Dry: A Memoir (24 page)

And I am torn. I am split down the middle. Anxiety spreads through me, as if whatever had been containing it cracked, burst. My heart races in my chest. Just one shot. I could order just one shot. I need to take the edge off. The edge is too sharp. I’m cutting myself with this edge.

“A Diet Coke,” I say after a long pause.

The bartender looks at me for just an instant longer. It’s as if he has been able to read my mind, knows what’s going on inside of me. And it occurs to me that he’s probably seen this many times before: the demons wrestling.

When he sets my Diet Coke on the bar he says, “Enjoy.”

I suck through the thin straw. I suck until only the ice is left.

THE MIRRORS OF LA

G

reer and I are in LA shooting the commercial for Wirksam. Shutters was booked, so we’re staying in bungalows near the Château Marmont. This is a surprise to everyone. The client is so cheap, I’m amazed they didn’t make us go to an animal shelter. However, they have said they will not pay for any meals. And we are to use our personal calling cards if we use the phone. And they even tried—though I will say they did not press the issue—to double us up, two in a room.

After we check in, we meander by the oval pool. A couple of busty female extras are sunbathing on red striped towels and a man with a hairy back is in the water. So hairy that at first I think it’s his front, but then realize it’s his back. LA allows this?

“Isn’t this the place where John Belushi overdosed?” Greer asks.

“No,” I tell her. “But somebody else probably died here.”

“Yeah, it must be pretty easy to OD in this town.” She looks at me and I can read her mind. She is thinking,
I hope you remembered to bring your alcoholic books with you.

She slides her sunglasses down from her head. “Well,” she says, “I’m exhausted. I’m going to go take a nap. Where are we going tonight?”

“The Ivy,” I say. “The Nazi gets in at five; we’re supposed to meet out front at seven.”

“I hate babysitting clients,” she says. “They think that just because they put you up in a nice hotel they own you. I wish he would just order room service and leave us alone.”

“I hope he doesn’t wear shorts,” I say.

“Yuck, I hadn’t considered that,” Greer says, crinkling up her nose.

“Oh well, see you later,” I say and head off to my room. As I’m walking away I can hear Greer’s thoughts as she passes by the sunbathing extras:
You girls are going to get malignant melanoma and then nobody’s going to cast you
.

The room is very nice. I go to the minibar out of habit and am depressed when I realize that its contents are off-limits. They have
No Smoking
rooms, they should have
No Temptation
rooms as well. I take a seven-dollar bottle of spring water from the door. I gulp it down. I have four hours to kill before dinner. In the past, this would have been just barely enough time to obtain a comfortable buzz and establish my relationship with the bartender. Now it seems like more than enough time to perhaps write a screenplay. Alcohol time is very different from sober time. Alcohol time is slippery whereas sober time is like cat hair. You just can’t get rid of it.

I go back to the minibar. It is all-powerful. I say the words out loud, thinking it will castrate my desire. “I want a drink.” Instead, it has the opposite effect. By admitting this, I’ve reinforced the craving, made it fiercer. I once read about a guy who lost his arms in a fire. The nurse took pity on him and gave him a hand job. I don’t even get that.

I pace. The room has a wealth of mirrors, and I am compelled to stare into each of them as I pass by. It’s impossible to go into the bathroom for even a washcloth without looking at my body from every angle, my pores magnified and illuminated. I stare at my stomach and pinch the thin, determined layer of fat that blocks my abs. I tell myself that it’s the LA mirrors. I am more ripped in my New York mirror. This one makes me look skinny, yet with a thick middle. Then I have a terrifying thought: maybe LA mirrors are better, sharper, more accurate. Maybe this is why physical perfection is so common in LA, because people have the truth of their reflections. I have fooled myself into believing that I have a good body, but obviously that is only by Manhattan standards, by inaccurate Manhattan mirrors.

Actually, I think I was better looking when I was drunk, because then I only saw myself through one half-opened eye. And through my own cloud of internal fame. I only saw myself when I was holding a tumbler of scotch in front of the mirror, which to me reflected as an Academy Award, while I gave my acceptance speech. Sigourney Weaver was always standing next to me, looking tearfully proud.

LA is just awful. It’s too sunny. And it makes me even more self-conscious and shallow than I already am. I suddenly wish I had some Valium or an appointment with a local doctor for dimple implants. Something to look forward to. If I can’t drink, I need something. A goal. Preferably one involving dissolving stitches.

I’ve only been here for a few hours and I already feel like a mess. At my core, I am a vain and shallow person, and being in LA always brings this buried truth closer to the surface. I fear that my soul wants not tranquillity and wisdom, but long, blond hair extensions that hang loosely down over my eyebrows and a ripped, liposuctioned stomach. I want pec implants and a chemical peel. I want Gucci loafers. I want Rupert Everett to be in love with me, a Range Rover and a new, small cell phone in my pocket.

I want reservations. No, this is wrong. I want to be somebody who never needs reservations. I want my reservations to be unspoken, a given.

I want my nose to be the same shape, but smaller, more in proportion to my face. I want to earn the respect of these LA mirrors. I want to be able to be able to say, in that disinterested Valley way, What
ever
.

I go to the window and fog it up by hyperventilating. I realize that I actually fear returning to New York because now that Hayden has gone back to London, I am worried he has taken my mental health with him. That he accidentally packed it in his suitcase along with his dirty socks and the hard cheese he bought at Dean & Deluca.

I would like to be sitting in a whirlpool right now. But not drunk at four in the morning like the last time I was in a whirlpool. I don’t even want to think about that time.

At dinner, Greer and I sit on either side of the Nazi, out of professional duty. He scowls at everybody who asks for the butter. He sees butter as a weakness. We try to make the dinner conversation light and enjoyable. But he will have no part of it. He pulls his preproduction booklet from his sinister black briefcase and starts talking about his “wardrobe concerns.”

Greer stares at her watercress salad, absently drumming her fingernails against her water glass. Elenor refills her wineglass constantly. And Rick sneaks glances at the waiter’s crotch and I catch him every time. It is astonishingly satisfying to look at him and think,
Closet case
, and know he can read my mind as he looks away, flushed. All Mormons are gay, I believe. Rick is merely a further example.

The account people smile while they chew, nodding at everything the Nazi says. I look at his arms and notice for the first time that they are furry. Pathetically, this makes me like him slightly. And miss Foster.

If I were straight, I am certain I would be one of those guys who goes to wet T-shirt contests and votes with great enthusiasm.

By the time dessert is offered, everybody at the table is drunk except for me and the Nazi. Even Greer has had two glasses of Chablis, which for her is drinking to blackout. I sit there and think how it isn’t fair that I can’t drink at all, even a little. I realize I have crammed an entire lifetime of moderate drinking into a decade of hard-core drinking and this is why. I blew my wad.

Fuck
.

Walking back from dinner past the Santa Monica pier, I notice that a lot of the homeless guys out here are pretty hot. I start thinking that it’s like there’s this whole, untapped resource of guys I hadn’t even thought of before. All these jobless, alcoholic Mel Gibsons. Like daisies sticking up through the sidewalk cracks.

The next morning, Greer and I are waiting for the light to change at the crosswalk on the corner of Pico and Ocean. We see a bus heading toward the intersection. It’s empty except for the driver and a single passenger in the very back.
HELP
. . .
CALL POLICE
. . . is scrolling across the marquis above the windshield.

“Oh, shit!” Greer cries, reaching in her bag for her cell phone.

I watch as the bus runs the red light.

Greer cups her hand over her other ear and speaks into the phone. “Sharon? It’s Greer. Listen, remind me to have the Wirksam outdoor ads resized to fit buses. I totally forgot to do it before we left. Talk to you later.” She snaps the phone closed and tosses it back in her bag.

“Greer, what the hell were you doing? I thought you were calling nine-one-one. We need to call the cops about that bus.”

“Oh,” she says. She bites her lip.

The bus makes a sharp left out of sight.

Greer shrugs. “Well, it’s too late now.”

I turn to her, stare hard.

“Don’t look at me like that! Jesus, I’m not the only person in LA with a cell phone. Somebody else will call.”

“I can’t believe you,” I say. “That was really horrible.”

We make it to the other side of the street. Greer stops and faces me. “Look, commercial shoots are stressful. My mind is focused on work. When I saw the bus, it reminded me of something, that’s all.”

“Didn’t you see the sign in the front? Lit up in the front?”

“I can’t take care of everybody,” she says. “What do you expect me to do? Go swim out there off the coast of Florida and escort all those Cubans to the shore? Or maybe help the Mexicans dig tunnels under the border?”

“What?” I say.

“Augusten, I’m not an alcoholic like you. Getting all this free therapy and having all these personal transformations all the time. I’m just a regular person living a regular life. I can’t be Florence
fucking
Nightingale.”

“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “You’re not in any danger.”

After lunch, we’re sitting by the pool and Greer looks up from her
Town and Country
magazine. “What do you think happened with that bus, anyway?”

I look over at her. “Whoever was in the back probably shot the driver, stole his wallet and took off.”

Greer shakes her head. “You’d have to be crazy to take public transportation these days.”

“How’s your magazine?” I ask.

She smiles. “Scandinavian Airlines prints poems on the sides of the engines for the passengers in the window seats to read. I just think that’s wonderful.”

“Mmmmm,” I say. “Wonderful.”

She glares at me. “Well, it
is
wonderful. It’s thoughtful. It shows they’re thinking about people, about their passengers.”

“They only do it for the press it generates,” I say.

Greer lays the magazine across her legs. “You can be really cynical sometimes,” she tells me. “For all your talk about recovery, you’re a very angry, bitter person.”

“Happy Hour’s over. What do you expect?” I snap.

“There are other ways to be happy,” she says, “besides drinking.”

“Like?” I ask the expert of happiness.

“Like just sitting out here, taking some time for ourselves, enjoying the sun.” She smiles a fake smile that she thinks looks real.

“While some poor bus driver bleeds to death on the side of the road because you didn’t call the police.”

“That’s not fair!” she cries.

“No, it’s not.”

Greer picks up her magazine and begins thumbing through it again, snapping the pages.

I close my eyes and imagine how easy it would be to walk into the hotel bar and have a cosmopolitan. Nobody would even know.

A moment later, she says, “Oh, wow. A new pill that prevents male pattern baldness. One hundred percent effective, it says.”

I bolt upright. “Where? What?”

She smirks and pretends to read. “Made from the blood plasma of slain bus drivers.”

Horribly, I laugh.

So does Greer. “God, I really am an evil monster.”

“No you’re not,” I tell her.

“How do you know?” she asks.

“Because if you were truly evil, the Nazi would like you more.”

She considers this. “True.”

“As long as the Nazi hates us,” I say, “we can’t be
all bad.
”

“We mean well,” she says.

“Mostly,” I add.

“It’s advertising,” she says. “Advertising does it to us.”

“I hate advertising,” I say.

“I know. We should be bus drivers.”

Later that afternoon, we are called to the set to approve the final wardrobe. Because we hate the commercial we are about to shoot, both Greer and I see this as an enormous task, something better left to God, or if God is preoccupied, then a coin toss among the stylists.

“I really couldn’t care less,” Greer says to me in the minivan.

“Dress them all in black. Put everybody in green armbands to tie into the bottle,” I say.

At this point, we’re not shooting our second or even third campaign choice. We’re shooting something that Elenor and Rick basically forced on us. Something that features dancers and the flag of Germany, along with a couple of puppies.

“It’s all just one big
so what
,” Greer says bitterly.

Once we’re on the set, I locate the M&M and potato chip table. It’s next to the director’s chairs where the agency is supposed to sit. Greer and I toss our stuff on one of the chairs and each grab of handful of corn chips.

“Ho hum,” Greer says. “Isn’t advertising exciting and glamorous?”

“It’s better than manual labor,” I point out. “The least amount of work for the maximum amount of money.”

“I guess,” she says, crunching a chip. “If you don’t mind handing over your dignity.”

“I don’t have any dignity,” I tell her. “I never have. That’s why I’m in it.” I eat some M&Ms. “Besides, I was drunk for so many years, I didn’t really even realize I was
in
advertising.”

“I was painfully aware of it,” she says, glaring at me.

After we nod our heads at the costumes, speak to the director for five minutes and choose a glass for the product shot, it’s time to go back to the hotel. Only two hours of actual work, yet it’s drained us completely.

“I’m just going to sink into the whirlpool,” Greer says, her head against the window of the minivan.

“I’m gonna order a salad and watch TV and then crash,” I say, hardly able to keep my eyes open.

Although it’s only six
P.M
., we seem to have contracted some sort of brain-numbing disease. The threat of tomorrow has made us drowsy.