Magical Thinking: True Stories

by Augusten Burroughs

  I felt something under my foot, an unevenness. It hardly registered, it was so subtle. Almost like a floorboard beneath the carpeting was warped. Just the same, I glanced down and was surprised to see the hand of a little girl, almost a little baby girl.

  She couldn’t have been more than two, because she didn’t have any teeth. I saw this now because her mouth was all the way open, and her eyes—both of them—mirrored her mouth. Her whole face was all the way open. She was about to scream; I was certain. The wonderful thing about children is that they do not yet have complex emotions. They have the starter set of factory-standard emotions. And they cannot hide them. She was feeling the shock of pain in her little fingers, and she was going to scream.

  I quickly slid away. I walked a good twelve feet to my right and began fingering the display of colorful wool pillows.

  And that little girl screamed. It was shrill and passionate, and her mother came immediately to the rescue.

  The mother had been standing just a few feet to the left of the little girl, inspecting some soy-based gift-wrapping paper. Now, the mother was crouched down to be face to face with her little screaming girl thing.

  “What is the matter?” she asked in that musical tone of voice parents use.

  The girl would only wail. She was too young to form thoughts, let alone sentences. She only looked vaguely in my direction and then back at her mother, screaming and streaming tears.

  The store had thoughtfully placed items for small children at floor level, near the register where I had been standing next to (or actually on top of) the little girl. These were cute toys, colorful and soft. There were tiny stuffed lambs with black collars, blocky wood cars and trucks, a number of squishy plastic things that had bubbles trapped inside neon liquid.

  The girl reached her damaged hand out toward her mother, but because her sense of direction was not yet fully formed, the hand landed on the shelf, among the toys.

  “No, you are not getting one of those,” the mother said. “And I want you to stop crying this instant. You may not have those.”

  The girl cried harder.

  The mother picked her up and scolded. “What’s gotten in to you?” she said. “Why are you acting like this all of a sudden? Do you need a nap? Well, we’re going to leave right now and I’m going to set you down for a nap.”

  So now the girl would be punished after having had her hand stepped on by a gay guy from New York.

  Horribly, I laughed.

  This poor little girl had been crawling along the floor next to her mother. When suddenly, perhaps, she did see the pretty little blocks with letters printed on the sides in bright, primary colors. Perhaps she wormed her way over just a foot, and then I crushed her little fingers flat into the carpet.

  Now a scolding, and soon a nap.

  I, like an especially clever and devious shoplifter, was entirely off the hook. It was sheer luck that some other mother hadn’t seen me and come to the rescue. “No, that bad man there stepped on your daughter’s fingers!”

  The fact is, life is hideous, and it’s a good thing this girl learned it now. I convinced myself of this later.

  Because later I was feeling remorse. I was feeling awful that I hadn’t rushed over and explained what had happened. Then the little baby girl would have been scooped up and kissed. Her mother would have soothed her and made her feel better.

  Instead, she learned that life is stunningly, painfully unfair. That guys always get off. And that your mother can turn on you.

  With my left shoe, I had sealed the little girl’s fate: a life on the therapist’s couch and tens of thousands of dollars to explore a paralyzing obsession with men’s feet.

  Still, I do sometimes fantasize about what it would be like to have a child. Perhaps a little girl like the one whose hand I accidentally crushed. I already know what her name would be: Malibu.

  Malibu evokes a kinder era, the seventies. It conjures images of a customized van, painted white but with glowing orange-and-yellow graphics airbrushed along the side and a small wet bar inside between the captain’s seats. It’s a blond hair, green eyes, ponytail-worn-to-one-side kind of name.

  In an age of Mayas, Karas, and Naomis, Malibu is refreshingly sunny.

  “Sure, sweetie. You can wear makeup. Just make sure the other second-graders don’t steal it,” I would say, sticking a Nars mascara into the zipper pocket of her Powerpuff Girls plastic knapsack.

  My daughter Malibu would understand that she was certainly smart enough to become president, if that is what she desired. But no matter what, she was going to wear heels, and she was going to have good haircuts. For her fifteenth birthday, I would get her a set of breast implants or a nose job: her choice.

  Of course, Malibu would, in the end, hate men because of me. She would gain weight, not shave her legs, cut all her hair off, and work in a bookstore named Womynfire. She would drop the first and last letters of her name to become simply Ali. I would be forced to literally tear the Chastity Bono and Jodie Foster posters down from her bedroom walls.

  ______

  But as a rule, gay guys do not make bad parents; they make excellent parents. Because unlike straight people, gay people can’t have kids by accident. Only by power of attorney. I would be a questionable parent not because I’m gay, but because I was raised by lunatics.

  So maybe seeing gay guys with kids isn’t really about being trendy. Maybe it’s about progress.

  And maybe the reason I never see shar-peis on the street anymore is because they’re all inside, curled up on the sofa with the kid, while dad number one is making dinner and dad number two is cleaning some sort of stain off the carpet.

  Let the people who want to have kids, have them. And let the rest of us spend the extra money on ourselves. Being gay doesn’t make you a bad person. Not wanting kids doesn’t make you a bad person. Perhaps crushing the bones in one little girl’s hand makes you a bad person, but that was an accident.

  Thus, feeling okay about the fact that I don’t want kids, feeling good for applying my energies to my career, I embarked on the last leg of my book tour. Only to then find myself on an ill-fated Delta flight from L.A. to New York.

  The flight was totally full, but I was happy. My first book tour had gone well: nobody threw anything at me, and booksellers didn’t make me strip the covers off my own books so they could send them back for a refund. I walked down the aisle searching for my seat, and there, I saw, impossibly, the only remaining seat. A woman sat in the window seat and a man sat in the aisle seat, and the center seat was for me. But there was a live BABY standing on my seat. Standing and grinning while what appeared to be mashed potato bubbled from its lips. The mother plucked the baby thing up and said, “Here you go.” She smiled at me like, “No harm done!”

  But still it did not sink in. I thought, Not possible. I, THE BABY HATER, COULD NOT POSSIBLY END UP IN THIS SEAT. I checked my ticket again, looked at the number above the seat, which of course matched my ticket, but it could not be true. After a brief confrontation with the flight attendant, I took my seat. The middle seat. Next to the mom holding the only baby on the plane.

  It tried to grab my hands as I read my Donna Tartt galley, ironically titled The Little Friend. It tried to coo at me and get my attention, and I ignored it, as though it were not there. Then, when the mother nodded off to sleep, I turned to the baby thing and made a monster face, wild-eyed with my fangs showing, which caused it to clap and laugh hysterically and wake up the mother. I pretended I had done nothing and turned another page. But the baby wanted me more now and kept poking me, so I made a claw hand and tried to snap, snap, snap at it. I was trying to be very mean to the baby, but it thought I was playing with it.

  It had a rash around its mouth, and when it dropped its apple juice feeder-bottle thing on me, the nipple brushed against my arm, and I immediately had to take my beta-blocker stage-fright pill to slow my heart down.

  As I sat in my seat, checking my watch every four minutes, I thought, Thi
s is just horrible: a tiny little single-aisle plane (an airbus, known to fall from the sky because of faulty composite materials). What an awful, rashy, clappy baby.

  Eventually, the mother fell asleep again, and shortly after, the baby followed suit. But the baby’s cool, alive little feet kept brushing up against my knee. Gradually, over two hours and many hundreds of air miles, the baby slid off the mother’s lap and partially onto my legs. Both of its feet and legs up to the knees were now resting completely on my right leg. I was outraged and wanted to press the flight attendant call button over and over until one of them came. But then what? They certainly wouldn’t pick the baby up and place it in some sort of container in the rear of the plane. And I knew they wouldn’t give me a Valium. So it was useless. I was trapped.

  I looked over at the mother. She was young, but her body now was destroyed. It was doughy from the baby, and I knew she would never lose this weight. Her breasts sagged into one soft fat pillow for her baby’s head. And her long hair was pulled back into a permanent ponytail. Of course, she wore no makeup, and the front of her shirt was covered with crumbs and stains.

  I pitied her.

  The baby, somehow, sensed that I was staring at its mother and thinking mean thoughts. It stirred and opened its eyes. It realized it was sliding off its mother’s lap, so it fidgeted and started gripping its mother’s breasts/neck/face. The mother automatically, in her sleep, hoisted the baby up higher onto her body, and she then relaxed her arms protectively around it.

  Then the baby again drifted off to sleep.

  After many hours, the plane was ready to land. Mother and baby sat upright. “I hope you weren’t too uncomfortable,” the mother said to me. “I know it must be really kind of awful to sit in the middle seat next to some mom and baby, but she’s a pretty good traveler. She really doesn’t cry.”

  I had to admit, although I detested admitting it, the baby thing had been well behaved. Mostly.

  In fact, if one wanted to be entirely technical about it, I was the only one who really misbehaved on the flight.

  I’M GONNA LIVE FOREVER

  A

  s a teenager in the eighties, the most appealing career options presented to me were featured in Fame and Flashdance. Pat Benatar was right, Love is a battlefield. I knew this from my relationship with a mentally ill pedophile, so I was in no hurry to fall into the love pit again. Better, I thought, to focus on my career. And what better career than celebrity?

  I would move to New York City and become famous. I hadn’t thought of exactly what I would become famous for. I just felt certain that it would happen. And I hoped it would not be for the slaughter of another person. Then again, perhaps I didn’t have to be famous “for” anything. In the seventies, there were plenty of people who were known only for being semifamous, like Charo and Pia Zadora.

  But then, in my twenties, I decided I didn’t want to be famous. I wanted to live in a log cabin in the woods, entirely removed from society. I wanted to have wolves as pets and not pay taxes. And while I hadn’t yet reached the point of sticking bombs in manila envelopes and mailing them, I was getting close.

  In the end, I wound up somewhere in the middle.

  While not famous on the same level as Gwyneth Paltrow or even Monica Lewinsky, I am more known than I would have been had I chosen a more Ted Kaczynski life (unless, of course, I had mailed the exploding envelopes).

  I wrote a novel called Sellevision. It was published and reviewed by a few newspapers and magazines, and then slid quietly from the shelf, as though it had been a particularly vivid delusion instead of an actual publication.

  But then two years later I wrote a memoir, and suddenly my face was on the masthead of USA Today. My embarrassing past made news in papers and magazines here and in Europe.

  But while all of this was happening, I was still home in my apartment with Dennis and our dog, Bentley, sitting at my computer and writing, like always. Nothing had changed except that I now gave interviews and posed for pictures which I hoped looked better than the actual me. I still didn’t go to literary parties or art gallery openings. I didn’t suddenly have a posse of fashionable friends with famous last names. I continued to wear the same dog-hair–covered sweatpants around the house for two weeks at a time.

  Of course, writer famous isn’t like movie famous. Movies are consumed in public, along with hundreds of other people, and the actor’s face is enlarged to the size of a minivan. And watching movies is the only thing besides sleeping and having sex that we do in the dark, so there’s that intimacy. On screen, each breath is magnified, so it feels like it’s on our own neck. Then we leave the theater and talk about the movie, obsess over the stars. We see their pictures on TV and in magazines and online. And as a result of this saturation, we would recognize Brad Pitt in a bathing suit before we would recognize our own aunt in one.

  Books, on the other hand, are read by individuals in bathtubs, beds, on toilets. Always in solitude. And the author’s face is only seen if the reader turns to the back of the book and looks at the jacket picture. Or, if a newspaper or magazine happens to print the author’s photo. This happened to me a few times, and when I left the apartment, sometimes I was recognized.

  Because my memoir was extremely confessional and contained scenes that were both mortifying and humiliating, people automatically feel comfortable approaching me in public and confessing their innermost secrets.

  “Aren’t you Augusten Burroughs?” one grandmother asked me outside Fairway Market.

  She was a nice-looking old lady, dressed well in a tailored brown suit. She had a good haircut. Her makeup was of a modern palate. She was exactly the sort of grandmother I would like to have had. “Uh, yeah,” I said. “That would be me.”

  She smiled and crossed her arms. The handle of her little black purse fell into the crook of her elbow. “Well, I just loved your book,” she said.

  Somebody’s grandmother read my book! Not just some gay guy from West Orange, New Jersey, “Thank you so much,” I said. “I really appreciate that.” I needed to get inside the store because Dennis was at home waiting for his goat cheese. But I couldn’t rush the old lady, especially when she was lavishing me with praise.

  “You know,” she said, leaning forward and lowering her voice to a conspirational whisper. “When I was a little girl my mother used to give me enemas with Dr Pepper. And then make me drink the liquid when it came out!”

  Although I was able to maintain a pleasant expression, I was mentally throwing up in her face. This is the sort of detail you don’t reveal to anybody, even a therapist. You simply avoid Dr Pepper and take your dirty little secret to the grave with you. I said, “Did she?”

  “Oh yes,” said the old lady. “She was a wicked woman. And let me tell you, to this day I cannot drink Dr Pepper. If I even catch a whiff of it, my sphincter tightens up into a little knot.”

  It was such a visual set of words.

  “Well, that’s just an incredible story. And it was so nice to meet you. But I’m running late and need to pick something up inside the store.”

  Now, whenever I see an old lady on the street, my mind involuntarily plays the old jingle from Dr Pepper. “I’m a Pepper, she’s a Pepper, wouldn’t you like to be a Pepper, too?” A gigantic sphincter lip-synchs the words.

  The trouble with writing a book is that you don’t get to choose who reads it. Sometimes I wish I did get to choose. I wish people had to fill out an application and provide a brief biographical summary.

  If I’d been allowed to personally select my readers, I wouldn’t have had the confrontation with the Crosswalk Lady.

  I was simply crossing the street to go to the shoe store when I was grabbed on the arm. “Hey, I know you.”

  I tried to escape with a smile. “Hi,” I said and continued walking. But she followed.

  “You wrote Running with Scissors. I just read that. Oh my God.”

  I made it to the other side of the street, and now she was standing next to me.
>
  “You know, your book really helped me. Because I am in the middle of, well, actually let me take that back. I am at the end of a horrible, horrible divorce. You know, I caught my husband fucking our building super up the ass, right in our living room. Can you imagine? Well, of course you can, being gay and all. And by the way, I thought those scenes of you having sex when you were such a little boy were so alarming and beautifully written. But anyway, like I was saying, my husband, whom I had been married to for seventeen years, was fucking the super up against my Steinway piano. I mean, I have nothing against gay people, but I honest to God do not want to be married to one, no offense.”

  It was impossible to escape her. She provided no natural break in the conversation, and she spoke with such intensity that I would have had to abruptly shout “SHUT THE FUCK UP,” punch her, and then run away in order to be free. But I couldn’t do that. It would be rude. So I listened to her, hoping that she would come to her senses and stop talking and leave me alone. No wonder your husband left you, I was thinking, You would never shut up.

  Eventually, she did stop talking but only because she happened to glance at the building across the street and see the digital clock. “Oh my God, I’m going to be late to the lawyer’s office. Well, it was so nice talking with you, and I’m going to read everything you write from now on.”

  It was very nice that she liked my book so much and felt comfortable telling me the details of her crisis. But at the same time, I wouldn’t have been sad if she’d slipped under the wheels of a garbage truck.