I arrive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at a quarter before nine. Fifteen minutes early. I’m wearing a charcoal gray Armani suit and oxblood red Gucci loafers. My head throbs dully behind my eyes, but this has actually become normal. It usually wears off by the end of the day and is completely gone after the first drink of the evening.
I didn’t technically sleep last night, I napped. Even in my drunken stupor of last night, I realized I couldn’t show up here this morning looking like a total disaster, so I managed to call 1-800-4-WAKE-UP (You snooze, you lose!) before I laid down on my bed, fully dressed.
I was awake by six A.M. and still felt drunk. I was making wisecracks to myself in the bathroom, pulling faces. This is when I knew I was still drunk. I just had way too much energy for six A.M. Too much motivation. It was like the drunk side of my brain was trying to act distracting and entertaining, so the business side wouldn’t realize it was being held hostage by a drunk.
I showered, shaved and slicked my hair back with Bumble and bumble Hair Grooming Creme. Then I ran the blowdryer over my head. Afterward, I arranged my hair in such a way that it appeared casual and carefree. A wisp of hair falling across my forehead, which I froze in place with AquaNet. After having gone on more fashion shoots than I care to count, I’ve learned that terminally unhip AquaNet is the best. The result was hair that looked windblown and casual—unless you happened to touch it. If you touched it, it would probably make a solid knocking sound, like wood.
I sprayed Donna Karan for Men around my neck and on my tongue to oppose any alcohol breath I might have. Then I walked to the twenty-four-hour restaurant on the corner of Seventeenth and Third for a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon and coffee. The fat, I figured, would absorb any toxins.
As a backup safety measure, I swallowed a handful of Breath Assure capsules and wore a distracting, loud tie.
Everyone somehow arrives precisely at once, even though they all came from different places. I make a mental note: read Carl Jung. I need to understand synchronicity. Maybe I can use it in an ad someday.
I shake hands and greet people with an unusual amount of energy and enthusiasm for nine o’clock in the morning. I hold my breath when I face people and exhale when I turn away. I make sure that I stay at least ten paces ahead of everybody else. The group is small: my Fabergé client—a petite young woman who wears handcrafted needlepoint vests, the account executive and my art director, Greer.
Greer and I have been a “creative team” for five years. She’s been getting a bit bitchy lately about my drinking. “You’re late for work . . . you look disheveled . . . you’re bloated . . . you’re always impatient. . . . ” The fact that I’ve missed a few important presentations hasn’t helped matters. So I told her recently that I’d cut my drinking way back. Almost to nothing. To this day, Greer has never forgiven me for calling one of our clients at home at two in the morning and initiating phone sex. I was in a blackout at the time, so I am spared the actual memory.
As we walk into the first room of the exhibit, I cruise to the display case in the center of the room. I pretend to be interested in the egg that’s illuminated by four spotlights. It’s hideous; a cobalt blue egg smothered with gaudy ropes of gold and speckled with diamonds. I walk around the case, looking at it from all sides, as though I am intrigued and inspired. What I’m really thinking is, how could I have forgotten the words to The Brady Bunch?
Greer approaches me with a quizzical look on her face, quizzical not as in curious, but quizzical as in disbelief. “Augusten, I think you should know,” she begins, “the entire room reeks of alcohol.” She waits a beat, glaring at me. “And it’s all coming from you.” She crosses her arms over her chest, angrily. “You smell like a fucking distillery.”
I steal a glance at the two other members of our group. They’re huddled in a far corner of the room, looking at the same egg. They appear to be whispering.
“I even brushed my tongue. I took half a box of Breath Assure,” I tell her defensively.
“It’s not your breath. It’s coming out your pores,” she says.
“Oh.” I feel betrayed by my body chemistry. Not to mention my deodorant, cologne and toothpaste.
“Don’t worry,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I’ll cover for you. As usual.” Then she walks away. Her heels sound like ice picks on the marble floor.
As we continue through the museum, I feel two things. On the one hand I’m depressed and feel like a loser, having been caught in the act of being a lush. But on the other hand, it’s a huge relief. Now that she knows, I don’t have to make such an effort to cover up. This is the dominating emotion and at times, I almost feel giddy. Greer manages to keep the group away from me for the rest of the morning, so I am able to pretty much ignore the eggs and instead focus on the Met’s amazing use of recessed lighting, their beautiful hardwood floors. I feel inspired to make renovations to my apartment and am cataloguing ideas. At lunch we go to Arizona 206, a funky Southwestern place that elevates corn into cuisine.
Greer orders a glass of Chardonnay, something she never does. She leans over and whispers in my ear. “You should order a drink too. In case nobody else noticed at the museum that you reek. So this way, if somebody gets too close to you and smells the liquor, they’ll think it’s from lunch.”
Greer. Forty-five-minutes-per-day-on-the-treadmill, no-saturated-fat, alcohol-is-bad-for-you Greer is so rational. I, on the other hand, am living proof of the chaos theory. To oblige her, I order a double martini.
Somebody says, “Oh, well, since you two are being wild . . .” and the client and the account guy each order a light beer.
The rest of the day passes smoothly, groceries on a conveyer belt. Soon, I am home.
I’m so relieved when I walk in my door, so grateful to be home where I don’t have to hold my breath or explain myself that I have an immediate tumbler of Dewar’s. One drink, I tell myself. Just to calm my nerves from today.
After I finish the bottle, I decide it’s time for bed. It’s after midnight and I need to be at tomorrow’s global brand meeting at ten. I set two alarm clocks for eight-thirty and crawl into bed.
I wake up the next day seized by panic. I bolt out of bed and stumble into the kitchen where I look at the clock on the microwave: 12:04 P.M.
The answering machine is blinking ominously. Very reluctantly, I hit PLAY.
“Augusten, it’s Greer. It’s a quarter of ten, I was just calling to see if you’d left the house yet. Okay, you must be gone.”
Beeeeeeeeeeep.
“Augusten, it’s ten o’clock and you’re not here. I hope you’re on your way.”
Beeeeeeeeeeep.
“It’s ten-fifteen. I’m going into the meeting now.” In this last message her voice had a hard, knowing edge to it. An I’m-through-with-you-motherfucker edge.
I shower and throw on my suit from yesterday as fast as I can. I don’t shave but that’s okay I figure since I have light facial hair anyway and besides, looking a little scruffy seems sort of Hollywood-ish. I walk outside and hail a cab. Naturally, it’s red lights all the way uptown. And as I step into the lobby of my office building, my forehead is soaking wet, despite the mild May temperature. I swipe my sleeve across it and then get into the elevator and stab the button for my floor: thirty-five. The button doesn’t light up. I stab it again. Nothing. A woman steps into the elevator, pushes thirty-eight and her button lights up. The doors slide shut and she turns to me. “Whew,” she says, “you just get back from a five-martini lunch?”
“No, I overslept,” I say, instantly realizing how bad that sounds.
Her smile fades and she looks at the floor.
The elevator stops on my floor and I step out and walk down the hallway to my office. I toss my attaché case on the desk and take a tin of Altoids out of the front pocket. I crunch a handful of them while I try to think of an excuse. I stare out my window at the East River. I would give anything to be the guy on the tugboat who is pushing a garbage bin upriver. I bet he doesn’t have to deal with this kind of stress. He just sits at the helm, the wind rushing through his hair, the sun on his face. Perhaps he reminisces about his days sailing the North Atlantic, yellowed snapshots of his grandkids scotch-taped to the sun visor. Either that or he listens to Howard Stern, a warm can of Coors between his legs. Either way, his life is certainly better than mine. He certainly isn’t late for a global perfume meeting.
I decide to give no excuse, to just be as friendly as possible and become as involved with the meeting as I can. I will sneak in and take my place and say things that will make people believe I have been there all along.
I try the conference room door but it’s locked. “Shit,” I say under my breath. This means I’ll have to knock. And somebody will have to get up and let me in, thus foiling my plan to be invisible. So what I do is I knock very softly. This way, only the person closest to the door will hear me.
I knock and the door is opened. It is opened by Elenor, my boss, the executive creative director of the agency. “Augusten?” she says with surprise when she sees me. “You’re a little late.”
I see that the conference room is filled with suits. Twenty, thirty of them. And everybody is standing up, stacking papers in their briefcases, throwing their empty Diet Coke cans in the trash.
The meeting is just now ending.
I spot Greer over in the corner of the room talking with our Fabergé client. Not only my Fabergé client, but my Fabergé client’s boss, the product manager, the brand manager and the global head of marketing. Greer catches my eye and her eyes narrow into small and hateful slits.
I say to Elenor, “I know, I’m sorry to be late. I had a personal emergency at home.”
She scrunches up her face like she has just smelled a fart. She takes one step closer to me and leans in, sniffing. “Augusten, are you . . . drunk? ”
“What?” I say, shocked.
“I smell alcohol. Have you been drinking?”
My face flushes. “No, of course I haven’t been drinking. I had a couple drinks last night. But—”
“We’ll talk about this later. Right now, I think you should go over to the client and apologize.” She slips past me out of the room and her panty hose make an important hush, hush sound as she walks away.
I make my way over to Greer and the clients. They stop speaking the moment I appear. I manage a smile and say, “Hi, guys. I’m really sorry I missed the meeting. I had a personal matter that I had to attend to. I’m terribly sorry.”
For a moment, nobody says anything, they just look at me.
Greer comments, “Nice suit.”
I start to say thanks, but then it dawns on me that she’s being sarcastic because it’s the same suit I had on yesterday and looks like maybe it should have been taken to the cleaners a few weeks ago.
One of the clients clears his throat and checks his watch. “Well, we need to be going. We have to get to the airport.” They move past me as a group, all pinstripes, briefcases and itineraries. Greer pats each on the shoulder as they go. “Bye,” she says after them. “Have a great flight. Say hi to the baby, Walter. And Sue?” She beams. “I want the name of that acupuncturist next time I see you.”
A few moments later, Greer and I are in my office, “having a talk.”
“It’s not just about you. It’s about me, too. It reflects on me. We’re a team. And because you’re not holding up your half of the team, I’m suffering. My career is suffering.”
“I know. I’m really sorry. I’m just really stressed out lately. I honestly have cut way back on the drinking. But sometimes, well, I fuck up.”
Suddenly, Greer takes an Addy Award off my bookcase and hurls it across the room against the wall. “Don’t you fucking understand what I am fucking telling you?” she screams. “I’m telling you that you are bringing us down. You are destroying not only your career, but mine.”
Her rage is like a force in the room that flattens me into complete silence. I stare at the floor.
I look at her. Angry blue veins have erupted on her temples.
“Greer, look. I told you I was sorry. But you’re being ridiculous. This is not ruining anybody’s career. Sometimes people are late to meetings; sometimes they miss them. This shit happens.”
“It doesn’t happen constantly,” she spits. Her blond, icy bob is so perfect it irritates me. There is, literally, not a hair out of place and somehow this strikes me as insanely wrong.
Now I want to throw an Addy. At Greer. “Calm down, will you? Christ, you crazy bitch, this is insane. If I’m such a mess, explain why we’re so fucking successful,” I say, making a motion with my hand around the office as if to say, Look at all of this!
Greer glances at the shelf, then to the floor. She inhales deeply and then lets it out. “I’m not saying you’re not good,” she states more calmly. “I’m saying that you have a problem. And it’s affecting both of us. And I’m worried about you.”
I fold my arms across my chest and stare at the wall behind her, needing a break. It’s weird how my mind goes blank. I hate confrontation, despite the fact that I was raised with so much of it. My parents’ shrink was big on confrontation. He encouraged shouting and screaming, so you’d think I’d be better at it. But I just freeze up. So I stare at the wall and I’m not really thinking so much as feeling guilty, I guess. Like I’ve been caught. The thing is, I know I drink too much, or what other people consider too much. But it’s so much a part of me, it’s like saying my arms are too long. Like I can change that? The other thing that is starting to annoy me as I stare at the wall is that this is Manhattan and everybody drinks, and most people are not like Greer. Most people have more fun.
“So I drink a little too much sometimes. I’m in advertising. Ad people sometimes drink too much. Jesus, look at Ogilvy. They’ve got a fucking bar in their cafeteria.” And then I actually point at her. “You make it sound like I’m some bum in the Bowery.” Bums, I want to remind her, do not make six-figure salaries. They do not have Addy Awards.
She looks at me without any trace of uncertainty. She is unmoved by my comments. “Augusten,” she says, “you’re going down. And I’m not going with you.” She turns and walks out of my office, slamming the door hard behind her.
Alone in my office. It’s over. She’s gone. She’s probably right. Am I worse than I think? I get so angry all of a sudden, like I’m a kid and am being forced to stop playing and go to bed. My parents used to have parties when I was a kid, and I hated being sent to bed just when they began. I hated the feeling that I was missing everything. That’s why I ended up living in New York City, so I wouldn’t miss anything. That fucking bitch has ruined my day. I will be unable to concentrate on work at all today. Part of the reason Greer and I are such a good team is because we are fast. We cannot stand for something to be unresolved—so we work at a frenzied, concentrated pace to solve problems fast and come up with the right campaign. There are some creatives who will piss away days or weeks. But after a briefing, we get to work immediately and we always try to have four ideas within a day; then we can coast.
But her little scene means I don’t get my resolution. I get to stew. And this makes me hate her. And I can’t live with that, so I want to drink.
That night at home, I watch a video of my commercials. Even my old American Express stuff is cool after all these years, though I do regret the wardrobe decisions. Still, whatever our little problems, Greer and I have done some great work together. I can’t be that bad, I think as I check the level on my bottle of Dewar’s. There’s a third of a bottle left. Which means I’ve already had two-thirds of a bottle. Which doesn’t seem like “a problem” to me. People often drink a bottle of wine with dinner. It’s just not so unusual. And anyway, I’m a big guy: six-foot-two. Besides, I’m almost twenty-five. What else are you supposed to do in your twenties but party? No, the problem is that rigid Greer obviously has control issues. And she’s judgmental.
Another problem is that I am thinking these things while perched on the edge of my dining room table, which I never use for dining, but as a large desk. And when I reach for the bottle of Dewar’s to refill my glass, I lose my balance and fall over on the floor, smashing my forehead against the base of my stereo speaker.
There is a gash and there is blood. More blood, really, than the gash calls for. Head wounds are so dramatic.
I finish the bottle and still do not have that sense of relief that I need. It’s like my brain is stubborn tonight. So I have some bottles of hard cider and these gradually do the trick and I get my soft feeling. I lose myself on the computer, at porn sites. It’s weird that no matter how drunk I get, I can always remember my Adult Check password.
The next day, I am summoned to Elenor’s office. It is on the forty-first floor and has floor-to-ceiling glass, polished blond hardwood floors, a glass-topped table with beveled edges and chrome legs. It would be austere except for the leopard-print chair behind the desk which lets you know the person in this office is “creative.” I have a beautiful view of the Chrysler Building’s spire. Because Elenor is sitting behind her desk and talking on the phone, the spire appears to be coming out from the top of her head like a horn. Which is apt. She motions me in.
Once I am inside her office I see that we are not alone. Standing against the far left wall of the office, as if they had been hiding from my view until I was inside, are Greer, Elenor’s asshole partner, Rick, and the head of human resources.
Elenor hangs up the phone. “Have a seat please,” she tells me, pointing to the chair in front of her desk.
I look at her, then the chair, then the others in the room. All is eerily quiet. I feel as if I have walked into the room during the Nuremburg proceedings. “What’s going on in here?” I say warily.
“Close the door,” Elenor says, but not to me. She says it to them. Rick steps away from the wall and closes the door.
I have a feeling I know what this is about, but at the same time I think it can’t possibly be what I’m thinking. What I’m thinking is too unthinkable. This can’t be about my drinking.
Again, Elenor tells me to sit. Finally, I do. And Greer, Rick and the human resources woman all move in unison to the large sofa.
“Greer?” I say. I want to hear the magic words: “Nightmare of a pitch, get ready,” or something worse, “Guess which account we just lost.” Except I know she will not say these things. And she doesn’t. She looks down at her shoes: polished Chanel flats with interlocked gold Cs. She says nothing.
Elenor rises from her chair and walks around her desk. She stands before me and then sits back on the edge of her desk, clasping her hands in front of her. “Augusten, we have a problem,” she begins. Then in a rather light and playful tone she adds, “That sounds almost like an insurance commercial, doesn’t it? ‘Nan, we have a problem. These sky-high premiums and all this confusing paperwork . . . if only there was an easier way.’ ” Her smile dies and she continues. “But seriously, Augusten. We do have a problem.”
So if she’s joking, maybe I am crazy and this is nothing. I feel like I’m in a department store and I’ve just pocketed a keychain flashlight and the security guard comes over to me and asks the time. Am I going to get off?
“It’s your drinking.”
Fuck. Greer, you cunt. I don’t look at her. I continue looking right at Elenor, and I don’t blink. A person with a drinking problem would deny it, would shout or create a scene right at this moment. But I smile, very slightly, like I am listening to some client’s stupid comments on a commercial.
“You have a drinking problem and it’s affecting your work. And you’re going to need to do something about it immediately.”
Okay, I need to slow things down a little. “Elenor, is this about being late to that meeting yesterday?”
“Missing the global brand meeting yesterday,” she corrects. “And it’s not just that. It’s many, many instances where your drinking has had an effect on your performance here at the office. I’ve had clients speak to me about it.” She waits a beat to let this sink in. “And your coworkers are concerned about you.” She motions with her head to the sofa, in the direction of Greer. “I myself have smelled alcohol on you numerous times.”
I feel tricked by these people. They have nothing better to do than obsess over how many cocktails I have? And Greer, she just has to control everything, has to get her way. Greer doesn’t like that I drink, so all of a sudden my drinking is a big agency affair. Greer wants me to drink diet soda, I will be forced to drink diet soda.
“Right now, as one example,” she says. “I can smell alcohol on you right now. But there have been other things. That shoot we had last year in London where you took the train to Paris for three days and nobody heard a word from you.”
Oh, that. My Lost Weekend in Paris. I’d done my best to forget what little I remembered. Still, I dimly recall a young sociology professor with a soul patch, which is that little tuft of hair under the bottom lip, which I had never heard of before him. That much I remember. But really, so what? The commercial got shot.
“This isn’t about just one thing here and there. It’s about a progression of behaviors. And it’s about our clients. Because more than one has spoken to me. See, Augusten, advertising is about image. And it just doesn’t look good to have a creative on the account who misses meetings, shows up late, shows up drunk or smelling like alcohol. It’s just not acceptable.” Framed behind her head is the Wall Street Journal ad profiling her. The headline reads, MADISON AVENUE, ACCORDING TO ELENOR.
It’s horrible, but I immediately think I can’t wait to tell Jim about what’s happening right now, when we have drinks later. Thinking this makes me accidentally smirk.
Greer gets off the sofa and stands next to Elenor. “It’s not a joke, Augusten. It’s serious. You’re a mess. Everybody knows it. I knew the only way to get through to you would be to have an intervention.” She is trembling, I see. Her bob is quivering ever so slightly.
The human resources woman speaks up. “We feel that it would be in your best interest for you to admit yourself into a treatment center.”
I look at her, and realize I hardly recognize her without a stack of paychecks in her hand. Next to her, Rick is doing his best imitation of somebody who is not a psychopath. He looks at me with such sincere concern and compassion that I want to harm him with a stick. Rick is the most insincere, backstabbing person I have ever met. But he fools everyone. They are all tricked by his kindness. It’s amazing how shallow advertising people truly are. Rick is a Mormon and although this is not a reason to hate him, I hate all Mormons as a result of knowing Rick. I want to say, what’s he doing here? But I don’t because he’s Elenor’s partner and they are a team, like me and Greer, only they are also my bosses.
The human resources woman drones on. “There are many treatment options, but we feel a residence program would be the best course of action under the circumstances.”
Oh, now, this is just way over the top. “Are you saying I need to go to rehab?”
Silence, but nods all around.
“Rehab?” I say again, just to make sure. “I mean, I can cut back on my drinking. I do not need to leave work and go to some fucking rehab.”
More solemn nods. There’s a thick tension in the room. As if everyone is ready to pounce and restrain me should I break out in a rash of denial.
“It would only be for thirty days,” the human resources woman says, as if this fact is supposed to somehow comfort me.
I feel this incredible panic and at the same time, I am certain there is nothing I can do. The thing is, I recognize what’s happening here, have seen it before in meetings when I am trying to sell a campaign to a client that they will never, never, never buy.
I will either have to quit right now and find another job or I will have to go to their ridiculous rehab. If I quit, I’m sure I can get another job. Pretty sure. Except advertising is sort of a small world. And I just know that Rick would be on the phone in five minutes calling everybody and telling everybody in the city that I’m a drunk who refused to go to rehab, so I quit. And really, what could happen? It’s actually possible I could be without a job. Even though I make way too much money, I still live paycheck to paycheck, so I would actually be broke. Like the bum that Greer already thinks I am.
It’s simple: I lose. “Okay,” I say.
Every shoulder in the room relaxes. It’s as if a valve has been released.
Elenor speaks up. “Are you saying you’ll agree to a thirty-day stay in a treatment center?”
I glance over at Greer, who is looking at me expectantly. “It doesn’t really seem like you’re giving me a choice.”
Elenor smiles at me and clasps her hands together. “Excellent,” she says. “I’m very glad to hear this.”
The human resources woman rises from the couch. “There’s the Betty Ford Center in Los Angeles. But Hazeldon is also excellent. We’ve had many people check into Hazeldon.”
Roaches check in but they don’t check out is what I want to say. And then I remember the priest. It was about three years ago and he was giving me a blowjob in the back of his Crown Victoria. I was drunk out of my mind and couldn’t get it up. He told me, “You really should check yourself into the Proud Institute. It’s the gay rehab center in Minnesota.”
So maybe I should do this instead. The guys will definitely have better bodies at a gay rehab hospital. “What about Proud Institute?” I say.
The human resources woman nods her head politely. “You could go there. It’s, for, you know, gay people.”
I look at Rick and he has turned away because he hates the word gay. It’s the only word that can crack his veneer.
“That might be better,” I say. A rehab hospital run by fags will be hip. Plus there’s the possibility of good music and sex.
And the confrontation suddenly becomes no different from any other advertising meeting. An agreement has been reached. It’s decided. I’ll take the rest of the week off to make the necessary arrangements and I’ll coordinate the details with human resources. I’ll be expected back in just over a month, clean and sober. Perhaps somebody will even write a conference report highlighting the main points of the meeting.
On my way out, Greer kisses the air on each side of my cheek. “Good luck,” she says. She grips my shoulders. “Someday you’ll thank me for this.”
What movie did she get that from? I wonder.
As I leave the building, I begin to feel somewhat elated. The bright side of the situation steps forward in my mind: I managed to escape from that awful intervention unscathed, I have over a month off from work, and it’s only two in the afternoon.
I do not have to go to work tomorrow or the next day or the day after this. As I walk away from the building, I have a sense of flight. The sun is strong, with heavy clouds in the sky. I can get seriously drunk tonight without that awful, annoying concern about how much I will stink in the morning.
I feel high, as though I have been handed some incredibly good news.
What I really like to do is get drunk at home so I don’t feel so nervous and inhibited, then go out to some dive bar and talk to guys. You never know who you’ll meet or where you’ll end up. It’s like this fucking incredible vortex of possibility. Anything can happen at a bar. Unlike Greer, I like options, I like to not really know what’s going to happen next. Resolutions can be very dull.
Then it hits me. An awful glitch. Something so unfathomable that it dawns on me with a slow blackness that makes me feel hollow.
In order to get away with this, I may actually have to do something so horrifying that I can barely admit it to myself.
I may actually have to go to rehab.
That evening, I call my best friend, Pighead, and tell him that I am checking into rehab. Pighead isn’t a drinking buddy like Jim, the undertaker. Pighead is more like, I don’t know, my normal friend. Plus he’s older than I am, he’s thirty-two. So maybe I think of him as being wiser in some ways.
“Good,” he says. “I’m glad you’re going into rehab. You’re a disaster.”
I take offense. “I’m not that bad. I’m just a little excessive, eccentric.” I make it seem like I am somebody who mixes stripes with plaids, somebody who laughs too loudly in restaurants. “All I’m going to do there is learn how to be a little more normal.”
“Augusten, do you know how you get when you drink? You get nasty. You don’t get silly and put a lampshade on your head or say witty, philosophical things. You get foul, dark and ugly. I don’t like you when you drink, not at all.”
I think of the karaoke bar. That’s not foul or dark. Just publicly humiliating.
“If I’m so foul and awful, why be my friend?” I hate people who don’t drink. They understand so little.
“Because,” he explains, “you, the person, are good. And I love you the person. But unfortunately, in order to get you the person, I also have to put up with you the drunk. I think this could be a real transformation, if you take it seriously.”
Somehow I feel a little stung by his response, like he’s taking their side instead of mine. I don’t know what I expected him to say. Maybe I expected him to say, “But why? Why you of all people?”
I have known Pighead since the first week I lived in New York. This makes him my official rock. The thing that grounds me.
I’m his rock, too, although he would never admit this. He would say, “I’m my own damn rock.” But he’s an investment banker, so for him, admitting the truth is something to be done only in the event of a plea bargain.
The reason I know what we are to each other is because we fight freely and almost constantly, about even the smallest thing. In fact, once we didn’t speak for an entire week because he didn’t like the way I loaded his dishwasher.
“Augusten, it’s just common sense. You don’t put a heavy frying pan on the top rack next to the drinking glasses, they’ll break.”
I thought it was uncommonly considerate of me to load the fucking thing in the first place. “Well how the hell am I supposed to know these things? I don’t have a dishwasher, I use plastic.” I can’t decide if we’re exact opposites, or somehow exactly the same except for minor cosmetic differences. I do know that all of his friends hate me and all of my friends hate him. We drive each other crazy in ways that nobody else can even touch. We never bore each other. And we both realize what a rare thing this is. What amazes me is that I never drink around him and still we get along, or rather don’t get along, so perfectly.
Pighead is HIV-positive. Or, as he simply says, “I’m an AIDS baby.” He got this phrase from watching 20/20. Diane Sawyer was profiling babies in Africa who were born with the disease, born to infected mothers. We were both sitting on his white sofa drinking Ocean Spray cranberry juice as the parade of bony children flashed across the screen. It was grim and depressing. “That’s me,” Pighead said in his mock, pity-me tone of voice. “I’m an AIDS baby. Hold me?”
But because he’s been healthy and virtually symptom-free for six years, baffling his entourage of physicians, neither of us ever really thinks about it. Or talks about it. He’s completely normal and healthy in every way. In fact, I’m so accustomed to the dozens of bottles of prescription medicines on his kitchen counter that I don’t even notice them anymore. There must be fifty of them, all in a group. But all I ever see is counter space and Post-it notes. I don’t even see the hypodermic needles he uses to inject himself with white blood cell boosters.
“When are you leaving?” he asks.
“In three days.”
“For how long?”
“A month.”
“Did you tell the office yet?”
“Well, they’re sort of the ones making me go. Elenor said I have to get cleaned up or I’m outta there.”
“Lucky for you they didn’t just fire you. It’s nice of them to give you a chance. So what are you going to do to prepare?”
I see a book of matches on the table in front of me, matches that read CEDAR TAVERN, NEW YORK CITY.
“Drink,” I say.
“Guess what?”
“What?” Jim says, taking a sip of his drink.
“The office did an intervention thing on me. They’re making me go to rehab for thirty days.”
Jim explodes into a fit of laughter, coughing over his gin and tonic. A little spray lands on me.
I wipe my forehead with a napkin, grinning at his reaction. We’re in a dive bar on Avenue A in the East Village.
“You’re kidding!” he cries, choking. His face is red.
“I’m serious. I don’t have to go to work for thirty days. Plus the whole rest of this week.” I bum a cigarette from his pack on the table, light up.
“That’s fucking awesome, man,” he says. “Congratulations.”
I take a long sip from my martini. “I know. The more I think about it, the cooler it seems. At first, I was sort of horrified. But now, well.” Now I’m thinking rehab could turn out to be great. I’ll dry out for thirty days and it’ll be like going to a spa. When I come home, I’ll be able to drink more like a normal person drinks. Why was I so freaked out before? There is a certain glamour to rehab. I almost feel like, what’s wrong with me that I resisted in the first place?
And Jim is totally on the same page. “No, it’s great. Think of all the celebrities you’ll see. Plus, it’s just great material.” He polishes off the last of his drink and crunches some ice in his mouth. “I mean, we’ll be able to laugh about this for years.”
“Right,” I agree.
“So what’d your buddy Pighead say? You tell him yet?”
I signal the bartender to get us another round. “Yeah, I told him. He thinks it’s a good idea, actually. And I mean good idea in the wrong sense. In the hospital sense, as opposed to the rehab sense.” When I say “rehab” I raise my chin, as though talking about the Oscars.
“That wuss,” Jim says.
“Yeah, he is.” But I feel a little bad saying this. And also, I can’t explain Pighead to Jim. But I also can’t ever have any of my friends meet each other. I have to keep them all separate. And they all think this is a little strange, but for some reason it’s normal to me.
“Pighead is a stick in the mud if you ask me,” Jim says, sliding his empty glass forward toward the bartender to make room for the fresh drink. “So un-fun.”
I can’t really tell Jim that I like that about Pighead, I like his un-fun-ness. I can’t say it’s comforting. “Yeah, I guess,” I say flatly.
“Anyway, you’ll have a blast,” he says. He raises his glass in a toast. “To rehab,” he says.
“To rehab,” I say and we clink. “Hey, why don’t you come with me?” I ask.
“Can’t,” Jim says as he swallows. “Gotta work. I don’t have some cushy-ass job like you.”
I leave the bar feeling confident and excited by the prospect of checking into rehab. Back in my apartment, I strip off my clothes, change into some sweats, crack open an ale and drink it quickly. I play early Blondie on the stereo. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of this rehab thing. There’s no telling who I might see there. And Jim’s right, it is the sort of story you can laugh about for years.
I call 411 for Minnesota and ask for Proud Institute. I scribble the number on my hand then go to the refrigerator for another ale. I spend the next forty minutes on the phone with someone from the rehab hospital and my enthusiasm withers. I answer a litany of questions: How much do you drink, how often, have you ever tried to stop before? Blah, blah, blah. I tell them I drink all the time, it’s only recently become a problem and I could probably stop on my own but my office sort of pushed me into this, so that’s why I’m going to rehab instead of those alcoholic meetings.
In the middle of the conversation, I open a third ale. I cup my hand over the mouthpiece so they don’t hear the tab of the ale being popped. It dawns on me that this is a slightly contrary action. Like stopping into Baby Gap before having an abortion.
After I hang up I walk into the bathroom and look in the mirror. “What have you done? Man, are you fucking crazy?” I watch myself take a sip of ale. “You don’t even like ale,” I tell my reflection. My reflection takes another gulp and goes back to the refrigerator.
I’m expected at Proud Institute in three days. I have a reservation, as if I am simply going to Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica.
I go into the living room and sit on the sofa. I stare at the blank wall across from me. Suddenly, rehab doesn’t seem so fun after all. The dour woman on the phone depressed me completely. If ever there were a person you would not want to invite to a keg party, it was she.
Suddenly I feel very uncomfortable on my sofa, so I get up. I pace around my apartment and no matter where I go, I still feel cagey. Like I ought to go out, but I just got back. I look at the ale in my hand and the other empty bottles that are sitting in the sink.
The fact is, I have accepted Pulitzer Prizes, Academy Awards, met wonderful people, and had healthy, loving relationships, all in my mind, all while drinking. How did this happen to me? I need to figure it out before I get to rehab so I don’t make a fool of myself there.
Is it because when I was eleven I saved up my allowance for three weeks in a row and bought a faux crystal decanter and glass set from J. C. Penney for nine dollars, then filled it with cream soda, pretending it was scotch? I remember thinking about that decanter set constantly until I was finally able to buy it one Saturday, allowance day, and take it home. I set it up on my desk. But it didn’t look right, so I went into the cellar and found one of the old silver serving trays my grandmother had given my parents when they were married. My mother hated all that silver, thought it was garish, and relegated it to a box next to the hamburger-filled freezer. My mother was much more down-to-earth and preferred wood to silver; she liked jazz and poetry. I brought one of the trays upstairs and polished it in the kitchen while I watched cartoons.
Then I brought the shiny tray into my bedroom and set the decanter plus the four glasses on top of it. It looked exactly right. I shined my desk lamp through the decanter filled with cream soda. I believed it to be the most beautiful thing, like something on The Price is Right. But within a few weeks, the cream soda grew a top layer of furry green mold.
So maybe that’s what did it. Or maybe it’s my father’s fault.
I can remember my father telling me to “never, under any circumstances” touch his bottles. He had all sorts of bottles, and they never gathered dust. They were beautiful and colorful, like jewels, especially in the late afternoon when sunlight entered the room from a low angle and made the bottles glow. I remember one of them was square-ish and had frosted glass on the outside. This would be gin.
When he was at work or downstairs in the basement drinking and sitting in the dark, I would uncap one of his untouchable bottles, place the palm of my hand over its mouth and turn it upside down. Then I’d quickly recap it and lick my hand. I couldn’t have been any older than eight.
Actually, it’s surprising that I drink at all, considering my father. He drank so much that I didn’t even see it. It was like some fathers had mustaches and some fathers had baseball caps and my father had a glass attached to his hand. It wasn’t strange. I didn’t think, Oh, my dad’s an alcoholic. I just thought he was always thirsty.
Then again, this could all be the result of Bewitched.
I was addicted to Bewitched as a kid. I worshipped Darren Stevens the First. When he’d come home from work, Samantha would say, “Darren, would you like me to fix you a drink?” He’d always rest his briefcase on the table below the mirror in the foyer, wipe his forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief and say, “Better make it a double.”
I go to the bed and sit on the edge, sinking into the plush down comforter and the featherbed below. I feel a prick of good fortune, an awareness that I am lucky to have such a nice bed to sit on during my anxiety attack. Why am I so anxious? And then it hits me. I’m not anxious, I’m lonely. And I’m lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be so lonely because it seems catastrophic—seeing the car just as it hits you. But then all of a sudden, that feeling is gone and I’m blank. So it’s like a door quickly opened, just a crack, to show me what a mess I was inside. But not enough to really stare for long and absorb all the details. Just enough to know the room needed a major spring cleaning.
I get drunk and call my father. “I’m checking into a rehab hospital, I’ll be gone for thirty days.”
Silence. Then, “Well, what about your work, son?”
“I’m in advertising, Dad,” as if this explains everything. I don’t tell him that work is the reason I have to go in the first place. Then I say, “It’s your fault I’m going. I caught this from you.”
He exhales loudly into the phone, and I can feel him move further along up the family tree, instantly branching out to become a distant relative. “I don’t want to talk about this with you. You do what you have to do. I’m just damned worried about that job of yours. You take that job for granted like you do, and you’re just not going to have it. It’ll be taken right away from you. And for Christ’s sake, you have to get over your past. You are a grown man now, not a little wounded boy.”
The animal portion of my brain seizes control and my blood is filled with hatred molecules. “Do you remember the time we were in the car together and you said you were gonna kill the thing that meant the most to my mother and you glared at me and sped up? Heading for a rock? And I had to jump out of the fucking car? When I was like nine, you motherfucker,” I spat.
More silence. Then he growls, “I did no such thing and you know it. You just make crap up, and I’m very tired of it, very tired.”
I know he remembers. “What about the cigarette burn on the bridge of my nose, between my eyes?”
Silence, except I swear I hear the thin pulse of the artery in his neck beating against the phone. “I do not know what you are talking about.” But the tone of his voice does not match his words. His tone says yes.
When I was much younger, maybe six, I was sitting on his lap in the La-Z-Boy and he very slowly brought his Marlboro toward my face, aimed the tip between my eyes and landed.
I had forgotten about this until I was twenty and had eczema.
I went to a dermatologist for the rash. She said, “What’s this?” as she touched my scar.
My mind went absolutely blank. The kind of blank where it’s not that you’re forgetting something, but your mind is not allowing you to remember. It’s a thicker, dumber blank. Like trying to run underwater in a dream. “I don’t know, just a mole or a glitch or something,” I said dismissively.
She leaned so close to my face that I could see the individual pores of her skin. “No, this is a burn, this is definitely an old burn.”
I told her it couldn’t be a burn. I used the same tone of voice I would have if she’d told me that I was pregnant. But that night, I went home and got very drunk. And that’s when I saw the burning tip of the cigarette. And I knew it wasn’t because I was drunk that I was imagining it, it was because I was drunk and my own head was out of the way and I could remember. This is maybe one of the best things to ever come of my drinking. Or maybe it’s one of the worst.
I tell my father, “I know you remember. Maybe you were drunk yourself when you did it. But I know how it is to be drunk. There are some things you just can’t forget.”
I think I hear him sniffle. But before I can decide if it’s a sniffle of recognition or a sniffle of allergy season, his wife takes the phone away from him and says to me, “That’s enough,” and hangs up. Two words and I’m gone.
I hit REDIAL but the line is busy. I sit and think, She just doesn’t know. She married him after he stopped drinking, she never saw any of it.
I walk into the bathroom to piss and as I’m pissing, I think, Did I make it all up? Is it all some Oprah/repressed memory thing? This seems likely.
Now I feel vacant. I guess it’s sad. Crushed?
I wake up the next morning curled against the bathtub, my head resting on a balled-up towel. When I stand up, I bring my hand around to touch my back where it had been in contact with the tub and my back is cold, like a dead person.