Dry: A Memoir (13 page)

We sit, I at my desk, she in the chair next to it. She crosses her legs, adjusts the gold bangle bracelet on her wrist. “So . . .” she exhales. “Tell me everything.” Then with a gossip-columnist grin, “Meet anybody famous?”

“Um, just Robert Downey, Jr., he was there.”

Greer’s legs fly into an uncrossed position and she leaps at me, slapping both hands on her thighs. “Oh my God, you are kidding!” she cries. “Robert Downey, Jr.? Why I am just so
not
surprised. I was reading in
People
last week . . .” She continues her story. I wait for her to catch up. It takes a moment. Then she sinks back into her chair, recrosses her legs. “Oh, I should have known. I am so gullible. Stupid Greer.” She knocks the palm of her hand against her left temple, careful not to disturb her hair. “Okay, so how was it . . . really?” she asks.

Do I tell her about the girl who needed her lover to cut her with razor blades? Or maybe the stuffed animal ritual? Perhaps I should talk about relapse triggers. Should I say,
I’m transformed, I see it now, I
get
it
? I feel overwhelmed by insight and knowledge, yet I also feel like I can’t explain everything to her. Or anybody. Like people say after they tell a really bad joke, you just had to be there.

“Honestly, Greer, it was great, it really was.”

I scratch my elbow, which probably means something to body language experts. “I don’t have the energy to go into all the details now. It was too intense and complicated, but—”

“I understand, I understand completely. Don’t feel you need to talk about it,” she says, cutting me off. Then she smiles, raising just her right eyebrow. “Wanna know what’s going on around the office?” she says, unable to contain her enthusiasm.

It’s a bit of a letdown that she doesn’t press me for details. I wouldn’t mind grossing her out with Kavi stories. “Sure, there must be a ton of work.”

Greer smiles. “You’re going to be
so
excited. We’re pitching the Wirksam account. Wirksam beer from Germany, can you imagine? I mean, I know it’s not Beck’s, but how cool!” Her face lights up, sixteen-hundred-dollar laser-whitened teeth gleaming.

“Wirksam beer?” I ask. “Hmm.” According to my rehab feeling chart, I am feeling worried and concerned, but also hopeful and excited. Possibly slightly panicked, though I don’t recall a face for this.

“What??!!” Greer wants to know. “You don’t seem . . .” She searches for that elusive word. “. . . excited.”

“Well, I am, you know. It’s just Wirksam is beer and beer is alcohol and, well, I just got out of rehab.”

Her Edith Bunker face appears. “Ohhhhhh,” she says, getting it. Then something in her head clicks. “Yeah, but beer isn’t alcohol. It’s just . . . beer. I mean, right? That’s right, isn’t it?” She smiles the guilty smile of somebody who has just dropped off her purebred Basenji to the Humane Society because it chewed her bedskirt—innocent without the right to be.

“No, beer
is
alcohol. It counts,” I say.

Now Greer is wearing this
I just shot my parents by mistake
face. “I’m sorry, yes, yes, of course. Oh my God, I really hadn’t thought of it like that.”

I wave my hands. “It’s okay, it’s fine. I’m not saying that it’s
going
to be a problem, just that I have to be careful.”

“Oh, we’ll be very careful,” Greer promises. “Very careful.”

I’ve never seen her look so bizarre. The vein on the side of her forehead seems to actually be pulsating. It’s awkward to be around her, because I feel like she’s walking on eggshells. Like in one of those cheesy interracial movies from the seventies where nobody ever mentions that the white girl’s boyfriend is black, but everyone is highly aware of it. Then somebody says
watermelon
in a sentence and everyone sort of gasps. That’s how I feel.

“I’m going to make a latte run, you want one?” she asks nervously. “Never mind, I’ll get you one. A decaf,” she says before I have a chance to answer.

My first day back and already there’s something boozy to deal with. Writing about beer isn’t drinking beer, but it’s certainly romanticizing it. I see the green glass bottle sitting on the white sweep, lit from behind, reflectors placed on either side to catch every glistening drop of moisture on the bottle. Unfortunately, it’s not much of a leap to then see myself licking the bottle caps, drinking the flat beer, making a pass at the photographer’s assistant and being fired for falling on top of the Hassleblad.

I will have to be careful. I will have to be more than careful. I will have to act as if I am in a hot zone, working with Ebola.

At a little past five, I decide that I have had enough for the first day and I take a cab home. Leaving at five in advertising is like leaving at eleven
A.M.
at normal jobs, so I feel a little guilty, like I’m slacking off. But all the way home in the cab, I notice how much brighter the colors of the signs out the window look, how much grander the buildings are. And when the cab bounces over a huge pothole, I seem to remain in midair just a little longer.

I am in possession of this cool new thing: my sobriety.

And it’s an actual high.

The cab flies down Second Avenue, making all the green lights. And then I see a yellow coming up and I think we’re not going to make it, but we do, just in time. We make it and this gives me a rush because making all the lights like this feels predestined, and to miss a light now would be like bad luck, a curse. I survived work, I’m going to an AA meeting tonight and I’m not drinking. I don’t even
want
to drink. Everything feels right.

And I don’t even feel like I’m talking myself into it, which for me is always an occupational hazard.

“You must be Augusten,” the woman in the floral print dress and Reeboks says to me. “I’m Wendy.” She extends her hand. What is it with alcohol counselors and floral prints?

I rise from my chair in the reception area of HealingHorizons. She has no grip. She lays her hand in mine like she’s handing me a baby trout she just caught and doesn’t know what to do with. I think,
Her father wanted a boy, so he didn’t bother to teach her about grips
.

“Hi, Wendy, nice to meet you.”

“Follow me, then.” She smiles.

She smells like hair conditioner. She smells like her floral print dress. I suspect a cover-up of some sort. But then, alcoholics are suspicious.

Once inside her office, she takes the seat at her desk and points me to the chair beside it. There’s a framed poster on the wall across from me that reads
WILL YOU
PLEASE
LET GO OF YOUR WILL
!? She also has a large bookcase filled with various manuals:
Managing Codependence, Twelve Steps One Step at a Time, When Children of Alcoholics Aren’t Children Anymore, If You Want What We Have
.

For the next fifty minutes, we go over my “plan.” Group therapy Tuesdays and Thursdays, one-on-one every Monday. I sign a consent form that states I will not become romantically involved with anyone from group therapy, that I will not come to Group intoxicated and that if I am unable to attend either Group or one-on-one, I will give at least twenty-four hours’ notice.

“So how are you feeling, settling back into your life?”

I smile broadly. The new me is open and expressive. “Tentative, but hopeful, really hopeful.” I’ve learned to always list more than one emotion when asked. It’s more believable.

“That’s good,” she says reassuringly. “It’s okay to have some mixed emotions. And I’m glad you admit that you feel tentative.” She smiles at me and there’s a long silence in the room. My hands start to sweat slightly. I’m not sure why. I think it’s because I’m thinking I should say something. But I’m also thinking that therapists believe silence is okay. So I am actually not being silent, but manipulative and controlling. Once again, an alcoholic specialty.

“How was your experience at Proud Institute?” she asks.

She’s the first person to say that name since I’ve returned. “It was very intense,” I tell her. “At first, I wanted to leave. My first impression was not a good one.”

“But you revised your opinion?”

I nod my head. “Yeah, that’s an understatement. I never expected it to be so intense. It was like emotion, emotion, emotion half of the day. And facts, facts, facts the other half. It was like
Jerry Springer
meets medical school. I mean it’s not like I had some great moment of truth or anything. More like a lot of little ones, gradually. Although I did really realize I’m an alcoholic, so I guess that’s happened.”

“I’ve heard that from many, many people.”

This makes me want to ask her if she’s an alcoholic. That she’s “heard” it implies she hasn’t experienced it herself. I don’t want a therapist who has only textbook knowledge. I want a therapist who lost a leg in the war. Someone who has been there. And this doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. Every woman I know goes to a female gynecologist, after all. They don’t want some
guy
poking around in there.

“So, what made you go into chemical dependency counseling?” I ask, as if I’m interviewing her for a position at my Scarsdale facility.

“What makes you ask?” she asks back.

“I guess it’s not my business, but I was just wondering if you have personal experience with addiction.”

“Would it make a difference with your program whether I have or have not?”

I feel trapped. If I say,
Yes, my mental health is possibly connected to whether or not you are an alcoholic
, then I am not taking responsibility for my mental health. If I say,
No, it makes no difference to me
, she’ll wonder why I asked in the first place. So I give her an advertising copywriter answer; I give her a weasel. “It was just a thought that passed through my head. I’m new to this ‘emotions’ stuff, so I’m making an effort to say just exactly what enters my mind. Right or wrong, good or bad, relevant or not.” I shrug and smile.

“I think that’s a great idea,” she says. “For you not to self-edit is exactly right.” Then she says, “So, have you been to AA yet?”

I think,
I have to be more careful with what I say
.

I come home and find myself feeling less than positive. Feeling that I just want to disappear. I feel disconnected, or like I am on
PAUSE
. I’m restless, but not energetic. Depressed? I think back to the feeling chart. I decide I am borderline panicked, but also I feel homesick or something else; lonely. Then I get it.

I miss alcohol.

Like it’s a person. I feel abandoned. Or rather like I’ve walked out of a violent, abusive relationship and want to go back because in retrospect, it wasn’t really all that violent or abusive. They told me in rehab that this happens. That out of the blue your moods can change. They also said it would be like dealing with a death in the family.

I turn on Channel 18, the Discovery Channel. Zebras. The announcer says, “. . . the female zebra is winking her vulva to attract a mate.” Sure enough, it winks.

Then the boy zebra mounts the girl. And I think,
Why do they call it ‘hung like a horse?’ It should be ‘hung like a zebra
.’ Its penis was at least half the length of its body. The zebras fuck.

It occurs to me that my sober life now includes watching animal pornography.

Depressed, I shut the TV off and go to sleep. I dream about winking zebra vulvas and swinging zebra penises all night long.

I wake up feeling relief that I am not dreaming anymore. Also, this slight feeling of being high, realizing I’m not hungover. This is one of the more pleasant side effects of not drinking.

I spend the day trying to live in the present at the office. Things that would have annoyed me before, I now let pass over me. I practice acceptance. I return phone calls. When I am asked to write body copy for somebody else’s ad, I say, “Sure.” As opposed to saying, “Get the hell out of my office.”

For lunch, Greer and I walk to a salad bar. I create a salad from dry spinach leaves, raw broccoli florets, zucchini slices as thin as matchsticks, and a small scoop of low-fat cottage cheese. I am eating like a girl, trying to accelerate the loss of my booze gut. I’m amazed by how quickly I was able to lose most of it. Now, it’s mostly just loose skin. The actual gut is mostly gone. I do a hundred situps every day and go to the gym four times a week, as required for a Manhattan guy who is into guys. If you’re gay and live in New York and don’t go to the gym, eventually they come for you. The Gym Rats from Chelsea come in their Raymond Dragon tank tops and haul your ass into the back of a Yukon. You wake up hogtied in a bathroom stall at a Red Lobster in Paramus. A sign around your neck reads,
DO NOT DRIVE ME INTO MANHATTAN UNTIL I HAVE PECS
.

Greer eyes me with contempt when she sees my lunch. She has also made a salad, but hers is topped with crumpled bacon and blue cheese dressing. “How can you deprive yourself like that?” Greer wishes she could deprive herself like this. She is very tall and thin as it is. She does not have to worry, but she worries. She obsesses.

“It’s easy,” I tell her. “If I can’t have alcohol, not having anything else is a breeze.”

I’m learning to appreciate the differences between brands of bottled water. Evian is too sweet. Volvic is crisp, clean. Poland Springs is also good. But Deer Park tastes like plastic.

We take our lunches back to work, go into Greer’s office and eat them. “I’ve noticed a change with you already, and you haven’t even been back all that long,” she says.

“Like what,” I say, forking dry spinach into my mouth, machinelike.

“Like you’re less angry.” She stabs a large chunk of bacon with her fork, then rolls it against a morsel of blue cheese.

“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.