Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [88]
This is when I learned of steroids. “Deca” was the name I heard most often. I began spending hours at my computer, scanning newsgroups, reading message boards, visiting websites.
Steroids were the new goatee. They were the new black. Steroids were in, and I had to find a way to get them.
I considered ordering them from websites in Thailand but worried I would be caught by drug enforcement officials and taken to Riker’s Island, where my thin frame would be the death of me.
So when I found out my own doctor would give them to me, I didn’t hesitate. There could be side effects, he said. But I was willing to accept the risk. If I was going to die of prostate cancer, at least I’d look hunky as they turned the ventilator off and gave me my last sponge bath. Besides, didn’t cell phones cause brain cancer? Considering I’d been using a cell phone since the days when they cost $1,000, what difference would a little testosterone make to my longevity?
If my problem had been being fat, you can bet I would have been sitting right there in the waiting room next to Carnie Wilson, an extra box of staples in my coat pocket.
Had I been fat, nobody would have told me that I shouldn’t go under general anesthesia and have liposuction. They would have offered to drive me home. Everybody wants fat people to get their fat sucked out. So why don’t they want skinny people to get pumped up?
Is this really so different from the other things people do to make themselves happier with their bodies? Breast implants, chin augmentation, rhinoplasty—at least steroids don’t require the use of a scalpel. Until, I suppose, they remove your cancerous parts.
MAGICAL THINKING
M
y friend Jill is the type of person who will cross the street at a crosswalk, keeping her eyes on the WALK light. She thinks, If I make it to the other side before it starts flashing DON’T WALK, I’ll have a good day. Conversely, she believes that if the light changes while she’s still crossing, something “vague but definitely bad” may occur.
This is the adult version of the superstitious game children play: “Step on a crack and break your mother’s back” is a saying Jesus himself probably heard on the playground. And with each generation, kids can be seen walking together, automatically stepping over cracks to spare their mothers from a life spent in a wheelchair.
I, on the other hand, can recall stomping on sidewalk cracks, pretending the line dividing the pavement from the sidewalk itself was my crazy mother’s spine. Whether because of this or for reasons unrelated, she’s now in a wheelchair, partially paralyzed.
Technically, both are examples of something psychologists call “magical thinking,” which is the belief that one exerts more influence over events than one actually has.
My friend Suzanne is another example. She is a fearful flier who sits bolt upright in her seat, concentrating hard on keeping the plane aloft. Who refuses to read a magazine or take a nap for fear that if she stops thinking about the plane soaring high above the clouds, it may indeed nose-dive straight down through them and into the earth. “I just sit there clenching the armrests with my hands and thinking, fly, fly, fly.” She understands, of course, that the plane will either continue to fly, or it will crash, regardless of whether she continues to concentrate or not. It’s between God and the terrorists.
I have never been one of these people who believes that some micron of the universe will shift if I concentrate hard enough or make it to the other side of the street before the light changes. Rather, I believe I control the world with my mind.
Take, for example, Charlotte.
In the mid-nineties I was courted by an advertising agency in Chicago. At the time, I was working in New York City on the Burger King account, and I was extremely miserable. My life consisted of nothing but shooting commercials for Whopper Value Meals. Leather, as I discovered, absorbs odors, so my shoes smelled like Whopper