Augusten Burroughs - Dry: A Memoir

D R Y

ALSO BY AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS

SELLEVISION

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS

AUGUSTEN
BURROUGHS

ST . MARTIN S PRESS NEW YORK

AUTHORS NOTE

This memoir is based on my experiences over a ten-year period. Names have been changed, characters combined, and events compressed. Certain episodes are imaginative re-creation, and those episodes are not intended to portray actual events.

DRY . Copyright 2003 by Augusten Burroughs. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Design by Phil Mazzone

ISBN 0-312-27205-7

First Edition: June 2003

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of George Stathakis

For my brother

And for Dennis

I am so fortunate to have St. Martins Press as my publisher, specifically: John Sargent, Sally Richardson, Matthew Shear, John Murphy, Gregg Sullivan, Tiffany Alvarado, Kim Cardascia, Jeff Capshew, Ken Holland, the entire Broadway sales force, Lynn Kovach, Darin Keesler, Tom Siino, George Witte, Lauren Stein, Matt Baldacci, John Cunningham. With love to Frances Coady. I would also like to thank my literary agent, the brilliant and generous Christopher Schelling at Ralph M. Vicinanza, Ltd. (Hi, Ralph.) With love for Lona Walburn, Jonathan Pepoon, Lawrence David, Suzanne Finnamore, Lynda Pearson, Jay DePretis, Lori Greenberg, the beautiful Sheila Cobb and her handsome and goofy husband, Steve. Also, when I needed blurbs for my memoir Running with Scissors, I wrote to a bunch of my favorite authors, and they wrote back. Thank you so, so, so much: Kurt Andersen, Phillip Lopate, Jay Neugeboren, Gary Krist, Tom Perrotta, A. L. Kennedy, Maxine Kumin, Jerry Stahl, Neil Pollack, and a special thanks to David Rakoff and Haven Kimmel. Thank you, Amy Sedaris, for your astonishing support and cupcakes. More gratitude must now drip on the booksellers who invited me to read Running with Scissors. Thank you also to Booksense for your support. And to the many hundreds of people who wrote me e-mails about Runningthank you. Most of all, I would like to thank Jennifer Enderlin for believing in me from the very first word. S ometimes when you work in advertising youll get a product thats really garbage and you have to make it seem fantastic, something that is essential to the continued quality of life. Like once, I had to do an ad for hair conditioner. The strategy was: Adds softness you can feel, body you can see. But the thing is, this was a lousy product. It made your hair sticky and in focus groups, women hated it. Also, it reeked. It made your hair smell like a combination of bubble gum and Lysol. But somehow, I had to make people feel that it was the best hair conditioner ever created. I had to give it an image that was both beautiful and sexy. Approachable and yet aspirational.

Advertising makes everything seem better than it actually is. And thats why its such a perfect career for me. Its an industry based on giving people false expectations. Few people know how to do that as well as I do, because Ive been applying those basic advertising principles to my life for years.

When I was thirteen, my crazy mother gave me away to her lunatic psychiatrist, who adopted me. I then lived a life of squalor, pedophiles, no school and free pills. When I finally escaped, I presented myself to advertising agencies as a self-educated, slightly eccentric youth, filled with passion, bursting with ideas. I left out the fact that I didnt know how to spell or that I had been giving blowjobs since I was thirteen.

Not many people get into advertising when theyre nineteen, with no education beyond elementary school and no connections. Not just anybody can walk in off the street and become a copywriter and get to sit around the glossy black table saying things like, Maybe we can get Molly Ringwald to do the voice-over, and Itll be really hip and MTV-ish. But when I was nineteen, thats exactly what I wanted. And exactly what I got, which made me feel that I could control the world with my mind.

I could not believe that I had landed a job as a junior copywriter on the National Potato Board account at the age of nineteen. For seventeen thousand dollars a year, which was an astonishing fortune compared to the nine thousand I had made two years before as a waiter at a Ground Round.

Thats the great thing about advertising. Ad people dont care where you came from, who your parents were. It doesnt matter. You could have a crawl space under your kitchen floor filled with little girls bones and as long as you can dream up a better Chuck Wagon commercial, youre in.

And now Im twenty-four years old, and I try not to think about my past. It seems important to think only of my job and my future. Especially since advertising dictates that youre only as good as your last ad. This theme of forward momentum runs through many ad campaigns.

A body in motion tends to stay in motion. (Reebok, Chiat/Day.)

Just do it. (Nike, Weiden and Kennedy.)

Damn it, something isnt right. (Me, to my bathroom mirror at four-thirty in the morning, when Im really, really plastered.)

Its Tuesday evening and Im home. Ive been home for twenty minutes and am going through the mail. When I open a bill, it freaks me out. For some reason, I have trouble writing checks. I postpone this act until the last possible moment, usually once my account has gone into collection. Its not that I cant afford the billsI canits that I panic when faced with responsibility. I am not used to rules and structure and so I have a hard time keeping the phone connected and the electricity turned on. I place all my bills in a box, which I keep next to the stove. Personal letters and cards get slipped into the space between the computer on my desk and the printer.

My phone rings. I let the machine pick up.

Hey, its Jim... just wanted to know if you wanna go out for a quick drink. Gimme a call, but try and get back

As I pick up the machine screeches like a strangled cat. Yes, definitely, I tell him. My blood alcohol level is dangerously low.

Cedar Tavern at nine, he says.

Cedar Tavern is on University and Twelfth and Im on Tenth and Third, just a few blocks away. Jims over on Twelfth and Second. So its a fulcrum between us. Thats one reason I like it. The other reason is because their martinis are enormous; great bowls of vodka soup. See you there, I say and hang up.

Jim is great. Hes an undertaker. Actually, I suppose hes technically not an undertaker anymore. Hes graduated to coffin salesman, or as he puts it, pre-arrangements. The funeral business is rife with euphemisms. In the funeral business, nobody actually dies. They simply move on, as if traveling to a different time zone.

He wears vintage Hawaiian shirts, even in winter. Looking at him, youd think he was just a normal, blue-collar Italian guy. Like maybe hes a cop or owns a pizza place. But hes an undertaker, through and through. Last year for my birthday, he gave me two bottles. One was filled with pretty pink lotion, the other with an amber fluid. Permaglow and Restorative: embalming fluids. This is the sort of conversation piece you simply cant find at Pottery Barn. Im not so shallow as to pick my friends based on what they do for a living, but in this case I have to say it was a major selling point.