Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [76]
Instead, she learned that life is stunningly, painfully unfair. That guys always get off. And that your mother can turn on you.
With my left shoe, I had sealed the little girl’s fate: a life on the therapist’s couch and tens of thousands of dollars to explore a paralyzing obsession with men’s feet.
Still, I do sometimes fantasize about what it would be like to have a child. Perhaps a little girl like the one whose hand I accidentally crushed. I already know what her name would be: Malibu.
Malibu evokes a kinder era, the seventies. It conjures images of a customized van, painted white but with glowing orange-and-yellow graphics airbrushed along the side and a small wet bar inside between the captain’s seats. It’s a blond hair, green eyes, ponytail-worn-to-one-side kind of name.
In an age of Mayas, Karas, and Naomis, Malibu is refreshingly sunny.
“Sure, sweetie. You can wear makeup. Just make sure the other second-graders don’t steal it,” I would say, sticking a Nars mascara into the zipper pocket of her Powerpuff Girls plastic knapsack.
My daughter Malibu would understand that she was certainly smart enough to become president, if that is what she desired. But no matter what, she was going to wear heels, and she was going to have good haircuts. For her fifteenth birthday, I would get her a set of breast implants or a nose job: her choice.
Of course, Malibu would, in the end, hate men because of me. She would gain weight, not shave her legs, cut all her hair off, and work in a bookstore named Womynfire. She would drop the first and last letters of her name to become simply Ali. I would be forced to literally tear the Chastity Bono and Jodie Foster posters down from her bedroom walls.
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But as a rule, gay guys do not make bad parents; they make excellent parents. Because unlike straight people, gay people can’t have kids by accident. Only by power of attorney. I would be a questionable parent not because I’m gay, but because I was raised by lunatics.
So maybe seeing gay guys with kids isn’t really about being trendy. Maybe it’s about progress.
And maybe the reason I never see shar-peis on the street anymore is because they’re all inside, curled up on the sofa with the kid, while dad number one is making dinner and dad number two is cleaning some sort of stain off the carpet.
Let the people who want to have kids, have them. And let the rest of us spend the extra money on ourselves. Being gay doesn’t make you a bad person. Not wanting kids doesn’t make you a bad person. Perhaps crushing the bones in one little girl’s hand makes you a bad person, but that was an accident.
Thus, feeling okay about the fact that I don’t want kids, feeling good for applying my energies to my career, I embarked on the last leg of my book tour. Only to then find myself on an ill-fated Delta flight from L.A. to New York.
The flight was totally full, but I was happy. My first book tour had gone well: nobody threw anything at me, and booksellers didn’t make me strip the covers off my own books so they could send them back for a refund. I walked down the aisle searching for my seat, and there, I saw, impossibly, the only remaining seat. A woman sat in the window seat and a man sat in the aisle seat, and the center seat was for me. But there was a live BABY standing on my seat. Standing and grinning while what appeared to be mashed potato bubbled from its lips. The mother plucked the baby thing up and said, “Here you go.” She smiled at me like, “No harm done!”
But still it did not sink in. I thought, Not possible. I, THE BABY HATER, COULD NOT POSSIBLY END UP IN THIS SEAT. I checked my ticket again, looked at the number above the seat, which of course matched my ticket, but it could not be true. After a brief confrontation with the flight attendant, I took my seat. The middle seat. Next to the mom holding the only baby on the plane.
It tried to grab my hands as I read my