Dry_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [75]
Then I imagine her padding barefoot into the kitchen, leaving the Taco Bell wrappings on the sofa, and opening the fridge just to look. I imagine her grunting as she squats down in front of it. She opens the salad crisper drawer and finds two slices of Oscar Meyer olive loaf, drying out and curling at the edges, in the yellow, plastic package. I see her rolling them up together into a tube and placing them between her lips like a cigar, nibbling her way to the end while her eyes scan for more, more, more of something.
“I’m very proud of you,” Pighead says as he pours dog food into Virgil’s bowl. “You’ve really turned your life around in terms of this not-drinking thing.”
I lean against his granite kitchen counter, and my elbow knocks over a few of his prescription pill bottles. A couple of them roll onto the floor. “Shit.”
“It’s all right,” he says. He places them back in order, then bends over and picks up the ones that rolled in front of the stove. He checks their labels and adds them to the others, setting them in their proper places.
And the pills do have a precise order on his countertop. There is almost a military strictness to their arrangement. Pighead, the millionaire banker at thirty, is incredibly gifted at removing variables.
There are pills for the morning, for the afternoon, before bed. Dozens of pills. So many that nobody should have to take them alone. I should know each pill. I should help him more. And yet I’m paralyzed.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him, meaning it.
“For what?” he says, leaning against the counter across from me.
“I’m just sorry.”
“Augusten,” he says, moving to my side. “I love you very much. And I will always love you. And not a day doesn’t go by that I don’t beat myself up for not realizing how much I love you, sooner. Back when you were in love with me.”
“But Pighead, I—”
“It’s okay. I understand why you had to move on. And I know you love me. As a friend. And I’m grateful for that.”
I might cry, but I don’t. “How come I’m not a better friend? Why do I always run away from you?”
“Because you’re afraid of losing me.”
I start to say something. I get out this much, “But—”
He hiccups convulsively. “Shit,” he says, frustrated. “I just wish I knew what the hell is causing them.”
“Can’t they just chop out your hiccupper?” I ask.
“They can’t find it,” he says.
Then he looks at me like, you fuckhead. And I look at him back like, you Pighead.
After work today, I go to Sophia, my usual Greek barber at Astor Place, and she says, “Same thing?” And I say, yeah. Same thing being short on the sides, flat on top, natural in the back. And then she does something she’s never done before. She starts buzzing the clippers over my ears, and way, way down my neck.
And I’m thinking, This is really bad. It’s starting. The hair-where-you-don’t-want-it stuff. And when she is done with the hair on top, my head looks shiny, like a baby crowning. My bald head saying here I come through the ever-thinning hairs on top. If I had thick hair, I would probably just buzz it off like the rest of the fags. And I wouldn’t care, because then it would be by choice.
At the barbershop while I was waiting, I read a quote by Michael Kors in Vogue. “I love Calvin Klein’s reissue of his original jeans, but my feeling is, if you wore them the first time around, you have no business wearing them now.”
Before reading this article, I bought two pairs. I have the bag with me.
I leave Astor Place and wish I had some cocaine.
• • •
We’re in a cemetery in Mystic, Connecticut. Foster rented a car and picked me up. We stopped for take-out fish