Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [102]
In secret, my mother rented her own apartment in rural Sunderland, miles from the Finches. “Dorothy is under Dr. Finch’s spell and there’s nothing I can do to get her out of it,” she told me in a phone call. Her girlfriend believed my mother was having a complete mental collapse and she was so upset, she was staying at the Finches’ house. My mother arranged for a mover to clear all her things out of the apartment. When Dorothy returned to the house in Amherst, it was empty and my mother was gone.
I took an inventory of my life: I was seventeen, I had no formal education, no job training, no money, no furniture, no friends. “It could be worse,” I told myself. “I could be going to a prom.”
But there, glittering in the distance of my mind, was New York City. It seemed to me that New York was the place where misfits could fit.
Maybe Bookman had known this.
So I served patty melts and chicken salads and potato skins and whiskey sours. And I walked around in a trance, daydreaming about Manhattan. Trying to see if I could picture myself there among the skyscrapers and hot dog vendors.
And I could see it.
I had no idea how I would ever get to New York or what exactly I would do once I arrived, but I knew that if I could save enough money to make it there for a week, somehow I’d figure out a way to stay.
And as I cleared Thousand Island dressing from the table with my rag, noticing that yet again I’d received only a fifty-cent tip, I understood one thing more clearly than I had ever understood anything before.
Of course I can make it in New York City. There’s no way New York could be crazier than my life had been at the Finches’ house in Northampton, Massachusetts. And I survived that. Unwittingly, I had earned a Ph.D. in survival.
I had a vision of Liza Minnelli in a black leotard singing, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere . . .” and then tossing me a black top hat that I expertly catch and place on top of my head, astonishing all of Broadway with my debut in the stage version of New York, New York.
Running parallel to this vision was another in which I am crouched down in the back of a police cruiser parked on a side street in Greenwich Village. I am giving a blowjob to a fat cop on the verge of retirement. He waves ten dollars in my face and gasps, “Fifteen if you swallow.”
Who knows?
In the opening sequence to The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mary’s in a supermarket, hurrying through the aisles. She pauses at the meat case, picks up a steak and checks the price. Then she rolls her eyes, shrugs and tosses it in the cart.
That’s kind of how I felt. Sure, I would have liked for things to have been different. But, roll of the eyes, what can you do? Shrug.
I threw the meat in my cart. And moved on.
EPILOGUE
D
r. Finch lost his license to practice medicine after the American Medical Association found him guilty on charges of insurance fraud. Despite this, many of his patients remained in treatment. He died from heart disease in 2000.
Agnes lives in a nursing home.
Natalie graduated from Holyoke Community College and applied to Smith. Not only was she accepted, she was accepted with a full scholarship. She graduated magna cum laude with a double major: psychology and voice. She later earned a postgraduate degree and works in the field of public health.
Hope continued to live at home and work for her father until the time of his death. She has since left the Northeast.
Fern, the minister’s wife, is divorced and now lives in Sonoma, California, where she runs a bookstore geared toward the recovery community.
Dorothy, my mother’s former girlfriend, is married and has children. It is my understanding that her husband