Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

Ten minutes later, the landlord stood in my kitchen. She was in a blue robe, with her arms crossed.
“You try to burn down my apartment,” she said.
“Oh no,” I said, startled by the accusation and hoping it was a glitch in translation. “It was an
accident. I’m so sorry.”
I couldn’t go back to sleep that night. At 5 am, before the sun rose, I decided to take a walk. I
walked across the Williamsburg Bridge, and I walked through the trash-strewn streets of the Lower
East Side, past the discount stores with their roll-down metal gates locked shut, and through the tidy
sidewalk cafés of Chelsea, and into the din of Midtown. If my feet hurt, I didn’t notice. I needed
forward motion. I needed to keep in front of my shame. I was near the zoo at Central Park when the
landlord’s daughter called me.
“When your lease is up in April, we’d like you to move out,” she said.
“OK, I’m sorry,” I said.
She must have hated making that call. She must have hated being the translator of Difficult
Information. “Listen, you’re a good person, but my mom is really upset. The building is old. Her
granddaughters live there. The whole place could have gone up in flames.”
“I understand,” I said, though it felt like an overreaction to a genuine mistake. I fell asleep, I kept
thinking. How could spaghetti smoke burn down your building? But underneath those defensive
voices, the knowledge I was wrong. To cast the event as anyone’s whoopsie was to exclude key
evidence. Like the part where I drank three martinis, two beers—and passed out.
“I was thinking about buying your mother a plant,” I said. “Or maybe flowers. Do you know what
kind she likes?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, because I thought everyone liked flowers.
“I think the better idea is if you don’t say anything, and you move out in April.”
I walked all the way up to Washington Heights, up to 181st Street, where my friend Lisa lived.
We’d met at the Austin paper, and she was one of the first people to convince me I could make a
living in New York. I slept on her couch during my first month in the city, and I used to drift off,
listening to her and her husband laugh in their bedroom, and I would think about how I would like that
one day. Lisa and Craig were leading candidates for the greatest people I knew, and if you are ever as
low as I was that morning, I hope you can walk far enough to get to Lisa’s doorstep.
She and I pulled a couple chairs outside and sat quietly in the sunshine. I stared off at the George
Washington Bridge, the blue sky behind it. My lips were trembling. “I think I’m going to have to quit
drinking,” I said, and she said, “I know. I’m sorry. I love you.”
And I quit drinking. For four days.
I HAD THIS great idea: I should get a job. Freelancing came with freedom, but maybe what I required
was a cage. I also needed a regular paycheck. I was $10K in the hole to credit card companies. And I
had neglected to pay a hefty IRS bill. Twice.
I got a job as a writer and editor at an online magazine called Salon. The gig came with full
benefits, perhaps the most important being hope. I looked at each new change—every geographic
move, every shuffle of my schedule—as a reason to believe I might finally reform bad habits.
Drinkers have an unlimited supply of 4 am epiphanies and “no, really, I’ve got it this time” speeches.