and the fire department, but as far as I'm concerned, cabbies are the superheroes of New York City. “I can’t even remember how I got home that night,” I told Allison. I'd get up, dust myself off, and grab another drink. But what was most remarkable about these extravagant nosedives was how painless and without consequence they often were. Vincent's hospital with a concussion and the world’s most excruciating hangover. Once, I tripped down the narrow metal staircase of a Turkish restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and wound up in St. I don’t know what’s crazier: That I drank as long as I did, or that I kept wearing heels. By my mid-30s, I had drunkenly tumbled down rickety outdoor wooden steps and glamorous winding staircases. Honestly, I'd never seen anything like it. I covered my face with my hands and peeked at Allison through the slats of my fingers. Anyone with a drinking history learns to hate those words. ![]() “Oh my God, do you remember that night?” she asked, and I braced myself. But I was starving, so I ate it.Īllison leaned in at the table. Once I woke up with a half-eaten corn dog in my hand and a smear of mustard across my face. My vibrator tossed on the living room couch. Orange juice on the counter, refrigerator door flapping open. Sometimes my blackouts were only a few minutes, a temporary outage, but a few lasted hours, and the first 10 seconds of a hungover Sunday morning were a checklist of panic: Did I remember how I got home? Was anyone lying beside me? Did I have any cuts or bruises? I woke to strange data sets. You keep going, even as your long-term memory shuts down. A person in a blackout is very much awake: Walking, talking, singing bad karaoke. A person who is passed out is unconscious. People often confuse blackout with passing out, but the experiences are quite different. If you’ve never had a blackout, then you might not understand the singular horror of waking up to discover that time is missing. I’d had blackouts since the first time I got drunk. CUT TO: Me, in my Williamsburg loft at 6 a.m., the white curtains billowing in the breeze. I'm talking to this girl on the back porch, I'm laughing with this girl on the back porch, and then … the screen goes blank. ![]() Trying to remember the end of that evening now is like watching a movie with a reel of film missing. How I charmed her chic 20-something colleagues from the online fashion magazine with my big ideas about female comedians and sex.īut of all the details I can summon, one I cannot is how I got home that night. How I planned to stop by for a quick drink, maybe three, before heading to another party across town. Three years later, I can still remember so much about it: How her cozy Park Slope apartment was strung up with Christmas lights. “Your 36th birthday party,” and I smacked the table like it was a buzzer. ![]() I pride myself on remembering more than anyone else. It had been so long that, as I scanned the menu and failed to listen to the waiter recite the evening’s specials, I couldn’t stop my mind from tunneling back through time in an effort to pinpoint when we last hung out. I met my friend Allison at a Mexican restaurant. The following is adapted and excerpted from "Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget," coming out June 23 (Grand Central).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |