Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [101]
“Please. Wait. I’m sorry, this must be extremely upsetting to you. It is to me. But I’m right about this, Augusten. He’s a very dangerous man and I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to see that. I wish you’d—”
I pulled away, slammed the door and ran back upstairs to my apartment. When I came in the door, Natalie was standing in the center of the kitchen, looking at me. “I just got off the phone with my father,” she said. “Your mother has finally completely lost it.”
I told Natalie what my mother told me. “Bullshit,” she said. “Augusten, your mother is a complete mental case. Look at you. She just abandoned you when you were twelve, sent you to live with my family. And you’re going to believe her?”
“I don’t know what to believe,” I said.
“Believe me,” she said. “I know my dad. I know he’s a little weird. Okay, a lot weird. But he’s not sick or crazy. He’d never rape your mother or drug her. That’s absolute fucking bullshit.”
But I believed what my mother said. I believed it in my guts. After all, more than once when I’d gone to his office complaining of my general misery, he’d reached behind his head and handed me the first sample bottle his fingers landed on. Mellaril, Ativan, Valium, Librium, Lithium, Thorazine. I’d taken them all as if they were candy corn. As for the rape, well, Dr. Finch did seem like a pretty horny old fat man. I thought back to his masturbatorium, his many “wives.”
Natalie knew in which direction I was leaning. She could sense it because she knew me so well. “Don’t let her warp your mind,” she said.
“This is just so . . . shocking,” I said.
“Yeah,” she agreed sadly. “It’s shocking alright.”
The rest of that evening, we barely spoke. Something had happened between us. Sides had been formed. Natalie wanted me on her side. She wanted me to drive to her dad’s house in the morning, declare my loyalty, disown my crazy mother. And my mother wanted . . . what? She wanted to be left alone, I guess. She certainly didn’t want me involved with the Finches anymore.
But Natalie was a Finch. And she was my best friend.
“It’s going to be difficult for us,” Natalie said just before we went to bed. “We’re caught in the middle of this. It’s going to be very hard to remain friends. This is big, Augusten. You’re going to have to decide.”
So it came to this: Was I a turd-reading Finch? Or was I my crazy mother’s son?
In the end, I decided that I was neither.
In the middle of the night, without saying good-bye, without packing my things, I moved out of our apartment feeling like a spy, or rather an actor from daytime television playing a spy. I took my backpack and drove to Motel 6 where I spent the night.
I didn’t call Natalie the next day. Or the day after that. I swam in the urine-tainted indoor pool and ate Cheese Nips from the vending machine. Natalie and I, we needed a little time apart, I figured, until this thing was sorted out. When I finally called her, she was very upset. “Where the fuck are you?” she said, furious.
“I’m staying at a motel. I needed to get away.”
“My father is very upset with you. He feels that you’re taking your mother’s side in this. And he needs your support because he wants to have her committed to a hospital.”
A creepy feeling spread over my arms. Like watching a horror movie and suddenly knowing the killer is upstairs hiding in the closet, has been there all along. “I don’t think she needs to be committed to a hospital,” I said.
“What motel are you at? We’ll come and get you.”
I hung up the phone.
That week, I found an affordable apartment located in a slum in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The top floor of the building was without windows, but at least I had hot water. And because I was accustomed to living with vermin, the mice didn’t bother me.
I also found a job as a waiter at a Ground Round restaurant in Northampton that had just opened up.
“Hi, my name