Dry: A Memoir (27 page)

Our Wirksam commercial is being tested in focus groups. Greer really stresses about this. She is worried the commercial will not test well, that people will not like it. I, on the other hand, could not care less. Advertising feels like this piece of dog shit I can’t seem to scrape off my shoe.

I sneeze.

Greer sees me eyeing my sleeve. “Do you want a Kleenex brand facial tissue?” she asks.

“Huh? A what?”

She reaches into her desk drawer and retrieves a small packet of tissues. “A Kleenex brand facial tissue. Do you need one?”

“Greer? What’s wrong with you? Why are you calling them that? They’re Kleenexes.”

She sets the tissues on the desk. “Augusten, you of all people should know better. Kleenex is a registered trademark of Kimberly-Clark. They’re not ‘Kleenexes,’ they’re tissues. Kleenex
brand
tissues.”

“You’re completely mad,” I tell her.

“No. You’re just being a selfish alcoholic. Kleenex is their brand. They have a right to protect it. And I, for one, respect that. I respect other people. You can’t just go around changing things into what you want them to be. Just because you want to call tissues
Kleenexes
doesn’t make it fair or right.” She’s very angry.

“Um. You’re taking this whole
Kleenex
thing way too seriously. What is this really about?”

“It’s about the entire world revolving around you, Augusten. Because you know what? It doesn’t. We all have to make compromises and get along.” She picks the tissues up and throws them in my lap. “And be civilized, okay? Don’t use the sleeve of your sweatshirt to wipe your goddamn nose.” She stands to walk out of the room.

“It’s not a sweatshirt, Greer. It’s a Gap High Performance Fleece Athletic Crew Top.”

At a little after noon, I phone Pighead at the hospital. I’m alarmed when his mother answers. Why can’t he answer the phone himself? “How is he?” I ask.

“He not so good,” she says in her thick Greek accent. “He have very high fever. No food, nothing. Can’t eat. Last night, very bad. He ask about you. You come?”

“I’m on my way.”

•  •  •

When I walk into Pighead’s room, I’m confronted with his mother and two of Pighead’s friends, whom I know only by name, from Pighead telling me deeply personal and embarrassing things about them. I nod to the friends. “Hey,” I say to his mother. She turns to me. Her eyes contain confusion, panic and ancient Greek spells. I walk to the bed.

Pighead’s eyes are wide open, too wide. “Hey, Pighead,” I say.

He looks at me. He extends his shaking hand. I take it. “Augusten,” he moans, “please don’t hit me.”

His mother looks at me quickly, sharply. “He’s only teasing,” I say. And I can see a tiny smile on his face, but it’s so small it’s almost like what’s left after a normal smile. He closes his eyes, which for some reason makes me feel better.

I ask him if he’s feeling okay and he shakes his head from side to side. “No.”

And suddenly he’s asleep, which does not make me feel better. Because falling asleep that fast is more accurately termed “losing consciousness.” “What’s going on with him?” I ask his mother. “He wasn’t this bad the other day.”

“He’ll be fine,” she says, walking to the nightstand and removing a used tissue, a paper cup and a peeled but uneaten banana, which has begun to turn brown. I note that she is wearing latex gloves. The diamond ring on her wedding finger pokes up through the rubber, stretching it.

I walk back over to Pighead, and suddenly his eyes are open again. He motions me to lean closer. He wants to whisper something.

“You,” he asks. And then he slowly raises his hand up and points to me. Faintly, he smiles. His hand falls back on the bed and he is asleep.

I whisper back. “You.”

•  •  •

Foster comes home a little after eight
P.M
. He looks ragged, horrible. He slinks in the door, sad and defeated. He glances at me only once. Then wordlessly, he collects his few things and puts them in his knapsack. Then he sits on the sofa, head down, and says, “I’m sorry, Auggie.”

“Your friend stopped by last night,” I tell him.

“I know,” Foster says.

I shoot him a glance. “You know? How could you know?”

He looks up at me. “Augusten,” he begins, “I want you to know that I truly love you. I love you so very much. But I can’t . . .” He stops. “I can’t . . . I’m not good for you and I know it.”

“What are you saying?” I ask him.

“I bought a brownstone in Brooklyn,” he tells me.

I cannot believe what I am hearing. “What? You what? When?”

He exhales in utter defeat. “A couple of weeks ago. I bought a brownstone.” Then, as if it can’t possibly get more disgusting, “Kyle’s going to be staying with me. For a while.”

“Wait a minute, Foster,” I say. “Are you telling me that you are moving back in with that psycho Brit?”

“It’s just for a while. He’s doing really bad, Auggie.”

And suddenly, I can see it all very clearly. The insanity. The parallel universe of it. How it mimics normal life enough to fool you while you’re in it. But when you step back, wow. I realize that this is one of those three-hundred-empty-bottles-of-Dewar’s-in-my-apartment-that-I-can’t-see things. Yet instead of rage, I feel sorry for him. He’s caught in the same place I was caught. It dawns on me that to be with him would be like living with my old self again.

I go and sit next to him. I want to think of something profound to say, but nothing comes to me. I put my arm around him and tell him I love him. I say I wish there was something I could do. “But there’s not, I know. Not really.”

On the way out he says, “I’ll give you the new phone number as soon as we have a phone.” He stammers, “Um, I mean, as soon as
I
have a phone.”

So they’re going to be a
We
. “Foster, why Brooklyn?”

He pauses in the doorway. Turns. “I wanted to be as far away from Eighth Avenue as I could get.”

Rae appears in my head, as she often does, carrying a quote with her.
You can’t move away from your addiction, it will follow you wherever you go
.

He sets his bag down and we hug. He feels so fucking good. But then, so does scotch.

THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

I

’ve been at Pighead’s apartment since six
A.M.
I’ve changed his diaper three times, given him four injections and watched while he vomited peach Yoplait onto the Philippe Starck hall runner. I can’t help but think that having a hangover while placing the soiled diaper into the red plastic biohazard bag would not be the end of the world. In fact, a hangover might improve my outlook. I took a week off from work, so at least I don’t have to deal with that shit. Just this shit.

Pighead is operating in slow, drooling motion. Within the space of a month he has been transformed into a skeleton without bladder control. The only reason he’s home instead of still at the hospital is because they ran out of tests to perform. Life is a question mark now.

“Do you still feel thick in the head?” I ask him while he sits on the couch watching the TV, which, incidentally, is off.

He nods slowly. A strand of saliva, as thick as yarn, sways from his lower lip. I use a tissue to pinch it off.

The visiting nurse that comes every day taught me how to give Pighead his intramuscular injections. This might be part of the reason Pighead always looks at me as if I am about to harm him. We ordered the tiniest needles possible for the tiniest amount of pain. I even injected myself with water to see how much it hurt. I was surprised that I could barely feel the prick. So I think it’s the medicine itself, not the needle, that burns. I don’t dare inject myself with his medicine. The stuff is deadly.

His mother has moved into his apartment. She spends the day muttering prayers in Greek and simmering lamb bones on the stove. Originally, the diaper changing was her department. I figured, she did it before, she can do it again. But she was unable to do it without sobbing, so I took over the task. Clearly, nothing is going according to plan.

“Do you remember last fall when we took a drive to Massachusetts to see the leaves?” I ask Pighead.

He turns to face me. I’m sitting next to him on the couch and the effort of turning his head seems large. He nods. He raises his arm and places it on my shoulder. He speaks very slowly. “I would give every penny I have for just one more day like that,” he says. His arm falls from my shoulder and lands on the sofa. I think that arm is too bruised; we need to move the IV to the other arm.

Last year at this time, Pighead looked like a soccer player. Handsome, stocky, healthy. One would easily have hated him for his fine genetics. Now, his cheekbones look like two luggage handles protruding from either side of his head. His legs are the diameter of Evian bottles. And the mind that was formerly valued at seven figures on Wall Street probably could not add ten plus two.

Meanwhile, I have discovered a latent talent for nursing. I find comfort in thumping air bubbles out of the IV line before inserting it. I like opening the little sterile alcohol pads before swabbing his arm and the cap of the medication bottle. I feel whole while I count and organize a week’s worth of his pills and place them into the pale yellow Monday-through-Friday plastic pill box with snapping lids over each day. Sometimes he will smile at me and I know that this is the old Pighead smiling. I smile back and then take his temperature. It is a play and we are in our roles. I am performing from a script.

I wonder if I were a normal person, instead of an alcoholic with a highly evolved sense of denial, whether or not I would be more of a mess right now. Instead of thinking,
My best friend might be dying
, I am thinking,
I need to take that retrovirus inhibitor tablet and split it in half.
I feel alarmingly stable.

Hayden calls from London to tell me that he relapsed in a pub near Piccadilly Circus. Well, well, well. Deepak Chopra finally made a bacon cheeseburger out of the holy cow of India.

“How tacky,” I tell him. “You relapsed in a tourist area.”

Shamed, he admits, “It was a poor choice.”

“What? Relapsing or where you relapsed?” I ask.

“Both,” he says. Then, “You don’t sound nearly as surprised as I expected you to be. I feel rather let down.”

“Nothing surprises me now,” I tell him. I am stoic. I am Joan of Arc, with liver damage and an unused penis.

“Are you going to meetings?” he asks when I tell him about Foster moving back in with the Brit and Pighead being in a free fall.

“Ha,” I snort. My life has become a series of choices based on triage. “I don’t have the time. Besides, you’re not one to talk about AA. You went every day and look what happened to you.” Hayden is now proof to me that AA is crap.

“I wouldn’t have relapsed in New York,” he says. “I had a sober network there. Here, well, I don’t have anything.”

“Bullshit,” I say. “You chose to relapse. You didn’t have to.” I hate it when alcoholics relapse and then act like somebody cut the brake lines on their cars.

“I suppose it was building up. I suppose it was inevitable.”

I wonder if it’s building up in me? I wonder if I would be able to tell? I wonder if the fact that I must wonder is my answer. “I’m not frightened about Pighead,” I tell him.

He’s quiet for a moment and I swear I can hear the Atlantic Ocean churning over the phone lines, even though I realize they aren’t lines but satellite signals. So maybe it’s interstellar dust motes banging around. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not,” he says finally.

“I don’t feel anything, actually,” I point out.

“Hmmmmm,” he says.

I know exactly what he means. Then remembering something, I ask Hayden, “Where do whales go when they die?”

“They beach themselves,” he says immediately.

“Oh,” I say.

“You really ought to go to a meeting, Augusten. I’m telling you this as somebody who has recently imbibed and who is now counting days once again and steeping in his own misery.”

I want to ask him if it was just a little bit fun, a little bit worth it. “It was really awful, huh?”

“You see?” Hayden explodes into the phone. “You’re asking
buying
questions. You want to know if it was really awful as opposed to semiawful. I swear, Augusten, I’m worried. Go to a meeting. Don’t drink.”

Hayden is annoying me. I had no intention of drinking. He’s the one who got smashed in the Times Square of London. He’s the one who threw his sobriety against the wall and now has to go clean up the mess.

All I have to do is change a few diapers.

 •  •  • 

Greer is not pleased when I tell her, over the phone, that I am taking a leave of absence. But because of the reason, she is forced to bite her tongue. Probably literally. Probably it is bleeding. “Well, that’s a very good thing you’re doing,” she says, like I have volunteered to serve turkey to homeless people in the Bowery.

“I’m a little late,” I say with some disgust at myself.

“Late for what?”

“Late for showing him that I actually give a shit. Late for everything.”

“It’s never too late,” Greer chimes. I picture her wearing a horribly expensive sweater made by a seven-year-old Cambodian orphan with head lice. “I’m sure you’re helping.”

“How’s the Nazi?” I ask, changing the subject to something neutral.

“He was furious that the music house wanted forty grand. He wanted us to ‘Jew them down.’ ”

“He didn’t say that.”

“Oh yes, he did. His exact words.”

I wonder how much of my soul remains after spending so many years as an advertising copywriter. Will I end up in Hell along with the Hamburger Helper Helping Hand, Joe Camel and Wendy, the Snapple Lady?

“Call me,” Greer says.

I know she doesn’t mean to call her and chat. Or call her for updates on work. She means call her when it all goes down.

For three days in a row, Pighead has had no hiccups. He stopped drooling and seems more mentally alert. Enough to call me “asshole Fuckhead” when I accidentally spill Ocean Spray CranApple juice on the arm of his pristine white sofa with the down cushions. It’s not a large stain, but it will be permanent, a fact Pighead has the mental capacity to remind me of more than once. Even Virgil has crawled out from under the bed. For weeks, he has been afraid of Pighead. Probably because Pighead no longer smells like Pighead but like something made by Pfizer.

His mother rolls pastry dough with a toilet paper dowel in the kitchen and I sit at the dining room table reading
Esquire:
“101 Things Every Guy’s Gotta Do Before His Number’s Up.” Number 73 is: paint a woman’s toenails. I add my own number 102 to the list: clean diarrhea off your ex-boyfriend’s legs. “Your eyes look better,” I tell Pighead. “Brighter,” I add.

“I feel a little better,” he says.

Virgil sleeps in a wedge of sunlight in front of the fireplace. He cannot be roused, even with the squeaky carrot. Dog denial.

If it weren’t for the seven boxes of medical supplies stacked next to the front door, the biohazard bags, the disposable diapers, the rubber gloves, the IV pole with the Plum XL3M Series Pump, the fact that most of the furniture has been moved to the sides of the room to make space, and the visiting nurse who is quietly connecting two lengths of clear plastic tubing in the corner, this might pass for an ordinary day.

On my way home, I surprise myself by stopping into a liquor store on Seventh Avenue and Twelfth. I surprise myself even further by buying a pint of Black Label. On the way out, I think how strange it is that liquor stores never redecorate. They never get cool-ized. But then, they don’t need to be hip. They are like urinals—people will go there no matter what.