Dry_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [15]
I wait ten minutes. Everybody I see seems to look like a recovering alcoholic looking for somebody.
I decide to ditch the New York thing, try to look more like someone on the brink of hospitalization. I tap my foot nervously. I look from side to side, quickly. I bite my lip. I think, Should I just sit down, right here at carousel seven, and shake until somebody’s arms are around me and they’re saying, “It’s okay, I’m here, I’m here, come with me to the institute.”
I wait four more minutes. It’s time to get out of here before the drug-sniffing dogs catch on to me. It’s inconceivable that a piece of luggage could sit in my closet for a year and not have at least a gram of coke dust on it.
I hoist both bags onto my shoulders and make my own way out the automatic door to the taxicab waiting area. The cab driver asks where I’m going. I give him the street address instead of the actual name. I don’t say “Proud . . . you know it? It’s the gay rehab center in Duluth, and by the way my name is Augusten and I’m an alcoholic . . .” I just give him the address, anonymous and factual: 3131 North Drive, Duluth.
I am only slightly mortified that he gives no pause before accelerating toward the exit gate and onto the interstate. He appears to know exactly where he is going. I am glad he says nothing.
“Had another drunk fag today,” he will tell his wife over a dinner of honey-glazed ham and Betty Crocker scalloped potatoes. He’ll shake his head. “And boy, was this one puffy.”
As seemingly endless miles of brown, drab Minnesota landscape pass by the window, I try to imagine what the institute will be like.
I have replayed my internal Rehab Hospital Tourism tapes over and over. My favorite goes like this: A discrete, Frank Lloyd Wright–ish compound shrouded mysteriously from public view by a tasteful wall of trimmed boxwood trees. Ian Schrager, of course, created the interior. Spare rooms, sun-drenched, with firm mattresses and white, 300-count Egyptian cotton sheets. There is a nightstand (probably made of birch with a galvanized steel top) and on it: Chicken Soup for the Alcoholic Soul and a carafe of ice water with lemon wedges. I imagine polished linoleum floors. (By allowing this one clinical detail into my fantasy, I believe I will be allowed all the other details I envision.) Nurses will be far too holistic and nurturing to wear white polyester; they will wear, perhaps, tailored hemp smocks and when they are backlit by one of the many floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the lily pond, I will see the outline of their lean, athletic legs.
There will be a large pool. I will forgive its heavy chlorination. I will understand. This is a hospital, after all.
Lap swimming will be supplemented with personal training in the modernly equipped gym. Here is where I will lose the twenty pounds of cocktail-belly that has accumulated around my middle.
I will eat only small, restrained portions of their steamed local trout and seasonal field greens. I will politely refuse the dessert of fresh berries in a marzipan nest.
But as the landscape transforms from flatlands to industrial parks, I begin to worry. Nowhere in my vision have I encountered so many parking lots filled with minivans. My internal Rehab Hospital Tourism tape has been snagged inside my internal VCR.
Where is the lush scenery? The pond with the rare Japanese goldfish? Where are the meandering hiking trails?
The driver turns left onto Maiden Lane. The hospital is supposed to be on the corner, but all I see is the Pillsbury factory outlet store among other industrial park buildings. And across from Pillsbury (complete with a giant inflatable Dough-Boy on the lawn) is a brown, 1970s professional