Dry: A Memoir

by Augusten Burroughs

  “Well, today is my ninety days.”

  A thunder of applause. You can’t help but feel a sense of excitement from the vibrations alone. Ninety days is significant for an alcoholic. It implies you are seriously on the road back to sanity.

  Nan blushes and smiles, while averting her eyes.

  Nan “shares.” She’s forty-seven, started drinking when she was sixteen. “I was expelled from the cheerleader squad for being intoxicated during practice. Can you imagine?”

  A few people laugh softly and nod their heads. One man nods his head vigorously as if he knows the pain of being forced off the cheerleading squad all too well. But then, this is the West Village.

  Nan grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, moved to New York when she was eighteen. She got a job as the personal assistant to this very eccentric and notorious senior editor at a fashion magazine. Two years later, Nan was a fashion editor herself. “I was twenty, I was hot, I was like, get the hell out of my way.”

  I’m thinking, Me too.

  “And fashion, you know, is a crazy business . . . parties, drinking, parties, coke, parties, more drinking. And this was my life, for twenty years. But you know, it was everyone’s life. Or so I thought. I didn’t have blackouts or do crazy things. No drama, no missing work, nothing.”

  I notice that her long red nails are chipped. I like that. It says something about her priorities. In rehab, I learned that being sober has to be your number one priority. Then a tiny seed of doubt enters my mind. Does it really say she’s just barely holding it together?

  “After a while I realized I was always the first one with a drink and the last one to leave the party. I mean, I knew I was drinking too much. I felt like it was no big deal because, you know, nothing had ever happened to me. And oh, you know. Let me just tell you that time passes. I went on like that all through my twenties and thirties.” She stops talking, takes a sip from the tall Starbucks cup in front of her. “People bitch about Starbucks but I think it’s the best,” she says.

  People laugh. Starbucks owes every alcoholic in America a few free rounds.

  “Starbucks is my higher power.”

  People laugh harder.

  She clears her throat, places both arms on the podium. “Okay, right, so last year, I’m in the shower one morning and I’m thinking about what I have to deal with that day. You know, like I have a meeting with Michael Kors, a lunch with the buyer from Bloomingdale’s, etcetera, etcetera; just work stuff.” She takes her pinkie finger and swipes it beneath her right eye. “And all of a sudden, I feel this lump in my breast.” Her voice becomes small, as though she’s just stepped over the threshold into a church or temple. “It was a big lump. It was a mass.”

  The blades of the ceiling fan continue to turn, oblivious.

  “I think, Well, this is nothing. That’s what I tell myself. Nothing at all. A callous. That’s actually what I told myself. Can you imagine, a callous on my breast? I mean my sex life is just not that good.” When she says this people laugh openly, grateful for the valve.

  “But even my powers of denial aren’t that powerful and I gently reminded myself that my mother died of breast cancer, my grandmother died of breast cancer. . . .” Nan starts to cry, she just loses it. She covers her face with her hands and I watch her head bob against them as she heaves her tears out. But then just as fast, she regains her composure, swipes a tissue that has magically appeared in her fist across her eyes. “Sorry about that. So anyway, you know, now I totally know. I go to my doctor, he sends me to an oncologist. They do a biopsy and surprise surprise, it’s breast cancer. More tests, more doctors, more bad news. It’s not just in my breast, but in both breasts—as well as my liver, my stomach, my lungs and my lymphatic system.” She lets out this great sigh.

  Somebody’s pager goes off.

  “See, it was just like that,” Nan quips. “Your beeper goes off one day and there’s nothing you can do. Your time’s up.”

  People laugh as though this were a much funnier joke than it is. The terminal cancer-ridden alcoholic is able to joke about her own mortality thanks to AA, and this lets us off the hook. She knows how we fellow alcoholics hate feelings. I love Nan.

  “When he told me I had maybe four months to live, my very first thought was, I’m going to go get sloshed at Old Town Pub. But then I thought, I am not going to die a drunk. I am going to try to live the best I can. And that means as somebody who is sober. You see, even though back when I was drinking I thought nothing bad ever happened to me, something did. Time passed. A lot of time passed. In bars, at parties with people I didn’t care for. It was always the drink. It wasn’t about love or reading the Sunday paper in bed. Or housebreaking a puppy. Or anything that people call ‘life.’ It was about drinking. So actually, something bad, very bad, did happen to me. I wasted my life. And now, what little I have left, I want.”

  I think she’s spectacular. I think I’m pathetic and shallow. If I were her, I would be at Old Town right now, I am absolutely certain. I would be so drunk, I wouldn’t even know I was there.

  “But today, I have ninety days. Maybe tomorrow I will have ninety-one, maybe the day after—ninety-two, I don’t know. I’m already living off borrowed time. But you know what? I’m sober today and I would rather have today, this one day sober than a whole lot of days drunk.”

  The room applauds. Applause is a constant thing in AA. It’s how we buy drinks for each other.

  She smiles, her eyes moist. After she’s finished, people raise their hands and she calls on them.

  Somebody says, “Nan, your story really made me grateful for my own sobriety. I have fifteen years, one day at a time, and, well, I think you are so brave.”

  Nan smiles. Calls on someone else: me.

  “Hi, Nan,” I begin. “I just got back from rehab and it’s weird. It’s like, I’m, uh.” I can’t think of what to say. As soon as I opened my mouth to express my thoughts, my thoughts dissolved. “I mean, you know. I guess I just feel raw and like all opened up. I was thinking as you were speaking, you know. That if I were you, I’d already be drunk. I don’t have your courage. Or your appreciation for life, I guess is what I mean. I mean, I’m really feeling good about being sober and everything. But I don’t know if I could deal if, you know, something bad happened.”

  Nan asks, “How many days did you say you have?”

  “Thirty.”

  “Congratulations, that is so fucking great. But I can tell you that at thirty days, I was a mess. At sixty days, I was getting better. And today, I really have this sense of sobriety. I really would rather be here, at Perry Street, than out there.” She motions with her head to the outside. “Thirty days ago, if I heard my story, I’d feel the same way you do. Keep coming back.”

  I want whatever it is that she has. Looking around at the faces in the room, I notice a certain amount of peace. These people don’t look strung out. They don’t look desperate. Nobody has tremors that I can see.

  We join hands and repeat the Sinead O’Connor serenity prayer. Followed by a chant: “Keep coming back it works if you work it so work it you’re worth it.”

  My feeling at the end is that AA is utterly amazing. Complete strangers getting together in rooms at all hours and saying things that are so personal, so incredibly intimate. This is the kind of stuff that happens in a relationship after a few months. But people here open up right away, with everyone. It’s like some sort of love affair, stripped of the courtship phase. I feel bathed in safety. I feel like I have this secret place I can go and say anything in the world, about anything I feel, and it’s okay. And this makes me feel grateful to be an alcoholic. And this is a very odd feeling. This is like what my friend, Suzanne, says about childbirth—that it husks the soul.

  Back home, I sit on the sofa of my newly clean apartment. I’m still blown away by the mess I encountered. Like stepping right back into my old life. How could I have lived like that? How could I have not seen it? The problem is, I’m a slob to begin with. So when you combine
alcohol with a slob, you just end up with something that would appall any self-respecting heroin-addicted vagrant.

  The next day, I go to the gym. It’s been over a month since I’ve worked out and I’m depressed to see that instead of being able to do curls with the forty-five pound weights, I struggle with the twenties. This shouldn’t matter to me. I’m not drinking is what should matter. But the fact that I’ve deflated depresses me and makes me want to drink. I gained one thing and lost another. Just shut the hell up, asshole, I tell myself. Get your priorities straight.

  While I’m doing tricep kickbacks, my face ready to burst capillaries, a handsome guy doing squats smiles at me. Nods his head. I immediately look away, feeling very much like damaged goods. Because even though I’m in public like a normal person now, I am still removed from society. I imagine how our coffee conversation might go.

  Squat Man: So, tell me about yourself.

  Me: Well, I just got out of rehab. And went to the first of the AA meetings I will have to attend for the rest of my life.

  Squat Man: Hey that’s great, man. Good for you. Listen dude, I gotta run. Nice talkin’ with ya. Good luck. Ciao.

  Like cubic zirconia, I only look real. I’m an imposter. The fact is, I’m not like other people. I’m like other alcoholics. Mr. Squat can probably go out, have a couple drinks and then go home. He might even have to be talked into a third drink on a Friday night. Then on Saturday morning, he might have a slight hangover. I, on the other hand, would have to be talked out of a thirteenth drink on a Monday. And I wouldn’t wake up with a hangover. Just a certain thickness that only after rehab, only after waking up without this thickness, did I realize was a hangover. A comfortable hangover, like a pair of faded jeans or a favorite sweater with too many fur balls on it.

  I go down to the locker room. In the shower I think about how I’m a drunk that doesn’t get to drink. It seems unfair. Like keeping a Chihuahua in a hamster cage.

  Today is my first day back at work. It’s my moment of dread. I make sure I am there by nine. At a quarter past ten, Greer knocks on my door even though it’s open. “Knock, knock,” she says softly, smiling, leaning her head into the door. I feel like I’m in a sanitary napkin commercial and she’s about to discreetly ask, “Kelly? Do you ever feel . . . you know, not so fresh?”

  “Hey,” I say, getting up from my chair.

  Greer is wearing a smile, as opposed to having one. “Give me a hug,” she says, outstretching her arms in a huge, grandiose arch.

  We never hug. Even though we’ve worked together for years, we just never hug. I was raised by an angry, unaffectionate alcoholic father and a manic-depressive, narcissistic mother, which explains why I don’t hug. Greer is from a “good” WASP family in Connecticut. They owned bluetick coonhounds and she vacationed in Switzerland. Which explains why she doesn’t hug, either.

  We hug, stiffly. She tells me, “You look great, so trim and healthy. I wouldn’t have recognized you.” Greer is beaming. When she beams, the skin on the bridge of her nose wrinkles in a funny way because of the two very subtle scars leftover from her nose job. (“It wasn’t a nose job, it was rhinoplasty. I had a bulbous nasal tip. That’s a medical condition.”)

  We sit, I at my desk, she in the chair next to it. She crosses her legs, adjusts the gold bangle bracelet on her wrist. “So . . .” she exhales. “Tell me everything.” Then with a gossip-columnist grin, “Meet anybody famous?”

  “Um, just Robert Downey, Jr., he was there.”

  Greer’s legs fly into an uncrossed position and she leaps at me, slapping both hands on her thighs. “Oh my God, you are kidding!” she cries. “Robert Downey, Jr.? Why I am just so not surprised. I was reading in People last week . . .” She continues her story. I wait for her to catch up. It takes a moment. Then she sinks back into her chair, recrosses her legs. “Oh, I should have known. I am so gullible. Stupid Greer.” She knocks the palm of her hand against her left temple, careful not to disturb her hair. “Okay, so how was it . . . really?” she asks.

  Do I tell her about the girl who needed her lover to cut her with razor blades? Or maybe the stuffed animal ritual? Perhaps I should talk about relapse triggers. Should I say, I’m transformed, I see it now, I get it? I feel overwhelmed by insight and knowledge, yet I also feel like I can’t explain everything to her. Or anybody. Like people say after they tell a really bad joke, you just had to be there.

  “Honestly, Greer, it was great, it really was.”

  I scratch my elbow, which probably means something to body language experts. “I don’t have the energy to go into all the details now. It was too intense and complicated, but—”

  “I understand, I understand completely. Don’t feel you need to talk about it,” she says, cutting me off. Then she smiles, raising just her right eyebrow. “Wanna know what’s going on around the office?” she says, unable to contain her enthusiasm.

  It’s a bit of a letdown that she doesn’t press me for details. I wouldn’t mind grossing her out with Kavi stories. “Sure, there must be a ton of work.”

  Greer smiles. “You’re going to be so excited. We’re pitching the Wirksam account. Wirksam beer from Germany, can you imagine? I mean, I know it’s not Beck’s, but how cool!” Her face lights up, sixteen-hundred-dollar laser-whitened teeth gleaming.

  “Wirksam beer?” I ask. “Hmm.” According to my rehab feeling chart, I am feeling worried and concerned, but also hopeful and excited. Possibly slightly panicked, though I don’t recall a face for this.

  “What??!!” Greer wants to know. “You don’t seem . . .” She searches for that elusive word. “. . . excited.”

  “Well, I am, you know. It’s just Wirksam is beer and beer is alcohol and, well, I just got out of rehab.”

  Her Edith Bunker face appears. “Ohhhhhh,” she says, getting it. Then something in her head clicks. “Yeah, but beer isn’t alcohol. It’s just . . . beer. I mean, right? That’s right, isn’t it?” She smiles the guilty smile of somebody who has just dropped off her purebred Basenji to the Humane Society because it chewed her bedskirt—innocent without the right to be.

  “No, beer is alcohol. It counts,” I say.

  Now Greer is wearing this I just shot my parents by mistake face. “I’m sorry, yes, yes, of course. Oh my God, I really hadn’t thought of it like that.”

  I wave my hands. “It’s okay, it’s fine. I’m not saying that it’s going to be a problem, just that I have to be careful.”

  “Oh, we’ll be very careful,” Greer promises. “Very careful.”

  I’ve never seen her look so bizarre. The vein on the side of her forehead seems to actually be pulsating. It’s awkward to be around her, because I feel like she’s walking on eggshells. Like in one of those cheesy interracial movies from the seventies where nobody ever mentions that the white girl’s boyfriend is black, but everyone is highly aware of it. Then somebody says watermelon in a sentence and everyone sort of gasps. That’s how I feel.

  “I’m going to make a latte run, you want one?” she asks nervously. “Never mind, I’ll get you one. A decaf,” she says before I have a chance to answer.

  My first day back and already there’s something boozy to deal with. Writing about beer isn’t drinking beer, but it’s certainly romanticizing it. I see the green glass bottle sitting on the white sweep, lit from behind, reflectors placed on either side to catch every glistening drop of moisture on the bottle. Unfortunately, it’s not much of a leap to then see myself licking the bottle caps, drinking the flat beer, making a pass at the photographer’s assistant and being fired for falling on top of the Hassleblad.

  I will have to be careful. I will have to be more than careful. I will have to act as if I am in a hot zone, working with Ebola.

  At a little past five, I decide that I have had enough for the first day and I take a cab home. Leaving at five in advertising is like leaving at eleven A.M. at normal jobs, so I feel a little guilty, like I’m slacking off. But all the way home in the cab, I notice how much
brighter the colors of the signs out the window look, how much grander the buildings are. And when the cab bounces over a huge pothole, I seem to remain in midair just a little longer.

  I am in possession of this cool new thing: my sobriety.

  And it’s an actual high.

  The cab flies down Second Avenue, making all the green lights. And then I see a yellow coming up and I think we’re not going to make it, but we do, just in time. We make it and this gives me a rush because making all the lights like this feels predestined, and to miss a light now would be like bad luck, a curse. I survived work, I’m going to an AA meeting tonight and I’m not drinking. I don’t even want to drink. Everything feels right.

  And I don’t even feel like I’m talking myself into it, which for me is always an occupational hazard.

  “You must be Augusten,” the woman in the floral print dress and Reeboks says to me. “I’m Wendy.” She extends her hand. What is it with alcohol counselors and floral prints?

  I rise from my chair in the reception area of HealingHorizons. She has no grip. She lays her hand in mine like she’s handing me a baby trout she just caught and doesn’t know what to do with. I think, Her father wanted a boy, so he didn’t bother to teach her about grips.

  “Hi, Wendy, nice to meet you.”

  “Follow me, then.” She smiles.

  She smells like hair conditioner. She smells like her floral print dress. I suspect a cover-up of some sort. But then, alcoholics are suspicious.

  Once inside her office, she takes the seat at her desk and points me to the chair beside it. There’s a framed poster on the wall across from me that reads WILL YOU PLEASE LET GO OF YOUR WILL!? She also has a large bookcase filled with various manuals: Managing Codependence, Twelve Steps One Step at a Time, When Children of Alcoholics Aren’t Children Anymore, If You Want What We Have.