Magical Thinking: True Stories

  “Uh, no. Not you. What’s your name?”

  “Augusten?” I said.

  “Yes, you, Augusten. You were great. We want you.” It was the man with the blue eyes speaking, and now I had my confirmation: he adores me, too. Instantly, my mood reversed, and I began to grind my teeth in joy.

  I can now trace my manic adult tendencies to this moment. It was the first time I felt deeply thrilled about something just a fraction of an instant after being completely crushed. I believe those three words “We want you” were enough to cause my brain to rewire itself, and from then on, I would require MORE than other people. At the same time, my tolerance for alcohol was instantly increased, and a new neural pathway was created for the future appreciation of crack cocaine and prescription painkillers.

  “You want me?” I said, containing my enthusiasm so completely that I probably appeared disinterested.

  “Well, yeah. Don’t you want to be in the commercial?”

  “Well, yeah. A lot.” I tried to imitate an excited boy. I was excited but somehow unable to express the actual emotion of excitement. My electrical system was all off now.

  “Good,” he said clapping his hands. Then he slid a stack of papers across the table. “Then you need to take these home and have your parents read them over very carefully. We’re going to be back Monday.”

  The ride home on the school bus was excruciatingly long. Only ten of us had been chosen to be in the commercial, so the rest of the kids were sullen. Chad, who hadn’t been chosen, sat with his head pressed against the window, crying.

  Piggy Lisa hadn’t been chosen either, and this had made her nasty. She blew spit balls through a straw until she accidentally hit the school bus driver, Mr. Ed. Mr. Ed hit the brakes and glared into his rearview mirror, scanning our faces to see if he could tell which kid was guilty. He was missing one of his front teeth. This made us (or was it just me?) think of him not as a man but as an animal, capable of inflicting great pain and possibly death. “Little girl,” he growled at Piggy Lisa, “you spit one more of them thingies at me and I’ll come right on over there and milk them little titties a yours like you was a cow.”

  That shut her up. Piggy Lisa sank into her seat and folded her arms across her fatty chest.

  Wendy was the prettiest girl in school, so of course she had been chosen. But Wendy was mentally lazy, relying on her looks alone to see her through life. She was what we called “a dip.”

  “What does it mean? What does it mean?” she kept asking over and over. She was entirely ecstatic, rising from her seat frequently and twirling around to ask the other kids, “But what does it mean?” Constantly, she tucked her long blonde hair behind her ears.

  “It means, you dip, that you’re gonna be in some dumb TV commercial for dumb old Tang.” This was spoken by Gary, who, because of my powerful mental powers, also hadn’t been chosen.

  I sat quietly on the middle hump seat over the wheel and tried to contain my insane excitement by staring out the window, and thinking of television cameras.

  But as soon as I got home, I sprinted up our gravel driveway and threw open the front door, screaming “I’m gonna be in a Tang commercial! I’m gonna be in a Tang commercial!”

  My mother was talking on the phone and smoking a cigarette.

  I screamed into her other ear, “I’m gonna be in a Tang commercial! They want me!”

  She winced and pulled away, then spoke into the phone. “I have to go, Dee. Augusten’s home, and he’s hysterical.”

  As soon as she hung up, I pounced on her again, shrieking about how I was going to be on TV!!! I told her that she had to sign the papers right now so I could bring them back to school.

  Unfazed, my mother set her cigarette in the clamshell ashtray and uncapped her Flair pen. She signed the papers without reading them and passed them back to me. “Just don’t bring home any animals,” she said. Then she took a long drag from her cigarette and added, “Who knows? Maybe now you’ll become a famous television star like you’ve always wanted. Then you can move away from your father and me and go live in a mansion in Hollywood.”

  I inhaled sharply, as if slapped. YES, I thought. With an electric gate in front and a tiki lounge by the pool.

  ______

  Obsessions with television talk shows, movie stars, mirrors, and anything gold-plated had defined my personality from an early age. This trait baffled my highly educated and bookish parents. Whereas my mother loved teak, I favored simulated wood grain. My father’s appreciation for old farm tractors was an interesting counterpoint to my fixation on white stretch limousines and Rolls Royce grills.

  Although my parents couldn’t stand each other day to day, the one thing they did agree on was that I was very different from them. “Where did you come from?” my mother asked me one afternoon as I used a Q-Tip to clean between the links on my gold-tone Twist-O-Flex watchband. Or “Where on earth did you ever hear of such a thing?” my father wanted to know when I told him that even the plumbing in the toilets was made of solid gold at the Vanderbilt’s Breakers mansion.

  At Christmas, my mother decorated our tree with strands of cranberries and popcorn that she strung together herself, Danish Santas, and antique clear light bulbs. I, on the other hand, saved up my allowance for a good five months for my own artificial Christmas tree, which I kept in my bedroom, festooned with silver tinsel, thick ropes of gold garland, and lights that flashed spastically and constantly. I bought spray snow, which I applied in artful, yet natural windswept patterns, to my windows. I illuminated my tree with my desk lamp, as though it were on a set.

  In preparation for my television acting debut, I watched commercials incessantly, committing them to memory and reciting key phrases endlessly to my parents.

  “Can I help you fry the chicken?” I mimicked in a high-pitched southern girl’s voice.

  “I wanna help,” I countered in a different high-pitched southern girl’s voice.

  Then, imitating their mother, I said, “I don’t fry chicken anymore. I use new Shake ’N Bake.”

  I loved to sing jingles. “That great Pepsi taste. Diet Pepsi won’t go to your waist. Now you see it. Now you don’t. Oh, Diet Pepsi one small calorie. Now you see it. Now you don’t.”

  Sometimes I got the words wrong, but my intentions were true.

  “Let’s get Mikey to try it. He won’t eat it; he hates everything!”

  My father, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, couldn’t bear my constant performing. “Jesus, son. What’s the matter with you? If you don’t stop that noise, you won’t be in any commercial at all. You’ll be right back in your room practicing penmanship.”

  This muted me, briefly. Long enough to contemplate his sudden death and wonder how I would ever be able to produce convincing tears. Onions, I’d heard, could do the trick if you applied just a small bit of the juice right under your eye. I went into the kitchen and tried this myself, thrilled with the weepy, sincere results. Oh Dad! Boo-hoo-hoo.

  My mother was slightly more understanding. “He’s amazing the way he can just memorize every commercial on the air. You have to admit, he does seem to be made for acting.”

  And with those words, my mother had cursed me.

  The director was a very round man, of face and of fist. His hands were clenched into tight little red balls as he stomped over to me yet again and asked, “Why is this so hard for you?”

  Again, I’d missed my mark and spoken my one line too early, out of sight of the camera. I knew my line so well; I’d practiced it in every room of my home, under every lighting condition. Yet now, on the day of the shoot and with the camera trained on me, I couldn’t get it right.

  “All you have to do is say ‘Hey, Mark, where are you going?’ That’s all you have to say. Why are you having so much trouble with this?” he asked me, unable to hide his obvious hatred of attractive, brilliant children.

  “I don’t know,” I said, again. “Something is throwing me out of character.”

  T
his infuriated him. “What are you talking about, character? You’re a kid in a school . . . playing a kid in a school! This is not On the Waterfront.”

  We’d been shooting for over an hour. It was a simple setup: I’m walking behind a group of other kids in the hall when I suddenly see my friend, Mark. I pause, turn toward the camera—though without looking at it—and say, “Hey, Mark, where are you going?”

  But I just couldn’t do it.

  The thing is, I’d known since the men first uttered the words “Tang commercial” that I was perfect for this role. All I had to do was be my natural, born-for-it self. But something had gone catastrophically wrong. In my obsession to be a perfectly natural boy for the camera, I was unable to be even vaguely natural, let alone perfect.

  And each time I spoke my line, my voice sounded forced, pretentious, dishonest. These were concepts I’d gleaned from a copy of Acting: A Handbook of the Stanislavski Method, which I’d found in my mother’s bookshelf.

  The other problem was that I didn’t feel I had found my character’s own space within the context of the scene. Why was I walking down the hall? Was I going to a class? Or coming from a class? These were essential questions, and the director refused to give me answers.

  “Will you shut up and just walk!” was what he said.

  “But when I walk, do you want me to be walking with urgency or relief?” was my reply.

  “Oh Jesus Christ, can we get another kid?” he shouted over his shoulder.

  It was my full intention to be so convincing as a normal school child that when these advertising executives got back to New York City they wouldn’t be able to forget me. Or else someone important—like Carol Burnett—would see me in the Tang commercial and then call my parents and request that I be flown out to Hollywood immediately.

  “Let’s try this one more time,” the director shouted as he walked back to his position behind the camera. He shook his head from side to side, as the light drained from the sky.

  He shouted action, and I began my walk down the hallway, fully aware of the camera trained on my every move. I concentrated hard on being normal, on making ordinary footsteps. But I could feel it happening. Like being the passenger in a car speeding out of control, I was unable to stop myself. In a high-pitched and overly rehearsed tone of voice, I recited my line and again peeked at the camera to make sure I’d reached my mark correctly.

  I winced as I waited for the director to again scream “Cut!” but instead there was silence. And then I felt a rush. Had I done it? Had I accidentally done it exactly right? I had done it right, hadn’t I? I bit my lip to repress the smile that was about to break the surface.

  “Forget it. We’ll fix it in the edit. This is a wrap!”

  And that was it.

  I saw the men in the suits standing in a huddle near the director, smoking cigarettes. The man who loved me, the man with the blue eyes, now glanced at me once sharply, then looked away.

  Had I failed him?

  The men packed up, leaving behind a piece of paper with the dates and times that the commercial was supposed to run on the air.

  At home my mother marked the calendar and counted down the days.

  I wondered what I would look like on TV. Would the part in my hair be straight? Would it be shiny? I’d used conditioner every night for a week. I wondered if I’d said my lines naturally, after all. Had I given them enough to work with in the edit? I’d been reading quite a bit about filmmaking, and it was amazing how much could be “saved” by a gifted editor.

  Then the day arrived. My mother turned on the Today Show, and we watched for nearly an hour before it came on.

  I saw myself for a split second, in back of Wendy and a bunch of other kids. Wendy said, “Hey, let’s go get some!” and the scene changed to Mrs. Ames at home serving Tang to her grandchildren for the rest of the commercial.

  My line had been cut. “Where were you?” my mother asked at the end. “Are you sure that’s the right one?”

  Mrs. Ames had hijacked the commercial. Mrs. Ames and Wendy, who, it seemed, was playing the role of Mrs. Ames’s granddaughter. Wendy, so pretty and noncurious lazy, had been the only child in the commercial to speak.

  “Where were you?” my mother cried again at the end. “Are you really sure that’s the right commercial?”

  “I’m sure,” I mumbled, crushed by my own failure.

  My grandmother called from Georgia. My mother answered the phone. “No, Momma, we saw it, too. But I didn’t see Augusten. He says that’s the commercial.”

  Depressed, I walked out of the kitchen and down the hall to my bedroom.

  “Hey, Mark, where are you going?” I said to my mirror, in a tone of voice so natural and plain I realized at once that this is what the director had wanted all along. He didn’t want passion, interpretation, meaning, and nuance. He wanted an ordinary kid who could say six words.

  Fine, I decided, right there on my bed. I won’t be a child actor in television commercials. Instead, I will be the one who thinks up the commercials in the first place. And then I will hire the director myself, and when he can’t make the kid give me a passionate, meaningful, and nuanced performance, I’ll fire him.

  I got up from my bed and went into the bathroom to retrieve a tube of Crest. I brought it back into my bedroom. And studied the tube.

  What could I ever think of that would make a person want to buy this stuff?

  VANDERBILT GENES

  W

  hen I was ten years old, I realized I’d been kidnapped as a toddler. Of course, I would have to have been a fairly dim child to miss the clues. Great big pink-elephant clues, trumpeting and lumbering and shitting through the house, ignored by everyone except me. Both of my parents spoke with thick Georgia accents and I did not. Both had a fondness for canned green beans and I did not. Both of them and my older brother had straight brown hair, whereas I had a mane of blond curls that my mother’s friends always commented on. “Like an angel,” they cooed. “Like a girl,” the man who installed our new septic system said. Yet there was something else: a primal knowledge. I just had a feeling about it. But it was on a family trip to Newport, Rhode Island, when I learned that I had, in fact, been not merely kidnapped but stolen from the finest family in American history.

  My father had decided on a weekend touring the mansions: colossal palaces built on the sea cliffs in the eighteen-hundreds, summer homes for the Rockefellers, the man who invented the paper clip, and yes, the Vanderbilts.

  The Vanderbilt estate was called The Breakers. It was the most popular tourist attraction because it was the most astonishingly lavish, a structure that made the White House seem more like a double-wide. The moment I stepped inside the grand foyer, I knew I belonged there. The feeling was similar to what it must be like to be a twin, separated at birth, and then reunited years later on television. I seemed to recognize the lavishly carved ceiling, the gilt mirror, the absence of white shag carpeting, like we had “at home.”

  The tour guide was very strict: we had to stay in a neat pack, like crayons. We were not to finger the tapestries, sit on the chairs, or lick the paintings. We were to follow, listen, and be awed by our own smallness.

  My first instinct was to inform the appalling tourists and my so-called parents that they must all leave immediately. I wanted to point back to the entrance and announce: “I’m sorry, people. But there has been a mistake. You must now leave my home and return to your busses. The rottweilers are being brought up from the wine cellar.”

  An overpowering sixth sense engaged, and I knew what each room would look like without even needing to explore.

  How, I wondered, had I been kidnapped by a southern couple with Del Monte green bean breath? How could it have happened that I would end up being raised by common academic trash? My father, a professor, and my mother, a graduate student earning her M.F.A.—these people had no business with me.

  Of course, my “parents” were suitably impressed with the majesty of the house, but I fel
t possessive and sullen. They walked enthusiastically through the rooms, commenting on the splendor, while I lagged behind them, just at the edge of another family.

  When the tour guide pointed to a gold faucet fixture in one of the gargantuan master bathrooms and remarked, “These faucets feature hot and cold running seawater,” I glared at my parents. See what I used to enjoy? I tried to recall if I’d ever sat in that tub. A dim memory floated to the surface, but a memory without any images, only a taste on the tip of my tongue: sea salt.

  Our own faucets had hot and cold running tap water, the same plain water that everyone in town had, even the Latts, with their Down’s syndrome girl, who lived in a shack near the dump. Our own bathtub featured a permanent dark ring of grime compliments of my older brother, who was seventeen and learning to repair car engines. A common grease monkey, someone who would hit me on the shoulder with the serrated edge of the aluminum foil box and then laugh as pinpricks of blood bloomed through the starched white dress shirt that I always wore. My brother was a farm animal, a grunting primitive. Not a Vanderbilt. Certainly not suitable for this vacation to Newport. He had thankfully stayed home with his pet car.

  I saw my self, my other self—the one who lived in a parallel universe and had not been stolen—hiding behind the heavy velvet drapes in the formal living room, while my mother searched for me, silk and gold-thread slippers on her feet, martini glass poised in her hand, pinkie extended. “Amadeus?” she was calling out through the vast home, peering behind tufted sofas, under fourposter beds. “Come out, come out wherever you are.” In the vision, I am smiling behind a large Ming vase, thinking about dashing outside and scratching the ears of my pet camel.

  I also knew with certainty that I was an only child. I had learned about only children at school, and everything those only children felt, I felt. The feeling hit me, too, in the Vanderbilt mansion. Why else would it be unoccupied, a museum? My real parents had been hopelessly distraught when I was taken, neither of them able to bear such extravagance in the face of such unthinkable loss. “Amadeus,” my mother would have wept. “Every tassel reminds me of him. All these marble columns he used to dance around.” My father would have wiped a tear from his own eye, the memory of me being placed in his arms by my Scandinavian wet nurse while he sat in the library too much for him to contain. Of course they would have sold the estate, at a loss. Unloaded it to the state. “Do whatever vulgar thing you want to with it; I don’t care. Sell tickets, print postcards—it just doesn’t matter,” my mother would have told the governor.