“You know what scares me?” I say. “What scares me is how institutionalized I’ve become. How my whole life is this sick group of alcoholics. It’s like some extended, fucked-up family that I have everything in common with. I’m afraid I might not fit on the outside anymore.”
Hayden misses the ball. “Fuck,” he shouts. “I know exactly what you mean, I never want to leave.”
“I’m not ready,” I tell him. It’s safe here. I can live with fishcake sandwiches and linoleum flooring. On the outside, people won’t call me on my bullshit. I’ll be back to getting away with it.
“You’re ready,” he says.
“How do you know? What makes you think so?”
“Because when I first met you, I wasn’t even sure that you were really an alcoholic. I thought maybe you just drank a little too much sometimes.” His eyes twinkle. “Now I’m positive that you are, in fact, a raging alcoholic.”
“That means I should stay.” Is it possible? Have I gotten worse?
“On the contrary,” Hayden says, raising the ball into the air as if in a toast. “It means, my dear boy, that you are more real.”
PART II
PREPARE FOR LANDING
I
am not prepared for what I see when I unlock the door to my apartment. Although I have obviously seen it before, lived with it even, I have never encountered it through the lens of thirty days of sobriety. My apartment is filled with empty Dewar’s bottles, hundreds of empty Dewar’s bottles. They cover all surfaces; the counters in the kitchen, the top of the refrigerator. They are under the table I use as a desk, dozens of them there, with a small clearing for my feet. And they line one wall, eleven feet long, seven bottles deep. This appears to be far more bottles than I remembered, as though they multiplied while I was gone.
The air feels moist and putrid. And then I see them: fruit flies, hovering at the mouths of the bottles. They form dark clouds at the ceiling above the kitchen sink. And dead fruit flies cover everything, like dust.
Clothing is strewn around the room, carpeting the floor, covering the chairs, sofa and bed. It looks like the home of Raving Insanity. It does not look like the home of somebody who makes TV commercials. There’s a full bottle of Dewar’s on top of the stove.
The only word is squalor.
An interior design not unlike what I grew up with at the crazy psychiatrist’s house.
Freshly brainwashed from rehab, I carry the bottle into the bathroom. I hold it up to the light. See the pretty bottle? Isn’t it beautiful? Yes, it’s beautiful. I unscrew the cap and pour it into the toilet. I flush twice. And then I think, why did I flush twice? The answer, is of course, because I truly do not know myself. I cannot be sure I won’t attempt to drink from the toilet, like a dog.
I have two options. I can just sit here and cry. Which is my first instinct. Or I can clean this fucking mess. Which seems as possible as winning Lotto. But this is what I do. I begin cleaning.
I pause only to listen to messages on my answering machine. The first message is from Jim. “Hey Buddy, you were just kidding about that rehab stuff, weren’t you?” There’s loud music in the background and human commotion so I can tell he’s calling from a bar. I press SKIP and go to the next message. “Augusten, it’s Greer, I just wanted to leave a message for you when you got home.”
Greer sounds like she’s reading from a script she had written before calling. I’m fairly certain this is, in fact, the case. Greer is that way. I once watched her scan her driver’s license photo and twenty pictures of hairstyles, torn from magazines. Then, in Photoshop, she cut and pasted her face into every hairstyle. This was back when she was trying to decide whether or not she should have bangs and get highlights.
“Well, welcome home. Not very original, I guess”—forced laughter—“but I just wanted to say I hope everything went well and that you’re feeling better. I can’t remember when you said you’d be returning to work, so give me a ring and let me know, okay? Okay then, well, okay, bye.”
A message from Blockbuster Video saying I owe eighty dollars for my overdue Towering Inferno, and another from Jim, this time sounding hungover and depressed. “Wow, man, maybe you really did go to rehab after all. I got a hairy-ass hangover. All I remember are Snake Bites with Coors chasers. Maybe you can teach me some shit you learned. I gotta lay off the sauce for a while.”
The rest of the messages play out, and the last one is from Pighead. “Hey Fuckhead, it’s Friday and I know you’re due back today. I was thinking you could come over and I could make dinner. Maybe liver and onions in honor of your new sobriety.” At the end of the message, he hiccups.
The bottles fill twenty-seven gigantic, industrial-sized bags. It takes more than seven hours and by the time I’m finished, I’m manic and drenched in sweat. I go to Kmart and buy Glade scented candles, eleven of them, and light them all at once to fumigate the apartment. After about forty minutes, the apartment reeks of artificial pine scent. I decide now would be a good time to go to an AA meeting.
I dial 411. “What city please?”
“Manhattan,” I say, already dreading what I have to say next.
“What listing?”
I clear my throat, remind myself I am talking to a faceless stranger through fiber-optic cables. “Um, the main number for Alcoholics Anonymous.” I expect her to either hang up or worse, make me repeat it. I’m sorry, what was that again? What anonymous?
Instead, she gives me the number and I call. “Yeah, hi, I just got back from rehab and I don’t really know where the AA meetings are here in the city.”
The guy on the other end of the phone sounds like he could be an employee of the Gap; helpful and good-natured. I feel certain that he’s wearing khakis and smells like summer. “What part of the city do you live in?”
“I’m at Tenth and Fifth.”
“That’s such a cool area,” he says before giving me a list of seven different meetings. It turns out New York City is a great place to be a drunk, not only if you want to drink, but also if you want to stop. There are dozens of meetings to choose from. Are you a midget? There’s an AA meeting specifically for you, right here in Manhattan. How about an albino midget? A transgendered albino midget NAMBLA member? Yes, there’s a meeting, so I have no excuse.
One of the names he mentions is the Perry Street meeting, which I remember Dr. Valium telling me about. The next meeting is at eight, so I decide I’ll do this.
It’s only a ten-minute walk from my apartment, but I leave immediately. Better to walk around than sit alone in my apartment. I arrive in front of the meeting place in less than seven minutes. I’m walking too fast. But since I have over an hour to kill and Pighead’s apartment is five minutes away, I decide to stop by.
The doorman looks too happy to see me and I am immediately suspicious. “How you doin’ there, Mr. Augusten?” he says. “Long time no see.”
I want to grab him by the lapel of his doorman jacket and say, “What did that Pighead tell you? Whatever he said, don’t believe a word: I’ve been in Madrid . . . shooting a commercial.”
But before I can do this, he says, “Oh, your friend, he just now got back from walking Virgil.” Virgil is Pighead’s scrappy white terrier. Virgil loves me more.
I take the elevator to the fourth floor and make a left. Pighead’s apartment is the last one on the right, at the very end of the long hallway. But already I can see he has the door open, because I see Virgil’s head sticking out and Pighead’s hand attached to the collar. “Go get him,” Pighead says and Virgil tears down the hallway, barking and snapping, immediately grabbing hold of my pant leg with his mouth.
I bend down and rub both of my hands across his back really fast. “Virgil, Wirgil, Squirgil, what a good boy, what a very good boy.” I run down the hallway to Pighead’s door, Virgil yapping at my ankles as he runs alongside.
I walk past Pighead, who’s standing in the entryway, and go right into the living room, where I pick Virgil up and throw him onto the sofa
. He bounces off and back onto the floor, charging at me immediately. I do it again. Then he runs to the corner of the room and retrieves a rubber carrot, brings it to me and drops it at my feet. He barks. I turn around and throw the carrot down the hallway into the bedroom, and Virgil takes off after it.
“Holy shit,” Pighead says when he finally sees my face. “I wouldn’t have recognized you.”
I take my jacket off, sling it over one of his dining room chairs.
“Don’t do that,” he says, “use a hanger.”
As he walks toward the hall closet for a hanger, I ask, “What do you mean?”
He turns. “A coat hanger? You know, that thing Joan Crawford hit her kid with?”
“No, fool. The other thing. How different I look. Tell me more. Me, me, me.”
He rolls his eyes, goes to the closet and hangs up my coat. “You look so . . . different . . . younger . . . and you lost so much weight. You look great.” He smiles and looks away from me as if he’s shy. He walks into the kitchen. I follow. “Want something to drink?” Before I answer, he corrects himself. “I mean, you know, like juice.”
“Oh, Christ. Is this how it’s gonna be from now on?” I whine.
He takes two glasses from the cupboard and opens the refrigerator. I notice a bottle of Chardonnay next to the cranberry juice. “Actually,” I say, “I’ll take some Chardonnay, but only this much.” I hold my thumb and forefinger about two inches apart.
Pighead looks troubled. “What, Chardonnay?”
I casually lean my hip against the counter. “Well, we’re allowed to have Chardonnay because it’s not really alcohol. It’s just, you know, wine. And that’s okay.”
He stands there with his hand in the refrigerator looking back and forth between the cranberry juice, the wine and me.
I grin at him. “I’m kidding, Pighead.”
He pours us each a cranberry juice and then carries them into the living room. He sits on the sofa, next to the end table where he sets both glasses and I sit right next to him and rest my head on his shoulder. I mumble something about being confused and happy and sad and overwhelmed and tired. He reaches his arm around my shoulders and moves his head against mine. “It’s okay, Fuckhead,” he says. “You’re still a mess but at least you’re not drunk.”
Virgil leaps onto the sofa, bouncing onto my stomach, almost knocking the wind out of me. Bark, bark, bark. I take his head in my hands and smush his face up.
“Virgil missed you,” Pighead says. I look at him, but he’s looking at his hands.
“I missed him too,” I say gently.
I pick the slobbery plastic squeaky carrot up off the floor and throw it hard, not caring if it hits a wall or a lamp or a painting. Pighead, who has a beautiful, fastidiously decorated apartment, doesn’t care either. If a lamp broke, I know it would be okay with him because I broke it. But if anybody else broke it, he’d have a shit fit. I know I’m lucky this way.
“What do you want to do for dinner?” he asks.
Pause. “Can’t, I have to leave in a few minutes. I have a lush meeting.”
“AA?” he asks. “But you just got back from rehab.”
Virgil charges back with the carrot, drops it at my feet. I ignore him, and he carries it over near the fireplace and chews, trying to kill the squeaker.
“That’s the whole point,” I tell him. “Alcoholics go to AA.”
“How long do you have to go?” he asks, like I’m on parole, which is sort of the case.
“Every day for the rest of my life.”
“You’re kidding, right?” he says, eyebrows raised.
I tell him that unfortunately I’m not. I tell him what Rae said about how if you found time to drink every day, you can find time for AA every day.
His eyes become large in actual disbelief.
“Oh, I know,” I say. “I was just as shocked as you.”
“What’s that they say, ‘One day at a time’ or something?” He takes a sip of juice.
“Yeah, one day at a time. For the rest of my life.”
“Jesus.”
“Oh, we don’t call it ‘Jesus’ anymore.” My head itches so I rub it against his shoulder. “We call it a ‘higher power.’ ”
“Oh no,” he says, rolling his eyes. “You’ve turned ‘recovery’ on me.”
For a moment we just sit there and say nothing. It’s so good and comforting to be with him. And yet . . . and yet. A sense of loneliness, and something else that is more frightening but that I cannot name. “Pighead?” I say.
“Hmm?” He turns to me.
This time I’m the one who turns away. I examine the cuticle of my thumbnail. “Nothing.”
“What?”
There’s so much I want to talk to him about. Need to talk to him about. But I’m not even sure I know what it is I need to say. It’s an odd feeling. Well, all feelings are odd to me because I’m not accustomed to being aware of them. But this feeling is especially odd. It’s like when I was a little kid, I never wanted my parents to leave the living room and go to bed until I was asleep first. I needed to know they were there, otherwise I couldn’t fall asleep.
“I have to go,” I tell him, getting up from the couch.
“But you just got here,” he says.
“I know. But I have to go. I just stopped by.” I am happy to see him, therefore I must leave. It’s weird, like there are magnets at play.
He straightens a book on the coffee table. “Well, it’s nice to see you haven’t changed all that much. ‘So long. I have to go. Everything’s more important than you, Pighead.’ As usual.”
It’s not difficult to hear the hurt in his voice. “I have to go,” are probably the four words I use most with him. The thought that normally accompanied these words was, Because I need a drink. Now it’s because I need to go talk about needing a drink. It’s like alcohol gets in the way even when it’s out of the way.
The room is small, no larger than the average suburban kitchen, though it’s not bright yellow with spider plants hanging from colorful baskets in the window. It’s dark and grim because the front window of what could have rented out as a tiny but chic Perry Street boutique instead features a donated curtain that blocks all the light out. In the center of the room against the wall are a small podium and a tall chair behind it. In a horseshoe configuration around the podium are about fifty folding metal chairs—the chair of choice for recovering alcoholics. Above, an old ceiling fan turns, just barely. The bumpy walls are covered with thick beige paint that can be no fresher than twenty years. When beige was new. When it was “the new white.”
“What you see here, what you hear here, stays here,” says the chairman of the meeting. The single overhead light has been dimmed, and the meeting has officially begun. He goes through the AA preamble. The AA preamble is the same at all AA meetings, everywhere. Just like Big Macs. It outlines the purpose of AA, which is to help people get sober, and it explains how there are no dues or fees or politics. It ends with a few questions.
“Is anyone here today new to the Perry Street meeting?” he asks.
I raise my hand.
In rehab, we had specific lectures about raising our hands. “In meetings, always raise your hand to share. Volunteer for service. Get a sponsor. Do ninety meetings in ninety days. Don’t just fade into the wallpaper.” In AA, one must not be wallpaper but a colorful wall hanging.
“My name is Augusten, I’m an alcoholic and this is my first time at Perry Street.” People clap encouragingly. I’m an albino seal and I’ve just caught a beach ball on the tip of my nose and then bounced it through a hoop of fire.
The chairman then reads off AA announcements from the notes he holds in front of him on pink index cards. A Sober Singles dance next Friday night at St. Lutheran’s Church; more volunteers are needed to man the phones at the main AA office; would anyone like a free kitten?
I catch a glimpse of a cute guy sitting in the back, off to the side. He has cool sparkly silvery hair and these incred
ibly bright blue eyes. He looks exactly like Cal Ripken Jr. And at once I am very comfortable. I decide that this may become my “home group,” the AA meeting I attend regularly.
On the wall directly across from the podium is a large, framed poster, listing the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. But the Twelve Steps are misleading. It’s not like assembling a bookcase from Ikea, where once you’ve finished with the last step, you get to put all your books on it and then all you have to do is dust it once a week. Here, when you’ve finished with the last step, you go back and do the first step again.
“Is anyone here counting days?” the chairman asks. Until I have ninety days of sobriety under my belt, I’m supposed to “count days.”
I raise my hand. “Augusten again,” I say. “And today is day thirty.”
Not only applause, but a couple of whistles plus “Congratulations” from a few people around the room. I scan the faces. Just normal people. Normal New York people, which of course means freaks. Nobody is wearing a primary color, most of the men have pierced eyebrows and long sideburns called “chops,” and the majority of the women wear suburban 1970s hairstyles with irony. Everybody looks like they’re about to appear on MTV’s Total Request Live. But then I am in New York City at an AA meeting downtown on Perry Street, which is one of the “it” addresses. If I were in a Tulsa AA meeting, I might see a Sears sweatshirt or two.
“Our speaker here today is Nan. Let’s give her a warm welcome,” the chairman says.
People clap absently. I crave a cigarette.
Nan rises from her folding metal chair in the first row of the horseshoe, walks to the podium. She’s a striking woman, all bone structure and pewter hair. She impresses me as someone who tosses Caesar salads in a hand-carved teak salad bowl. I bet she reads Joan Didion in hardcover.
“I’m a little nervous here today, but I’m just going to do it. I’m just going to speak and not think about it.”
In rehab, it was called “thought dropping.” When your addict is saying, “It’s eleven A.M., let’s go celebrate with gin and tonics!” you drop the thought—push it out of your head.