Dry

After meeting on a phone sex line, Burroughs and Pighead engaged in a back-and-forth courtship dance that never reached fruition. Their chemistry was clear from their initial conversation, but when it came right down to it, Pighead admitted, “I love you too, Augusten… But I’m not in love with you” (80). Burroughs was hurt and angry, but even Pighead’s words could not shake the relational foundation they established, and they eventually settled into a comfortable friendship. Burroughs describes Pighead, a mortgage banker, as “slick” and “charming,” but that initial setback—Burroughs is in love, but Pighead is not—keeps Burroughs at an emotional distance. Even when Pighead is diagnosed with AIDS, Burroughs either can’t process the pain of Pighead’s rejection or simply can’t face the syndrome that devastated so many gay communities. He finds excuses not to visit, even after he hears the hurt in Pighead’s voice.

As is often the case, Burroughs realizes Pighead’s importance only when the relationship is threatened, when Pighead is near death. Burroughs seeks atonement for his years of neglect by becoming Pighead’s nurse, changing his diapers and doling out his medication. As Pighead wastes away, Burroughs relapses, unable to confront the possibility of his friend’s death. Pighead is slipping away, and Burroughs cannot fix it, so he wraps himself in a cocoon of alcohol, waiting for the inevitable. Pighead’s gift of the gold pig head in some ways suggests that he knows Burroughs better than Burroughs knows himself. As adamant as Burroughs is (prior to his relapse) that he will never drink again, Pighead understands what they mean to each other and the effect his death could have on his friend’s sobriety; hence the inscription, “STOP DRINKING.” Any memoir of gay culture in the ‘80s and ‘90s that didn’t touch on the AIDS crisis would be an outlier, and Pighead is a grim reminder of the death and loss suffered by so many.

Hayden, recovering from a crack addiction, is the perfect mirror to Burroughs. Both are resistant to rehab’s clichés; both look at the world through cynical, angry eyes; and in time, both come to embrace the value of 12-step programs. When Hayden enters rehab 20 days after Burroughs, the author sees himself in the defiant Brit. Rather than echoing the soothing mantras of the staff—he knows it wouldn’t work on him—Burroughs is honest with Hayden: “Welcome to hell” (86), he says by way of introduction. That honesty creates an initial bond that gives Burroughs the credibility to ease Hayden through the process. By the end of their respective stays, neither man wants to leave. It is fitting that they should be roommates, acting as each other’s gatekeepers, cheering each other on and supporting each other. When Hayden suddenly announces he’s returning to London, Burroughs, having become acclimated to a second body in the apartment, fears the emptiness; and almost predictably, both men relapse without the other’s encouragement. Hayden is exactly what Burroughs needs in those early days of sobriety: a fellow survivor, someone who has walked the same path of addiction and recovery and who knows how easily one can stumble.

The “painfully handsome” Foster is Burroughs’s Achilles heel, a charming, beautiful man who claims to love him. Burroughs cannot believe his luck, and the taboo of fraternizing with fellow patients seems beside the point. If Hayden is the angel on Burroughs’s shoulder, Foster is the suave devil, his presence a constant temptation. He relapses frequently only to crawl back begging for forgiveness, swearing this time will be different and then relapsing once again. The portents of Burroughs’s own relapse are written on the wall as he replaces Hayden’s guiding support with Foster’s instability. Foster is a wounded and broken man, precisely what Burroughs does not need during his fragile recovery. He unwittingly preys upon Burroughs’s weak spot—his desperate desire for the love of a handsome man—showering him with praise and adoration, even taking the first tentative steps toward couplehood.

When Pighead’s health declines and Burroughs relapses, Foster only makes it worse, almost gleefully ushering Burroughs into his world of crack use. After Pighead’s death, and even after Foster is out of Burroughs’s life, Foster’s influence lingers. Nearly a year into his relapse, Burroughs walks the streets of Manhattan’s East Village to score crack, even spending the night in a “crack house” with a sympathetic sex worker. In the end, however, Burroughs’s and Foster’s paths diverge. Burroughs barely escapes death and finds his way to sobriety, while Foster opens a bar in Florida.

Burroughs’s partner at the advertising agency, Greer is a tightly controlled perfectionist, although Burroughs, like a release valve, allows her wicked humor to seep out from time to time. If the ad business is indeed all about “false expectations,” it’s ironic that both Greer and Burroughs are masters of their craft: One might be tempted to dismiss their efforts as hypocritical and soulless, but the fact that they both recognize the industry’s duplicity suggests that they do have souls, although bartered to the ad agency for a hefty paycheck. This conundrum—both hating and being good at their jobs—chips away at their spirits over time. They argue (she accuses him of narcissism, and he accuses her of being uptight), but they always reunite to work their advertising magic.

Greer shows her own flashes of shallowness, such as writing an angry letter to the makers of her face cream and demanding a free supply as compensation, or thinking only of work when a bus in LA drives by with a cry for help. Nevertheless, she initiates an intervention to push Burroughs into rehab. She is the only one who consistently calls him out for his drinking, and despite both his ingratitude and the threat to her own career, she always sticks by him. On the spectrum of potential hazards—Hayden and Pighead on one end and Foster on the other—Greer sits somewhere in between, her honesty an inconvenient but sometimes necessary barb.