Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [10]
I went into the bathroom and ran a bath. Then I marched into the kitchen, glared at them, and pulled a container of Morton’s salt from the cabinet. They were too numb to say anything; they just watched me without the slightest hint of curiosity. I took the salt with me into the bathroom and poured all of it into the tub before climbing in.
As I sat in the hot, salty water, I thought, No wonder Mr. Bubble always gives me a urinary tract infection and hives. Mr. Bubble was for common people. Mr. Bubble was for my so-called brother, their true child. I was a Vanderbilt. I should bathe in condiments and seasonings. It was in my Vanderbilt genes.
TRANSFIXED BY TRANSSEXUALS
W
hen I was in the fourth grade all the girls wore Calvin Klein corduroy jeans and wanted to be psychologists. All the boys wore Levis and wanted to play pro football. I wore polyester stretch pants with bell-bottoms and wanted to be Christine Jorgensen, the world’s first famous transsexual.
At my school in western Massachusetts the students had their own cubicles. This was the late seventies, when everything was about personal space and emotional growth. We were allowed to decorate our cubicles any way we wanted. Most of the boys taped pictures of race cars or football stars to their walls. The girls favored snapshots of their cats, taken with their moms’ Kodak 110 Instamatic cameras.
My cubicle was a shrine to Christine. I had newspaper clippings, photographs, and an article from a magazine that had before-and-after anatomical line drawings.
“Who is this?” asked Mrs. Rayburn, fingering a clipping of an extremely tall woman in sunglasses climbing down the steps of an airplane, parked dramatically on the center of the tarmac.
“That’s Christine Jorgensen,” I told her, feeling very superior. “Isn’t she incredible?”
Mrs. Rayburn leaned in for a closer look. “I’m not sure I know who she is,” she said, smiling and intrigued. She must have wondered if this was some new folk singer or perhaps the author of a popular series of children’s books.
“She’s not the first, but she’s one of the first and definitely the most famous male-to-female transsexual,” I explained. “She was born George Jorgensen, and then in 1953 she flew to Denmark to have her surgery.” I could have talked about her all day.
Mrs. Rayburn appeared alarmed. “Do you identify with Ms. Jorgensen?” she asked.
“Oh yes,” I replied enthusiastically. “If I could be anything in the world, I would be her.”
Which pretty much ended that conversation.
It wasn’t so much that I wanted to be a girl. It was that I wanted to make a dramatic change in my life. My parents hated each other, and I hated them. I longed for them to die in an auto accident so that I could be whisked away by uniformed social workers and sent to live in a compound near a major city.
I was in the midst of an unhappy childhood, ripe for transformation. The idea that a person could make such a profound change in life gave me hope. In my world there were boys and there were girls and that was it. And here’s this girl who used to be a boy. My whole idea of what was possible in life expanded.
Besides, I already had more in common with the girls.
Boys only seemed to care about trading baseball cards or riding their dirt bikes. And my feeling about baseball cards was, Give me the gum, and you can have the stupid cards. As for riding a dirt bike, dirt made me anxious, so I preferred my mother’s station wagon. And the girls were always much more fun. They read books and talked about what they wanted to be when they grew up. All the boys ever did was snort and then swallow it.
Eventually, I took down my articles about Christine Jorgensen and replaced them with pictures of Jesus on the cross, though I wasn’t religious. I had asked my parents “Is there a God?” And when I couldn’t get a definite answer from them, when they offered no actual proof, I decided that God was like Santa Claus