Shaken and stirred

Memoirist and reformed alcoholic Augusten Burroughs talks about his $63,000 bar bill, why it's hard to be a drunk when you're allergic to alcohol, and how hard it is to have sex when you're sober.

By Kera Bolonik

Jul 8, 2003 | When author Augusten Burroughs first came to New York at 23 to take a copywriting job at Ogilvy & Mather, he owned only a yellow inflatable raft for a bed, a cheap phone, a Braun travel alarm clock and a copy of "The Andy Warhol Diaries." It appeared he traveled light, but actually Burroughs carried a lot of emotional baggage. In last year's mordantly funny memoir "Running With Scissors," Burroughs wrote that when he was 12, his newly divorced, bipolar poet mother pawned him off on her crazy shrink, Dr. Finch, an onanist who got aroused by pictures of Golda Meir and sought prophecies in his own fecal matter. (His license was eventually revoked in 1986.) Finch taught Burroughs how to fake a suicide attempt to get out of going to school, and hosted a steady stream of patients in his roach-infested, anarchic Northampton, Mass., household.

By far, the most menacing resident was Neil Bookman, a 33-year-old who preyed on Burroughs; the two embarked on a disturbing relationship that was encouraged by the doctor. By the time Burroughs left Dr. Finch's house at age 17, he had no formal education, yet he'd had countless sexual escapades, witnessed primal scenes between his mother and her lesbian lover, and watched enough psychotic breakdowns -- his mother's, and those of Dr. Finch's various patients -- to shock even the most seasoned psychoanalyst.

Now Burroughs returns with a new memoir, "Dry," which begins where "Scissors" left off and is already hitting bestseller lists and garnering strong reviews. The book begins when Burroughs is 24, a flourishing, self-made advertising executive whose support network is made up of best friend Pighead, a kindly investment banker dying of AIDS; his drinking buddy Jim, an affable coffin salesman; Greer, his tightly wound colleague; and his constant companion, Dewar's Scotch whisky. For a person whose youth was one endless stream of unpleasant surprises, drinking provided an escape hatch for Burroughs, even though his allergy to alcohol required him to choke down Benadryl before getting loaded. Similarly, advertising proved an ideal career choice for him, despite his lack of schooling, because, as Burroughs explains, it "makes everything seem better than it actually is. It's an industry based on giving people false expectations. Few people know how to do that as well as I do, because I've been applying those basic advertising principles to my life for years."

As the "Leaving-Las-Vegas-esque" drinking binge that opens "Dry" is a testament, however, the bottom of that hatch would inevitably start to fall away. Greer stages an intervention and the advertising agency sends him to the rehab of his choosing. Burroughs opts for the Proud Institute, a gay-and-lesbian facility in Minnesota, where he expects to find "a discreet, Frank Lloyd Wright-ish compound shrouded mysteriously from public view by a tasteful wall of trimmed boxwood trees. Spare rooms, sun-drenched, with firm mattresses and white 300-count Egyptian cotton sheets." In this respect, his awakening proves as rude as the stark fluorescent lighting and the tasteless mush they serve up in the cafeteria.

After 30 days at Proud, Burroughs returns to New York a sober man, his job and friends awaiting him, delighted at the newly lean and clean man they see. Burroughs takes his recovery seriously, throwing himself into his work with renewed vigor, attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and outpatient therapy, even as he commits the ultimate no-no: getting involved with an active crackhead, a dashing Southern trust-funder named Foster.

But it's a sobering reality that puts Burroughs' sobriety to the ultimate test. When Pighead's health takes a deathly turn, Burroughs no longer sees a reason to stay dry. He relapses, and though he stays gainfully employed in the advertising business, it takes him two years to return to A.A., where he will recover once more. Burroughs has been "dry" ever since.

I met the author on a sultry June afternoon in New York at the Corner Bistro, a West Village joint as renowned for its juicy hamburgers as its hard-drinking denizens. Burroughs was just wrapping up his book tour, and was thrilled to return home to his partner of four years, Dennis Pilsits, and their two French bulldog puppies, Bentley and Cow-Cow. After six years of sobriety, he assured me that being in the Bistro threatened him not at all, though he recalled having gone there many times, and regularly buying bottles of Scotch at the liquor store just around the corner. As we feasted on cheeseburgers and guzzled Diet Cokes, Burroughs talked about sitting for hours in basements and bars -- the underworld for alcoholics both active and recovering -- and the perils and pleasures of drinking and drying out.

Your childhood was so chaotic, and you arrived in New York at 23 with practically nothing. What coping mechanisms, besides drinking, did you use to get by?

I didn't have really any survival skills except my instincts. I don't talk about it in "Dry," but I declared bankruptcy when I was 23. I got myself so heavily into debt with my credit cards because I did not have a sense of any fiscal responsibility. I had racked up in one year $63,000 on cocktails at the Odeon (a restaurant in TriBeCa) on AmEx. That's a lot of cocktails, and that was just one place.

Do you believe people can be predisposed to alcoholism? Your dad was an alcoholic.

I think that a lot of alcoholics tend to be very obsessive. I've always had certain tics. Alcohol for me was all about pouring my drink in my favorite Santa mug, taking a sip, looking at it. It itched my brain that the level of the glass had gone down from the sip. I'd have to fill it up again. Same thing with smoking: I would smoke. I'd hate it, so I'd put it out and light another one. Four packs a day. I couldn't stand to smoke them down. I think obsessive behavior is definitely genetic. And I think alcohol, like anything, can be learned through your parents. I don't know if alcohol-ism is genetic because it's a man-made substance. It would be like having a genetic predisposition to CD players.

One of the first things you talk about when you're getting sober is your feelings rushing back. Were you conscious that you were drinking to obliterate your feelings when you were in your early 20s?

Yeah, I was fleeing. I was really ashamed of my past, the way I was raised. It felt like it was the same rush you would get driving a sports car through a tunnel at a really high speed. It was just go. I never knew what was going to happen next. I never knew who I'd meet or where I'd end up. I had absolutely no sense of responsibility or reality. To me, when I was drinking, it was all about the now. It was a complete escape.

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