Bay Windows - February 5, 2004
J.S. Hall

At the beginning of "Dry," Burroughs is an award-winning creative executive in a New York City ad agency. He's also a tremendous alcoholic - imagine Patsy from "Absolutely Fabulous" made real - whose job is in jeopardy after showing up pickled for one too many client meetings. An intervention ensues, with rehab or unemployment as his two options. Burroughs opts for the Proud Institute in Minnesota because "a rehab hospital run by fags will be hip. Plus there's the possibility of good music and sex." His appalled, disbelieving reaction to the dowdy, linoleum-lined reality of the clinic is one of the book's highlights. Here, nurses confiscate cologne and mouthwash for their alcohol content and stuffed animals play a bizarre part in the group meetings. Despite himself, Burroughs responds well to rehab and eventually returns to Manhattan a sober man.

He promptly discovers that his squalid apartment's d cor consists of wall-to-wall Dewar's liquor bottles, and AA meetings will now take up that the time he squandered drinking. Shortly thereafter, a fellow alcoholic (and crack addict) whom he befriended at the Proud Institute, a Brit named Hayden, moves in and they form a tenuous support network. All is well, but not for long. After all, it would be a fairly short book if there weren't the constant danger of his falling off the wagon.

Burroughs' agency lands a new client - a German beer company! - and someone keeps leaving bottles of booze or magazine clippings of liquor ads in his desk. Against all sane advice, he embarks on a relationship with someone else in his meeting group (a big no-no): a devastatingly handsome, wealthy, Southern crack addict named Foster. At one point, Hayden compares Foster and his addiction to Liz Taylor: "You know, if she weren't as beautiful as she is, people wouldn't admire her struggle with booze and pills. They'd just cross her off as a hopeless lush."

Also, Burroughs continues his distant friendship with his best friend (and former semi-boyfriend) here named Pighead. "We drive each other crazy in ways that nobody else can even touch. We never bore each other. And we both realize what a rare thing this is." Unfortunately, Pighead is HIV-positive and, after years of health, is losing his battle with the virus. Through therapy, Burroughs realizes that he never really stopped loving Pighead, and that his distancing has been a defense mechanism to cope with the possibility of losing him; better to do it on his own terms than the virus's.

The question of whether Burroughs can resist relapsing into alcoholism drives "Dry" and fuels it with impressive, page-turning tension. Even when he's being appallingly reckless and doing amazingly stupid things, Burroughs remains incredibly sympathetic - no mean feat. In fact, Burroughs' voice and writing style are so compelling that they breathe new life into the Gay Man Struggling With Addiction and Best Friend Dying of AIDS subgenres which now verge on clich . Like the liquor he so craves, Burroughs' wit is biting, bitter and searing, taking no prisoners and sparing no one. His co-workers, fellow alcoholics, parents, enemies and even Sally Struthers receive his elegantly caustic observations, but he saves the harshest judgments for himself. Initially he naively "thought that rehab would stop me from drinking like an alcoholic. I thought it would teach me now to drink like a normal person." Now sober, he dejectedly realizes, "I bought all of my furniture while either hungover or drunk.... I bought it for the person I wanted to be."

While "Dry" can be laceratingly funny, it can also be dark, depressing and frightening; at some points you'll either want to swear off alcohol for life, or drink yourself into oblivion to erase the memory of what you've just read.

But for all its gloom and despair, "Dry" contains an empowering message of hope - Burroughs eventually sobered up and became the success he is now; his message is that "nobody has to be stuck with the life they have if they don't like it." He also urges readers to "stop skating across the surface of your life and really go inside and dig around for the good stuff."

Burroughs admits that he wrote "Dry" before "Running With Scissors," and occasionally this shows. At the same time, "Dry" abounds with more genuine feelings than "Scissors" because here Burroughs is confronting the years of emotions that he had suppressed in order to survive. Where "Scissors" abounds with detached irony and deadpan, gallows humor at the conditions he grew up in, "Dry" brims with the consequences of these actions. Like old age, it's not for "sissies." But those brave enough to face Burroughs' demons will be the better for it.

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