Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [48]
But standing there watching, I felt terrible for Father Christopher. He sobbed, and shook and appeared, there on his knees, like he was about to divide into pieces, which in a way I suppose was exactly what was happening. He, the priest, was vulnerable and ruined for that moment. And I, the fourteen-year-old, felt kind of thrilled and kind of like, What do you expect? You worship a naked man; this shit’s bound to happen. There seemed to be nothing to do but step around him and leave, and when I tried to do this, he reached up and grabbed my arm. “Please,” he said.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “You’re going to be fine. Nothing terrible happened.”
When I moved back to Manhattan after my brief stint in Chicago, I thought my priest days were behind me. For somebody who was not a member of the church, it seemed to me that to receive two blow jobs from two different Catholic priests was an extraordinarily rare, nearly miraculous coincidence.
So imagine my shock when it happened a third time.
Only this time, there could have been no way for me to know.
I was in a cab on my way back from J.F.K. I’d been out in L.A. for three weeks shooting a commercial for UPS. As always, I got loaded in the bar at the airport before boarding the plane and then had more drinks on the plane itself. By the time I landed in New York, I was completely wasted.
The cab driver turned out to be really cute. He did not, for once, smell like a farm animal or wear a filthy turban. He was Irish and in his late thirties, and although I don’t remember what we talked about, I do remember that we kept checking each other out in his rearview mirror. Funny how even a cab can turn into a gay bar when two gay guys are in it. Anyway, by the time we were in Queens, it seemed inevitable that something was going to happen, and I could finally add “cab driver” to my list of sexual partners.
In fact, he pulled into a deserted area in Long Island City and climbed into the backseat. After we were finished, he got back in the driver’s seat, turned on the meter, and continued driving me home.
“You’re a funny cab driver,” I told him. “A lot friskier than any other cab driver I’ve ever had. Plus, you speak English.”
He laughed. “Well, I wasn’t always a cab driver, so that’s why.”
“Oh, don’t tell me. An actor.”
“Actually, I was a Catholic priest.”
MARK THE SHRINK
L
ast night, Mark the Shrink invited me to dinner at Zucca, a trendy new restaurant in Chelsea, to celebrate the birthday of someone I don’t know. I was wary of crashing the party, but he said it was okay. So I arrived with him, and suddenly we were seven people instead of six. So now we had to wait an hour for a table, on top of the forty-five minutes everybody else had already been waiting before Mark and I got there. But this was not the worst thing. What horrified me most was that they were all shrinks.
A table of shrinks, and me, the alcoholic, high-school dropout, Anne Sexton fan, advertising copywriter who was raised in a cult by a crazy psychiatrist. At first, I just wanted to slide under the table and squat among their legs, unnoticed. I felt profoundly out of place, like I should be wearing a thin cotton teddy with the back open and paper slippers. Or at the very least, some sort of electronic ankle bracelet. When one of the shrink’s whole fish arrived, I tried to make an ironic comment about how skillfully she removed its head with her knife and how perfect this was for a shrink. She looked at my forehead, smiled politely, and said, “Don’t you like fish?”
I felt like an inpatient who suddenly found himself eating with the doctors. I felt that at any moment, a nurse would