Dry

by Augusten Burroughs

  I smiled and said, “I’m great, Rick. Thank you so much for asking.”

  He closed his eyes briefly and smiled tightly. “You’re welcome,” he said, except no words came out. He just sort of mouthed the words.

  “Anyway,” Elenor said. “Let’s see some work.”

  We took Elenor through the storyboards. “This campaign would take place in real bars in modern Berlin,” Greer began.

  “Uh-oh, do I smell a travel bug in this room?” Rick said in his annoying, high-pitched perky voice.

  Greer ignored him and continued. “And the bars would be filled with really hip, eccentric characters. Dwarfs, albino waitresses, cross-dressers.”

  Before we were able to even take them through the whole storyboard, Elenor interrupted. “I don’t want to get into the whole weird Germany thing. I can just tell you they’re not gonna go for that. I mean, it’s totally true, the Germans are all perverted, but they’ll never go for it. Sorry.”

  I looked at Greer. “Let’s show her the next one.”

  Greer pulled the next campaign out. “Okay, no weird Germany. How about playing off all the other German imports. Like Claudia Schiffer, BMWs, Albert Einstein.”

  “That could be cool,” Elenor said, nodding.

  As Greer led her through the visuals, I read the copy out loud.

  A look of concern spread across Elenor’s face. “It’s too much like Apple. Got anything else?”

  We presented our German perfectionist campaign, which made both Elenor and Rick think of concentration camps.

  “What else?” Elenor asked, lighting a cigarette and then chewing on her lip while she exhaled through her nose.

  Greer coughed. “We were looking into this direction of old German stereotypes, like milk maidens and lederhosen. Making them new and hip.”

  “Sort of a ‘Germany isn’t what you think’ kind of thing,” I said.

  “I like that concept,” Rick said as I held up the picture of the blonde with double braids.

  I studied his annoying face, the ponytail years out of style, the Diesel jeans that no forty-four-year-old should be wearing. He struck me as sad, if not pathetic. I silently willed him under a bus, soon.

  “What?” he said pleasantly, catching me staring at him.

  “Nothing.”

  “Listen guys,” Elenor began, “I don’t think we’re there yet. Keep working. We really want to push the envelope on this one. Think outside the box. Think Nike.”

  Greer forced her mouth into a smile. “Okay. We’ll keep going.”

  “I agree,” Rick said. “Keep going. But I’d stay away from anything that’s gonna cause problems.” He clasped his hands in his lap. “And stay away from the whole New Germany thing, that’s just not a safe space to be thinking in.”

  Elenor glanced at Rick, puzzled. As if to say, What New Germany thing?

  I looked at Greer. We hadn’t presented our New Germany campaign. We decided between us that it was wrong. The New Germany campaign existed in only two places: in our heads, and in my backpack in the form of loose sketches.

  “Rick,” I said, “how do you know about the New Germany campaign?”

  He sat a little straighter and blinked. “You just presented it.”

  “No we didn’t,” Greer said quickly.

  Rick looked at Elenor who was looking at Rick, waiting for his answer. “What do you mean?” he said.

  “How did you know we did a New Germany campaign?” I said. I folded my arms across my chest. My heart was pounding, I was furious.

  “Well, I just, you know, I just mean in general,” he said clumsily.

  “You fucking asshole,” I said. “You went through my goddamn backpack. You went into my office and you looked at our work.”

  “Hold on there a minute, Augusten,” Elenor said.

  I turned to her sharply. “He’s been rooting around in my office. He’s been leaving nasty notes and moving my stuff around. He stuck a bottle of booze on the bookcase.”

  “Oh, that’s absurd,” Rick said. “Augusten, you’re tense. You’re really being paranoid. I know you’ve gone through a difficult time, but no one is out to get you. Really.”

  Greer glared at him and he seemed to shrink into the sofa.

  “You’re pathetic,” I spat. “I see through you, you know. You don’t fool me at all.”

  Elenor said, “Okay, let’s just move on.” She rose from her chair. “I can’t sit here all day and listen to who took whose crayons. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  Greer and I moved to the door. “When do you want to see another round?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Tomorrow morning?”

  I checked my watch: it was almost six.

  In the elevator, Greer stabbed the lobby button. “I hate those two,” she spat. “I can’t believe we have to work all night again. They are so full of shit. Nike! They don’t want anything cool. They want some awful jingle.”

  “I wish Rick would get gang-raped by a bunch of Muslim garbage collectors,” I said, fuming. Now I knew for sure. The magazine ads, the bottle and now this.

  The doors opened and Greer stormed through the lobby. We walked to the coffee shop next door and ordered two large coffees. In the elevator on the way back up to our office, Greer turned to me. “God, her ugly little daughter must be horribly spoiled and obnoxious.”

  “I can just imagine,” I said. “And ad people are so full of shit. ‘Push the envelope.’ It’s like, they think something is cool and edgy if they’ve only seen it a couple of times before.”

  “Exactly. I’d like to push the envelope right up her cunt,” Greer hissed.

  After work one night, I call Foster. I either have to see him every day or talk to him on the phone. It’s come to that.

  “C’mon over,” he says.

  When I get to his apartment, I’m shocked by how awful he looks; ragged and red-eyed. He hasn’t shaved for days. “What’s the matter with you?” I ask him.

  He walks over the sofa, sits. “I just haven’t felt good this week.”

  He’s smoking crack, I think. “Are you using?” I ask.

  “No,” he says.

  Foster has two clocks in his living room. One on the fireplace mantel and another on the table next to the sofa. Both clocks are set incorrectly. And he knows exactly how incorrectly. The clock on the mantle is one hour and four minutes slow. The one on the table is five minutes fast. So when you ask him the time, his eyes dart back and forth between the two clocks while he does the math in his head. Although he could have not one but two clocks that are each set to exactly the correct time, this does not happen. It would be too easy. Better to struggle. Better to work for the time and sometimes get the math wrong and arrive an hour late.

  I ask him if I missed anything interesting in Group this week. “Nah, nothing much,” he says. Something is off with him. Or maybe it’s me. Maybe he doesn’t like me anymore. I test the theory by leaning back against him.

  He folds me into his arms. “Ahhh, that’s exactly what I needed,” he drawls. “I missed you so much, more than you can know. I hate your work, Auggie.”

  I figure, as long as there aren’t any scented candles burning, this can’t be considered romantic, and thus in violation of the “no romantic involvement” clause I signed.

  He reaches over for a book on the coffee table. “Here, let me read you a little Dorothy Parker. That’ll cheer us up.” He gives one of his utterly comforting Southern laughs. His laugh is made of porch swings and lemonade. He begins reading, and I close my eyes. I realize I have not been read to since I was little kid. My mother used to read to me all the time. As he reads, he kind of wraps those thick legs of his around mine. I picture my therapist Wendy asking me, “So what do you and Foster do?” And me replying, “Oh, we talk on the phone, hang out.”

  What are the odds of me finding another movie-star handsome, literate, sweet, loyal, masculine, independently wealthy and single guy who seems to be crazy about me? Crack is
only five letters, I remind myself.

  Last week after my road trip with Foster, Hayden asked if we’d slept together yet.

  “No, we haven’t,” I said, the truth.

  “Just be careful,” he said. “Just know what you’re getting yourself into.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean, if you’re going to sleep with the mobster then fine, sleep with the mobster. But don’t pretend that’s a Stradivarius he’s carrying around inside that violin case.”

  We haven’t slept together. But we’ve napped.

  The weekend goes like this: Hayden paces around the apartment, frantic and edgy, because of an opera he’s editing freelance, which he calls “incomprehensible, impossible.”

  I pace around the apartment wondering why Foster hasn’t called me. Why, when I call him, which I have been doing constantly, he doesn’t answer. I’ve left messages, I’ve spent large chunks of time psychically directing him to make my phone ring. Nothing. Why is it not difficult to imagine him smoking crack in a hotel room somewhere?

  Hayden goes to four meetings on Sunday. I go to none.

  Our of sheer anxiety and general mental dysfunction, I shave off my chest hair and see a Gus Van Sant movie at the Angelika. I go to the gym twice. I almost have a washboard stomach now. It’s a five-pack, not quite a six-pack. I take care of it like I’m taking care of Foster’s pet. I consider it his.

  By Sunday night Hayden’s calmer, having made progress on the score.

  And I’m worse. At group on Tuesday, there’s no Foster. And the reason there’s no Foster is, as Wayne the group leader explains, because “Foster has quit therapy. He called one of our staff on Monday and explained that he’s been using for a month and that he’s not ready to stop.”

  My first thought: Evisceration—swift and complete. My second thought: So that wasn’t salt I tasted on his lips at the beach. It was crack.

  After Group, I go to the nearest pay phone and call him. I let it ring a couple dozen times. No answer.

  “Guess what?” I tell Hayden when I come home, furious. “Foster quit therapy. He’s been smoking crack for a month, in secret.”

  “Je-sus,” Hayden says slowly. But I detect something in his voice. Awe. Envy?

  I call Foster again; still nothing. I am insane, that’s all there is to it. What was I thinking? Falling for a crack addict from my group therapy? A guy who can’t even set a clock? A man who, while stroking my hair and telling me everything is perfectly fine, was going out at night and scoring crack?

  All of a sudden Hayden says, “I need to go for a walk. I need some air.” And before I can ask him what the problem is, he’s out the door.

  I rummage around for a snack. I choose the wrong thing. There is no worse taste in the mouth than chocolate and cigarettes. Second would be tuna and peppermint. I’ve combined everything, so I know.

  “I’m sorry, Auggie. I’m sorry I let you down.”

  I’m sitting on Foster’s sofa, because I took a cab up to his building and tipped the doorman fifty dollars to let me in. Then I took the elevator up to his apartment and pounded on the door until he answered it, groggily.

  “Why?” is all I can think to say.

  He says nothing.

  I look at him, sprawled back on his sofa. A raging crack addict, group therapy dropout disguised as a Banana Republic ad. His toes wriggle in his socks and my first thought is, I want to snip them off with hedge trimmers. Not only does he not deserve to wriggle his toes, he does not deserve to have toes. He deserves to have stumps. He cannot be trusted with toes because they enable him to walk and thus seek out the company of crack dealers. Kathy Bates’s character completely understood this concept in Misery.

  “I hate you,” I tell him. “I really, really hate you.” I lean my head against his chest. “You’re bad for me.” I am channeling Hayden. What I really feel is, You are perfect for me.

  He kisses the top of my head and I pull away. “You look horrible, Foster,” I tell him. And he does, for him, look horrible. He’s fallen rock-bottom to a nine-and-a-half in the looks department. I turn away. It’s an effort.

  The coffee table is strewn with debris; cigarette butts, dirty glasses, old newspapers, his asthma inhaler. I fantasize about sticking a safety pin through the opening of it and ppppfffffssssssssst, letting all the medicine out. So when he reaches for it in the night, it won’t be there, like the sobriety he had amassed. It will be gone. And as he wheezes and turns blue, I will point out the irony. “See, Foster, one must never take for granted those things which keep us alive.”

  “Don’t hate me, Auggie,” he says, in his best puppy dog voice, which unfortunately is a very good puppy dog voice.

  “It’s a little too late for that, Foster.” Kick the puppy.

  “Auggie, answer me honestly. Do you hate me?”

  Long, contemplative sigh. “No, I don’t hate you, Foster.” I don’t tell him that what I feel is far beyond mere hatred, and well into another state of mind that only a handful of people on the FBI’s Most Wanted list ever experience. Those people and perhaps Jim.

  “It’s so easy for you, Auggie, so easy. You go to rehab and BAM! you come back and that’s it—you don’t drink anymore. You don’t even go to meetings anymore. That group therapy just wasn’t working for me.”

  “Well, how could it work, if you were high all the time?” I’m disgusted with him. And me. “Look, you know what? Go ahead and smoke all the crack you want. Hang out with your hustlers or your dealers or whatever it is you do.” I stand up to leave. “But know exactly what it is you’re giving up.”

  He leaps up off the couch and grabs a hold of my arm. “Auggie, please.”

  “Please what, Foster?”

  “Please don’t walk out of my life.”

  I could kill him, I really could. “Give me one good reason why not.”

  “Because I love you.”

  Uh huh. “Yeah, but not as much as you love other things. Like crack, for example.” I pull my arm away and turn back toward the door. I tell myself, Just keep walking. Go to the door and turn the knob. Don’t look back at him. Don’t do it. Go with the flow of mental health.

  “Auggie,” he says.

  I stop, still facing the door. “What?” I say angrily.

  “Would you please turn around and look at me?”

  I don’t budge.

  “Auggie, please?”

  I turn around and face him.

  “Please don’t give up on me.”

  “What difference does it make if I give up on you? You’ve already given up on yourself.” This seems like the right, dramatic thing to say. I am a movie of the week.

  And then something in him engages. Some internal machinery. And very slowly, he walks toward me, head slightly down, shining ice-blue eyes looking directly at me. His jeans are rumpled, his T-shirt half untucked. I back away, until I’m up against the door. Inches from my face, he cocks his head slightly. Then he moves his lips so close to mine, they just barely touch and he whispers,

  “One

  more

  chance.”

  Had I known beforehand that this would be the night I actually slept with him, I’m sure I wouldn’t have come in the first place.

  WHAT’LL IT BE?

  I

  make it home sometime after midnight. Hayden is lying on the sofa reading Elizabeth Berg. “Well, hello there,” he says as I walk in the door.

  “Hey,” I say, trying to sound casual, hoping he won’t ask where I’ve been.

  “I almost relapsed,” he says, resting the book on his chest.

  “What!?” I shout.

  “You know, when you told me that Foster has been smoking crack for a month, it just triggered something in me. And I swear I could actually smell crack.” He looks a little crazy. “And I wanted it.”

  “What did you do?” The idea that he came so close to relapse is fascinating and also appalling. I simply cannot imagine myself coming anywhere close to re
lapsing, no matter how awful things become.

  “I went into a bar and I ordered a glass of wine.”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”

  “And then I got up from the bar right away and went straight to a meeting.”

  Relief.

  “But I’ll tell you, I was mighty close.”

  “Hayden, I am so glad you didn’t relapse.”

  And then without missing a beat, Hayden asks me with his most British of British accents, “And where were you this evening?”

  Hayden is aghast that I not only went uptown to confront Foster, but that on top of it, had sex with him.

  “We didn’t technically have sex,” I say in my own defense.

  “Well, you either did, or you didn’t. Which is it?”

  “Yes and no,” I say.

  “Augusten . . .”

  “Okay, I know this is going to sound strange, but I didn’t look at it.”

  Hayden looks at me like he’s not sure he really wants to understand what I mean. “You didn’t look . . . at what?”

  “I didn’t look, you know, at his thing.”

  “At his penis?” Hayden says, a word the British should never say out loud.

  “Yeah. I didn’t look at it. So technically, I’ve never seen him fully naked and this means, we couldn’t technically have had actual sex.”

  Hayden takes the book off his chest and sits upright on the sofa, looks at me with his mouth agape.

  “And besides, Hayden, even if you do consider it sex, I haven’t crossed any boundaries because we’re not in the same group therapy anymore.”

  Hayden laughs, rolls his eyes. “You make it sound like he switched over into another group. The reason you’re not ‘in the same group therapy anymore’ is because your little boyfriend quit group therapy so he can smoke crack cocaine full-time.”

  “But I love him,” I say in all my pathetic glory.

  Hayden stands up, pulls a Silk Cut from the pack. “If—just for a moment try to imagine—if this Foster character wasn’t as you say devastatingly handsome, if he looked just average, would you still be in love with him?”

  His question really takes me by surprise, because I’d never even considered that. Yet the answer comes immediately: “No. I don’t know. Yes. No.”