Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [72]
Although I was officially living at the Finches, I spent some nights at my mother’s apartment in Amherst. Sometimes Bookman and I would stay there together or sometimes just me alone on the sofa. I told myself that I was like a bicoastal celebrity, moving between Amherst and Northampton at will, when the spirit moved me. But what I truly felt was that neither place was home. In truth, when things got too crazy at the Finches’, I stayed in Amherst. When I felt like my mother and Dorothy couldn’t stand me anymore, I moved back to Northampton. Usually, one night was the most I could stay in Amherst. One night every few weeks.
At just after midnight, I was awakened from a dream that a hard penis was pressing against my ass. It turned out there was a hard penis pressing against my ass.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I said, shoving him off.
He was completely naked, even his teeth were out of his mouth. “I only want to try,” he gummed. “I love you, new son.”
“Get away from me,” I said.
I locked him out of the living room and went back to sleep on the sofa. My powers of denial were strong even then, and I was able to convince myself that it didn’t really matter because it didn’t really happen. When I heard him climbing the stairs to go find Deirdre and Dorothy, I figured he’d finally leave me alone.
Throughout the night, my mother would come downstairs and pass through the living room on her way to the kitchen. She was sweating profusely, looking extremely preoccupied. Whatever she had been doing in her bedroom, it was clear that it didn’t involve sleep. When I asked her what was going on, she said, nearly out of breath, “Dorothy is still a virgin as far as men are concerned.”
Later, I heard Dorothy suddenly start shrieking and then sobbing. This was followed by the muffled sounds of my mother saying something in a soothing tone of voice.
An hour later the lumberjack came downstairs. He sauntered into the living room, thumbs hooked through his belt loops, and winked at me. “She as wet as a dishrag.” He motioned with his head, indicating upstairs.
The next morning, Dorothy appeared smug and pleased, but aloof toward my new father.
“Please give me the man a glass of something to drink.”
“Get your own fucking drink, asshole,” Dorothy replied distantly, as she brushed a fresh coat of polish over her nails. Fuchsia.
My mother, too, seemed ready to dispose of him now. Last night he was a gift from God, a new member of the family, my lumberjack father. But today he was an insect that needed to be crushed with a shoe. The black widows had mated with him and now they needed to destroy him.
“I think it’s time for you to leave, Cesar,” my mother informed him as she stroked Dorothy’s hair. They were sitting at the kitchen table together, with Cesar hovering over them.
“No, I just get here. I stay and be man father.”
“You heard her, asshole. Scram,” Dorothy said, blowing on her pinkie to dry the polish.
The elkhound slept peacefully under the table, as it had for the past six days, moving only occasionally—and then very sluggishly—for a drink from its NyQuil-spiked water bowl.
“Where I should go?” he pleaded. “Have no place?” He glanced at me, but I shrugged and looked away.
Being mentally ill, temporarily homeless and wanted by the law, the only logical place for him to go was to Dr. Finch’s.
“Let me make a phone call,” my mother said finally. After she hung up, she scribbled the Finches’ address down on the inside cover of a book of matches. Then, instead of handing him the matches, she tore off the cover. “Here you go,” she said.
Dorothy snatched up the matches and held them over the candle on the kitchen table where they burst into flames. “Pretty,” she said.
At the Finch house, the lumberjack discovered and fell madly in love with Natalie.
Natalie was repulsed by him at first. “Get the fuck away from me, you missing link,” she said, slapping his hand away with the serrated edge of an aluminum foil box, one of dozens that were in the pantry, left