Dry_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [39]
“Sure.” I haven’t played since I was a kid and my grandfather sent us a huge, folding green Ping-Pong table one Christmas. My parents couldn’t stand the thing and they kept it folded in the basement, against the wall near the hot water heater. But if you unfolded just one side and left the other side up at a right angle, you could play against yourself, hitting the ball off the opposite wall of the table. I got pretty good, but then it wasn’t like my opponent ever did anything unexpected.
After missing the ball three times in a row, I’m finally able to whack it back at him. The Ping-Pong section of my brain wakes up and we fall into a rhythm. “How’d you get so good?” I ask as I bend under the table to pick up the ball I just missed.
“Oh, my father. It’s all we’ve ever done together.”
“You’re not bad,” Hayden says after we’ve been going steady for a good sixty seconds or so.
“That’s because I’m excellent at pushing things away from me.”
We play for a few more minutes in silence, actually concentrating on Ping-Pong. This is either an achievement for me, or a new low.
He holds the ball up. “You wanna serve?”
“No, you.”
He fwaps the ball over to me and I fwap it back. I’m pretty good at this. If nothing else, I will leave here being able to play Ping-Pong. Possibly even against someone Chinese.
“I’m really going to miss you,” he says to me.
I’m leaving here in three days. Which doesn’t seem possible, because it feels like I’ve been here for years. Supposedly, I now have the “tools” that will help me cope on the outside. Tools such as the piece of paper Ray handed out last week in group. It was illustrated with about twenty different faces, drawn with simple black lines and displaying an emotion. Under each face was a caption. Happy. Sad. Jealous. Angry. Confused. Afraid. “When you’re wondering what it is you’re feeling at any given moment, simply pull out this chart and find the face that fits your mood.” So it’s basically an alcoholic-to-normal dictionary. I found myself carrying the thing folded up in the front pocket of my jeans and referring to it constantly, trying to decide what I was feeling. At the back of the lunch line, I would unfold the chart and find the face that matched my mood: nauseous.
“You know what scares me?” I say. “What scares me is how institutionalized I’ve become. How my whole life is this sick group of alcoholics. It’s like some extended, fucked-up family that I have everything in common with. I’m afraid I might not fit on the outside anymore.”
Hayden misses the ball. “Fuck,” he shouts. “I know exactly what you mean, I never want to leave.”
“I’m not ready,” I tell him. It’s safe here. I can live with fishcake sandwiches and linoleum flooring. On the outside, people won’t call me on my bullshit. I’ll be back to getting away with it.
“You’re ready,” he says.
“How do you know? What makes you think so?”
“Because when I first met you, I wasn’t even sure that you were really an alcoholic. I thought maybe you just drank a little too much sometimes.” His eyes twinkle. “Now I’m positive that you are, in fact, a raging alcoholic.”
“That means I should stay.” Is it possible? Have I gotten worse?
“On the contrary,” Hayden says, raising the ball into the air as if in a toast. “It means, my dear boy, that you are more real.”
PART II
PREPARE FOR LANDING
I
am not prepared for what I see when I unlock the door to my apartment. Although I have obviously seen it before, lived with it even, I have never encountered it through the lens of thirty days of sobriety. My apartment is filled with empty Dewar’s bottles, hundreds of empty Dewar’s bottles. They cover all surfaces; the counters in the kitchen, the top of the refrigerator. They are under the table I use as a desk, dozens of them there, with a small clearing for my feet. And they line one wall, eleven feet long, seven bottles deep. This appears to be far more bottles than I remembered, as though they multiplied while I was gone.
The air feels moist and putrid. And then I see them: fruit flies, hovering at the mouths of the bottles.