Dry_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [38]
At breakfast the next morning, Hayden is telling me about his tirade in the nurses’ station last night. “I was furious, told them, ‘I cannot afford for this program not to work.’ I explained that I am very serious about getting off the crack and alcohol and that what I had expected was a professional rehabilitation hospital and not some ridiculous, childish parody.”
When I go to butter my toast, it snaps in half. “I don’t blame you a bit, I felt exactly the same way.” I consider the strange awareness of feelings that seems to happen here. The awareness that all is not Happy Hour. “But it really does get . . . interesting.” I think of Rae in her floral prints. “Just give it a couple of days.”
“Well, it had better,” he huffs. Which is hilarious and I must bite the inside of my cheek to prevent laughing out loud. Hayden is maybe five-foot-two, max. But he does not seem to know this. In fact, he seems to be under the impression that he is six-two and weighs just over two hundred pounds.
“These are delicious,” he says of the reconstituted scrambled eggs, the same eggs that sit on my own plate, untouched.
So far, I have lost almost ten pounds. Why do stars suddenly appear . . . “You’re from London, what would you know.”
He laughs, “That’s very true, actually. This is far better than anything my mother ever made.”
I make a face. “Did you have that nasty, yeasty stuff they spread on toast, what’s it called?”
His eyes brighten. “Vegemite! Oh yes, I love Vegemite.”
“You’ll enjoy dinner then,” I promise him.
For the next week, Hayden and I are inseparable. We sit together on the fireproof loveseats, cocooned in our own world of superiority. We exchange mortifying stories from our sordid pasts. We gossip endlessly about the other patients. No detail is too small to be ignored. When one of the lesbians trimmed her own bangs with nail clippers, we were utterly hysterical. We took it as a sure sign that she was struggling with control issues, destined for relapse.
I don’t think I have ever had such a close friend in my life, made instantly like Tang.
Time accelerates with Hayden around. I’ve stopped watching the second hand on the clock. It’s the kind of friendship that’s easy to make in elementary school when you’re six or seven. You let a kid have your swing and suddenly, he’s your best friend. Suddenly, you don’t care that you hate math, because you can hate it together. And after school, you want to play together. You never question it. You never say to yourself, Am I spending too much time with him? Am I sending the wrong signal?
Then you get pubic hair and everything changes. Pubic hair signals the beginning of your demise. After pubic hair comes high school, college, work. By the time you’ve started working, you’re ruined. And you will never make a friend as completely and easily as you did when you still wiped your nose on your sleeve.
Unless, it seems, you are forced into rehab.
Hayden and I have talked about this very thing. We have marveled at the friendship that has blossomed between us, despite a combined age that would entitle us to a discount at the movies. “And the amazing part is,” Hayden has said, “we’re not drunk in a bar.”
This is true. It is possible to make close, instant friendships while sitting at a bar drinking. But these friendships tend to evaporate at four in the morning when the bar closes, or the next morning when you find yourself sleeping in the same bed.
But with Hayden, it just keeps going. And I can’t help but worry that it’s some sort of rehab spell. Like, will we still be friends when we’re both out of this place? I want us to be friends. I want us to live in the same apartment building, one floor between us like Mary and Rhoda. I feel gypped that I didn’t meet him earlier in life, so finding apartments with matching sunken living rooms in the same building seems like something we are owed.
During my last week in rehab, Hayden and I discover a Ping-Pong table folded up in the gym. It was behind a mound of boxes, so we never noticed it before.
“You want to give it a go?” he asks.