Magical Thinking: True Stories

by Augusten Burroughs

  At the next class where we were all to demonstrate our poses, I intentionally saved myself for last. I wanted to watch the other students, so that I could modify, if need be, my pose. I was going to be the star of the class, this much I had decided. But to my surprise, the poses were very ordinary. The men chose standing poses, mostly from the Sears catalogue. They stood, and they looked off into the distance, and they pointed. This, I knew, was a pose that only worked if you were standing next to another person. Other people chose to lean against the wall, legs crossed in front, face turned to the side. And while I thought this was a legitimate pose for a bathrobe or perhaps a scoop-neck sweater, I felt it was a limiting pose and not one I would have selected. Amazingly, nobody chose the Brooke Shields Calvin Klein pose. I had felt certain that I wouldn’t be the only student to bring this electrifying pose to class. But apparently the other students had naturally gravitated toward a certain comfort zone, a safety area without risks: mediocrity.

  Finally, it was my turn, and I assumed my position on the floor. Even with my short hair and no fan, I could feel myself resemble Brooke. I glanced quickly at Phillip’s eyes, to see if I could gauge his reaction. And for one brief instant, I felt I saw awe in his eyes. But I wasn’t sure. It may have merely been the hair-spray fumes, which had replaced the oxygen in the room. The entire building smelled like hair spray and nail-polish remover. The men’s restroom smelled like face powder.

  Phillip cornered me as everyone was collecting their notebooks, magazine clippings, and towels after class. He spoke in a low voice that seemed to suggest wisdom and authority. “You have real potential as a floor model. I mean, you work that floor.”

  Had I heard him correctly? “Floor, um, floor model?? What, you know, exactly is that?” It sounded exotic, like a cosmologist who scans the sky for only collapsing stars.

  He nodded. Phillip didn’t have the looks or the height to be a model, but he had the polish, and he certainly had the passion. Although the curious thing about him was that he was clearly a straight man. He was like some variant breed of straight man that seemed like a fag. “There are catalogue models, runway models, hand models, crotch models, and there are floor models. These are, you know, models who just really do well in a horizontal position. Some people? They just look wrong on a floor. Take Cheryl Tiegs. You never see her lying down, no way. Cheryl just doesn’t work when she’s horizontal because she’s actually got saddlebags. Neither does Christy Brinkley, although she’s very thin. She just doesn’t work when she’s flat because she looks slutty. But you know, there’s a lot of work for a model who can work a floor. There’s bedding, nightwear, and then the more avant garde. The eighties are going to change everything. With ‘new wave’ and everything, it’s just real exciting.”

  So there were specialties. I hadn’t realized that modeling was such a parallel career to medicine. The decision between runway model and floor model was easily as difficult as the one between infectious disease and proctology.

  But I still wasn’t convinced that I had the looks to be a top male model. I worried that my eyes were too deep-set and that my nose, while Roman, was too long. If I were going to be a top male model, I would have to be ruthlessly honest with myself. “Truly, do you think I have any chance? Or is this just a waste of time?”

  Phillip bit his lower lip and touched his fingers to his intensely hair-sprayed hair. “I think you need to grow into your looks. I think you’re going to really bloom in four, five years.”

  “Thanks,” I said. Maybe he was right. Maybe I would bloom. This gave me hope. I’d forgotten I was only a teenager and that I would change. Perhaps my eyes would begin to push out from my head. Maybe my face would grow in around my nose. And while this did comfort me somewhat, it also alarmed me. There were too many variables. If my biology decided to screw with my looks, it wouldn’t matter how ambitious I was; I’d never be a top male model. The Barbizon instructors would surely understand this. For they were people who had enormous ambitions to make it to the top of the modeling profession but whose genetics had other plans. Their genetics said, “Oh no. You can’t be a top model. But you can teach modeling at a franchise school!”

  Phillip patted me on the shoulder, like a coach. “Now I want you to tape that picture of Brooke Shields up on your wall, and I want you to study it night and day. When I see you again next Saturday, I want to see your leg at the exact same angle as Brooke’s. Remember your butt. And really take a close look at how she’s got her fingers splayed behind her and the way her eyebrow is cocked just so.” He cocked his eyebrow just so. “If you spend a good couple of hours a day, I don’t see any reason why you can’t master that pose. I really think you can do it.”

  “Okay, I will,” I said, trying to sound optimistic, trying to hide my doubts.

  Phillip playfully socked me on the shoulder. “You can do it, sport.”

  And for the first time in my life, I knew how it must feel to be a valued member of the football team.

  In my own defense, modeling school hadn’t been my idea. It was my mother’s friend Suzette’s. “Jesus, just look at him! He’s gorgeous! He’s so tall . . . and that hair! What magazine wouldn’t snatch him right up!”

  I was tall, skinny, and had thick, wavy blond hair: all the qualities that ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the female population equate with beauty. To Suzette, modeling school made perfect sense. Especially considering I had dropped completely out of normal school and had seen Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon six times.

  But my mother wasn’t as enthusiastic. “I’m just not sure, Suzette. I mean, that sounds awfully expensive. And we just don’t have the money. Augusten’s son-of-a-bitch father has really cut us off financially.”

  Suzette said, “I’ll pay!” Which was the only argument my mother ever needed on any topic in order to be swayed.

  “Oh, Suzette,” my mother dripped with polished gratitude. “That would be such a wonderful, supportive act of love.” I’d heard her say the exact same thing to people who had offered to pay her car insurance, rub her feet, or sneak a Frida Kahlo print into whatever mental hospital she was occupying at the time.

  The next month, I was enrolled in my first class.

  Of course, I’d seen the famous Barbizon ads in the backs of magazines for years. They were small black-and-white ads, featuring a handsome square-faced man with the headline “TRAIN TO BE A MODEL . . . OR JUST LOOK LIKE ONE!”

  And while it’s true that I was obsessed with my hair, with all things vapid or flashy, and with celebrity in general, I’d never considered a career in modeling.

  That all changed the moment I saw the glamorous offices of the Barbizon School. I was convinced. This is me. I was born to be a top male model.

  The Barbizon School was located in a strip mall in Springfield, Massachusetts, tucked between a Radio Shack and a clothing store for plus-size women. When you stepped through those doors, you left the world of weak chins and superfluous hair behind. Smoky mirrors covered the walls, and a mauve sectional sofa created an intimate conversation pit. Framed photographs of Barbizon success stories lined the walls: a woman in a newspaper ad for JC Penney, a Sears print ad featuring a man in a kelly green Izod. In one ad for a tampon, an attractive teenage girl addressed her mother with the headline “Will I still be a virgin?”

  Junior high school, with its drab cinderblock walls and flat black chalkboards, simply couldn’t compare. Suddenly, it made perfect cosmic sense that I had dropped out. This was my destiny. This was my calling.

  “This is a cuticle pusher,” Sharon explained to the class. “Never, never, never cut your cuticles. Moisten them first, really get the skin soft. And then push them back with this little stick.”

  We were in manicure and makeup class, a required course even for the men.

  At first I thought this was silly. Makeup for men?

  “I’m telling you,” Sharon said. “Nine times out of ten when you go on a black-and-white shoot, you’ll be doing your own makeup
.” She turned to the men. “You’ll be darkening your razor stubble, bringing out your bone structure. You’ll be hiding those dark circles under your eyes. Makeup for black-and-white photography is very different from makeup for color. Color means a print ad, not just a newspaper ad. And if you get magazine work, you’re doing really, really well.”

  Sharon hadn’t done “really, really” well as a model. She had been a flight attendant for Pan Am for ten years, but only domestic and not the more coveted international. Then she’d been a hand model in Miami. This surprised me because her hands were absolutely enormous and surely would have dwarfed anything they held, with the exception of a Big Gulp from 7-Eleven. But realistically, Sharon didn’t have the face to be even a catalogue model. She had a horse face: long and boxy, with large ears and a nose with a bulbous tip. And although I understood her face for what it was the instant I saw her, it took Sharon years to accept her own lack of traditional beauty. “I’m just not that pretty,” she said. “I have nice hands, and I have nice legs. But my face is just so-so. But I make the most of it. And that’s what you’re going to learn to do here.”

  I liked Sharon more than the other modeling instructors because she didn’t seem resentful that she was teaching as opposed to modeling.

  Phillip, for example, always seemed slightly hostile that he still had not achieved a magazine cover. It seemed obvious to me that Phillip would always be a modeling teacher and not a model. But he, himself, had not come to this conclusion. Phillip apparently still had ambitions of one day leaving this teaching crap and ending up with his face on a Times Square billboard in an advertisement for Salem cigarettes or perhaps a Norelco shaver. “It’s a tough-as-nails business,” he would say on cigarette break.

  But Sharon really liked teaching. Maybe if I’d had her for Greek mythology at Amherst Regional Junior High School, I might not have left in the first place.

  “Nice shadow,” she said to me after I applied dark mascara to the line of my cheekbone. “Looks pretty funny here under the lights, but in a black-and-white photo, that would be incredible. You really have excellent bones.”

  Coming from Sharon, who had certainly spent years studying her own sad bones in the mirror, this compliment thrilled me. If anybody knew about good bones, it would be the woman who didn’t have them.

  My favorite class was called “Expressions.” Here, we gathered in a conference room and sat around a large oval table holding hand mirrors. Phillip led the class.

  “We all look at our faces every day in the mirror. When we shave, when we brush our teeth, and if we’re ladies, when we apply our makeup.” Then Phillip’s voice lowered to nearly a whisper as he became philosophical. “But how well do we really know our faces?”

  I knew that my nose was too big and my ears were uneven, the right one slightly higher than the left. I also knew how I looked when I gave a blow job because I’d done it with a banana in front of a mirror.

  “You need to know exactly how your face looks when you make any facial expression.”

  All my years of staring at myself in the mirror had, at this moment, paid off. All along, I’d been doing my homework for this moment.

  Then he instructed us. “Look into your mirrors.”

  First we all glanced at each other nervously. There was some soft laughter. It was weird to be sitting in a room full of people and then stare into a hand mirror. But that’s what I did.

  “Okay, smile,” Phillip said. “And as you do, watch the different stages of the smile. As your lips begin to move up at the corners and then a little higher and then a little higher. When you’re in front of the camera, the photographer is going to expect you to be in complete control of your facial expressions. He’s going to say ‘a little less smile,’ and you’re going to know what ‘a little less’ means.”

  For an hour and a half we smiled.

  When I began raising my eyebrows, first my right then my left, Phillip stopped me. “Augusten, don’t get ahead of yourself. Today we’re working below the nose. We’re focused on the mouth.”

  I felt scolded. And I was surprised that he wasn’t thrilled that I already had independent control over my eyebrows.

  “You need to perfect a half smile, a full smile, and everything in between; every smirk and almost smirk.”

  He was right, I knew. I needed to memorize every single facial expression I was capable of making. If it meant staring into a mirror for twelve hours a day, I would do it. Which, it turned out, is exactly what I did.

  For hours a day, I gazed into the mirror laughing, frowning, flirting. I imagined a camera pointed at my face, a shutter clicking. In my mind, Francesco Scavullo was shouting “Beautiful, wonderful, now just give me eighty percent less smile. Lower on the right side. No, not that much. Yes, just like that!”

  I spent so much time making facial expressions in the mirror that to this day, more than two decades later, when I laugh people say it looks fake.

  Which it is.

  I am now wholly incapable of making a normal, natural facial expression. All my reactions seem studied and rehearsed because they are.

  Nobody ever warned me there would be delayed, long-term effects from modeling school. This wasn’t in their gate-fold brochure or in mouse-type on the retail sales agreement. Nobody ever told me that if I went to Barbizon, I’d be fake for the rest of my life.

  Graduation wasn’t a black-cape affair with speeches from the dean of students and the class president. It was a fashion show at JC Penney in Agawam. We rehearsed for a month leading up to the event. And during this time we also had classes in assembling our professional portfolios, interview skills, business essentials, and half an hour of ethics.

  Sharon pulled me aside after one class and said, “I think you’re going to do really well. You’re the most ambitious student I’ve ever seen in my life.” She was wearing glitter eye shadow, and this touched me because a pretty woman probably would have been too vain to wear glitter. Sharon was able to have some fun with her face, not take it too seriously.

  Phillip was cooler. “Good luck out there,” he said, and he gave my hand a firm pump. Because we were standing so close, I detected the slightest hint of alcohol on his breath. So, clearly, graduation was a difficult time for him.

  On graduation night, I led my female partner down the runway. The theme of the show was “Romance Is in the Air” because it was late January. I wore a rented pale blue polyester tuxedo, and she wore a beaded fuchsia ball gown and a tiara with glittery pink stones. At the end of the runway, we kissed and then executed flawless pivots before walking back.

  And after eight long months, I was a Barbizon model. My whole future as a top male model lay before me, and I was excruciatingly aware of this fact. It seemed predestined. Therefore, all the pressure was suddenly off. I thought, I’m going to be a top male model someday, so for now I’m just gonna hang around the house and smoke.

  I DATED AN UNDERTAKER

  T

  he most distracting thing about getting a blow job at a funeral home wasn’t the fact that there were three fresh bodies downstairs in the cooler or one dead body twenty feet away from me in a casket across the room. The most distracting thing was that I was getting this blow job from an undertaker at a prestigious funeral home, in the exact same viewing room where the wake for Rose Kennedy took place.

  “Right over there,” he said, after I shot my wad.

  We were naked, sitting on the thick carpet, with our backs against the sofa. I was smoking a Marlboro Light. He was smoking a menthol. I reached for a tissue and didn’t have to reach far; there were boxes of tissues everywhere. It was very convenient for this.

  “Wow,” I said. “Can you imagine what the Kennedy family would do if they knew what happened here thirty seconds ago?”

  He chuckled and took a deep drag from his cigarette. “The Kennedys? Are you kidding? Shit, they wouldn’t care. They’ve seen worse. They’ve done worse.”

  I liked the undertaker, but it wasn’t lo
ve.

  Let me just get this out of the way right off the bat: I am not now, nor have I ever been, into dead bodies. Nor into the people who make it their lives to work with them.

  We met in the twenty-first century gay guy way: online. He placed a funny ad and I answered it. We exchanged e-mails. One of them made me laugh and spit café mocha on my keyboard.

  He was also mysterious because he wouldn’t tell me what he did for a living. “I’m in packaging,” he wrote. I suspected he was just being a coy fashion designer.

  We graduated to speaking on the phone. He was more contemplative than I imagined. A little more serious. His mellow, masculine voice brought to mind images of a methodical patent attorney or perhaps an oceanographer, in other words, a career that did not involve a dark suit and pinkie ring.

  “I won’t meet you unless you tell me what you do,” I joked.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “I’m an undertaker.”

  I laughed. “No, I’m serious. What do you do?”

  “I’m not kidding,” he said pleasantly. “I manage a funeral home. I deal in prearrangements. I don’t actually do the embalming anymore. Haven’t for years.”

  Dead silence.

  “So,” he said. “Want to go to the zoo?”

  I did sort of want to go to the zoo with an undertaker. But I had to clear the air first. “How do I know you’re not some kind of freak? That you’re not gonna stab my eyes out with an ice pick when I get in the car?”

  “Hey, I’m a nice guy. We always leave the eyes in.”

  Hmmm. “Okay, Pick.” And he was instantly nicknamed.

  ______

  He came for me the next Saturday in his wine-colored minivan. “Twenty-five cubic feet of storage,” he said with a wink. A small placard sat in the window, facing out. It read: FUNERAL DIRECTOR ATTENDING FUNERAL—DO NOT TICKET. I appreciated the implied threat. What police officer would dare ticket Death’s minivan?