Running With Scissors

by Augusten Burroughs

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s not that easy.”

  “That’s why you have to do it,” I said.

  “That’s why you have to do it, too.”

  Natalie leaned in and put her elbows on the table. “Don’t you ever just feel like we’re chasing something? Something bigger. I don’t know, it’s like something that only you and I can see. Like we’re running, running, running?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re running alright. Running with scissors.”

  Our food arrived and we both reached for the same sea roach at once.

  “They were right here and now they’re gone. The fucking maid stole my earrings.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m positive,” Natalie said.

  She’d already turned the motel room upside down looking for them; the sheets were all off the bed and wadded into a mound on the chair; the cushions of the chair were on the floor, the TV had been moved, all the mini soaps opened.

  “Maybe you lost them someplace else.”

  “I didn’t,” she said with authority. “I’m absolutely positive that I left them right here next to the phone. I remember setting them down. Right here.” She stabbed at the table next to the phone.

  “So what are we gonna do?”

  “We’re gonna call the fucking manager and make him get them back.”

  I felt sick from the lobster and the fries.

  Natalie called the front desk. She explained the situation to the person who answered and was then placed on hold. A new person came on the line and she explained the situation all over again. Then she screamed, “No, motherfucker, I did not lose them. I left them right here. Right next to the phone. My friend and I went on a whale watch and out to dinner and we came back and the room was clean and the earrings are gone. Can you call the maid at home and tell her to bring me my earrings please?”

  Then she was listening. And I watched as her face transformed from annoyance to anger to rage to complete calm. Her foot stopped tapping a rhythm on the carpet. She hung up.

  “So he says his maid didn’t steal them. He says I lost them.”

  “Fuck,” I said. “Oh well.”

  “Oh well?” She looked at me with her eyebrows raised. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, oh well. No more earrings. It sucks, but that’s life.”

  Natalie folded her arms across her chest, bunching her uniform under the arms. “You have a very bad attitude,” she told me. “Haven’t you ever heard the phrase, ‘when life gives you lemons, make lemonade’?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Here,” she said bending over and gripping the side of the mattress. “Help me with this thing.”

  “Huh?”

  “Help me lift this fucking mattress. We’re going to turn a negative situation into a fun situation.”

  We were able to ease the mattress into the swimming pool out front without making so much as a splash.

  The television set, the chair and both nightstands didn’t make much of a splash either.

  “Hey motherfucker,” Natalie screamed toward the front office of the motel. “I did like you said and looked everywhere and I still didn’t find my earrings.”

  As the manager opened the door to see what all the shouting was about, Natalie and I tore off into the cool, salty Hyannis night. I grinned as I watched her sprint ahead of me, her long hair whipping behind her. Just your everyday McDonald’s counter girl, on the run.

  YOU’RE GONNA MAKE IT AFTER ALL

  W

  HEN I WAS SEVENTEEN AND NATALIE WAS EIGHTEEN, WE moved into our own small apartment in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Natalie had enrolled in Holyoke Community College and the apartment was close to school. Inspired by her, I took—and passed—my GED exam. This wasn’t difficult, as the questions were things like “Spell cat.” Then I, too, enrolled in the community college.

  As a pre-med student.

  To pay my way, I applied for and received a slew of student loans and a Pell grant. Most of which I spent on new clothes and a 1972 Volkswagen Fastback that I chose not for mechanical soundness but because it didn’t have any scratches and was showroom-shiny.

  The best part about being a pre-med student was that my laminated student I.D. stated my major: pre-med. I carried it in the front pocket of my jeans so that I could remove it throughout the day and gaze at it, reminding myself why I was there. When overwhelmed by a tedious microbiology lecture, I would simply pull out my I.D. card, look at my picture along with the words “Pre-med” and imagine myself at a future point in time double-parking my Saab convertible.

  Natalie worked very hard, studying well past midnight each night. She was taking more advanced classes than I, so we didn’t study for the same courses together. This meant that I was forced to study alone. Instead, I sat in my small bedroom and typed short stories on my manual typewriter for English class.

  English 101 was mostly about the technicalities of language—verbs, adverbs, what’s a split infinitive, what’s a double negative. I found all of this mind-numbing, so instead, believing my professor would be thrilled, I wrote ten-page essays on such topics as My Trip to the Depressing Mountain Farms Mall, Why Are There So Many Brands of Hair Conditioner? and My Childhood Was More Screwed Up Than Yours.

  By midterms, it seemed I was going to fail English class. As well as chemistry, anatomy, physiology, microbiology and even choral.

  The only bright spot was that my English professor routinely wrote notes on my essays. “Wonderful and strange, but this was not an assignment. If you could focus on the core materials in the course, I believe it would help your creative writing. You do show a flair.”

  My anatomy professor also took pity on me and called me into her office one afternoon after an exam.

  “Close the door,” she said, sliding off her faux tortoiseshell bifocals and resting them on top of her desk. She was a mannish woman—handsome, with a fierce intelligence. In fact, she wrote the published textbook from which the class was taught.

  I was certain she was going to inform me that I had a gift for science unlike any she’d ever seen. Perhaps she would tell me that I could skip community college and go straight to Harvard Medical School.

  Instead, she picked up my exam from the pile of papers in front of her and read from it. “Augusten. On the test a question was asked: Identify the structure A. And you wrote, ‘I believe this is a tibial tuberocity. But it could also be one of the foramans that I failed to memorize. Thank God for malpractice insurance, huh?’”

  I smiled at my witty answer.

  She said, “Do you really want to be a doctor? Or do you want to play a doctor on a soap opera?”

  At first, I thought this was a terrible insult. But then I saw her face, saw that she was not being nasty, merely asking an honest question. I said, “I really want the respect of a doctor. And I want the white jacket. And I want the title. But . . . I guess I really would like to have my own time slot opposite a game show.”

  “You seem to me,” she said, leaning back in her swivel chair, “to have a very creative side. Why not major in something creative? English? Or maybe theater?”

  My shoulders slumped and my throat went dry. I felt defeated. I explained that I was failing English. “I would like the writing part of English, but there’s no writing in it. Except for the stuff I do on my own. It’s all things I don’t need. Like memorizing prepositional phrases. I don’t need to memorize prepositional phrases. You’d think English would be about writing. But it’s not.”

  “You have to learn a lot of things you may not want to learn, may not feel you need to know. Before English Composition there is English 101. It’s a building process, you establish a foundation and then you build and build and build.”

  “I guess,” I said. I knew she was right. And I knew that I was not cut out for school, even college. Ironically, I had been excited to go to college, but in order to be able to do it, I really needed study habits and kno
wledge I would have learned in high school.

  Oops.

  So I withdrew from school before the semester was out.

  And a week after I withdrew, one evening when Natalie and I were in our little apartment, my mother called.

  She said she needed to see me. That she would be over in an hour to pick me up.

  “What? What’s this about?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you in person when I see you.”

  In the same way that a tornado rips the roof off a double-wide trailer, leaving the occupants dazed and staring at the clouds from the splinters of what used to be their living room, it was over.

  “I am no longer going to have anything to do with Dr. Finch or any member of the Finch family.” We were sitting in her car, the old brown Aspen station wagon. She was smoking a More and I was smoking a Marlboro Light. She looked calm, almost flat. And she didn’t seem crazy.

  “What are you talking about?” I noticed a suitcase on the backseat and next to it her straw wide-brim hat.

  “This has been building for many years, Augusten. There’s much you don’t know or understand about my relationship with Dr. Finch. But for years, he has been medicating me in a way that I have come to see as unhealthy and, well, very wrong.”

  “What?”

  “And years ago, when I had that psychotic episode in Newport, do you remember?”

  I nodded slowly, as if underwater. This was moving too fast and everything she was saying was a complete blur.

  “He raped me in that motel room.”

  “What!?”

  “The doctor has been controlling me, manipulating me emotionally and with drugs. He’s a very sick man and I’m just now seeing this.” She tossed her burned-down cigarette out the window and lit another. “I know this must come as a shock to you, but it’s been building. I need to go away now, on my own, to do some thinking. He’s very, very angry with me. I need to get away for awhile.”

  I felt deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I also felt my default emotion: numbness. “You know, I have to go back inside. I don’t know what to make of any of this.” I climbed out of the car but my mother reached for me.

  “Please. Wait. I’m sorry, this must be extremely upsetting to you. It is to me. But I’m right about this, Augusten. He’s a very dangerous man and I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to see that. I wish you’d—”

  I pulled away, slammed the door and ran back upstairs to my apartment. When I came in the door, Natalie was standing in the center of the kitchen, looking at me. “I just got off the phone with my father,” she said. “Your mother has finally completely lost it.”

  I told Natalie what my mother told me. “Bullshit,” she said. “Augusten, your mother is a complete mental case. Look at you. She just abandoned you when you were twelve, sent you to live with my family. And you’re going to believe her?”

  “I don’t know what to believe,” I said.

  “Believe me,” she said. “I know my dad. I know he’s a little weird. Okay, a lot weird. But he’s not sick or crazy. He’d never rape your mother or drug her. That’s absolute fucking bullshit.”

  But I believed what my mother said. I believed it in my guts. After all, more than once when I’d gone to his office complaining of my general misery, he’d reached behind his head and handed me the first sample bottle his fingers landed on. Mellaril, Ativan, Valium, Librium, Lithium, Thorazine. I’d taken them all as if they were candy corn. As for the rape, well, Dr. Finch did seem like a pretty horny old fat man. I thought back to his masturbatorium, his many “wives.”

  Natalie knew in which direction I was leaning. She could sense it because she knew me so well. “Don’t let her warp your mind,” she said.

  “This is just so . . . shocking,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she agreed sadly. “It’s shocking alright.”

  The rest of that evening, we barely spoke. Something had happened between us. Sides had been formed. Natalie wanted me on her side. She wanted me to drive to her dad’s house in the morning, declare my loyalty, disown my crazy mother. And my mother wanted . . . what? She wanted to be left alone, I guess. She certainly didn’t want me involved with the Finches anymore.

  But Natalie was a Finch. And she was my best friend.

  “It’s going to be difficult for us,” Natalie said just before we went to bed. “We’re caught in the middle of this. It’s going to be very hard to remain friends. This is big, Augusten. You’re going to have to decide.”

  So it came to this: Was I a turd-reading Finch? Or was I my crazy mother’s son?

  In the end, I decided that I was neither.

  In the middle of the night, without saying good-bye, without packing my things, I moved out of our apartment feeling like a spy, or rather an actor from daytime television playing a spy. I took my backpack and drove to Motel 6 where I spent the night.

  I didn’t call Natalie the next day. Or the day after that. I swam in the urine-tainted indoor pool and ate Cheese Nips from the vending machine. Natalie and I, we needed a little time apart, I figured, until this thing was sorted out. When I finally called her, she was very upset. “Where the fuck are you?” she said, furious.

  “I’m staying at a motel. I needed to get away.”

  “My father is very upset with you. He feels that you’re taking your mother’s side in this. And he needs your support because he wants to have her committed to a hospital.”

  A creepy feeling spread over my arms. Like watching a horror movie and suddenly knowing the killer is upstairs hiding in the closet, has been there all along. “I don’t think she needs to be committed to a hospital,” I said.

  “What motel are you at? We’ll come and get you.”

  I hung up the phone.

  That week, I found an affordable apartment located in a slum in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The top floor of the building was without windows, but at least I had hot water. And because I was accustomed to living with vermin, the mice didn’t bother me.

  I also found a job as a waiter at a Ground Round restaurant in Northampton that had just opened up.

  “Hi, my name is Augusten and I’ll be your server,” was the only thing I needed to keep in my mind. I entered a period of sleepwalking. A low-intensity time where the worst thing that could happen to me was that I spilled French onion soup on my apron. I felt safe, even though the restaurant was in Northampton, because none of the Finches would go there. It wasn’t within walking distance of the house.

  In secret, my mother rented her own apartment in rural Sunderland, miles from the Finches. “Dorothy is under Dr. Finch’s spell and there’s nothing I can do to get her out of it,” she told me in a phone call. Her girlfriend believed my mother was having a complete mental collapse and she was so upset, she was staying at the Finches’ house. My mother arranged for a mover to clear all her things out of the apartment. When Dorothy returned to the house in Amherst, it was empty and my mother was gone.

  I took an inventory of my life: I was seventeen, I had no formal education, no job training, no money, no furniture, no friends. “It could be worse,” I told myself. “I could be going to a prom.”

  But there, glittering in the distance of my mind, was New York City. It seemed to me that New York was the place where misfits could fit.

  Maybe Bookman had known this.

  So I served patty melts and chicken salads and potato skins and whiskey sours. And I walked around in a trance, daydreaming about Manhattan. Trying to see if I could picture myself there among the skyscrapers and hot dog vendors.

  And I could see it.

  I had no idea how I would ever get to New York or what exactly I would do once I arrived, but I knew that if I could save enough money to make it there for a week, somehow I’d figure out a way to stay.

  And as I cleared Thousand Island dressing from the table with my rag, noticing that yet again I’d received only a fifty-cent tip, I understood one thing more clearly than I had ever understood anything before.

>   Of course I can make it in New York City. There’s no way New York could be crazier than my life had been at the Finches’ house in Northampton, Massachusetts. And I survived that. Unwittingly, I had earned a Ph.D. in survival.

  I had a vision of Liza Minnelli in a black leotard singing, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere . . .” and then tossing me a black top hat that I expertly catch and place on top of my head, astonishing all of Broadway with my debut in the stage version of New York, New York.

  Running parallel to this vision was another in which I am crouched down in the back of a police cruiser parked on a side street in Greenwich Village. I am giving a blowjob to a fat cop on the verge of retirement. He waves ten dollars in my face and gasps, “Fifteen if you swallow.”

  Who knows?

  In the opening sequence to The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mary’s in a supermarket, hurrying through the aisles. She pauses at the meat case, picks up a steak and checks the price. Then she rolls her eyes, shrugs and tosses it in the cart.

  That’s kind of how I felt. Sure, I would have liked for things to have been different. But, roll of the eyes, what can you do? Shrug.

  I threw the meat in my cart. And moved on.

  EPILOGUE

  D

  r. Finch lost his license to practice medicine after the American Medical Association found him guilty on charges of insurance fraud. Despite this, many of his patients remained in treatment. He died from heart disease in 2000.

  Agnes lives in a nursing home.

  Natalie graduated from Holyoke Community College and applied to Smith. Not only was she accepted, she was accepted with a full scholarship. She graduated magna cum laude with a double major: psychology and voice. She later earned a postgraduate degree and works in the field of public health.

  Hope continued to live at home and work for her father until the time of his death. She has since left the Northeast.