Dry

“There’s a huge old bar to my right, carved by hand a century ago from several ancient oak trees. It’s like this great big middle finger aimed at nature conservationists.”

For Burroughs, the environment of the bar takes precedence over everything else—his health, his job, the planet. While his humor is gleefully malevolent at times, and while it’s doubtful that he doesn’t really care about the environment, his casual brush-off of groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club reflects his mindset during his heady drinking days. Nothing must interfere with his drinking—not Greer, not an early meeting at the Metropolitan Museum, and certainly not a couple of old growth oak trees.

“He provides a service. I, on the other hand, try to trick and manipulate people into parting with their money, a disservice.”

Comparing his job to Jim’s, Burroughs sees the undertaker role as objectively superior to the deception inherent in the advertising world. Burroughs’s morbid fascination aside, Jim provides a necessary service to grieving families, while Burroughs sees himself as a well-paid grifter. Burroughs’s denigration of his own career is a comment on one of the pillars of business and capitalism: marketing—how to convince people who may not need a product that they must have it.

“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.”

As Burroughs prepares for a client meeting, still drunk and with only two hours of sleep, he utilizes a strategy to separate the previous night’s karaoke-singing Augusten from the professional, nine-to-five Augusten: self-deception. The strategy may work for him, but it doesn’t fool Greer or Elenor, and no amount of fragrant hair product or breath freshener can suppress the reek of alcohol coming from his pores.

“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 primary conflict of Dry is internal. Somewhere in the recesses of his conscience, Burroughs knows his drinking is a problem, but his defensiveness and justifications are just as much a part of him as his drinking, and his list of excuses is seemingly endless. He won’t even acknowledge an objective standard for what “too much” drinking is, declaring instead that it’s “what other people consider too much.” It’s gone far beyond a habit. He feels it is part of his identity, like his sexual orientation or career, and to sever him from that part of himself would feel like cutting off a limb.

“I hate people who don’t drink. They understand so little.”

When Burroughs informs Pighead he’s checking into rehab, Pighead is relieved, telling his friend he gets “foul, dark, and ugly” (24) when he drinks. Burroughs resorts to a nobody-understands-me defense, still unable or unwilling to admit the severity of his problem. He acknowledges one of the common experiences of alcoholism: The disorder can alter perception in such a way that only other drinkers are in on the joke, and sober people just don’t get it. The fact that Pighead doesn’t drink isolates him from his best friend, and for many of Burroughs’s drinking years, he chooses alcohol over friendship.

“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.”

When he was 20, Burroughs saw a dermatologist, and she pointed out an old burn scar between his eyes, a burn inflicted by his father’s cigarette when he was six. He had buried the memory up to that moment, as if it never happened. He here describes the mind’s mechanism for coping with severe trauma, a mechanism he differentiates from other kinds of memory lapses. Some unprocessed traumas can lie beyond the reach of conscious memory, and it can require a trigger to pull them out of the depths of the unconscious.

“In my mind, this settles the issue. I would never drink cologne and therefore am not an ‘alcoholic’ and am, in fact, in the wrong place.”

As the reality of sobriety settles in, Burroughs rationalizes wanting to check out of rehab on the first day. When the staff checks his bag for contraband, noting that some patients have even drunk cologne, Burroughs makes a sketchy leap: He’s not one of those “alcoholics,” and so he must not be an “alcoholic” at all, just someone who drinks to loosen up and wind down. The argument’s fallaciousness is apparent—even to him, perhaps—but the fear of giving up such an integral part of his life is very real. He will have to confront the complex cocktail of emotions—panic, loneliness, depression—before he can begin to tackle the hard work of sobriety.

“I believe that I am meeting people, shaking their hands, but I have left my body and am operating purely on muscle memory.”

As he adjusts to his new surroundings, Burroughs dissociates from the outside world, from the strange people, the distasteful furniture, the overwhelming suddenness of it all. He is still trying to convince himself that he is not like these people, these people with problems so severe they must be herded like sheep through their day and exude false cheer to cope with what feels like incarceration. He handles it by withholding all emotional investment in the other patients and, indeed, in his own recovery.

“It scares me that I can have emotions so close to the surface and yet not even be aware of them.”

Several times throughout the narrative, Burroughs notes that people with alcohol addictions don’t like to “feel things,” which seems logical since the root cause of much addiction is a compulsion to numb out unpleasant feelings. When he reads aloud in therapy his letter to Pighead, the emotional dam bursts, and he experiences true emotions for the first time in years. Those emotions are frightening, not only for the physiological response they evoke but for what they tell him about himself: Burroughs has been avoiding Pighead as a way to kill him off on his own timeline rather than Pighead’s death hitting him out of the blue. While the feelings are hard and disturbing, they are a necessary part of his recovery.

“Then Kavi speaks up. ‘When my lover was diagnosed with AIDS, I left him. Couldn’t deal with it.’ He is fiddling with the gelled curl on his forehead as he says this. ‘And what I regret the most is that he died not knowing how much I loved him.’”

So much regret runs through the narrative, not just from Burroughs but from nearly everyone in recovery. The “sex addict,” Kavi, relates a story to which Burroughs can definitely relate. While Pighead and he are no longer lovers, the pain of regret in Kavi’s voice and the reasons for his leaving echo almost word for word the reasons spelled out in Burroughs’s letter—leaving is a self-defense strategy, an attempt to be the first one out the door to avoid the pain of being left behind.

“It’s like alcohol gets in the way even when it’s out of the way.”

Burroughs’s first visit to Pighead post-rehab is short-lived. He wants to stay, to recapture lost time, to say so many things, but he can’t miss his AA meeting, the importance of which he has difficulty conveying to his friends, even Pighead. Instead, Pighead sees the same old Augusten—pop in, pop out, never lingering long enough to establish intimacy. Although he’s not leaving to go to a bar (like the old days), the ghost of his alcoholism is still an impediment to his friendship.

“The terminal cancer-ridden alcoholic is able to joke about her own mortality thanks to AA, and this lets us off the hook. She knows how we fellow alcoholics hate feelings.”

Sitting in a Perry Street AA meeting, Burroughs hears a devastating story of wasted years, missed opportunities, and looming death. The speaker, Nan, doesn’t seek pity, however. She is resolved to make up for lost time and to embrace the rest of her life. When she improvises a joke in the middle of her story, Burroughs is grateful for her assuming the burden of sorrow and relieving her audience of the obligation of feeling miserable for her. It’s a gift that acknowledges what the author considers a truth about “alcoholics”: They don’t like to experience another’s pain.

“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.”

On his first day back at work after rehab, Burroughs discovers he and Greer will be working for a beer company. His newly sober mind makes all kinds of cautionary leaps, as AA has trained him to do. Even the suggestion of alcohol can be dangerous, and Burroughs must now navigate a minefield of potential hazards he never even considered before: talking about alcohol, being in its orbit, romanticizing and promoting it. For Burroughs in recovery, there’s no such thing as being too careful.

“After Bookman raped me, he became my friend. We used to go on walks every night. After a week, he told me I had turned his world upside down, that he realized he was in love with me.” 

Burroughs’s childhood abuse is both physical and psychological. Not only does his abuser—20 years his senior—rape him, but he then conflates that abuse with love (which morphs into obsession). A 13-year-old Burroughs, too neglected and confused to tell the difference, craves the attention and the “love,” so much so that when the man disappears, Burroughs sits by the phone waiting for him to call. Such deep emotional manipulation throughout the author’s developmental years makes healthy relationships in adulthood more challenging for him.

“Of course, they were such small things to do, but they each felt so impossibly large and uncomfortable to me.”

After his mother had a stroke, Burroughs reluctantly visited to help her with household tasks, but even the simplest ones—changing a lightbulb, buying food—were a massive burden. The dynamic was complex, and the reasons for his resentment had deep roots. The most obvious complicating factor was that she expected his love and care after offering so little of her own. Her neediness felt tainted and contagious, and after living self-sufficiently for so many years, he didn’t want to need anyone (or be needed). Giving any small part of himself after receiving so little in return felt like a profoundly unfair arrangement.

“Of course, I probably would have turned out to be an alcoholic lawyer who hated my mother for overprotecting me, so guess it all averages out in the end.”

Trying to envision his life if his mother had been different—a woman who could “be made happy with something from the Macy’s catalogue instead of the Physician’s Desk Reference” (169)—Burroughs meticulously charts out this amended version of his life and career. In the end, however, he always sees his life being entwined with alcohol, suggesting that a person’s choices may not dictate their outcomes as much as they think.

“I hate having feelings. Why does sobriety have to come with feelings?”

Feeling “manic” one morning, Burroughs laments his wild mood swings: “One minute I feel excited, the next I feel terrified” (181). He learns that sobriety is an ongoing battle, and part of that battle is dealing with long-suppressed emotions. He’s accustomed to burying those emotions beneath bottles of scotch, and when they come up unexpectedly, he struggles. Rather than facing and actually feeling them, he drinks coffee, sings wildly to the radio, and calls Pighead and demands his company. In the absence of alcohol, he seeks any other diversion to avoid those pesky feelings.

“Foster is consuming you. He’s becoming your drug.”

Having warned Burroughs multiple times about getting involved with Foster—and having those warnings ignored—Hayden bluntly tells his friend that he’s becoming unhealthily obsessed. Indeed, Burroughs seems prone to obsessions: alcohol; cigarettes; for a time, crack; and now, Foster. In his pattern of addiction, he can’t score one fix so casually switches to whatever’s available, regardless of whether it’s good for him.

“Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. For the rest of my life, there will be a bar tab.”

When Burroughs is charged $1600 for simply removing liquor bottles from the hotel minibar (which he replaced, unopened), a truth hits him squarely in the face: It’s not just a matter of drinking or not drinking; even sober, he is still “an alcoholic,” just a non-drinking one. One by one, his assumptions crumble away. In rehab, he assumes he will be transformed into a “normal” drinker. Post-rehab, he assumes the hardest work is over. Now, his assumption that he is somehow cured of alcoholism also proves untrue.

“I feel as if something essential is rushing out of me and there is nothing I can do to stop it.”

As Pighead’s condition worsens to dangerously high fever and difficulty breathing, Burroughs feels helpless. He wants to lie by Pighead’s side and comfort him; indeed, he feels that’s what he should do, but the “selfish” part of him “did not want to see Pighead sigh deeply and relax into death” (240). He is torn between obligation and grief, a conflict he likens to “bleeding out.” Unable to deal with the reality of his friend’s imminent death, Burroughs “deflates,” a natural reaction to the onslaught of emotions with which he is ill-equipped to deal.

“And suddenly, I can see it all very clearly. The insanity. The parallel universe of it. How it mimics normal life enough to fool you while you’re in it.”

When Foster announces that he’s bought a brownstone and is moving back in with the abusive Kyle, Burroughs has a revelation about the man whom he thought he loved, with whom he envisioned a long-term relationship. Foster will never change for him, not even for love. Burroughs has fallen under the spell of someone charming and manipulative who will say or do anything to get what he needs. This flash of insight gives Burroughs a fresh perspective on Foster. Rather than a man who has sought to hurt him personally, he sees instead a sick man in desperate need of help. It’s a mature perspective and an empathetic one, indicating Burroughs’s ability to function independent of his former obsessions.

“I feel only slightly bad that I have done this. And I’m not sure that all of me believes I actually have. But then another part of me feels like it’s no big deal.”

After Burroughs relapses and feels the old, familiar comfort of alcohol in his system again, all of his hard work—the rehab, the 12-step meetings, all the resisted temptation and vows to never drink again—suddenly becomes inconsequential. The drinking has stopped for a time, but none of his problems have gone away, and in Pighead’s case, they’ve gotten worse. Just as serious as Burroughs’s relapse is his laissez-faire attitude toward it, his utter lack of remorse at throwing away everything he’s worked for. The intensity of his relapse—drinking for days straight accompanied by a newfound and devastating crack addiction—suggests he is making up for lost time, as if drunkenness is where he was always meant to be and the sobriety was just a tragic detour. For Burroughs, relapse is always right around the corner, and “one day at a time” is a vital mantra.

“I wanted to hug her and so I did. Then I gave her a hundred dollars in twenties because I had a hundred dollars in twenties, and then I left.”

After Burroughs spends the night smoking crack with strangers, he wakes the next morning “extremely sober.” One of the strangers, a sex worker, is kind and empathetic, telling him nonjudgmentally that he needs to change his life. Out of gratitude for her kindness or simply out of apathy, he leaves her $100. The nonchalance with which he deviates from the usual protocols—an intimate gesture toward a woman for whom intimacy is just business, and payment for no services rendered—indicates Burroughs’s state of mind: “Normal” gestures and large sums of cash don’t matter at this moment. He has reached a low point, and all that matters is what he must now reckon with.