Magical Thinking: True Stories

by Augusten Burroughs

  Clearly, it will be years before we step foot inside our own log cabin. It will take at least five years to choose a plan. Then another three or four to decide on the finishing options. And of course before we can do any of this, we must first choose a piece of property. And I can’t even imagine how this will happen. Once you find your property, you have to have it checked for radon, leveled, electric and water brought in. Honestly, I don’t know how anybody builds anything. If I had been in charge of developing the modern world, we would all still be living in caves. We wouldn’t even have fire yet.

  So for now, we make do with our own view of the Trump apartments. When I get a craving for Nature, I turn on the Discovery Channel and watch bear-attack survivors recount their horror and show us the results of their reconstructive surgery.

  My friend Suzanne in California gave me some advice that her own therapist gave to her: “Tend to your inner garden,” he said.

  This seems wise to me. I will stop obsessing over log cabins and weekend houses. I will instead focus on my inner garden. Around which is my own personal electrified fence.

  UP THE ESCALATOR

  I

  ’m through the revolving door, and instantly, profoundly, the air is different. Washed with chemicals and mercury vapor light, scented in such a specific way that I would know the name of this store if blindfolded, hog-tied, and instructed to sniff the air. I’m in Kmart in Manhattan’s East Village. It’s a new store, their first in New York City. Yet it smells exactly like the Kmart in Hadley, Massachusetts, that I remember from childhood. I glance around and see, am comforted to see, that this Kmart looks identical to every other. There has been no concession made to Manhattan’s refined tastes. The floor is not raw concrete, stainless steel, or anything remotely groovy. It is pale beige tile.

  The only difference between this Kmart and every other is that this one is vertical. Three stories. And the escalator is broken, so I have to walk up. I climb three of these tall, steel steps and feel tired and heavy. I look up and see that I am still very far from the top. Why is this so much harder than climbing a normal flight of stairs? It’s like each foot is a frozen Butterball turkey.

  I think it’s because of expectations.

  Your brain sees the escalator and tells your body it can relax, make progress while leaning. It’s like a little vacation from walking. But then you get there, and the escalator is broken, and the disappointment starts sinking from your chest, gathering mass along the way until it hits your feet, where it congeals and leaves you with twenty-pound heels.

  And it seems pathetic that the escalator is out of order, a sign of failure. How hard can it be to keep an escalator working? All it has to do is go around and around, like a hamster on a wheel. It’s not a ventilator in Lenox Hill hospital. People have to hire attorneys and appear before judges just to get one of those turned off.

  I wouldn’t even have to walk up this broken escalator if I were wheelchair-bound. I could have rung a bell on the ground floor, and an elevator would have come, along with a minimum-wage employee with averted eyes. I would be an excellent quadriplegic, not at all like those awful, independent cripples who are always talking about how abled they are. I would sit in my wheelchair, and I would moan and shake my head “no” as though in excruciating pain, until somebody came to assist me, possibly even carrying a beverage. I believe a person must use whatever it is they have. I, myself, am an emotional cripple, certainly. Raised without school or normal parents, I do not know how to mix with others. In a way, I am a psychological transsexual, always trying to “pass” for a normal person but being clocked every time.

  I do not belong in Kmart.

  Or, if I am here, I should be here ironically. “I’m in Kmart. Wink, wink. Where are the Toughskin jeans?” But I am not here ironically; I am here sincerely.

  I need an iron.

  I am thinking about my need for an iron as I climb the escalator stairs. I am halfway to the top and briefly I consider turning around and walking back down the steps and going to another store. But this cannot happen. I am being pressed forward by doughy shoppers holding family-sized boxes of Rice Chex and flimsy Kathy Ireland coordinates, which are impossible to imagine on any person with a full set of chromosomes. These grim, fleshy shoppers stomping up, on, forward into their Kmart futures. They add weight to my feet. And they confuse me, because these are not people I normally see on the streets of Manhattan, certainly not the East Village. Where are the pierced eyebrows? The tattoos? Where are the buff gay guys with manicured facial hair and neatly trimmed chests? These people are like ordinary people one might find in Idaho or Kentucky. And while there’s certainly nothing wrong with this, it’s odd to see them here. It is as if Kmart has bussed in their own shoppers along with their own air.

  Finally, at the top I am greeted by gigantic posters of Martha Stewart, sneering at me. I must admit that the posters comfort me and inspire me to shop for bed shams and stemware. I was raised by a mother similar to Martha Stewart in that she was selfconsumed and incredibly successful and famous. Except my mother was only incredibly successful and famous in her brain, which was diseased. So I am drawn to women like Martha, Martha most specifically. More than once I have had fantasies of working for her and then having her fall in love with and adopt me. The thing is, I have always craved a home. I was raised in a makeshift mental institution, so this doesn’t count as a home. I’ve always craved both the concept of home—security, comfort, safety—as well as the physical qualities of home—sheets, picture frames, door knobs. This is why Martha Stewart has the same effect on me that hardcore pornography has on Andrea Dworkin: intense interest.

  I pass by a mirror and catch a glimpse of my arms. I think, I really need to work on my shoulders more at the gym. I should have a separate shoulder day as opposed to lumping shoulders together with arms. If I really work on my shoulders, the deltoid will cut into the part of my arm that separates my triceps from my biceps. And I need this. And this strikes me immediately as the difference between a gay man and everybody else. A straight man or woman might think, I can relax a little once my 401(k) reaches a certain level. A gay man thinks, I’ll be happy once I’ve added another two inches to my chest.

  Near the stacking plastic trash cans, a pack of children is standing in a confused mass, adult-less. They are looking in different directions, little heads turning, arms down at their sides, fingers gripping and releasing air. I can see spittle in the corners of their pink mouths. A pedophile could walk into the group and take over. He could clap his hands and say, “Time to get some lunch,” and I bet at least two of them would follow. It’d be easy. People don’t get how easy.

  I walk past the pyramid display of plastic Martha Stewart soap dishes and head into the housewares section in search of my iron.

  My pulse is thrumming at my wrists, and I can feel that my face has flushed. It’s the same feeling I had the first time I went to Las Vegas and put a silver dollar in one of the slot machines. And won five hundred dollars. I am deeply excited by this environment and thrilled to consider what might happen.

  Every day, millions of people come to stores like this, and they buy small appliances without so much as a second thought. Perhaps for most, it’s even a chore. But I have waited my entire life to buy an iron. In a sense, I might as well be walking up the steps to accept my Grammy.

  The iron is not for me. It’s for Dennis. I haven’t ironed anything since I stuck crayons between two sheets of wax paper in third grade. But Dennis irons frequently and well.

  At first, without ever actually watching him iron, I suggested he just “give it to the Dragon Lady.” By which I meant he could simply bring it downstairs to the coy Chinese lady who runs the dry-cleaner place. Dennis smiled, as if with secret knowledge. He said, “I like to iron.”

  But this didn’t make any sense to me. Ironing was just something you gave up when you lived in Manhattan. You either dropped your clothes off at the cleaners or, like me, let gravity take care of the w
rinkles.

  Dennis sauntered over to the closet and pulled his ironing board off its hook on the wall. He carried it back under his arm and then made a display of opening it. He winked at me, flirting. Then he walked into the kitchen and pulled his old iron out from one of the kitchen cabinets that I never open.

  And he went at it.

  When Dennis irons, it is a slow, soothing, and careful thing. Creases are blended away, smoothed into soft flat plains. Wrinkles melt. He works very gently, with the tip. He edges around buttons as if he is driving an exquisite car, handmade in Italy. Gliding along the stitching on the cuff, then the cuff itself.

  I watched him iron and experienced what my friend Christopher, a science-fiction reader, describes as a “time slip.” This is when you become so absorbed in something that either one minute or one hour can pass, and you honestly couldn’t say which it was. And when you snap out of it, things have shifted, sometimes in alarmingly perceptible ways.

  Was it twenty minutes later? I was wearing the shirt, and it felt warm and smooth and loved. How had this happened?

  So now I am pro-ironing and to show my support am buying him a new Rowenta.

  Because an interesting metamorphosis has occurred. Against all odds, I am becoming domesticated.

  The other day while I was at the doctor’s office waiting for my suspicious mole appointment, I was paging through Redbook magazine. I was reading about how crumpled newspapers are actually better than paper towels for cleaning windows because they don’t leave behind lint. And I was thinking, I’ve got to try this! I was so absorbed in the article that the receptionist had to call my name twice.

  Our routine involves Dennis cooking dinner and me washing the dishes. And I love washing dishes by hand and even bought myself a stainless-steel dish rack from Williams-Sonoma. I was so excited in the cab with the box next to me that I went home and ate some gluey vanilla yogurt just so I could wash the bowl and place it in the new dish rack to dry.

  Now I understand packaged-goods advertising. Softens hands while you do dishes. Before, when I had a loathsome job in advertising, I created lines like this without ever truly considering their meaning. I’ve gone from duping the public to being a target audience. I used to sit on the other side of the one-way mirror in focus groups and sneer at homemakers. “How pathetic,” I would comment. “She’s actually been brainwashed to believe in Tide with Bleach.” But now, I see that all along, she was right. And I was the smug fool. The fact is, Tide with Bleach does remove more stains than regular detergent and bleach. I’ve spent hours downstairs in the basement laundry room experimenting.

  My domestication was not a spontaneous event, like the collapse of a star. It has occurred as a direct result of living with Dennis.

  I moved into Dennis’s apartment one year, three months, and seventeen days after we met. It’s on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, five minutes from Central Park and close to the Hudson River. It is large, with an entire wall of windows facing north. It has tall ceilings, art on the walls, a sofa with boiled wool, down-filled cushions from Wales.

  The water pressure in the shower could strip the paint off a car. There is a doorman. And an elevator. And a garbage chute. These are not uncommon amenities in New York City, the city I have made my home for fifteen years. But they are new for me.

  My previous apartment was a filthy three-hundred-square-foot studio on the third floor of a five-story building in the East Village. When it rained, water poured from the center of the single overhead light fixture. During a heavy storm, I would have to empty the twenty-gallon plastic tub I kept beneath it several times. The ceiling was permanently damp, moldy, and falling away in whole sections.

  There was no heat because of a wiring problem in the wall, somewhere between the thermostat and the furnace downstairs. But I didn’t care. I just opened the oven door in the winter and removed the smoke alarm so it wouldn’t beep at the carbon monoxide.

  Friends suggested that at the very least I fix the leak. “Call the super for God sakes. There are laws about things like that, even in New York.”

  But I didn’t mind. The constant sound of falling water was like living in a hut in the rain forest. It was very Gorillas in the Mist and made me feel somewhat exotic and adventurous.

  “You’re like a serial killer,” my friend Suzanne commented. “You live in exactly the sort of apartment that ends up in a photograph on the cover of the Post. With a big fat headline over it: PSYCHO’S DEN OF SQUALOR.”

  But I’ve always been comfortable in squalor. Because I was raised in chaos and filth, because the psychiatrist’s house was so messy and disgusting, this has become my default. What may horrify other people is mundane to me. “That’s just old chow fun, don’t worry. It’s dry. It doesn’t stink anymore, so no rats will smell it.”

  While it’s true that I spent five thousand dollars on a shabby chic sofa, it is also true that the white slipcover eventually became beige, and the sofa itself vanished beneath a mound of clothing. I was in the habit of wearing a pair of khaki slacks twice, and then instead of taking them across the street to the cleaners, I would simply buy another pair. As a result, I owned seventy pairs of the exact same khaki slacks. The same was true of shirts, underwear, and socks.

  I never used the stove and during the warm months filled the oven with paperback novels. At any given moment, the refrigerator contained twenty bottles of seltzer water; my watch, keys, and wallet (so I wouldn’t misplace them); and a hundred rolls of Fuji Velvia slide film.

  The kitchen cabinets themselves were filled with more books, empty seltzer bottles, and unread mail.

  The sink in the bathroom was crusted with five years’ worth of dried toothpaste. And the dozens of magazines that covered the bathroom floor were all crinkly from water because I never used a shower curtain.

  It wasn’t because I was poor that I lived this way. I made decent money at my advertising job. It was just that I really didn’t know how to live any other way. I’d even begun to feel above all things domestic. Anybody could clean, after all. But not just anybody can create the next global advertising campaign for UPS. So I spent all my time at the computer, either working or writing in my journal. “I live in my head,” was my own justification.

  Dennis didn’t see my apartment until we’d been dating for nearly two months. In one way, this wasn’t odd because we were taking it very slow. We weren’t sleeping together; we were getting to know each other in jazz clubs on the Bowery, at restaurants, on park benches in Central Park at midnight. We were courting each other like people did in the forties.

  When Dennis took a trip south to Kentucky to visit his business partner’s family, I took the opportunity to clean my apartment. He was going to be gone for four days. I calculated that if I worked twelve hours a day, I might have the apartment presentable by the time he returned. While I understood that I would not be able to have the apartment “clean” by this time, I could at least remove the majority of the debris and make it appear as though a bachelor lived here and not a psychopath.

  By the end of day four, I had slept a total of nine hours, removed fifty-one garbage bags, and torn a ligament in my back. Yet the apartment still looked terrible. I felt like an unattractive girl who must wear a ton of makeup in order to get all the way up to “plain.”

  But at least the sofa was free of clothing, the wood floors bare. I’d collected all the books that were previously strewn around the apartment and stacked them into two skyscrapers next to the bed. I went across the street to the store where the NYU college students get their dorm room furniture and purchased three metal Metro shelving units. I assembled these and lined them up against one wall. Then I stacked my clothing on the shelves. In between two piles of white T-shirts, I placed my Bang & Olufsen stereo. I bought a twenty-dollar area rug to cover the dark stain of unknown origin in the center of the floor. And I bought a shower curtain.

  When Dennis finally saw the apartment, he was surprised by the tiny size. But he was plea
sed with my bed, which was now fitted with three thousand dollars’ worth of sheets, down pillows, and down comforter from ABC Home.

  I was relieved that Dennis thought me eccentric for being able to live in such a tiny apartment. “It’s like the dorm room of some rich kid,” he said. While certainly not impressive, at least the apartment was no longer a deal breaker.

  And now, one year, three months, and seventeen days later, I am in Kmart selecting an iron.

  I choose the top-of-the-line. There will be absolutely no compromise here.

  Back at the escalator, I see that the “down” side is working. Of course, this would be the case. The “down” side always works. You can always slide down with ease. It’s going up that sometimes takes extra effort.

  The symbolism is not lost on me as I drift down to the main floor.

  I take the subway uptown. I think, Have I given up anything by living with another person? Has there been a trade-off? Always, there is a trade-off. And the answer comes to me instantly. I have given up a certain degree of freedom. The ability to plow through my life with utter disregard for the thoughts and feelings of other people. I can no longer read a magazine and throw it on the floor.

  In exchange, I get unlimited access to the one person I have met in my life whom I automatically felt was out of my league. My favorite human being, the single person I cherish above all others. This is the person I get to share the oxygen in the room with.

  And for this, I will happily scrub the toilet. And I won’t make fun of anybody who drives an SUV. Unless, of course, they really deserve it. And I’ll try to let things happen. Not always feel like I have to control everything.

  With the exception of those things I can control, that is, with my mind.

  Table of Contents