Magical Thinking (26 page)

“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.

Would I have done this if the tables had been turned? Would I stop and approach Donna Tartt on the street and tell her that when I was a little kid, I was fucked up the ass by some guy who used hair conditioner as lubricant? Oh, and your little bob is adorable, by the way.

I know for certain that I would never send an author a picture of my dick.

It’s amazing to me how many gay guys send me photographs of their penises as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. Frankly, I find it odd when somebody who’s read my book e-mails me a picture of their face. Why do I need to see what they look like? As a result, I am often tempted to objectively comment: “Thanks for the picture. You have a bulbous nasal tip and should get that surgically repaired.” Or perhaps: “Please don’t write me again until you have had a chin implant.”

But to send a picture of your dick reveals an entirely different pathology.

“Hey. Loved the book, man. And you’re cute. Here’s my pic,” one e-mail read. “Here’s my pic.” As though this was simply a snapshot taken by his mom.

One man from Italy sent me a photograph of his penis with a glass eyeball tucked into the folds of his foreskin, so that it appeared his penis was looking at the camera. He wrote, “As he say in the movies, here looking at your kid.”

In addition to their penises, gay guys also send me pictures of their arms. This, because in my memoir, out of three hundred pages, there are a couple of tiny sentences about how as a child I was entranced by Tony Orlando’s arm hair.

“You like furry arms, and I got ’em!” one man wrote. He included a picture of his two fat arms crossed over his barrel chest.

Not all gay men send me penis pictures. But no straight men do. And to date, no woman has sent me a picture of her vaginal canal. “I know it’s a little stretched out, but I’ve had four kids. What do you expect? LOL.”

What is sometimes more shocking than a photograph is an extremely long letter. One man, who wrote from Massachusetts and claimed to be somehow acquainted with the crazy psychiatrist in my memoir, wrote me an e-mail that was thirty-five pages long. I was so stunned by the length, the way I just kept scrolling and scrolling endlessly, that I printed it and counted the pages. And you might think such an insanely long letter is uncommon, a freak event. But no. Many people feel the need to send me long letters saying things like “I know you’re busy but . . .” and going on for ten pages about their dreams of being a famous author and do I know a good literary agent who would be able to sell their work and turn it into the blockbuster international publishing phenomenon that it most certainly is.

My editor had warned me about this when my book first started getting attention. “Just wait,” she said. “Fans get this crazed look
in their eyes when they get near you. There’s something about a writer that makes people act really weird.”

I see this look she speaks of when I do readings and signings. While the majority of the people who come to my readings are nice, normal people I would like to know and be friends with, a few are people who should probably be locked inside hospitals.

One man in Brooklyn came to my reading smelling like a gangrenous foot. He had the most disgusting breath, which was made all the more revolting by his lack of teeth. When he spoke, he gummed the words out. “I wuved wur book.”

But then, look at me. My brain is incorrectly formed, and I’m shaped like a tube. Plus, I’m an alcoholic, a “survivor” of childhood sexual abuse, was raised in a cult and have no education. So, really, if you think about it, the only thing that separates me from the guy with the stinky foot and no teeth is a book deal and some cologne.

But even with my minimal amount of fame, there are certain perks. Recently, I was at a movie premier, and at the party after the movie, Meryl Streep was loose, walking around the room like a normal person. Absolutely nothing was preventing me from lunging toward her and shrieking “Dingoes ate my baby! Dingoes ate my baby!”

When you think about it, there are not only different tiers of fame but genres. The “classic” famous person is a movie star, and even here there are different grades, like eggs. There are grade-B actors, like Susan Anton, has-beens such as Ann Archer or the star of
Flashdance
herself, Jennifer Beals. Then, of course, there are top-tier movie stars like Ms. Streep. But there are other routes to fame. America always loves a good serial killer. And it’s tough to beat John Wayne Gacy, also known as Pogo the Killer Clown. The clown paintings he did while on death row have sold at auction for thousands of dollars. I know, because I spent many a drunk hour online looking to buy one on Ebay.

Then there are those who become famous because they are in
the center of a scandal. Of course, one instantly thinks of Monica Lewinsky. Monica is now superfamous worldwide. Italians still call her Portly Pepper Pot.

The fame of a writer is altogether different. For the most part, Americans don’t read. Statistically, virtually nobody reads; everybody watches TV and movies instead. Alice Sebold’s debut novel,
The Lovely Bones
, was an enormous blockbuster, the likes of which had been unseen for years. In hardcover, it sold nearly two million copies. But if an issue of
Time
magazine sold two million copies, the editor would be fired. And yet most people wouldn’t recognize Alice Sebold if she passed them on the street.

I didn’t sell two million copies of my first memoir. So I am even less famous. But still, I am famous enough now for old ladies to stop me in front of grocery stores and tell me about their Dr Pepper enemas.

“But I like what I have,” he said when I handed him the sleek gray bag. I’d bought not one bottle but three.

I laughed. “I know you do.” I said this in the exact same tone I might use to speak to a baby or a retarded person. “But it’s old. There are newer and better things on the market.” I then explained, as simply as possible, about alpha-hydroxy compounds
and how they are like dermabrasion you can do at home: a sort of chemical peel without the harsh chemicals.

He was not persuaded.

So I took his lotion of inferior, pore-clogging technology, and I hid it at the top of the closet, where he is too short to reach without the stepladder, which is in the front closet and very difficult to get out. Dennis is not a short man; he’s five-nine-and-a-half. But that “and-a-half” tells you something. Short(er) guys always add the “and a half.” Tall people never do this. So I hid his lotion and smiled at my mental image of him jumping up and reaching, jumping and reaching, with his old, prehistoric lotion just slightly out of reach.

When he went into the bathroom, he noticed his lotion was gone and in its place, my new improved lotion gift. “What’d you do with my stuff?” he shouted.

I was now sitting at the computer, which is on the dining room table, e-mailing my friend Suzanne in California. “I hid it,” I said.

“You better not have,” he said with surprising anger. Actually, it was so surprising that I assumed it to be mock.

“Yes I did. All gone. I threw it away.” There was glee in my voice. Glee mixed with triumph.

He scampered back into the bathroom, skidding on the highly polished wood floor like a cartoon dog. I heard him rummaging through the trash can. This made me smile because it’s just sort of cute.

He returned, indignant. “I mean it. Where is it?”

I sighed. “Okay, fine,” I said. I padded across the floor and went to the closet where I barely reached—certainly no stretching—to the top shelf and produced his favorite pale green bottle. I handed it to him and became serious. “But will you at least try the new one?”

“I’ll try it,” he said, but I knew he wouldn’t.

I explained the situation to him, doctor to patient. “Look. This will be better for your skin because it will remove more dead epithelial cells. I mean, I know it’s just lotion, but there have been advances.” I emphasized the word “advances,” knowing that Dennis is wary of advances.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll try it.”

I was somewhat annoyed by his resistance to change, and I also felt like he was still angry with me for hiding his oily lotion, so when we crawled into bed that evening I said, “Are you pissed at me for hiding it?”

“Yes,” he said, like a child who was very mad at having his blocks taken away.

I smiled and nestled against him. He kissed my shoulder. I’d never felt closer to him because I did know that he was mad and yet it didn’t matter. He loved me enough to be mad at me and not then have to reconsider the entire relationship.

I took this as a sign that things were good between us.

But the next morning, he seemed off. He seemed distant. Dennis wakes up half an hour before I do, and when he’s finished showering, kisses me between my eyes to wake me up. But this morning, there was a preoccupied tone to his voice, and his kiss seemed hurried, almost professional, as though he were paid to kiss me and was contemplating another line of employment.

After I took my own shower I said, “Is everything okay?”

He told me he was worried about a meeting he had that morning. It was with his new client, and things had not been going smoothly.

I felt a rush of hatred toward the client and fantasized about cornering said client in the parking lot after the meeting and producing a Henckels knife, which I would use to circumcise him.

But later that day at the horrible Japanese ad agency where I was working, I got an e-mail from Dennis. The subject line read
“Confession,” and it went on to say that he was actually still mad about the lotion and felt I was being controlling and manipulative and that it really hit a nerve because he can’t stand to be controlled.

I was furious and wanted to leave him immediately, find myself a much younger boyfriend who did not have fine lines and wrinkles but, more important, wasn’t so averse to change. I’d read somewhere that one of the signs of aging is a resistance to new things. I have worried myself by losing my interest in contemporary music. Whereas when I was in my twenties, I bought twenty new CDs a week, now I buy maybe five a year. I don’t listen to music on the radio, only NPR. So when Dennis expressed his own lack of willingness to embrace the new technology, I felt very strongly that maybe it was time to leave him and open myself up to the possibility of dating a twenty-yearold.