Dry_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [10]
The human resources woman nods her head politely. “You could go there. It’s, for, you know, gay people.”
I look at Rick and he has turned away because he hates the word gay. It’s the only word that can crack his veneer.
“That might be better,” I say. A rehab hospital run by fags will be hip. Plus there’s the possibility of good music and sex.
And the confrontation suddenly becomes no different from any other advertising meeting. An agreement has been reached. It’s decided. I’ll take the rest of the week off to make the necessary arrangements and I’ll coordinate the details with human resources. I’ll be expected back in just over a month, clean and sober. Perhaps somebody will even write a conference report highlighting the main points of the meeting.
On my way out, Greer kisses the air on each side of my cheek. “Good luck,” she says. She grips my shoulders. “Someday you’ll thank me for this.”
What movie did she get that from? I wonder.
As I leave the building, I begin to feel somewhat elated. The bright side of the situation steps forward in my mind: I managed to escape from that awful intervention unscathed, I have over a month off from work, and it’s only two in the afternoon.
I do not have to go to work tomorrow or the next day or the day after this. As I walk away from the building, I have a sense of flight. The sun is strong, with heavy clouds in the sky. I can get seriously drunk tonight without that awful, annoying concern about how much I will stink in the morning.
I feel high, as though I have been handed some incredibly good news.
What I really like to do is get drunk at home so I don’t feel so nervous and inhibited, then go out to some dive bar and talk to guys. You never know who you’ll meet or where you’ll end up. It’s like this fucking incredible vortex of possibility. Anything can happen at a bar. Unlike Greer, I like options, I like to not really know what’s going to happen next. Resolutions can be very dull.
Then it hits me. An awful glitch. Something so unfathomable that it dawns on me with a slow blackness that makes me feel hollow.
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