Dry_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [87]
“I don’t know. My obsession with Foster is kind of fading. It’s like he’s severed my give-a-shit nerve. I’m over him.”
“Ha! You are so full of shit. He’s done just the opposite; he’s reconnected your give-a-shit nerve.”
“No, it’s not true. I don’t deserve to be in love with such a mess.”
“I’m not talking about what you deserve. I’m talking about what you feel.”
“I hate it when you play therapist. Especially with your accent. It makes everything you say sound so BBC.”
The first course arrives and we start talking about rehab. “Don’t you think it’s odd,” Hayden says, “that you spend thirty intense days with these perfect strangers, you become this really tight little dysfunctional family? And you never hear from anybody again?”
I stab a piece of tikka chicken kabob onto my plate. “I do think about that sometimes. Like, I wonder if Dr. Valium is okay. Or Big Bobby, I wonder if he’s cross-addicted to White Castle.” In rehab we learned that it’s easy to cross-addict from one thing to another. Like you give up crack and you pick up dope. Or you give up booze and pick up a crack addict.
“I’m sure Pregnant Paul is out there using again. I have no doubt about that,” he assures me.
“And that girl, what was her name? The cutter?
“Sarah,” he says.
“That’s right, Sarah. She’s probably sitting at home right now with a serving fork stuck in her thigh and a syringe in her arm, having multiple orgasms.”
“You’ve really only slept with Foster once?” Hayden asks as he spoons some maatar paneer gravy over his saffron rice.
“Twice now, actually.”
“When was the twice?”
“Yesterday, after you went to Barnes & Noble. But I only count it as the first ‘official’ time.”
“And why is that?”
“Because this time, I looked.”
Back home, Hayden gathers his things together from around the apartment, stuffing them into his suitcases, double-checking under the sofa and in the bathroom for anything left behind.
Foster calls just after we turn off the lights to go to sleep. He calls just to let me know he’s okay and not using. He doesn’t want me to worry, he says. He’s content tonight to just stay home, curled up on the sofa reading Bastard Out of Carolina. After the operator cuts in and asks him to deposit twenty-five cents for an additional three minutes, Foster doesn’t call back. But I can see him: standing there on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-Seventh Street, banging his head against the hung-up phone receiver, saying shit, shit, shit.
I help Hayden carry his suitcases downstairs to the black Lincoln he ordered from a car service to take him to the airport. “No cocktails on the plane,” I warn.
Hayden gives me a hug. “Good luck to you. Please get to some meetings, they’ll do you good.”
“I know, I know. I will. I promise.” Even as I say this, I know I won’t. I’m so over AA.
“And good luck with Foster. Be careful.”
Hayden has become my common sense. I don’t want him to go. I’m afraid of what I might do, what might happen. Without him, who will keep me in check?
He climbs into the backseat, slides the window down and leans out. As the car pulls away he shouts, with feigned earnestness, “And remember, you are somebody.”
Hayden is gone. And suddenly I feel so completely alone. I stand on the sidewalk, surrounded by apartment buildings, cabs, cars, people packed into every available inch of this city. And yet I feel alone. It doesn’t feel like we’re each going our own separate ways. It feels like he is moving on and I am staying behind.
I begin to smell it in the hallway as I walk toward my office. It gets stronger. When I finally reach my office door, I realize I have reached ground zero for the smell. I bend down, swipe my hand across the gray wall-to-wall carpeting and then bring my finger to my nose and sniff. It’s unmistakable: scotch.
I open my door. The smell hits me in the face like something physical. Fumes so powerful that if I were to light a match, the room would probably explode.
My office has been drinking,