Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

My dad was self-conscious like me. He was self-conscious about his ears,

Tilting the wide brim of a martini glass toward the sky to catch whatever plunked into it.

What’s the difference between a person who’s unfulfilled and a person who’s impossible to please?

Parents often try to correct the mistakes of their own past, but they end up introducing new errors.

Surrounded by a land of plenty, I couldn’t shake the notion that what I had been given was not enough. So I “borrowed” clothes from other people’s closets. I had an ongoing scam with the Columbia Record & Tape Club

I needed alcohol to drink away the things that plagued me. Not just my doubts about sex. My self-consciousness, my loneliness, my insecurities, my fears. I drank away all the parts that made me human, in other words, and I knew this was wrong.

That was the worst sin of all: trying too hard.

I said yes to please you, and then I did whatever I wanted. I thought of it as “being nice.” Now I think of it as “being manipulative.”

The troubled drinker’s sleight of hand—dividing your confessions among close friends but never leaving any one person doused with too much truth.