Dry_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [50]
“I feel . . . transformed in many ways,” I say. “I realize it’s about letting things go, and not adding more things.” And the fact that I realize this surprises me. I hadn’t really expected to realize anything or change in any positive, meaningful way. But somehow, something sunk in.
“What do you mean, letting things go?” Greer asks.
Because she is asking questions, I feel almost like a minister, like I need to preach and convert. “Well, by getting rid of the alcohol, it’s like I have lost this thing that took up so much of my life and caused too many problems, directly and indirectly. You know, the butterfly thing.”
“What butterfly thing?” she says.
“You know how when a butterfly beats its wings in the Amazon, this sends a mote of pollen through the air which causes the wild bore in wherever to sneeze which creates a breeze which, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, all ends up affecting traffic in LA or something. I forgot how it works exactly.”
“Oh, yeah,” Greer says. “There was a Honda commercial a few years back like that.”
I roll my eyes at her Greerness. “I just feel like I have less baggage and so, I don’t know, I’m able to just accept things more, not have to fight them. Don’t fight the river, go with it.”
“God, you do sound transformed.” She dabs the paper napkin against the corner of her mouth. Then she abruptly looks down at it. “Speaking of the rain forest,” she says. “Poor napkin.”
As we finish our lunches, I feel this little flame inside of me. This proud little flame, because even though it’s new, I do feel transformed. The technical term is Being on a Pink Cloud. I hear the only trouble with Pink Clouds is that eventually you fall off.
After work, I head straight to HealingHorizons for my first Group. For the first fifteen minutes, it’s exactly like rehab. Because I’m new, they go over the rules of the group, all of which I already know: no crosstalk, no handing tissues to someone if they cry, “I” statements. We go around the room introducing ourselves, saying a little bit about our lives, how long we’ve been sober. But after fifteen minutes, the door swings open, this guy walks in and everything changes.
The first thing I notice about him, the first thing anybody would notice about him is the plain fact that he is what a magazine might describe as painfully handsome. He’s got jet-black hair, husky-blue eyes, a strong nose, a strong chin, dimples—all of it. Yet, he’s a little rough around the edges; five, maybe six o’clock shadow, tousled hair, rumpled clothes. But he looks sloppy almost as if a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-day prop-stylist made him look this way. He apologizes for being late as he makes his way over to an empty chair by the window. His voice is deep, low-country South Carolina. “I’ve had an awful day,” he begins, taking over the room. But nobody seems to mind. In fact, everybody is looking at him, spellbound. So am I. Every few seconds his eyes twitch, a nervous tic. I have the exact same nervous tic. This is truly appalling.
Foster is his name. He’s thirty-three, a crack addict/alcoholic who doesn’t need money and thus has too much free time on his hands. He has a small, vague job for just this reason. He’s living with a physically abusive alcoholic illegal alien from London named Kyle. And from what I gather, he’s trying to get the guy to move out. “I almost used last night,” he says. “After work, I got off at two A.M., I was just dreading going home to him. So I went up to Eighth Avenue and I was going to score some crack. I was out of control and I was going to do it. But then, this hustler I know, the guy I was going to buy the crack from, was arrested right before my eyes, just as I was about to come up to him.” Foster exhales, tosses his head back. I look at his Adam’s apple, the dark razor stubble that shadows his neck. “It just really knocked the wind out of me.”
He runs his fingers through his hair. He doesn’t seem to actually look at anybody in the room, make eye contact. Just shifts around