From the Apr 22 – Apr 28, 1999 issue

Pullout

In Praise of the Blackout

by Jamie Hook

You're drunk, between a rock and a hard place. One more drop of liquor and you'll black out, but if you stop drinking, you'll throw up. Your hand seems to be bleeding, but, miraculously, it can still grip a bottle of scotch. Blackout. You wake up with your pants off, and explain to the guy next to you that Tricky's music sounds like this (you lick the floor), but PJ Harvey's music sounds like this (you pantomime Marcel Marceau riding a bicycle). You offer him the best blowjob he's ever had, and he runs away. Blackout. Suddenly, you're covered in mud, and you seem to be wearing nothing but a slip. A loud sound startles you, and you look up from where you're eating out some woman--your girlfriend?--in front of a 7-11, and see policemen and flashing lights. You do the only thing you can, and ask them for a cigarette.

Hard liquor is still the most psychedelic drug available. While lesser drugs may addle the eyesight and rattle the brain, only hard liquor can warp time and space. Hard liquor suspends the devoted drunk in a toxic mist between consciousness and sleep, opening up a window through which the peripheral and tangential--in thought, word, and deed--may briefly shine and inspire. The clichés hardly do justice to this rapturous state of drunkenness. Inhibitions disappear, yes, but with all coherent thought processes gone as well, the drunk utterly transcends the constrictive web of thought, eventually leading him to forget why he set out to have a drink in the first place.

The point is, you should get drunk. You should get drunk and threaten people, you should get drunk and break things, you should get drunk and ask to be sodomized, you should get drunk and start crying. Your day is taken up with the central and meaningful gesture, the constructive relationship, the definitive phrase. You should allow yourself time to throw up and lose your wallet. There is no shame in waking up in a pasture with cow poop on your head, or opening your eyes to behold a stranger's ass. You're missing out if you've never known the shame of the morning after: hazy memories of naked dog-chasing and vomiting on fancy cars filtering into your consciousness like morning sun on the breakfast table. As you leave your house, strangers leer at you with a knowing smirk, and murmur, "Hey, Ringmaster,• or "Howza Captain today?• Tales of your escapades--of your heroic challenge to French a policeman; of your fevered consumption of a whole bottle of hot sauce; of your adroit disassembly of an entire sofa-- return to you via the mouths of friends. Your lover's glower, when he returns at the end of the day, adds complexity.

There are those of us for whom the blackout is as American as apple pie and as regular as a monk. We have learned to cherish the gaps in our memory as if they were loci of enchantment. Within these voids, we are capable of anything: our sexualities become fluid and polymorphous, our physical powers become vast, our courage recalls that of the Vikings, and our bodies become as flexible as a spider web. The surreal acts we perform defy simple explanation, taking on strange symbolic meanings and creating their own transcendent logic.

Moreover, in our enchantment, we are directly receptive to the protective talisman of the Godhead. The blackout drunk is a holy fool, unlike the pothead or the speed freak, or the even lesser beer drunk. The liquor drunk is "touched• by God, and protected from all harm. How casually we topple down stairs, fall from balconies into thorny bushes, and submerge ourselves in violent seas only to come beaming back from the edge, ready for more. Provided you don't arm us with guns or cars, we are, for the most part, God's creatures, earnestly walking through plate-glass doors and forever falling off bicycles. We are pure protoplasm, moving like raw energy through the night, stopping only when the spirit overwhelms us and we are physically forced to fall where we stand.

Though we may wake up soiled, bloody, impoverished, and friendless, we must remember: it is always worth it. Alexander the Great couldn't have conquered all of Asia sober, and he knew it. Or, closer to home, there's my friend Maynard who, in a stupor while visiting New Orleans, challenged a gang of Hell's Angels to a fistfight. They politely declined, and so he redoubled his efforts, removing his pants and yelling at them. They casually threw him out, and after a few moments he re-entered, demanding their blood. Again they threw him out, this time locking the door. Only after crawling back inside through the transom was he arrested. In lieu of bail, he offered the cops the best blowjob they could imagine, and was thrown in the drunk tank, where he eventually woke up, refreshed and transformed. There was no meaning nor purpose, but his act will forever reside in that fantastic archive of the universal consciousness, alongside all the other inexplicables and mysteries, keeping a harmonious balance with this world's overwhelming amount of thoughtful behavior.

So. What have you added to the archive today?

Jamie Hook drinks... well, what doesn't Jamie Hook drink?