I’ve been at Pighead’s apartment since six A.M. I’ve changed his diaper three times, given him four injections and watched while he vomited peach Yoplait onto the Philippe Starck hall runner. I can’t help but think that having a hangover while placing the soiled diaper into the red plastic biohazard bag would not be the end of the world. In fact, a hangover might improve my outlook. I took a week off from work, so at least I don’t have to deal with that shit. Just this shit.
Pighead is operating in slow, drooling motion. Within the space of a month he has been transformed into a skeleton without bladder control. The only reason he’s home instead of still at the hospital is because they ran out of tests to perform. Life is a question mark now.
“Do you still feel thick in the head?” I ask him while he sits on the couch watching the TV, which, incidentally, is off.
He nods slowly. A strand of saliva, as thick as yarn, sways from his lower lip. I use a tissue to pinch it off.
The visiting nurse that comes every day taught me how to give Pighead his intramuscular injections. This might be part of the reason Pighead always looks at me as if I am about to harm him. We ordered the tiniest needles possible for the tiniest amount of pain. I even injected myself with water to see how much it hurt. I was surprised that I could barely feel the prick. So I think it’s the medicine itself, not the needle, that burns. I don’t dare inject myself with his medicine. The stuff is deadly.
His mother has moved into his apartment. She spends the day muttering prayers in Greek and simmering lamb bones on the stove. Originally, the diaper changing was her department. I figured, she did it before, she can do it again. But she was unable to do it without sobbing, so I took over the task. Clearly, nothing is going according to plan.
“Do you remember last fall when we took a drive to Massachusetts to see the leaves?” I ask Pighead.
He turns to face me. I’m sitting next to him on the couch and the effort of turning his head seems large. He nods. He raises his arm and places it on my shoulder. He speaks very slowly. “I would give every penny I have for just one more day like that,” he says. His arm falls from my shoulder and lands on the sofa. I think that arm is too bruised; we need to move the IV to the other arm.
Last year at this time, Pighead looked like a soccer player. Handsome, stocky, healthy. One would easily have hated him for his fine genetics. Now, his cheekbones look like two luggage handles protruding from either side of his head. His legs are the diameter of Evian bottles. And the mind that was formerly valued at seven figures on Wall Street probably could not add ten plus two.
Meanwhile, I have discovered a latent talent for nursing. I find comfort in thumping air bubbles out of the IV line before inserting it. I like opening the little sterile alcohol pads before swabbing his arm and the cap of the medication bottle. I feel whole while I count and organize a week’s worth of his pills and place them into the pale yellow Monday-through-Friday plastic pill box with snapping lids over each day. Sometimes he will smile at me and I know that this is the old Pighead smiling. I smile back and then take his temperature. It is a play and we are in our roles. I am performing from a script.
I wonder if I were a normal person, instead of an alcoholic with a highly evolved sense of denial, whether or not I would be more of a mess right now. Instead of thinking, My best friend might be dying, I am thinking, I need to take that retrovirus inhibitor tablet and split it in half. I feel alarmingly stable.
Hayden calls from London to tell me that he relapsed in a pub near Piccadilly Circus. Well, well, well. Deepak Chopra finally made a bacon cheeseburger out of the holy cow of India.
“How tacky,” I tell him. “You relapsed in a tourist area.”
Shamed, he admits, “It was a poor choice.”
“What? Relapsing or where you relapsed?” I ask.
“Both,” he says. Then, “You don’t sound nearly as surprised as I expected you to be. I feel rather let down.”
“Nothing surprises me now,” I tell him. I am stoic. I am Joan of Arc, with liver damage and an unused penis.
“Are you going to meetings?” he asks when I tell him about Foster moving back in with the Brit and Pighead being in a free fall.
“Ha,” I snort. My life has become a series of choices based on triage. “I don’t have the time. Besides, you’re not one to talk about AA. You went every day and look what happened to you.” Hayden is now proof to me that AA is crap.
“I wouldn’t have relapsed in New York,” he says. “I had a sober network there. Here, well, I don’t have anything.”
“Bullshit,” I say. “You chose to relapse. You didn’t have to.” I hate it when alcoholics relapse and then act like somebody cut the brake lines on their cars.
“I suppose it was building up. I suppose it was inevitable.”
I wonder if it’s building up in me? I wonder if I would be able to tell? I wonder if the fact that I must wonder is my answer. “I’m not frightened about Pighead,” I tell him.
He’s quiet for a moment and I swear I can hear the Atlantic Ocean churning over the phone lines, even though I realize they aren’t lines but satellite signals. So maybe it’s interstellar dust motes banging around. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not,” he says finally.
“I don’t feel anything, actually,” I point out.
“Hmmmmm,” he says.
I know exactly what he means. Then remembering something, I ask Hayden, “Where do whales go when they die?”
“They beach themselves,” he says immediately.
“Oh,” I say.
“You really ought to go to a meeting, Augusten. I’m telling you this as somebody who has recently imbibed and who is now counting days once again and steeping in his own misery.”
I want to ask him if it was just a little bit fun, a little bit worth it. “It was really awful, huh?”
“You see?” Hayden explodes into the phone. “You’re asking buying questions. You want to know if it was really awful as opposed to semiawful. I swear, Augusten, I’m worried. Go to a meeting. Don’t drink.”
Hayden is annoying me. I had no intention of drinking. He’s the one who got smashed in the Times Square of London. He’s the one who threw his sobriety against the wall and now has to go clean up the mess.
All I have to do is change a few diapers.
• • •
Greer is not pleased when I tell her, over the phone, that I am taking a leave of absence. But because of the reason, she is forced to bite her tongue. Probably literally. Probably it is bleeding. “Well, that’s a very good thing you’re doing,” she says, like I have volunteered to serve turkey to homeless people in the Bowery.
“I’m a little late,” I say with some disgust at myself.
“Late for what?”
“Late for showing him that I actually give a shit. Late for everything.”
“It’s never too late,” Greer chimes. I picture her wearing a horribly expensive sweater made by a seven-year-old Cambodian orphan with head lice. “I’m sure you’re helping.”
“How’s the Nazi?” I ask, changing the subject to something neutral.
“He was furious that the music house wanted forty grand. He wanted us to ‘Jew them down.’ ”
“He didn’t say that.”
“Oh yes, he did. His exact words.”
I wonder how much of my soul remains after spending so many years as an advertising copywriter. Will I end up in Hell along with the Hamburger Helper Helping Hand, Joe Camel and Wendy, the Snapple Lady?
“Call me,” Greer says.
I know she doesn’t mean to call her and chat. Or call her for updates on work. She means call her when it all goes down.
For three days in a row, Pighead has had no hiccups. He stopped drooling and seems more mentally alert. Enough to call me “asshole Fuckhead” when I accidentally spill Ocean Spray CranApple juice on the arm of his pristine white sofa with the down cushions. It’s not a large stain, but it will be permanent, a fact Pighead has the mental capacity to remind me of more than once. Even Virgil has crawled out from under the bed. For weeks, he has been afraid of Pighead. Probably because Pighead no longer smells like Pighead but like something made by Pfizer.
His mother rolls pastry dough with a toilet paper dowel in the kitchen and I sit at the dining room table reading Esquire: “101 Things Every Guy’s Gotta Do Before His Number’s Up.” Number 73 is: paint a woman’s toenails. I add my own number 102 to the list: clean diarrhea off your ex-boyfriend’s legs. “Your eyes look better,” I tell Pighead. “Brighter,” I add.
“I feel a little better,” he says.
Virgil sleeps in a wedge of sunlight in front of the fireplace. He cannot be roused, even with the squeaky carrot. Dog denial.
If it weren’t for the seven boxes of medical supplies stacked next to the front door, the biohazard bags, the disposable diapers, the rubber gloves, the IV pole with the Plum XL3M Series Pump, the fact that most of the furniture has been moved to the sides of the room to make space, and the visiting nurse who is quietly connecting two lengths of clear plastic tubing in the corner, this might pass for an ordinary day.
On my way home, I surprise myself by stopping into a liquor store on Seventh Avenue and Twelfth. I surprise myself even further by buying a pint of Black Label. On the way out, I think how strange it is that liquor stores never redecorate. They never get cool-ized. But then, they don’t need to be hip. They are like urinals—people will go there no matter what.