Magical Thinking: True Stories

by Augusten Burroughs

  But then I considered the statistics: each year four million dogs are “put down” in animal shelters. And twice as many cats. And even at our local supermarket, there is a glue trap designed especially for snakes.

  There isn’t a house in all of Connecticut that doesn’t have a twelve-hundred-dollar “bug zapper” from Brookstone in the backyard. And these are often designed to emit a pleasing glow yet destroy everything that flies into them.

  And, of course, in New York City there are entire committees of suit-wearing professionals devoted to the destruction of rats in Central Park.

  So it did seem that the American way of dealing with a pest was to make a kill.

  I was hoping for a less nefarious solution, so I called my friend Suzanne, who lives in California. Suzanne is one of these people who is always smiling and you can see her smile, even over the phone. She is quintessentially Californian in this way. “Set a trap,” she said. “And then you can take it into a field and let it go.”

  But this required a bit more of a relationship with the opossum than I was willing to have. I just wanted it to go away from wherever it came from and leave me and my dog’s shit alone. The idea of trapping the scavenger in some sort of contraption and then going on a little nature hike with it just so I could then let it go seemed like more than an act of kindness than I was capable. That, to me, was approaching an act of God.

  Wasn’t there some sort of giant mouse trap that would just clamp down on its head? And couldn’t I place this deep in the woods, near the river? And just never, ever go for a walk back there again, so that I wouldn’t have to see it?

  But then Dennis, as he is prone to do, had a brilliant idea. “Why don’t we just get a trash can with a lid.”

  Well . . . yeah? Why didn’t we?

  The next afternoon we bought a small canister designed to hold wood stove pellets. It was smaller than a typical trash can, but it was sturdy. The lid fit snuggly. It was perfect.

  We set the can in the barn, tucked against the wall, right near the door. And for a while, this solution seemed to be perfect.

  Each time Bentley relieved himself on the driveway, we simply collected the mess in a baggie and tossed it in the trash can.

  The opossum, finding nothing of interest on the floor of the barn, did not make another appearance.

  I felt really good, positive, and nature-friendly.

  For a month.

  As adults, Easter morning means little to us. In fact, I don’t think we’ve exchanged baskets or hunted for eggs in all the years we’ve been together. For us, Easter is just another day. But on the Easter Sunday one month after we bought our poo can, we did wake up early. Because there was a little girl screaming in our backyard.

  “Mommy!”

  “What the fuck?” Dennis said.

  I don’t think either of us had ever heard a little girl scream, except on television. If you don’t actually have a little girl, to suddenly hear one screaming in your own backyard is shocking.

  “Mommy! Hurry!”

  We both climbed out of bed and walked across the hall into the guest bedroom. Here, we peered like perverts out the window overlooking the backyard. We were crouched down low, so nobody would see us. And just beyond our yard, in the field that abuts the riverfront, we saw a little girl. She was dressed in a pretty blue dress, bordered in white ribbon. She wore a white hat. In one hand, she held a basket, overflowing with green, artificial Easter grass. In her other hand, she held a plastic bag of dog shit.

  She screamed for her mother again. “I thought it was an egg!” she cried.

  And then Dennis said, “Oh no, look at that. Look over to her left. And there,” he pointed, “to her right, over by that tree.”

  The field was filled with plastic bags. Because it was morning, the sun hit the plastic at an angle and the bags actually appeared to sparkle, like treasures. What little girl wouldn’t see one of the sparkly bags and then run toward it? Only to discover that it contained not candy or perhaps gems, but turds.

  More bags littered our own backyard. And when I pressed my face against the window, I could just make out the front of the barn. And I could just see the trash can turned over on its side. There was no lid.

  “We should have killed it,” Dennis said that evening. We’d spent the afternoon on our own nasty little Easter Egg hunt.

  “Yeah, we should have,” I said. Because I felt pretty certain that sometimes, you really do have to kill. It’s the American way.

  CUNNILINGUSVILLE

  L

  ast weekend, Dennis and I drove to Lancaster County, in southeastern Pennsylvania, otherwise known as Amish country. Ironically, it turns out that the Amish happen to live in towns with names like Blue Ball and Intercourse.

  And these people forbid zippers?

  I thought Dennis was joking when he read the names from the map. “What?” I asked, “No Fist Fucking? Check the map again.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “There should be a Fist Fucking, Pennsylvania. And it should be in Gang Bang County.”

  Had the Amish moved to towns with these names, or had the Amish named the towns after they arrived? It seemed important to know.

  The one thing we did know was that neither Blue Ball nor Intercourse was anything like they were when the Amish first arrived. Because while there were still hints of nature—the occasional farm, a gently rolling pasture or two—most of these towns had been developed into strip malls and superstores. So at any given intersection, you might see Banana Republic and Adidas factory outlet stores. And just across the street, another store twice the size of the Best Buy: a Mishmash Amish Treasures and more!

  The traffic on the narrow, two-lane road that led to Blue Ball was particularly dense. It was bumper-to-bumper from one Wendy’s to the next.

  “Oh my God,” I said, pointing to a remarkable sight out the window.

  “See,” Dennis said. “I told you.”

  In the opposite lane, right behind a white BMW 5 Series sedan, was a small black buggy drawn by a single old horse. The driver appeared to be a man with a peculiar beard and a black hat with a wide brim. But perhaps it was only Kelly McGillis, who is rumored to have moved to this area? Then as we passed the buggy, I could see that it was not Kelly but in fact a real-life Amish man. He was smiling and waving and, to my utter shock, did not appear drunk. Behind him, a line of cars inched forward, the drivers rolling their eyes and slapping at the steering wheels. This peaceful old Amish man was unknowingly being willed cardiac arrest by every driver a mile behind him.

  “Is he insane?” I asked. “I mean, how can he live here? This is like the most commercial area of the state. It’s awful.”

  Dennis agreed. “Yeah, it does seem that strip malls are contrary to the Amish way of life.”

  We watched as the Amish man with the doubtfully clean beard aimed his buggy into the driveway of a small house, instantly freeing the cars behind him. The house was what a real estate agent would optimistically call a “starter home, a fixer-upper.” With its peeling beige paint, its lack of shutters, and its bare dirt lawn, the house was in need of far more than a little TLC. The house needed to be leveled and replaced by an AutoZone, in keeping with the spirit of the neighborhood.

  As we drove past, three little Amish girls were playing in the dirt alongside the house. They wore drab white smock dresses and scarves that resembled dishrags on their heads, covering their hair. They were playing with some sort of curious round wooden hoop. It appeared to be a cross between a toy and some sort of primitive tool for extracting roots or stones from the earth. The girls tossed the hoop to one another, and then one of the girls would bang the hoop on the ground, sending up a cloud of dust and pebbles. This appeared to be the point of the game: to watch the dust rise. I could not imagine my thirteen-year-old nephew trading in his Game Boy for this hoop.

  A small garden was barely visible from the street. This “garden” would be completely unacceptable to Martha Stewart as even a compost area. Any v
egetables that came from this plot of land would most certainly be contaminated with carbon monoxide and every other imaginable traffic carcinogen. Any woman eating a salad from this garden would certainly have a child born with flippers.

  “It wasn’t always like this,” Dennis said, driving on. “It used to be all farms out here, and then the tourists came and ruined everything.”

  But from the look of it, the Amish didn’t seem to mind that the natural beauty of their land had been destroyed. Quite the contrary. The Amish had become filthy rich.

  The streets were lined with Amish souvenir shops, Amish furniture stores, even a corrugated metal warehouse that sold “authentic Amish children’s clothing.” Though I can’t imagine a parent within two thousand miles of this area dressing their child in such a way. “Look, Megan! A burlap pinafore! And a matching bonnet!”

  “So why the fuck,” I wondered, “didn’t they get the hell out of here? How can they live this monastic, Amish life in the midst of such horrid commercialism?”

  It seemed like some mass pathological level of denial, or rabid persistence, a refusal to accept change. Maybe the Amish were not living in a simpler time, holding fast to a more wholesome way of life, but in fact they were mentally ill and in desperate need of power tools.

  “Well, a lot of them have moved to the Midwest,” Dennis said.

  That’s exactly what I would do if I were Amish. I’ve been through Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, and I can tell you, it’s the perfect place to live off the land and avoid zippers.

  “But why didn’t they all move?” I asked as another buggy approached, infuriating the Lexus owner behind it.

  We watched the buggy crawl ahead and the driver behind restrain himself from honking. Because I knew, on the one hand he wanted to honk, wanted badly to slide down the power window and shout “Get that fucking thing into the breakdown lane, you old cocksucker!” But on the other hand, the Amish in the buggy was the reason the driver in the Lexus was here in Blue Ball, so he really couldn’t complain. He wanted quaint, and he got it, at seven miles per hour. Supersize those fries for you?

  Eventually, we found the center of town, which was, actually, rather quaint. The town of Blue Ball itself was more country store than strip mall.

  We parked and began strolling. These stores were not part of larger franchises but appeared to be owned by individuals. Many of the signs were made of wood, hand-carved and leafed with gold. The lure was so powerful that we were sucked into nearly every store. One sold candles that had such an unusual, rustic charm, I bought all seventeen of them. “Do you have a website?” I asked, and the woman behind the counter simply smiled and shook her head, no. I was thrilled with these candles, which smelled of nutmeg, cinnamon, and paraffin. And I felt certain they wouldn’t explode, like the last candles I bought at Pottery Barn had. But then again, this store didn’t have a website and a toll-free customer service number I could call. And if something were to happen with these candles, I don’t believe this little store would send me a five-hundred-dollar gift certificate, and a customer service follow-up phone call the way Pottery Barn had. So in this way, we—the materialistic, commercialized, ruined modern peoples—take good care of ourselves.

  Another store sold quilts. I’m not interested in crafts, as a general rule, but these quilts were very impressive. Just as impressive was the price.

  “Look at this,” I whispered to Dennis, holding up the tag for him to see.

  His reply was a startled intake of air. “Five thousand dollars? That can’t be right.”

  I’d stitched a pair of moccasins when I was fifteen and locked in a mental hospital, so I knew firsthand how difficult it would be to stitch something as large as this quilt. “Oh no,” I said. “I’m sure that’s the right price.”

  “Well, that just proves my point. These Amish are rich, rich, rich,” he said. “It’s easy to look at their houses and their ratty clothes and think they’re poor. But they’re not. They own all this land out here. And what land they don’t own, they sold to the Gap and Walmart for millions.”

  That may be true, I thought. But they don’t have digital cable or Internet access, so really what’s the point of being alive? Civilized life, with all its threats and potential dooms, is too much to bear without the respite of three hundred channels. True, Osama bin Laden may very well send nuclear-bomb–filled suitcases on Amtrak trains into Penn Station, but until then: I Love the 80s on VH1.

  We ambled down the street and into a furniture store. Here, we encountered an amazing solid cherry chest of drawers that was handmade without hardware—it featured tongue-and-groove construction. The wood was so glossy it looked plastic, and the finish smelled faintly of beeswax. When I pulled the drawer out, it slid with solid confidence. It was an excellent piece of furniture. The perfect size to tuck into a small corner of a room, perhaps a place to hold a few sweaters. Nine thousand dollars.

  “It’s tomorrow’s antique . . . today,” Dennis said. And this was true. This isn’t the kind of thing you find at Hold Everything. This is the kind of thing your grandfather might have made, if you had that sort of grandfather, which I didn’t. My grandfather was a Nyquil salesman, and while he did make millions of dollars selling the sticky green cough suppressant, the closest he came to building furniture was specifying red leather for his Cadillac Fleetwood.

  Being in the store surrounded by such fine items activated the intense need section of my brain, and I deeply wanted the handcarved bed, the chest of drawers, the dining room table and matching chairs. The modern furniture in our apartment suddenly seemed incompatible with long life and mental health. Ray and Charles Eames were, in retrospect, total hacks having a little fun with some plywood.

  We crossed the street, and an old lady in the passenger seat of a buggy waved at us. She was a happy, nice-looking lady, and her wave contained no sexual innuendo, no sarcastic irony as one might expect in Manhattan. Her warmth was so genuine and pure, I was taken aback. I managed to smile back at her and even wave. But suddenly, I wanted to chase after her and make her my mother. I wanted to scream, “Take me with you! Make me a dresser!”

  The fact is, you can’t fake that kind of warmth. You just can’t. I’ve tried. And it seems to me, you just don’t encounter such warmth from strangers that often, unless they’re drunk or have a hard-on.

  So maybe, I thought, these Amish aren’t in denial or mentally ill. Maybe they really are living better, richer, more wholesome lives, even if they are surrounded by Gap outlet stores and tourists. Maybe they have found some sort of excellent secret and are living with it, letting the world accelerate and brake and scream and crash and blow up around them. By day they offer us their Amishness, then at night they go home and experience a level of humanity and connection we’ve traded for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and The 700 Club.

  While the name Blue Ball does bring to mind an image of a horny testicular cancer survivor, these Amish seem oblivious to the tawdry innuendo of their town’s name. And somehow, this made me feel mentally ill and in denial.

  As she passed by, the buggy lady did not break eye contact, and she did not lower her hand. She continued to wave, like a queen. And I did the same, waving back, like her subject.

  So what if she didn’t go online and look at porn or use zippers? What have zippers ever really done for me?

  They are, after all, just something for a dick to hang out of.

  I KID YOU NOT

  N

  ow that gay people are allowed to adopt children, the new gay thing in Manhattan is to be a parent. Just ten years ago, this was unheard of. Then it was all about having a shar-pei puppy, the more wrinkles the better.

  You never see shar-peis anymore. Like in-line skates, they’re all gone now. And where did they go? I think the gay guys dropped off their shar-peis at animal shelters on the way to JFK to pick up their new, adopted third-world babies.

  These days, it’s all about Baby Gap and Abercrombie Kids. It’s about play dates and hunky pediatri
cians with tattooed forearms.

  But Dennis and I will have none of this madness.

  Neither of us wants to accept the special challenges presented by a severely handicapped Romanian child or a baby who was born addicted to crack and has only half a head.

  As Dennis says, “That’s what they give us. The day-old-bread kids, the dented-can kids.”

  And we don’t want them.

  “So, are you guys going to have kids?” people ask us, as though this is the single defining proof of our commitment to each other.

  “God, no,” I say. I make a face, as though asked if I would ever consider having my intestines surgically moved to the outside of my body.

  “But you’d make such great parents!”

  Yes and no. Dennis would make a good parent. He loves to cook, and he does it extremely well. He listens. He nurtures. He flosses.

  But this relationship contains two people, and the other one is unfit.

  Whenever I see a baby-slapper on CNN, I think, There but for the grace of God.

  I’m terrified of what sort of parent I would make. First, because I am startlingly self-centered. I require hours alone each day to write about myself. It takes no leap of imagination to know that in our home, there would be a Sony Playstation in every room. “Leave daddy alone and go make it to level four. And Daddy will give you ten bucks if you put it on mute.”

  Another problem is that I was raised without proper parenting myself. So I really have no wisdom to impart. If a bully so much as touched him at school, my kid would be armed with a stun gun the next day.

  And I have a wide, deep cruel streak. This is not something I am proud of. But it’s a fact I’ve come to accept about myself. Maybe I’ll bring it up in therapy, after I have addressed my other issues (fear of intimacy, sexual dysfunction, obsessive-compulsive behavior, social anxiety disorder, and mania).

  Last week Dennis and I were browsing in a store in Northampton, Massachusetts, that sells a selection of incongruous though carefully chosen items. For example, they sell dishwashing detergent with retro, nineteen-fifties packaging alongside greeting cards handmade from fibrous paper and flowers picked from a lesbian’s garden. I happened to be looking at a beautiful book of magic spells and incantations when I stepped just a few inches to my left and shifted my weight onto that leg.