She’s different one-on-one, less intense, more relaxed. I feel like I am visiting a friend. Like we could be sitting at a bar talking, except that there’s a ONE DAY AT A TIME poster above her head and her bookshelf is lined with clinical addiction textbooks.
“How are you feeling?” she asks. I tell her that up until the other day, I was ready to check out. I tell her about my Pighead letter and how reading it in front of people upset me. That I’m realizing I don’t like to feel things, don’t want to feel pain or fear. And mostly, how I can see that I don’t drink like a normal person. That I use booze like an escape hatch and also like a destination in itself. I tell her my recent observation of rehab, in terms of how it works. How it sort of sneaks up on you. The way somebody will say some dumb affirmation and then later in group, somebody will say, “I didn’t buy that affirmation you said at all,” and there will be a heated argument and somebody will be reduced to tears. And how all of this will bring something up inside of you, wake something up. And you have some insight you wouldn’t have had otherwise. It’s very odd and nonlinear and organic. And yet it’s real.
Rae smiles because she knows this is exactly how it works. It is stealth.
She says we need to begin designing a “re-entry” plan for when I leave rehab and go back out into the real world. I think of the space shuttle, burning up as it breaks through the earth’s hard atmosphere upon re-entry. This could easily happen to me.
She places her arms on her desk, leans forward. “My recommendation is that you continue with therapy on an outpatient basis after you leave here.”
This sounds fine with me, I like the idea of seeing a shrink once a week as maintenance. It’s another chance to talk about myself without being interrupted. Plus, a shrink doesn’t really know me, so I can present a more balanced picture of who I really am.
“What I recommend is six months of treatment, four days a week. The program I have in mind is called HealingHorizons. It’s in Manhattan and we’ve done a lot of work with them—they’re excellent.”
I blink. Six months, four times a week?
“Basically, it’s a combination of group and individual therapy. It runs about two hours, four times a week.” Her facial expression is pleasant. She might as well be giving me restaurant recommendations.
“What about my job, what about advertising?” I ask.
She says only, “You may have to make some changes.”
Make some changes? Like what? Move the lamp to the other side of the room?
She takes a piece of paper and a pen and makes a drawing. “Think of a puzzle,” she says. She draws a square and then inside of this adds squiggly puzzle shapes, with one missing piece. “So this piece here is you.” She draws an individual puzzle piece. “In recovery, your shape changes. In order for you to fit back into the rest of the puzzle, your life, the other pieces of the puzzle must also change their shapes to accommodate you.”
I have the distinct feeling that this will not happen. That I will end up the misplaced puzzle piece, lost under the sofa. “And if the other pieces of the puzzle don’t change? What then?”
“Then,” she says, “you find another puzzle to belong to.” She leans back in her chair and it squeaks.
And it hits me. The reason for all the metaphors in recovery. Because the bald truth would be too terrifying. What she’s saying is that I may need an all-new career and all-new friends.
“Are you looking forward to tonight?” she asks.
I’m not sure what she means.
She must read my face. “The AA meeting tonight, are you excited?”
“Oh, that. Yeah, I guess. It’ll be interesting.”
“You know,” she says, “some people consider rehab to be the ambulance that delivers you to AA. Rehab is a start. It teaches you certain things, you get your first thirty days of sobriety here. But rehab is not a cure, by any means. The real work is done on a day-to-day basis in AA.”
“You mean, I’ll be going to AA meetings every day?”
“Well, that’s up to you, but statistically, those with the longest sobriety tend to go to meetings once a day.”
All of a sudden, I feel overwhelmed with the work involved with mental health. Therapy four times a week, AA meetings every day for the rest of my life. “It seems like, I don’t know, so much work.”
“You found the time to drink every day,” she points out.
True. But that was fun. That’s why they call it Happy Hour. I feel like I’m in prison and have just learned than upon my release, I will be on house parole for the rest of my life, wearing one of those electronic ankle things. Free, but not. I guess I thought that rehab would stop me from drinking like an alcoholic. I thought it would teach me how to drink like a normal person.
• • •
Today is day twenty. The days have stopped having names and are now numbers. Numbers that indicate how far away I am from my last drink. I’ve heard rumor that there are people in AA who still “count days” well into the years. So this means that in addition to all the other life changes I may need to make, including friends and career, I must now also live by a calendar with a different principle, like the Chinese. So today, day twenty, would have been just like nineteen except for one thing. A new guy arrived today.
I was in the conversation pit reading last week’s local newspaper during one of my rare thirty minutes of free time and I watched the new guy come in and sit in the nurses’ station, behind the chicken-wire glass window. He was sitting in the same chair I sat in when I checked in. He looked miserable, his face contorted into a mask of worry, panic, horror. He appeared to be handsome, but neglected.
Since he arrived at around eight, his first exposure to rehab will be the evening Affirmations. The stuffed-animal song and handout. I can’t wait.
I finish reading the paper and go to the bathroom to take a leak. When I come back into the room, he’s standing next to the coffee table where a coffee machine and a selection of herbal teas are available to all alcoholics, nervously fingering a white styrofoam cup, waiting for the fresh pot of coffee to finish brewing.
“Welcome to hell,” I say, taking a Styrofoam cup for myself and plopping a Cranberry Zinger tea bag into it.
He looks at me as if I have a stun gun behind my back.
“Er, hello. I’m Hayden.” He’s a Brit.
“Augusten.”
“You’ll have to excuse me, I’m just really out of sorts. I’m exhausted and in a bit of a panic over being here. I really can’t believe I’m here at all. Frankly, I can’t believe I’m alive.”
“I know the feeling.”
“Where are you from?” he asks.
“Manhattan,” I say. I don’t say New York City because I don’t want somebody from London thinking I live in one of the outer boroughs.
“Oh really?” He brightens up a bit. “I’m from there as well.” Then he crashes. “Well, I was from there. But I lost my apartment before coming here. So when I leave rehab, I’ll probably have to go back to London for a while, back to live with my parents.”
The coffee’s done; he pours a cup. A Brit who drinks bad coffee instead of tea. I like him already. We have twenty minutes before the evening Affirmations group, so I ask, “You wanna step outside, get some air?”
“That’s a wonderful idea.”
We walk outside to the backyard. We are allowed to go no further than down to the edge of the creek, about one hundred feet. But we don’t go that far. We sit at the ratty old picnic table. I get a little homesick looking at the stars because they remind me of office lights in skyscrapers.
“How’d you lose your apartment? What happened?”
He takes a sip of coffee, sighs. “To be honest, I lost it because of crack cocaine. I was seven months behind in my rent, spending every penny I had on the crack, and I was evicted. Just before coming here, I was staying at a friend’s house, under the condition that I stop smoking immediately. And, well . . . I didn’t—couldn’t stop. So my frien
d I was staying with, he and a couple of other friends basically forced me into rehab.”
“They forced you?” I ask.
“Yes, they threatened to report me to immigration. See, I’ve been here in the states for seven years, illegally. They said that if I didn’t check into a rehab hospital at once, they would have me deported.”
Me too, sort of, I think. Rehab or expulsion from my cushy job. “So it’s crack, not alcohol?”
“Well, no, that too.” He looks like a guilty child. A guilty child in his early thirties.
“So in a nutshell, you’re a British illegal alien crack addict alcoholic, recently evicted from his New York City apartment,” I say.
He smiles mischievously. “Yes, that just about sums me up at the moment.”
From my vantage point at the picnic table, I can see people inside filing up the stairs. I catch a glimpse of a floppy blue ear. “Oh, it’s time for Affirmations. Prepare yourself for the unimaginable.”
He looks at me warily.
We head upstairs to join the others. Hayden sits across the room from me. Affirmations are as lame as always:
“I’d like to thank Sarah for giving me a hug at group today.”
“I’d like to thank the group for accepting me.”
“I’d like to thank Paul for brewing a fresh pot of coffee.”
Pregnant Paul just gazes at the reflection in the window, like always. I get the feeling he’s here, but not really here. Like he’s pregnant with himself and hasn’t given birth yet.
When it’s time to sing the song about the codependent plush toys, I repress an evil smile and just watch.
The instant after the stuffed animals are dropped onto his lap, Hayden stands up and storms out of the room and down the stairs. We all gawk at his empty chair.
The counselor says, “Okay everybody, let’s continue, let’s just finish our affirmations.”
After Group, I walk extra slowly past the nurses’ station on the way to my room. The door is closed and Hayden is standing there talking to two of the counselors, making exaggerated hand gestures. He looks furious. Both of the stuffed animals are sitting on top of one of the desks, like confiscated evidence.
Dr. Valium walks into our room, flops on his bed. “It looks like our new friend isn’t pleased with his first hour in rehab.” He smiles wickedly.
“I can’t imagine why not,” I say.
“It really is an embarrassment,” he adds and picks up his copy of Psychology Today.
I want to say something to him, but am not sure quite how. “Do you really think you’ll lose your license?”
He looks up from the magazine. He takes a breath, then lets it out slowly. “I think it’s really possible.”
And then I get an anxious feeling. What if I make it through rehab, and they still fire me? They could easily say they got along just fine without me. Word would spread quickly. No other ad agency would touch me.
I sit down on the edge of my bed and consider this. Until now, it hadn’t really seemed like something that could actually happen. But if it can happen to a doctor? And to a WASP? And to a flight attendant . . . ?
After a while, Big Bobby comes in, sits on his bed. “Gosh, you guys, what do you think is happening in the nurses’ station with the new guy?”
I answer without looking up from my notebook (in which I am writing feverishly), “The fucking stuffed animal thing. He’s probably freaked out by it.” I have always kept a journal. Before I could write, I had a blue tape recorder that I came to see as a friend whom I could tell anything.
“Gee, that sure is too bad. I hope he gives us a chance.” His stomach makes a loud rumble. “Anybody want anything from the kitchen?” he asks.
At breakfast the next morning, Hayden is telling me about his tirade in the nurses’ station last night. “I was furious, told them, ‘I cannot afford for this program not to work.’ I explained that I am very serious about getting off the crack and alcohol and that what I had expected was a professional rehabilitation hospital and not some ridiculous, childish parody.”
When I go to butter my toast, it snaps in half. “I don’t blame you a bit, I felt exactly the same way.” I consider the strange awareness of feelings that seems to happen here. The awareness that all is not Happy Hour. “But it really does get . . . interesting.” I think of Rae in her floral prints. “Just give it a couple of days.”
“Well, it had better,” he huffs. Which is hilarious and I must bite the inside of my cheek to prevent laughing out loud. Hayden is maybe five-foot-two, max. But he does not seem to know this. In fact, he seems to be under the impression that he is six-two and weighs just over two hundred pounds.
“These are delicious,” he says of the reconstituted scrambled eggs, the same eggs that sit on my own plate, untouched.
So far, I have lost almost ten pounds. Why do stars suddenly appear . . . “You’re from London, what would you know.”
He laughs, “That’s very true, actually. This is far better than anything my mother ever made.”
I make a face. “Did you have that nasty, yeasty stuff they spread on toast, what’s it called?”
His eyes brighten. “Vegemite! Oh yes, I love Vegemite.”
“You’ll enjoy dinner then,” I promise him.
For the next week, Hayden and I are inseparable. We sit together on the fireproof loveseats, cocooned in our own world of superiority. We exchange mortifying stories from our sordid pasts. We gossip endlessly about the other patients. No detail is too small to be ignored. When one of the lesbians trimmed her own bangs with nail clippers, we were utterly hysterical. We took it as a sure sign that she was struggling with control issues, destined for relapse.
I don’t think I have ever had such a close friend in my life, made instantly like Tang.
Time accelerates with Hayden around. I’ve stopped watching the second hand on the clock. It’s the kind of friendship that’s easy to make in elementary school when you’re six or seven. You let a kid have your swing and suddenly, he’s your best friend. Suddenly, you don’t care that you hate math, because you can hate it together. And after school, you want to play together. You never question it. You never say to yourself, Am I spending too much time with him? Am I sending the wrong signal?
Then you get pubic hair and everything changes. Pubic hair signals the beginning of your demise. After pubic hair comes high school, college, work. By the time you’ve started working, you’re ruined. And you will never make a friend as completely and easily as you did when you still wiped your nose on your sleeve.
Unless, it seems, you are forced into rehab.
Hayden and I have talked about this very thing. We have marveled at the friendship that has blossomed between us, despite a combined age that would entitle us to a discount at the movies. “And the amazing part is,” Hayden has said, “we’re not drunk in a bar.”
This is true. It is possible to make close, instant friendships while sitting at a bar drinking. But these friendships tend to evaporate at four in the morning when the bar closes, or the next morning when you find yourself sleeping in the same bed.
But with Hayden, it just keeps going. And I can’t help but worry that it’s some sort of rehab spell. Like, will we still be friends when we’re both out of this place? I want us to be friends. I want us to live in the same apartment building, one floor between us like Mary and Rhoda. I feel gypped that I didn’t meet him earlier in life, so finding apartments with matching sunken living rooms in the same building seems like something we are owed.
During my last week in rehab, Hayden and I discover a Ping-Pong table folded up in the gym. It was behind a mound of boxes, so we never noticed it before.
“You want to give it a go?” he asks.
“Sure.” I haven’t played since I was a kid and my grandfather sent us a huge, folding green Ping-Pong table one Christmas. My parents couldn’t stand the thing and they kept it folded in the basement, against the wall near the hot water heater. But if you u
nfolded just one side and left the other side up at a right angle, you could play against yourself, hitting the ball off the opposite wall of the table. I got pretty good, but then it wasn’t like my opponent ever did anything unexpected.
After missing the ball three times in a row, I’m finally able to whack it back at him. The Ping-Pong section of my brain wakes up and we fall into a rhythm. “How’d you get so good?” I ask as I bend under the table to pick up the ball I just missed.
“Oh, my father. It’s all we’ve ever done together.”
“You’re not bad,” Hayden says after we’ve been going steady for a good sixty seconds or so.
“That’s because I’m excellent at pushing things away from me.”
We play for a few more minutes in silence, actually concentrating on Ping-Pong. This is either an achievement for me, or a new low.
He holds the ball up. “You wanna serve?”
“No, you.”
He fwaps the ball over to me and I fwap it back. I’m pretty good at this. If nothing else, I will leave here being able to play Ping-Pong. Possibly even against someone Chinese.
“I’m really going to miss you,” he says to me.
I’m leaving here in three days. Which doesn’t seem possible, because it feels like I’ve been here for years. Supposedly, I now have the “tools” that will help me cope on the outside. Tools such as the piece of paper Ray handed out last week in group. It was illustrated with about twenty different faces, drawn with simple black lines and displaying an emotion. Under each face was a caption. Happy. Sad. Jealous. Angry. Confused. Afraid. “When you’re wondering what it is you’re feeling at any given moment, simply pull out this chart and find the face that fits your mood.” So it’s basically an alcoholic-to-normal dictionary. I found myself carrying the thing folded up in the front pocket of my jeans and referring to it constantly, trying to decide what I was feeling. At the back of the lunch line, I would unfold the chart and find the face that matched my mood: nauseous.
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