Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget (9 page)

I
wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl. Actually, I wanted to be a writer-actress-director (and, for a brief and confusing time, a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader-writer-actress-director). But I made up my own worlds; I didn’t report on real ones. I never even considered journalism until my roommate Tara became the head of our college daily and invited me to contribute. I walked down into a dingy basement where pale chain-smokers argued about school vouchers. A sign hung at the entrance.
Welcome to the
Daily Texan
—where GPAs go to die.

I found a home in the entertainment section, which allowed me to cover any theater production in town, while boys in ratty concert T-shirts grappled for the latest Pavement album. It hadn’t occurred to me I could write a story
today
, and it could show up on your kitchen table
tomorrow
. What a rush. There are wonderful reasons to become a journalist. To champion the underdog. To be professionally curious. Me? I just wanted to get free stuff and see my name in print.

And I was charmed by the companionship of the newsroom.
Writing had always been a solitary pursuit, but winding my way alongside those cubicles full of keyboard clatter felt like being backstage before a show. I had stopped acting, in part because I’d grown uncomfortable with people looking at me. Journalism offered a new kind of exposure, like performing on a stage with the curtains closed.

At 23, I landed a gig at a beloved alt weekly called the
Austin Chronicle
, and I couldn’t have been more ecstatic. A real-live salary. Something called “health benefits.” I felt like I was standing on the first step of a staircase that stretched all the way to—why not?—the
New York Times
. Then again, the
Chronicle
was the kind of place a person wouldn’t mind staying forever. Staffers wore flip-flops and arrived after 10 am. A group got stoned by the big tree each afternoon, and production halted at 5 for a volleyball game. Each morning, a woman appeared in the lobby to sell breakfast tacos for a dollar, one of a million reasons Austin was amazing: random people showing up out of nowhere to hand out hangover food.

My desk was in front of a brick wall that I decorated with a giant poster from the musical
Rent
. I’d bought the poster on my first trip to New York City, where I visited my brother, who was in grad school there. He’d taken me to a Broadway show, and I sat in those squeaky seats watching a vision of bohemia I hoped might one day be mine: documentarians with spiky gelled hair, drug addict musicians, lipstick lesbians in black catsuits.

A week after I started at the paper, a scruffy guy from production stopped in front of the poster, pointed to it, and shook his head. “Seriously?” he said, and moved on.

I didn’t know
Rent
had become a punch line of ’90s sincerity and manufactured edge. I didn’t realize AIDS victims singing in five-part harmony about seasons of love could make some of my
colleagues want to punch an old lady in the neck. But that day I learned my first lesson in pop-culture tyranny: Subjective tastes can be wrong.

That Saturday, when no one was around, I took down
Rent
and replaced it with
Blade Runner
, a film beloved by sci-fi nerds and cinephiles, although I wasn’t certain why. I’d only seen it once, and fallen asleep.

The production guy passed my desk again on Monday. “Now we’re talking,” he said, giving me the thumbs-up, and moved on.

I’d always considered myself fluent in pop culture, but the
Chronicle
was a crash course in acceptable indie tastes. I kept a mental list of artists I needed to become familiar with, much like the vocab words I used to memorize in middle school to casually drop into conversation. Jim Jarmusch, François Truffaut, Albert Maysles. The Velvet Underground, Jeff Buckley, Sonic Youth. The spirit of an alt weekly, after all, was to be an alternative. Our mandate dictated that the most important stories lived outside the mainstream. And also: Top 40 sucked.

Every Thursday afternoon, the staff gathered in a cramped meeting room that looked more like a bomb shelter and lined up stories for the week. Debates were always breaking out, because those people could argue about anything: the most overrated grunge band, the notion of objective journalism, black beans or refried. I sat with my hands in my lap and hoped to God the conversation wouldn’t drift my way. But when the meeting ended, and nobody had called on me, I’d feel weirdly crestfallen. All that anxious buildup for nothing.

I’ve always been mixed up about attention, enjoying its warmth but not its scrutiny. I swear I’ve spent half my life hiding behind a couch and the other half wondering why no one was paying attention to me.

On the weekends, coworkers and I started going to karaoke, which was the perfect end run around my self-doubt. I would sit in the audience, drinking beer after beer, filling myself up with enough “fuck it” to take the microphone. Karaoke was a direct line to the parts of our brains unburdened by aesthetics, the child who once found joy in a Journey song. No singer was bad, no taste was wrong—which was pretty much the inverse philosophy of the paper, but my coworkers still loved it. I guess even people who judge others for a living can secretly long for a world with no judgment.

At our holiday karaoke party, I blew out my vocal cords with an over-the-top version of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” I was in that sparkling state of inebriation where the chain comes off your inhibitions and your voice grows so bold.

The following Monday, our cranky editor-in-chief kicked off the staff meeting. “I have one thing to say about the holiday party.” He turned toward me, and his eyes lit up.
“Sarah Fucking Hepola.”

You could’ve seen my glow from space. Before that, I wasn’t even sure he knew my last name.

G
ROWING UP
, I saw journalism as a serious profession. I never anticipated how much damn fun it would be. Music festivals, interviews with celebrities, parties where Quentin Tarantino showed up. Dot-com money was pouring into our flophouse hamlet, and the city’s growth made the paper fat with advertising. We got bonus checks and open-bar celebrations. Coming to the
Chronicle
a year after college was like leaving a five-year house party only to plunk down on the ripped couches of never-never land.

Swag. That was the name for the promotional items that
arrived with alarming abundance. T-shirts, tote bags, novelty toys. For a year, a beach ball with the words “There’s Something About Mary” roamed through the hallway like a tumbleweed.

We got free movies and free CDs and free books. Complimentary bottles of Tito’s Vodka lived in the kitchen. Shiner Bock popped up in the fridge (we paid for that). Each Wednesday night, we put the paper to bed—and those were the words we used, like the paper was our toddler—and I stayed late on the picnic table out back drinking with the proofreaders and the guys from production. We played games of “Who Would You Rather?” sorting the entire staff into people we would like to bang, careful to never mention each other.

I didn’t write much at first. I ran the listings section and contributed third-string theater reviews with unnecessary adjectives. The young, hotshot music critic wrote with such wild metaphors, paragraphs like jazz riffs. I asked him once how he got so good, and he told me, “I did acid.” But he also had what every writer needs: his own voice.

I did not. My writing was a kind of literary karaoke. I aped the formulas and phrasings of older critics whose work I admired. I sometimes borrowed friends’ opinions for theater reviews, because I was certain theirs were more accurate than my own. I’d sit each week in the meeting, listening to the lineup of cover stories, wanting that spotlight so badly. But what did I have to say?

In college, I never read newspapers, which made it a tiny bit awkward to be working for one. What did people want from their news? The
Chronicle
offered two primary channels, criticism and reporting. But I had neither the deep knowledge nor the training for either. My colleagues slung their authority around the room, while I became afraid to botch any answer. Black or refried: Which
are
the superior beans?

As for my artistic tastes, I wasn’t sure about them, either. We had entered the Age of Irony. Low culture was high culture, and the difference between loving something and hating it was razor thin. People like me disguised our true feelings in layers of detachment, endless pop-culture references, sarcasm. Because no one can break your heart if they don’t know it.

I pulled down the
Blade Runner
poster and put up a picture of the Backstreet Boys, and I forced everyone on staff to vote on their favorite member.

“I don’t fucking know,” the cranky editor-in-chief said when I stopped him in the hallway. “The blond one, with the nice smile.”

About nine months after coming to the paper, I got my first big assignment. I went undercover to high school prom. The mass shooting at Columbine had taken place a few months prior, leading to a glut of paranoid articles about “teens today,” and my story was the kind of goofy, first-person escapade almost guaranteed to wind up on the cover.

There was one problem. I was so freaked out by the pressure I couldn’t write a word. I spent hours staring at a blinking cursor, typing words only to erase them again. The night before the piece was due, desperate for any fix, I opened a bottle of wine.
Fuck it. Maybe this will help.

Before then, I never drank while I was writing. I might have downed a few beers while I waited on page edits. But writing and drinking were two fundamentally opposing activities—like eating and swimming. Writing required hush and sharpness of vision. Drinking was roar and blur.

The wine turned down the volume on my own self-doubt, which is what a blocked writer is battling: the bullying voices in her head telling her each thought is unoriginal, each word too
ordinary. Drug users talk about accessing a higher consciousness, a doorway to another dimension—but I just needed a giant fishhook to drag my inner critic out of the room.

That night, I drank myself into the writing zone. Words tumbled from my fingers like they’d been waiting to get shaken loose. I couldn’t believe how well it worked. After the story came out, staff members stopped me in the hall to quote their favorite lines.

So, of course, this became a common practice. A couple glasses to prime the pump. Sometimes, in the privacy of my funky little garage apartment, I would drink myself blind. I purposefully did this—drank myself to the place where I was clattering all over the keyboard with my eyes drooped to half-moons, free as Ray Charles over his piano, and you’d think this would result in reams of nonsense, and sometimes it did. Other times, I’d find myself reading over the words later and thinking:
Wow, this is pretty good. I didn’t even know I thought that.
Those pages were full of typos and run-ons, but they had the hypnotic clickety-clak of a train barreling across the high plains. They had the last-call honesty of someone pulling the listener close.
We only have a few more minutes. Let me tell you everything.

People sometimes ask me how someone can drink so much and still keep her job. But drinkers find the right job.

After drawing my name for Secret Santa, the editor-in-chief gave me a hat with beer holders on either side. “So you can drink more at work,” he said.

O
N MY TWENTY-FIFTH
birthday, I drove out to visit Anna. She had moved to San Francisco, where she wrote me long letters from a café near Golden Gate Park, and her voice had the lightness of a girl in constant hop-skip.

But I don’t think I’ve ever felt as bitter and depressed about a birthday as I did at 25. This may sound strange, given how young that is, and given how great my job was, but 25-year-olds are experts at identifying what the world has not given them, and that birthday was like a monument to everything I hadn’t achieved. No boyfriend. No book deal. Only the flimsiest kind of fame. “I saw your name in the paper,” people said to me. Why did they think this was a compliment?
I saw your name.
Oh, thanks. Did you bother to read the next 2,000 words?