Dry: A Memoir

by Augusten Burroughs

  “Ten years ago, I was a prostitute in Green Bay, Wisconsin. I would fuck or blow anybody for enough money to buy a bottle of booze. And hey, it didn’t have to be good booze. Gut rot was perfectly fine, just as long as it was a liter. Then I met my ‘Mr. Right,’ ” Rae says, spitting out Mr. Right like it’s something toxic. Like she bit down on a thermometer and is now spitting out the mercury.

  I look at her face while she talks, seeing if I can spot any signs of the leftover broken bones. I see no evidence, and, in fact, her skin is very smooth and she has an expression of calmness that seems, to me, almost like a vacation destination—a place I want to go.

  “I hit rock bottom in my bathtub. I’d been unconscious in it for two days. When I woke up, my hair was glued to the side of the tub with my own blood. I was lying in my own excrement.”

  I look at her in her loud floral print and think, No way.

  “But that was ten years ago. Five years before that, fifteen years ago, I was a doctor’s wife. I drove a Cadillac and went to night school. I had plans. Except, my marriage was beginning to fall apart; my husband was having an affair and I refused to admit this to myself. So I picked up a new hobby: drinking. At first, it was just a cocktail at night, before dinner. Then two cocktails. Then six. By the end of the first year I was having a drink in the morning, instead of coffee. And after three years I had dropped out of school and was drinking full-time.”

  Wow, I think. Does a Bloody Mary count? I love a Bloody Mary in the morning. Doesn’t everybody?

  She continues. “I realize my case is a little different. It was a little faster. Five years, from nothing to rock bottom. I guess I learn quick.”

  She’s an excellent presenter and would have succeeded in advertising, is what I think. She generates a sense of excitement in the room and I become aware that my hands are moist with sweat, but not from fear. From needing to know what happened next. I like the drama. I glance around the room and other people look rapt as well. And I feel like, That’s the reason to go to a gay rehab. People appreciate the drama.

  “When I got out of that tub and looked in the mirror, I did not recognize the creature looking back at me. And on that day, I went to my first AA meeting. That was ten years ago. Today, I’m sober, I have a Ph.D. and I’m sitting here with you, trying to help you become sober.”

  Sober. So that’s what I’m here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven’t felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green. It’s no longer really summer but the air is still too warm and heavy to be fall. It’s the season between the seasons. It’s the feeling of something dying.

  “See, alcoholism is exactly like bubble gum. You know when you blow a bubble and it bursts, some of the gum sticks to your chin?”

  Small, tentative laughter.

  “What’s the only thing that gets the bubble gum off your chin?” she asks.

  Sometimes I will chew grape bubble gum because it stinks and hides the smell of alcohol. I answer, “Bubble gum. You have to take the gum out of your mouth and press it against the gum on your chin and it’ll pick it up.”

  Rae beams. “You’ve got it.”

  Slam dunk. I am on the road to recovery.

  “Only an alcoholic can treat another alcoholic. Only other alcoholics can get you sober.” Then she slaps her hands down on her legs, exhales really fast and says, “Okay, that’s it for Group. Time for lunch.”

  Still, I’d kill for a cosmopolitan.

  I am released from the detox room and the rainbow footprint poster and placed in a regular room, directly across from the men’s showers. My roommates are Dr. Valium and Big Bobby. Without trying, I’ve kind of fallen into a routine here. Much like a worker at a labor camp. The morning and evening Affirmations (and I AM somebody!!) are cheesy bookends to each intense day of what amounts to Alcoholic Academy.

  The days here tend to blur together. Because once you’ve gone through four days, you’ve experienced every “class” there is and then it’s just a matter of doing the same day over and over again. Like the movie Groundhog Day, it’s an endless loop.

  Recently, a skinny girl named Sarah piped up in group. “I can only have an orgasm if my girlfriend cuts my legs with a razor blade. The thing is, I feel so inhuman, like I’m just a shell, a husk. But when she cuts me and I bleed and see the blood and taste it off my fingers, well, then I realize I’m human, real.”

  So she’s one of those girls on Lifetime, Television for Women, who stabs her knees with a fork until her parents catch her and take her to an expensive shrink, played by Jaclyn Smith. And while that’s moderately entertaining, I still don’t understand how any of this directly relates to me. On the plus side, they’re feeding me Librium like candy. It gives me the sensation of floating just a few inches above the floor. It’s a nice feeling, one I’d like to carry with me when I leave this place. It’s great that rehab has turned me on to a new drug.

  David gave the group a writing assignment the other day that we had to go over in Group today.

  “I want you to write a letter to somebody very close to you. And I want you to tell this person exactly what you honestly feel about them and your relationship with them.”

  Dr. Valium wrote a general letter to his patients, apologizing for taking their Valiums and giving them aspirins. The WASP wrote to his mother, apologizing for being drunk, driving her to the party and going off the side of the road in the car, paralyzing her. He apologized for being born.

  I wrote to Pighead.

  Dear Pighead,

  The reason I am so distant is because, well, there are two reasons actually. The first reason is my drinking. I require alcohol, nightly. And nothing can get in the way.

  The second reason is your disease. I can’t stand the idea of getting close to you, or closer, only to have you up and die on me, pulling the carpet out from under my life. You’re my best friend. The best friend I ever had. I have to protect that.

  I don’t call you or see you much because I’m killing you off now, while it’s easier. Because I can still talk to you. It makes sense to me to separate now, while you’re still healthy, as opposed to having it just happen to me one night out of the blue.

  I’m trying to evenly distribute the pain of loss. As opposed to taking it in one lump sum.

  I read my letter out loud in David’s group and something completely unexpected occurs. I mortify myself and get choked up. Tears fill my eyes. Marion reaches for the box of tissues.

  “No, Marion, don’t,” says David.

  “Oh yeah, I forgot . . . how stupid of me,” she says in a hard, punishing voice.

  I mouth the words thank you to her and she gives me a small, private smile. I make her know that she handed me a tissue even though she didn’t and that it was just what I needed. Then I clear my throat. “I don’t know what that’s all about,” I say. It scares me that I can have emotions so close to the surface and yet not even be aware of them. And really, I thought I had all my Pighead stuff worked out.

  “I, uh,” I begin. I’m surprised when my voice comes out thin and shaky, like I’m sitting on top of a washing machine during the spin cycle. And then I’m crying. And it’s humiliating to sob in front of these people, but I can’t help it. Something in me has snapped. After what feels like ten minutes, I’m able to pull it together.

  “You okay?” David asks.

  I nod, wiping my eyes on my sleeve.

  He leans forward, elbows on knees. “What’s going on inside you?”

  I bite the inside of my mouth. “It’s Pighead stuff, I guess. Reading that letter, you know. It makes me think back, I don’t know, to when it started.”

  Pighead and I met on a phone sex line. I’d just moved to Manhattan and didn’t have any furniture except for a yellow inflatable raft to sleep on that I bought at Wal-Mart. But I had a phone, and a Village Voice. A number
advertised in the back of the Voice promised, “Hook up with other guys.” So I called the number and drank beer while I chatted with guys. I adopted a British accent.

  The way it worked was, you called the number and were connected to another caller. If you didn’t like him, you pushed the pound sign on your phone and you got somebody else.

  Usually I would wait for the other guy to talk first. “How big is your cock?” was the standard question.

  I adopted a British accent and started asking the question, “So what brand of toothpaste do you use?”

  Mostly, I got pound-signed. Except one guy answered, “Crest.”

  And I said, “Really? And why not Colgate or Gleem?”

  And he said, “Because I like the taste of Crest better. And doesn’t Colgate have MFP? I don’t know what MFP is, you see. So I’m really mistrustful of that. It’s like Retsin in Certs.”

  This caused me to laugh.

  “You know,” he said, “You have an excellent British accent. Except it falls away when you laugh. You need to work on that.”

  I said in my normal voice, “Shit. But you bought it up until the laugh?”

  He said he did, indeed.

  “Good, because I almost never laugh,” I said.

  He said, “That really is something you need to change about yourself. Do you believe in changing yourself? Or are you one of those tiresome people who prefer to stagnate?”

  I said, “I grew up near a pond, so I understand the dangers of stagnation.”

  He said this was very good news. Then he asked, “So why haven’t you asked me how big my dick is? Everybody else wants to know. Aren’t you curious?”

  I said, “Okay. How big is your dick?”

  And he said, “I thought so. So you really are just looking for sex. You’re not looking for anything more than sex. What was I thinking? Calling this line looking for a deep, personal connection.”

  “That was a trick,” I told him.

  “Or treat,” he said.

  We went on like this for an hour. Back and forth. Until finally he suggested that we meet. “Just for a drink,” he said.

  We met the next day, at the Winter Garden, downtown in the World Financial Center. I wore jeans and a yellow oxford and he was in a crisp Armani suit. He wore a gold pinkie ring, which I commented on immediately. “That,” I said, “is something Donald Trump would wear.”

  He said, “Take that back.”

  I smiled at him and said I wouldn’t because it was the truth.

  He said, “I think I may need alcohol in my system in order to spend any more time with you.”

  There was a Chinese restaurant in the courtyard on the first floor, so we sat at the bar in front of a long aquarium filled with orange fish. He ordered an Absolut and tonic, with a splash of Rose’s lime juice. I ordered the same thing, in a tone of voice suggesting my surprise that we both drank the same drink. What a coincidence, my eyes said. It seemed essential that I appear to know exactly what I was doing.

  Pighead was extremely—and there is no other word for it—slick. Even his thick, black hair was so glossy, it looked nylon. He was charming and witty and he smelled of Calvin Klein Obsession.

  I told him about my life in advertising, impressing on him my lack of formal education beyond elementary school and my success at an early age. These were the two things about myself that I could display for others to admire. I could not talk about my parents or my childhood or my adolescence because these things would seem insane to other people and I would appear an iffy risk, especially to a mortgage banker.

  Pighead checked his gold watch and told me he had to leave.

  I did sort of feel that the rest was mere formality and we should just move in together. I was too new to New York City to understand that many people must have felt this way about him. That I was not unique. A handsome banker is not hard up for a date in Manhattan, ever.

  • • •

  On my bookcase at home, there’s a photo of Pighead trying on a leather jacket I bought for him one Christmas. I can be seen behind him in the mirror taking the picture. I’m wearing a ridiculous red Santa hat and my wire-framed nerd glasses. In another picture, I’m swimming in some motel pool in Maine. It was the Lamp Lighter Motel, I remember. It was fall and the pool was freezing cold and had orange leaves floating in it. Leaves and beetles. This was one of our first road trips. We’d known each other for about a year. I remember that after getting out of the pool, we went back to the room and I took a hot shower. When I came out, we ended up fooling around on the bed. We stayed in bed for two full days, leaving only at night to get prime rib or spaghetti at the only restaurant in town that served water in glass instead of paper.

  Back in Manhattan, I told him one night, “I think I’m in love with you.” We were leaning against the railing of the esplanade at Battery Park City, watching the planes circle in their holding patterns above us. For New Yorkers, planes circling above at night replace stars, in terms of romance.

  He turned to face me. “I love you too, Augusten.” Then gently he said, “But I’m not in love with you. I’m sorry about what’s happened between us. It shouldn’t have happened. I should never have let things get sexual, A. And B, I should have never made you feel that we could be anything more than friends. It’s my fault.”

  I was trapped because I did love him, but also now wanted to cause the most massive harm possible. You will love me, I thought. And then it will be too late.

  It went on like this for a year. The sex, always intense, fast and hungry. And the friendship. But no romance. I’d go over to his apartment (mine was always too messy for his taste) and he’d make roast chicken or beef stew. I’d watch his hands work: slicing, stirring, grinding pepper. I would watch his hands and think, I love those hands. And all the while, I knew I had to get over him. It didn’t matter why he wasn’t interested in me romantically. Just that he wasn’t.

  I started dating. First there was Tim, which lasted three months. Then there was Ned, which lasted a couple of weeks. There was Julian, Carlos, Eric. All of them in some way resembled Pighead. Tim was a banker, like Pighead. Julian and Carlos resembled him. Ned didn’t look like Pighead but he was Greek and I thought, Maybe this will be enough.

  It was a year later when I finally thought I was over him. When not every song reminded me of him. And I was able to go for entire days without thinking about him on a constant basis. I was able to imagine the possibility of someone else.

  One evening he called me from his car and told me to meet him downstairs. It was a Friday. Probably I had plans with Jim, maybe we would be going to the Odeon or Grange Hall. “You need to come downstairs. Now.”

  I climbed into his car and foul mood. “Jesus, what the hell is the matter with you?” I remember asking him. Maybe not those exact words, but close enough. “You have to keep things in perspective. Nothing is this bad. Your fucking job is just a job. It’s not like you’re HIV-positive.”

  But it was. He’d tested positive.

  That night, I slept over at his house, holding him, showing him that it didn’t matter to me. I wanted him to know that even if there was no cure, there was hope. The kind of hope that is powerful, because it comes from such need. That was the night he told me that he loved me. That he was in love with me.

  But hearing him say it made me feel like he was saying it only because he was afraid. Afraid he’d never get anything better. I made it my mission to fall completely out of love with him, yet be there for him as a friend. That virus was something I just didn’t want anything to do with. And I was angry with him. Furious that I had spent so much energy falling out of love with him, only to have him fall in love with me after he became diagnosed with a fatal disease. Part of me felt deep compassion. And another part felt like, You fucker.

  So now we’re friends and I thought I was way past all that crap. But obviously I am not over all that crap. Obviously I am a sort of a mess.

  For a while the room is silent. Then Kavi speak
s up. “When my lover was diagnosed with AIDS, I left him. Couldn’t deal with it.” He is fiddling with the gelled curl on his forehead as he says this. “And what I regret the most is that he died not knowing how much I loved him. And how the only reason he didn’t know was because of my using, and my selfishness. I was already married, I guess. To coke. I couldn’t even deal with the two of us together, let alone his virus, which made it three of us. I hate myself for that.”

  He looks at me. “He died never knowing how much I really loved him. He died believing that it was his virus I was afraid of. But that’s not it. I left him before he could leave me. Because I’ve been left a lot in my life. Except by coke. Coke never leaves me. Coke is always there. I had to leave him. I had to break the cycle.”

  I want to throw up at hearing this. I can feel it kicking around at the back of my throat, knocking on the door. My stomach is pushing the acid up. My stomach is saying, This is too much.

  Kavi disgusts me. He disgusts me more than any other human being has ever disgusted me before.

  Because I am him.

  Suddenly I want to drink. The urge hits me like a tsunami. I don’t want to drink in a jovial “Highballs for everybody!” way. I want to drink to the point where I could undergo major knee surgery and not feel so much as a pinch.

  I sit for a moment, staring straight ahead, eyes unfocused, unblinking as reality settles over me like a lead dental X-ray cape.

  It’s not about being an ad guy who throws back a few too many sometimes.

  It’s about being in rehab or being fired.

  It’s about being an alcoholic.

  It’s about me being an alcoholic.

  My lips move when I whisper the words out loud. I’m an alcoholic.

  Today is one-on-one therapy. This is exactly like seeing a shrink in New York, minus the Barcelona chair and Eileen Gray end table from Knoll. And instead of a dignified father figure with a salt-and-pepper goatee, I have Rae in all her floral-print grandeur.