Dry_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [47]
“Honestly, Greer, it was great, it really was.”
I scratch my elbow, which probably means something to body language experts. “I don’t have the energy to go into all the details now. It was too intense and complicated, but—”
“I understand, I understand completely. Don’t feel you need to talk about it,” she says, cutting me off. Then she smiles, raising just her right eyebrow. “Wanna know what’s going on around the office?” she says, unable to contain her enthusiasm.
It’s a bit of a letdown that she doesn’t press me for details. I wouldn’t mind grossing her out with Kavi stories. “Sure, there must be a ton of work.”
Greer smiles. “You’re going to be so excited. We’re pitching the Wirksam account. Wirksam beer from Germany, can you imagine? I mean, I know it’s not Beck’s, but how cool!” Her face lights up, sixteen-hundred-dollar laser-whitened teeth gleaming.
“Wirksam beer?” I ask. “Hmm.” According to my rehab feeling chart, I am feeling worried and concerned, but also hopeful and excited. Possibly slightly panicked, though I don’t recall a face for this.
“What??!!” Greer wants to know. “You don’t seem . . .” She searches for that elusive word. “. . . excited.”
“Well, I am, you know. It’s just Wirksam is beer and beer is alcohol and, well, I just got out of rehab.”
Her Edith Bunker face appears. “Ohhhhhh,” she says, getting it. Then something in her head clicks. “Yeah, but beer isn’t alcohol. It’s just . . . beer. I mean, right? That’s right, isn’t it?” She smiles the guilty smile of somebody who has just dropped off her purebred Basenji to the Humane Society because it chewed her bedskirt—innocent without the right to be.
“No, beer is alcohol. It counts,” I say.
Now Greer is wearing this I just shot my parents by mistake face. “I’m sorry, yes, yes, of course. Oh my God, I really hadn’t thought of it like that.”
I wave my hands. “It’s okay, it’s fine. I’m not saying that it’s going to be a problem, just that I have to be careful.”
“Oh, we’ll be very careful,” Greer promises. “Very careful.”
I’ve never seen her look so bizarre. The vein on the side of her forehead seems to actually be pulsating. It’s awkward to be around her, because I feel like she’s walking on eggshells. Like in one of those cheesy interracial movies from the seventies where nobody ever mentions that the white girl’s boyfriend is black, but everyone is highly aware of it. Then somebody says watermelon in a sentence and everyone sort of gasps. That’s how I feel.
“I’m going to make a latte run, you want one?” she asks nervously. “Never mind, I’ll get you one. A decaf,” she says before I have a chance to answer.
My first day back and already there’s something boozy to deal with. Writing about beer isn’t drinking beer, but it’s certainly romanticizing it. I see the green glass bottle sitting on the white sweep, lit from behind, reflectors placed on either side to catch every glistening drop of moisture on the bottle. Unfortunately, it’s not much of a leap to then see myself licking the bottle caps, drinking the flat beer, making a pass at the photographer’s assistant and being fired for falling on top of the Hassleblad.
I will have to be careful. I will have to be more than careful. I will have to act as if I am in a hot zone, working with Ebola.
At a little past five, I decide that I have had enough for the first day and I take a cab home. Leaving at five in advertising is like leaving at eleven A.M. at normal jobs, so I feel a little guilty, like I’m slacking off. But all the way home in the cab, I notice how much brighter the colors of the signs out the window look, how much grander the buildings are. And when the cab bounces over a huge pothole, I seem to remain in midair just a little longer.
I am in possession of this cool new thing: my sobriety.
And it’s an actual high.
The cab flies down Second Avenue, making all the green lights. And then I see a yellow coming up and I think we’re not going to make it, but we do,