Dry_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [31]
Wow, I think. Does a Bloody Mary count? I love a Bloody Mary in the morning. Doesn’t everybody?
She continues. “I realize my case is a little different. It was a little faster. Five years, from nothing to rock bottom. I guess I learn quick.”
She’s an excellent presenter and would have succeeded in advertising, is what I think. She generates a sense of excitement in the room and I become aware that my hands are moist with sweat, but not from fear. From needing to know what happened next. I like the drama. I glance around the room and other people look rapt as well. And I feel like, That’s the reason to go to a gay rehab. People appreciate the drama.
“When I got out of that tub and looked in the mirror, I did not recognize the creature looking back at me. And on that day, I went to my first AA meeting. That was ten years ago. Today, I’m sober, I have a Ph.D. and I’m sitting here with you, trying to help you become sober.”
Sober. So that’s what I’m here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven’t felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green. It’s no longer really summer but the air is still too warm and heavy to be fall. It’s the season between the seasons. It’s the feeling of something dying.
“See, alcoholism is exactly like bubble gum. You know when you blow a bubble and it bursts, some of the gum sticks to your chin?”
Small, tentative laughter.
“What’s the only thing that gets the bubble gum off your chin?” she asks.
Sometimes I will chew grape bubble gum because it stinks and hides the smell of alcohol. I answer, “Bubble gum. You have to take the gum out of your mouth and press it against the gum on your chin and it’ll pick it up.”
Rae beams. “You’ve got it.”
Slam dunk. I am on the road to recovery.
“Only an alcoholic can treat another alcoholic. Only other alcoholics can get you sober.” Then she slaps her hands down on her legs, exhales really fast and says, “Okay, that’s it for Group. Time for lunch.”
Still, I’d kill for a cosmopolitan.
I am released from the detox room and the rainbow footprint poster and placed in a regular room, directly across from the men’s showers. My roommates are Dr. Valium and Big Bobby. Without trying, I’ve kind of fallen into a routine here. Much like a worker at a labor camp. The morning and evening Affirmations (and I AM somebody!!) are cheesy bookends to each intense day of what amounts to Alcoholic Academy.
The days here tend to blur together. Because once you’ve gone through four days, you’ve experienced every “class” there is and then it’s just a matter of doing the same day over and over again. Like the movie Groundhog Day, it’s an endless loop.
Recently, a skinny girl named Sarah piped up in group. “I can only have an orgasm if my girlfriend cuts my legs with a razor blade. The thing is, I feel so inhuman, like I’m just a shell, a husk. But when she cuts me and I bleed and see the blood and taste it off my fingers, well, then I realize I’m human, real.”
So she’s one of those girls on Lifetime, Television for Women, who stabs her knees with a fork until her parents catch her and take her to an expensive shrink, played by Jaclyn Smith. And while that’s moderately entertaining, I still don’t understand how any of this directly relates to me. On the plus side, they’re feeding me Librium like candy. It gives me the sensation of floating just a few inches above the