The Blackout, Part 1
An excerpt from How to Love Someone. In this episode, our protagonist gives us the preamble to a night that defined her struggle with her own consciousness and knowing. The Blackout treats a significant moment in our protagonist’s relationship with her self, trust in her own perception of events. It was a night that defined her reliability as the narrator of her own story, her sovereignty over her own cognition. In Part 1, she hopes to entangle you with The Boyfriend even a fraction as much as she was, so that perhaps you might share in a fraction the devastation she experiences in Part 2.
She hardly ever thought of him. He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a seashell, always boring against the rock, might do. The making of the place had been her pain. But now the shell was safely in the rock. It was lodged, and ground no longer.
-T.H. White
I despise memory. So many sane people I know hold memory to be their ally, use it to defend their position in an argument, speak from it faithfully when telling a story. I can perform no such act of bravado. I am seldom confident in my memories, the few that I have. They are like these Frankenstein monsters of still photography and imagination sewn awkwardly onto flashes of real events that I can’t quite grasp or place on a longer timeline. In my life, memory has been no friend. It betrays or forsakes me when I need it most. Usually, when I tell a story about what happened, I take a bit of artistic license. I tell about the spirit of a thing, not the actual event. It’s like Maya Angelou said; I am the people she was talking about. I will forget what you said, what you did, but I will never forget how you made me feel. So, I fill in the blanks of my stories with the daydreams that bring to life that experience for my listener. I can’t know for sure what happened, but I can make you, my friend, feel what I was made to feel…
That is why I sit here now, trying to tell you a story about something I have faith is true, something between me and The Boyfriend. There are very few things that I am dead sure they happened, especially ones so surreal, embanked in fog and doubt. But this is one of those things. In those days, almost two decades ago now, I was in the habit of lying about my experiences. I did so much back then that I was ashamed of. A lot of it I felt powerless to stop myself from doing. I often was in a blackout from drinking, slipping in and out of conscious experience. Or I was in a disembodied state, I guess spurned on by stress, either emotional or physical, from days of drinking and doing drugs and not eating or sleeping enough. I remembered this dissociated part of myself pleading with this other, acting part of myself to stop, to just stop. But I had no control over my body, my mouth, my words, my choices. The helpless frustration to try and tamp down this out-of-control, wild animal part of myself, I don’t know how to describe it with any justice. It was an abortion. An empty, aching pit in my uterus. The stress of it, I guess, I would just go very far away. And it would all go black.
So, if I needed plausible deniability for something reprehensible that I’d done, that I watched happen from outside my body, or that I hallucinated and confused for reality, or that I partially blacked out, I got into the habit of saying that I didn’t know at all. That I didn’t remember. I couldn’t stand hearing about it from other people, The Boyfriend, his friends. I couldn’t stand their looks of confusion, disgust. Outrage. Exasperation.
Eventually, I sacrificed any credibility I had, even the basic amount entitled to all humans simply by virtue of being conscious. Just to avoid any true responsibility for my heinous behavior. Therefore, other people, The Boyfriend, in particular, appointed themselves the authority of my experience and wrote it to suit their interests. And consequently, accountability was excused for us all.
Most days, I was content to exist without credibility; I swirled in my own closed circuit of self-obsessed deterioration undisturbed. But when the time came that it really mattered, that I knew what I knew, and it was my word against theirs… Well, it was easier for my unofficial wardens to write off my version of events as my annoying but harmless lunacy and to believe a thing more convenient for them. I was the girl who cried ‘ghost.’
I wish I had better memories to tell about us, The Boyfriend and me. Or even just stories of times that were bad but in a funny or cute way. Sadly, it feels like I can only remember the horrible things I did and about which I feel so ashamed. And, abstractly, I only remember that he was a good person who didn’t deserve it. It’s taken almost two decades for a new light to be shown back on the past. Now I’m not sure he was so pristine and I so wholly despicable. It seems instead that those were roles that I cast us in, or that perhaps we cast ourselves and each other in, because doing so served us in some twisted way. It pinned down a version of reality that we could understand and operate within. Because we weren’t yet capable of grappling with the confusing truths within ourselves and each other. And anyway, the truth, then and now, is so elusive. I can never quite put my finger on it and hold it down. Sometimes, as an exercise, I list all the things I can remember about us, and I try to focus and picture it as a vividly as I can.
We met in high school. I was a sophomore, and he was a junior. My freshman year I had been in a messed-up relationship with a second-year senior with serious emotional problems; this new group of kids didn’t like that guy and created a social buffer between us. I was grateful but it took me a while to adjust to my new friends. These new guys were straight edge punks, and BMX bikers, and rowdy and goofy at school. I needed a little good, clean fun in my life at that point, but I found it awkward, the sobriety, the camaraderie. The Boyfriend was in this circle but quiet compared to the rest. He wasn’t a model student or anything, but he could usually be found just outside the circle, calmly reading a book. You’d think he wasn’t listening to the other guys goofing around until occasionally he threw in a jab or response to their teasing. And I realized he could pay attention to two worlds at once, which I envied. Sometimes, while he was trading shots with them, he got a little worked up and he’d stammer a bit, get tongue-tied. Not a lot, but noticeable. The other guys never said anything, and I thought, either they’re oblivious, or they really respected him, to only tease him about unimportant things and not things essential to his being.
The day The Boyfriend and I finally got together we had a snow day from school. The guys all wanted to go snowboarding and sledding at the park. Neither he nor I was particularly interested in that. We sat in the car to stay warm. We listened to music. We ditched the guys and went to my house to hang out alone. He let me drive his car in the snow. My mom gave him shit about that when we got home. It was the first time she had ever met him. Eventually, he would be like a son to her. From that day on, for the next decade or more, no matter the space or insanity between us, we just would not be able to quit one another.
As a girlfriend, I did come with an instruction manual, several in fact. Years later, he would buy the book Loving Someone with Bipolar Disorder and other books geared toward partners of people with mental health issues. He would sit in the living room reading them under the lamp light while sipping his whiskey neat just like he read his VH1 Encyclopedia or books on Norse or Gaelic mythology. I don’t know if either of us really wanted to get better. Me from my crazy, or him from his addiction to crazy. I used to think crazy was contagious. The anxiety seemed to spread like a rash to anyone with prolonged contact. After 5 or 6 years with me, through all my erratic behavior, my ups and downs, he seemed to have aged 10. He would look relaxed, reading in the living room, but I would sniffle or cough suddenly, and he’d jolt enough to slosh his whiskey. When it occurred to me how on edge he was, and that I was the reason why, I choked back a few guilty tears.
He was so devoted to me. You would think I liked it but instead, it’s like it made me angry. He was unfazed by the largeness of my personality, the wildness of my emotions. I talked incessantly and he listened. He adored everything I did, even the annoying or gross stuff. He was steady. I could count on him. It drove me mad. I found myself breaking up with him just to watch his expression change, just to feel something. It devastated him. I creeped myself out how I couldn’t feel anything. It’s like he was in a jar, under glass. I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying. I couldn’t touch him. It was like I could press pause or mute and he would just be stuck there, quiet and helpless.
Inevitably without him, though, panic would set in. The room would lose air. I didn’t like his devotion, but I required it. I would ask for him back and he would take me. Neither of us would question it. And my relief would subside and give way again to that unnerved feeling. And eventually, the cycle would go around again. But neither he nor I could stop. I don’t want to make it seem like there were never any good times. Of course, there were. I just don’t remember them as well. Once we came home from the bar the good, silly kind of drunk and he asked for some macaroni and cheese. So, I made him macaroni and cheese there in a tank top and panties at 3 o’clock in the morning as he sat and watched, giggling like a little boy. Then he messily scrawled out an agreement that I had to sign: “I, Sarah Coffer, will only make macaroni and cheese in my bra and panties from this day forward.” We were laughing so hard we almost choked on our juvenile elbow pasta. And we made love on the kitchen table.
Once we went out to the movies on Delmar and came out to the parking lot and it was raining. We made out in the rain. We fucked in the car, and the windows got foggy like in the movies and we were drunk then on the experience of it. Maybe like a lot of unstoppable toxic relationships, the sex part of our relationship worked really well. We would turn ourselves over completely to whatever power it was that the other had over us. In that space we were totally honest with one another, totally willing. Vulnerability was more difficult in other areas of our relationship. But we had a mutual respect for each other’s intelligence, our interests, our senses of humor. We would get into deep conversations about feminism in ancient Greece and be trying to make analogies to the emergence of punk in the UK or some such nonsense and I would make a joke and he would laugh in spite of himself, because we were arguing different points, and there was this thing he would always say to me when I did something like that, that got the better of him. He would say, “I knew there was a reason I loved you.” And I would blush, and we would kiss hard.
These good boys, the crazy draws them in like moths to a flame. It’s very cliché, really. I’m enchanting and irresistible and spontaneous and alluring, and then, singe, you’re toast. Burnt to a crisp. It takes only a second. Most never see it coming. And there were of course boys that never approached, who saw me for what I was. The most notable of those were The Boyfriend’s closest friends. I wanted them most of all. The people I couldn’t have. And of all the people I wanted to like me, I always believed I could hear their judging thoughts about me, feel their disdain and scrutiny. And it drove me to such awkward behavior around them that there was no way they could ever like me. So, The Boyfriend was always stuck in this uncomfortable situation between the girl he loved and his friends who hated her.
Fortunately, with The Boyfriend, however, my anxieties were silent. I wasn’t preoccupied with his thoughts. I could feel his approval of me just sitting beside him. I could see his desire and his appreciation when he looked at me. In fact, I had trouble looking other people in the eyes. Too much shame. But with him it was different. Looking into his eyes made the demons behind mine nervous. I had this exhilarating nakedness when I met eyes with him. I feared it and I craved it at the same time. He saw me exactly as I was and didn’t look away.
After high school, though, he started drinking. And once he started, he drank like most people watch television, steadily and without guilt or an afterthought. There were so many nights I was white-knuckling a near-beer, trying not to drink, and baffled, I would watch him throw back his fifth Manhattan and keep his composure, never lose control. He’d move on to Maker’s Mark neat. And we’d be sitting there at the bar, him unburdened by shame and me feeling so awful about myself it seemed I had no choice but to drink. And he’d sip his bourbon or his rye whiskey and, glass still in hand, point to me and, without flinching at the irony of it, say, “You, Sarah, need to quit drinking.”
I couldn’t drink. That is not to say that I didn’t drink. But compared to the skill and poise with which The Boyfriend drank, I couldn’t. Not to save my life. I’ve never had any tolerance for alcohol whatsoever. I was blacked out by the third drink. A sobbing mess or a hysterical fool by the fourth, flicking my cigarettes in girls’ faces, punching strange boys I believed were hitting on me, peeing in line for the club in front of dozens of strangers, dragged away by bouncers. Thousands of nights I drank, thousands of times I blacked out, thousands of stories there are out there of crazy, horrible, humiliating things that I did. I don’t even know. I’ve heard quite a few of the stories; I imagined a pretty vivid picture. Invented memories that I can’t scratch out of my mind with a razor blade.
Julia Cameron said, “Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.” By 2006, the bad idea I’d gotten in my head was that I was worthless, that I didn’t deserve anything, least of all was I good enough for him. The Boyfriend told me, shaking his head at me, eyes blinking away frustrated tears, “Every time I see that spark of self-esteem in you, of self-discovery, you drown it in self-doubt, self-pity.” With every mistake I made, I would soak in the guilt, the shame, the embarrassment, the regret. It made me more self-conscious, weird. I would act out. Regret. Rinse. Repeat. He wouldn’t give up, though. He didn’t want to think he could be beaten. He thought he could love it into me, the feeling of worthiness. But instead, my bad idea beat us both, and the day came when I didn’t just believe I wasn’t good enough for him; it was so. Years of my choices had made it so.
