Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [91]
After fifteen minutes, the damaged puppy is slightly less timid. It is able to walk from me to Dennis. When it reaches Dennis’s lap, it tries to climb into it.
This was on a Friday.
That Saturday, Dennis, mysteriously, inexplicably intoxicated without the consumption of alcohol, enters the pet store in a supernatural blackout and comes home with the French bulldog puppy.
The puppy grows into a strong, healthy dog that shrieks and levitates each time Dennis enters the room. The dog is so strong we call it The Beast.
Dennis cannot imagine life without him. It seems now, we never existed without Bentley, that he has been ours all along, since before he was born.
Perhaps my supernatural abilities come from my solid spiritual beliefs. I believe in the baby Jesus. And I believe he is handsome and lives in the sky with his pet cow. I believe that it is essential the cow like you. And if you pet the cow with your mind, it will lick your hand and give you cash. But if you make the cow angry, it will turn away from you, forget you exist, and your life will fall into shambles. I believe that as long as the cow likes you, you can get what you want.
In order to keep in the cow’s favor, you need to “let go and let God,” meaning, you can’t obsess about controlling every little thing. You have to let things unfold naturally and not try to change things you cannot change. On the other hand, I believe that if you’ve made the cow happy by living this way, you’re allowed to ask for favors.
I tell people my theory, and they think I am either kidding or insane. But think this as they may, I have cow saliva on my hands, and many of them do not.
My friend Larry complains constantly about his career. And it’s true that he has suffered a series of career setbacks that are stunning in their coincidence. Larry has had a string of such unfortunate luck it can be only one of two things.
“Either you’ve made the baby Jesus mad or his pet cow hates you,” I tell him. “You need to conjure images of a cow in a field of green, munching on grass. Then you need to reach out and scratch between his ears.”
Larry tells me to go away.
But I believe that he does exactly what I say because a month later, he has a new job, and he’s begun using the phrase “the baby Jesus.”
When I was thirty-four, I decided to stop being an alcoholic and become a New York Times bestselling author. The gap between active alcoholic advertising copywriter living in squalor and literary sensation with a scrapbook of rave reviews seemed large. A virtual canyon. Yet one day, I decided that’s exactly what I would do. And I began writing my first novel, Sellevision.
Fourteen days later, Sellevision was written, and I had my first manuscript. But I needed an agent, and I didn’t have any idea how to get one. So I bought a book on literary agents that provided me with names and e-mail addresses. Still, how to tell them apart from each other? I decided to send my query letter to literary agents whose names I liked. This seemed as good a method as any. Within a week, seven agents had requested the manuscript. Two weeks later, I began to hear feedback. One agent wrote: “No, this isn’t something I’d be interested in at all. Satire is over.” But another agent was more optimistic: “Well, I liked it. It needs work, but I wouldn’t know what to tell you to revise. I could send it to a couple of publishers, but I wouldn’t accept you as a regular client. It would be a situation where I send the manuscript as is to two or three publishers, and that’s it.” At the end of his note he explained that his office charges for photocopies and postage.
I immediately opened a new e-mail document and wrote to my friend Suzanne. “Should I go with him? He sounds like he’s willing to lift a finger—a pinkie—but that’s all. And he doesn’t LOVE the manuscript. And who the hell is he? For all I know, he’s some old pervert who’s into taxidermy and lives in a studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. What if some other better real agent comes along? One without a drinking problem and a history of sexually abusing