Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [51]
So, basically, he’s ten. And I’m forty.
Why does three years seem like an enormous amount when it involves crossing the line of a decade?
Now that I know him, he seems to me to be made out of sensitivity, like it’s a substance. Like a snowman. We went to a movie, and halfway through I felt his fingers, cold, on my arm. And I didn’t move, because I wasn’t sure he had intended to actually hold onto my arm. And then I touched his hand with my finger tips. And then he sank against me, and our hands made out while we watched Al Pacino do Shakespeare. And he has intense hands. There’s something going on there with those hands. They know things.
He’s probably not a shrink but has confused himself with his own shrink, whom he probably sees four times a week in his inpatient residential home, from which he’s gained day privileges.
I wonder what his catch is. He can’t just be single and that good looking and a doctor. It doesn’t make any sense. It makes sense that I’m single because of my alcoholism and advertising career and entire history. There’s always some reason. What’s his?
My friend Suzanne says to be honest with him. She says to be myself, that shrinks are wrecks and that that’s why they’re shrinks.
But I’m afraid to tell him that, inside, I’m a mess. That my confident, outgoing exterior is just a mask that hides the fact that I am damaged at the core, have a cracked trunk. That I drank my twenties away to forget my childhood, which was beyond-belief fucked up. The other day he opened the closet to borrow a sweater, and he saw my box. And he said, “What’s this?” And I freaked out and said, “Nothing.” But I said it too quickly. And because he’s trained, he became suspicious. “It’s a big nothing. You almost have no closet left.” So I told him it was all my journals from childhood, and when he suggested we open the box and take out a journal, I told him that I’ve never opened it and that I don’t think I ever will. Clearly, this was a fucked-up moment. But he let it slide. I closed the door.
Just for a little while I want to pretend to be normal. I want to fit in among the doctors, to sit at the table and laugh freely without having something to tell.
Always, something to tell.
“I have to tell you something.” Always a catch. Not just baggage, but luggage, steamer trunks, moving vans.
I just don’t want to snap the shiny spell of Mark the Shrink thinking he’s met a normal and successful guy who is well-adjusted and can make jokes about fish at dinner with his friends.
Maybe I could tell him just enough about me to seem interesting, not real.
Should I put this in a letter?
I don’t want to go to L.A. with this on my mind. I want to be able to tell him but not force it on him like a bigger deal than it is. Although I guess it is a pretty big deal. And there’s a very real possibility that a responsible shrink would know better than to become involved with someone who has a history of alcohol abuse, among other things, and less than one year of sobriety.
______
I’m in L.A. shooting a UPS commercial. The actual shoot isn’t for four days, so basically there’s nothing to do but sit around the pool and then hop in the car to go to the production office and look at the wardrobe for ten minutes, then come back to the pool.
I called Mark the Shrink last night and woke him up. He was sleeping at seven-thirty at night because he had worked until four in the afternoon, having worked all night before. I apologized and tried to get off the phone, but he wanted to talk. He said he missed me, which made me gain sudden weight in my chest because of what I was about to tell him.
“I have something to tell you that you’re not going to like,” I said.
There was a pause, and then he said, “What is it? Are you HIV positive?”
I said no. I said, “I’m an alcoholic. I don’t drink anymore, but I did, a lot and for a long time. I quit a year ago. Or, actually, I