Dry_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [36]
“Are you looking forward to tonight?” she asks.
I’m not sure what she means.
She must read my face. “The AA meeting tonight, are you excited?”
“Oh, that. Yeah, I guess. It’ll be interesting.”
“You know,” she says, “some people consider rehab to be the ambulance that delivers you to AA. Rehab is a start. It teaches you certain things, you get your first thirty days of sobriety here. But rehab is not a cure, by any means. The real work is done on a day-to-day basis in AA.”
“You mean, I’ll be going to AA meetings every day?”
“Well, that’s up to you, but statistically, those with the longest sobriety tend to go to meetings once a day.”
All of a sudden, I feel overwhelmed with the work involved with mental health. Therapy four times a week, AA meetings every day for the rest of my life. “It seems like, I don’t know, so much work.”
“You found the time to drink every day,” she points out.
True. But that was fun. That’s why they call it Happy Hour. I feel like I’m in prison and have just learned than upon my release, I will be on house parole for the rest of my life, wearing one of those electronic ankle things. Free, but not. I guess I thought that rehab would stop me from drinking like an alcoholic. I thought it would teach me how to drink like a normal person.
• • •
Today is day twenty. The days have stopped having names and are now numbers. Numbers that indicate how far away I am from my last drink. I’ve heard rumor that there are people in AA who still “count days” well into the years. So this means that in addition to all the other life changes I may need to make, including friends and career, I must now also live by a calendar with a different principle, like the Chinese. So today, day twenty, would have been just like nineteen except for one thing. A new guy arrived today.
I was in the conversation pit reading last week’s local newspaper during one of my rare thirty minutes of free time and I watched the new guy come in and sit in the nurses’ station, behind the chicken-wire glass window. He was sitting in the same chair I sat in when I checked in. He looked miserable, his face contorted into a mask of worry, panic, horror. He appeared to be handsome, but neglected.
Since he arrived at around eight, his first exposure to rehab will be the evening Affirmations. The stuffed-animal song and handout. I can’t wait.
I finish reading the paper and go to the bathroom to take a leak. When I come back into the room, he’s standing next to the coffee table where a coffee machine and a selection of herbal teas are available to all alcoholics, nervously fingering a white styrofoam cup, waiting for the fresh pot of coffee to finish brewing.
“Welcome to hell,” I say, taking a Styrofoam cup for myself and plopping a Cranberry Zinger tea bag into it.
He looks at me as if I have a stun gun behind my back.
“Er, hello. I’m Hayden.” He’s a Brit.
“Augusten.”
“You’ll have to excuse me, I’m just really out of sorts. I’m exhausted and in a bit of a panic over being here. I really can’t believe I’m here at all. Frankly, I can’t believe I’m alive.”
“I know the feeling.”
“Where are you from?” he asks.
“Manhattan,” I say. I don’t say New York City because I don’t want somebody from London thinking I live in one of the outer boroughs.
“Oh really?” He brightens up a bit. “I’m from there as well.” Then he crashes. “Well, I was from there. But I lost my apartment before coming here. So when I leave rehab, I’ll probably have to go back to London for a while, back to live with my parents.”
The coffee’s done; he pours a cup. A Brit who drinks bad coffee instead of tea. I like him already. We have twenty minutes before the evening Affirmations group, so I ask, “You wanna step outside, get some air?”
“That’s a wonderful idea.”
We walk outside to the backyard. We are allowed to go no further than down to the edge of the creek, about one hundred feet. But we don’t go that far. We sit