Magical Thinking (15 page)

“It’s a little salty,” he answers.

I immediately agree. “It’s good in a salty way. My body must crave salt for some reason. Maybe I didn’t drink enough at the gym and I’m dehydrated.” Why am I doing this? Why am I shapeshifting in front of this man? And the answer is, of course, because he is handsome and perfect, and I feel I am neither.

Raoul takes a large sip of water. “So tell me about you,” he says, smiling.

“Well, I’m in advertising. Like Darren Stevens on
Bewitched
.” I have used this line hundreds of times, and sometimes people smile.

He doesn’t smile.

I nod and go on. “So that’s what I do for work. For fun, I really like going to movies. I see pretty much everything.”

Aces align in his eyes, like a winning slot machine. “I love movies,” he says. Finally. Something in common.

“Yeah? What’s your favorite?”

“American Beauty
,” he says, not having to think. “I saw it ten times. It’s the most incredible movie about Buddhism I’ve ever seen.”

I can’t stand spiritual gay men. They annoy me more than flavored coffees. A spiritual gay man simply means he has a yin/yang tattoo on his ass, which you can be sure has had electrolysis. “So you’re a Buddhist?” I ask, pleasantly.

“Put it this way,” he says, clasping his fingers together under his chin, “I’m very interested to know as much as I can and experience as much of the moment as possible.” The candle between us flickers when I cough. “What about you? What movie did you really like recently?”

Suddenly my mind goes white, and I cannot remember seeing any movie, ever. This happens to me. Somebody asks me a simple question, and my petulant child of a mind turns away and faces the wall. “I liked
Deliverance
. The pig scene was great.”

After dinner Raoul shocks me by asking me out again. “We could take a walk in the woods up in Inwood. It’s really beautiful, more untouched than Central Park. And it would be really nice to be together in Nature.”

Because I am so surprised by his invitation, as I’d assumed that Raoul didn’t like me either, I say, “Okay.” Even though I am wary of Nature. After all, where do most manhunts for escaped serial killers begin? Exactly. In the woods. After I agree, I ask myself why. And all I can think is that I’m doing what my friend John once told me to do: dismiss the first date, write it off. You have to give somebody two or three dates before you can really know.

I tell myself how good this is that I am making an effort, giving Raoul a fair shot, not being so judgmental.

 

The following Sunday I meet Raoul at Inwood Hill Park, at the northern tip of Manhattan. I have never been above
Seventy-Third Street, so this is something of an adventure, and I am carrying two hundred dollars in cash in case of an emergency. When I see Raoul sitting on a bench, I smile automatically. He is wearing shorts and a loose T-shirt and appears very casual and sexy, yet at the same time very wholesome and down-to-earth. I suddenly feel crazy and judgmental, not to mention shallow.

“It’s great to see you, Augusten,” he says, extending his hand.

We shake, and then Raoul pulls me close in a hug. “And you feel great,” he tells me. “Man, you must work out all the time, you’re just all muscle.”

I am deeply flattered by this, much more flattered than I should be. My feeling is, now I will follow him anywhere.

As we walk, Raoul tells me a little more about himself. He feels that life is an adventure and that if you want something, you just have to go out there and get it. “I wanted to have enough money to retire at thirty-three, and that’s what I did,” he says. “I’m living proof that you can’t fail if you have a plan. You only fail if you don’t have a plan.” As we walk past bushes, Raoul extends his hand to touch the leaves, often identifying them by their Latin names. He wants to know if I am where I want to be in my life. “Are you on course?” he asks.

I can’t help feeling that if he were standing now in front of a jury of my friends and acquaintances, they would all whisper and scribble the word “odious” on their legal pads.

Finally we reach a small clearing. Here in the middle of the woods is green grass, a pool of sunlight, and an old log overturned and perfect to sit on. Raoul walks over to a large ancient oak tree and places his palms on the trunk. Then he leans forward slowly and kisses the bark. “This is Beth,” he says. “She’s my favorite tree.”

Okay, I officially despise Raoul now, so I reach into the flap pocket of my cargo shorts and pull out a box of Marlboro Lights. I light a cigarette and blow a plume of smoke into the air. “Nice to meet you, Beth.”

Raoul is horrified. “You smoke?” he asks, with utter disgust.

“I’m trying to quit.”

“Well, you either smoke or you don’t. You don’t ‘try’ to quit; you either do or you don’t.”

“Okay,” I say, “you’re right. I’m thinking about quitting but haven’t really tried, so, yes, I smoke.”

“Well I wish you wouldn’t smoke here in the woods,” he says.

I remove the cigarette from between my lips, toss it on the grass, and mash it into the earth with the tip of my hiking boot. “Okay,” I say.

The corners of Raoul’s mouth curl into a frown of distaste. “Let’s head back,” he says.

 

Somehow we end up in bed. It seems clear that we have nothing in common, but Raoul invites me up to his apartment—a two-bedroom on Central Park West—and I accept because his muscular calves seem to have a curious power over me. Once upstairs, he tells me again how sexy I am.

I am ashamed that I am so easily swayed by this compliment. All my life I have felt bad about my skinny body. So I have worked out for years and have grown much larger and stronger, and although my own mirror still reflects back to me the image of a skinny kid, other people see somebody else entirely and sometimes want to sleep with him.

Raoul takes his shirt off, and his chest, muscular, hairy, masculine, engages my interest. And within ten minutes we are undressed and in bed.

It turns out Raoul has a condition known as micropenis. This means his penis is less than three inches long, fully erect. It looks like a large clitoris, sticking out above two balls.

“Suck my big, fat cock,” he tells me. “You like that big dick?”

I am dizzy. I am literally dizzy. I was so shocked to encounter the micropenis and now am even more shocked to encounter
his apparent lack of knowledge about the micropenis. I grip it in my hand, and it’s lost, so I use my thumb and index finger to jerk it.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, man, stroke that long, hard cock. Work it.”

I am now engaged in what I consider volunteer work. I am jerking him off purely out of pity. This is really no different from donating five percent of my paycheck to the United Way every month, and it occurs to me that maybe now I don’t need to give to the United Way and instead can keep the cash for myself for dating, which I am obviously going to have to do quite a bit more of.

He comes. “I need to wash up,” I say.

Raoul is distant, cool. “Go ahead,” he says, standing and slipping into a pair of briefs. Then he says, “Thanks.”

“No problem,” I say, drying my hands on his expensive towel. “But I should be going.”

“Yeah,” Raoul says. “That’s cool. I really enjoyed meeting you, Augusten. But, you know. The smoking thing, that’s sort of a deal breaker for me.”

 

Later, at home, I wonder if dating in, say, Dayton, is different. Out there, maybe you have a pool of fifty guys from which to choose. So maybe you pick the guy with whom you have the most in common, and you just iron it all out as you go along. But here in Manhattan, if a guy has last year’s sideburn length, forget it. If you can’t check off every quality you listed in your delusional personal ad, next. There’s always another guy.

Am I any better? If Raoul had been okay with my smoking, would I have been okay with his mini dick? After all, he was handsome, smart, successful. Maybe if I got to know him, I’d actually find that I liked him.

The funny thing is, if he’d come right out and told me on the first date that he had a dick the size of a pencil eraser, if he’d
made a joke about it (“But I’m so perfect in every other way”), maybe I would have liked him. As it was, he not only didn’t admit his flaw, he was entirely oblivious to it. So although Raoul was far from perfect, he seemed to think he was quite close.

And for me, that’s a deal breaker.

H
OLY
B
LOW
J
OB

 

 

 

L
ately, you can’t pick up a newspaper or click on a website without encountering yet another horrifying story involving a priest, his penis, and a child. Suddenly, inexplicably, we have turned our collective eyes away from terrorists and are now obsessing over men of the cloth. We have stopped asking “But how did little Tabitha get a machine gun in the first place?” and are now asking “Is Griffin spending too much time with Father O’Brian?”

Well, I’m here to defend our Holy Fathers. The fact remains, Catholic priests have given me some of the best blow jobs of my life.

“Do you really think this is okay?” I asked Father Bill in Chicago. We were sitting in his black Crown Victoria, parked on
Mayrose Street. A street, I might add, that is not altogether unpopulated, especially at ten at night. “It’s fine,” he told me. “We’ll just look like a couple of guys waiting for somebody to come out of a store.”

But I wasn’t so sure. People
looked
at a black Crown Victoria. It was a surveillance vehicle that attracted attention. “Maybe we should just pull around, you know, in back of something.”

He smiled, and I was struck by how warm and sincere his smile was. Then I remembered,
Well of course it is
. What else would it be? The pine tree–shaped air freshener that hung from his rearview mirror gave the car a pleasing, artificial scent. Somehow, this aroma suited him. “Would you feel more comfortable if we parked in the alley?” he asked. I told him I would. Father Bill put the car in gear and drove around the block. That’s the great thing about Chicago: it has alleys.

I was fascinated by Father Bill. He was a ruggedly handsome man in his mid-forties, and when we met in the bar, I would have never pegged him as a Catholic priest. In fact, he looked suspiciously like a software developer I once dated. “Are you in software?” was my opening line to him, my come-on.

He rested his drink on the bar and turned to me, sliding sideways on the stool. “As a matter of fact . . .” he said in a leading tone of voice, “. . . no. But I could be if you want me to be.” I smiled at his charming offer to reinvent himself for me. It showed that he had a playful personality. But I told him no, that was okay; he could just be whatever he was. And because I am from New York City and not Chicago, I pressed the issue. “So what
are
you then?”

He chuckled to himself and glanced down at his hands. The answer was, it seemed, a private joke between him and his fingers. I looked at his thumb for a clue. He didn’t look like a construction worker or a typist.

“I’m a Catholic priest,” he said.

I thought he was maybe joking, going for shock value. But after I sat down and had a few more drinks, adding to the fifteen
or so already coursing through my veins, it did turn out to be the truth. He was an actual Catholic priest, the kind that knows many old ladies by their first name. When I pressed him, he was even able to quote from the Bible. His memory was astonishing, and I realized that his ability to recall a certain verse from a particular passage within a given chapter of the Bible meant he probably could have sailed through medical school. And he still would get to wear a uniform at the end, only he’d also get to drive a sexier car.

He signaled the bartender and ordered us another round. He was drinking something red, which I teased him about. “Is that the blood of Christ?”

He smiled at this but politely, letting me know he’d heard that one before. “Not quite. Just a Cape Codder.”

I leaned in. “I thought you guys weren’t supposed to go to gay bars. Or be gay, for that matter.”
Or drink
, but I didn’t say this, because really, anyone’s allowed to be an alcoholic.

Here he laughed wickedly. “Oh, we do a lot of things we’re not supposed to do. Trust me.”

And who wouldn’t trust him? A priest!

And that’s how I ended up in his car, now parked in neutral behind a restaurant in a scummy alley in Chicago.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. I said this after my penis refused to become erect. I was upset by my impotence, at twenty-six, but also didn’t want to disappoint Father Bill. He was such a nice guy. “I’ve had way too much to drink,” I told him.

Here, he pulled his face up from my lap and sat back against the seat. He said, “You know, you should really go to rehab.”

This was a stunning thing to hear, especially from a man who had, not an hour ago, bought me five drinks. “Really? That’s an interesting remark. Do you think so?”

“I think so,” he said, closing his eyes.

I tried to size him up. I decided that perhaps he was being passive-aggressive, sort of punishing me in some clever
priest
way for being too drunk to get hard, thus spoiling his free evening. Catholics were the world’s foremost experts at applying guilt in subtle but damaging ways. “So why do you think I should go to rehab?”