Dry: A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs Page B

was because of my using, and my selfishness. I was already married, I guess. To coke. I couldn’t even deal with the two of us together, let alone his virus, which made it three of us. I hate myself for that.”
    He looks at me. “He died never knowing how much I really loved him. He died believing that it was his virus I was afraid of. But that’s not it. I left him before he could leave me. Because I’ve been left a lot in my life. Except by coke. Coke never leaves me. Coke is always there. I had to leave him. I had to break the cycle.”
    I want to throw up at hearing this. I can feel it kicking around at the back of my throat, knocking on the door. My stomach is pushing the acid up. My stomach is saying, This is too much .
    Kavi disgusts me. He disgusts me more than any other human being has ever disgusted me before.
    Because I am him.
    Suddenly I want to drink. The urge hits me like a tsunami. I don’t want to drink in a jovial “Highballs for everybody!” way. I want to drink to the point where I could undergo major knee surgery and not feel so much as a pinch.
    I sit for a moment, staring straight ahead, eyes unfocused, unblinking as reality settles over me like a lead dental X-ray cape.
    It’s not about being an ad guy who throws back a few too many sometimes.
    It’s about being in rehab or being fired .
    It’s about being an alcoholic.
    It’s about me being an alcoholic.
    My lips move when I whisper the words out loud. I’m an alcoholic .

    Today is one-on-one therapy. This is exactly like seeing a shrink in New York, minus the Barcelona chair and Eileen Gray end table from Knoll. And instead of a dignified father figure with a salt-and-pepper goatee, I have Rae in all her floral-print grandeur.
    She’s different one-on-one, less intense, more relaxed. I feel like I am visiting a friend. Like we could be sitting at a bar talking, except that there’s a ONE DAY AT A TIME poster above her head and her bookshelf is lined with clinical addiction textbooks.
    “How are you feeling?” she asks. I tell her that up until the other day, I was ready to check out. I tell her about my Pighead letter and how reading it in front of people upset me. That I’m realizing I don’t like to feel things, don’t want to feel pain or fear. And mostly, how I can see that I don’t drink like a normal person. That I use booze like an escape hatch and also like a destination in itself. I tell her my recent observation of rehab, in terms of how it works. How it sort of sneaks up on you. The way somebody will say some dumb affirmation and then later in group, somebody will say, “I didn’t buy that affirmation you said at all,” and there will be a heated argument and somebody will be reduced to tears. And how all of this will bring something up inside of you, wake something up. And you have some insight you wouldn’t have had otherwise. It’s very odd and nonlinear and organic. And yet it’s real.
    Rae smiles because she knows this is exactly how it works. It is stealth.
    She says we need to begin designing a “re-entry” plan for when I leave rehab and go back out into the real world. I think of the space shuttle, burning up as it breaks through the earth’s hard atmosphere upon re-entry. This could easily happen to me.
    She places her arms on her desk, leans forward. “My recommendation is that you continue with therapy on an outpatient basis after you leave here.”
    This sounds fine with me, I like the idea of seeing a shrink once a week as maintenance. It’s another chance to talk about myself without being interrupted. Plus, a shrink doesn’t really know me, so I can present a more balanced picture of who I really am.
    “What I recommend is six months of treatment, four days a week. The program I have in mind is called HealingHorizons. It’s in Manhattan and we’ve done a lot of work with them—they’re excellent.”
    I blink. Six months, four times a week?
    “Basically, it’s a combination of group