Dry_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [116]
I go to sleep.
And I do not die.
ONE YEAR LATER
A
nyone here counting days?”
Jim raises his hand, reluctantly. “My name is Jim and I’m an alcoholic. Today is day ninety.”
Everyone claps and Jim’s sponsor winks at him. I nudge him with my elbow and grin.
After the meeting, Jim and I walk along West Fourth. “Fuck. I really want a drink. I mean, I’m not gonna drink, but I really want one. Does the want ever go away?” he asks.
“Well, I’m no expert. But no. Probably not.”
“Great,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets.
“That’s the bad news,” I tell him. “You can never replace it. The good news is you do learn to live without it. You miss it. You want it. You hang out with a bunch of other crazy people who feel the same way and you live with it. And eventually, you start to sound like a cloying self-help book, like me.”
We pass by a secondhand bookstore and stop to look at the antique globe in the window. “It seems so easy for you,” he says. “It’s like you just don’t drink, period.”
I recall the months after Pighead died where I entered my coma. What else to call it? Drinking from the moment I woke up until I passed out. Going to bars and trying to find a penis and then not having any idea what to do with it. Smoking crack with Foster. And then meeting Serena.
And then the pig head. From Pighead.
And then the plain, almost monastic process of waking up, taking a shower, going to an AA meeting and then doing this again and again, day after day until an amount of time had passed and it became not a struggle, but a routine. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I tell him. “It is so not easy for me. It was easy the first time. And look what happened. This time I have to really stay on top of it so it doesn’t sneak up on me. But you’re right in one way,” I say. “I just don’t drink.” And it doesn’t hurt that Foster has moved to Florida to open a bar. One less temptation in my geographical area.
“What about tomorrow?” he asks.
I spot Thailand on the globe, then Kuala Lumpur. “I don’t know anything about tomorrow,” I tell him. “The only thing I know about tomorrow is that I’m meeting Greer for this freelance thing we’re doing. Assuming a runaway bus doesn’t have other plans in store for me.” At first I was worried that I might have too much time on my hands as a freelancer. But it turned out to be the best thing. I don’t have to be in an office every day with assholes like Rick. And the day rate for freelancers is outrageous. I can afford really excellent underwear to sit around all day in.
“It’s good that you and Greer are getting along again,” he says.
“Yeah, I didn’t think it would stay bad forever.” Greer and I didn’t speak for almost ten months. Then she quit work and started taking anger workshops at the New School. She also took up painting. All her paintings are black. “It’s better now. We both speak recovery.”
Jim goes into the tobacco store on the corner of Christopher and Seventh for some cigarettes. He comes out with a pack of American Spirits and growls, “It’s just so fucking uncomfortable.” A match flares at his fingertips.
I nod. “I know, I get like that. I get where I feel like I’m gonna drink anyway, eventually. So I might as well do it now. It’s awful. Sometimes I feel like I have hives in my brain that I can’t scratch.”
“What do you do?” Jim asks, very hungry for the answer, as this has probably described perfectly the way he feels at this moment.
“You’re supposed to go to a meeting. I mean, as much as you hate them or if they feel stupid or you just don’t want to go. The thing is, if you go to a meeting, you won’t drink that day. It’s like a minibrainwash. It kind of fixes you for a little while.” But then I say, “Of course if I’m really wallowing in self-pity, then I’ll tell myself, ‘Pighead would give anything to feel this uncomfortable right now.’ ” So there’s always the auto–guilt trip method.
We make a right on Bank. As we walk below a street lamp, a curious thing happens: it flickers and then illuminates. A