Dry: A Memoir

by Augusten Burroughs

  “Of course. So like I said, he came in a few months ago, and he had this very specific piece of jewelry that he wanted made . . . for you, Mr. Burroughs.” He laughs softly again. “Like I said, he was very specific. And, it’s a mighty unusual piece, I must say. But our craftsmen did a beautiful job, if you’d like to see.” He opens the box.

  I lean forward. Whatever it is, it’s wrapped in velvet. “Here we go, let me just remove this pouch and . . . there you have it. There’s an inscription on the back, certainly the most unique inscription we’ve ever done.”

  At first, I can’t tell what it is except that it’s large and gold. I reach my hand toward the object in the box, but before I touch it, I see clearly exactly what it is.

  It’s a gold pig’s head. A Pighead.

  It comes out of me at once, propelled by a force all its own, a noise I’ve never made before.

  A gigantic laugh straddling a guttural sob. The older man flinches, startled. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I’m trying to speak, but it comes out messy and wet. I slide my glasses off my face, drag my sleeve across my eyes. A laugh comes through, then a choke.

  “Can I, may I please . . .” And I take the Pighead out of the box. The back of it is flat, engraved. I have to swipe my eyes again to get the blur out so I can read what it says.

  In the tiniest italic print, it says:

  I’M WATCHING YOU. NOW STOP DRINKING.

  I remove the golden Pighead, palm it and start to leave. “Mr. Burroughs,” the man says. “The box?”

  I say, “I don’t need it.” And I don’t. I absolutely do not need anything else.

  I walk outside. And there is no word for this. I walk and I walk and I walk and I walk and I walk. Something is building in me, and I know what it is, so I chant, “Let it out, let it out, let it out,” as I walk, not caring if I seem insane. Not looking at the other people on the sidewalk who must be staring at me as I talk to myself.

  And then I am weeping. I am bawling. I am not holding any of it back. I am not thinking of ducking into a doorway and covering my face or swallowing it whole so that it goes deep inside my chest again. I am walking and everything is draining out of me.

  And like a moron, like a wasted disaster of a man, I open my hand and see that my palm is still filled with this obscene mound of gold, this message from the dead. And I bring it to my lips and I kiss it and I say, “I fucking love you.”

  Except I am not saying this. I am screaming it at the very highest altitude of my lungs.

  I feel as though helium has been injected into the spaces between my cells. I feel lighter and also slightly intoxicated.

  It is only when I get home, the Pighead glowing warm and gold in my pocket, that I sink.

  I am excited that Pighead has communicated with me from the dead. I want to summon the actual, live Pighead and tell him this. “It’s a miracle,” I want to tell him. “A message.”

  And as I step into my apartment and twist the deadbolt, it hits me. He’s dead.

  And suddenly, I feel tricked. As though someone has played a horrible joke on me. Given him to me, then taken him back. My elation—a message from Pighead! I can go over to his apartment again and ignore him!— seemed to imply that I’d found a sort of portal.

  Like when I sleep. I look forward to going to sleep because I hope, or sort of wish, that I will dream about him and that it will be so real, I will have no choice but to accept that I slipped through some kind of wormhole, over to the “other side” and that the Pighead I met in my dream is the real Pighead.

  The gold Pighead had opened a door. It was a message, and it’s rude not to return a message.

  This is followed by the crushing of fact. He ordered the Pighead before he died. It was a message from the living. From the dying, actually. But still. There is no door.

  My apartment, perfect squalor, closes in around me once again. The empty cartons, some with leftover, uneaten food dried and molding in the corners, comfort me. My mess, my disgusting nest. Bottles, everywhere. The mattress, soaked with urine, left to dry, only to be pissed on again. Flies skid across the surface of the sheet, itself unwashed for months—perhaps sucking salt or other minerals from the fibers.

  On the stove, in the center between the burners where I always keep my “current” bottle, is my current bottle. It is half empty and, like a baby, this makes me long for more. I will need to go to the liquor store on Second Avenue and get two more bottles. Two is the most I can manage to force myself to buy at once. More than two, and I feel ashamed, chronic, like a wino.

  I remove the gold Pighead from my pocket and place it carefully in the cabinet above the sink. This is where I keep important things—birth certificate, passport, the sterling silver cup my grandmother gave my mother the day after I was born. I place it in the cupboard next to the cup and I close the door. Inside the cupboard is the only clean space in the apartment. It is protected from dust, debris. The air is rare and clean, the door blocking most of the stale cigarette smoke and a rotting life.

  I walk to the liquor store, get my bottles and return home. I drink. Why couldn’t I let Pighead’s gold Pighead be what he meant it to be: a message? He knew he’d be dead when I got it. It was his way of finding me.

  Yet, I drink. And I feel sick with myself that I do.

  I sit at the computer and get lost, drinking, smoking, going deeper and deeper into the screen. I am rereading Pighead’s old e-mails. There are dozens of them and I read them all. Drunk now, I am looking for something I missed.

  “I miss you,” he writes. “And yet, what can I say? It seems that you will always think I am asking so much—too much from you. When all I want is your company. Just a movie, just some time. But you’re always busy, advertising or drinking or, I don’t know, Augusten. I’m just so tired.”

  In bed, I turn off the light and the dark pulses around me. My eyes adjust, the thick black dissolving, giving way to shapes in the room—my bookcase, a mound of magazines, some years old. And then I see the spider. It moves quickly from one corner of the room, along the seam where the ceiling meets the wall. I think it has something to do with my eyes adjusting to the dark. But I watch as it pauses, and then changes direction. It’s big, and its apricot seed–sized body is supported by long legs. It waits. Does it see me? Carefully, I reach over and turn on the light. I do this without moving my eyes from it; I do not want to lose the spider. I will turn on the light and see if it scampers away and if it doesn’t, I will get a magazine and squash it.

  The light is on and the spider is not there.

  And this is absolutely impossible, because my eyes did not leave the spot for one instant, my finger turning on the lamp switch beside the bed by feel. But the spider is gone.

  It defies reason. I go to sleep.

  The next evening, I drink again. I finish the first liter of Dewar’s and then go to the cabinet to hold the gold Pighead.

  I feel its weight in the cup of my hand. Gold is heavy. For the first time I think, This must have cost him a fortune.

  It scares me to have the Pighead exposed to the air in my apartment. The air feels filthy, as though it will contaminate this treasure the way I feel contaminated myself. I place it back in the cabinet and sit at my computer.

  I type chatty e-mails to friends in San Francisco and I am okay. I finish both bottles.

  I go to bed and I see the spider when I turn off the light. Tonight, there are many spiders. The ceiling is filled with them.

  I turn on the light and there are none.

  I understand now that I am hallucinating. In rehab I learned that chronic, late-stage alcoholics hallucinate. Seeing spiders is, in fact, not uncommon.

  I go to sleep feeling impressed with the powers of the mind.

  The next morning, I am sick. I feel like I have the flu. My lungs hurt. I have a fever. I cannot move.

  I have been in bed for ten hours. It is, in fact, not morning but afternoon. I put a pillow over my eyes, tucking it around the bridge of my nose
so I can breathe. I sleep.

  When I wake up, I feel worse. My body aches, as though damaged.

  I understand that I will not drink today. I will not smoke, either. I am too sick to drink or smoke, my interest in both replaced by the knowledge that I am not afraid of death. I feel like shit. If I died, it would be okay. The cliché When you have your health, you have everything is very true. When you do not have your health, nothing else matters at all.

  I sleep for another ten hours. When I wake I am shaking all over. I hold my hand out in front of me and it vibrates.

  I feel worse.

  My heart is racing. This, in fact, is what woke me up. My heart beating so wildly in my chest that it woke me from my dream, like someone pounding on the front door.

  I sit up in bed, pillows stuffed behind me. What the fuck?

  That night, I am worse still. My whole body is shaking and hives are making swift progress across my entire body. They have covered my legs in red welts. They are spreading to my arms and my chest. They are ringing my neck, just above my clavicle. My mouth tastes metallic. Every sound—a horn outside, a distant shriek from somebody on the street, startles me. I lie down, thinking I must sleep this off. But as soon as I begin to drift off, I have the sensation of falling, and startle awake.

  The hives are fusing. They are not splotches now. They are like ropes, wrapped all around me. I am afraid.

  In the middle of the night I understand that I am in alcohol withdrawl and that it is serious and that I need to be in a hospital. But I cannot walk across my apartment, even to pee. I must pee in bed, sober, not asleep. I must pee in bed because I am too sick to walk. When I stand, I become massively dizzy and begin to black out. My legs itch and I have caused them to bleed. My throat feels like it has narrowed. Like I have hives inside my throat now. They feel like hands around my neck.

  It takes me three hours to prepare, but by morning I am dressed and I am walking down the two flights of stairs. I walk into the Korean market that is just downstairs and never closes. I go to the beer case and I buy hard cider. I am in agony as I wait for my change, having handed him a twenty. Finally, I cannot wait while he answers the phone. “It’s okay,” I say, and leave without a bag.

  Upstairs, I uncap a bottle and I drink from it as though it is water. And the effect is nearly immediate, but it is not enough. I drink three more in succession. My hands stop shaking and I feel calmer. The hard cider is medicine, now. Like in rehab, this is what they do with the really, really bad cases. They feed them small volumes of alcohol to lessen the physical withdrawal. They call it tapering.

  I stash the remaining bottles in the refrigerator and get back into my filthy bed. I turn on my right side, not my heart side, and I try to sleep. But again, as soon as I begin to drift to sleep, I have the feeling that I am falling from a great height and I am startled awake.

  I am going to die. If I fall asleep, my heart will stop and I will die. I need to be in a hospital now. I have alcohol poisoning.

  Oh my God, what have I done to myself? I am too afraid to move.

  Forty-eight hours later, I am better. The hives have reduced, though my legs are covered in welts, some split and bleeding. But I can tell they have lessened. My hands are not shaking. I drank the remaining bottles of hard cider and today have had no alcohol. I have had cranberry juice.

  I feel as though I will not die.

  And also, I feel as though I came very close to death.

  This is not a joke, I tell myself. I poisoned myself with alcohol. I almost killed my fucking self. I look around my apartment, standing in the center of it, the filth, everywhere, in piles, on surfaces, dead fruit flies, living fruit flies. Who would have found me? And when?

  I sit at my computer and there is still some Dewar’s in the cup next to me. The cup sits on top of the two-year-old box my computer came in. This is my table. Its top is concave, ready to implode. I drink from a Santa mug, a holiday mug I bought at the pharmacy downstairs for two dollars because I was sick of drinking from plastic cups and decided I deserved a real cup.

  A film of dead fruit flies cover the surface of the liquid.

  I will never take another drink for the rest of my life.

  I am in no position to say this. It is the One Thing an alcoholic should never say. It is the one thing an alcoholic cannot be certain of. It is unrealistic, part of denial.

  I will never drink again.

  And I will clean this apartment and reinvent myself and change every single thing until I am unrecognizable. I will new and improve myself, like an ad.

  I will start now.

  I take my mug to the kitchen sink and I pour the liquid into the drain. But what do I do with the mug? There is no trash can here. It’s all a trash can.

  I am so tired.

  I set the mug on the counter. I need to sleep. I wonder if I can.

  I get back into bed and this time, I fold a T-shirt into a strip and tie it around my head to block out the light.

  I go to sleep.

  And I do not die.

  ONE YEAR LATER

  A

  nyone here counting days?”

  Jim raises his hand, reluctantly. “My name is Jim and I’m an alcoholic. Today is day ninety.”

  Everyone claps and Jim’s sponsor winks at him. I nudge him with my elbow and grin.

  After the meeting, Jim and I walk along West Fourth. “Fuck. I really want a drink. I mean, I’m not gonna drink, but I really want one. Does the want ever go away?” he asks.

  “Well, I’m no expert. But no. Probably not.”

  “Great,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets.

  “That’s the bad news,” I tell him. “You can never replace it. The good news is you do learn to live without it. You miss it. You want it. You hang out with a bunch of other crazy people who feel the same way and you live with it. And eventually, you start to sound like a cloying self-help book, like me.”

  We pass by a secondhand bookstore and stop to look at the antique globe in the window. “It seems so easy for you,” he says. “It’s like you just don’t drink, period.”

  I recall the months after Pighead died where I entered my coma. What else to call it? Drinking from the moment I woke up until I passed out. Going to bars and trying to find a penis and then not having any idea what to do with it. Smoking crack with Foster. And then meeting Serena.

  And then the pig head. From Pighead.

  And then the plain, almost monastic process of waking up, taking a shower, going to an AA meeting and then doing this again and again, day after day until an amount of time had passed and it became not a struggle, but a routine. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I tell him. “It is so not easy for me. It was easy the first time. And look what happened. This time I have to really stay on top of it so it doesn’t sneak up on me. But you’re right in one way,” I say. “I just don’t drink.” And it doesn’t hurt that Foster has moved to Florida to open a bar. One less temptation in my geographical area.

  “What about tomorrow?” he asks.

  I spot Thailand on the globe, then Kuala Lumpur. “I don’t know anything about tomorrow,” I tell him. “The only thing I know about tomorrow is that I’m meeting Greer for this freelance thing we’re doing. Assuming a runaway bus doesn’t have other plans in store for me.” At first I was worried that I might have too much time on my hands as a freelancer. But it turned out to be the best thing. I don’t have to be in an office every day with assholes like Rick. And the day rate for freelancers is outrageous. I can afford really excellent underwear to sit around all day in.

  “It’s good that you and Greer are getting along again,” he says.

  “Yeah, I didn’t think it would stay bad forever.” Greer and I didn’t speak for almost ten months. Then she quit work and started taking anger workshops at the New School. She also took up painting. All her paintings are black. “It’s better now. We both speak recovery.”

  Jim goes into the tobacco store on the corner of Christo
pher and Seventh for some cigarettes. He comes out with a pack of American Spirits and growls, “It’s just so fucking uncomfortable.” A match flares at his fingertips.

  I nod. “I know, I get like that. I get where I feel like I’m gonna drink anyway, eventually. So I might as well do it now. It’s awful. Sometimes I feel like I have hives in my brain that I can’t scratch.”

  “What do you do?” Jim asks, very hungry for the answer, as this has probably described perfectly the way he feels at this moment.

  “You’re supposed to go to a meeting. I mean, as much as you hate them or if they feel stupid or you just don’t want to go. The thing is, if you go to a meeting, you won’t drink that day. It’s like a minibrainwash. It kind of fixes you for a little while.” But then I say, “Of course if I’m really wallowing in self-pity, then I’ll tell myself, ‘Pighead would give anything to feel this uncomfortable right now.’ ” So there’s always the auto–guilt trip method.

  We make a right on Bank. As we walk below a street lamp, a curious thing happens: it flickers and then illuminates. A wiring problem seems to have developed over the past year within the New York City street-lamp system. Many times I’ve noticed a street lamp coming on in the mid-afternoon, just as I pass by.

  “Hi, Pighead,” I whisper.

  “What’d you say?”

  “Nothing.” I smile, but it’s small, and only to myself.