Magical Thinking (29 page)

Take, for example, Charlotte.

In the mid-nineties I was courted by an advertising agency in Chicago. At the time, I was working in New York City on the Burger King account, and I was extremely miserable. My life consisted of nothing but shooting commercials for Whopper Value Meals. Leather, as I discovered, absorbs odors, so my shoes smelled like Whopper meat during this period of my life. After six months on the account, even my wallet smelled like dead cow.

I was ready for a change, and the Chicago agency offered just that. I would have an office that overlooked the lake. I would work on a variety of products, not just one. And I would work for Charlotte.

When I met her, the first thing Charlotte did was say, “Oh, my
God. You’re here! Let’s go have tea and finger sandwiches across the street at the Fairmont.”

So we crossed the street through an underground strip mall, and we ended up in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel. Here, we enjoyed Earl Grey tea and cucumber sandwiches with the crusts already trimmed off.

Charlotte was tall, with short blonde hair, which she wore in a trendy “bed-head” fashion. She wore primary colors and earrings in bold, geometric forms leftover from the eighties. She was charming and a little scatterbrained. She changed subjects quickly and without warning, jumping from beautiful Chicago summers to “how can I get rid of the flesh wings under my arms?” She was funny and she was smart, and I loved her completely.

I accepted the job, after spending that single day in Chicago. The following week, I flew back and met with a broker to look at apartments. I found one near the lake for almost no money and wondered,
Why didn’t I move here years ago
?

My first week was bliss. Charlotte frequently stopped by my office just to chat. She loved all my ideas. And she told me to leave every day at five so I didn’t burn out.

But by the fifth week, another version of Charlotte began to emerge. One not so primary colored.

I was in a studio on Wacker Drive doing color correction on a cheesecake spot when I got a call from Charlotte.

“What’s the idea behind this teaser campaign I see on my desk?” she snapped.

The teaser campaign was something she’d asked me to do for another client. She hadn’t been around, and I was due at the editing studio, so I left the storyboards on her desk with a sticky note.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, why the fuck isn’t the client’s name in these storyboards, you arrogant cocksucker? You think you can come out here from New York City and start doing commercials that don’t even have the client’s name mentioned? You think we are fucking
stupid out here in the Midwest? Because let me tell you, buddy. We invented the motherfucking Dough Boy and the Green Giant.”

I was horrified and shocked, exactly like when I watched
The Exorcist
for the first time. A teaser ad typically does
not
have the client’s brand name mentioned. That’s why it’s called a “teaser.” It’s supposed to be intriguing enough to make you wonder, “Hmmmmm. . . .What interesting brand is that?” So this is what I told Charlotte.

“Oh, you condescending fuck. I know what the hell a teaser is.” She was screaming now. “You get the fuck back here now, you son of a bitch, and you come see me.”

I said, “Charlotte, you don’t know what you’re talking about. And I will not be spoken to like this.” I hung up.

I’d been in advertising for fifteen years, and nobody had ever yelled at me. I’m just not one of those people other people scream at. I’m easygoing. I’m nice. People considered me a swell guy: a drunk but not one you’d call an arrogant cocksucker.

I went back to the office, furious. My inner serial killer had been activated. Charlotte was going to pay.

I stepped into her office, and I said, “Screw you. You have serious brain-chemistry issues. I’m quitting and I’m going to tell the president of the agency that I’m quitting because you’re not fit to be a creative director.”

Charlotte raged at me, her neck bright red and bulging with veins. “You get your ass back in here right this minute.”

I turned to her and spoke matter-of-factly. “Listen you crazy old snake. Just because your husband is screwing your daughter at home is no reason to take it out on people at the office.”

Her eyes bulged from her face, and when she opened her mouth, a string of saliva joined her two lips together. I’d shocked her.

“Put two and two together, Ms. Oblivious,” I continued. “Your daughter’s having trouble at school, your husband is a stay-at-home
dad. Everybody in the office knows. We talk about it. Your slut daughter even flirts with some of the older male art directors. It’s pathetic. She’s totally fucking her father, and it’s obvious to everyone here.”

Of course, I’d made this all up in a moment of inspiration, but she recoiled against the back of her chair.

I went downstairs to the president’s office, and I explained that Chicago wasn’t going to work for me after all. I detailed what happened with Charlotte, revising everything I said.

His eyes slid to the floor, and he admitted, “Charlotte can be difficult. We’ve had some problems.”

Back in New York, I spent the rest of the year loathing Charlotte and then moving past loathing to simply wishing her dead. I decided an emotionally abusive nightmare like Charlotte does not deserve to live. So I willed her under the wheels of a bus.

The following month I got a phone call from one of the account executives at the Chicago agency. “Did you hear?” she said. “Are you coming?”

“Coming where?” I asked.

“To Charlotte’s funeral.”

What do you know? Charlotte was waiting for an elevator, had an aneurism, and dropped dead, holding an armful of storyboards.

I hung up the phone smiling and marveled, “That’s even better than a bus.”

I have also used my powers of magical thinking for good, if you consider tricking Dennis into being my boyfriend “good.”

Dennis is attracted to muscular black guys, and I am unfortunately not an African American man with large, full buttocks. I am a lanky WASP, the product of centuries of inbreeding. I have almost no butt. I am as pale as the moon.

And yet I was able to cause Dennis to see me as a homeboy. I
sent my thoughts into his eyes, where they rearranged the neural rods and cones of vision and instead of seeing me for what I am, he saw me for what I wanted him to see me as: a bro.

“And I can’t even get a tan,” I joke to him now, shaking my head at the wonder of it all and sticking my butt out in a pathetic, teasing fashion.

Once or twice, and a person could easily chalk it all up to coincidence, but coincidence implies a lack of control, a random occurrence. With me, I can manipulate the external influences in my life as surely as I can make a baby cry just by grinning.

I can give countless examples. I feel certain that conjoined twins are born so that they can later be profiled on the Discovery Channel and watched by me. My hunger for conjoined-twin stories is so powerful that I believe it actually rearranges molecules in the universe that affect the very cells in the womb. So that when I need it most—when I’m feeling depressed or anxious and turn on the television to distract myself—there’s a two-headed girl in a one-piece bathing suit!

Skeptics might say “Yes, but who doesn’t enjoy a good conjoined-twin profile on the Discovery Channel? Surely, you can’t think you’re the only one? You didn’t cause them to be born . . .it was a simple matter of an egg not dividing correctly.”

Fine, another example: I obsess endlessly over wanting a French bulldog puppy. I check websites and call Dennis over to the computer. “Look!” I say. And each time he says, “No way. Absolutely not. We’re not getting a dog.”

One evening, we find ourselves downtown shopping for halogen light bulbs next door to a place with puppies in the window. “Oh, let’s just go inside and look,” I whine. Dennis agrees. “But just to look. We’re absolutely not getting a dog, Augusten. I’m serious.”

They have a French bulldog puppy in a cage. He’s skinny and
shaking, sickly. He looks more like a lab rat injected with shampoo than a puppy. I ask to see the puppy, and they take him out of the cage and hand him to me. He trembles in my hands, terrified, undoglike.

At this moment, he becomes mine.

Dennis says, “Oh, that’s so sad. The poor thing.”

We put the puppy on the floor, and he trembles, unsteady. The salesman informs us that the dog is from Russia, that he had recently had an operation to treat his “cherry eye.” The salesman says he’s nine weeks old.

After fifteen minutes, the damaged puppy is slightly less timid. It is able to walk from me to Dennis. When it reaches Dennis’s lap, it tries to climb into it.

This was on a Friday.

That Saturday, Dennis, mysteriously, inexplicably intoxicated without the consumption of alcohol, enters the pet store in a supernatural blackout and comes home with the French bulldog puppy.

The puppy grows into a strong, healthy dog that shrieks and levitates each time Dennis enters the room. The dog is so strong we call it The Beast.

Dennis cannot imagine life without him. It seems now, we never existed without Bentley, that he has been ours all along, since before he was born.

Perhaps my supernatural abilities come from my solid spiritual beliefs. I believe in the baby Jesus. And I believe he is handsome and lives in the sky with his pet cow. I believe that it is essential the cow like you. And if you pet the cow with your mind, it will lick your hand and give you cash. But if you make the cow angry, it will turn away from you, forget you exist, and your life will fall into shambles. I believe that as long as the cow likes you, you can get what you want.

In order to keep in the cow’s favor, you need to “let go and let God,” meaning, you can’t obsess about controlling every little
thing. You have to let things unfold naturally and not try to change things you cannot change. On the other hand, I believe that if you’ve made the cow happy by living this way, you’re allowed to ask for favors.

I tell people my theory, and they think I am either kidding or insane. But think this as they may, I have cow saliva on my hands, and many of them do not.

My friend Larry complains constantly about his career. And it’s true that he has suffered a series of career setbacks that are stunning in their coincidence. Larry has had a string of such unfortunate luck it can be only one of two things.

“Either you’ve made the baby Jesus mad or his pet cow hates you,” I tell him. “You need to conjure images of a cow in a field of green, munching on grass. Then you need to reach out and scratch between his ears.”

Larry tells me to go away.

But I believe that he does exactly what I say because a month later, he has a new job, and he’s begun using the phrase “the baby Jesus.”

When I was thirty-four, I decided to stop being an alcoholic and become a
New York Times
bestselling author. The gap between active alcoholic advertising copywriter living in squalor and literary sensation with a scrapbook of rave reviews seemed large. A virtual canyon. Yet one day, I decided that’s exactly what I would do. And I began writing my first novel,
Sellevision
.

Fourteen days later,
Sellevision
was written, and I had my first
manuscript. But I needed an agent, and I didn’t have any idea how to get one. So I bought a book on literary agents that provided me with names and e-mail addresses. Still, how to tell them apart from each other? I decided to send my query letter to literary agents whose names I liked. This seemed as good a method as any. Within a week, seven agents had requested the manuscript. Two weeks later, I began to hear feedback. One agent wrote: “No, this isn’t something I’d be interested in at all. Satire is over.” But another agent was more optimistic: “Well, I liked it. It needs work, but I wouldn’t know what to tell you to revise. I could send it to a couple of publishers, but I wouldn’t accept you as a regular client. It would be a situation where I send the manuscript as is to two or three publishers, and that’s it.” At the end of his note he explained that his office charges for photocopies and postage.

I immediately opened a new e-mail document and wrote to my friend Suzanne. “Should I go with him? He sounds like he’s willing to lift a finger—a pinkie—but that’s all. And he doesn’t LOVE the manuscript. And who the hell is he? For all I know, he’s some old pervert who’s into taxidermy and lives in a studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. What if some other better real agent comes along? One without a drinking problem and a history of sexually abusing children? But then again, what if no other agent wants me? What should I do? Should I go with this creep?”

I hit
SEND
.

In my excitement, I’d accidentally typed my note to my friend Suzanne in the wrong document. I’d just sent the letter to the agent.

Instantly, I wrote the agent another e-mail: “As you can see, I am mentally unstable and unfit for representation. I am truly sorry for my horrible comments. I deserve to be electrocuted, I know.”

I never heard back from him.

But I did hear back from another agent, who loved the manuscript. He was a very enthusiastic man who laughed at all my mean jokes and he thought the book needed a lot of work, but he was willing to go through it with a red pen and mark up the pages.