Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [0]
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RUNNING WITH SCISSORS
A MEMOIR
Augusten Burroughs
Picador New York
RUNNING WITH SCISSORS. Copyright © 2002 by Augusten Burroughs.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of
this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Burroughs, Augusten.
Running with scissors : a memoir / Augusten Burroughs
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-28370-9 (hc)
ISBN 0-312-42227-X (pbk)
1. Burroughs, Augusten—Childhood and youth. 2. Burroughs, Augusten—Homes and haunts—Massachusetts—Amherst. 3. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Amherst (Mass.)—Social life and customs. I. Title.
PS3552.U745 Z477 2002
813′.6—dc21
2001058857
First published by St. Martin’s Press
10
AUTHOR’S NOTE
T
HE NAMES AND OTHER IDENTIFYING CHARACTERISTICS OF the persons included in this memoir have been changed.
For
Dennis Pilsits
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
G
RATITUD E DOESN’T BEGIN TO DESCRIBE IT: JENNIFER EN-derlin, Christopher Schelling, John Murphy, Gregg Sullivan, Kim Cardascia, Michael Storrings, and everyone at St. Martin’s Press. Thank you: Lawrence David, Suzanne Finnamore, Robert Rodi, Bret Easton Ellis, Jon Pepoon, Lee Lodes, Jeff Soares, Kevin Weidenbacher, Lynda Pearson, Lona Walburn, Lori Greenberg, John DePretis, and Sheila Cobb. I would also like to express my appreciation to my mother and father for, no matter how inadvertently, giving me such a memorable childhood. Additionally, I would like to thank each and every member of a certain family for taking me into their home and accepting me as one of their own. Most of all, I would like to thank my brother for demonstrating, by example, the importance of being wholly unique.
Look for the ridiculous in everything
and you will find it.
—Jules Renard, 1890
RUNNING WITH SCISSORS
SOMETHING ISN’T RIGHT
M
Y MOTHER IS STANDING IN FRONT OF THE BATHROOM MIRror smelling polished and ready; like Jean Naté, Dippity Do and the waxy sweetness of lipstick. Her white, handgunshaped blow-dryer is lying on top of the wicker clothes hamper, ticking as it cools. She stands back and smoothes her hands down the front of her swirling, psychedelic Pucci dress, biting the inside of her cheek.
“Damn it,” she says, “something isn’t right.”
Yesterday she went to the fancy Chopping Block salon in Amherst with its bubble skylights and ficus trees in chrome planters. Sebastian gave her a shag.
“That hateful Jane Fonda,” she says, fluffing her dark brown hair at the crown. “She makes it look so easy.” She pinches her sideburns into points that accentuate her cheekbones. People have always said she looks like a young Lauren Bacall, especially in the eyes.
I can’t stop staring at her feet, which she has slipped into treacherously tall red patent-leather pumps. Because she normally lives in sandals, it’s like she’s borrowed some other lady’s feet. Maybe her friend Lydia’s feet. Lydia has teased black hair, boyfriends and an above-ground pool. She wears high heels all the time, even when she’s just sitting out back by the pool in her white bikini, smoking menthol cigarettes and talking on her olive-green Princess telephone. My mother only wears fancy shoes when she’s going out, so I’ve come to associate them with a feeling of abandonment and dread.
I don’t want her to go. My umbilical cord is still attached