Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [57]
Dennis glanced at my plate and then down at his. There were at least three pounds of meat between our two plates. He smiled in a way that suggested mischief and remarked, “We are at the top of the food chain.”
I said, “And we can eat anything we want.”
Unlike every other person I’ve ever shared a meat-based meal with, Dennis did not comment on how clogged his arteries were about to become or how many miles he would have to run to burn off the fat. He tucked into his plate with quiet bliss. This, I thought, was a very good sign.
“So are you close to your family?” I asked.
He stabbed a quarter-inch-thick slab of medium-rare beast. “Not incredibly close. But we all get along and everything.” He carefully sliced the beast into a bite-sized piece and steered it into a small pool of sauce at the edge of his plate. “We don’t really see each other very often. I don’t know, it’s weird,” he said. “Two of my brothers and my sister all live within like twenty minutes of each other in Pennsylvania. They all have kids around the same age. And yet,” he popped the beast into his mouth, causing the fork to clank against his front teeth. “And yet, they never see each other. Maybe once every couple years.”
His mother, he explained, died of cancer. It had been a particularly sadistic cancer, and it took a long time for her to die. She suffered, and he spoke gently, kindly, of her. “She raised five kids with no help from anybody. She did the cooking, the cleaning, took care of everything and everyone as best as she could.”
He told me that his father lived alone in an efficiency apartment near his siblings. When he spoke of his father, his eyes flashed with complexity. I didn’t want to pry, but I wanted to know more. “What’s your dad like?”
“He’s, oh I don’t even know how to describe him. Okay, he’s like this. He believes that he put a roof over our heads and made sure we had food on the table and that was enough. That was more than enough. That was his entire responsibility, and as far as he was concerned, he was a good father.”
“I think it’s a generational thing,” I said. “Because my father was pretty much the same way. But it seems like women have pretty much pussy-whipped all the straight men, so they’re a lot more expressive and participatory than they used to be.”
Dennis said quickly, “You mean, straight guys are the new gay guys.”
“That’s exactly what I mean. Straight guys are like fags used to be. And the fags now are more like straight guys were. Fags today are all about body building and pickup trucks, and straight guys are all about feelings and open-toe sandals.”
This got us onto the topic of guys and dating. Dennis told me about some of the lousy dates he’d had over the past few years, including the recent date in Central Park where he cried.
“I’ve never cried on a date,” I told him.
“It was more than cried. It was like a complete mental collapse.”
He explained how he had met a guy through a personal ad, the old-fashioned kind in the back of a newspaper. He answered an ad this guy had placed. So they spoke on the phone—for hours—over a period of a week. Their chemistry was intense.
But when they met, the man was shaped like a pear, and he had a tiny head.
I said, “That’s the catch. That’s why his ad was in the newspaper and not online, with a picture.”
Dennis said, “Well, I tried to overlook that. I kept thinking, We were really connecting on the phone; I can overlook his body.”
“Yeah, but the tiny head,” I said.
“Well, yeah. I know. That was hard to overlook. So anyway, we met in the park, and I just was so wound up from our conversations, so let down, I guess, by the way he looked. And so tired of dating and ten