Dry: A Memoir Read online

  Kavi volunteers by leisurely raising his arm in the air and allowing his hand to flop back and forth at the wrist in a vague and affected fashion.

  I notice that he has changed into eveningwear. Gone is the tight white T-shirt. Now he’s wearing a black fishnet tank top and his long, springy chest hairs are sticking out through the wide weave. The hairs are strangely glossy, as though he has used conditioner on them. I think I even catch the perfumed scent of Finesse in the air. But it could just be a nasal hallucination.

  He reads from a heavily fingered paperback with a sunburst on the cover. “April fifth, taking a single footstep toward change.” As he reads the inspiring and motivational entry, I look at people’s feet. I notice that almost everyone is wearing the pale blue hospital slippers that came in my hospital welcome pack. I morbidly wonder if it’s possible that I will be so broken by this place that I, too, will wear the little booties. And then I’ll cry when they rip, sharing my pain with the others.

  Big Bobby keeps blinking his eyes really hard with what is some sort of nervous tick. Pregnant Paul stares out the window, but because it’s dark, I suspect he’s really watching the group reflected in the glass. The WASP has changed from a pinstripe shirt into a white oxford, as though he is on a cruise.

  After Kavi finishes reading the affirmation, Marion the Low-Esteem Leader says, “I guess I’ll begin the Grateful Statements. I’m grateful to be here tonight. . . . I’m grateful that I’m alive and feel loved . . . and I’m grateful for you, Augusten, for being here.”

  Oh, I really wish she hadn’t done that. I do not want more attention drawn to me. I mentally vanish from the room, Endora from Bewitched.

  Somebody else says, “Steve, I’m grateful you watered the plants while I was at ‘individual.’ And I’m grateful that I didn’t use today and I’m hopeful about tomorrow.”

  A few people sigh, heads nod in appreciation.

  The man with the cowboy hat from my group says, “I’m grateful to have you here too, Augusten. And I’m grateful to be here myself. I’d like to thank God for another chance. And say, one day at a time.”

  Dr. Valium smiles to himself and stares at the floor. Is he biting the inside of his cheek to halt a smile?

  And so it goes, that for fifteen minutes the patients express their gratitude to each other for such things as “saying hello to me in the hallway . . . sharing what you did in Group this afternoon . . . splitting your chocolate-chip cookie with me.”

  I can feel the artery on the left side of my head pulsing, moments away from bursting into an aneurysm. Whatever Librium was in my system has already been metabolized by my urban liver. My liver wastes no time. It’s the New York City cabdriver of livers. I’m thinking it can’t get any worse than this.

  But of course, then it absolutely does.

  “Okay, everybody, what time is it?” Marion asks playfully, leading everybody on.

  Two of the patients reach behind their chairs and retrieve two large, well-worn stuffed animals; one is a monkey, one is a blue kitten. They hug the dirty plush toys to their laps and wear great big smiles.

  At once, the entire room breaks into an alarming musical chant. “It’s Monkey Wonkey time . . . Monkey Wonkey was a lonely monkey. Then Blue Blue kitten became his friend . . . now Monkey Wonkey and Blue Blue Kitten want to make friends with . . . YOU!!!”

  And both patients suddenly lunge off their chairs and sprint over to me, giggling and dropping the stuffed animals onto my lap before returning to their seats like obedient children.

  I sit motionless and confused, bathed in applause. Why a song about codependent stuffed animals? And why am I now holding them on my lap? And more essentially, what time is the first flight in the morning? At this point, I would even take a bus, gladly the rear seat next to the toilet.

  I look at Dr. Valium. He lifts his eyebrows smugly, as if to say, And there you have it.

  Marion explains, for once looking up from the carpeting, “Don’t worry, Augusten, it’s just a little tradition we have here. Each night, we hand out Monkey Wonkey and Blue Blue Kitten to somebody special who needs a little lift. And since you’re new, that’s why you got them.” Then she adds, as if it were a perk, “So you get to curl up with both of these guys tonight—and tomorrow, you get to choose who pass them along to!”

  Before I am able to say a word, the group rises to its feet and joins hands. My own hands are forcibly grabbed by the alcoholics on either side of me. The stuffed animals tumble from my lap.

  Then, as if genetically programmed to do so, a young male alcoholic who had been previously slumped in a chair with his hair hanging over his eyes begins, “God . . .” and the group joins him in spooky unison, “. . . grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen.”

  I think, How bizarre. They’re quoting the opening of Sinéad O’Connor’s “I Feel So Different.” I love that song. I associate it with vodka and Rose’s lime juice, back when I first moved to New York City and lived downtown in a Battery Park City highrise apartment. I’d blast that CD and lean out the window in my living room, watching the traffic blur up West Street, the unfathomably gigantic World Trade Center towers illuminated always, even at midnight.

  The crowd breaks up, people laugh, somebody says, “Race you to the coffee machine.” I find myself carried by the flow of the group, down the stairs, still clutching the stuffed animals.

  “Look, I know this seems really corny, but you’ve got to trust me. Once you get past all the crap, the program here is truly amazing,” Dr. Valium says. “Give it some time,” he adds. “It needs time to sink in.”

  Big Bobby waddles over. I want to tell him, “I have no food, go away.”

  He says, “Don’t worry, they’re clean.”

  “Huh?” I say.

  “Monkey Wonkey and Blue Blue Kitten. We throw them in the washer once a week.” He smiles, clomps down the stairs.

  I imagine the entire inpatient community standing in the laundry room wringing their hands while they wait anxiously for the plush toys to dry. I go to my room. My roommate is on his bed, curled up into the fetal position. I drop the animals on the floor at the foot of my bed and sit.

  It’s nine o’clock. Let’s see. Right about now, I’d be at the Bowery Bar, working on my seventh martini of the night. I’d have napkins with ad campaign ideas scribbled on them strewn on the bar in front of me. I might even be flirting back and forth with the actor/bartender.

  I look at my roommate, an older, withered black man who checked in only hours before me. He hasn’t left the room all day. It was whispered to me that he has terminal liver cancer. Earlier he’d been taken to the other, normal hospital, for some additional tests, which is why I didn’t see him when I first arrived.

  I undress to my boxers and T-shirt and crawl under the thin sheet. The flat pillow under my head offers no support. I stare at the beige water stains on the suspended ceiling.

  I sigh.

  So far, mental health sucks.

  ALCOHOLISM FOR BEGINNERS

  M

  y name is Marion and I’m an alcoholic and drug addict,” says Low-Esteem Marion as she looks at the two plump hands in her lap.

  “Hi, Marion,” chants the circle.

  “I’m right where I need to be,” says Marion to the hands.

  “You’re right where you need to be,” echoes the circle.

  “I feel my feelings and share them with others.”

  “You feel your feelings and share them with others.”

  Marion looks across the room at a member of the circle, briefly, before looking away. “I love myself.”

  “You love yourself,” affirms the group.

  “And I am somebody.”

  “And you are somebody,” the room says in unison.

  A brief, small smile passes across Marion’s lips, her cheeks flush with color and she wipes the palms of her hands across the legs of her jeans, t
urning to the person sitting to her right.

  “My name is Paul, Alcoholic,” says Pregnant Paul.

  “Hi, Paul Alcoholic,” says everyone verbatim, including Marion who is now able to look directly at Paul, who himself looks at the floor and represses a nervous smile.

  “I’m a good person.”

  “You’re a good person,” promises the room.

  “I will get well,” says Paul optimistically.

  “You will get well,” promise the addicts.

  “I’ll lose my spare tire and find a cute boyfriend,” grins Paul.

  “You will lose your spare tire and find a cute boyfriend,” sing the patients.

  “And I am somebody,” he says, hands clasped across his belly.

  “And you are somebody,” says everyone, except me.

  As was explained by a counselor this morning, Affirmations are a time when we affirm in ourselves something we would like to strengthen. For example, if I feel I am fat, I would say, “I am thin,” and the group would affirm this in me. “You are thin.” It’s as simple as that. And you always end with the phrase, “I am somebody.”

  Funny, but similar affirmations haven’t worked for me in the past. I do recall many times telling Greer, “I’m not drunk. I would never show up to work drunk.” And her telling me, “Bullshit, you lying fuck.”

  When the circle finally comes to me, there’s a brief moment of silence, because I have stopped paying attention to the affirmations, and am instead imagining how it would feel to walk into a jewelry store in downtown Minneapolis and buy an expensive watch to replace the one that I gave to the ex-cop after sex one night during a blackout in my apartment.

  There is a clearing of a throat. All eyes slide my way.

  “My name is Augusten and I’m an alcoholic,” I grumble.

  “Hi, Augusten,” says the room.

  “I’m glad to be here,” I lie.

  “You’re glad to be here,” they repeat.

  “I won’t check out after lunch,” I say.

  “You won’t check out after lunch,” they affirm.

  There, I think. Done.

  “And . . . ?” somebody says.

  “And what?”

  “And you ARE somebody,” three or four people say with some hostility.

  Jesus Fucking Christ. “And I am somebody,” I say sarcastically.

  “And you are somebody,” they overemphasize.

  When Affirmations are over, I go straight into Group. Today, nice David is not the counselor of the group, but instead there’s Rae. Rae’s a big woman. And to add an exclamation point to this fact, she wears a loud floral print; gigantic blossoms all over her body. There’s something in her voice that makes me think I won’t get away with anything, that I shouldn’t even try. I feel pretty confident Rae’s clubbed more than her fair share of baby seals in her life.

  “Today we’re going to talk about consequences. The consequences of our drinking. Does everybody know what consequences are?”

  Nobody says a word.

  She looks around the room, stares each and every person directly in the eyes, including me. This takes a while. I feel a shiver pass through me. Worse, I think, than making eye contact on the subway with someone you suspect belongs to a gang because they are wearing a Halloween mask in June.

  Rae gives a bloodthirsty grin. “Oh, I see. None of you have experienced any consequences as a result of your drinking. My oh my, what a lucky group of alcoholics you are.”

  The only thing that I can think is, Oh shit.

  Still nobody says anything. People just sort of shift around in their seats, we don’t even look each other. I sense we are all looking at our shoelaces, concentrating hard on the knot.

  “Okay then, let me tell you what a consequence is. A consequence is when you’re a drunk and you meet another drunk at a bar. And you and this other drunk start a relationship. Every night you drink together. And every night this drunk that you hooked up with beats the shit out of you. And every morning, he apologizes. And you forgive him. So what if he breaks four bones in your face? You have plenty more.”

  She pauses. My hands are sweating. I have the sensation of ascending on a roller coaster.

  “When your friends tell you that you are crazy to stay with this man, you tell them that it’s none of their business. Eventually, you lose your friends. But you don’t care, because you have your booze and you have your man. But that’s just an example.”

  She pauses. “Of course, a consequence could also be losing a job because of your drinking, or losing a friendship, or even losing your self-respect. Maybe letting the dishes pile up in your sink until you can’t see your sink anymore.”

  A bell rings. I think of my apartment. It’s my deepest, darkest secret. The fact that I drink is not a secret. The fact that I’m usually already drunk when I meet Jim for drinks is not a secret.

  My apartment is my secret. It’s filled with empty liquor bottles. Not five or six. More like three hundred. Three hundred one-liter bottles of scotch, occupying all floor space not already occupied by a bed or a chair. Sometimes I myself am stunned by the visual presentation. And the truly odd part is that I really don’t know how they got there. You’d think I’d have taken each bottle down to the trash room when it was empty. But I let two collect. And because two is nothing, I let three collect. And on it went. The ironic thing is that I’m not the kind of person who saves things. I don’t have boxes filled with old postcards from friends, cherished mementos from childhood. My apartment is clean and modern in design, kind of what you’d think a New York City ad guy’s apartment would look like. I even spent half my paycheck one month on a single end table.

  Except there are bottles everywhere. And magazines all over the floor.

  Every time I’ve removed the bottles from my apartment, promised myself it would never happen again, it always happens again. And when I used to drink beer instead of scotch, the beer bottles would collect. I counted the beer bottles once: one thousand, four hundred and fifty-two. You have not felt anxiety until you have carried a plastic trash bag stuffed with a few hundred beer bottles down the stairs in the middle of the night, trying not to make a sound.

  Quickly, before I can change my mind, I speak up. “Something you just said, I can relate to that.” Already, “I” statements.

  She looks at me, folds her arms across her chest and nods. “Go on.”

  I tell her about the bottles. And how because of them, I never invite anybody over to my apartment. “Actually, whenever I hear somebody in the hallway, I freeze in case they knock on my door, so I can pretend I’m not home.”

  I feel a pang of sadness, and it’s actually for myself. Why would somebody live that way? I also feel like I have broken a confidence. So this is what I say. “It’s funny, but admitting this out loud, I feel really strange, like I’m saying something I shouldn’t.”

  She claps her hands together. “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.’ ”

  I play along. I try to imagine a nasty little man living inside my forehead, kicking the backs of my eyeballs for telling. Then I imagine myself wearing the hospital slippers.

  “Of course, your addict is not really a separate entity within you, but I think it helps to visualize it as such.” She smooths the front of her dress. “Now, how are bottles a consequence of drinking?”

  “Um, I guess because they make the apartment messy,” I say.

  “And?” she questions, sounding like a prosecuting attorney.

  I just look at her, puzzled. Someone forgot to give me my script.

  “Anybody else?” she asks the room.

  Big Bob
by straightens in his chair. “Well, if he’s got all those bottles in there, then, like he said, nobody ever visits him. So that must be lonely.”

  I feel instantly pathetic. More transparent than jellyfish sashimi.

  “Yes,” she says, “That’s it exactly. The bottles allow you, Augusten, to place a wall—a wall of glass if you will—between you and other people. Effectively, you are a prisoner in your own home. And your internal addict loves this. Because the goal is to have you isolated. Your addict is very jealous and wants you all to itself.”

  I think of how I’m always in a rush to leave the office early, come home and drink. How lately, I don’t even care if Jim’s busy or if I don’t see any friends. I don’t mind at all staying home alone. And drinking. In fact, I think I’m starting to crave staying home alone instead of going out. And then I think of Pighead. How we never talk about his HIV because we never need to because he’s fine. Except for sometimes.

  “Augusten,” he will say to me, “I’m not asking for any favors. I’m not asking you to take a vacation to Hawaii with me for a month. Just come over for dinner once in a while, come for roast beef. Call me up and say, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ ”

  I think of how demanding I consider him to be. Needy. “I can’t,” I always tell him these days. “Work.” Even roast beef and 60 Minutes is too much to ask of me. Even a phone call.

  Dr. Valium goes next. He talks about how he might lose his medical license for his Valium addiction. How all those years of schooling could end up being for nothing.

  “That’s a consequence all right,” Rae says.

  The others bring out their greatest hits. The WASP talks about the car accident and his mother’s paralysis. Low-Esteem Marion talks about her failed relationship with her girlfriend of six years. Big Bobby talks about not being able to hold a job and hating himself because he’s thirty-two and still lives with his parents.

  It’s all very Ringling Brothers. And as freakish as these people may be, it’s not exactly like I can’t relate to what they’re saying. It’s more like I can sort of relate. Sort of completely.