Excerpted from
"This Is How" by Augusten Burroughs. Copyright © 2012 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.
Many people continue to feel influenced and even controlled by the things that happened to them a long time ago. Sometimes, people harbor dark, traumatic memories from childhood. Or fragments of memories — incomplete scenes, uncomfortable feelings, perhaps even a sense of certainty that something specific and terrible happened to them, but little more than this.
Others experienced something traumatic in adulthood that continues to affect them day to day many years later. Maybe an assault has left a person afraid to leave their home or enter a particular neighborhood.
For a certain kind of person this will be the end of the story. What ever experience they endured essentially continues to this day, ever present in the background, shaping the choices made on a daily basis, affecting the quality and range of their life. This kind of person might be angry all the time or feel guilty or afraid. They just accept these states as a part of themselves.
Then there are people who are keenly aware of their experiences, who are psychologically ambitious; they wish to “get over” these historical traumas and might see a therapist to help them.
The therapeutic process takes time, commitment, and funding. Then, insight leads to understanding, which leads to choice. At last, they are free to move on.
It’s such a clean, well-defined structure for the process of healing. Almost like a paint-by-numbers portrait where all those black outlines are confusing at first, but in time, as you apply the correct colors in the right areas, the tangle of lines resolves into a perfectly clear image.
Unfortunately, our brains tend to color outside the line. First, there is the matter of understanding our past and the events that transpired.
Understanding what happened in the past is rarely truly possible. Because true understanding must incorporate context. Not merely what we experienced, but why. And the why requires knowing the motivations of the other people involved. Without the perspective of this context, our understanding will always be biased; it will be from a single perspective: Ours. And therefore, not necessarily accurate or true.
If you are on a highway and you drive past a car accident so severe that the hood of the car has been crushed up against the windshield, you may very well assume the occupants are dead. And perhaps this will haunt you because as you passed by the car, you glimpsed a little girl’s doll on the shelf behind the backseat. One look at that accident was all anybody would need to know what “unsurvivable” looked like. And you have never been able to forget that doll or the little girl who must have loved it and who died in such a terrible crumple of steel and glass. Let’s imagine that you are haunted by dreams where you come upon the accident and you see the doll and you do nothing.
Let’s say that what was unknown to you was that the car was a high-end Mercedes that featured crumple zones designed to absorb the impact of a crash while protecting the occupants within a safety cage. And let’s say that the two occupants inside the car were sitting there as you drove by and the man in the driver’s seat was on his cell phone.
“No, I mean totally like, trashed, totaled. We’re waiting; they’re supposed to send a tow truck. She’s good except she has to pee so she’s—”
“Oh my God, did you just tell Jason that I have to pee? Now he’s going to imagine me peeing. Don’t forget to tell him we found the doll at a tag sale but we need to buy wrapping paper. At least we think it’s the doll.”
“You hear that? Yeah, don’t think about her peeing. And we’re pretty sure it’s the right doll; we had to spend like three hours on Craigslist to find one.”
Imagine that after the tow truck arrives and our couple has been safely installed into a rental vehicle, they don’t really ever think about that crash again except both are pleased with the new car’s color. Neither liked the wrecked Mercedes’ particular shade of red.
In this example, you can see how your entire perception of what happened — and you were a witness — is completely distorted by your point of view.
So, if you were to enter therapy over being disturbed by this wreck, you could spend years discussing why the sight of the doll was so upsetting, and how impotent you felt being unable to stop and help but even if you could stop, what could you have done?
Possibly, the therapist would have you write letters to the dead little girl.
What this really accomplishes is the creation of a sort of personal myth. A series of well-remembered events with finely honed details. As accurate as they may be, they are accurate from only one perspective.
For many years, I believed that one’s past had to be fully understood in order to move through and beyond it. I see now that I was wrong about this. I know now that scrutinizing one’s past and trying to gain understanding and “make peace” with it is a kind of addiction that keeps one focused on the past and not on the present.
As with any addiction, the first step to overcoming it is to see it.
And once you see it, you have to stop it.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - -
Once the current moment moves into the past, it is entirely gone. It ceases to exist except in documents, photographs, and an impression left in a sofa cushion. The past — and all the moments it contained — are no longer sharing this world with us.
They are no more real than Cinderella.
To spend time — year after year — in therapy or on your own thinking about your past and forming conclusions and stitching the elements into a narrative that you can name, “the truth,” in order to be “free” of it, is not how you become free from your past.
The past does not need to be reconsidered in the present and given a structure. The events of the past cannot be understood when you are the only element of the past actively engaged in reliving it.
When somebody says, “Therapy has been really helpful to me in terms of resolving some of my issues from the past,” what does this actually, in practical terms, mean?
Or somebody is “haunted” or controlled by their past. How is this possible?
When I first moved to New York, I became friends with a guy who seemed to be exactly the guy I wanted to be. He was very outgoing and had lots of friends and they probably all felt as I did: Like his best and closest friend.
After we’d been friends for almost a year, one night we were out drinking and he told me he had a confession to make, something he wanted me to know about himself.
I nodded and tried to look very sincere and open, while inside my mind it was the Kentucky Derby, with most of the money being placed on female-to-male transsexual. That wasn’t it.
He proceeded to tell me in great detail about the utterly atrocious physical abuse he’d experienced at the hands of his father and mother during his childhood. It was well beyond anything I myself had ever come close to experiencing.
After this evening, my friend spoke of his past abuse frequently. And I realized that all the time we’d been friends, all those moments prior to his revelation had probably been, in his mind, moments leading up to The Telling.
Only after The Telling could he be fully himself with me. His story of his past abuse was a large part of his identity. It was a protected secret that was kept out of view for acquaintances and coworkers. Only after a measure of trust and intimacy had been formed would there be almost a ceremony in which he detailed his abuse. Rather like unwrapping, slowly, an extravagant gift one knows is going to blow the mind of the recipient.
When we first became friends it had amazed me that he was single. I now understood that he was single because of
how guys reacted when my friend finally revealed his history. It was like encountering a new person. And my friend’s abuse was now like a third person with us wherever we went.
Who could blame him? It was a wonder he was still alive.
Today, I see it differently.
My friend is a dramatic example of somebody who is haunted by their past. But because the past is gone, how does it haunt? Of course, it does not. The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We allow our minds to focus in that direction. We open memories and examine them. We re-experience emotions we felt during the painful events we experienced because we are recalling them in as much detail as we can.
We enter therapy and discuss our past. We formulate opinions about what happened. We create a rich, detailed world. In therapy or on our own, we focus our attention on something that no longer exists in order to understand or have perspective or acknowledge or own what has happened. And only after we decide this understanding or recognition has taken place do we stop worrying that particular tooth with our tongue.
For years, I believed this was how to live.
I was wrong. It’s how to stagnate.
I know now how to get over the past. It has worked for me in a deeper, more enduring way than any therapy I have ever had.
Writing six autobiographical books is what freed me from my past.
If the books had been cookbooks I expect I would feel just exactly as free. That I wrote six books about my past is the red herring; nothing I have written has in any way altered the past or healed me clean, so no scar remains.
Perhaps the process of writing — being fully in the moment, while I write letter by letter — has soothed me because it’s kept me busy. When you’re busy, you lack the time to fondle your emotional baggage. And if that sounds too reductive, remember we crawled from the swamp. Simple isn’t such a terrible thing to be in this respect.
For the same reason, being out of a job and just hanging around is depressing in a thousand different ways. All you have is time. Sooner or later, you end up wandering around bad neighborhoods inside your head. Neighborhoods like, “They never should have fired me, those assholes.” Which may be true or it may be untrue but it’s irrelevant to everything. It is through work that challenged me and required continuous freshness that I began to occupy not the past but this, right now. My advertising career had not been challenging. Being busy is not the same as being focused. Being focused means being here.
And this, here, this line, that comma.
That’s what freed me from the past. The present kidnapped me. I climbed into its car when it held up its hand and showed me the candy. I hopped right in.
When something from my past upsets me here in my present, it’s because I let my mind think back to the past and grab hold of something.
This is how the past haunts us. We think about it.
Therapy could be of tremendous benefit to “getting over” one’s past if the therapy is focused on specific ways to stop submitting to the temptation to obsess.
Many people with difficult histories carry these histories with them, burnishing the past with each retelling. Sometimes, a particular trauma may be the largest thing we have ever experienced. So we kind of move into it, make it our home. Because there’s nothing in our lives on the scale of that loss or that trauma.
So, you need a larger life. Something that can successfully compete with your past.
To live with your mind in the past — in the name of healing or understanding or overcoming — is to live in a fantasy world where nothing new or original is created. To “understand” one’s past is to handle clay that no longer exists and shape it into a bowl nobody can ever see or touch.
Denial of the painful events in one’s past is the same as obsessing over one’s past. To actively refuse to discuss or think about, if need be, what happened is to imbue it with power. Recycling the past into a new business, a not-for-profit to help others, a workshop, a painting, a book, a song — these are ways to explore the past in the context of the present. These are things people who are actively alive do.
You must never allow something that happened to you to become a morbidly treasured heirloom that you carry around, show people occasionally, put back in its black velvet pouch, and then tuck back into your jacket where you can keep it close to your heart.
Then, when asked to join the pole vaulting club, pull the coach aside and whisper, “I can’t. See” — and remove your gem from your pocket — “this is my terrible thing and as I expected, showing it to you has taken your breath away and made you sympathetic. So I will be excused, I assume?”
Other people will allow you — they will never blame you or challenge you — to use your past as an excuse to not face the normal fears everybody has when facing their future. Even if you were brutally physically assaulted, you must not withdraw because you are afraid it will happen again. This is not a valid exit.
Your fears that it might happen again are perfectly reasonable and justified: It might happen again.
Many people believe that if something really bad happens to them, they have paid their dues and nothing else really bad can happen again. But on the day you attend your mother’s funeral or declare personal bankruptcy, there is no law in the universe that prevents you from also getting a speeding ticket and your first grey hair.
When multiple bad things happen, it can feel like “life is out to get you.” It’s not. And it’s not a sign, either. What you do is, you keep going. You stop waiting for fairness.
- – - – - – - – - – - – -
You do not need to work through your past so you can heal. You need to move forward and then you’re as healed as you’re likely to be.
Unless.
Unless you experienced something so unspeakably terrible, something so out of scale in magnitude that it simply doesn’t fit into the past. It is too large to be contained by time or space. And if this is you, the thing you can do for the duration of your existence is to tell your story over and over. So that other people can hear you tell it and they can be moved, changed by it. This can help others.
Which is the single comfort for people who will always remain locked in their history, inside something that is really a different species of awful.
I met somebody whose grandfather had survived the death camps in Germany.
He told me that his grandfather was a very quiet, broken man. He rarely spoke and when he did, he told the same stories about how he survived.
I told him, “Do you listen, every time he tells you?”
He said, “No, I just kind of let him talk and do my thing; I’ve heard it all a thousand times.”
I wondered if he had ever truly heard it once. I suggested he listen, hang on every word and try to see visuals in his mind of the story his grandfather was telling him.
Some stories must be carved into the present and the future by telling and telling again and then again until the story is part of us.
From “This Is How” by Augusten Burroughs. Copyright © 2012 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.
I was exhausted. Which isn’t even the word for it, really. I was in the midst of my last month with Pighead, only I didn’t know it. I was giving him daily injections, flushing his I.V. line, cleaning diarrhea off his legs, counting endless pills and sorting them into the plastic pill box. I was drinking, but not for pleasure. I was drinking at night alone, just because it was my comfort. I knew it was a lousy comfort. But my life was about triage, and drinking was my consistency, dependability, slight warmth. And I knew I’d fucked up everything. Gone through rehab, become clean, now become filthy again. But it didn’t matter, because Pighead was sick. And I just had to get through this. Which is what I called it to myself, this.
Pighead was dying. And I just wanted to sleep for a very long time.
We were in his bedroom on Perry Street. It was midafternoon, spring, and his mother was in the next room, crammed onto the tiny bench that was built into the wall next to the fireplace. She was sleeping, the Windex bottle tucked under her arm, a roll of paper towels as a pillow. She was snoring. And I was certain she wasn’t dreaming. I slept the same way in those days: hard, dreamless. It was efficient sleep, nearly German. It was diesel Mercedes truck sleep — there to get the job done, not to be luxurious. From my position on the bed, I could just see her feet.
Pighead was sleeping, too. Finally. He’d been awake the previous night, awake coughing and bleeding out of his holes and finally, now, he was napping. I wasn’t napping. But I was beside him, his I.V. line stretched across my chest. The I.V. pump was on my side of the bed because I knew he might knock it over, by accident. His coordination was gone now, along with much of his mass. Only a gaunt face, protruding lips, enormous teeth and sticklike arms and legs remained. He looked famished, and was. But not for food.
I was next to him because I needed to listen to him breathe. Sometimes, mucus lodged in his throat and his breathing stopped; then he choked. So I was there, listening.
It was my way of controlling the situation. It was my way of insisting that he continue to live.
He woke up after an hour. “Was I asleep?” I told him yes. “For a little while. Do you feel better?” I sat up, leaned on my elbow.
He swallowed, frowned slightly. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” He spoke slowly, which had the effect of making him sound less intelligent than he actually was. And I wondered, has it damaged his brain forever?
Because I was still thinking things like “forever.” I was unaware of where, exactly, I was in time.
“Oh, God,” he sighed.
And the way he said this, the way the words — so trite — contained so much weight and fatigue and crushing sadness and exhaustion. I knew what he meant. He meant, “Nothing has gone according to plan. How did I get here? When will it end? Why isn’t there something to cure this?” He was saying something that could never be said in two words.
I reached over and I put my hand on his crotch. This move startled me. I hadn’t known I’d do this. I’d only been aware of a certain longing, of a pit I wanted only to cover. I put my hand on his crotch as though it was a time capsule and could take me back.
You’d think I slapped him hard across the face. He turned fast to look at me, his eyes large with the surprise of it. And something else. Confusion? I wasn’t sure. And then I was sure. I massaged what I felt under my hand. The look in his eyes was just exactly this: disbelief.
He got hard.
It had been almost a year since we’d had sex. This, for us, was quite a record. Our other record was 12 times in 24 hours. That was on Christmas 1993.
He grinned a little. “The bruised banana still works,” he said, somewhat marveling at the fact. Everything else was broken. But this still worked. “It hasn’t done that for a while.” He looked at my fingers working his zipper. Then he glanced at me and I saw something that made me feel just tiny with sadness: He was grateful.
He closed his eyes. He fell asleep so quickly I thought he’d simply died.
I moved my hand up to his forehead and I traced his eyebrows with my finger. “My Pighead,” I whispered.
This was the last time we had sex. But it was the only time we ever made love. Only I didn’t know the difference at the time.
After I went through rehab and got sober, I made a list of all the guys I’d ever slept with. The entries included names like “Under the Stairs Guy,” “Taco Bell Counter Guy” and “’70s TV Icon Guy.” By average American standards, the list was shockingly long: 63 names. But by Manhattan standards, and specifically gay Manhattan standards, my list was paltry, one step above a lifetime of solitary masturbation.
The truly startling discovery, however, was that with the exception of the first person on the list (my 12-year-old “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine” scenario) alcohol had been involved in every encounter.
Maybe “involved” isn’t the right word.
I’d been in a liquor-induced blackout every time I had sex.
In rehab they do not teach you how to have sex without the lubrication of a martini or 19. So at age 30, I found myself in a very odd position. I was a sexually experienced virgin. Even I could identify this as a problem.
I decided I needed to date and have sex and maybe even start a relationship. As a sober person. So I started to hang out in Barnes and Noble. Because if you don’t drink, you shouldn’t go to bars. In rehab they said, “If you keep going into barbershops, eventually you’ll get a haircut.” That’s another thing about recovery. It’s all in metaphors. So if you don’t like talking about life in terms of small steps and puzzle pieces, you should just stay smashed.
Thus, it was in the Recovery and Addiction section of the Astor Place Barnes and Noble where I met Luciano.
“Hi,” this hunk said in heavily accented English. “I seen you from over there,” he pointed to the Fiction New Releases. “So I come over to say hi.”
I was flattered and suspicious. My first thought was, he’s homeless and wants cash. But he was too hot to be homeless. I stammered, “Oh, well.” And then, “Thank you.” I recognized this for what it was: my chance.
“Do you want to go to Starbucks?” he asked.
I was momentarily alarmed. Even in a certifiable hunk, an invitation to coffee within 30 seconds could mean only one thing: stalker.
But the rules couldn’t apply here because I was desperate to have sober sex, and this man was Italian, from Italy, not Long Island. Although I’d never been to Italy, I’d seen documentaries on the Travel Channel. Italians held hands, they kissed. Of course they’d invite a perfect stranger to coffee.
Within 15 minutes, I had told him that I was an alcoholic, that I was 90 days out of rehab, that I was a writer and that my apartment was around the corner. As though I were ruptured, I was hemorrhaging information.
Luciano didn’t seem to mind. He reached across the table and touched my face. “I want to make love to you,” he said, in perfect English. Surely, this was the one phrase he’d made sure he knew before coming to America. He said it very well.
Moments later, he unbuckled his belt and let his shorts fall to my apartment floor. Of course, he was wearing no underwear. He had a large penis, uncircumcised. He was, in every way, my physical ideal. He unbuttoned my oxford shirt. But when he reached down to my cock and found it soft, he asked, “Is something the matter?”
I said, “I’m nervous.”
I was in awe of his beauty. He had a sculpted body with hair that appeared to have been sketched on by an artist, in exactly the right places.
And yet. I’d never been more unaroused in my life. There was the sensation of being crushed from all sides, like diving too deep in the ocean. Failure gathered around my head like a cloud and I said, “You know, this isn’t working. I’m sorry.”
It didn’t make any sense. He was incredibly hot. Luciano shrugged, as though we’d simply decided not to play handball after all. “Is OK,” he said. “Is no problem.”
We both dressed again and Luciano was gone.
Eventually it became clear: Alcohol had enabled me to have sex with people I didn’t care about. It had been an airbag. But it had long since deployed, and taken with it my ability to have sex with another human being. That’s one metaphor they skipped in rehab.
So then: How do you connect sex and love? I began to obsess over this. Had I ever connected them? And what if I couldn’t?
Seven years, three therapists and one published book later, I met my partner. I am now able to have a physical relationship. And I learned that the way to connect sex and intimacy is by talking about the feelings you have at the moment of contact. For me, this included saying things like, “I feel like killing you” and “My mind just shut down.”
It takes another person of remarkable self-assurance. Somebody who takes this not as rejection, but as progress. It requires such basic things as: making eye contact. And really reminding myself that I’m a grown-up, safe, loved.
It’s pretty terrible that the only route to mental health is to talk to yourself like a Cosmo article. But I guess this just makes me a normal mess, as opposed to an alcoholic mess.
I still have my Guy List. But I hope I never add another name to it. Which I guess makes me a bit of a romantic.
Each news network has its own marquee for it. CNN’s is “Showdown: Iraq.” MSNBC uses “Countdown: Iraq,” “Conflict with Iraq” and “Saddam’s Iraq.” News shows gleam with hyper-colorful, throbbing graphics. This is truly a bordello of violence, an orgy of missiles and jet fighters and fist-crotched soldiers in tight fatigues.
We don’t want a war. But oh, we do. We want it bad. We don’t actually want the consequences of war — suicide bombers and a high death toll of innocents in Iraq. And we certainly don’t want to fight this war ourselves. But we want to watch it. We like to watch.
More than anything, we like to watch.
This war is our new favorite reality show. And we love reality TV. But now we’re beyond people eating slugs and getting voted off islands. Our hunger for reality programming is increasing. We want more graphics, higher stakes, greater losses. We adapt quickly. We become bored instantly.
We want to see death. Maybe not up close and personal, but certainly real. We want to see destruction and human suffering. We want to watch our military muscle flex in front of the mirror. And as we watch, we want to gasp. We want to cry, “No! Stop!”
Harder. Faster.
This is why we want war. But we won’t admit it. None of us will. We feign disgust at the way the media has turned the war into entertainment, but secretly, truly, deep inside — it’s what we really want.
Or, if we are in support of this war, we say we are in support of our president. We do not say, Yes, zoom in close to the burned children … gasp … where can we send our check to help?
I have no doubt that this war will bring the networks a ratings windfall. For at least a week, until it becomes ho-hum, we will all — every one of us — be glued to our sets in horror, fear and fascination.
War is porn the whole family can watch together.
“Joe Millionaire” picked the nice girl and now we’re bored. We’ve had enough nice and we want some dirty.
And then after the war, we want commemorative coins. We want plates that depict our young sons — excuse me, heroes — who fought in the war. And we will hang these in our dining rooms where the light from the television will glow blue off their rims. We want hero mousepads that will make us feel proud as we click on porn sites.
But the networks had better be ready. Because after war, we will need sex. We will need a show called “The Virgin” where a 15-year-old girl from Nashville will sell her virginity to a man for $1 million. She will go on a single date with each of 10 men, and then she will have to pick one. But what she won’t know is that each pig will be more loathsome than the last. Old, fat, unfit for a beautiful, fresh young virgin. But … she will have signed a contract so she’ll have to choose. And on the last night, when she finally makes her decision, she will sleep with him. On camera. As a pay-per-view special.
The news networks will be horrified by this show, which lacks a moral foundation and completely exploits young people. This will be anti-family programming and news hosts will debate it. And, of course, it will be huge.
And then, naturally, it will seem tame to us and we will need more. Something darker, worse, more corrupt. We want to go places we don’t dare go in real life or in our minds. We want television to do what it could have done all along — transport us. Not just to the set of a game show, but into the dark and rotten and secret corners of ourselves.
Michael Jackson excited us again recently. First, with his baby-dangle and then with the documentary where he was tricked into being himself. We love Michael. But he is no substitute for exploding cities and CNN reporters — like sexy and confusing Bill Hemmer — live in Baghdad. In a perfect world, we would go to war at the same time that the infamous pictures of Michael Jackson’s penis surfaced on the Internet, just as some former child came forward with fresh charges. Then we could gorge. Alas, life is never so perfect, so we will have to make do with war.
But we don’t want a war. But we do. We want it bad. Our lower brain stem craves war because we are animals. Civilized, Lexus-driving, and child-loving, but animals nevertheless. And we are fascinated by the attack.
Hunt. Kill. Fuck. Sleep. Eat.
Watch.
When I was in the third grade all the girls wore Calvin Klein corduroy jeans and wanted to be psychologists. All the boys wore Levi’s and wanted to play football. I wore polyester stretch bell-bottoms and wanted to be Christine Jorgensen, the world’s first famous transsexual.
At my school in Western Massachusetts all the students had their own cubicles. This was the early ’70s when everything was about emotional growth and personal space. We were allowed to decorate our cubicles in any way we saw fit. Most of the boys taped pictures of race cars or football stars to their walls. The girls favored snapshots of their cats, taken with their moms’ Kodak 110 cameras.
My cubicle was a shrine to Christine. I had newspaper clippings, photographs and an article from a Danish newspaper, which I couldn’t read but which had before and after anatomical line drawings.
“Who is this?” asked Mrs. Rayburn, fingering a clipping of an extremely tall woman in sunglasses climbing down the steps of an airplane, parked dramatically on the center of the tarmac.
“That’s Christine Jorgensen,” I told my teacher, feeling very superior. “Isn’t she incredible?”
Mrs. Rayburn leaned in for a closer look. “I’m not sure I know who she is.” She must have wondered if this was some new folk singer, or perhaps the author of a popular series of children’s books.
“She’s not the first, but she’s one of the first, and definitely the most famous, male-to-female transsexuals,” I explained. “She was born George Jorgensen, and then in 1953 she flew to Denmark to have her surgery.” My face radiated delight.
Mrs. Rayburn’s face radiated alarm. “Do you identify with Ms. Jorgensen?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” I replied enthusiastically. “If I could be anything in the world, I would be her.”
Which pretty much ended that conversation.
It wasn’t so much that I wanted to be a girl. It was that I wanted to make a dramatic change in my life. My parents hated each other and I hated them. I longed for them to die in an auto accident so that I could be whisked away by uniformed officers and sent to live in a compound near a major city.
I was in the midst of an unhappy childhood and was ripe for transformation. The idea that a person could make such a dramatic change of life gave me hope. In my world there were boys and there were girls and that was it. And here’s this girl who used to be a boy. My whole idea of what was possible in life expanded.
Or was it really just that I did want to be a girl?
Boys only seemed to care about trading baseball cards or riding their dirt bikes. And my feeling about baseball cards was, give me the gum and you can have the stupid cards. As for riding a dirt bike, dirt made me anxious so I preferred my mother’s station wagon.
The girls always seemed much more fun. They read books and talked about what they wanted to be when they grew up. All the boys ever did was snort and then swallow it.
Eventually, I took down my articles about Christine Jorgensen and replaced them with pictures of Jesus on the cross, though I wasn’t religious. I had asked my parents, “Is there a God?” And when I couldn’t get a definite answer from them, when they offered no actual proof, I decided that God was like Santa Claus for adults. But I did like the image of a naked man on the cross.
I didn’t think much about transsexuals again until I was 19 and working in San Francisco as a junior advertising copywriter. The receptionist’s name was Liz. She was 6-foot-4, black and had Diana Ross hair — except that she had been born a man, so her hairline was receding and she looked like Diana Ross after a particularly brutal round of chemo.
My transsexual obsession was rekindled. Liz wore brightly colored stretch pants and I couldn’t help but stare at her crotch because it was an open, gaping hole that you could see quite clearly through the fabric. It didn’t make any sense to me. Surely they could close up the hole better than this. Her vagina was so large, I could easily have stuck my fist in it. Maybe she needed to go back for a revision but couldn’t afford it? This was probably the case. She’d probably saved all her money for the big operation and couldn’t afford the finishing touches. In this way it was like buying a Jeep, stripped down until there wasn’t even carpeting or an AM radio.
Liz used to eat her lunch alone, downstairs in the vending machine room. Her lunch was always the same thing: a gigantic Tupperware tub of spaghetti with meat sauce that she brought from home and an entire bag of Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popcorn, which she microwaved and ate one kernel at a time with her long, slim fingers.
I couldn’t help but watch her gigantic Adam’s apple slide up and down as she swallowed. This seemed to me to be a dead giveaway. This, and the fact that she was 6-foot-4 and balding.
I started reading every book I could find on the subject. I spent hours at night scrutinizing graphic photographs of post-surgical vaginas. I compared the clitorises created by the various doctors in America, Asia and Europe. I learned that Liz could have a tracheal shave, where her Adam’s apple would be trimmed and made to appear more feminine. I learned that, indeed, many new women have to go back and have their new vaginas revised.
I wanted to show Liz the articles I found but felt I better not do this, in case it upset her that she hadn’t “passed.” This is something else I learned about, passing. And it’s the goal of every transsexual.
A transsexual who doesn’t pass alarms people. I think this is because as a culture, we are uncomfortable with sex to begin with. So when we see someone who is toying with their own sex, it makes us want to grab our penises and cross our arms in front of our breasts. It threatens us in a deep, primal place in our brain stems.
One of my favorite transsexuals of all those I read about was named Caroline Cossey, also known as Tula. Unlike many male-to-female transsexuals, Tula didn’t look like a supertall depressed guy in a matronly floral dress. She looked like Cindy Crawford. With a better body.
In fact, Tula was a Bond girl and a Seagram’s model before a British tabloid got hold of the fact that she was once some guy. This horrified people, probably men, who had previously engaged in fantasies of the lovely Tula only to learn she had recently been a Hal or a Greg.
When I turned 30, I briefly flirted with the notion of undergoing sexual reassignment surgery. For one thing, I was ready for a big change in my life. And for another, I was having a really difficult time meeting gay guys who didn’t seem gay, yet were still caustic and could appreciate “Mary Tyler Moore” reruns. So I figured as a woman I would have a whole new pool of men to fish from.
I decided I would probably opt for self-lubricating vagioplasty. This was a more expensive vagina, because it was partially constructed from a one-inch band of mucous-secreting small intestine. The plus side of this vagina was that it was, like the name implies, self-lubricating. So I wouldn’t need to give myself away and reach for the KY. On the downside, it was always self-lubricating, so you had to wear a maxi pad at all times, even at funerals.
I wouldn’t make the same mistake that Liz had made: I would absolutely have the tracheal shave. I would also have the “Facial Feminization” option that was offered post-surgically by a surgeon in Los Angeles.
And even if the hormones made my breasts grow, I would still get saline implants. Because if I was going to be a woman, I was going to be stacked.
The problem was my feet. I wore a size 13 shoe, and while I could possibly find a surgeon who would be willing to remove my toes and bring my feet down to a more reasonable 10, I might have trouble walking.
And there was just no way I could be a woman with feet this large. I would look worse than Daryl Hannah.
And then, of course, there was the fact that, in the end, Rogain really hadn’t worked for me. So I’d be forced to wear wigs. And while there were excellent-quality wigs made from the finest Japanese hair, each wig cost thousands of dollars and New York can be extremely windy in the winter.
It all seemed like so much unnecessary trouble and it wasn’t like I was unhappy being a guy. I really liked being a guy. It’s just I was bored with my life and wanted a change.
So here’s what I did: I went to the AKC Puppy Center on Lexington Avenue and I bought a purebred Shiba Inu puppy. He was frisky, smart and adorable.
I named him Becky.
Lately, you cannot pick up a newspaper or click onto a Web site without encountering another mortifying story involving a priest, his penis and a child. We have turned our collective eyes away from terrorists and are now obsessing over men of the cloth. We have stopped asking, Where’s Chandra? and are now asking, Is Griffin spending too much quality time with Father O’Brian?
Well, I’m here to defend our holy fathers. The fact of the matter is, Catholic priests have given me some of the best blow jobs of my life.
“Do you really think this is OK?” I asked Father Bill, in Chicago. We were sitting in his black Crown Victoria, parked on Mayrose Street. A street, I might add, that is not altogether unpopulated, especially at 10 at night. “It’s fine,” he told me. “We’ll just look like a couple of guys waiting for somebody to come out of a store.”
But I wasn’t so sure. “Maybe we should just pull around, you know, in back of something.”
He smiled and I was struck by how warm and sincere his smile was. Then I remembered, well of course. What else would it be? The pine tree-shaped air freshener that hung from his rearview mirror gave the car a pleasing, artificial scent. Somehow, this aroma suited him. “Would you feel more comfortable if we parked in the alley?” he asked. I told him I would. Father Bill put the car in gear and drove around the block. That’s the great thing about Chicago: It has alleys.
I was fascinated by Father Bill. He was a handsome man in his mid-40s and when we met in the bar, I would never have pegged him as a Catholic priest. In fact, he looked suspiciously like a software developer I once dated. “Are you in software?” was my opening line to him, my come-on.
He rested his drink on the bar and turned to me, sliding sideways on the stool. “As a matter of fact,” he said in a leading tone of voice, “no. But I could be if you want me to.” I did smile at his charming offer to shape-shift for me. It showed that he had a playful personality. But I told him no, that was OK, he could just be whatever he was. And because I am from New York and not Chicago, I pressed the issue. “So what are you then?”
He chuckled to himself and glanced down at his hands. The answer was, it seemed, a private joke between him and his fingers. I looked at his thumb for a clue. He didn’t look like a construction worker or a typist.
“I’m a Catholic priest,” he said.
I thought he was maybe joking, going for shock value. But after I sat down and had a few more drinks, adding to the 15 or so already coursing through my veins, it turned out to be the truth. He was a real, live Catholic priest — the kind that knows lots of old ladies by first name. When I pressed him, he was even able to quote from the Bible. His memory was astonishing. He signaled the bartender and ordered us another round. He was drinking something red, which I teased him about. “What’s that, the blood of Christ?” He smiled at this. “Not quite. Just a Cape Codder.”
“I thought you guys weren’t supposed to go to gay bars. Or be gay, for that matter.” Or drink, but I didn’t say this.
Here he laughed wickedly. “Oh, we do a lot we’re not supposed to do. Trust me.” And who wouldn’t trust him? A priest? And that’s how I ended up in his car, now behind a restaurant in a scummy alley in Chicago.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. I said this after my penis refused to become erect. I was mortified by my impotence, at 26, but also didn’t want to disappoint Father Bill. He was such a nice guy. “I’ve had way too much to drink,” I told him.
He pulled his face up from my lap and sat back against the seat. He said, “You know, you should really go to rehab.”
This was a stunning thing to hear, especially from a man who had, not an hour before, bought me five drinks. “Really?”
“I think so,” he said.
I decided that perhaps he was being passive-aggressive, sort of punishing me in some clever priest way for being too drunk to get hard, thus spoiling his free evening. “And why is that?”
He said, “Because there’s something in your eyes that makes me think now that this is not a one-time event, like you told me at the bar? When you apologized for being ‘loaded.’ I think that’s the word you used. Because you had a lousy day at work? Anyway, now something — call it instinct — is telling me you do this a lot. Like every night.”
He was right, of course; my drinking was quite out of hand. And the fact that he was now able to see this impressed me. “Well,” I said. And then we sat silent in the car and I noticed he didn’t have air conditioning or a CD player and this humble fact made me feel tender toward him. I felt strangely connected to him at that moment and became instantly aroused.
He noticed. And this is when I got one of the best blow jobs of my life. Along with, at the end, a piece of paper with the name of a rehab hospital scribbled on it. “It’s in Minnesota. It’s the best. Lots of celebrities go there.”
He seemed to think that this would be something that might impress me, and he was sadly correct. The possibility of seeing Elizabeth Taylor or Robert Downey Jr. in withdrawal would be enough to make me want to go to rehab whether I was a drunk or not.
I left him then, parked there on the alley. He offered to drive me home, but I told him my apartment was only a few blocks away.
Of course, I never saw Father Bill again. I left Chicago and moved back to New York and went on with my life and my drinking until my drinking was my life. Then one day I opened an old datebook and came across his scribbled note. I’d apparently tucked it away for later, forgetting. And then later came. And I called the number on the paper and checked myself into rehab, which, in fact, did save my life.
So you could say he was a scumbag priest who drank, went to gay bars and picked up guys to have sex with in cars. On the other hand, he did save a life — mine. So while I’m sure there are many priests out there who have helped many people, I wonder what percentage of them can actually claim to have saved a life. Surely God is going to look at his checklist and say, “OK, we’ve got this series of blow jobs here, which is gay. Which, you know, I technically can’t allow. On the other hand, you did save a life. So …” clap of the hands, “get into the minivan, you’re going up.”
The other memorable Catholic priest blow job occurred when I was much younger, just 14. I suppose this would be the height of fashion now, to receive a blow job from a priest when you are a teenager.
His name was Father Christopher and he was a priest at the local Catholic church where I grew up. My mother wasn’t Catholic — my family wasn’t particularly religious — but she loved Catholic symbolism and she loved the services. She was a poet and a painter, so perhaps the rituals appealed to her dramatic side.
Father Christopher was the associate of a priest my mother knew and I sort of had a crush on him because he was young and almost hunky. He looked like he should be out on a grassy field in a pair of shorts kicking a soccer ball and not inside, wearing a black smock dress and lighting candles.
My mother attended church most Sundays, and sometimes, out of boredom, I would go with her. I seldom attended the service, instead preferring to walk around the empty offices that extended from the church itself, looking up close at the naked Jesus attached to the cinderblock walls with 8-inch bolts, the inspirational posters that were so corny they made me laugh and the various implements and accoutrements of the Catholic religion that I found strange and fascinating. I especially loved the brass tithing tray with the long black broom handle on the other end. I wanted, desperately, to steal it and hang it in my room above my bed.
Often on my explorations, I would pass by Father Christopher and we would exchange a nod and a glance. The first few times, I thought his glance meant, I’m watching you so don’t steal anything. But then I began to detect something else in his eyes. Something that reminded me of my dog, Brutus. It was hunger that I saw. And being a hungry, attention-starved teenager myself, I gave him back the same look he gave me.
It happened when I went into the men’s room. I’d passed him in the hallway and then turned left and gone into the bathroom with the sole purpose of peeing. But a moment later, the door opened and in walked Father Christopher. My first thought was, He thinks I’m going to smoke in here. And while I did, from time to time, steal cigarettes and smoke, that wasn’t what was on my mind. But instead of scolding me, he simply walked up to the urinal next to mine and peered over the metal wall at my penis.
It was such a sudden, unexpected thing. Truly, you really can’t say what you’d do in such a situation until you’re suddenly there.
I pretended not to notice and then when I was finished peeing I looked at him and said, “Hi.”
His eyes were glazed over with some sort of mad glue and he could not stop staring at my crotch. He was clenching his jaw, I could tell by watching the muscles twitch. And he was sweating, which was odd since the building was always freezing, like a meat locker. His hands were in his pants and I saw then that he was playing with himself.
OK, twist my arm. I was 14, bored, angry, horny, lonely and for various reasons my threshold for strangeness was very high, so I simply dropped my pants and stepped away from the urinal, facing him.
And this turned out to be my first excellent blow job from a Catholic priest.
He sobbed after I came and I felt terrible. I didn’t feel terrible for me. I mean, it wasn’t like he was somebody I trusted who molested or betrayed me. He was a hunky young guy in the wrong career who got my rocks off. For a straight guy, it would be like being 14 and having one of the centerfolds from Playboy step out of the magazine and hand you a bottle of mineral oil. Like you’d complain? Like you’d go, Oh my God, you’ve damaged me! On the other hand, I was unusual. I was an unsupervised youth, old for my age, not a virgin. I wasn’t a good Catholic boy. If I’d been a good, trusting Catholic boy and this shit happened? Well, then my attitude might have been to round up all the Catholic priests and feed them to a pack of pissed-off Hells Angels.
But standing there watching, I felt terrible for Father Christopher. He sobbed and he shook and looked, there on his knees, like he was about to split into pieces. He, the priest, was vulnerable and ruined for that moment. And I, the 14-year-old, felt kind of thrilled and kind of like, what do you expect? You worship a naked man on a cross all day? This shit’s bound to happen. There seemed to be nothing to do but step around him and leave and when I tried to do this, he reached up and grabbed my arm. “Please,” he said.
I knew what he was asking. “Never,” I told him. “I will never tell anybody.”
And I didn’t.
Augusten Burroughs 
