Read Dry: A Memoir for Free Online Page A

going to have it. It’ll be taken right away from you. And for Christ’s sake, you have to get over your past. You are a grown man now, not a little wounded boy.”
    The animal portion of my brain seizes control and my blood is filled with hatred molecules. “Do you remember the time we were in the car together and you said you were gonna kill the thing that meant the most to my mother and you glared at me and sped up? Heading for a rock? And I had to jump out of the fucking car? When I was like nine, you motherfucker,” I spat.
    More silence. Then he growls, “I did no such thing and you know it. You just make crap up, and I’m very tired of it, very tired.”
    I know he remembers. “What about the cigarette burn on the bridge of my nose, between my eyes?”
    Silence, except I swear I hear the thin pulse of the artery in his neck beating against the phone. “I do not know what you are talking about.” But the tone of his voice does not match his words. His tone says yes .
    When I was much younger, maybe six, I was sitting on his lap in the La-Z-Boy and he very slowly brought his Marlboro toward my face, aimed the tip between my eyes and landed.
    I had forgotten about this until I was twenty and had eczema.
    I went to a dermatologist for the rash. She said, “What’s this?” as she touched my scar.
    My mind went absolutely blank. The kind of blank where it’s not that you’re forgetting something, but your mind is not allowing you to remember. It’s a thicker, dumber blank. Like trying to run underwater in a dream. “I don’t know, just a mole or a glitch or something,” I said dismissively.
    She leaned so close to my face that I could see the individual pores of her skin. “No, this is a burn, this is definitely an old burn.”
    I told her it couldn’t be a burn. I used the same tone of voice I would have if she’d told me that I was pregnant. But that night, I went home and got very drunk. And that’s when I saw the burning tip of the cigarette. And I knew it wasn’t because I was drunk that I was imagining it, it was because I was drunk and my own head was out of the way and I could remember. This is maybe one of the best things to ever come of my drinking. Or maybe it’s one of the worst.
    I tell my father, “I know you remember. Maybe you were drunk yourself when you did it. But I know how it is to be drunk. There are some things you just can’t forget.”
    I think I hear him sniffle. But before I can decide if it’s a sniffle of recognition or a sniffle of allergy season, his wife takes the phone away from him and says to me, “That’s enough,” and hangs up. Two words and I’m gone.
    I hit REDIAL but the line is busy. I sit and think, She just doesn’t know. She married him after he stopped drinking, she never saw any of it .
    I walk into the bathroom to piss and as I’m pissing, I think, Did I make it all up? Is it all some Oprah/repressed memory thing? This seems likely.
    Now I feel vacant. I guess it’s sad. Crushed?
    I wake up the next morning curled against the bathtub, my head resting on a balled-up towel. When I stand up, I bring my hand around to touch my back where it had been in contact with the tub and my back is cold, like a dead person.

NOTHING TO BE PROUD OF

    I
    am to be picked up at the airport in Minnesota when my flight arrives. As the plane circles in its holding pattern, I try to imagine what the person who is going to meet me might look like since the administrator on the phone couldn’t give me a description. “It’ll be one of the staff assistants, I’m just not sure who yet. They’ll find you, don’t worry.”
    I wonder how they’ll find me. Do alcoholics emit some sort of daiquiri-scented pheromone that only other alcoholics can detect? I visualize an older man, a father figure with a Freudian beard and knowing, recovered-alcoholic eyes made kinder through years of inner growth and abstinence. Perhaps in the car he will quote from the I Ching .
    As the