On Blacking Out
Note: I wrote this essay about a year after getting sober, and despite getting some editorial help from college workshop pals, ultimately never continued to flesh it out or submit it anywhere. I present it here, now, lightly edited and with an additional 6 years (and change) of sobriety under my belt. I hope you enjoy it, in all it’s messiness.
“People say they drink to unwind. I unravel.” – Joe List
One night at work, I sit in the back of the Belly Room, the Comedy Store's smallest, most claustrophobic show room. The overbearing comic running the show doesn't have a producer acting as a buffer, so I bear the full brunt of his micromanaging. I’m irritable, hungry, and feel like I'm losing my grip. I had my last drink just shy of four months ago.
A foot away from the sound board I’m slouched next to, a couple pays their tab and leaves. A full margarita sits on the table. I love margaritas. They remind me of Tex-Mex meals paid for by my parents, where I'd routinely save about half my plate of chicken fajitas as the next day's breakfast but drink two strong margaritas on the rocks, along with whatever leftover tequila my parents couldn't finish. Drinking always made it easier to be around my family. It made it easier to be around everyone.
At the first college party I ever went to, it was decided that I’d be drinking my first beer. A fratboy handed me a can of Busch Ice, and instructed me to chug. Despite deflecting earlier offers of beer with some stupid line about how I wasn’t much of a drinker, I was afraid that if I didn’t take him up on the offer, I’d become a social pariah. The role of “sober guy at the party” that I was used to playing in high school, around my friends, didn’t seem to exist in this new environment. I didn’t want these strangers to think I was lame. So, hiding my reservations, I chugged, crushed my can, and was handed another one, accompanied by an impressed nod.
Five beers later, I was dancing with some random girl on the dance floor, the furthest thing from my mind. I felt like I was cool. I felt like I'd arrived. I remember understanding what all the fuss was about. I remember thinking I was going to impress people. I don't remember much after that.
I highly doubt I would have turned to problematic drinking the way I did if I wasn't a kid who sought easy friendship, the kind of safe haven that drinking in a dorm room provided. I was lonely, horny, and unconfident: three problems I solved with help from a few drinks.
My first night back on campus sophomore year was the first time I ever blacked out. There was a reunion of the guys from our freshman year dorm happening in one of the bedrooms of our new suite. One of them, Cam, had always been a prodigious drinker. We chalked it up to his being from Australia, where it sounded like beer flowed freely into your mouth as soon as you were strong enough to pop the top on a Foster's can. That night, he brought over a bottle of what he called "Bambi Juice": vodka, 5-Hour Energy, and Kool-Aid powder. He couldn't finish it, so I volunteered. I chugged the bottle.
We wandered to a frat party in the parking lot of Sheridan, a sprawling collection of townhomes where people were known for falling off roofs. Our man on the inside hooked us up with beer. We eyed girls in the parking lot. I got a girl's phone number, my confidence boosted by the booze already flowing through my bloodstream.
We decided to walk to another party in a big house at the top of the hill. The last memory I have is being mid-stride on the asphalt. I come to taking a shower in my new dorm. It's 4 AM. The water is cold. I wash my face, dry off, then remember I have to take my dad to the airport in about three hours.
I'm definitely drunk on the drive to Raleigh-Durham. I'm trying to keep that fact hidden from my dad. It's early enough in the morning that I can still chalk it up to sleepiness. I spend the rest of the morning piecing together what happened the night before. Flashes come back to me.
A desperate phone call to a friend, pleading with her to come to this party. Leaving the party with said friend so I could go puke in the woods. Running away from the increasingly more pissed-off friend through the brick awnings of our main quad hiding behind pylons and bushes, and popping out to scare her. Sprinting across the street while she screams bloody murder at me. Telling the girls who I meet up with by the fountain that I have no idea what this bitch across the street is yelling about.
I apologize via text. I don’t earn forgiveness.
Once those floodgates opened, it became awful hard to close them, especially once I joined a fraternity myself during the fall of my sophomore year. I blacked out again the night I got my bid. My pledge class pounded beer after beer in a crowded bedroom upstairs in the frat house. Later, we would cross the finish lines of case races and empty jungle juice buckets together.
On my first night as a full member of the fraternity, I drink so much I black out within an hour and a half. After an ill-fated keg stand, I run into the bathroom of one of our more dilapidated party houses to puke. My final memory is wiping vomit from my face and giving one of my new brothers a thumbs-up. He asks if I'm ready to rally. I clap my hands together, trying to show that I’m a team player. My consciousness cuts out.
Greek life culture, in particular, promoted some of the least healthy drinking I've ever seen. It sucked me in, then sucked the life out of my liver. People planned their weekends around blacking out. It became a rite of passage. Drinking games. Drinking contests. Sloshball. Beer Olympics. Handles & Handcuffs. The annual Blackout Make Out party thrown by the sorority girls living across from the intramural fields.
Everything was an excuse to drink. Going to a horse race? Let's bring coolers of cheap light beer and Seagram's gin so we can get drunk at 8 in the morning, three hours after we've hit the road. Last class of the semester? Bring a drink. Last class before break? Bring a drink. Last class before the weekend? Bring a drink. Last class of the day? Bring a drink. It's sunny outside! Why aren't you drinking?
My college drinking rituals have strict patterns, clockwork precision.
First: decide how you’ll be pregaming. This largely comes down to what kind of mood you want to be in by the time you decide to head to the party. Want to be jovial, just drunk enough? Play beer pong, maybe a movie-related drinking game. If you’re looking to get sullen in the corner of some couch, play Mario Party. The randomness of the game will inevitably make someone so mad that they shut down until everyone goes to the next pregame, and even then they keep to themselves and drink more than they normally would. Card games always seem like a great idea, but devolve into yelling sometime around the fourth round. One time, a game of Cheers To The Governor went so bad that my friend Shea, eight or nine drinks in after around only an hour, drunkenly accused another friend of being the real reason he was leaving school after that semester, transferring to a college in Georgia that he could afford.
Next: at the frat party I inevitably wind up at, inquire about the evening’s alcohol selection and take whatever liquid in whatever cup is handed to me. I usually drink several. There’s always someone drunker than everyone else who crashes in. He is greeted with whoops and pats on the back before going outside to smoke borrowed cigarettes. More people trickle in, and around midnight things really get going. The house, no matter which one, is always packed, and you have to assert yourself to move anywhere inside or else you’ll wind up standing in one spot for the rest of the night, or at least until you can move your elbows around a little bit. People are wobbly. Guys wearing fleece vests and backwards baseball caps shotgun beers on the back deck. The girls smell like fruit, vodka, or fruit vodka.
Later: I roam. I'm easily bored when I’m this drunk, so I catch up with people I don’t see during the week. We talk about how many people are there, what’s going on in their personal lives, how much classes suck. One night, to entertain myself, I decide to randomly collapse mid-conversation with people, act unresponsive while counting to twenty in my head, then get up and continue whatever sentence I left them at. It’s fun, even though I get beer and mud all over my jacket and pants.
On bad nights: I feel like the kid at the party who doesn’t belong, the stranger in a room full of good friends with inside jokes and secret handshakes. I’ve had too much to drink. I'm sitting on a couch, alone in a room full of people. If I don’t get out of my head fast enough I become convinced that nobody wants to talk to me anymore, that I am getting sidelong glances from people across the room whispering about my shortcomings. Another drink — or three — usually cures this.
The problem: I am never as good at convincing myself that I don’t care about what people think about me as I pretend that I am. Even in the throes of partying, I couldn’t tell myself that I’d always be happy with whatever happens while I get wasted with my friends?
By the end of college: I wonder how everyone else manages the upkeep of juggling social obligations. Who is most important? Which friends haven’t I seen in a while? Will any of this matter when I’m gone and we’re all in the real world?
Three months after I am initiated into my fraternity, I watch a boy almost die from alcohol poisoning.
We are at a pregame, Big/Little Night, when the pledges are “allowed” to get rip-roaringly drunk in the name of brotherhood. By the time I got there, Ben had already finished most of a fifth of Captain Morgan. He’s glassy-eyed, melting into the couch, yelling, slurring, smiling. The guys in charge of him say to stop drinking, but he evades them and finishes the fifth.
Next thing I know, he’s out on the balcony slumped over in a camping chair, vomit pooled around his feet. His skin is grey. He wheezes, eyes closed, clinging to consciousness as people gather around him, debate the next move. “No ambulance – someone’s gotta take him to the hospital though – we can’t just let this kid get hurt.”
He isn’t even the first guy who got hurt under our watch that night. Another blackout kid jumped out of a moving car and busted his chin open.
The next day, our fraternity is kicked off campus. Some guys panic. Most just get blackout drunk again. Par for the course.
Three years after graduating, I am becoming a career alcoholic. I have been drinking pretty hard and professionally for seven years. I am the guy who the servers at the club know they always can bring spare drinks to, the one who will stay past close drinking in the back, the one who is occasionally given side-eye by the managers for being a little too drunk on the job.
Despite romanticizing this outcome for years, something feels off about it. I'm told I'm a happy drunk, but I can recognize how selfish I get now when I drink, too. I want things done on my terms. I become mean, manipulative, and even a touch sociopathic. Alcohol has a way of teasing my worst qualities out of the woodwork, giving me the sense of entitlement I craved so much. While I drank, my alcoholism never crossed the line from functional to crippling. But near the end, I danced on that line.
This is the part where it's not fun any more. For a while, I was able to appreciate the way alcohol severed my tact from my conscience. Eventually, that was what bothered me the most about getting drunk.
We are all looking for ways to detach. After all, it can be fun to avoid reality. What I begin to worry about is what happens if I stay detached.
On the 4th of July, 2015, I drink all day with friends. We start off at an all-you-can-drink brunch on the Upper East Side that costs $50. We get our money’s worth, and I puke in the bathroom after 11 mimosas and too many plates of Mexican food. After that, we drink on a rooftop of the apartment complex we’re crashing at, daring each other to wander over the edge.
We meet up with a bunch of girls, then wander our way over to a bar on some hotel rooftop. I come outside to make a phone call and try to let people know where the fuck we are. My last memory is the bouncers refusing to let me back in at around midnight. My next memory is at 3 AM.
I'm wandering through what seems like a foreign land, with no cash in my pockets and no money on my Metrocard, too proud to buy a cab back to my friend's apartment. Gripped by panic, I sprint through the streets in shoes that are falling apart at the soles, trying to orient myself. By the grace of someone who lets me onto the subway platform illegally, I wind up on a train back to uptown. I make it home safe and sleep on the floor, arriving too late to earn a coveted spot on the couch or even the air mattress.
My cousin's August wedding starts innocently enough. The thrill of an open bar keeps everyone boozy and happy, the way my family gatherings tend to go. But I am in my head about my ex being close enough to my cousin to score an invite, and the solution I choose is drinking too much. Way too much. But I’m eating and dancing, so, despite having had something like ten or twelve drinks in three hours – maybe even more than that, factoring the daiquiri and the shot of tequila before the ceremony starts – the booze doesn't hit me.
When the afterparty begins, all bets are off. I double up on liquor at last call and charge the drinks to the room. We wander to a tiki bar in the French Quarter and my ex-girlfriend and I split a Scorpion Bowl, which is meant to be shared by more than just two people. Another cousin later tells me he saw the moment when the alcohol took over and I was no longer present. He encouraged me to go back to the hotel.
Blackout me has other plans. I flash between gushing praise on my ex and berating her as she valiantly tries to walk me back to the Westin. One moment, we’re making out on a couch. The next, we’re in a screaming match in the street. I have no idea how much time elapses between moments. The next morning, she tells me she hadn't cried that much in a long time. Mortified and fearing for my health, I decide I will not ever get blackout drunk again.
In early September, I wake up with a start on my couch. The lights are on in the apartment. I don't know what time it is. My face hurts. My legs hurt. My body aches as I slowly realize that I haven't kept the promise I made to myself after my cousin's wedding. The last time wasn't the last time. I've blacked out once more.
It all started so innocently, as per usual. Free drinks at an alumni event for my college. I start drinking liquor, switch to beer, then back to liquor. A professor buys the entire bar a round of tequila shots. I wind up with extras. I wander with some people to a bar by my house that they dislike. I buy their drinks for the trouble, then wind up drinking two of the three. My last clear memory is picking up something from a comic in the parking lot.
My bank statement reveals that we went bar-hopping, and that I took a cab home instead of the cheap convenience of a Lyft. Concerned texts from my friends about my safety sit unopened in my phone.
The night weighs on me as the day drags on slower than any day has in a long time. I am no longer numb. Instead, I'm furious with myself. Where the fuck is my self-control? Why can't I just stick to stopping at two drinks? Why do I feel like I have to keep up with everyone to be the life of the party? Why can't I just be myself?
Eventually I wobble over to work, exhausted, telling myself I just can’t day drink like I used to. Huffing and puffing to scale the hill, I consider that I’ve been drinking pretty nonstop over the weekend. Nights blur together more than they’ve already started to in my three years in LA. I can’t remember much.
My stomach starts to turn as I clock in and order a shot from the back bar with a Red Bull chaser to perk up. My body is disagreeing with my decision to work more and more. I pull an off-duty door guy aside and ask him if he’ll cover for me since I’m feeling sick. He says sure, looking concerned, and I pass my walkie-talkie off and walk to the back. I clock out, order another drink, do my stage time, then summon a car to take me home. Modern technology is great for problem drinkers.
Five minutes after I realize the couple isn't coming back, the thought occurs to me that I could drink that margarita and everything would be fine. The anger would subside. The warmth would come back in. In this moment, I could use some warmth. Then I think back to a conversation I had the week I quit drinking. My friend Steve tells me that when he feels like having a drink, he plays the following scenario in his head:
One morning, you wake up with a bag containing $10,000 to spend on whatever you want. You, being a party animal, with a reputation to uphold as such, throw a rager. You blow your windfall on a blowout: booze, drugs, women, and a hotel room to corral it all in. You do this without a second thought, because that's how you operate. You wake up with a hangover and, mysteriously enough, another bag with $10 grand at your side. You rinse. You repeat. Then, one morning, you wake up without that bag. You're in an empty hotel room, surrounded by the remnants of your bender. You ask yourself, "what now?"
I take the margarita and the empty pint glass beside it and bus them. I need to keep them out of my sight. The craving will linger with me otherwise, taunting me with the prospect of feeling like things are okay. That night, I call a trio of alcoholics to talk about wanting to take a drink, concerned for myself. They remind me that this is how we operate. This is our normal. All we can strive for is to accept the new normal. I finish my phone calls and sit on the sofa for a minute, letting the unfiltered quiet of 2:30 AM wash over me.