Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [77]
It had a rash around its mouth, and when it dropped its apple juice feeder-bottle thing on me, the nipple brushed against my arm, and I immediately had to take my beta-blocker stage-fright pill to slow my heart down.
As I sat in my seat, checking my watch every four minutes, I thought, This is just horrible: a tiny little single-aisle plane (an airbus, known to fall from the sky because of faulty composite materials). What an awful, rashy, clappy baby.
Eventually, the mother fell asleep again, and shortly after, the baby followed suit. But the baby’s cool, alive little feet kept brushing up against my knee. Gradually, over two hours and many hundreds of air miles, the baby slid off the mother’s lap and partially onto my legs. Both of its feet and legs up to the knees were now resting completely on my right leg. I was outraged and wanted to press the flight attendant call button over and over until one of them came. But then what? They certainly wouldn’t pick the baby up and place it in some sort of container in the rear of the plane. And I knew they wouldn’t give me a Valium. So it was useless. I was trapped.
I looked over at the mother. She was young, but her body now was destroyed. It was doughy from the baby, and I knew she would never lose this weight. Her breasts sagged into one soft fat pillow for her baby’s head. And her long hair was pulled back into a permanent ponytail. Of course, she wore no makeup, and the front of her shirt was covered with crumbs and stains.
I pitied her.
The baby, somehow, sensed that I was staring at its mother and thinking mean thoughts. It stirred and opened its eyes. It realized it was sliding off its mother’s lap, so it fidgeted and started gripping its mother’s breasts/neck/face. The mother automatically, in her sleep, hoisted the baby up higher onto her body, and she then relaxed her arms protectively around it.
Then the baby again drifted off to sleep.
After many hours, the plane was ready to land. Mother and baby sat upright. “I hope you weren’t too uncomfortable,” the mother said to me. “I know it must be really kind of awful to sit in the middle seat next to some mom and baby, but she’s a pretty good traveler. She really doesn’t cry.”
I had to admit, although I detested admitting it, the baby thing had been well behaved. Mostly.
In fact, if one wanted to be entirely technical about it, I was the only one who really misbehaved on the flight.
I’M GONNA LIVE FOREVER
A
s a teenager in the eighties, the most appealing career options presented to me were featured in Fame and Flashdance. Pat Benatar was right, Love is a battlefield. I knew this from my relationship with a mentally ill pedophile, so I was in no hurry to fall into the love pit again. Better, I thought, to focus on my career. And what better career than celebrity?
I would move to New York City and become famous. I hadn’t thought of exactly what I would become famous for. I just felt certain that it would happen. And I hoped it would not be for the slaughter of another person. Then again, perhaps I didn’t have to be famous “for” anything. In the seventies, there were plenty of people who were known only for being semifamous, like Charo and Pia Zadora.
But then, in my twenties, I decided I didn’t want to be famous. I wanted to live in a log cabin in the woods, entirely removed from society. I wanted to have wolves as pets and not pay taxes. And while I hadn’t yet reached the point of sticking bombs in manila envelopes