Dry: A Memoir (4 page)

In order to get away with this, I may actually have to do something so horrifying that I can barely admit it to myself.

I may actually have to
go
to rehab.

That evening, I call my best friend, Pighead, and tell him that I am checking into rehab. Pighead isn’t a drinking buddy like Jim, the undertaker. Pighead is more like, I don’t know, my
normal
friend. Plus he’s older than I am, he’s thirty-two. So maybe I think of him as being wiser in some ways.

“Good,” he says. “I’m glad you’re going into rehab. You’re a disaster.”

I take offense. “I’m not that bad. I’m just a little excessive, eccentric.” I make it seem like I am somebody who mixes stripes with plaids, somebody who laughs too loudly in restaurants. “All I’m going to do there is learn how to be a little more normal.”

“Augusten, do you know how you get when you drink? You get nasty. You don’t get silly and put a lampshade on your head or say witty, philosophical things. You get foul, dark and ugly. I don’t like you when you drink, not at all.”

I think of the karaoke bar. That’s not foul or dark. Just publicly humiliating.

“If I’m so foul and awful, why be my friend?” I hate people who don’t drink. They understand so little.

“Because,” he explains, “you, the person, are good. And I love you the person. But unfortunately, in order to get you the person, I also have to put up with you the drunk. I think this could be a real transformation, if you take it seriously.”

Somehow I feel a little stung by his response, like he’s taking
their
side instead of mine. I don’t know what I expected him to say. Maybe I expected him to say, “But why? Why you of all people?”

I have known Pighead since the first week I lived in New York. This makes him my official rock. The thing that grounds me.

I’m his rock, too, although he would never admit this. He would say, “I’m my own damn rock.” But he’s an investment banker, so for him, admitting the truth is something to be done only in the event of a plea bargain.

The reason I know what we are to each other is because we fight freely and almost constantly, about even the smallest thing. In fact, once we didn’t speak for an entire week because he didn’t like the way I loaded his dishwasher.

“Augusten, it’s just common sense. You don’t put a heavy frying pan on the top rack next to the drinking glasses, they’ll break.”

I thought it was uncommonly considerate of me to load the fucking thing in the first place. “Well how the hell am I supposed to know these things? I don’t have a dishwasher, I use plastic.” I can’t decide if we’re exact opposites, or somehow exactly the same except for minor cosmetic differences. I do know that all of his friends hate me and all of my friends hate him. We drive each other crazy in ways that nobody else can even touch. We never bore each other. And we both realize what a rare thing this is. What amazes me is that I never drink around him and still we get along, or rather
don’t
get along, so perfectly.

Pighead is HIV-positive. Or, as he simply says, “I’m an AIDS baby.” He got this phrase from watching
20/20
. Diane Sawyer was profiling babies in Africa who were born with the disease, born to infected mothers. We were both sitting on his white sofa drinking Ocean Spray cranberry juice as the parade of bony children flashed across the screen. It was grim and depressing. “That’s me,” Pighead said in his mock, pity-me tone of voice. “I’m an AIDS baby. Hold me?”

But because he’s been healthy and virtually symptom-free for six years, baffling his entourage of physicians, neither of us ever really thinks about it. Or talks about it. He’s completely normal and healthy in every way. In fact, I’m so accustomed to the dozens of bottles of prescription medicines on his kitchen counter that I don’t even notice them anymore. There must be fifty of them, all in a group. But all I ever see is counter space and Post-it notes. I don’t even see the hypodermic needles he uses to inject himself with white blood cell boosters.

“When are you leaving?” he asks.

“In three days.”

“For how long?”

“A month.”

“Did you tell the office yet?”

“Well, they’re sort of the ones making me go. Elenor said I have to get cleaned up or I’m outta there.”

“Lucky for you they didn’t just fire you. It’s nice of them to give you a chance. So what are you going to do to prepare?”

I see a book of matches on the table in front of me, matches that read
CEDAR TAVERN, NEW YORK CITY
.

“Drink,” I say.

“Guess what?”

“What?” Jim says, taking a sip of his drink.

“The office did an intervention thing on me. They’re making me go to rehab for thirty days.”

Jim explodes into a fit of laughter, coughing over his gin and tonic. A little spray lands on me.

I wipe my forehead with a napkin, grinning at his reaction. We’re in a dive bar on Avenue A in the East Village.

“You’re kidding!” he cries, choking. His face is red.

“I’m serious. I don’t have to go to work for thirty days. Plus the whole rest of this week.” I bum a cigarette from his pack on the table, light up.

“That’s fucking awesome, man,” he says. “Congratulations.”

I take a long sip from my martini. “I know. The more I think about it, the cooler it seems. At first, I was sort of horrified. But now, well.” Now I’m thinking rehab could turn out to be great. I’ll dry out for thirty days and it’ll be like going to a spa. When I come home, I’ll be able to drink more like a normal person drinks. Why was I so freaked out before? There is a certain glamour to rehab. I almost feel like, what’s wrong with me that I resisted in the first place?

And Jim is totally on the same page. “No, it’s great. Think of all the celebrities you’ll see. Plus, it’s just great material.” He polishes off the last of his drink and crunches some ice in his mouth. “I mean, we’ll be able to laugh about this for years.”

“Right,” I agree.

“So what’d your buddy Pighead say? You tell him yet?”

I signal the bartender to get us another round. “Yeah, I told him. He thinks it’s a good idea, actually. And I mean good idea in the wrong sense. In the hospital sense, as opposed to the rehab sense.” When I say “rehab” I raise my chin, as though talking about the Oscars.

“That wuss,” Jim says.

“Yeah, he is.” But I feel a little bad saying this. And also, I can’t explain Pighead to Jim. But I also can’t ever have any of my friends meet each other. I have to keep them all separate. And they all think this is a little strange, but for some reason it’s normal to me.

“Pighead is a stick in the mud if you ask me,” Jim says, sliding his empty glass forward toward the bartender to make room for the fresh drink. “So un-fun.”

I can’t really tell Jim that I like that about Pighead, I like his un-fun-ness. I can’t say it’s comforting. “Yeah, I guess,” I say flatly.

“Anyway, you’ll have a blast,” he says. He raises his glass in a toast. “To rehab,” he says.

“To rehab,” I say and we clink. “Hey, why don’t you come with me?” I ask.

“Can’t,” Jim says as he swallows. “Gotta work. I don’t have some cushy-ass job like you.”

I leave the bar feeling confident and excited by the prospect of checking into rehab. Back in my apartment, I strip off my clothes, change into some sweats, crack open an ale and drink it quickly. I play early Blondie on the stereo. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of this rehab thing. There’s no telling who I might see there. And Jim’s right, it is the sort of story you can laugh about for years.

I call 411 for Minnesota and ask for Proud Institute. I scribble the number on my hand then go to the refrigerator for another ale. I spend the next forty minutes on the phone with someone from the rehab hospital and my enthusiasm withers. I answer a litany of questions: How much do you drink, how often, have you ever tried to stop before? Blah, blah, blah. I tell them I drink all the time, it’s only recently become a problem and I could probably stop on my own but my office sort of pushed me into this, so that’s why I’m going to rehab instead of those alcoholic meetings.

In the middle of the conversation, I open a third ale. I cup my hand over the mouthpiece so they don’t hear the tab of the ale being popped. It dawns on me that this is a slightly contrary action. Like stopping into Baby Gap before having an abortion.

After I hang up I walk into the bathroom and look in the mirror. “What have you done? Man, are you fucking
crazy?
” I watch myself take a sip of ale. “You don’t even like ale,” I tell my reflection. My reflection takes another gulp and goes back to the refrigerator.

I’m expected at Proud Institute in three days. I have a reservation, as if I am simply going to Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica.

I go into the living room and sit on the sofa. I stare at the blank wall across from me. Suddenly, rehab doesn’t seem so fun after all. The dour woman on the phone depressed me completely. If ever there were a person you would not want to invite to a keg party, it was she.

Suddenly I feel very uncomfortable on my sofa, so I get up. I pace around my apartment and no matter where I go, I still feel cagey. Like I ought to go out, but I just got back. I look at the ale in my hand and the other empty bottles that are sitting in the sink.

The fact is, I have accepted Pulitzer Prizes, Academy Awards, met wonderful people, and had healthy, loving relationships, all in my mind, all while drinking. How did this happen to me? I need to figure it out before I get to rehab so I don’t make a fool of myself there.

Is it because when I was eleven I saved up my allowance for three weeks in a row and bought a faux crystal decanter and glass set from J. C. Penney for nine dollars, then filled it with cream soda, pretending it was scotch? I remember thinking about that decanter set constantly until I was finally able to buy it one Saturday, allowance day, and take it home. I set it up on my desk. But it didn’t look right, so I went into the cellar and found one of the old silver serving trays my grandmother had given my parents when they were married. My mother hated all that silver, thought it was garish, and relegated it to a box next to the hamburger-filled freezer. My mother was much more down-to-earth and preferred wood to silver; she liked jazz and poetry. I brought one of the trays upstairs and polished it in the kitchen while I watched cartoons.

Then I brought the shiny tray into my bedroom and set the decanter plus the four glasses on top of it. It looked exactly right. I shined my desk lamp through the decanter filled with cream soda. I believed it to be the most beautiful thing, like something on
The Price is Right
. But within a few weeks, the cream soda grew a top layer of furry green mold.

So maybe that’s what did it. Or maybe it’s my father’s fault.

I can remember my father telling me to “never, under any circumstances” touch his bottles. He had all sorts of bottles, and they never gathered dust. They were beautiful and colorful, like jewels, especially in the late afternoon when sunlight entered the room from a low angle and made the bottles glow. I remember one of them was square-ish and had frosted glass on the outside. This would be gin.

When he was at work or downstairs in the basement drinking and sitting in the dark, I would uncap one of his untouchable bottles, place the palm of my hand over its mouth and turn it upside down. Then I’d quickly recap it and lick my hand. I couldn’t have been any older than eight.

Actually, it’s surprising that I drink at all, considering my father. He drank so much that I didn’t even see it. It was like some fathers had mustaches and some fathers had baseball caps and my father had a glass attached to his hand. It wasn’t strange. I didn’t think,
Oh, my dad’s an alcoholic
. I just thought he was always thirsty.

Then again, this could all be the result of
Bewitched
.

I was addicted to
Bewitched
as a kid. I worshipped Darren Stevens the First. When he’d come home from work, Samantha would say, “Darren, would you like me to fix you a drink?” He’d always rest his briefcase on the table below the mirror in the foyer, wipe his forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief and say, “Better make it a double.”

I go to the bed and sit on the edge, sinking into the plush down comforter and the featherbed below. I feel a prick of good fortune, an awareness that I am lucky to have such a nice bed to sit on during my anxiety attack. Why am I so anxious? And then it hits me. I’m not anxious, I’m lonely. And I’m lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be so lonely because it seems catastrophic—seeing the car just as it hits you. But then all of a sudden, that feeling is gone and I’m blank. So it’s like a door quickly opened, just a crack, to show me what a mess I was inside. But not enough to really stare for long and absorb all the details. Just enough to know the room needed a major spring cleaning.

I get drunk and call my father. “I’m checking into a rehab hospital, I’ll be gone for thirty days.”

Silence. Then, “Well, what about your work, son?”

“I’m in
advertising
, Dad,” as if this explains everything. I don’t tell him that work is the reason I have to go in the first place. Then I say, “It’s your fault I’m going. I caught this from you.”

He exhales loudly into the phone, and I can feel him move further along up the family tree, instantly branching out to become a distant relative. “I don’t want to talk about this with you. You do what you have to do. I’m just damned worried about that job of yours. You take that job for granted like you do, and you’re just not going to have it. It’ll be taken right away from you. And for Christ’s sake, you have to get over your past. You are a grown man now, not a little wounded boy.”

The animal portion of my brain seizes control and my blood is filled with hatred molecules. “Do you remember the time we were in the car together and you said you were gonna kill the thing that meant the most to my mother and you glared at me and sped up? Heading for a rock? And I had to jump out of the fucking car? When I was like nine, you motherfucker,” I spat.