Magical Thinking

by Augusten Burroughs

  Technically, both are examples of something psychologists call “magical thinking,” which is the belief that one exerts more influence over events than one actually has.

  My friend Suzanne is another example. She is a fearful flier who sits bolt upright in her seat, concentrating hard on keeping the plane aloft. Who refuses to read a magazine or take a nap for fear that if she stops thinking about the plane soaring high above the clouds, it may indeed nose-dive straight down through them and into the earth. “I just sit there clenching the armrests with my hands and thinking, fly, fly, fly.” She understands, of course, that the plane will either continue to fly, or it will crash, regardless of whether she continues to concentrate or not. It’s between God and the terrorists.

  I have never been one of these people who believes that some micron of the universe will shift if I concentrate hard enough or make it to the other side of the street before the light changes. Rather, I believe I control the world with my mind.

  Take, for example, Charlotte.

  In the mid-nineties I was courted by an advertising agency in Chicago. At the time, I was working in New York City on the Burger King account, and I was extremely miserable. My life consisted of nothing but shooting commercials for Whopper Value Meals. Leather, as I discovered, absorbs odors, so my shoes smelled like Whopper meat during this period of my life. After six months on the account, even my wallet smelled like dead cow.

  I was ready for a change, and the Chicago agency offered just that. I would have an office that overlooked the lake. I would work on a variety of products, not just one. And I would work for Charlotte.

  When I met her, the first thing Charlotte did was say, “Oh, my God. You’re here! Let’s go have tea and finger sandwiches across the street at the Fairmont.”

  So we crossed the street through an underground strip mall, and we ended up in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel. Here, we enjoyed Earl Grey tea and cucumber sandwiches with the crusts already trimmed off.

  Charlotte was tall, with short blonde hair, which she wore in a trendy “bed-head” fashion. She wore primary colors and earrings in bold, geometric forms leftover from the eighties. She was charming and a little scatterbrained. She changed subjects quickly and without warning, jumping from beautiful Chicago summers to “how can I get rid of the flesh wings under my arms?” She was funny and she was smart, and I loved her completely.

  I accepted the job, after spending that single day in Chicago. The following week, I flew back and met with a broker to look at apartments. I found one near the lake for almost no money and wondered, Why didn’t I move here years ago?

  My first week was bliss. Charlotte frequently stopped by my office just to chat. She loved all my ideas. And she told me to leave every day at five so I didn’t burn out.

  But by the fifth week, another version of Charlotte began to emerge. One not so primary colored.

  I was in a studio on Wacker Drive doing color correction on a cheesecake spot when I got a call from Charlotte.

  “What’s the idea behind this teaser campaign I see on my desk?” she snapped.

  The teaser campaign was something she’d asked me to do for another client. She hadn’t been around, and I was due at the editing studio, so I left the storyboards on her desk with a sticky note.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean, why the fuck isn’t the client’s name in these storyboards, you arrogant cocksucker? You think you can come out here from New York City and start doing commercials that don’t even have the client’s name mentioned? You think we are fucking stupid out here in the Midwest? Because let me tell you, buddy. We invented the motherfucking Dough Boy and the Green Giant.”

  I was horrified and shocked, exactly like when I watched The Exorcist for the first time. A teaser ad typically does not have the client’s brand name mentioned. That’s why it’s called a “teaser.” It’s supposed to be intriguing enough to make you wonder, “Hmmmmm. . . .What interesting brand is that?” So this is what I told Charlotte.

  “Oh, you condescending fuck. I know what the hell a teaser is.” She was screaming now. “You get the fuck back here now, you son of a bitch, and you come see me.”

  I said, “Charlotte, you don’t know what you’re talking about. And I will not be spoken to like this.” I hung up.

  I’d been in advertising for fifteen years, and nobody had ever yelled at me. I’m just not one of those people other people scream at. I’m easygoing. I’m nice. People considered me a swell guy: a drunk but not one you’d call an arrogant cocksucker.

  I went back to the office, furious. My inner serial killer had been activated. Charlotte was going to pay.

  I stepped into her office, and I said, “Screw you. You have serious brain-chemistry issues. I’m quitting and I’m going to tell the president of the agency that I’m quitting because you’re not fit to be a creative director.”

  Charlotte raged at me, her neck bright red and bulging with veins. “You get your ass back in here right this minute.”

  I turned to her and spoke matter-of-factly. “Listen you crazy old snake. Just because your husband is screwing your daughter at home is no reason to take it out on people at the office.”

  Her eyes bulged from her face, and when she opened her mouth, a string of saliva joined her two lips together. I’d shocked her.

  “Put two and two together, Ms. Oblivious,” I continued. “Your daughter’s having trouble at school, your husband is a stay-at-home dad. Everybody in the office knows. We talk about it. Your slut daughter even flirts with some of the older male art directors. It’s pathetic. She’s totally fucking her father, and it’s obvious to everyone here.”

  Of course, I’d made this all up in a moment of inspiration, but she recoiled against the back of her chair.

  I went downstairs to the president’s office, and I explained that Chicago wasn’t going to work for me after all. I detailed what happened with Charlotte, revising everything I said.

  His eyes slid to the floor, and he admitted, “Charlotte can be difficult. We’ve had some problems.”

  Back in New York, I spent the rest of the year loathing Charlotte and then moving past loathing to simply wishing her dead. I decided an emotionally abusive nightmare like Charlotte does not deserve to live. So I willed her under the wheels of a bus.

  The following month I got a phone call from one of the account executives at the Chicago agency. “Did you hear?” she said. “Are you coming?”

  “Coming where?” I asked.

  “To Charlotte’s funeral.”

  What do you know? Charlotte was waiting for an elevator, had an aneurism, and dropped dead, holding an armful of storyboards.

  I hung up the phone smiling and marveled, “That’s even better than a bus.”

  I have also used my powers of magical thinking for good, if you consider tricking Dennis into being my boyfriend “good.”

  Dennis is attracted to muscular black guys, and I am unfortunately not an African American man with large, full buttocks. I am a lanky WASP, the product of centuries of inbreeding. I have almost no butt. I am as pale as the moon.

  And yet I was able to cause Dennis to see me as a homeboy. I sent my thoughts into his eyes, where they rearranged the neural rods and cones of vision and instead of seeing me for what I am, he saw me for what I wanted him to see me as: a bro.

  “And I can’t even get a tan,” I joke to him now, shaking my head at the wonder of it all and sticking my butt out in a pathetic, teasing fashion.

  Once or twice, and a person could easily chalk it all up to coincidence, but coincidence implies a lack of control, a random occurrence. With me, I can manipulate the external influences in my life as surely as I can make a baby cry just by grinning.

  I can give countless examples. I feel certain that conjoined twins are born so that they can later be profiled on the Discovery Channel and watched by me. My hunger for conjoined-twin stories is so powerful that I believe it actually rearranges molecules
in the universe that affect the very cells in the womb. So that when I need it most—when I’m feeling depressed or anxious and turn on the television to distract myself—there’s a two-headed girl in a one-piece bathing suit!

  Skeptics might say “Yes, but who doesn’t enjoy a good conjoined-twin profile on the Discovery Channel? Surely, you can’t think you’re the only one? You didn’t cause them to be born . . .it was a simple matter of an egg not dividing correctly.”

  Fine, another example: I obsess endlessly over wanting a French bulldog puppy. I check websites and call Dennis over to the computer. “Look!” I say. And each time he says, “No way. Absolutely not. We’re not getting a dog.”

  One evening, we find ourselves downtown shopping for halogen light bulbs next door to a place with puppies in the window. “Oh, let’s just go inside and look,” I whine. Dennis agrees. “But just to look. We’re absolutely not getting a dog, Augusten. I’m serious.”

  They have a French bulldog puppy in a cage. He’s skinny and shaking, sickly. He looks more like a lab rat injected with shampoo than a puppy. I ask to see the puppy, and they take him out of the cage and hand him to me. He trembles in my hands, terrified, undoglike.

  At this moment, he becomes mine.

  Dennis says, “Oh, that’s so sad. The poor thing.”

  We put the puppy on the floor, and he trembles, unsteady. The salesman informs us that the dog is from Russia, that he had recently had an operation to treat his “cherry eye.” The salesman says he’s nine weeks old.

  After fifteen minutes, the damaged puppy is slightly less timid. It is able to walk from me to Dennis. When it reaches Dennis’s lap, it tries to climb into it.

  This was on a Friday.

  That Saturday, Dennis, mysteriously, inexplicably intoxicated without the consumption of alcohol, enters the pet store in a supernatural blackout and comes home with the French bulldog puppy.

  The puppy grows into a strong, healthy dog that shrieks and levitates each time Dennis enters the room. The dog is so strong we call it The Beast.

  Dennis cannot imagine life without him. It seems now, we never existed without Bentley, that he has been ours all along, since before he was born.

  Perhaps my supernatural abilities come from my solid spiritual beliefs. I believe in the baby Jesus. And I believe he is handsome and lives in the sky with his pet cow. I believe that it is essential the cow like you. And if you pet the cow with your mind, it will lick your hand and give you cash. But if you make the cow angry, it will turn away from you, forget you exist, and your life will fall into shambles. I believe that as long as the cow likes you, you can get what you want.

  In order to keep in the cow’s favor, you need to “let go and let God,” meaning, you can’t obsess about controlling every little thing. You have to let things unfold naturally and not try to change things you cannot change. On the other hand, I believe that if you’ve made the cow happy by living this way, you’re allowed to ask for favors.

  I tell people my theory, and they think I am either kidding or insane. But think this as they may, I have cow saliva on my hands, and many of them do not.

  My friend Larry complains constantly about his career. And it’s true that he has suffered a series of career setbacks that are stunning in their coincidence. Larry has had a string of such unfortunate luck it can be only one of two things.

  “Either you’ve made the baby Jesus mad or his pet cow hates you,” I tell him. “You need to conjure images of a cow in a field of green, munching on grass. Then you need to reach out and scratch between his ears.”

  Larry tells me to go away.

  But I believe that he does exactly what I say because a month later, he has a new job, and he’s begun using the phrase “the baby Jesus.”

  When I was thirty-four, I decided to stop being an alcoholic and become a New York Times bestselling author. The gap between active alcoholic advertising copywriter living in squalor and literary sensation with a scrapbook of rave reviews seemed large. A virtual canyon. Yet one day, I decided that’s exactly what I would do. And I began writing my first novel, Sellevision.

  Fourteen days later, Sellevision was written, and I had my first manuscript. But I needed an agent, and I didn’t have any idea how to get one. So I bought a book on literary agents that provided me with names and e-mail addresses. Still, how to tell them apart from each other? I decided to send my query letter to literary agents whose names I liked. This seemed as good a method as any. Within a week, seven agents had requested the manuscript. Two weeks later, I began to hear feedback. One agent wrote: “No, this isn’t something I’d be interested in at all. Satire is over.” But another agent was more optimistic: “Well, I liked it. It needs work, but I wouldn’t know what to tell you to revise. I could send it to a couple of publishers, but I wouldn’t accept you as a regular client. It would be a situation where I send the manuscript as is to two or three publishers, and that’s it.” At the end of his note he explained that his office charges for photocopies and postage.

  I immediately opened a new e-mail document and wrote to my friend Suzanne. “Should I go with him? He sounds like he’s willing to lift a finger—a pinkie—but that’s all. And he doesn’t LOVE the manuscript. And who the hell is he? For all I know, he’s some old pervert who’s into taxidermy and lives in a studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. What if some other better real agent comes along? One without a drinking problem and a history of sexually abusing children? But then again, what if no other agent wants me? What should I do? Should I go with this creep?”

  I hit SEND.

  In my excitement, I’d accidentally typed my note to my friend Suzanne in the wrong document. I’d just sent the letter to the agent.

  Instantly, I wrote the agent another e-mail: “As you can see, I am mentally unstable and unfit for representation. I am truly sorry for my horrible comments. I deserve to be electrocuted, I know.”

  I never heard back from him.

  But I did hear back from another agent, who loved the manuscript. He was a very enthusiastic man who laughed at all my mean jokes and he thought the book needed a lot of work, but he was willing to go through it with a red pen and mark up the pages.

  He became my agent, and a couple of months after he helped me revise the manuscript, he sold it.

  I never expected Sellevision to be a bestseller. I called it “my cheese popcorn book.” What I did expect was that Sellevision would be published. Which is exactly what happened.

  Then I wrote a memoir about my childhood. And this, I decided, needed to be a New York Times bestseller, high on the list. It needed to be translated into a dozen languages and optioned for film.

  “You need to tone down your ambitions,” my agent said. “Because you’re only setting yourself up for disappointment.”

  I understood his point of view. I also understood that the book would be huge, not because it was exceptionally well written—in fact, the book felt like a sloppy mess—but nonetheless I knew it would be a bestseller because it had to be a bestseller, so I could quit my loathsome advertising job and write full time. I didn’t have to become rich. I just had to be able to publish another book and then another.

  I needed the book to be a New York Times bestseller because I needed those words “New York Times bestseller” to accompany my name for the rest of my life, even if I never wrote another book that sold more than two copies. It was like “M.D.” I felt I needed those letters to be complete.

  My therapist expressed concern. “Why do you feel you require this event outside yourself to make you happy? It’s something that is not only highly unlikely, but something you have absolutely no control over whatsoever.”

  I merely smiled and said, “You’ll just have to watch and see.”

  After Running with Scissors was published, I was sad to see that the Barnes & Noble at Lincoln Center didn’t have it displayed on the front table, like other new books. Instead, they had it tucked away where nobody would see it. I willed the cha
in to have a corporate scandal and fall into financial ruin. KABOOM: the next day, the free-standing shelf units were removed and my book placed on a large new table.

  A month later, the book reached number five on the Times list. A few months after this, it was sold in nine countries and optioned for film. I quit my advertising job.

  Luck? The greedy wishes of a desperate man randomly fulfilled? No. There are no accidents.

  My editor phones me and says, “Augusten. You need to concentrate hard on DRY. You need to make it another bestseller. I know you can do it. You did it with Running with Scissors, and you need to do it again with DRY.”

  “Okay,” I tell her, as though she has asked me to turn her brother into a toad and I am able to do this. “I will think hard. But first, I’m focused on something else.”

  “What? What are you working on now?” Jennifer believes completely in magical thinking. She says she can do it, too, and I know she can. She is the only other person I know who shares my mental powers.

  “Well, right now I’m obsessed with Elizabeth Smart.”

  “That little girl who went missing from her bedroom?”

  “Yes, exactly. It’s making me crazy that they can’t find her. I need them to find her. Either she has to come home, or they have to find her head on a stick in the woods.”

  “God, I certainly hope she comes home.”

  “I can’t control that. There are limits,” I say.

  “Wow,” Jen says. “Okay, I’ll think of Elizabeth Smart, too. And then we’ll work together on DRY.”

  “Okay, Jen.”

  We hang up.

  Three days later, Elizabeth Smart is found, returned to her parents. No longer a virgin, of course, but at least her head was still attached to her body.

  PUFF DERBY

  K

  now this: the Kentucky Derby is not about the horses. It’s about the hats. These creations are wider than a professional linebacker’s shoulders and cost about as much as his annual salary. They come in all colors, from that pale blue in sanitary napkin commercials to unapologetic red. Profusions of flowers or feathers or both extend at least a foot in every possible eyepoking direction. Know this also: it is apparently a Kentucky State law that the hat and dress must be a coordinated twinset. Therefore, if the dress has violet leopard-print spots, so, too, must the hat. The dress itself must hug the body like a second layer of cells, and if it is above a size four, the wearer of the dress must stay within one hundred yards of the parking lot. Said hat and dress are always, always worn with strappy, open-toed high heels in a complimentary hue.