Magical Thinking

by Augusten Burroughs

  This is Easter with gigantic, leaking breast implants.

  I know these things because last week, Dennis and I drove from Manhattan to Louisville for Derby Day. But as mesmerizing as these hats are, my eyes were involuntarily drawn to the faces of the ladies who wore them. Though many were in their early twenties, they’d already racked up multiple face-lifts, evidenced by their unnaturally uniform skin and a nearly identical facial expression: “Southern cordial.” These Dixie chicks wear so much makeup that if you touched one of their cheeks, your finger would look as though you’d just dipped it into a jar of Skippy.

  These ladies have one final accoutrement: a man’s arm hooked territorially—predatorily, even—around their waists. The arm is clad in a flawless Hickey-Freeman seersucker suit. At the wrist: a heavy, shiny Rolex. On the hand: a wedding band, sized slightly up for easy removal in airport lounges.

  The men don’t have hats, but they do have thick, penis-width cigars protruding from the smug corners of their mouths. Their mere presence say “old money/young wife.”

  Yet for all their composure and utter self-confidence, not one of these ladies or gentlemen passed by our seats without giving us a look of mild curiosity tinged with jealousy.

  Dennis and I were dressed in shorts from Abercrombie, oxfordcloth shirts, and loud striped ties. We both wore linen navy blazers and baseball caps. Dennis wore Nikes; I wore New Balance. The security guard at the front gate remarked, “This is the best outfit I’ve seen today,” as she scanned Dennis’s camouflage cargo pockets with her wand. Apparently she’d already had her fill of plastic women in dangerous headgear.

  But our outfits were not the source of Derby envy. Quite simply, we had the best seats at Churchill Downs. Private box seats, right on the track, at the finish line. The box seats belong to Dennis’s friend Sheila or, more accurately, to Sheila’s grandfather, Doc Twining.

  Doc Twining was a doctor in the day when being a doctor meant something grand, like a Cadillac Eldorado convertible, a large home without a mortgage, and a lake house for the summer. He was a surgeon, saved lives in World War Two, and became best friends with the governor of Kentucky. Thus, the box seats. He probably paid for them with a round of drinks and a handshake. Or perhaps a free appendectomy. These days, a typical doctor who worked for an HMO might not even be able to afford digital cable to watch the Derby on TV.

  When Doc Twining dies, the box reverts to the Derby, where it will be auctioned yearly to the highest bidder. Sadly, a corporation will probably be the highest bidder, and uncouth middle managers at a snack-chip company will occupy the box. I imagine they will wave flags of some sort. Perhaps they will brandish sticks.

  But last weekend, the box belonged to six of us: Dennis, me, Sheila, Sheila’s husband, mother, and brother. The brother was fresh out of prison, having served time for an unnamed crime. He wore gray polyester slacks and a Hawaiian shirt and ate beef jerky. He seemed like a really cool guy and for a moment I thought, Maybe I should commit a petty crime just to see what jail is really like.

  At the start of the third race, a young black man approached our box with a tray of mint juleps. They were in glass glasses, with tall sprigs of mint sticking up higher than the straws. Just like one of the Hats. I ordered a round for everybody except myself, because I don’t drink. As each julep was pulled from the tray, I saw that the glasses were encrusted with ice. Such civility.

  As I sat in the box watching the glossy and ultramuscular horses blur past me, I thought about how unlikely it was that I was at the Derby in the first place. In one sense I am a highly likely candidate, since it would be difficult to find a person whose blood was a more perfect shade of blue than mine. On my father’s side I am a descendant of the original Jamestown colonists, who arrived in America in 1620, a few years before the Mayflower. My mother’s people owned enormous pecan orchards and Taralike plantation houses in southern Georgia. My ancestors were judges, doctors, lawyers, mayors, governors, and land owners.

  Unfortunately, a wide streak of mental illness, alcoholism, and irresponsibility runs through my family tree like a sort of gypsymoth rot. So while I may, indeed, be a blue-blooded, purebred American with roots in the Great South, I no longer have my papers.

  So I sat there in the Derby box feeling a bit like an imposter. “Got any more of those?” I asked the former inmate. He handed me a greasy stick of jerky.

  During the seventh race, a man in a blindingly white suit approached our box and, seeing that it was full, stood at the opening of the box next to ours, the one just slightly ahead of the finish line. A murmur rippled through the box, and I heard the word “Daddy,” a word that for various reasons always gets my attention.

  His diamond earrings flashed in the sun. Of course: P. Diddy (formerly Sean “Puffy” Combs), rap star, music producer, recently acquitted gun-out-the-window-thrower. A small entourage of impeccably dressed and very handsome black men huddled behind him.

  A crowd materialized, and there seemed to be less oxygen in the air. The dozens of photographers in front of us on the track now turned around to face Puffy. Auto-focus lenses whirred into action. Flashes fired.

  “Puffy!” yelped one of the debutantes. “A picture? Pretty please, Daddy?”

  Puffy extended his arm, and the girl parted the crowd and slid right in. Flashes exploded on their faces. The light around us popped.

  The crowd seemed to close in on our little box. Puffy signed autographs, signed anything passed to him. He held a cigar between his teeth. There was not a single smudge on his white suit. His Rolex shone. When he spoke, he sounded like a senator.

  Even without his white, white suit, Puff Daddy would have been the whitest man at the Derby. And yet I couldn’t help but think: all these Hats, swooning over him, their faces melting into smiles, their bodies leaning into him, their eyes trained on his every gesture—these ladies wouldn’t give him a quarter to save his life if he were wearing sweat pants, a Fubu jersey, and a backward baseball cap. Yet now, I was certain, any of them would have been proud to bear his children. The men, too. Any one of them would happily shrug, “What the hell?” and be his bitch.

  People sneer at “new money.” Until, that is, they are actually face-to-sneer with it. Puffy single-handedly stole the show from the Hats, who had themselves stolen it from the horses.

  “Nice outfits, guys,” he said to Dennis and me, leaning over the railing that separated our box from his. He nodded and made an effort to reach over and shake our hands. He had the sincerity of JFK and certainly as much charm.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  We were dressed for comfort, with a nod to tradition. Puffy was dressed for tradition, with a nod to world domination. The ladies were dressed to impress and found themselves hopelessly in awe of a black man who had reinvented himself as the richest, whitest man at the Derby.

  I didn’t feel so out of place then.

  MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH

  D

  ennis and I live in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side, in a large studio apartment that overlooks the new Trump development along the river. From our living room, we can peer into the two-million-dollar apartments across the street and admire the popcorn ceilings and overhead fluorescent lights that apparently come standard in every kitchen. We used to have a view of the Hudson River, but this is no longer the case. We now get a sliver of sky and a chunk of New Jersey, and that is all, which is clearly not enough for anyone. So we’ve decided that this summer, we need “a place in the country.” A place where we can go to decompress and look at trees in their natural habitat. As opposed to trees that have been reformed into particle board and placed into a Trump window frame.

  So we began looking at houses in western Massachusetts. And we recently found a farmhouse from the seventeen-eighties that has been fully restored by its current owner, a New Yorker. This means all the molding has been stripped and left tastefully bare, the wide pine floors polished with European wax. In the kitchen there is a sink made of slate and
the faucet is from Paris, but it’s not fancy; it’s blissfully plain in a way that only the French could manage to pull off. I’m dead certain this faucet has added twelve thousand dollars to the price of the house.

  In the living room is an enormous beehive fireplace complete with Dutch oven. This fireplace is what made us want the house. This is a fireplace a person of six feet can nearly stand in. The bricks are, of course, handmade.

  There is a huge apple tree in front and just below this, an old stone wall that has mostly melted into the earth. The house is on eighty acres of pastures and woodlands. At the western edge of the yard there is even a post-and-beam barn with a bright red door, like an Elizabeth Arden spa. This barn has plumbing, a soapstone woodstove, and two bedrooms.

  In other words, this is a perfect house. The ultimate escape hatch from the stress of the city, yes?

  Actually, no.

  This house would, in fact, triple your stress. Because you would feel the need to be accountable to it. It would be like dating royalty: a fine idea in the abstract but draining financially and emotionally.

  When you shopped for furniture, you would find yourself thinking words like “honest” and “authentic,” and then nothing would ever be good enough and the one small thing that was good enough would cost you seven thousand dollars and would be fragile. No way could you ever go to Target, ever again. You would shop in places where you ran into Martha Stewart and Barbra Streisand, and they would both outbid you for everything.

  In a normal house, if you have a clogged drain you call a plumber. But in this antique New England Cape, a clogged drain would require a certified specialist and possibly even approval from the registry of historic homes.

  And this, I understand now, is why the New Yorkers must sell it. It is too flawless a house to actually live in. It is a house to sit in and be photographed, not a house to sit in and eat eggs. You could absolutely never fart in this house.

  In desperation I phoned a real estate agent on Nantucket. I said, “I’m just looking for a little summer shack. A writer’s shack, really, very sort of simple and crude. Doesn’t have to be on the water but close enough to walk.”

  She chuckled and said, “Let me think.” And for a moment, there was silence, and then I heard her tapping on her keyboard. “Okay, okay,” she said. “I think I have something here. It’s like you want, very Hemingway-ish, very rustic, and sort of iconoclastic: one bedroom, kitchen, living room, bath, eighth of an acre. Eight hundred thousand.”

  It was beginning to seem that Dennis and I would be trapped in Manhattan forever, unless one of us won the Powerball lottery.

  But then I got an idea. What about a log cabin? What if we bought a piece of land in the Berkshires and then bought one of those log cabins, from a kit?

  The truth is, I’ve always fantasized about living in a log cabin. Maybe because I had such an unstable childhood, I deeply crave a house made of solid, ten-inch timbers. A house without drywall. A house made of solid trees that has a great, two-story fieldstone fireplace dividing the living room and the kitchen.

  As it turned out, Dennis had a similar fantasy. “I’d live in a log cabin,” he said. “As long as it didn’t have animal heads on the wall.”

  So I went online and discovered that one of the log-home manufacturers had a model home in Massachusetts, right in the general area where we would want to buy land and build our own home. The following Saturday, we drove there to inspect the house.

  The model log home was located on a busy street, filled with fast-food restaurants and industrial park buildings. Not exactly what we’d envisioned for our dream home, but the house was there, strong and woody, and it was easy to picture it in a field or nestled in a clutch of pine trees.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” said the warm, blonde-haired woman who was standing in the center of the Great Room when we stepped inside. “My name is Joanne. How can I make your log-home dreams come true?” She was wearing a patchwork vest and a rust-colored cotton turtleneck. Around her neck was a thin gold chain with a cross.

  We smiled. Dennis said, “Hi. We’re just sort of, you know, just looking. Just starting to look. This is the first time we’ve seen a log cabin.”

  “Well,” she said, as she approached us, “this isn’t a log cabin; it’s a two-thousand-four-hundred-square-foot log home. This particular model is called the Timberdream, and it’s perfect for families who like to entertain or who have a lot of children. Feel free to take a look around,” she said, making a general sweeping gesture with her arm. “You’ll find the bedrooms upstairs, along with a loft that overlooks this Great Room. On this floor you’ll find the kitchen just over there on the other side of the fireplace. Down the hall over there is where the laundry room and pantry are located. And at the other end is a den, which is easily converted into a fourth bedroom.” Then her eyes got wider. “And downstairs,” she said, “is a finished basement.”

  Was it my imagination, or did she look at my crotch when she said this? Did she look at both of our crotches? Was she thinking, Gay guys . . . basement . . . leather straps suspended from the ceiling . . .

  “Thanks,” I said and moved away from her, heading to the kitchen.

  “Wow,” Dennis said. “This is amazing.”

  And it was amazing. The kitchen gleamed with what I can only imagine must have been a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of the finest appliances. A Wolf range, a Subzero refrigerator with glass doors, a hammered-copper hood over the range.

  “I think this kitchen costs more than what we could spend on a whole house,” Dennis said.

  Joanne appeared behind us. “With our kits, you have options. You have flexibility. You can choose to create a dream kitchen, like this one. Or you can opt for a more moderate arrangement. Standard with each of our kits are solid hardwood cabinets, an electric range, refrigerator, and microwave oven. But as you can see, you are free to customize your home any way you like.”

  We explored the rest of the house, feeling most intoxicated when we reached the mud room. “Imagine having our own washer and dryer and not having to give our laundry to the laundry wench,” I said. The laundry wench worked in the lobby of our building. She had her own room where she collected everybody’s laundry, sent it off to be washed and damaged, then gave it back to you, folded, at the end of the day. Years of handling Upper West Siders’ eighty-five-dollar bras had made her bitter.

  “I like the fireplace,” Dennis said, admiring the two-story fieldstone fireplace exactly as we’d imagined it.

  “That,” Joanne said, “is an amazing fireplace. But you should keep in mind that a fireplace such as this one will add about sixty thousand dollars to the price of the home.”

  Here, I paused. If the fireplace added sixty thousand dollars, how much more would my special features add?

  Because there was no way I was living in a log cabin in the woods unless the entire basement was a large panic room. I would have to have two-foot-thick concrete walls throughout. Broadband Internet access. A vault door that was both blast and chemical agent proof. I would need a basement that could sustain us for at least a month. In addition, whatever house we built in the woods would need to be secured by a fourteen-foot-high chain-link fence surrounding the property. The fence would need to be electrified.

  I voiced some of my concerns to Joanne, but she only absently fondled the cross around her neck and said, “I’m not sure I even understand what sort of house you’re talking about. Because that doesn’t seem like a house. That seems like some sort of military compound, and we certainly do not sell military compounds.”

  Back in the car Dennis said, “Where did that come from?”

  “What?” I said.

  “That panic room and electrified-fence stuff.”

  “Oh. Well, you know. If we’re gonna live in the country, we have to be safe.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Dennis said. “You can have a little pen in the backyard with an electrified fence around it.”

  T
his made me happy. Dennis always looked after me, indulged me, spoiled me rotten, like meat in the sun.

  “Okay,” I said and leaned over the seat to kiss him.

  Back home in New York, we went through the book that Joanne gave us. The book contained two hundred log-home plans, along with prices. I thought it was fantastic that you could just pick a house out of this catalogue and then . . . have it built! Like ordering a sandwich from Subway.

  Dennis, ever practical, suggested that we order more catalogues from more log-home companies. This is smart, as I would have simply picked a floor plan out of this book and then placed my order. But Dennis is not a take-what-you-can-get-and-be-glad-you-got-it sort of guy.

  I went online and visited the websites for as many log-home companies as I could find. Then I sent away for their brochures.

  And for the next week, we spent our free time looking at floor plans, an activity that proved to be entirely overwhelming. To make matters even worse, all the floor plans could be combined, mixed, and matched. So you could have the master bedroom you like from the Eagle’s Nest together with that great in-law suite from the Montana. Then, if you wanted, you could steal the loft from the Pine Crest but use the loft railings from the Dusty Rose.

  The process made me increasingly more anxious, and my obsessive-compulsive disorder went into overdrive. I began to twitch frequently, wash my hands every half hour, and adjust my glasses constantly. I took an extra ten milligrams of Lexapro to keep my symptoms in check.