Magical Thinking

by Augusten Burroughs

  I know for certain that I would never send an author a picture of my dick.

  It’s amazing to me how many gay guys send me photographs of their penises as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. Frankly, I find it odd when somebody who’s read my book e-mails me a picture of their face. Why do I need to see what they look like? As a result, I am often tempted to objectively comment: “Thanks for the picture. You have a bulbous nasal tip and should get that surgically repaired.” Or perhaps: “Please don’t write me again until you have had a chin implant.”

  But to send a picture of your dick reveals an entirely different pathology.

  “Hey. Loved the book, man. And you’re cute. Here’s my pic,” one e-mail read. “Here’s my pic.” As though this was simply a snapshot taken by his mom.

  One man from Italy sent me a photograph of his penis with a glass eyeball tucked into the folds of his foreskin, so that it appeared his penis was looking at the camera. He wrote, “As he say in the movies, here looking at your kid.”

  In addition to their penises, gay guys also send me pictures of their arms. This, because in my memoir, out of three hundred pages, there are a couple of tiny sentences about how as a child I was entranced by Tony Orlando’s arm hair.

  “You like furry arms, and I got ’em!” one man wrote. He included a picture of his two fat arms crossed over his barrel chest.

  Not all gay men send me penis pictures. But no straight men do. And to date, no woman has sent me a picture of her vaginal canal. “I know it’s a little stretched out, but I’ve had four kids. What do you expect? LOL.”

  What is sometimes more shocking than a photograph is an extremely long letter. One man, who wrote from Massachusetts and claimed to be somehow acquainted with the crazy psychiatrist in my memoir, wrote me an e-mail that was thirty-five pages long. I was so stunned by the length, the way I just kept scrolling and scrolling endlessly, that I printed it and counted the pages. And you might think such an insanely long letter is uncommon, a freak event. But no. Many people feel the need to send me long letters saying things like “I know you’re busy but . . .” and going on for ten pages about their dreams of being a famous author and do I know a good literary agent who would be able to sell their work and turn it into the blockbuster international publishing phenomenon that it most certainly is.

  My editor had warned me about this when my book first started getting attention. “Just wait,” she said. “Fans get this crazed look in their eyes when they get near you. There’s something about a writer that makes people act really weird.”

  I see this look she speaks of when I do readings and signings. While the majority of the people who come to my readings are nice, normal people I would like to know and be friends with, a few are people who should probably be locked inside hospitals.

  One man in Brooklyn came to my reading smelling like a gangrenous foot. He had the most disgusting breath, which was made all the more revolting by his lack of teeth. When he spoke, he gummed the words out. “I wuved wur book.”

  But then, look at me. My brain is incorrectly formed, and I’m shaped like a tube. Plus, I’m an alcoholic, a “survivor” of childhood sexual abuse, was raised in a cult and have no education. So, really, if you think about it, the only thing that separates me from the guy with the stinky foot and no teeth is a book deal and some cologne.

  But even with my minimal amount of fame, there are certain perks. Recently, I was at a movie premier, and at the party after the movie, Meryl Streep was loose, walking around the room like a normal person. Absolutely nothing was preventing me from lunging toward her and shrieking “Dingoes ate my baby! Dingoes ate my baby!”

  When you think about it, there are not only different tiers of fame but genres. The “classic” famous person is a movie star, and even here there are different grades, like eggs. There are grade-B actors, like Susan Anton, has-beens such as Ann Archer or the star of Flashdance herself, Jennifer Beals. Then, of course, there are top-tier movie stars like Ms. Streep. But there are other routes to fame. America always loves a good serial killer. And it’s tough to beat John Wayne Gacy, also known as Pogo the Killer Clown. The clown paintings he did while on death row have sold at auction for thousands of dollars. I know, because I spent many a drunk hour online looking to buy one on Ebay.

  Then there are those who become famous because they are in the center of a scandal. Of course, one instantly thinks of Monica Lewinsky. Monica is now superfamous worldwide. Italians still call her Portly Pepper Pot.

  The fame of a writer is altogether different. For the most part, Americans don’t read. Statistically, virtually nobody reads; everybody watches TV and movies instead. Alice Sebold’s debut novel, The Lovely Bones, was an enormous blockbuster, the likes of which had been unseen for years. In hardcover, it sold nearly two million copies. But if an issue of Time magazine sold two million copies, the editor would be fired. And yet most people wouldn’t recognize Alice Sebold if she passed them on the street.

  I didn’t sell two million copies of my first memoir. So I am even less famous. But still, I am famous enough now for old ladies to stop me in front of grocery stores and tell me about their Dr Pepper enemas.

  TOTAL TURNAROUND

  Y

  esterday I went to Saks and bought Clinique Total Turnaround lotion. The label claims that it “instantly, continuously helps skin feel and look its best by getting new cell turnover performing optimally.” I bought this for Dennis because he is in his mid-forties and uses a moisturizer on his face that was invented eighteen years ago. The technology has improved, was my thinking.

  “But I like what I have,” he said when I handed him the sleek gray bag. I’d bought not one bottle but three.

  I laughed. “I know you do.” I said this in the exact same tone I might use to speak to a baby or a retarded person. “But it’s old. There are newer and better things on the market.” I then explained, as simply as possible, about alpha-hydroxy compounds and how they are like dermabrasion you can do at home: a sort of chemical peel without the harsh chemicals.

  He was not persuaded.

  So I took his lotion of inferior, pore-clogging technology, and I hid it at the top of the closet, where he is too short to reach without the stepladder, which is in the front closet and very difficult to get out. Dennis is not a short man; he’s five-nine-and-a-half. But that “and-a-half” tells you something. Short(er) guys always add the “and a half.” Tall people never do this. So I hid his lotion and smiled at my mental image of him jumping up and reaching, jumping and reaching, with his old, prehistoric lotion just slightly out of reach.

  When he went into the bathroom, he noticed his lotion was gone and in its place, my new improved lotion gift. “What’d you do with my stuff?” he shouted.

  I was now sitting at the computer, which is on the dining room table, e-mailing my friend Suzanne in California. “I hid it,” I said.

  “You better not have,” he said with surprising anger. Actually, it was so surprising that I assumed it to be mock.

  “Yes I did. All gone. I threw it away.” There was glee in my voice. Glee mixed with triumph.

  He scampered back into the bathroom, skidding on the highly polished wood floor like a cartoon dog. I heard him rummaging through the trash can. This made me smile because it’s just sort of cute.

  He returned, indignant. “I mean it. Where is it?”

  I sighed. “Okay, fine,” I said. I padded across the floor and went to the closet where I barely reached—certainly no stretching—to the top shelf and produced his favorite pale green bottle. I handed it to him and became serious. “But will you at least try the new one?”

  “I’ll try it,” he said, but I knew he wouldn’t.

  I explained the situation to him, doctor to patient. “Look. This will be better for your skin because it will remove more dead epithelial cells. I mean, I know it’s just lotion, but there have been advances.” I emphasized the word “advances,” knowing that Dennis is wary of ad
vances.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll try it.”

  I was somewhat annoyed by his resistance to change, and I also felt like he was still angry with me for hiding his oily lotion, so when we crawled into bed that evening I said, “Are you pissed at me for hiding it?”

  “Yes,” he said, like a child who was very mad at having his blocks taken away.

  I smiled and nestled against him. He kissed my shoulder. I’d never felt closer to him because I did know that he was mad and yet it didn’t matter. He loved me enough to be mad at me and not then have to reconsider the entire relationship.

  I took this as a sign that things were good between us.

  But the next morning, he seemed off. He seemed distant. Dennis wakes up half an hour before I do, and when he’s finished showering, kisses me between my eyes to wake me up. But this morning, there was a preoccupied tone to his voice, and his kiss seemed hurried, almost professional, as though he were paid to kiss me and was contemplating another line of employment.

  After I took my own shower I said, “Is everything okay?”

  He told me he was worried about a meeting he had that morning. It was with his new client, and things had not been going smoothly.

  I felt a rush of hatred toward the client and fantasized about cornering said client in the parking lot after the meeting and producing a Henckels knife, which I would use to circumcise him.

  But later that day at the horrible Japanese ad agency where I was working, I got an e-mail from Dennis. The subject line read “Confession,” and it went on to say that he was actually still mad about the lotion and felt I was being controlling and manipulative and that it really hit a nerve because he can’t stand to be controlled.

  I was furious and wanted to leave him immediately, find myself a much younger boyfriend who did not have fine lines and wrinkles but, more important, wasn’t so averse to change. I’d read somewhere that one of the signs of aging is a resistance to new things. I have worried myself by losing my interest in contemporary music. Whereas when I was in my twenties, I bought twenty new CDs a week, now I buy maybe five a year. I don’t listen to music on the radio, only NPR. So when Dennis expressed his own lack of willingness to embrace the new technology, I felt very strongly that maybe it was time to leave him and open myself up to the possibility of dating a twenty-yearold.

  Instead, I wrote back a confident I Will Make You Seem Crazy e-mail that read: “Wow. I didn’t realize you were so upset over the lotion. I never intended that. I actually thought it was kind of funny to hide your lotion and get you all ruffled. But I never imagined that you were truly upset. It’s almost like I bought you a new color television but you like your black-and-white because you’ve never seen color. So all I wanted to do was turn you onto the new and better color.”

  He wrote back five minutes later saying “I am embarrassed now and feel like a fool.”

  I was immediately distressed; I’d gone too far. I never wanted him to feel embarrassed, because I wanted him always to feel he could tell me anything, no matter how seemingly small. So I wrote him back and said just this, adding “I felt so close to you when you told me you were still mad at me. I smiled, fell asleep instantly.”

  He wrote back and said he knew what I meant, he felt it, too.

  Then, on the way home, I thought about taking the new lotion and throwing it into the trash, all three bottles. I thought maybe he would finally acquiesce and look for it to at least try it. And it would be gone and he would be puzzled, and I would say glibly “I threw it out,” and this would build into a fight.

  Or perhaps I would stop at Saks on the way home and buy two thousand dollars’ worth. I would fill the medicine cabinet with these lotion bottles as a statement: “Not only do I embrace change, but I finance it.”

  I was mad walking home, making myself even madder by thinking of possible scenarios involving Dennis, myself, and bottles of lotion. What if I emptied his own lotion bottle and then replaced it with the new, technologically superior lotion. And then when he commented “See? My face looks great, my lotion is fantastic,” I would reveal the ruse.

  Who, but two gay men, could possibly have a fight over moisturizing lotion?

  But as I passed Lincoln Center, I decided that it wasn’t as shallow as it seemed. There was the very real issue that ten years come between us. That Dennis is much more conservative in many ways than I. He is averse to change and slow to make decisions. By the time I made it to the Tower Records a few blocks from our apartment, these seemed like insurmountable obstacles.

  Until I imagined him being hit by a Honda Accord while he crossed the street, distracted and feeling bad about my manipulative e-mail. I saw him lying on the sidewalk, sliding into unconsciousness. And here, I nearly heaved a sob. I was overcome with a powerful feeling of utter devastation and loss. A door opened a crack, and I was able to see that I was now far beyond the point of merely being able to throw in any towel. Clearly, I was no longer dating somebody or living with somebody or in a relationship with somebody. I was married to somebody. I was merged with somebody.

  Truthfully, if Dennis wanted to moisturize his face with mayonnaise, I would be in the kitchen cracking jumbo eggs and separating the yolks.

  Tonight we saw the film Iris, with Judy Dench as Iris Murdoch, the acclaimed British author who descended into Alzheimer’s. As we watched Iris Murdoch watch Teletubbies and pee in the living room, I had to breathe deeply to avoid making incredibly loud, humiliating heaving sobs in the theater.

  “I’ll take care of you when you get like that next year,” I said, as we left the theater. Although realistically, I felt it was I who would be the one to lose his mind and probably not even when I’m old and have lived a rich, full life. Possibly as early as next spring.

  It’s ten-thirty on a Monday night, and Dennis is in the kitchen, lean cuts of pork splayed out on plastic wrap on the floor. He is wearing his suit, and in his left hand he is holding a silver meathammer thing. He places a sheet of plastic wrap on top of one of the cutlets, and he begins to smack it with the hammer. And it’s surprisingly loud. I mean, you would really be amazed by how much sound a filet of pork can make when you place it on the floor and hit it with a hammer.

  Before I moved in, Dennis had problems with his downstairs neighbor. The way I understand it is, the neighbor used to slam his door—at all hours. And the sound came straight up through the floor and into Dennis’s eardrums. So he actually had to go downstairs and tell the man, don’t slam your door. And ever since then, they’ve been like two wheaten terriers who see each other on the sidewalk and snarl.

  So I was thinking about this as I watched him pound the meat. I was thinking, Any minute, our neighbor is going to come upstairs and tell us to stop hammering into the floor. And I would then have to explain, we’re not hammering. We’re cooking. We’re tenderizing. We’re just doing it on the floor.

  Of course, the fact that this is Monday night at ten-thirty and Dennis is still in his suit and now in the kitchen pounding pork on the floor to make me dinner from a recipe in COOK’S Illustrated magazine is testament to his character. I truly, truly feel guilty that I am the only one who gets to have him as my mate.

  “I love doing this,” Dennis says when I tell him how sweet it is of him and how guilty I feel that he’s going to so much trouble after working all day. And I believe him, I think he really does love to cook.

  I bought him a set of French copper pots and pans, and he enjoys these. The saucepan weighs like seventeen pounds. The endorphins released just from picking the thing up make you drunk enough to think, Snails are great! Bring on the stomach lining!

  At midnight, we eat. Our beastly French bulldog watches us for a few minutes, but he is too tired to stare with his typically penetrating gaze, and he goes under the table to become flat. When he is exhausted, he lies down on his belly, all his little arms and legs sticking out straight.

  And it was incredible, the dinner. It was one of his best, and this is saying q
uite a lot because Dennis is an incredible cook.

  I washed the dishes, and while I was washing, Dennis went into the other room to lie on the bed. Or so I assumed.

  A moment later, Bentley was barking, and I could hear his nails scratching along the floor, like he’s chasing. Or being chased. Then, more barking. It was his play bark, the bark he makes in the mornings when Dennis chases him around nude after his shower.

  I said, “No, don’t do that. Don’t get him all excited before bed. We need to wind him down.”

  Bentley is the first dog Dennis has ever lived with. We got him together. But I was raised with dogs. So I am our resident dog expert. “Really,” I shouted over the running water, “just put him on the bed and stroke his back, make him calm.”

  Dennis called back to me, but I couldn’t understand him. I heard only the one word “he.”

  So I said, “What?” The dog’s barking was getting more intense. I was now positive our neighbor was going to knock on the door. First the pounding, now the crazed animal. “Dennis,” I shouted, “don’t get him all excited.”

  And Dennis shouted right back, “I didn’t start it. He started it.”

  I turned off the water and walked out of the kitchen. They were together on the bed, Dennis attempting to turn down the covers and Bentley standing on the covers. Dennis was fluffing the pillows, panting. Bentley’s eyes were crazed, like he’d just swallowed a package of bacon, wrapper and all. Dennis, also, looked slightly crazed. He was smirking, and I could tell he was hot. His face was red, and he was beginning to sweat. Dennis sweats at the first sign of physical exertion.

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. And I said this still wearing the yellow rubber dish-washing gloves. “What you’re saying to me is, ‘It’s not my fault. He started it’?”