Read Online Lust & Wonder by Augusten Burroughs - Free Book Online

pizza place around the corner, chicken burrito from the filthy Mexican dive, or a cheeseburger with fries, of which he would only eat three.
    I am exactly as limited in the foods I eat, except I eat all the fries.
    He hugged me good-bye, and it was a surprisingly deep, fast hug.
    I headed home but then decided that I wanted to walk. So I passed my building and went farther south, beyond Astor Place and into the Bowery. Here, I landed on the most curious crescent of a street that hugged a park where there was a columned space set with benches. Old Chinese men were playing cards and smoking, and there were several dogs, all with fur that had been petted smooth over many years. I had arrived at a place I’d never seen before, where every detail was entirely unfamiliar.
    I stopped walking and watched the old men play cards. I had the feeling I would never be able to find this spot again no matter how tirelessly I tried.
    At home, I received the call I had known would arrive. George had died. I had expected to feel relief, but instead I felt, That’s impossible. I require him.

 
    II
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    When George died, I could not conjure an image of my life, next week, without him. So I lay on my bed, and I stayed there, waiting to die. I only got up to buy scotch, two bottles at a time.
    I can say this with authority: a queen-sized mattress can hold a year’s worth of urine and still be perfectly serviceable.
    When I drunkenly opened my eyes at half past four in the afternoon one day, I realized I had entered the week following his death. That life I could not imagine was here, and I was in it, alive. What had been an impossible future was me, now, sluggishly, heavily awakening and squinting without my glasses to see if I could gauge how much scotch remained in my second bottle on the counter next to the stove.
    It was an act of willpower to swing my legs over and stand. In six clumsy steps, I was across the room and beside the stove; such was the beauty of a minuscule Manhattan studio apartment. The bottle of scotch had less than two inches at the bottom. And I hated myself for not being a better planner and buying them four at a time or even six.
    I was always so fucking obsessed with what other people thought. Carrying two bottles up to the cashier said, “I’m on my way to a party.” Carrying four said, “I’m on my way down.”
    I would have to brush my teeth and put on clothes and leave my fetid, debris-engorged apartment and then walk across Ninth Street to the liquor store on University Place. (The one near Astor Place was closer, but I’d gone there last night.) Once I accomplished this, I would be able to return to my stomach-contents of a home and be alone again with whatever vapors remained of George. Maybe drunk, I could find a way to be with him again, even if only through the rereading of his e-mails.
    It was like being famished and knowing that only the box from the frozen dinner remained, the picture of the meal and not the meal itself. I could lick the glossy cardboard.
    So I dressed myself in never-washed jeans and a T-shirt, and on the way to the liquor store, I recognized somebody on the sidewalk that I knew from the Perry Street AA meetings.
    I turned away from her because this made me invisible.
    I got my two bottles of scotch and returned home.
    Nothing happened except I drank the liquor and pissed in the bed, and then I did this 547 more times.
    *   *   *
    Downing bottle after bottle of scotch was not my only addict behavior during that time. I also consumed enormous quantities of QVC, television’s number-one home shopping network. I had witnessed home shopping before. Late at night in that last, desperate attempt to find something watchable among the two hundred channels before going to sleep, I’d paused and gawked in bemused disbelief as an electric egg scrambler was offered forth like a holy grail. But one night, I was just about to scroll past