Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [37]
One thing he was quite fond of was trains. He would follow a train in his car for hours, riding parallel to the tracks, whether or not there was a road. “Hold on tight,” he would shout over the rumble of the tires on the gravel, “there’s a good chance we’ll roll.”
He also liked cars. He liked to take them apart and then put them back together. Which would have been perfectly fine, except when we were younger, he liked to do this on the living room rug.
“Jesus, Troy. What do you think you’re doing? You can’t take that carburetor apart on the living room rug.”
“Huh,” he would grunt. “Why not?”
To him, a rug was nothing more than a surface area. And it had the distinct advantage of being white, so the dark greasy engine parts were easier to spot.
I missed my brother and wanted to see him constantly. I often wished he would pick me up and carry me away with him. But when he did pick me up and carry me away, I soon grew tired staring at the red light on the caboose, my stomach growling and my brother having nothing more to say than, “Look, the caboose.”
“I just want a big life, you know?” I would say, examining my hair in the illuminated visor mirror.
“What do you mean?”
“You know, I want to get noticed. I don’t just want to be a nothing.”
“Huh,” he would grunt. “Then be a plumber. People notice plumbers all the time.”
And while he didn’t crave the company of either parent, my brother didn’t seem to be tortured by their very existence like I was. “I can pretty much take them or leave them,” he would often say.
When I would scream, “My fucking father won’t even give me money for food. He won’t take my calls. He wants nothing to do with me at all. I want to stab him with a butcher knife,” my brother would reply flatly, “Yeah, he is basically worthless.”
Throughout my life, my brother had been the one person I could rely on. Even when it seemed we had absolutely nothing in common, I knew that he was as reliable as a mathematical formula.
Many years later, he would be diagnosed with a mild form of autism known as Asperger’s syndrome. It explained his fascination with cars, his peculiar way of speaking and his abrupt nature, as well as his mind-numbing and highly specific intelligence. It also explained his lack of desire to discuss Three’s Company at any length.
Sometimes I wonder if his life would have been easier if my parents had taken him to a doctor instead of just assuming he was cold and emotionally blocked.
But then I remind myself that my parents had very questionable taste when it came to choosing medical professionals.
With this in mind, I like to think that my brother wasn’t so much overlooked as he was inadvertently protected.
THE JOY OF SEX (PRETEEN EDITION)
I
’M LYING BACK ON NEIL’S BED, THE TOP OF MY HEAD KNOCKing against the headboard because his cock is inexplicably down my throat. His photographs—the reason I came up to his room in the first place—are sliding off, falling on the floor. I can hear them smack against the floor. Flutter-smack. All I see is a triangle of dark hair coming at me. This, and I feel an unprecedented sensation of fullness in my throat. It’s hard to breathe. The air comes into my nose in gasps that seem controlled by the thrusting of Neil’s hips. He thrusts; I get air. The air comes out my mouth, forced around the shaft of his cock.
“Yes, fuck yes,” he spits. “Jesus mother fucking Christ.”
The triangle of hair comes at me, away from me, at me, away from me, at me, away from me, at me, away from me.
My arms are stretched out at my sides, pinned to the mattress by Neil’s hands. I must look like Jesus on the cross. This image actually occurs to me. I also think, I didn’t come here for this.
It goes on. The thrusting, the lucky sucking of air through my nose, the repulsive sound it makes leaving my mouth, the wet exhale.
“You fucker,” Bookman says, biting the word out of the air, like he’s taking a chunk of something off with his teeth; a chunk of