But to call him nervous wouldn't be quite right. He takes his glasses off repeatedly he blinks and wonders if he has something in his eye he smooths his hands over his lap he takes a steady stream of foil packets from his pocket, pops the nicotine gum from them, then plays with the wrapper on the table. 'I've turned out pretty normal, considering.'īurroughs is intense and laid-back, fidgety yet focused. 'Yeah, I know,' he laughs when we're sitting down. He is tall, with a small, blondish beard and little round glasses, and he's dressed in a blue suit jacket with a carefully faded patterned shirt and the hint of a Seventies-style T-shirt underneath. I meet Burroughs for lunch at one of his favourite local cafés on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Now stop drinking.' That was five years ago. Pighead dies of Aids, leaving him a piece of jewellery with the inscription: 'I'm watching you. Except that it doesn't have a happy ending. He and 'Pighead' meet on a phone sex line and, instead, of the usual explicit routine, have a brilliantly absurd chat about what brand of toothpaste they use. But embedded in the gruelling testimony of Dry, his book about going on the wagon, is a love story worthy of any screwball comedy. Once, at the height of what he didn't yet realise was his alcoholism, he took 1,452 beer bottles to the tip. Having had no formal education, he managed to find a highly paid advertising job, only to jeopardise his success by drinking. When he was 17, he ran away and, a year later, he changed his name to Augusten Xon Burroughs.
Meanwhile, his mother wrote poems and had an affair with the local vicar's wife.
Their 34-year-old adopted son, a former patient, raped Burroughs for years. The Finches ate dog food and thought they could divine the future by reading the doctor's turds, which he exhibited on a table in the backyard. Burroughs's parents went into therapy with Finch and, before long, Burroughs's mother left him at the Finch house, 'a place where nothing was shiny at all', on the understanding that it would only be for a couple of days. He boiled coins on the cooker to make them shiny, and would wrap the dog in tinfoil and take it for walks.
He retreated into a world of his own, in which his hair had to be kept compulsively smooth, and he could lip-synch to Barry Manilow. His parents argued so much, he writes, that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was the closest thing he had to a home movie. The horrors of his past are extreme, yet he describes them with such throwaway hilarity that they could be trips to the circus.
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