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Augusten Burroughs: “What did normal people do when they stopped drinking?”

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

When I was a kid, one of my many phobias was that somebody would read my diary. Not because I revealed anything particularly secret beyond run-of-the-mill complaints about my brother’s greasy metallic aroma or the lack of buying power afforded by my pittance of an allowance. It’s just that I’d written this journal only for me; it wasn’t polite enough or interesting enough or funny enough for anyone else to read.

Dry began as nothing more ambitious than a journal I started the day I returned to New York City from rehab in Minnesota.

I was feeling nearly electriﬁed with the discomfort of existing with a blood alcohol level at zero. And I had no idea what to do with my sober self.

What did normal people do when they weren’t drinking?

Augusten Burroughs: Conquer trauma by letting it go

Sat, 12 May 2012 19:00:00 +0000

Many people continue to feel influenced and even controlled by the things that happened to them a long time ago. Sometimes, people harbor dark, traumatic memories from childhood. Or fragments of memories — incomplete scenes, uncomfortable feelings, perhaps even a sense of certainty that something specific and terrible happened to them, but little more than this.

Others experienced something traumatic in adulthood that continues to affect them day to day many years later. Maybe an assault has left a person afraid to leave their home or enter a particular neighborhood.

For a certain kind of person this will be the end of the story. What ever experience they endured essentially continues to this day, ever present in the background, shaping the choices made on a daily basis, affecting the quality and range of their life. This kind of person might be angry all the time or feel guilty or afraid. They just accept these states as a part of themselves.

Then there are people who are keenly aware of their experiences, who are psychologically ambitious; they wish to “get over” these historical traumas and might see a therapist to help them.

Last rites

Thu, 01 Jul 2004 19:36:00 +0000

I was exhausted. Which isn't even the word for it, really. I was in the midst of my last month with Pighead, only I didn't know it. I was giving him daily injections, flushing his I.V. line, cleaning diarrhea off his legs, counting endless pills and sorting them into the plastic pill box. I was drinking, but not for pleasure. I was drinking at night alone, just because it was my comfort. I knew it was a lousy comfort. But my life was about triage, and drinking was my consistency, dependability, slight warmth. And I knew I'd fucked up everything. Gone through rehab, become clean, now become filthy again. But it didn't matter, because Pighead was sick. And I just had to get through this. Which is what I called it to myself, this.

Pighead was dying. And I just wanted to sleep for a very long time.

We were in his bedroom on Perry Street. It was midafternoon, spring, and his mother was in the next room, crammed onto the tiny bench that was built into the wall next to the fireplace. She was sleeping, the Windex bottle tucked under her arm, a roll of paper towels as a pillow. She was snoring. And I was certain she wasn't dreaming. I slept the same way in those days: hard, dreamless. It was efficient sleep, nearly German. It was diesel Mercedes truck sleep -- there to get the job done, not to be luxurious. From my position on the bed, I could just see her feet.

Sober sex

Tue, 08 Jul 2003 19:51:00 +0000

After I went through rehab and got sober, I made a list of all the guys I'd ever slept with. The entries included names like "Under the Stairs Guy," "Taco Bell Counter Guy" and "'70s TV Icon Guy." By average American standards, the list was shockingly long: 63 names. But by Manhattan standards, and specifically gay Manhattan standards, my list was paltry, one step above a lifetime of solitary masturbation.

The truly startling discovery, however, was that with the exception of the first person on the list (my 12-year-old "You show me yours, I'll show you mine" scenario) alcohol had been involved in every encounter.

Maybe "involved" isn't the right word.

I'd been in a liquor-induced blackout every time I had sex.

In rehab they do not teach you how to have sex without the lubrication of a martini or 19. So at age 30, I found myself in a very odd position. I was a sexually experienced virgin. Even I could identify this as a problem.

I decided I needed to date and have sex and maybe even start a relationship. As a sober person. So I started to hang out in Barnes and Noble. Because if you don't drink, you shouldn't go to bars. In rehab they said, "If you keep going into barbershops, eventually you'll get a haircut." That's another thing about recovery. It's all in metaphors. So if you don't like talking about life in terms of small steps and puzzle pieces, you should just stay smashed.

The newest reality show

Sat, 15 Mar 2003 20:40:00 +0000

Each news network has its own marquee for it. CNN's is "Showdown: Iraq." MSNBC uses "Countdown: Iraq," "Conflict with Iraq" and "Saddam's Iraq." News shows gleam with hyper-colorful, throbbing graphics. This is truly a bordello of violence, an orgy of missiles and jet fighters and fist-crotched soldiers in tight fatigues.

We don't want a war. But oh, we do. We want it bad. We don't actually want the consequences of war -- suicide bombers and a high death toll of innocents in Iraq. And we certainly don't want to fight this war ourselves. But we want to watch it. We like to watch.

More than anything, we like to watch.

This war is our new favorite reality show. And we love reality TV. But now we're beyond people eating slugs and getting voted off islands. Our hunger for reality programming is increasing. We want more graphics, higher stakes, greater losses. We adapt quickly. We become bored instantly.

We want to see death. Maybe not up close and personal, but certainly real. We want to see destruction and human suffering. We want to watch our military muscle flex in front of the mirror. And as we watch, we want to gasp. We want to cry, "No! Stop!"

Harder. Faster.

Fabulous fantasies

Wed, 10 Jul 2002 19:13:00 +0000

When I was in the third grade all the girls wore Calvin Klein corduroy jeans and wanted to be psychologists. All the boys wore Levi's and wanted to play football. I wore polyester stretch bell-bottoms and wanted to be Christine Jorgensen, the world's first famous transsexual.

At my school in Western Massachusetts all the students had their own cubicles. This was the early '70s when everything was about emotional growth and personal space. We were allowed to decorate our cubicles in any way we saw fit. Most of the boys taped pictures of race cars or football stars to their walls. The girls favored snapshots of their cats, taken with their moms' Kodak 110 cameras.

My cubicle was a shrine to Christine. I had newspaper clippings, photographs and an article from a Danish newspaper, which I couldn't read but which had before and after anatomical line drawings.

"Who is this?" asked Mrs. Rayburn, fingering a clipping of an extremely tall woman in sunglasses climbing down the steps of an airplane, parked dramatically on the center of the tarmac.

"That's Christine Jorgensen," I told my teacher, feeling very superior. "Isn't she incredible?"

A priest on his knees

Wed, 15 May 2002 19:20:00 +0000

Lately, you cannot pick up a newspaper or click onto a Web site without encountering another mortifying story involving a priest, his penis and a child. We have turned our collective eyes away from terrorists and are now obsessing over men of the cloth. We have stopped asking, Where's Chandra? and are now asking, Is Griffin spending too much quality time with Father O'Brian?

Well, I'm here to defend our holy fathers. The fact of the matter is, Catholic priests have given me some of the best blow jobs of my life.

"Do you really think this is OK?" I asked Father Bill, in Chicago. We were sitting in his black Crown Victoria, parked on Mayrose Street. A street, I might add, that is not altogether unpopulated, especially at 10 at night. "It's fine," he told me. "We'll just look like a couple of guys waiting for somebody to come out of a store."

But I wasn't so sure. "Maybe we should just pull around, you know, in back of something."

He smiled and I was struck by how warm and sincere his smile was. Then I remembered, well of course. What else would it be? The pine tree-shaped air freshener that hung from his rearview mirror gave the car a pleasing, artificial scent. Somehow, this aroma suited him. "Would you feel more comfortable if we parked in the alley?" he asked. I told him I would. Father Bill put the car in gear and drove around the block. That's the great thing about Chicago: It has alleys.

Beating Raoul

Wed, 27 Feb 2002 20:41:00 +0000

"It's good to mix 'em up," Raoul says of the martial arts. He currently holds a brown belt in karate but hopes to have his black belt by fall. In the meantime he's taking tae kwon do to supplement his judo. He's also a semiprofessional downhill skier and a former investment banker who retired a multimillionaire last year at the age of 33. He is extremely handsome (a former model), articulate, and read "Ulysses" when he was 13 ("It really shaped me in many ways"). He is fluent in three languages, four if you count Mandarin, which he can only read. He tells me all of this while he plucks a slender, nearly transparent bone from his steamed Chilean sea bass.

I nod. "That's great," I say as I stab a leaf of kale and fork it into my mouth. It tastes nothing like the bacon cheeseburger that I wish I were having right now. A greasy bacon cheeseburger at home, on the sofa, in front of "The Sopranos."

I'm 30 minutes into my first date with Raoul and I am surprised by the intensity of my hatred for him. Truly, it is stunning.

"I don't watch TV," Raoul says, when I ask him if he likes "The Sopranos."

"Never?" I ask.

Dating an undertaker

Wed, 06 Feb 2002 20:11:00 +0000

The most distracting thing about getting a blow job at a funeral home wasn't the fact that there were three fresh bodies downstairs in the cooler, or one body 20 feet away from me in a mahogany casket across the room. The most distracting thing was that I was getting this blowjob from an undertaker at a celebrated Manhattan funeral home known for serving society's highest echelon -- including certain Kennedys. We were in the exact same viewing room, in fact, where the wake for one of them had once taken place.

"Yup, right over there," he said, after I shot my wad.

We were naked, sitting on the plush Karastan carpet with our backs against the sofa. I was smoking a Marlboro Light, he was smoking a menthol. I reached for a tissue and didn't have to reach far -- there were boxes of tissues everywhere.

"Wow," I said. "Can you imagine what the Kennedy family would do if they knew what was going on in this room now?" I balled the tissue and tossed it at the small gold trashcan, but it bounced off the rim.

He chuckled and took a deep drag from his cigarette. "The Kennedys? Are you kidding? Shit, they wouldn't care. They'd probably want to join in."

I liked the undertaker, but it wasn't love.