Dry_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [111]
The bathroom was clean. This surprised me as much as anything that morning. How many people used this one bathroom? At least the whole floor. And how many apartments were there on this floor? Five, maybe seven. And not a single door among them. I pissed into the bowl and my urine turned the blue water green.
“You leaving?” Serena asked when I walked back into the apartment. She had lit a candle and already I could smell the apple scent.
“Yup. I gotta go,” I said. I was no longer drunk. I was suddenly extremely sober.
“You don’t belong doing what you’re doing,” she told me. There was no blame in her voice. Just kind observation.
“I have to change,” I told her. Out of my clothes? Out of my life?
“Everybody can change,” she said. I believed her. But why didn’t she believe herself?
“You?” I asked.
“I’m doin’ what I can do.”
I wanted to hug her, and so I did. Then I gave her a hundred dollars in twenties because I had a hundred dollars in twenties, and then I left.
Outside, I looked up at the building. So many windows smashed. Angry sprays of white paint looping over the brownstone steps. Crushed cigarette butts, broken beer bottles, a condom.
Empty glass vials lined the path to the front steps, a few of them crushed almost back into sand. The geraniums of a crack house.
I walked down the sidewalk, the only white man for half a mile. Certainly the only gay white male advertising copywriter wearing a Rolex for half a mile. I walked and I thought, That apartment without a door or electricity is nicer than my apartment. It is more lived in. It is lived in, not rotted in.
I took the subway home, but could not bring myself to look at anybody. I knew I must have smelled insane, like chemicals and alcohol and something perhaps unfamiliar, yet sinister. I looked, instead, at people’s feet. I saw their stockings and their black banker shoes, I could smell their shampoo and their hair gel.
I thought, This is it. I am rock-bottom, on the subway. I have to stop. I cannot end up like that.
When I finally entered my apartment, it was two in the afternoon. My apartment, once again, a debris field. Even the ceiling above my chair was yellow from nicotine. It was worse now than when I came home from rehab. And then it occurred to me: I have relapsed for a longer period of time now than I was sober before.
I was drunk by four.
I wake up slowly, gradually leaving a dream where I’ve fallen asleep in the woods, out back behind the house I grew up in. I’m cold and damp. The dream leaves, the sheets are soaking wet; the feather bed drenched. I climb out of the bed, disgusted. Two nights in a row I’ve peed in the bed. Last month, I am smoking crack in the South Bronx and this month, I am urinating in my own bed. This is not progress.
I make my way to the refrigerator, stepping over all the clothes, empty Chinese food containers and unopened mail that covers the floor. There is a vague path from the bed to the refrigerator, then from the refrigerator to my table. Mounds of papers, containers, empty cigarette packets have been pushed out of the way to make this path, or flattened. I take out a bottle of Evian and gulp, then I catch my breath and gulp some more. I drink water in the morning and the middle of the night.
The machine is blinking.
“What do you want??” I say out loud as I stab the PLAY button with my finger.
The polite voice of an older, unfamiliar man begins speaking. “Hello, um, this call is for a Mr. Augusten Burroughs . . .”
I go to the computer, poke a key to wake it up.
“. . . Mr. Burroughs, my name is Mercer Richter, and I’m calling from . . .”
I hunt around the empty Marlboro Lights boxes on my desk, looking for a cigarette.
“. . . Robison Jewelers on Spring Street. The piece of jewelry