Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [74]
We crossed the street, and an old lady in the passenger seat of a buggy waved at us. She was a happy, nice-looking lady, and her wave contained no sexual innuendo, no sarcastic irony as one might expect in Manhattan. Her warmth was so genuine and pure, I was taken aback. I managed to smile back at her and even wave. But suddenly, I wanted to chase after her and make her my mother. I wanted to scream, “Take me with you! Make me a dresser!”
The fact is, you can’t fake that kind of warmth. You just can’t. I’ve tried. And it seems to me, you just don’t encounter such warmth from strangers that often, unless they’re drunk or have a hard-on.
So maybe, I thought, these Amish aren’t in denial or mentally ill. Maybe they really are living better, richer, more wholesome lives, even if they are surrounded by Gap outlet stores and tourists. Maybe they have found some sort of excellent secret and are living with it, letting the world accelerate and brake and scream and crash and blow up around them. By day they offer us their Amishness, then at night they go home and experience a level of humanity and connection we’ve traded for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and The 700 Club.
While the name Blue Ball does bring to mind an image of a horny testicular cancer survivor, these Amish seem oblivious to the tawdry innuendo of their town’s name. And somehow, this made me feel mentally ill and in denial.
As she passed by, the buggy lady did not break eye contact, and she did not lower her hand. She continued to wave, like a queen. And I did the same, waving back, like her subject.
So what if she didn’t go online and look at porn or use zippers? What have zippers ever really done for me?
They are, after all, just something for a dick to hang out of.
I KID YOU NOT
N
ow that gay people are allowed to adopt children, the new gay thing in Manhattan is to be a parent. Just ten years ago, this was unheard of. Then it was all about having a shar-pei puppy, the more wrinkles the better.
You never see shar-peis anymore. Like in-line skates, they’re all gone now. And where did they go? I think the gay guys dropped off their shar-peis at animal shelters on the way to JFK to pick up their new, adopted third-world babies.
These days, it’s all about Baby Gap and Abercrombie Kids. It’s about play dates and hunky pediatricians with tattooed forearms.
But Dennis and I will have none of this madness.
Neither of us wants to accept the special challenges presented by a severely handicapped Romanian child or a baby who was born addicted to crack and has only half a head.
As Dennis says, “That’s what they give us. The day-old-bread kids, the dented-can kids.”
And we don’t want them.
“So, are you guys going to have kids?” people ask us, as though this is the single defining proof of our commitment to each other.
“God, no,” I say. I make a face, as though asked if I would ever consider having my intestines surgically moved to the outside of my body.
“But you’d make such great parents!”
Yes and no. Dennis would make a good parent. He loves to cook, and he does it extremely well. He listens. He nurtures. He flosses.
But this relationship contains two people, and the other one is unfit.
Whenever I see a baby-slapper on CNN, I think, There but for the grace of God.
I’m terrified of what sort of parent I would make. First, because I am startlingly self-centered. I require hours alone each day to write about myself. It takes no leap of imagination to know that in our home, there would be a Sony Playstation in every room. “Leave daddy alone and go make it to level four. And Daddy will give you ten bucks if you put it on mute.”
Another problem is that I was raised without proper parenting myself. So I really have no wisdom to impart. If a bully so much as touched him at school,