Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [60]
“Could you date somebody with Down’s syndrome?” I ask.
Without thinking, he replied, “If he had a bubble butt, pecs, and a big dick.”
He thinks he’s being very clever, so I tell him my scary story. I say, “You remember I told you about my Australian friend, Hateful Harold?”
The Schnauzer nods because he does remember Hateful Harold; he remembers everything I tell him.
“Well, he got drunk one night and went to that awful Ty’s bar on Christopher Street?”
The Schnauzer made a sour face. He knows the bar and can imagine exactly the sleazy clientele that goes there, a crowd that has already been to every other bar on the street and is now sweating and desperate. I continue, “So he was depressed and at this pit of a bar, and he was drunk and horny. And all of a sudden, some guy came up to him, and they started talking. But Hateful Harold wasn’t in a talkative mood, so he suggested they just hop on the subway and go back to his Jersey City apartment. So that’s what they did.
“Flash forward to the next morning, when Hateful Harold wakes up, completely hungover and next to a body. The guy’s back is to him, and he can barely remember even going out the night before, let alone picking somebody up. So gently he turns the guy over, and—surprise—the guy had Down’s syndrome.”
The Schnauzer yelps with glee.
“It’s true!” I say. “And so then he, the guy with Down’s syndrome, wakes up with this big fat hard-on and Hateful Harold just recoils from the bed. He flies out of it and stumbles backward. And the Down’s syndrome guy says to him, ‘I love you.’ ” Here, I look directly into the Schnauzer’s eyes. “So you better be careful what you wish for.”
Later we order Chinese food. It arrives about forty-five seconds after we hang up the phone. We open the bag and fortune cookies wrapped in cellophane spill onto the counter. I take one, rip off the wrapper and break the cookie in two. I peel out the fortune and read it. “You are gifted in business matters.”
“We must have the wrong order,” Dennis says.
“I am good at business,” I protest.
“Oh?” he says, raising just an eyebrow. With this look I know he is referring to my oven. The thing is, I live in a studio, so space is limited, and I never cook. So naturally, I keep all my tax crap in the oven.
“Ick, what is this?” I say, peeling the plastic lid off one of the containers.
“It doesn’t matter,” Dennis says. “It all comes from the same place.” Then he explains Chinese food in Manhattan to me: “See the way it works is, there’s one central location out on Long Island where all this stuff is made. Then it’s piped into the city through a series of underground pipes that run parallel to the train and subway tracks. The restaurants then just pull a lever. One lever for General Tso’s chicken, another for beef with broccoli sauce. It’s like beer; it’s on tap.”
It’s amazing how convincing he is when he says this. There’s no pause in his description, nowhere for him to stop and think, to make this up as he goes along. It’s as though he’s simply repeating something he read in the Times yesterday.
This makes me love him more than I did just five minutes ago.
The Schnauzer is a responsible business owner who balances his checkbook down to the penny. Whereas I throw my bank statements into the trash unopened. He shops at Fairway market, where there is an entire aisle devoted to olives. I shop at the Korean market downstairs from my crummy apartment, where there is an entire aisle devoted to cream-flavored Japanese gummy worms.
There are other differences between us.
He washes and reuses Zip-Loc storage bags. And I have single-handedly destroyed many acres of rain forest through my extensive use of yellow Post-it notes and paper towels, which I use compulsively for everything.
He has no vices whereas I have had all of them at one point but now have only Nicorette gum, which I chew constantly, causing my jaw to snap and pop.
The Schnauzer listens to jazz. I listen