Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [42]
I understood the score very quickly and went ahead and placed another personal ad on AOL last night, after he canceled.
I love placing personal ads on AOL. It’s exactly like a combination of ordering from the L. L. Bean catalogue and writing a letter to God, only you get replies. My experience has been good with AOL. I always meet somebody interesting that I wouldn’t normally meet in my social circle. Especially considering that my social circle consists almost entirely of faces on a television screen. Placing a personal ad feels proactive, not so much like changing destiny but helping it along.
So I placed this ad, and I asked for an Italian or a Greek because I love that dark swarthiness. And I placed the ages between twenty-nine and thirty-five, which incidentally places Bob entirely out of the category because he is Jewish and forty.
So now that my “roof work” is over and I still have my mouth, I feel ready to bring something new into my life. Screw little Bob, who will eat a small dead lamb but will not date somebody who smokes leaves, I’ll find a new person, and this will be my Something. A handsome, hairy-chested Greek man is far better than mouth cancer, and he will occupy just as much of my thoughts.
It then occurs to me that I am mentally unstable.
So I decided to close my office door and go online. Maybe I can do some research and find out what’s wrong with my personality and then fix it.
BEATING RAOUL
I
t’s good to mix ’em up,” Raoul says of the martial arts. He currently holds a brown belt in karate but hopes to have his black belt by autumn. In the meantime he’s taking tae kwon do to supplement his judo. He’s also a semiprofessional downhill skier and a former investment banker who retired a multimillionaire last year at the age of thirty-three. He is extremely handsome (a former model) and articulate, and read Ulysses when he was thirteen. (“It really shaped me in many ways.”) He is fluent in three languages, four if you count Mandarin, which he can only read. He tells me all of this while he plucks a slender, nearly transparent bone from his steamed Chilean sea bass.
I nod. “That’s great,” I say as I stab a leaf of kale and fork it into my mouth. It tastes nothing like the bacon cheeseburger that I wish I were having right now. A greasy bacon cheeseburger at home, on the sofa, in front of MTV.
I’m thirty minutes into my first date with Raoul, and I am surprised by the intensity of my hatred for him. Truly, it is stunning.
“I don’t watch TV,” Raoul says, when I ask him if he likes MTV.
“Never?” I ask.
“Rarely. Sometimes a little PBS or CNN. I used to watch a couple of shows, but not anymore. Not since I stopped drinking.”
I try and veil my glee by adopting a mask of compassion. “So you had . . . a drinking problem?” I want to pound the table and cheer. I want neon signs to appear, huge arrows that point at him, flashing FLAW, FLAW, FLAW. I like flaws and feel more comfortable around people who have them. I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.
“No, I didn’t have a drinking problem. But you know,” he shakes his head, “who needs the extra carbs?” Raoul’s teeth are so white they look plastic. Though I am certain they are real and that he has never had a cavity, because no doubt he flosses four times a day.
And this is where I notice that all the bread sticks are gone. A trail of crumbs leads from the basket to my side of the table. When Raoul takes a sip of mineral water, closing his eyes, I quickly brush the crumbs off my shirt.
“CNN had a thing about carbs the other night,” he says. “You see it?”
I never watch CNN. I hate news and information and anything that threatens to puncture the bubble of oblivion in which I live. “No,” I say. “I missed that. But I agree, carbs are just awful. I usually don’t eat them. Except, you know, when I eat out in restaurants.”
Raoul smiles. “I thought you said you always eat