Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [45]
“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.
HOLY BLOW JOB
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,