Running with Scissors, Film Tie-In: A Memoir - Softcover

AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS is the author of Sellevision. He lives in New York City.

 

Chapter One

Something Isn’t Right
 
My mother is standing in front of the bathroom mirror smelling polished and ready; like Jean Naté, Dippity Do and the waxy sweetness of lipstick. Her white, handgun-shaped blow-dryer is lying on top of the wicker clothes hamper, ticking as it cools. She stands back and smoothes her hands down the front of her swirling, psychedelic Pucci dress, biting the inside of her cheek.
 
“Damn it,” she says, “something isn’t right.”
 
Yesterday she went to the fancy Chopping Block salon in Amherst with its bubble skylights and ficus trees in chrome planters. Sebastian gave her a shag.
 
“That hateful Jane Fonda,” she says, fluffing her dark brown hair at the crown. “She makes it look so easy.” She pinches her sideburns into points that accentuate her cheekbones. People have always said she looks like a young Lauren Bacall, especially in the eyes.
 
I can’t stop staring at her feet, which she has slipped into treacherously tall red patent-leather pumps. Because she normally lives in sandals, it’s like she’s borrowed some other lady’s feet. Maybe her friend Lydia’s feet. Lydia has teased black hair, boyfriends and an above-ground pool. She wears high heels all the time, even when she’s just sitting out back by the pool in her white bikini, smoking menthol cigarettes and talking on her olive-green Princess telephone. My mother only wears fancy shoes when she’s going out, so I’ve come to associate them with a feeling of abandonment and dread.
 
I don’t want her to go. My umbilical cord is still attached and she’s pulling at it. I feel panicky.
 
I’m standing in the bathroom next to her because I need to be with her for as long as I can. Maybe she is going to Hartford, Connecticut. Or Bradley Field International Airport. I love the airport, the smell of jet fuel, flying south to visit my grandparents.
 
I love to fly.
 
When I grow up, I want to be the one who opens those cabinets above the seats, who gets to go into the small kitchen where everything fits together like a shiny silver puzzle. Plus, I like uniforms and I would get to wear one, along with a white shirt and a tie, even a tie-tack in the shape of airplane wings. I would get to serve peanuts in small foil packets and offer people small plastic cups of soda. “Would you like the whole can?” I would say. I love flying south to visit my grandparents and I’ve already memorized almost everything these flight attendants say. “Please make sure that you have extinguished all smoking materials and that your tray table is in its upright and locked position.” I wish I had a tray table in my bedroom and I wish I smoked, just so I could extinguish my smoking materials.
 
“Okay, I see what’s the matter,” my mother says. She turns to me and smiles. “Augusten, hand me that box, would you?”
 
Her long, frosted beige nail points to the box of Kotex maxi pads on the floor next to the toilet bowl. I grab the box and hand it to her.
 
She takes two pads from the box and sets it on the floor at her feet. I notice that the box is reflected in the side of her shoe, like a small TV. Carefully, she peels the paper strip off the back of one of the pads and slides it through the neck of her dress, placing it on top of her left shoulder. She smoothes the silk over the pad and puts another one on the right side. She stands back.
 
“What do you think of that!” she says. She is delighted with herself. It’s as if she has drawn a picture and placed it on her own internal refrigerator door.
 
“Neat,” I say.
 
“You have a very creative mother,” she says. “Instant shoulder pads.”
 
The blow-dryer continues to tick like a clock, counting down the seconds. Hot things do that. Sometimes when my father or mother comes home, I will go down and stand near the hood of the car to listen to it tick, moving my face in close to feel the heat.
 
“Are you coming upstairs with me?” she says. She takes her cigarette from the clamshell ashtray on the back of the toilet. My mother loves frozen baked stuffed clams, and she saves the shells to use as ashtrays, stashing them around the house.
 
I am fixated on the dryer. The vent holes on the side have hairs stuck in them, small hairs and white lint. What is lint? How does it find hair dryers and navels? “I’m coming.”
 
“Turn off the light,” she says as she walks away, creating a small whoosh that smells sweet and chemical. It makes me sad because it’s the smell she makes when she’s leaving.
 
“Okay,” I say. The orange light from the dehumidifier that sits next to the wicker laundry hamper is looking at me, and I look back at it. Normally it would terrify me, but because my mother is here, it is okay. Except she is walking fast, has already walked halfway across the family room floor, is almost at the fireplace, will be turning around the corner and heading up the stairs and then I will be alone in the dark bathroom with the dehumidifier eye, so I run. I run after her, certain that something is following me, chasing me, just about to catch me. I run past my mother, running up the stairs, using my legs and my hands, charging ahead on all fours. I make it to the top and look down at her.
 
She climbs the stairs slowly, deliberately, reminding me of an actress on the way to the stage to accept her Academy Award. Her eyes are trained on me, her smile all mine. “You run up those stairs just like Cream.”
 
Cream is our dog and we both love her. She is not my father’s dog or my older brother’s. She’s most of all not my older brother’s since he’s sixteen, seven years older than I, and he lives with roommates in Sunderland, a few miles away. He dropped out of high school because he said he was too smart to go and he hates our parents and he says he can’t stand to be here and they say they can’t control him, that he’s “out of control” and so I almost never see him. So Cream doesn’t belong to him at all. She is mine and my mother’s. She loves us most and we love her. We share her. I am just like Cream, the golden retriever my mother loves.
 
I smile back at her.
 
I don’t want her to...