“It’s tough to have a sick mom,” he said. “My mom couldn’t handle me either. Neither could my dad.”
“Yeah, mine too. He never wants to see me. And my mother, she’s just so caught up in her own stuff. I guess she’s been through some really bad things and she needs to focus on herself right now.”
“And where does that leave you?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” Neil said. “Exactly. Here at the crazy house of the even crazier Dr. Finch.”
“Do you think he’s crazy?”
“In a good way. I think he’s a genius. I know he saved my life.” And then out of the blue he said, “He was the first person I told I was gay.”
“Really?” I said. He’d finally said it. All this time I was beginning to wonder if Hope had been wrong. He seemed so normal, like a regular guy. He didn’t have an earring or talk with a lisp and judging by his brown shoes and pale blue polyester slacks, he certainly wasn’t gifted with color.
“Me too,” I said.
“What?” asked Bookman, pausing on the sidewalk.
“I’m gay.”
Somehow, this took him completely by surprise. He gasped, inhaling sharply and his eyes widened. “What? Are you serious?”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling embarrassed. “I thought you knew, I thought Hope told you.”
“Holy Mary mother of God,” he said. “So that’s what this was about.”
“What?”
“Nothing. So you’re gay?” he asked again.
“Yeah,” I said.
We continued walking but then he stopped again. “Are you sure you’re gay? I mean, how long have you felt like this?”
I told him all my life.
“That’s pretty sure.” He chuckled.
*
As we walked down Main Street past the closed stores, Neil said to me, “I just want you to know, I’m here for you whenever you need to talk. I mean, night or day. You can talk to me about anything, this or anything else.”
I glanced at him and thought he looked so handsome, bathed in the artificial yellow glow of the street lamp. “Thanks,” I said.
“And don’t ever worry,” he said firmly. “I will never take advantage of you.”
“Okay,” I said, reaching in my pocket for a Marlboro Light.
“You smoke?”
“Yeah,” I admitted. It was a habit I’d picked up from Natalie. At first, I was worried that Agnes or the doctor would be furious and not allow it. But they didn’t mind as long as “you don’t burn down the house.”
Neil pulled a lighter from his pocket and lit my cigarette.
“Thanks,” I said. Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when. No wonder my parents smoked, I thought. The part of me that used to polish my jewelry for hours and comb my hair until my scalp was deeply scratched was now lighting cigarettes every other minute and then carefully stomping them out. It turned out I had always been a smoker. I just hadn’t had any cigarettes.
“It was great talking with you,” Bookman told me when we were back at the house.
“Thanks for everything,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said and smiled warmly, eyes moist.
He left, climbing into his wreck of a car and I sank into the TV-room sofa. I felt mildly intoxicated, like I’d just taken a big swallow of Vicks 44. Then I saw a stray Purina Dog Chow Agnes had dropped on the seat cushion. Without hesitation, I picked it up and popped it into my mouth. No longer would I be afraid of trying new things.
“Hi, Augusten,” Hope said, when she came home an hour later.
I was still sitting on the sofa in a daze. “Hi,” I said vaguely.
“What are you doing?”
I’d been staring at the radiator. “Nothing. Just got back from walking around with Bookman.”
She looked around. “Oh yeah? Good. I need to ask him something. Where is he?”
“Oh, he left,” I said.
“Shoot. Do you think if I run down the street I can still catch him?”
“No,” I said. “He left like an hour ago.”
Hope took a seat on the sofa. “Shucks,” she said. “I wanted to ask him if he can fill in for me at the office this Friday. I wanted to visit my friend Vivian in Amherst.” Then Hope reached into her canvas rainbow bag and pulled out a small white bible.
“Would you mind doing a bible-dip with me?”
“Sure,” I said.
All the Finches did bible-dips. It was like asking a Magic Eight Ball a question, only you were asking God. The way it worked was, one person held the bible while another person thought of a question to ask God, like, “Should I get my hair cut short?” Then the person holding the bible opened it at random, and the person asking the question dropped his or her finger on the page. Whatever word your finger landed on, this was your answer. The doctor was so enthusiastic about bible-dips as a direct form of communication with God that most of his patients performed them. Although nobody did as many dips as Hope.
I held the bible and Hope closed her eyes. “Ready?” I said.
She opened her eyes. “Okay.”
I opened the bible.
Her finger landed on the word “awakened.”
“Oh my God,” Hope said. “That’s just incredible.”
“What’d you ask?”
“I asked if the fact that I missed Bookman means that I shouldn’t visit my friend Viv on Friday, if that was a sign.”
“So?”
“Well, so,” Hope said. “I got awakened. And to me, that means that I would be disturbing Vivian if I visited her. She did have a cold last month and she’s seventy-four. So she probably needs her sleep. If I showed up on Friday, I might wake her up.”
I nodded my head and Hope looked up at the ceiling. “Thanks, God,” she said.
Hope and God were buddies. Theirs was not a formal relationship steeped in ritual and tradition. It was more of a close yet casual friendship.
Last week, Hope and I were driving around the center of town looking for a parking space. When a red Vega pulled out of a handicap spot in front of Thome’s Market, Hope shrieked. “Okay!”
“You shouldn’t park here,” I told her. The car smelled sweet, like wet dog and armpits, and I was sick of sitting in it. But I still didn’t feel she should take a handicap spot.
“This space was meant for me,” she said.
We climbed out of the car and Hope set her rainbow bag on the hood. In addition to the rainbow bag, Hope always carried a canvas PBS bag and usually a plastic shopping bag. “Lock it,” she called.
I locked it, but didn’t see the point. As if there was anything to steal: a World Father’s Day button, a bag of balloons, a blue plastic Goody hairbrush on the dashboard. Then again, there was a box of Valium in the trunk.
Hope reached into her PBS bag and pulled out an electric alarm clock. “Have you got a dime?”
I dug into my pocket, feeling my hip bones, feeling too skinny, and pulled out a dime. “Here,” I said, handing it to her.
Then I noticed there was no parking meter. “Hope, there’s no meter.”
“I know,” she said, as she bent over and placed the dime on the sidewalk in front of the car. “It’s a tithe. I like to thank God when he does something nice for me.”
In Thome’s Market Hope couldn’t decide between a tuna sandwich or a turkey sandwich so, even though there was a line behind her, she pulled out her white bible. She did the dip herself, because she was in a hurry. “Harvest,” she said. “I landed on the word harvest.” She thought for a moment and then said, “Aren’t turkeys grain-fed? They are, I think. So that’s pretty close to a harvest.” Then she smiled at the perplexed girl who was standing behind the counter looking mortified and she said, “I’ll take the turkey. But on multigrain just to make sure.”
At first, I, too, was mortified by all the bible-dipping that went on in this house. But like everything else, I q
uickly got used to it.
And then I started to do them myself. It was surprising how addictive they could become. When I asked, “Will I like the new Supertramp album?” and landed on the word “starvation,” I knew that the album was a dud and I should save my money. It was like being able to turn to the back of the book and look at the answers.
Or it was like asking a parent.
THE BURNING BUSH
F
ERN STEWART WAS A MINISTER’S WIFE. AND A CLOSE FRIEND of my mother’s. She had a white smile that was usually located just a few inches above a plate of Rocky Road brownies she had baked from scratch just for me. She lived with her family in Amherst, in a warm and comfortable house that sat at the top of a small grassy hill. A clutch of tall white birch trees stood next to the house, their branches just grazing the slateshingled roof.
Fern was a perfect minister’s wife who shopped for teak napkin rings with my mother and enjoyed discussing contemporary poetry and visiting the local galleries. She wore her prematurely gray hair in a blunt-cut bob, held back away from her face with a black velvet hairband. And she spoke with a slight British accent, although it was my understanding she had been raised in Vacaville, California. Fern and her family took ski trips to Stowe. They shopped mail-order from J. Peterman and L. L. Bean. She wore nubuck leather kiltie flats from Talbots and a small gold cross around her neck.
And instead of fuck, Fern Stewart said fiddlesticks.
When my parents divorced, my mother and I had nowhere to live. The house was to be sold; the profits split. But until then, we were homeless.
Fern took us in.
She arranged for us to live in a house just down the street from hers. There was a basement apartment in that house and I was fascinated by the leaded glass windows, the copper plumbing and the wide oak floors. For a few months, I spent part of the time in this small apartment and the other part at the Finch house, in a room near the back bathroom that Hope had cleared out for me.
Many nights, my mother and I had dinner at Fern’s. Her family was genuinely warm and always made me feel like they’d been waiting impatiently all day long for me to show up.
Her four children each had perfectly white, straight smiles. Like Chiclets. Even the girls had clefts in their chins. And they always appeared to have just stepped from a hot shower.
As Fern set a pottery bowl of steaming broccoli with homemade cheese sauce on the table, her son would reach for it and offer me the first serving. “Even if you don’t like vegetables, you’ll love my mom’s Gruyère broccoli,” he would wink.
His older sister would playfully sock him on the shoulder of his Izod. “Heck, Daniel. Mom could even make us love lima beans!”
Everyone at the table would laugh. Then join hands and say grace.
To me, these people were as exotic as animals in a zoo. I’d never seen anything like them. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be one of them or simply live among them taking notes and photographs.
I was certain that Fern, unlike my mother, had never hurled the Christmas tree off the deck or baked one of her kids a cornstarch birthday cake. Furthermore, there was no doubt in my mind that Fern never craved a cigarette-butt-and-canned-smoked-oyster sandwich.
In some part of my lower brain stem, I recognized these people for what they were—normal. I also recognized that I was more like a Finch and less like one of them.
It was difficult to imagine handsome, preppy Daniel sitting in the TV room at the Finches’, pointing at the family dog and laughing because little Poo was lying on the floor in a fit of giggles with his pants pulled down and the dog licking his erect penis. It was hard to imagine Daniel seeing this and then shrugging and turning back to the TV. Because he’d gotten used to it.
My mother eventually found us our own place to live. It was one half of a large old house on Dickinson Street, just a few miles up the road from Fern. My mother liked the fact that it was across the street from where Emily Dickinson once lived. “I’m as brilliant a poet as she was, you know. It just feels right for me to be here at this point in my life.” And I liked the fact that it was a lot closer to Northampton and the Finches’. Now, instead of my mother having to drive me over there, I could take the PVTA bus. The fact that my “room” was really just a nook without a door told me that I wouldn’t be spending much time with Mom.
Dr. Finch had already told me to consider his house my house. He said I could just show up anytime I wanted to. “Just pound on the door and Agnes will get out of bed and let you in.” And I knew Hope really liked having me there. So did Natalie. Even though she was living in Pittsfield with her legal guardian, she came to Northampton a lot. And she said if I was there, she’d come all the time.
At first I’d thought it was weird that Natalie had a legal guardian, considering she already had a father. But Dr. Finch believed a person should choose his or her own parents. So at thirteen, Natalie had chosen one of her father’s patients, Terrance Maxwell, who was forty-two and rich. So now she lived with him and attended a private prep school that he paid for. Just like Vickie lived with a pack of hippies that traveled from barn to barn all across America. Every six months or so, Vickie would make a pit stop back home in Northampton.
So I was learning that living arrangements needed to remain fluid. And that I shouldn’t get too attached to anything. In a way, I felt like an adventurer. And this appealed to my deep need for a sense of freedom.
The only problem was school. I had just turned thirteen, a seventh-grader at Amherst Regional Junior High. Elementary school had been a disaster, with me repeating the third grade twice. Then after the divorce and the move to Amherst, I transferred to a new elementary school and that hadn’t worked either. Now, I was heading for something much worse.
From the first day when I walked in the door and was assaulted by the smell of chlorine, I knew I wouldn’t be attending this school for very long. Chlorine meant a pool. And a pool meant mandatory swimming, and this meant not only wearing a bathing suit in front of other kids, but being cold and wet and then stripping it off when my dick was at its smallest.
Another problem was the esthetics. To me, the large gray one-level building looked like some sort of factory that might churn out ground meat products or just the plastic eyes for stuffed animals. It was certainly not the sort of place I would want to spend any real time. The Amherst Cinema, on the other hand, was exactly the sort of place I wanted to hang out. It even had a smoking section. I also liked the Chess King at the Hampshire Mall. They sold reflective shirts and fantastic white dress pants with permanent creases.
But these paled in comparison to the real problem: I was surrounded by normal American kids. Hundreds of them, teeming through the halls like the roaches in the Finches’ kitchen. Except I didn’t mind those nearly as much.
I had nothing in common with these kids. They had moms that nibbled matchstick-thin slices of carrot. And I had a mom that ate matchsticks. They went to bed at ten o’clock and I was discovering that life could go on well past three in the morning.
The more time I spent at the Finches’, the more I realized what a waste of my life this school crap was. It was nothing but a holding tank for kids without bigger plans or ideas. Even Natalie said if she had to go to public school instead of private school, she just wouldn’t go.
The Finches were showing me that you could make your own rules. That your life was your own and no adult should be allowed to shape it for you.
So I would go to school for a day. Sometimes two days in a row. The other twenty-eight days I would do my own thing, which basically meant write in my journal, see movies and read Stephen King novels. I was careful not to be absent for thirty days in a row because this would cause the school board to issue a “core evaluation” which could result, I feared, in reform school.
The trick was to show up for homeroom. And then leave. This created confusion within the school’s records. Allowing me to slip through the cracks. And the fact that I had absolutely no frien
ds, knew not one person’s name, made my invisibility even easier.
One afternoon I came home early from school. I made my appearance to be counted at homeroom and then I casually walked out of The Factory. It was a beautiful day and I had seven dollars. I was thinking I could go to the Amherst Cinema and see the German film that was playing there. So I decided to stop by Dickinson Street to get another five dollars from my mother.
And when I opened the front door, there was Fern with her face buried between my mother’s legs.
My mother was sprawled back on the sofa with her eyes squeezed tightly shut. Fern’s head was moving from side to side like a dog gnawing on a rawhide bone. They were both naked; my mother’s blue nightgown draped over the arm of the sofa; Fern’s blouse and skirt in a heap on the floor.
My mother didn’t notice me at first, but Fern opened her eyes and turned her head toward the doorway, keeping her mouth on my mother. She looked right at me and for just a split second, I saw real terror.
Grossed out and disturbed on a deep level, I turned to leave. As I walked out the door I heard Fern howling like an animal, screaming from somewhere down inside her chest.
My mother was shrieking, “Fern, Fern, it’s okay.”
I went outside onto the porch and just stood there. I felt like, ick. But also like laughing. The street was quiet; twostory homes, trimmed hedges, driveways, a cat. The things people do behind closed doors. Looking at the yellow house with its green shutters and the brown Dodge Aspen in the driveway, you’d just never imagine it.
It seemed like only a few seconds passed before I heard the door open, felt hands on my shoulders turning me around. Fern was standing there, dressed but untucked, her hair dented. She was crying, her cheeks all shiny, and she was pulling me toward her, trying to hug me, kissing my cheek, my forehead, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”