People talk about the horrible things strangers do to you when you are drunk, but my experience has mostly been the opposite. I have been the recipient of so much unsolicited kindness. The bartender who helps me track down the shoes I threw under a table. The woman who slips the glass of water under the bathroom stall where my head hangs over a toilet rim with a fishing line of drool stretching from my lips to the water. Honey, I’ve been there.
And then there were my friends, my actual friends, who would walk me up the stairs to my bedroom. Who poured me into taxis and texted with me until I was home. They did it for me, and I would do it for them. The golden rule of a lush’s life. Be kind to drunk people, for every one of them is fighting an enormous battle.
“Is it possible this gentleman is the one you were talking to at the bar tonight?” the concierge asked.
And there it was, finally. My first clue.
OF COURSE. OF course I’d gone to the hotel bar. It was located directly off the lobby. Pass the concierge and veer to the right. It’s where I’d gone after my interview on the first night, when I got back to my hotel and wasn’t ready to concede the good times just yet.
Did the guy pick me up? Did I pick him up? Was “picking” even the right verb? The bar was small, a few leather booths and a smattering of wooden tables. Striking up a conversation in a place like this would be exceedingly easy. There’s an hour when finding someone in a bar to sleep with doesn’t require a clever line so much as a detectable pulse.
HIM: Come here often?
ME: You bet.
HIM: Wanna fuck?
ME: You bet.
HIM: Should I tell you my name first?
ME: That’s OK. I won’t remember it.
I was embarrassed by my aggressive sexuality when I drank. It didn’t feel like me. And after a blackout, I would torture myself thinking of the awful things I might have said or done. My mind became an endless loop of what scared me the most.
At the concierge desk, I didn’t have time to indulge in such fantasy. I pretended to remember the guy. Anything to bluff my way out of this mess.
“Yes,” I told him, clapping my hands together. “That is definitely the guy. So you saw me with him tonight?”
He smiled. “Of course.”
Hallelujah. I had a witness.
He handed me a new key to my room. He told me he would figure out the guy’s name but that he might need an hour or two. “I don’t want you to worry anymore,” he said. “Go rest.”
“Hey, what’s your name?” I asked.
“Johnson,” he said.
“I’m Sarah,” I told him, and I took his hand with both of mine. A double-decker handshake. “Johnson, you’re the hero of my story tonight.”
“Not a problem,” he said, and flashed a smile.
As I headed toward the elevator, I felt like a new woman. I had a chance to restore order, to correct the insanity of the night. Johnson would find the guy’s name. I would meet the guy downstairs, suffer the indignity of small talk, then take my stuff and bolt. No, better yet, Johnson would knock on the guy’s door and retrieve the purse himself. I didn’t care how it happened, just that it happened. It was all going to be OK.
I walked back into my room. And there, to the left of the entrance, on an otherwise unremarkable shelf, was a sack of vinyl, openmouthed and drooping. Holy shit: my purse.
A WOMAN TOLD me a story once about folding her clothes in a blackout. She woke up, and her room was clean. How bizarre is that? But I understood how, even in a state of oblivion, you fight to keep order.
I had lost so many things that fall in New York. Sunglasses. Hats, scarves, gloves. I could have outfitted an orphanage with the items I left behind in taxicabs. But what amazed me was how many things I did not lose, even when my eyes had receded back into my skull. I never lost my cell phone. I never lost my keys. I once woke up with the refrigerator door flapping open but my good pearl earrings placed neatly beside the sink, their tricky backs slipped back onto their stems.
Part of this was simple survival. You could not be a woman alone in the world without some part of you remaining vigilant. I was a woman who tripped over sidewalks and walked into walls, but I was also a woman who, at the end of the evening, held on to her valuables like they were a dinosaur egg.
How did my purse get in my room? This new evidence was forcing me to reevaluate the story I’d already settled on. I suppose I might have dropped the purse off on my way to the guy’s hotel room. But a side trip like that was a serious break in the action that didn’t track with a drunk’s impulsive style. The more likely scenario is that I went upstairs first, decided my room was entirely too quiet, and then headed back to the bar for company, leaving my purse behind. A woman locking up her diamond ring before she leaps into the sea.
I called the front desk. “You’re never going to believe this,” I told Johnson. “My purse is in my room.”
“I told you this would work out,” he said.
“And you were right.”