Dry_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [91]
“Greer, what the hell were you doing? I thought you were calling nine-one-one. We need to call the cops about that bus.”
“Oh,” she says. She bites her lip.
The bus makes a sharp left out of sight.
Greer shrugs. “Well, it’s too late now.”
I turn to her, stare hard.
“Don’t look at me like that! Jesus, I’m not the only person in LA with a cell phone. Somebody else will call.”
“I can’t believe you,” I say. “That was really horrible.”
We make it to the other side of the street. Greer stops and faces me. “Look, commercial shoots are stressful. My mind is focused on work. When I saw the bus, it reminded me of something, that’s all.”
“Didn’t you see the sign in the front? Lit up in the front?”
“I can’t take care of everybody,” she says. “What do you expect me to do? Go swim out there off the coast of Florida and escort all those Cubans to the shore? Or maybe help the Mexicans dig tunnels under the border?”
“What?” I say.
“Augusten, I’m not an alcoholic like you. Getting all this free therapy and having all these personal transformations all the time. I’m just a regular person living a regular life. I can’t be Florence fucking Nightingale.”
“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “You’re not in any danger.”
After lunch, we’re sitting by the pool and Greer looks up from her Town and Country magazine. “What do you think happened with that bus, anyway?”
I look over at her. “Whoever was in the back probably shot the driver, stole his wallet and took off.”
Greer shakes her head. “You’d have to be crazy to take public transportation these days.”
“How’s your magazine?” I ask.
She smiles. “Scandinavian Airlines prints poems on the sides of the engines for the passengers in the window seats to read. I just think that’s wonderful.”
“Mmmmm,” I say. “Wonderful.”
She glares at me. “Well, it is wonderful. It’s thoughtful. It shows they’re thinking about people, about their passengers.”
“They only do it for the press it generates,” I say.
Greer lays the magazine across her legs. “You can be really cynical sometimes,” she tells me. “For all your talk about recovery, you’re a very angry, bitter person.”
“Happy Hour’s over. What do you expect?” I snap.
“There are other ways to be happy,” she says, “besides drinking.”
“Like?” I ask the expert of happiness.
“Like just sitting out here, taking some time for ourselves, enjoying the sun.” She smiles a fake smile that she thinks looks real.
“While some poor bus driver bleeds to death on the side of the road because you didn’t call the police.”
“That’s not fair!” she cries.
“No, it’s not.”
Greer picks up her magazine and begins thumbing through it again, snapping the pages.
I close my eyes and imagine how easy it would be to walk into the hotel bar and have a cosmopolitan. Nobody would even know.
A moment later, she says, “Oh, wow. A new pill that prevents male pattern baldness. One hundred percent effective, it says.”
I bolt upright. “Where? What?”
She smirks and pretends to read. “Made from the blood plasma of slain bus drivers.”
Horribly, I laugh.
So does Greer. “God, I really am an evil monster.”
“No you’re not,” I tell her.
“How do you know?” she asks.
“Because if you were truly evil, the Nazi would like you more.”
She considers this. “True.”
“As long as the Nazi hates us,” I say, “we can’t be all bad.”
“We mean well,” she says.
“Mostly,” I add.
“It’s advertising,” she says. “Advertising does it to us.”
“I hate advertising,” I say.
“I know. We should be bus drivers.”
Later that afternoon, we are called to the set to approve the final wardrobe. Because we hate the commercial we are about to shoot, both Greer and I see this as an enormous task, something better left to God, or if God is preoccupied, then a coin toss among the stylists.
“I really couldn’t care less,” Greer says to me in the minivan.
“Dress them all in black. Put everybody in green armbands to tie into the bottle,” I say.
At this point, we’re not shooting our second or even third campaign choice. We’re shooting something that