Dry_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [40]
Clothing is strewn around the room, carpeting the floor, covering the chairs, sofa and bed. It looks like the home of Raving Insanity. It does not look like the home of somebody who makes TV commercials. There’s a full bottle of Dewar’s on top of the stove.
The only word is squalor.
An interior design not unlike what I grew up with at the crazy psychiatrist’s house.
Freshly brainwashed from rehab, I carry the bottle into the bathroom. I hold it up to the light. See the pretty bottle? Isn’t it beautiful? Yes, it’s beautiful. I unscrew the cap and pour it into the toilet. I flush twice. And then I think, why did I flush twice? The answer, is of course, because I truly do not know myself. I cannot be sure I won’t attempt to drink from the toilet, like a dog.
I have two options. I can just sit here and cry. Which is my first instinct. Or I can clean this fucking mess. Which seems as possible as winning Lotto. But this is what I do. I begin cleaning.
I pause only to listen to messages on my answering machine. The first message is from Jim. “Hey Buddy, you were just kidding about that rehab stuff, weren’t you?” There’s loud music in the background and human commotion so I can tell he’s calling from a bar. I press SKIP and go to the next message. “Augusten, it’s Greer, I just wanted to leave a message for you when you got home.”
Greer sounds like she’s reading from a script she had written before calling. I’m fairly certain this is, in fact, the case. Greer is that way. I once watched her scan her driver’s license photo and twenty pictures of hairstyles, torn from magazines. Then, in Photoshop, she cut and pasted her face into every hairstyle. This was back when she was trying to decide whether or not she should have bangs and get highlights.
“Well, welcome home. Not very original, I guess”—forced laughter—“but I just wanted to say I hope everything went well and that you’re feeling better. I can’t remember when you said you’d be returning to work, so give me a ring and let me know, okay? Okay then, well, okay, bye.”
A message from Blockbuster Video saying I owe eighty dollars for my overdue Towering Inferno, and another from Jim, this time sounding hungover and depressed. “Wow, man, maybe you really did go to rehab after all. I got a hairy-ass hangover. All I remember are Snake Bites with Coors chasers. Maybe you can teach me some shit you learned. I gotta lay off the sauce for a while.”
The rest of the messages play out, and the last one is from Pighead. “Hey Fuckhead, it’s Friday and I know you’re due back today. I was thinking you could come over and I could make dinner. Maybe liver and onions in honor of your new sobriety.” At the end of the message, he hiccups.
The bottles fill twenty-seven gigantic, industrial-sized bags. It takes more than seven hours and by the time I’m finished, I’m manic and drenched in sweat. I go to Kmart and buy Glade scented candles, eleven of them, and light them all at once to fumigate the apartment. After about forty minutes, the apartment reeks of artificial pine scent. I decide now would be a good time to go to an AA meeting.
I dial 411. “What city please?”
“Manhattan,” I say, already dreading what I have to say next.
“What listing?”
I clear my throat, remind myself I am talking to a faceless stranger through fiber-optic cables. “Um, the main number for Alcoholics Anonymous.” I expect her to either hang up or worse, make me repeat it. I’m sorry, what was that again? What anonymous?
Instead, she gives me the number and I call. “Yeah, hi, I just got back from rehab and I don’t really know where the AA meetings are here in the city.”
The guy on the other end of the phone sounds like he could be an employee of the Gap; helpful and good-natured. I feel certain that he’s wearing khakis and smells like summer. “What part of the city do you live in?”
“I’m at Tenth and Fifth.”
“That’s such a cool area,” he says before giving me a list of seven different meetings. It turns