Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

he’s impotent or not, I don’t know. But he wasn’t hard enough, so he turned over and I gave him
a hand job, and I guess he liked that, and he tried again, but I couldn’t. I mean, not that I
physically couldn’t, but first of all, it hurt, and second of all, he didn’t have protection, and I
didn’t want to get pregnant, and I didn’t know if he had AIDS or whatever. I mean, I’m sure he
didn’t have AIDS. But I didn’t want to lose it that early.
So he never came. I mean he never went that deep in, and then he asked me to give him a
blow job, and at first I didn’t, but he kept asking me, and I thought, poor guy, he’s not going to
get it tonight, I guess I’ll give him some head. So I did, and that was really gross. It gagged me.
In a big way. I was like, “Oh, this is real fun.”
And then we had to get up and go. I left the room, but I had to come back for my shoes. And
when I came back he kissed me, which made me feel good. Because that made me feel like he
didn’t regret anything. And then I left, and I’ve never seen him since, or heard about him. This
has got to be boring for anyone who is listening, and this tape is almost out.
I could spend a lifetime unwinding what I heard on the tape. From the fact he had trouble getting hard
to the part where he told me to be quiet, to the way I couldn’t recall key details of how I wound up on
the floor.
I’d had three wine coolers before we went into the room, not enough to black out but enough to
have a warm buzz. I remember feeling grateful for the drinks, because otherwise my heart might have
punched out of my mouth. I remember lying on the floor, his bare shoulder shifting back and forth in
my line of vision, and the voice screaming in my brain: Am I having sex right now?
The part that kills me is near the end, when he kisses me. Because that made me feel like he
didn’t regret anything. It was all I cared about at 13. That I wouldn’t be someone he’d regret.
There are reasons for statutory rape laws. One is that 18-year-olds have very different
expectations of dark and empty rooms than 13-year-old girls. But I was the kind of 13-year-old girl
who didn’t want to be protected. Forget your laws and your conventions. I was ready for the “best
summer of my life.” And I wanted to seem unfazed by what was happening. I didn’t want him to know
how utterly inexperienced I was. I wanted to look cool.
My underpants were bloody when I got home. I spent years wondering if I’d lost my virginity, and
if I’d consented, just as I would spend years wondering how I ended up in that Paris hotel room, and
why I let Johnson stay in mine.
Was it rape? I don’t think so, though part of me still doubts my interpretation. I know some people
will read it another way. But one of the great powers we have is the ability to give meaning to our
own experience. To me, this was a bad and fumbling early sexual episode that has many meanings.
But the one that stands out to me is how I quashed my feelings for the sake of someone else’s. His
pleasure was important, not mine. His regret was important, not mine. It was a pattern I repeated for
years. And every time I did, alcohol was there.
ABOUT THREE YEARS into my sobriety, I was on a plane from DFW to New York. The guy beside me
was 23. Rumpled and exhausted from staying up all night. He slumped beside me and flashed the
sideways grin of a boy who gets what he wants. “I’m moving to New York,” he said. “Have you been
before?”