Dry

by Augusten Burroughs

Something to do with my hands, because I have always needed something to do with my hands or else they will flutter about and twitch; I’m liable to smack them against something or cut into them by accident and require stitches. So it’s good to have them right in front of me at all times where I can watch them.

there’s definitely a book here.” “That a person might want to read?” I asked. “Absolutely,” he said. “It’s funny and sad and fucked-up and crazy and completely riveting.”

Books are like that. Books just are. Sometimes books need to be, they need to exist and so they will body-snatch a writer and climb out through the writer’s fingers and into the world where they belong to different people to different degrees and for different reasons.

Thank you, Amy Sedaris, for your astonishing support and cupcakes.

everything seem better than it actually is. And that’s why it’s such a perfect career for me. It’s an industry based on giving people false expectations. Few people know how to do that as well as I do, because I’ve been applying those basic advertising principles to my life for years.

Okay, what’s the latest I can get to sleep and still be okay? If I have to be there at nine, I should be up by seven-thirty, so that means I should get to bed no later than—I begin to count on my fingers because I cannot do math, let alone in my head—twelve-thirty.

room and her panty hose make an important hush, hush sound as she walks away.

My parents used to have parties when I was a kid, and I hated being sent to bed just when they began. I hated the feeling that I was missing everything. That’s why I ended up living in New York City, so I wouldn’t miss anything.

best imitation of somebody who is not a psychopath.

And I knew it wasn’t because I was drunk that I was imagining it, it was because I was drunk and my own head was out of the way and I could remember. This is maybe one of the best things to ever come of my drinking. Or maybe it’s one of the worst.

Here is where I will lose the twenty pounds of cocktail-belly that has accumulated around my middle.

He looks Indian, but highly gay-Americanized.

David is almost handsome. But he also looks borderline homeless with his greasy hair and untucked shirt. I calculate that for me, he is two light beers away from being doable. And nine away from being a Baldwin brother.

Tracy, the leader of the CDH group, looks at me with eyes that seem to belong to someone three times her age. It’s something beyond wisdom, all the way to insanity and back. It’s like her eyes are scarred from all the things she’s seen.

I mentally vanish from the room, Endora from Bewitched.

“Exactly! What you are doing is ‘telling on your addict.’ You need to visualize your own internal addict. Think of it as a separate ‘being’ that lives inside of you. And it wants nothing more than for you to drink. When you don’t drink, it says, ‘Oh come on, just one.’ Your addict wants you all to itself. So when you talk about the bottles, or any other consequence of drinking, you are in effect, ‘telling on your addict.’”

That’s the reason to go to a gay rehab. People appreciate the drama.

Sober. So that’s what I’m here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven’t felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green. It’s no longer really summer but the air is still too warm and heavy to be fall. It’s the season between the seasons. It’s the feeling of something dying.

I don’t call you or see you much because I’m killing you off now, while it’s easier. Because I can still talk to you. It makes sense to me to separate now, while you’re still healthy, as opposed to having it just happen to me one night out of the blue. I’m trying to evenly distribute the pain of loss. As opposed to taking it in one lump sum.

It scares me that I can have emotions so close to the surface and yet not even be aware of them.

he was in a crisp Armani suit. He wore a gold pinkie ring, which I commented on immediately. “That,” I said, “is something Donald Trump would wear.” He said, “Take that back.” I smiled at him and said I wouldn’t because it was the truth.

I sit for a moment, staring straight ahead, eyes unfocused, unblinking as reality settles over me like a lead dental X-ray cape.

And it hits me. The reason for all the metaphors in recovery. Because the bald truth would be too terrifying. What she’s saying is that I may need an all-new career and all-new friends.

Hayden is maybe five-foot-two, max. But he does not seem to know this. In fact, he seems to be under the impression that he is six-two and weighs just over two hundred pounds.

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.

She’s a striking woman, all bone structure and pewter hair. She impresses me as someone who tosses Caesar salads in a hand-carved teak salad bowl. I bet she reads Joan Didion in hardcover.

notice that her long red nails are chipped. I like that. It says something about her priorities. In rehab, I learned that being sober has to be your number one priority.

You see, even though back when I was drinking I thought nothing bad ever happened to me, something did. Time passed. A lot of time passed. In bars, at parties with people I didn’t care for. It was always the drink. It wasn’t about love or reading the Sunday paper in bed. Or housebreaking a puppy. Or anything that people call ‘life.’ It was about drinking. So actually, something bad, very bad, did happen to me. I wasted my life. And now, what little I have left, I want.”

We join hands and repeat the Sinead O’Connor serenity prayer.

“Knock, knock,” she says softly, smiling, leaning her head into the door. I feel like I’m in a sanitary napkin commercial and she’s about to discreetly ask, “Kelly? Do you ever feel … you know, not so fresh?”

“Tentative, but hopeful, really hopeful.” I’ve learned to always list more than one emotion when asked. It’s more believable.

Depressed, I shut the TV off and go to sleep. I dream about winking zebra vulvas and swinging zebra penises all night long. I wake up feeling relief that I am not dreaming anymore.

“I realize it’s about letting things go, and not adding more things.”

Then I realize what’s happening: Greer is shape-shifting. She is a puzzle piece who is reshaping herself to accommodate the newly reshaped me. More or less.

I’m worried that all of the inner mess that was channeled into alcoholism is now channeled into other disturbing rivers. That I’ve drained the lake to flood the city.

He hiccups convulsively. “Shit,” he says, frustrated. “I just wish I knew what the hell is causing them.” “Can’t they just chop out your hiccupper?” I ask. “They can’t find it,” he says. Then he looks at me like, you fuckhead. And I look at him back like, you Pighead.

At the barbershop while I was waiting, I read a quote by Michael Kors in Vogue. “I love Calvin Klein’s reissue of his original jeans, but my feeling is, if you wore them the first time around, you have no business wearing them now.”

I feel flattered that he presumes to know anything about me at all. It makes me think maybe someday, he would know what book I would like, what foods I would hate, what movie I would go see. It makes me imagine things happening at a future point in time that involve a dual credit application.

I never lost time like that before. I never lost time like that again.

“I wish Rick would get gang-raped by a bunch of Muslim garbage collectors,”

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.”

“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?

“He was promoted,” she says. “That’s wonderful,” I say, ready to hang up. “To Direct,” she adds. A thin smile comes to me. Rick is now in Direct Marketing, the lowest of the low. His life will be about getting people to open their envelopes and send back the SASE. If ad people are bottom-feeders, Rick is now a catfish with no dorsal fin and an extra eye. I drink to Rick.

Many times I’ve noticed a street lamp coming on in the mid-afternoon, just as I pass by. “Hi, Pighead,” I whisper.