His best friend, Pighead, is glad when Augusten informs him where he'll be spending the next 30 days. When your closest friend (not your closest drinking partner) acts relieved when you say you're going into rehab, you are blind-sided: Fuck the office--but your friends? "Augusten, do you know how you get when you drink? You get nasty. You don't get silly and put a lampshade on your head or say witty, philosophical things. You get foul, dark, and ugly. I don't like you when you drink, not at all." You feel sad, sick, and just a little betrayed.
Augusten is Augusten Burroughs, the irreverent, witty, and hilarious author of bestseller Running with Scissors, a memoir of his weird-ass childhood in the '70s. In Dry, we find him experiencing adulthood, again using his inner thoughts as narrator, and though he's gay, straight fuckups won't have any trouble relating to his plight. We've all got that best friend we keep separate from our partners in crime, mostly because we fear they'd be appalled by our daily behavior. But they know, and stick by us anyway because they love what's there besides the booze fumes, crusty nostrils, and cranky moods. We don't spend as much time with them as we should.
As his cab heads toward Proud Institute, Augusten imagines what lies ahead: "a Frank Lloyd Wright-ish compound... Ian Schrager, of course, created the interior. Spare rooms, sun-drenched, with firm mattresses and white, 300-count Egyptian cotton sheets... I will eat only small, restrained portions of their steamed local trout and seasonal field greens... I will politely refuse the dessert of fresh berries in a marzipan nest." He is filled with grim foreboding when he arrives at an unkempt 1970s office building with a sign that reads: PROUD INSTITUTE. "Missing letters can only mean bad things," he tells us. "When I was a kid, the 'e' went out in the local Price Chopper grocery store and stayed out for many years. Because the 'Pric Chopper' logo happened to be a man wielding an axe, the sign sent out an eerie and powerful castration message, which, at the age of 12, affected me deeply. Oh, fuck."
Augusten's experience in the dryer is damn funny, and demonstrates that there are no differences between rehab centers--all are instantly humiliating to those of us who consider ourselves stylish individuals who don't belong there. (Though I wasn't expecting a resort, when I first sat on my own rehab bed, my thoughts screamed, "Sleep on a plastic mattress with transparent, 50-50 sheets?! One fucking pillow--foam?! I must be having a blackout.") Augusten makes some friends and stays in touch once he's out, not realizing that he's replaced his old partners in crime with new ones.
His relationship with his best friend (Pighead) is the heart of the story, and though Augusten has known forever that his best friend is HIV positive, when things get bad and his rock becomes very ill, he doesn't know how to deal emotionally, so he plays the role of caretaker--but with an alcoholic's highly evolved sense of denial. "Instead of thinking, My best friend might be dying, I am thinking, I need to take that retrovirus inhibitor tablet and split it in half. I feel alarmingly stable."
Dry is a funny book through and through, also deeply sad. That Burroughs is able to make readers laugh at themselves and sob with recognition is a marvelous accomplishment.
