Read Online Dry: A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs - Free Book Online

breathe. “You like this?” he says as he pounds. “Huh? You like my big fat dick?” Neil is a friend of my parents and he is the “adopted” son and patient of their psychiatrist, whom I now live with. I have known Bookman since I was five. I look past him at the ceiling and see the thin black cracks in the plaster. I go inside one of the cracks. I leave my body on the bed, let Bookman do anything he wants to with it .

    “Augusten?” David asks. “Would you like to share your feelings?”
    I look at all the faces looking at me. Except Pregnant Paul; he is looking away.
    I can’t be here, this can’t be happening. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what I feel . “I feel like I want to leave. Like this was a big mistake.”
    Paul turns, quickly looks at me. “That’s exactly how I felt when I first came here,” he says.
    Then somebody else says, “Me too.”
    And then somebody else, “It took about a week before I finally accepted it.”
    “Good, good,” David says in a soothing tone.
    A WASPy looking man who is slumped down in his chair suddenly bursts into tears. The room falls silent. I could be wrong, but I believe I sense palpable excitement in the air as everyone suddenly turns to him. He buries his face in his hands and sobs so hard that his entire body rocks. A couple people whisper something back and forth.
    David turns to them with his finger on his lip. “ Shhhhhhhhhh .”
    The WASP chokes and then, much to my horror, looks directly at me and says, “I don’t belong here, either. I don’t belong in this room or in this goddamn world. I should be dead.”
    He continues to look at me and I look at him back, afraid that if I break eye contact he will hurl a chair at me.
    David asks in a very soft voice, “Tom, why do you feel you should be dead?”
    The WASP looks at him. Phew . Let this mess transfer onto a trained professional.
    Then the WASP starts talking. He’s talking about how he drank every single night and on the nights he didn’t drink would get really sick. He’s been in and out of rehab six times and he feels this is his last chance. And the reason he is here this time is because he was driving his parents to a party and they didn’t realize he was drunk. They thought he was on the wagon. But he was in a blackout. He veered off the road and the car rolled over an embankment and landed against a tree. His mother’s legs were crushed. Now she’s paralyzed from the waist down. And every time he looks at her, he realizes that if he had killed himself earlier, his mother would be okay. Now he can’t even look at her without reliving that night.
    I notice he is wearing cuff links on his pinstriped shirt. Cuff links and loafers. But when you look at his eyes, all you see is destruction and emptiness. Something so sad it scares me. It scares me because I almost recognize it. He could be an ad guy.
    “I had a car accident,” says another man who is wearing a cowboy hat. “My face went right through the windshield, thirty-two stitches,” he says, pointing to the scar that runs across his forehead, just below the brim of his hat. “Think that stopped me? Hell no. And you know why? ’Cause I didn’t hit nobody else. It was only me that got hurt, and I don’t count, see?”
    Tom, the WASP, looks at the cowboy and nods his head. Yeah, he knows.
    Car accidents, facial lacerations, paralyzed mothers . . . I am definitely in the wrong place. This is for hard-core alcoholics. Rock-bottom, ruined-their-lives alcoholics. I’m an Advertising Alcoholic. An eccentric mess. I fold my arms across my chest and look out the window at the lone tree in the distance. The tree looks homeless. It looks like—oh, I don’t know—an advertising copywriter who refused to go to rehab and got fired. A general sense of doom swells inside of me.
    A woman says, “But Dale, you are important. It’s your disease that makes you feel you’re not.”
    David looks at the woman who just spoke. He’s