Magical Thinking (30 page)

He became my agent, and a couple of months after he helped me revise the manuscript, he sold it.

I never expected
Sellevision
to be a bestseller. I called it “my
cheese popcorn book.” What I did expect was that
Sellevision
would be published. Which is exactly what happened.

Then I wrote a memoir about my childhood. And this, I decided, needed to be a
New York Times
bestseller, high on the list. It needed to be translated into a dozen languages and optioned for film.

“You need to tone down your ambitions,” my agent said. “Because you’re only setting yourself up for disappointment.”

I understood his point of view. I also understood that the book would be huge, not because it was exceptionally well written—in fact, the book felt like a sloppy mess—but nonetheless I knew it would be a bestseller because it had to be a bestseller, so I could quit my loathsome advertising job and write full time. I didn’t have to become rich. I just had to be able to publish another book and then another.

I needed the book to be a
New York Times
bestseller because I needed those words
“New York Times
bestseller” to accompany my name for the rest of my life, even if I never wrote another book that sold more than two copies. It was like “M.D.” I felt I needed those letters to be complete.

My therapist expressed concern. “Why do you feel you require this event outside yourself to make you happy? It’s something that is not only highly unlikely, but something you have absolutely no control over whatsoever.”

I merely smiled and said, “You’ll just have to watch and see.”

After
Running with Scissors
was published, I was sad to see that the Barnes & Noble at Lincoln Center didn’t have it displayed on the front table, like other new books. Instead, they had it tucked away where nobody would see it. I willed the chain to have a corporate scandal and fall into financial ruin. KABOOM: the next day, the free-standing shelf units were removed and my book placed on a large new table.

A month later, the book reached number five on the
Times
list. A few months after this, it was sold in nine countries and optioned for film. I quit my advertising job.

Luck? The greedy wishes of a desperate man randomly fulfilled? No. There are no accidents.

 

My editor phones me and says, “Augusten. You need to concentrate hard on
DRY
. You need to make it another bestseller. I know you can do it. You did it with
Running with Scissors
, and you need to do it again with
DRY.”

“Okay,” I tell her, as though she has asked me to turn her brother into a toad and I am able to do this. “I will think hard. But first, I’m focused on something else.”

“What? What are you working on now?” Jennifer believes completely in magical thinking. She says she can do it, too, and I know she can. She is the only other person I know who shares my mental powers.

“Well, right now I’m obsessed with Elizabeth Smart.”

“That little girl who went missing from her bedroom?”

“Yes, exactly. It’s making me crazy that they can’t find her. I need them to find her. Either she has to come home, or they have to find her head on a stick in the woods.”

“God, I certainly hope she comes home.”

“I can’t control that. There are limits,” I say.

“Wow,” Jen says. “Okay, I’ll think of Elizabeth Smart, too. And then we’ll work together on
DRY.”

“Okay, Jen.”

We hang up.

Three days later, Elizabeth Smart is found, returned to her parents. No longer a virgin, of course, but at least her head was still attached to her body.

P
UFF
D
ERBY

 

 

 

K
now this: the Kentucky Derby is not about the horses. It’s about the hats. These creations are wider than a professional linebacker’s shoulders and cost about as much as his annual salary. They come in all colors, from that pale blue in sanitary napkin commercials to unapologetic red. Profusions of flowers or feathers or both extend at least a foot in every possible eyepoking direction. Know this also: it is apparently a Kentucky State law that the hat and dress must be a coordinated twinset. Therefore, if the dress has violet leopard-print spots, so, too, must the hat. The dress itself must hug the body like a second layer of cells, and if it is above a size four, the wearer of the dress must stay within one hundred yards of the parking lot. Said hat
and dress are always,
always
worn with strappy, open-toed high heels in a complimentary hue.

This is Easter with gigantic, leaking breast implants.

I know these things because last week, Dennis and I drove from Manhattan to Louisville for Derby Day. But as mesmerizing as these hats are, my eyes were involuntarily drawn to the faces of the ladies who wore them. Though many were in their early twenties, they’d already racked up multiple face-lifts, evidenced by their unnaturally uniform skin and a nearly identical facial expression: “Southern cordial.” These Dixie chicks wear so much makeup that if you touched one of their cheeks, your finger would look as though you’d just dipped it into a jar of Skippy.

These ladies have one final accoutrement: a man’s arm hooked territorially—predatorily, even—around their waists. The arm is clad in a flawless Hickey-Freeman seersucker suit. At the wrist: a heavy, shiny Rolex. On the hand: a wedding band, sized slightly up for easy removal in airport lounges.

The men don’t have hats, but they do have thick, penis-width cigars protruding from the smug corners of their mouths. Their mere presence say “old money/young wife.”

Yet for all their composure and utter self-confidence, not one of these ladies or gentlemen passed by our seats without giving us a look of mild curiosity tinged with jealousy.

Dennis and I were dressed in shorts from Abercrombie, oxfordcloth shirts, and loud striped ties. We both wore linen navy blazers and baseball caps. Dennis wore Nikes; I wore New Balance. The security guard at the front gate remarked, “This is the best outfit I’ve seen today,” as she scanned Dennis’s camouflage cargo pockets with her wand. Apparently she’d already had her fill of plastic women in dangerous headgear.

But our outfits were not the source of Derby envy. Quite simply, we had the best seats at Churchill Downs. Private box seats, right on the track, at the finish line. The box seats belong to Dennis’s
friend Sheila or, more accurately, to Sheila’s grandfather, Doc Twining.

Doc Twining was a doctor in the day when being a doctor meant something grand, like a Cadillac Eldorado convertible, a large home without a mortgage, and a lake house for the summer. He was a surgeon, saved lives in World War Two, and became best friends with the governor of Kentucky. Thus, the box seats. He probably paid for them with a round of drinks and a handshake. Or perhaps a free appendectomy. These days, a typical doctor who worked for an HMO might not even be able to afford digital cable to watch the Derby on TV.

When Doc Twining dies, the box reverts to the Derby, where it will be auctioned yearly to the highest bidder. Sadly, a corporation will probably be the highest bidder, and uncouth middle managers at a snack-chip company will occupy the box. I imagine they will wave flags of some sort. Perhaps they will brandish sticks.

But last weekend, the box belonged to six of us: Dennis, me, Sheila, Sheila’s husband, mother, and brother. The brother was fresh out of prison, having served time for an unnamed crime. He wore gray polyester slacks and a Hawaiian shirt and ate beef jerky. He seemed like a really cool guy and for a moment I thought,
Maybe I should commit a petty crime just to see what jail is really like
.

At the start of the third race, a young black man approached our box with a tray of mint juleps. They were in
glass
glasses, with tall sprigs of mint sticking up higher than the straws. Just like one of the Hats. I ordered a round for everybody except myself, because I don’t drink. As each julep was pulled from the tray, I saw that the glasses were encrusted with ice. Such civility.

As I sat in the box watching the glossy and ultramuscular horses blur past me, I thought about how unlikely it was that I was at the Derby in the first place. In one sense I am a highly likely candidate, since it would be difficult to find a person whose blood was a more perfect shade of blue than mine. On my father’s
side I am a descendant of the original Jamestown colonists, who arrived in America in 1620, a few years before the Mayflower. My mother’s people owned enormous pecan orchards and Taralike plantation houses in southern Georgia. My ancestors were judges, doctors, lawyers, mayors, governors, and land owners.

Unfortunately, a wide streak of mental illness, alcoholism, and irresponsibility runs through my family tree like a sort of gypsymoth rot. So while I may, indeed, be a blue-blooded, purebred American with roots in the Great South, I no longer have my papers.

So I sat there in the Derby box feeling a bit like an imposter. “Got any more of those?” I asked the former inmate. He handed me a greasy stick of jerky.

During the seventh race, a man in a blindingly white suit approached our box and, seeing that it was full, stood at the opening of the box next to ours, the one just slightly ahead of the finish line. A murmur rippled through the box, and I heard the word “Daddy,” a word that for various reasons always gets my attention.

His diamond earrings flashed in the sun. Of course: P. Diddy (formerly Sean “Puffy” Combs), rap star, music producer, recently acquitted gun-out-the-window-thrower. A small entourage of impeccably dressed and very handsome black men huddled behind him.

A crowd materialized, and there seemed to be less oxygen in the air. The dozens of photographers in front of us on the track now turned around to face Puffy. Auto-focus lenses whirred into action. Flashes fired.

“Puffy!” yelped one of the debutantes. “A picture? Pretty please, Daddy?”

Puffy extended his arm, and the girl parted the crowd and slid right in. Flashes exploded on their faces. The light around us popped.

The crowd seemed to close in on our little box. Puffy signed autographs, signed anything passed to him. He held a cigar
between his teeth. There was not a single smudge on his white suit. His Rolex shone. When he spoke, he sounded like a senator.

Even without his white, white suit, Puff Daddy would have been the whitest man at the Derby. And yet I couldn’t help but think: all these Hats, swooning over him, their faces melting into smiles, their bodies leaning into him, their eyes trained on his every gesture—these ladies wouldn’t give him a quarter to save his life if he were wearing sweat pants, a Fubu jersey, and a backward baseball cap. Yet now, I was certain, any of them would have been proud to bear his children. The men, too. Any one of them would happily shrug, “What the hell?” and be his bitch.

People sneer at “new money.” Until, that is, they are actually face-to-sneer with it. Puffy single-handedly stole the show from the Hats, who had themselves stolen it from the horses.

“Nice outfits, guys,” he said to Dennis and me, leaning over the railing that separated our box from his. He nodded and made an effort to reach over and shake our hands. He had the sincerity of JFK and certainly as much charm.

“Thanks,” I said.

We were dressed for comfort, with a nod to tradition. Puffy was dressed for tradition, with a nod to world domination. The ladies were dressed to impress and found themselves hopelessly in awe of a black man who had reinvented himself as the richest, whitest man at the Derby.

I didn’t feel so out of place then.

M
EANWHILE
, B
ACK AT THE
R
ANCH

 

 

 

D
ennis and I live in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side, in a large studio apartment that overlooks the new Trump development along the river. From our living room, we can peer into the two-million-dollar apartments across the street and admire the popcorn ceilings and overhead fluorescent lights that apparently come standard in every kitchen. We used to have a view of the Hudson River, but this is no longer the case. We now get a sliver of sky and a chunk of New Jersey, and that is all, which is clearly not enough for anyone. So we’ve decided that this summer, we need “a place in the country.” A place where we can go to decompress and look at trees in their natural habitat. As opposed to trees that have been reformed into particle board and placed into a Trump window frame.

So we began looking at houses in western Massachusetts. And we recently found a farmhouse from the seventeen-eighties that has been fully restored by its current owner, a New Yorker. This means all the molding has been stripped and left tastefully bare, the wide pine floors polished with European wax. In the kitchen there is a sink made of slate and the faucet is from Paris, but it’s not fancy; it’s blissfully plain in a way that only the French could manage to pull off. I’m dead certain this faucet has added twelve thousand dollars to the price of the house.

In the living room is an enormous beehive fireplace complete with Dutch oven. This fireplace is what made us want the house. This is a fireplace a person of six feet can nearly stand in. The bricks are, of course, handmade.