Dry: A Memoir (11 page)

“These are delicious,” he says of the reconstituted scrambled eggs, the same eggs that sit on my own plate, untouched.

So far, I have lost almost ten pounds.
Why do stars suddenly appear . . .
“You’re from London, what would you know.”

He laughs, “That’s very true, actually. This is far better than anything my mother ever made.”

I make a face. “Did you have that nasty, yeasty stuff they spread on toast, what’s it called?”

His eyes brighten. “Vegemite! Oh yes, I love Vegemite.”

“You’ll enjoy dinner then,” I promise him.

For the next week, Hayden and I are inseparable. We sit together on the fireproof loveseats, cocooned in our own world of superiority. We exchange mortifying stories from our sordid pasts. We gossip endlessly about the other patients. No detail is too small to be ignored. When one of the lesbians trimmed her own bangs with nail clippers, we were utterly hysterical. We took it as a sure sign that she was struggling with control issues, destined for relapse.

I don’t think I have ever had such a close friend in my life, made instantly like Tang.

Time accelerates with Hayden around. I’ve stopped watching the second hand on the clock. It’s the kind of friendship that’s easy to make in elementary school when you’re six or seven. You let a kid have your swing and suddenly, he’s your best friend. Suddenly, you don’t care that you hate math, because you can hate it together. And after school, you want to play together. You never question it. You never say to yourself,
Am I spending too much time with him? Am I sending the wrong signal?

Then you get pubic hair and everything changes. Pubic hair signals the beginning of your demise. After pubic hair comes high school, college, work. By the time you’ve started working, you’re ruined. And you will never make a friend as completely and easily as you did when you still wiped your nose on your sleeve.

Unless, it seems, you are forced into rehab.

Hayden and I have talked about this very thing. We have marveled at the friendship that has blossomed between us, despite a combined age that would entitle us to a discount at the movies. “And the amazing part is,” Hayden has said, “we’re not drunk in a bar.”

This is true. It is possible to make close, instant friendships while sitting at a bar drinking. But these friendships tend to evaporate at four in the morning when the bar closes, or the next morning when you find yourself sleeping in the same bed.

But with Hayden, it just keeps going. And I can’t help but worry that it’s some sort of rehab spell. Like, will we still be friends when we’re both out of this place? I want us to be friends. I want us to live in the same apartment building, one floor between us like Mary and Rhoda. I feel gypped that I didn’t meet him earlier in life, so finding apartments with matching sunken living rooms in the same building seems like something we are owed.

During my last week in rehab, Hayden and I discover a Ping-Pong table folded up in the gym. It was behind a mound of boxes, so we never noticed it before.

“You want to give it a go?” he asks.

“Sure.” I haven’t played since I was a kid and my grandfather sent us a huge, folding green Ping-Pong table one Christmas. My parents couldn’t stand the thing and they kept it folded in the basement, against the wall near the hot water heater. But if you unfolded just one side and left the other side up at a right angle, you could play against yourself, hitting the ball off the opposite wall of the table. I got pretty good, but then it wasn’t like my opponent ever did anything unexpected.

After missing the ball three times in a row, I’m finally able to whack it back at him. The Ping-Pong section of my brain wakes up and we fall into a rhythm. “How’d you get so good?” I ask as I bend under the table to pick up the ball I just missed.

“Oh, my father. It’s all we’ve ever done together.”

“You’re not bad,” Hayden says after we’ve been going steady for a good sixty seconds or so.

“That’s because I’m excellent at pushing things away from me.”

We play for a few more minutes in silence, actually
concentrating
on Ping-Pong. This is either an achievement for me, or a new low.

He holds the ball up. “You wanna serve?”

“No, you.”

He
fwaps
the ball over to me and I
fwap
it back. I’m pretty good at this. If nothing else, I will leave here being able to play Ping-Pong. Possibly even against someone Chinese.

“I’m really going to miss you,” he says to me.

I’m leaving here in three days. Which doesn’t seem possible, because it feels like I’ve been here for years. Supposedly, I now have the “tools” that will help me cope on the outside. Tools such as the piece of paper Ray handed out last week in group. It was illustrated with about twenty different faces, drawn with simple black lines and displaying an emotion. Under each face was a caption.
Happy. Sad. Jealous. Angry. Confused. Afraid.
“When you’re wondering what it is you’re feeling at any given moment, simply pull out this chart and find the face that fits your mood.” So it’s basically an alcoholic-to-normal dictionary. I found myself carrying the thing folded up in the front pocket of my jeans and referring to it constantly, trying to decide what I was feeling. At the back of the lunch line, I would unfold the chart and find the face that matched my mood:
nauseous
.

“You know what scares me?” I say. “What scares me is how institutionalized I’ve become. How my whole life is this sick group of alcoholics. It’s like some extended, fucked-up family that I have everything in common with. I’m afraid I might not fit on the outside anymore.”

Hayden misses the ball. “Fuck,” he shouts. “I know exactly what you mean, I never want to leave.”

“I’m not ready,” I tell him. It’s safe here. I can live with fishcake sandwiches and linoleum flooring. On the outside, people won’t call me on my bullshit. I’ll be back to getting away with it.

“You’re ready,” he says.

“How do you know? What makes you think so?”

“Because when I first met you, I wasn’t even sure that you were really an alcoholic. I thought maybe you just drank a little too much sometimes.” His eyes twinkle. “Now I’m positive that you are, in fact, a raging alcoholic.”

“That means I should stay.” Is it possible? Have I gotten worse?

“On the contrary,” Hayden says, raising the ball into the air as if in a toast. “It means, my dear boy, that you are more real.”

PART II

PREPARE FOR LANDING

I

am not prepared for what I see when I unlock the door to my apartment. Although I have obviously seen it before, lived with it even, I have never encountered it through the lens of thirty days of sobriety. My apartment is filled with empty Dewar’s bottles, hundreds of empty Dewar’s bottles. They cover all surfaces; the counters in the kitchen, the top of the refrigerator. They are under the table I use as a desk, dozens of them there, with a small clearing for my feet. And they line one wall, eleven feet long, seven bottles deep. This appears to be far more bottles than I remembered, as though they multiplied while I was gone.

The air feels moist and putrid. And then I see them: fruit flies, hovering at the mouths of the bottles. They form dark clouds at the ceiling above the kitchen sink. And dead fruit flies cover everything, like dust.

Clothing is strewn around the room, carpeting the floor, covering the chairs, sofa and bed. It looks like the home of Raving Insanity. It does not look like the home of somebody who makes TV commercials. There’s a full bottle of Dewar’s on top of the stove.

The only word is
squalor
.

An interior design not unlike what I grew up with at the crazy psychiatrist’s house.

Freshly brainwashed from rehab, I carry the bottle into the bathroom. I hold it up to the light. See the pretty bottle? Isn’t it beautiful? Yes, it’s beautiful. I unscrew the cap and pour it into the toilet. I flush twice. And then I think, why did I flush twice? The answer, is of course, because I truly do not know myself. I cannot be sure I won’t attempt to drink from the toilet, like a dog.

I have two options. I can just sit here and cry. Which is my first instinct. Or I can clean this fucking mess. Which seems as possible as winning Lotto. But this is what I do. I begin cleaning.

I pause only to listen to messages on my answering machine. The first message is from Jim. “Hey Buddy, you were just kidding about that rehab stuff, weren’t you?” There’s loud music in the background and human commotion so I can tell he’s calling from a bar. I press
SKIP
and go to the next message. “Augusten, it’s Greer, I just wanted to leave a message for you when you got home.”

Greer sounds like she’s reading from a script she had written before calling. I’m fairly certain this is, in fact, the case. Greer is that way. I once watched her scan her driver’s license photo and twenty pictures of hairstyles, torn from magazines. Then, in Photoshop, she cut and pasted her face into every hairstyle. This was back when she was trying to decide whether or not she should have bangs and get highlights.

“Well, welcome home. Not very original, I guess”—forced laughter—“but I just wanted to say I hope everything went well and that you’re feeling better. I can’t remember when you said you’d be returning to work, so give me a ring and let me know, okay? Okay then, well, okay, bye.”

A message from Blockbuster Video saying I owe eighty dollars for my overdue
Towering Inferno
, and another from Jim, this time sounding hungover and depressed. “Wow, man, maybe you really
did
go to rehab after all. I got a hairy-ass hangover. All I remember are Snake Bites with Coors chasers. Maybe you can teach me some shit you learned. I gotta lay off the sauce for a while.”

The rest of the messages play out, and the last one is from Pighead. “Hey Fuckhead, it’s Friday and I know you’re due back today. I was thinking you could come over and I could make dinner. Maybe liver and onions in honor of your new sobriety.” At the end of the message, he hiccups.

The bottles fill twenty-seven gigantic, industrial-sized bags. It takes more than seven hours and by the time I’m finished, I’m manic and drenched in sweat. I go to Kmart and buy Glade scented candles, eleven of them, and light them all at once to fumigate the apartment. After about forty minutes, the apartment reeks of artificial pine scent. I decide now would be a good time to go to an AA meeting.

I dial 411. “What city please?”

“Manhattan,” I say, already dreading what I have to say next.

“What listing?”

I clear my throat, remind myself I am talking to a faceless stranger through fiber-optic cables. “Um, the main number for Alcoholics Anonymous.” I expect her to either hang up or worse, make me repeat it.
I’m sorry, what was that again?
What
anonymous?

Instead, she gives me the number and I call. “Yeah, hi, I just got back from rehab and I don’t really know where the AA meetings are here in the city.”

The guy on the other end of the phone sounds like he could be an employee of the Gap; helpful and good-natured. I feel certain that he’s wearing khakis and smells like summer. “What part of the city do you live in?”

“I’m at Tenth and Fifth.”

“That’s such a cool area,” he says before giving me a list of seven different meetings. It turns out New York City is a great place to be a drunk, not only if you want to drink, but also if you want to stop. There are dozens of meetings to choose from. Are you a midget? There’s an AA meeting specifically for you, right here in Manhattan. How about an albino midget? A transgendered albino midget NAMBLA member? Yes, there’s a meeting, so I have no excuse.

One of the names he mentions is the Perry Street meeting, which I remember Dr. Valium telling me about. The next meeting is at eight, so I decide I’ll do this.

It’s only a ten-minute walk from my apartment, but I leave immediately. Better to walk around than sit alone in my apartment. I arrive in front of the meeting place in less than seven minutes. I’m walking too fast. But since I have over an hour to kill and Pighead’s apartment is five minutes away, I decide to stop by.

The doorman looks too happy to see me and I am immediately suspicious. “How you doin’ there, Mr. Augusten?” he says. “Long time no see.”

I want to grab him by the lapel of his doorman jacket and say, “What did that Pighead tell you? Whatever he said, don’t believe a word:
I’ve been in Madrid . . . shooting a commercial
.”

But before I can do this, he says, “Oh, your friend, he just now got back from walking Virgil.” Virgil is Pighead’s scrappy white terrier. Virgil loves me more.

I take the elevator to the fourth floor and make a left. Pighead’s apartment is the last one on the right, at the very end of the long hallway. But already I can see he has the door open, because I see Virgil’s head sticking out and Pighead’s hand attached to the collar. “Go get him,” Pighead says and Virgil tears down the hallway, barking and snapping, immediately grabbing hold of my pant leg with his mouth.

I bend down and rub both of my hands across his back really fast. “Virgil, Wirgil, Squirgil, what a good boy, what a very good boy.” I run down the hallway to Pighead’s door, Virgil yapping at my ankles as he runs alongside.

I walk past Pighead, who’s standing in the entryway, and go right into the living room, where I pick Virgil up and throw him onto the sofa. He bounces off and back onto the floor, charging at me immediately. I do it again. Then he runs to the corner of the room and retrieves a rubber carrot, brings it to me and drops it at my feet. He barks. I turn around and throw the carrot down the hallway into the bedroom, and Virgil takes off after it.

“Holy shit,” Pighead says when he finally sees my face. “I wouldn’t have recognized you.”

I take my jacket off, sling it over one of his dining room chairs.

“Don’t do that,” he says, “use a hanger.”

As he walks toward the hall closet for a hanger, I ask, “What do you mean?”

He turns. “A coat hanger? You know, that thing Joan Crawford hit her kid with?”

“No, fool. The other thing. How different I look. Tell me more. Me, me, me.”

He rolls his eyes, goes to the closet and hangs up my coat. “You look so . . . different . . . younger . . . and you lost so much weight. You look great.” He smiles and looks away from me as if he’s shy. He walks into the kitchen. I follow. “Want something to drink?” Before I answer, he corrects himself. “I mean, you know, like juice.”

“Oh, Christ. Is this how it’s gonna be from now on?” I whine.

He takes two glasses from the cupboard and opens the refrigerator. I notice a bottle of Chardonnay next to the cranberry juice. “Actually,” I say, “I’ll take some Chardonnay, but only this much.” I hold my thumb and forefinger about two inches apart.

Pighead looks troubled. “What, Chardonnay?”

I casually lean my hip against the counter. “Well, we’re allowed to have Chardonnay because it’s not really alcohol. It’s just, you know, wine. And that’s okay.”

He stands there with his hand in the refrigerator looking back and forth between the cranberry juice, the wine and me.

I grin at him. “I’m kidding, Pighead.”

He pours us each a cranberry juice and then carries them into the living room. He sits on the sofa, next to the end table where he sets both glasses and I sit right next to him and rest my head on his shoulder. I mumble something about being confused and happy and sad and overwhelmed and tired. He reaches his arm around my shoulders and moves his head against mine. “It’s okay, Fuckhead,” he says. “You’re still a mess but at least you’re not drunk.”

Virgil leaps onto the sofa, bouncing onto my stomach, almost knocking the wind out of me.
Bark, bark, bark
. I take his head in my hands and smush his face up.

“Virgil missed you,” Pighead says. I look at him, but he’s looking at his hands.

“I missed him too,” I say gently.

I pick the slobbery plastic squeaky carrot up off the floor and throw it hard, not caring if it hits a wall or a lamp or a painting. Pighead, who has a beautiful, fastidiously decorated apartment, doesn’t care either. If a lamp broke, I know it would be okay with him because
I
broke it. But if anybody else broke it, he’d have a shit fit. I know I’m lucky this way.

“What do you want to do for dinner?” he asks.

Pause. “Can’t, I have to leave in a few minutes. I have a lush meeting.”

“AA?” he asks. “But you just got back from rehab.”

Virgil charges back with the carrot, drops it at my feet. I ignore him, and he carries it over near the fireplace and chews, trying to kill the squeaker.

“That’s the whole point,” I tell him. “Alcoholics go to AA.”

“How long do you have to go?” he asks, like I’m on parole, which is sort of the case.

“Every day for the rest of my life.”

“You’re kidding, right?” he says, eyebrows raised.

I tell him that unfortunately I’m not. I tell him what Rae said about how if you found time to drink every day, you can find time for AA every day.

His eyes become large in actual disbelief.

“Oh, I know,” I say. “I was just as shocked as you.”

“What’s that they say, ‘One day at a time’ or something?” He takes a sip of juice.

“Yeah, one day at a time. For the rest of my life.”

“Jesus.”

“Oh, we don’t call it ‘Jesus’ anymore.” My head itches so I rub it against his shoulder. “We call it a ‘higher power.’ ”

“Oh no,” he says, rolling his eyes. “You’ve turned ‘recovery’ on me.”

For a moment we just sit there and say nothing. It’s so good and comforting to be with him. And yet . . .
and yet
. A sense of loneliness, and something else that is more frightening but that I cannot name. “Pighead?” I say.

“Hmm?” He turns to me.

This time I’m the one who turns away. I examine the cuticle of my thumbnail. “Nothing.”

“What?”

There’s so much I want to talk to him about. Need to talk to him about. But I’m not even sure I know what it is I need to say. It’s an odd feeling. Well,
all
feelings are odd to me because I’m not accustomed to being aware of them. But this feeling is especially odd. It’s like when I was a little kid, I never wanted my parents to leave the living room and go to bed until I was asleep first. I needed to know they were there, otherwise I couldn’t fall asleep.

“I have to go,” I tell him, getting up from the couch.

“But you just got here,” he says.

“I know. But I have to go. I just stopped by.” I am happy to see him, therefore I must leave. It’s weird, like there are magnets at play.

He straightens a book on the coffee table. “Well, it’s nice to see you haven’t changed all that much. ‘So long. I have to go. Everything’s more important than you, Pighead.’ As usual.”

It’s not difficult to hear the hurt in his voice. “I have to go,” are probably the four words I use most with him. The thought that normally accompanied these words was,
Because I need a drink
. Now it’s because I need to go
talk
about needing a drink. It’s like alcohol gets in the way even when it’s out of the way.

The room is small, no larger than the average suburban kitchen, though it’s not bright yellow with spider plants hanging from colorful baskets in the window. It’s dark and grim because the front window of what could have rented out as a tiny but chic Perry Street boutique instead features a donated curtain that blocks all the light out. In the center of the room against the wall are a small podium and a tall chair behind it. In a horseshoe configuration around the podium are about fifty folding metal chairs—the chair of choice for recovering alcoholics. Above, an old ceiling fan turns, just barely. The bumpy walls are covered with thick beige paint that can be no fresher than twenty years. When beige was new. When it was “the new white.”

“What you see here, what you hear here, stays here,” says the chairman of the meeting. The single overhead light has been dimmed, and the meeting has officially begun. He goes through the AA preamble. The AA preamble is the same at all AA meetings, everywhere. Just like Big Macs. It outlines the purpose of AA, which is to help people get sober, and it explains how there are no dues or fees or politics. It ends with a few questions.

“Is anyone here today new to the Perry Street meeting?” he asks.

I raise my hand.

In rehab, we had specific lectures about raising our hands. “In meetings, always raise your hand to share. Volunteer for service. Get a sponsor. Do ninety meetings in ninety days. Don’t just fade into the wallpaper.” In AA, one must not be wallpaper but a colorful wall hanging.