11.2006
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A Journal of Prose and Commentary Volume 8
In this volume: Augusten Burroughs Litsa Dremousis Rob Giampietro Robert Hass Erika Meitner Tom Moore Rachel Zucker
A Journal of Prose and Commentary
Armchair Shrink A Journal of Prose and Commentary Volume 8
Armchair Shrink
editors Katherine Furler, Jeff Hanson, Roy Seeger,
Melissa Tuckey, Tony Viola, Amanda Warren
AJ Pr our Co ose a nal o Vo mme nd f lum nt e 8 ary
What is the difference between regression
The publication of this issue is made possible in part by a grant from the Ohio Arts Council. We also extend special recognition to the Ohio University Student Activities Commission, without whose continued support the publication of this journal would not be possible. The editors also wish to thank the following: The Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor Scholarship, Colette Inez, Casa Nueva Restaurant, Darrell Spencer, Dorothy Anderson, and Kenneth Daley. Special thanks to the English Department at Ohio University for their extraordinary support in the recent year.
Š Armchair Shrink, 2005 Armchair Shrink is distributed by Ingram Periodicals, Inc., 1226 Heil Quaker Blvd., La Vergne, TN 37086-7000 Armchair Shrink Volume 8 Editors Katherine Furler, Jeff Hanson, Roy Seeger, Melissa Tuckey, Tony Viola, Amanda Warren Art Editors David Johanson and Kent Smith Production Editor Eric Freeze Book Review Editor Pat Madden Website Editor Scott Gallagher Readers Wells Addington, Carl Boon, Ashley Capps, Brad Chamberlain, Jeremy Countryman, Margaux Cowden, Marnie Ellis, James Engelhardh, Rebecca Fleming, Eric Freeze, Scott Gallagher, Leslie Henne, Claire Kegley, Laura Kusnyer, Pat Madden, Paul Shovlin, Sharon Starr-Koelm, Nikole Stephenson, Aaron Van Dorn, Jonas Williams, Elijah Wright Faculty Advisor Martha Scotford Book Design Kelly M. Murdoch-Kitt
the editors warmly welcome you to sit down with our eighth volume of Armchair Shrink. This month, most of our
and reflection?
contributing writers share a connection to New York in some way, whether they were born there, grew up there, or moved there as adults to live and work. Their writings offer a range experiences and developmental perspectives: Erika Meitner, Augusten Burroughs and Tom Moore provide different points of view on children and childhood. Rachel Zucker’s Persephone is in the throes of adolescent angst, balanced by the adult logic of Rob Giampietro’s essay. We hope you enjoy these personalities, ideas and neuroses as much as we enjoyed producing this edition for you.
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the big apple issue
Poetry Letter: (Persephone to Demeter) Rachel Zucker
1
Essay On Arranging Books by Color 3 Rob Giampietro
Poetry The Problem of Describing Color 5 Robert Hass
Diary The Students Get the Last Word 11 Tom Moore
Poetry Homeroom 13 Erika Meitner
Interview Augusten Burroughs 21 Litsa Dremousis
Fiction Running With Scissors 33 Agusten Burroughs
Contributors 43
Wear y of a confined adolescence, Persephone withdraws to the Underworld in order to be “away from where the body / of my mother is ever ywhere.”
Joshua Kryah on Eating in the Underworld Rachel Zucker’s first book of poems, Eating in the Underworld, spotlights the myth of Persephone, chronicling her dramatic transition from maidenhood to womanhood: “I am / becoming something / other than I was. / A consort. A Queen. / No more a maiden but still with maiden hands.” Escaping the vigilant watch of mother Demeter, Persephone gradually warms to the physical and otherworldly intrigues offered by her husband Hades in the underworld, where she spends half the year. Zucker’s collection attempts to distinguish Persephone from both mother and lover, and to separate her from the myth by chronicling the transformation of the adolescent self. Zucker chooses to explore the nuances of Persephone’s binary existence through spare lyrical poems, employing a subtle economy of line to hollow out a space in which she is able to speak on the “end of maidenhood,” as well as to verify the “ache and savor” of maturity. The collection is made up of a sequence of diary entries, letters, and notes divided into two parts, the first a record of Persephone’s experiences in the realm of the dead, and the second her return to the world of the living. The epistolary genre has long been associated with women writers, and in this case it allows gender and genre a parallel space within identity and ideology, where the text’s shape and style inform the power relationships explored within each poem.
adapted from epoetry.org
Zucker Letter (Persephone to Demeter) 1
Letter (Persephone to Demeter) Rachel Zucker
At home, the bells were a high light-yellow
with no silver or gray just buttercup or sugar-and-lemon.
Here bodies are lined in blue against the sea.
And where red is red there is only red.
I have to be blue to bathe in the sea.
Red, to live in the red room with red air
to rest my head, red cheek down, on the red table.
Above, it was so green: brown, yellow, white, green.
My l o n g i n g for red furious, sexual.
There, things were alive but nothing moved.
Now I live near the sea in a place which has no blue and is not the sea.
Gulls flock, leeward then tangent
and pigeons bully them off the ground.
Hardly alive, almost blind—a hot geometry casts off
every color of the world. Everything moves, nothing alive.
In the red room there is a sky which is painted over in red
but is not red and was, once, the sky.
This is how I live.
A red table in a red room filled with red air.
A woman, edged in blue, bathing in the blue sea.
The surface like the pale, scaled skin of fish
far below or above or away—
On Arranging
Books by
designobserver.com
Rob Giampietro
Colour
W
hen it comes to the organization of knowledge, a lot is revealed by the system of organization that’s used. For most serious academ-
ic libraries in America, the organizational system of choice was invented in 1874 by Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey (or Melvil Dui, as he liked to spell it), who was an assistant librarian at Amherst College when his eponymous system was devised.
The Dewey Decimal Classification system (or DDC) is definitely
widespread, however there are some notable exceptions. The Library of Congress, for example, has its own system known as LCC. And the New York Public Library has not one, but two, arcane systems: one is the Billings Classification, a broad subject classification created in the 1890’s and recently retired in favor of LCC; the other is a fixed-order scheme arranged by the size of books.
So that’s how the pros do it. But what about the rest of us? Before I
consider this question, let’s get back to Dewey for a second. A trailblazer in many ways, Dewey was the founder and editor of Library Journal, a cofounder of the American Library Association, and an outspoken advocate of spelling reform, a 19th century movement which suggested changing oddlooking British words like “catalogue” to more familiar-looking American ones like “catalog.”
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One of the words that would have caught Dewey’s eye was “colour”—or,
more patriotically spelled, “color”—and on this subject Dewey’s opinions were perhaps a bit unorthodox. Later in his life, Dewey sponsored several pamphlets about Ro, a language created by Rev. Edward Powell Foster in which words are constructed using a categorical system similar to Dewey’s own system for books. In Ro, words starting with “bofo-” are color words, as in “bofoc” for red (c=crimson?), and “bofof ” for yellow (f=who knows?). Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? Replace the color words of this lovely final line from Robert Haas’s poem “The Problem of Describing Color,”
Red, I said. Sudden, red.
with its Ro equivalents:
Bofoc, I said. Sudden, bofoc.
The poetic effect is not really the same. It’s a bit like saying the hexadecimal
color equivalent of medium goldenrod—“EAEAAE”—out loud. Like a computer language, Ro is not a language of nuance, it is a language of hard, driving logic. Such a regimented worldview may have also shaded one of Dewey’s other unorthodox color opinions: he was rumored to be an extreme racist and advocate of racial segregation.
Questionable personal beliefs aside, I have never found the Dewey Decimal
Classification system to be an accurate reflection of how books are organized in my own mind—or anybody else’s for that matter. Certainly I understand the
DDC’s advantages when it comes to large-
books I have on the dramatic arts. Some-
scale collections, but if how we choose to
times the size of the books themselves is the
organize our personal effects says something
governing agent: I have ganged up a set of
about who we are, then an arbitrary numeric
cheap paperbacks on a squat shelf because
system says very little about me. My library
they fit there splendidly. A book’s value can
is, to borrow from Georges Perec, “a sum
govern my placement of it: for example, I
of books constituted by a nonprofessional
keep my expensive books away from the sun.
reader for his own pleasure and daily use.”
In other cases, time is the reason for a book’s
Perec’s definition comes from a wonderful
placement, with older books piling up a
essay of his titled, “Brief Notes on the Art
dark corner of my studio while newer books
and Manner of Arranging One’s Books,” and
are proudly displayed on my coffee table.
includes such other quoteables as “The prob-
(Though there is some method to my mad-
lem of the library is shown to be twofold: a
ness, I still take solace in Terry Belanger’s
problem of space first of all, then a problem
aptly-named Lunacy and the Arrangement of
of order.” I am well aware of both.
Books, which profiles several of my predeces-
sors.) The central issue, as Perec warms us, is
schemes in his essay, and in practice I have
that “None of these classifications systems is
used a number of these, sometimes alone
satisfactory by itself,” and he is right. But one
and sometimes in combination with one
idea from his list, “ordering by color,” seems
another. Randomness (or chance) has domi-
to be gathering a small following of late,
nated certain shelves of mine for a while.
particularly among the visually-inclined.
Loose categories governed by architectural
constraints was a working method of mine,
my building called Thumb to see my friend
too, with a large wall grouping my novels
Luke Bulman. He’d just reorganized his
and a side table sheltering the smattering of
books by color, and I asked him why he did it.
Red, I said. Sudden, red.
at Tarot?) who cheats
you not love
Rouged nipple, mouth
Until it comes out right
a woman
of fallen leaves If she tells fortunes with a deck
dangles from her silky lobe, If I said, her one red earring
o hillside outside Fan On a wind-struck
-scented summer y in the tar-grass Or flecks of popp
If I said fire, if I said blood welling from a cut
In the painting
of Renoir
lapdog ry, black-nosed Dangling the wi
s pooched-out lip Of the girl with
bon on the cock ed straw hat If I said, red rib
ds ter woo
smudge sudden
gray win are In the b
I
inal’s The card
bering,
in summ
er,
of red
air
Recently, I stopped by a design studio in
(how could
Perec lists several possible ordering
remem f I said,
The Problem of Describing Color Robert Hass
Giampietro On Arranging Books By Color
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A Visually Organized Language Ro was a ‘philosophical language;’ it was designed as a categorical system that would allow a reader to understand basic meanings about a work by simply looking at the first letters. Reverend Edward Powell Foster and his wife invented Ro and worked exstensively to develop it for over 24 years. Foster wrote this explanation of his linguistic brainchild: “Ro did not begin with attempting to rival or supplant any other language whatever, either natural or artificial, nor was it suggested by any of them. Unexpectedly came the thought: ‘How strange it is that there is nothing in the appearance of a written or printed word that gives the slightest hint of its meaning. Why should a word not be a picture? A new word, never seen before would then, like a painting seen for the first time, convey at least some of the meaning to the eye.’” adapted from Ro by Rick Harrison
Giampietro On Arranging Books By Color
A few reasons resonated with me, and
Argument of Jürgen Habermas, Adorno
helped to illuminate his logic.
and Horkheimer’s irresistible Dialectic of
Enlightenment and, last but not least, The
For one, books he’s purchased or received
as gifts are books he knows and often loves,
Meaning of Contemporary Realism. None
and the color of these books is a major part
of these, despite their common sunny color,
of the experience of interacting with them.
are exactly what you’d think of as beach
He’s not the only one. When I glance at my
reading. In thinking over the titular question,
own bookshelf, I immediately react to the
Siegel decides that “I search out these books
black spine and stacked caps of Tibor, the
because their relentless orangeness speaks
metallic silver heft of a monograph on Frank
to the relationship between theory and
O. Gehry, the austere white backdrop of Sol
visual practice. Just as the designer enforces
Lewitt, and the optical orange punch of the
a uniform surface to market this genre, the
15th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style.
content of the genre—theory itself—is used
by savvy designers to add a marketable mys-
Another of Luke’s reasons is this: organiz-
ing his books by color allows him to discover
tique to their work.”
new and unexpected relationships between
books he knows well already. When two un-
part of Luke’s final reason for organizing his
related books are forced to occupy the same
books by color: pleasure. Our bookshelves
shelf simply because of their spine color, the
often take up a good deal of space in the
shelver is asked to think about whether they
places we live and work, and organizing
have ideas to share between them. Perhaps,
them by color transforms them from a banal
the designers of these chromatically related
backdrop into a poppy, rainbow-colored fo-
books saw something in the books’ content
cal point. Books organized by color are cool
that even their authors did not. Maybe their
to look at. Just ask designer Mark Owens,
ideals share a common hue? The orange of
who transformed a photograph of color-
my Chicago Manual of Style (which in my
coded binders in at a European office supply
own theoretical color-coded library would be
store into a 15-second bumper for the MTV
shelved next to Alberto Manguel’s
show Video Clash.
A History of Reading) seems to support this romantic notion about the color of ideas, which has been explored more fully by Dmitri Siegel in his short piece for Dot Dot Dot 8 entitled, “Why Are All These Books Orange?” Siegel shows four books at the start of the piece: An Introduction to the Principles of Transformational Syntax, Metacritique: The Philosophical
“
This “marketable mystique” may also be a
I was considering Dewey, but now this has been bought to my attention…I’m amazed I’ve not thought of it myself. You’d know what I mean if you ever saw my garden, clothes on the washing line, wardrobe, Linen closet…ad infinitum.
Maybe I didn’t think of books because my librarian mother influenced me into more logical arrangements…? Posted by: Sara October 4, 2006 06:50pm
”
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There is Nothing Wrong in the Whole Wide World
Prior to his installation, artist Chris Cobb discusses his plans to give the Adobe Bookshop a makeover by Suzanne Kleid Q: When did you originally think of the idea for this? What made you decide to do what you’re going to do? A: I wanted to make something that I didn’t think would exist anywhere, and that nobody would ever make, that I couldn’t go anywhere in the world and see it. Q: So you think you can do this all in one night? How are you going to do it? A: I’m really grateful for the fact that when the bookstore was organized, all of the shelves along the walls are exactly the same. I think there’s seven shelves in every unit. So you can estimate the number of books pretty accurately. It’s around 20,000 books. Because of how they’re positioned, I can map them out and give coordinates for every book. It’ll be, like, shelf 3, row 1. Each book will be given its own designation, so that after they’re all taken out and rearranged by color, when it comes time to put them back I can just go back to shelf 3, row 1, or whatever, and I’ll know exactly where they go. Q: Because it’s a piece of public art and because you’re just rearranging books, there isn’t a thing you’re producing that can be sold, you know? You’re doing this incredibly complex, time-consuming thing and it’s only going to exist just to look nice. A: Well, there are elements of the sublime and elements of beauty involved here that do more than “look nice.” The fact that it’s some thing you wouldn’t see anywhere has the potential to make it a trans gressive experience for some people. People who can appreciate imagi nary things or imaginary places, and the power that those places have. Also, there’s a lot about ceremony, I think, and ritual. Ritualistic acts. In some Native American cultures, if you make something, you have to then sleep with it next to you overnight, so that the object is trans formed through your dreaming. Then it has this special power that it wouldn’t normally have, and this is kind of like that same place, maybe.
adapted from McSweeney’s
Giampietro On Arranging Books By Color
“
what i find beautiful about the adobe bookshop project is that it takes the chaos of the neighborhood bookstore and applies a very simple ordering system based on something essentially visual like color. you look at it in a different way.
despite the strictness of the system, there is still a lot of personality in terms of the variation of color tones, shapes, thicknesses, and sizes. Posted by: manuel on August 30, 2006 11:04pm
Or ask artist Chris Cobb, who (along with
”
there are sharing photos of color-coding
20 volunteers) recently reshelved the 20,000
systems they’ve observed on everything from
books at San Francisco’s Adobe Bookshop
condiments to bike racks, from dress shoes
according to the color wheel.
to trash cans. In addition to books, I know
Even The New York Times Magazine’s
a number of people who’ve organized their
style section recently featured the home of
records by color, and this makes lots of sense
art collector Andy Stillpass, which houses
too. The many moods of music seem well-
a number of site-specific works by lead-
suited to color-coding, as does the indescrib-
ing contemporary artists in a wide variety
ably abstract quality of the art form itself.
of media, including Stillpass’s own books,
which were rearranged first by Dominique
Dewey’s decimals anytime soon? Probably
Gonzalez-Foerster to form “The Blue Vein”
not. But don’t let that discourage you. To re-
in 1993 and then further juggled by Rirkrit
arrange your books is to see them afresh and
Tiravanija to form “The Red Threat” several
to investigate yourself in the process. Even
years later.
if you make a terrible mess, Perec reminds
us that “Disorder in a library is not serious in
The more you look, the more you see an
So, will Pantone’s numbers replace
enthusiasm for color-coding in every corner
itself; it ranks with ‘Which drawer did I put
of our culture. A cursory glance at Flickr
my socks in?’” And your sock drawer is prob-
does well at articulating the range. Users
ably color-coded already.<
The ry dia
of
To m
Mo
ore:
bli A week long journal of a pu
r in che a e lt h oo c sc
the
on Br th u So
x
For the week of February 23, 2004, Slate asked Mr. Moore to write down his observations on his days as a teacher. The entries are wide-ranging and at times raw, but over the course of the week a lot of emotion, information and insight accumulate. —UC Berkeley Interactive University Project
The St u
dents
The school
Get the Last Word
Two days before the start of our midwinter recess, a friend of mine, a
Monday, Feb. 23, 2004
fellow teacher, was punched in the face by a student, the son of a school
1:35pm EST
aide. The incident has been handled badly by everyone. My friend waited
1
two days to start the paper trail, for all he knows he might have the kid in his class tomorrow. He told me that when the kid was cocking his fist, he thought to himself, “I wonder if he would do this to Mr. Moore?” I don’t know. I’ve never been punched in the face. I’ve been pushed; I’ve had spitballs, chairs, garbage cans, pencils, chalk, crayons, and other stuff thrown at me. I’ve been threatened by children and adults with violence; I’ve been threatened by children and adults with lawsuits, dismissal, “letters in my file.” I’ve been called “White Motherf--ker,” “White-Out,” “Chicken Tender,” “Twinkie,” “Gay,” “White Boy,” and “Racist.” I’ve also learned that sometimes these taunts and epithets aren’t meant to insult. The kids use these words among friends. I’ve learned how to react: Nothing attracts more insults than a wounded prig.
They don’t seem like they really want to fight.
My lunch Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2004
Thursday is a half-day because we have parent-teacher conferences. We teachers will be available to the parents from noon to 3 and 6 to 8. We’ll be handing out “Promotion in Doubt” letters, informing many parents that at
2 12:38pm EST
best, their child should reconsider any summer plans, and at worst, their child might have to repeat the grade. I look forward to Thursday night, but not because I have a cruel streak. I enjoy meeting the parents, especially the parents who support their kids, bring them to libraries and museums, work overtime to get a computer. They’re strong people and I admire them. One girl in my class has, for years now, been failing and getting into all sorts of trouble: threatening classmates, cursing teachers, hiding under her desk. Since October, we’ve been trying to move her into a special-education class, but these things take time, despite—or maybe because of (depends on who you ask)—the restructuring of the schools. Her grandmother came to a planning meeting we held last week and before even saying hello said, “I want her in special ed.” Everyone at the meeting—guidance counselors, psychologists, all of us sitting knee-to-knee in a tiny office—agreed with Grandma. It was a lucky coincidence that we also had a seat open in a special ed class, so we don’t have to wait until next year to move her, as would usually be the case. This girl, in spite of her troubles, has perfect attendance and is usually the first or second person to arrive for class. I wonder whose class she’ll walk into tomorrow. I feel unprepared for the week, so this morning I catch the early bus. Outside of school, I bump into my friend who was assaulted. Mr. S. looks shocked to see me so early—it’s 7:35 a.m. I ask about the incident, and he tells me he can’t say much; he’s been advised to get a lawyer. Four years ago, he came to my school as one of the first Teaching Fellows. (The city’s Teaching Fellows program was begun to help fill the many vacancies that existed in hard-to-staff schools like the one I teach in.) Out of five Fellows from that year, Mr. S is the only one still teaching. The other four lasted between two weeks and three months before quitting. I think the Fellows program learned from this experience because they don’t seem to send teachers to schools like mine anymore. With 20 minutes left before the homeroom bell, I find the assistant principal, the keeper of the keys, to try to get some books from the book room—no dice. The secretary apparently has the only key and she’s running late so I’ll have to wait. The assistant principal assures me that she’ll look for the books sometime later. I don’t have much confidence in that, but I thank her anyway. I ask if I can get the
Moore The Students Get the Last Word 13
(For all their posturing, boys usually don’t.)
key to a different storage room for the digital projector, to show my class a brief video on Rome. That key is also sealed in the secretary’s desk. It occurs to me that many problems in this school could be solved with a crowbar, but I keep the remark to myself.
After lunch, the kids are wide awake. The class
settles down, more or less, to write in their journals for 10 minutes. We “freewrite” every day. I don’t read their journals—they’re private. I suppose that many kids write about whatever they’re thinking that day; some of them no doubt write curses and threats; some appear to be composing long poems or rap lyrics, or maybe they’re
Homeroom Erika Meitner
transcribing them. While they write, I walk around the
Yesterday in the mail I got a package
room. I notice that one girl is staring intently at something
from the Teachers’ union: a magnet
on the floor. I follow her gaze but see nothing remarkable.
to hang on the fridge with their motto—
She looks at me and then points to her sneaker, gleaming
I Cope—printed in white on a red apple
new black and white Jordans. She asks me, “Do you have a tissue?” “For what?” She points at her sneaker with a look that says, “DUHHHH!” I’m perplexed. She hoists up her sneaker and points at what looks like a slight reddish discoloration on the side of the sole. A classmate produces
which is what I’ve been doing lately. Sometimes I chant ung namo guru dev namo, feeling stupid, thinking dignity, serenity, integrity
a tissue. She meticulously cleans her sneaker, making a big
the way Ellen taught us, twisted in yoga.
show if it, and then, eventually content with her sneaker’s
Other days it’s all I can do to board
return to immaculateness, writes in her journal. I wonder if
the train going in the right direction,
she is writing about her sneakers. During my second prep
rising mornings above the Gowanus projects
period, I have a conference with a student who explains to me that he is misbehaving because he is angry. I ask him if it would be OK if the next time I get angry, I am mean to him and his classmates. He agrees that that wouldn’t be fair. I take it a step further: If you go to McDonald’s, I ask
when the subway surfaces into sunlight, thundering tin cars slicing through my head— cranes, warehouses, piles of rock shooting past. The conductor punctuates stops with,
him, and the girl at the fryer is angry with her boyfriend, is
Stand clear the closing doors, and I wonder
she allowed to spit in your fries? He scrunches his face in
what I’ll yell today when Curtis punches
disgust, smiles slightly. Does my talk help? I don’t know.
Julio with all his might, straddling
The next two periods, he is so disruptive to the class that I
his curled-up body because Abel Pena
have to put him into the hallway (something I have been repeatedly warned by administrators not to do) for 15 minutes.
told him Julio said, Your dad’s a crackhead, which he was before he died. But Julio, he never speaks, which Curtis can’t know because he rarely shows up to class.
14 armchair shrink vol. 8 |
diary
The Overhead projector
8:10 a.m. I get the call—the desk has been opened and the key is avail-
Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2004
able. I rush down the hallway to the storage closet, unlock it (it takes two
3 1:31pm EST
keys,) and pull out the digital projector. I have only 10 minutes to set it up and prepare myself for the beginning of the day. I recall the mantra all teachers have drilled into their heads the first year: “If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.” DVD player set up and ready to go, the kids begin streaming down the hallway. They walk under two strands of origami cranes that my classes folded back in October. The fact that these 30 or so cranes, hanging on a thread from the ceiling, remain where I put them reminds me how much the school has changed in the past three years. Four years ago, nothing would have hung for long without being ripped down or tagged with a marker. At the end of the school day, the hallways looked like somebody had thrown a party and forgot to clean up: candy wrappers, paper, cafeteria food. When the old principal was removed and the guy we have now hired, things changed—for the better. We used to be known as one of the worst schools in the Bronx. Now parents want to send their kids here. And thanks to the No Child Left Behind initiative, it is now easier to transfer a kid into a school their parent chooses; this year we took in over 40 transfers from other neighborhoods. For the first time in five years, I have 32 kids in my class. I had to ask the janitor for an extra desk.
As the kids walk past me and into the room, some stop and respond
to my “Good morning.” Some mumble and narrow their eyes, aghast that an adult would even talk to them. Others walk by silently, as if trying to sneak into the class unnoticed. Third period, I have the more difficult of my two groups. It includes many children who would have been in bilingual education had the school not cut that program last year. I have one student who arrived from Sierra Leone this summer and had never been in school before. The first day, I noticed that when he was asked to write things, he copied from whatever text he could find around the room. For example, Name: Fire Drill Exit 2. This tendency is common to ESL students. I don’t blame them; I would probably do the same if I was asked to write in Russian or Arabic. What was unusual was that his letters were not uniform. This indicated to me that he was not accustomed to using our alphabet. I referred him to the guidance department, who sent him to the ESL teacher. She still sees him one period a day and says he’s making some progress, but since he only speaks Fulani, and there is no Fulani translator in the school—or in the Department of Education, even—she feels hindered.
Moore The Students Get the Last Word 15
In this class, I also have two students who have been
held back in the sixth grade twice. I taught both of them two years ago. They should be looking forward to graduation and high school; instead they are both 14 and looking at summer school. When asked about it, they say, “I don’t care,” a hardened response that is sadly common. During a change of classes, a fight involving two large boys from my difficult class almost breaks out in the hallway. Mr. P, a first-year science teacher from Niagara Falls, attempts to break it up. I stand back. They don’t seem like they really
And I wonder if this mix of anger
want to fight. (For all their posturing, boys usually don’t.)
and sadness won’t eat me alive by June
Quickly, calm is restored, but later in the day I hear that
since it’s only October and the ginkgoes
one of the boys punched Mr. P in the back. Mr. P gets
are just starting to drop their yellow fans,
advice from Mr. S about which forms to fill out and who to call. While some teachers and I are discussing this new assault, stories begin to circulate about another incident that took place the week before break. A teacher on the second floor, an Albanian guy who has been teaching here
ginkgo the only piece of information I remember from sixth grade along with that Jabberwocky poem. I wonder what these kids will piece out of this mess I’ve made—
for years, was hit with a chair by a female student. I can’t
what old journal entries or ancient assignments
remember a time since the new principal arrived that there
they’ll keep. The ginkgo leaves are everywhere
has been so much violence in the school. I’m afraid that
on the way from your house at sunrise
the school may be getting worse, even before he retires
where I’ve unfurled my body against yours
this June. I dread what might happen next year.
to rock out this cracked world. With each step away from you I compress, late to school in last night’s clothes, sloshing coffee, running past the burnt out bodegas, endless tire stores, the disapproving stare of the squat principal. I’m squashed with tension, wound up, ready to spring. The No. 2 pencil I need to fill in attendance has been stolen, Michael Cruz is already at me— Ms. Meitner, this writing class is bootleg, a word my kids use for anything cheap, imitation, though right now I’d kill or moonshine because Chris Roman has nothing to write with and Maritza is complaining her journal is wasted—meaning finished, not drunk—and I yell, Silent journal writing
high road? Mr. moore Thursday, Feb. 26, 2004
Periods 1 and 2 go well, considering I am teaching my difficult class. The “I misbehave because I’m angry” boy is especially subdued, and he keeps
4 4:27pm EST
catching my eye to make sure that I notice. The most talkative, disruptive kids snap to attention when I remind them that I spoke to the coach of the Junior Knicks, the after-school basketball program they attend. The coach warned that they will be suspended if they misbehave in class. For today, at least, that’s the silver bullet. It also helps that it’s only 9 a.m. When the period ends, I tell the class, “You see, if you can behave like this every day, you’ll have no stress, you’ll pass all your classes, and you’ll never get in trouble.”
Period 3 begins very differently. When the class comes in, I realize that
there is a student in this class who used to be in my difficult class and whom I haven’t seen in months. He was removed from my class after I took a 4-inch letter-opener with a sharpened edge from him. It was the closest thing to a shiv I’ve ever taken from a kid. He was suspended only a short time, but his parents decided to relocate him to the cow country of New Jersey to chill out for a bit. It’s not long before I discover that the rustic tranquility of the Western counties has had little lasting effect on him. No doubt the kid still holds a grudge. The first thing he says to me is that I need to get a shape up. That one I let go with a stern look. Soon afterwards he advises, “You shoes is dusty.”
In classroom management seminars, they will tell you all sorts of ways
to handle situations like this one. There’s The Neutral Path: Ignore it, don’t even engage the child, deal with it after class. Then there’s The High Road: Explain to the child that such blatant disrespect is not acceptable and that his parents, the dean, the principal, whoever the kid is most afraid of, will be told. And then there’s The Low Road, which they tell you (and this is good advice) never to take—engaging the child on his or her level. They tell you that if you challenge a child, you will always lose. And they are right.
“So, you talk about my hair, you talk about my shoes, you’ve checked
Moore The Students Get the Last Word 17
for ten minutes. Come on kids, you should
know this by now. I wait for my anger to boil away, stop myself from telling me out head to foot, when are you gonna get your eyes off of me?” It comes out in a rapid blast, instinctive, regrettable (maybe), and it stuns the kid. His friend, sensing danger, fills in, spitting noisy, furious syllables, but the class is momentarily awed at my counterattack. I calmly continue the lesson, turning to the other side of the class. The offending
this turtle-shaped boy with enormous glasses that he’s a bootleg student, stop myself from losing my temper with Robert Castillo who didn’t do his homework again, though I won’t learn until December
student sits quiet and uncertain, so for the moment at least,
that his mother throws him out of the house
it seems that I won. Years ago, I’d never have thought of
every night from five to ten so she can
saying or doing anything like this, but there it is; it hap-
work as a prostitute so he really
pened. I put the kid down, and I did it on his level. The kid
has nowhere to do it. And when Elias
doesn’t challenge me again, even volunteers an answer or two, but still I’m not convinced I won.
During lunch, the angry misbehaver comes to my
classroom to ask if he behaved well this morning. He asks if I saw his mom yesterday when she came to confer with
unscrews his seat and wears it on his head instead of starting the Do Now on the board, I make him sit out in the hallway the same way I will months later though one day
another teacher. He tells me she told him to act that way. I
he turns to me and says, I used to get beat
tell him to keep it up and he’ll make everyone happy.
with two by fours in the bathtub for wetting my bed. And Lloyd, who smells rank this morning, every morning, comes up to me,
low r ad?
18 armchair shrink vol. 8 |
diary
Some parents won’t admit to preferring Spanish, and it has happened that I finish a five-minute speech on a child’s disrespect, disruptions, and academic shortcomings, only to have the parent pause and say,
“So the work is good?”
Entry 5
Today’s a half-day so it’s an easy morning, but it’s Open School night,
Friday, Feb. 27, 2004
which means I won’t be home until 9:30 this evening. We also have two
5 4:00pm EST
sessions of parent-teacher conferences scheduled, noon to 2:30 and then again from 6 to 8:30. I’ve enjoyed parent/teacher conferences ever since I learned the secret to a productive meeting: Leave the kid in the hallway. There’s a reason they’re not called “parent/teacher/student” conferences. If the kid is sitting there as you’re detailing all his or her failings and misbehaviors, you then have to sit and listen to the parent lecture and yell at the kid, repeating the same. You have to watch the kid turn on the waterworks. You have to sit, tapping your pencil uncomfortably, while other parents hover around the door, awaiting their turn. Third period, I decide to dispense with my lesson plan and give the kids a chance to write about things they think people should know about their school and their neighborhood. An 11-year-old girl who wants to be a chef and an author writes: “My neighborhood has such a bad reputation, that when I go to order food over the phone they say, ‘Sorry we can’t send your order.’”
“My neighborhood is messed up, it’s not a good neighborhood. One day
this man got stabbed in the neck, “ writes a 10-year-old aspiring poet.
“If you walk outside, you have to watch your back because you just can
get jumped, mugged, killed,” writes a 12-year-old girl who wants to be a lawyer.
And another 12-year-old lawyer-hopeful writes, “I like this school a lot.
The Principal comes to classes to see how they are going.”
Out of 59 students, I see 32 parents. Not bad. About six of them are
Spanish speakers, so I have to dust off the old college Spanish. I spent a semester in Granada and used to speak pretty well, but nowadays I only use it on Open School night. It helps. Some parents won’t admit to prefer-
Moore The Students Get the Last Word 19
ring Spanish, and it has happened that I finish a five-minute speech on a child’s disrespect, disruptions, and academic shortcomings, only to have the parent pause and say, “So the work is good?” I’ve learned to inquire up front, “Spanish or English?”
The conferences are an event. Many children leave in
tears. Sometimes even the parents leave in tears, or fuming. Others leave with wide, proud smiles on their faces. Security guards and deans watch the halls, on the lookout for anything that might go wrong. But tonight nothing happens, thankfully. After the evening session, the teachers who ride the subway gather to walk together to the station. It is past 8:30, we’ve been at the school for over 12 hours, and we are punchy with exhaustion.
On the subway, we trade stories about parents, kids,
puts his red mirrored wraparound sunglasses
what will happen after the principal leaves. Some of my col-
over my eyes, shouts, Yo, look at Ms. Meitner!
leagues are nodding off. When I step out of the train I say,
She look mad dope, and I sit down heavily
“See you in the morning,” and it seems like a joke that we
in my wooden chair with Lloyd’s sunglasses on
have to return so soon. But we know we’ll see each other every day for as long as we work at this school, on good
letting chaos overtake 601 for the morning,
days, bad days, half-days, days before vacation and after
laughing at the kids laughing at me.<
break. Sometimes we’ll see each other doing the right thing, sometimes doing the thing that get us through the day. One of my students wrote, “I want people to know that not all public schools are violent. Some are, but we can change that by working together, and cooperating with each other.” She’s 11 and wants to be a writer—she’s also right.< (Thanks to Fatima, Jeiry, Ana, Sasha, and Cynthia for their thoughts.) Adapted from Slate.com
Homeroom is from Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore (Anhinga Press, 2003) and originally published in Sewanee Theological Review 47.1 (Christmas 2003).
Augusten B u r r o u g h s didn’t set out to become the new bad boy of American letters when he careened onto the bestseller lists two years ago with Running with Scissors, his hilarious, horrifying account of the world’s worst childhood: it just
There are
happened, like much of his highly unconven-
da r k pas sag e s
tional life to date.
indeed to Burroughs’ modern-day Horatio Alger tale as depicted in
Abandoned by his dysfunctional parents to
Running and its 12-step sequel,
the “care” of his mother’s lunatic shrink, his
Dry. America may not have been
Valium-gobbling patients and the pedophile
quite prepared for his depiction of
next door, Burroughs left formal education in
addiction, obsession, and AIDS,
the fourth grade, overcame childhood sexual
but we soldier through the grim
abuse, earned his GED at 17 (“It was like,
stuff for the same reason Bur-
‘Spell cat,’” he recalls) and by 19 was a New
roughs did: in the belief that love
York advertising writer responsible for $200
and happiness lie just around the
million accounts. Unusual events seem to
next ordeal. He has earned his
form a static-like cling to Burroughs, leaving
place alongside such singular
him to process them the best way he knows
dysfunctional hall of famers as
how—by writing about them.
Oscar Levant (The Memoirs of an Amnesiac), Frederick Exley (A Fan’s Notes) and Jim Carroll (The Basketball Diaries).
Dremousis Augusten Burroughs 21
I
met the author on a sultry June afternoon in New York at the Corner Bistro, a West Village joint as renowned for its juicy hamburgers as its
hard-drinking denizens. Burroughs was just wrapping up his book tour, and was thrilled to return home to his partner of four years, and their two French bulldog puppies, Bentley and Cow-Cow. After six years of sobriety, he assured me that being in the Bistro threatened him not at all, though he recalled having gone there many times, and regularly buying bottles of Scotch at the liquor store just around the corner. As we feasted on cheeseburgers and guzzled Diet Cokes, Burroughs talked about sitting for hours in basements and bars—the underworld for alcoholics both active and recovering—and the perils and pleasures of drinking and drying out. so cosmopolitan
Litsa Dremousis: Before I received a copy of the book, I wondered if you worried that you were going to run out of material now that you’re sober and successful and in this great relationship. Do you think that things just happen to you?
Augusten Burroughs: I really look at my childhood as being one giant rusty tuna can that I continue to recycle in many different shapes. As a child, I was never drawn toward depraved or extreme situations; I really wanted a normal little childhood. Unfortunately, that’s just not what happened. But I ended up having the ability to appreciate this strangeness I found, an ability to use it for something better.
22 armchair shrink vol. 8 |
interview
All I ever wanted was to be a little trust fund kid whose mother went to Yale and it’s the opposite of what I got. I never wanted to have peculiar experiences. I’m not one of those writers, you know how there are some writers who go around and do weird stuff so they can write about it. LD: Kind of like William Vollman goes around the world. He really throws himself into things.
AB: Right. They really look for the dwarves with the missing fingers. And I never wanted to be friends with the dwarves. I wanted a social life, you know? For some reason, I end up with all the dwarves. [laughs.] black
& tan and david & augusten
LD: You get compared to David Sedaris a lot.
AB: Uh, huh. LD: And I was going to ask you if you get tired of it, then I read that great review you wrote [in Entertainment Weekly] of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. I think it’s a favorable comparison for both of you and you can see why people associate the two of you together, but does it get tiresome to have your work continually compared to another writer? Even one you admire?
AB: Yeah, I do admire him. Maybe it should get tiresome. Maybe I haven’t looked at it in the right way. It doesn’t bother me, but maybe it should. I really respect him and people love him, so it’s not a bad thing.
“I was prepared to have the book come out, sell seven copies, and have to keep working in advertising, so it was just great that it was received so well and by such a huge audience. I mean, it allowed me to continue writing and not have to publish myself at Kinko’s.” —Augusten Burroughs on Running with Scissors
Dremousis Augusten Burroughs 23
shot with a twist of fate
LD: Regarding the whole concept behind Magical Thinking, that you can control the world around you with your thoughts, how much of that do you believe, like with the Baby Jesus and the cow [detailed in the essay, Magical Thinking], and how much do you say you believe? AB: [laughs.] It’s tongue in cheek. I joke about it. It’s the kind of the thing I joke about, but I joke about the things that come true, so I joke about it more. So, I’ll say to my editor, “Say something weird” and then it’ll happen and it’s weird so we’ll joke about it. LD: Right. And everyone’s got experiences like that in their own lives, where it seems too much to be coincidence. That seems to be a pan-cultural concept, that you can somehow control fate. Do you believe in curses and things like that? AB: Well, I think to some degree, you do have control over your fate. But there are so many variables that you absolutely can’t control. When I got out of rehab, years and years and years ago, I had a problem with the whole “higher power” thing, so I decided that whatever the Baby Jesus wants me to do, I’ll just do. I basically lived my life like a Magic 8 Ball and things fell into place instantly. It was uncanny. It was so peculiar and I began happily following all the little serendipitous paths that lead me to my literary agent and got me started writing, and it’s all very peculiar. I mean, the way I found my agent is so strange. Remember Pighead [Augusten’s close friend chronicled in “Dry”]? Pighead’s brother was a book designer with Doubleday, so Pighead would buy the books his brother designed. And after Pighead died, I had one of the books his brother designed in my apartment and I read it and I called the author and said, “Who’s your agent?” That’s how I got my agent. That’s how I found him, after everyone turned me down.
24 armchair shrink vol. 8 |
interview
bloody mary’s volvo
LD: So, going back to the concept of magical thinking, like when you talk about Charlotte at the Chicago ad agency [from the essay, Magical Thinking]‚—by the way, that’s the most horrific thing I’ve ever laughed at—it was so scathing, but it was so funny, because we’ve all wanted to tell a boss off like that. And then she dies. So if you knew you could kill someone and get away with it, who would you kill? If mentally you could will it, who would you pick and why? AB: Oh, that’s a difficult question because there are so many people. There would be mass devastation. [laughs.] It’d be unbelievable. I’d flatten whole countries. LD: [laughs.] AB: Bridges and schools would blowup. LD: I’m laughing because you know in the back of Vanity Fair? Their “Proust Questionnaire?” One of the questions is, “Which living person do you despise?” So many people will get all eloquent and say, “I no longer despise anyone.”
AB: Oh, please. LD: You know that’s horseshit. They just don’t want to say it in print.
AB: They just don’t want to say it. LD: Is there anyone you want to name?
AB: It’s not even usually, like, specific people. It’s like groups of people. Jeez, there’s got to be someone… LD: Even an anonymous stranger on the street or someone like that?
AB: Well, there’s always someone in traffic. There was a woman on I-91 and she had a Volvo, a silver Volvo and she had two kids in the back, and they were not in their seat belts, so they were just sort of crawling around. And then she cut in front of me, really, really unsafe, and then she zoomed over to the left, and then she cut in front of someone else. And it made me sick. I wanted to immediately pull her over, take her kids, raise them as my own, and then I wanted to beat her with a crowbar on the head until she was dead. And if you told me I wouldn’t get arrested for doing it, as sick as I am, I would. I would take her kids and I would raise them and I would spoil them all horribly. I would have been like Joan Crawford and strapped them into their beds at night so they wouldn’t get hurt. [laughs.] But I can’t stand sanctimonious, self-righteous, bigoted people. You know, people who are aggressively hateful … LD: …anyone that dogmatic, who carries it to that extreme.
AB: Right.
Dremousis Augusten Burroughs 25
mr. manhattan
LD: Magical Thinking will be released soon, and you’ve already had Scissors and Dry on the New York Times bestseller list simultaneously. Do you worry, “What do I do now?” Do you worry about topping yourself or do you just not care about it?
AB: No, I never worry about that, because you know what? That’s one of the things you can’t control. You just can’t control it. LD: It seems like the healthier approach is to not worry about it. AB: It’s hard. It’s hard not to worry about it, but there’s some part of me—it’s so hard to explain to people—but there’s some part of me that was worn down so many years ago. Just worn down, flat. This is fun, publishing and books is a lot of fun, but it’s my career. You know what I mean? And my career is so not everything to me. It’s just not the most important thing, so if all my books just completely tanked, I’d feel horrible for my publisher, I’d feel just horrible, not horrible enough to give them back any money, but it wouldn’t crush me, you know what I mean? To me it was an honor to have my first little book, Sellevision, published the first time. For me, that was it. That was what I wanted to accomplish. LD: You could be this sage for young writers. You sound so amazingly grounded and mature. AB: It’s hard because I think I got to this place just by just having such a piece of a shit life for so many years. So much stuff, you know, in quotes, is just not important to me. Now the other day, we had these two friends in town. We don’t go out. So I’ve got these two glamorous girls in town from San Francisco. They own an ad agency and they’re both incredibly healthy and beautiful, so I’ve known them for years, since I was nineteen. One of them was my first boss. So I thought, where’s somewhere trendy? I called up a friend and said I had to take these girls out somewhere trendy and cool in New York. Where should I go? And he said, go to this place called Meat in the Meatpacking District. So I called up Meat, and I had no time to make a reservation. I should have thought of this not the day of the actual dinner, but I should have thought of this the week before, right? So I called Meat and asked, “Do you think you could squeeze in four people for dinner?” And she was like, “Oh, I don’t know. Let me see. Do you have a reservation? What’s your name?” And I said, “Augusten is the first name”
26 armchair shrink vol. 8 |
interview
and she said, “Augusten Burroughs?” And she said, “The Augusten Burroughs?” And I said, “Yeah.” And she said, “Oh my god, I’m such a huge fan” and it was so sweet. And I’m like, thank god. So we have dinner and I thought, it would be fun to use this, to go out to parties and hobnob, but I can’t even imagine it. I just have no desire for that kind of life. LD: There’s something to be said for the time at which it’s hitting you, because you’re in your late thirties, right?
AB: Right. LD: So maybe if you’d broken through at twenty-four…
AB: …maybe I would have been like Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney and would have been out on the town. But somehow, doing it at this age, I don’t know. I guess there are people who still do it, though. They absolutely still do it. [laughs.] So maybe that’s why I wouldn’t be leveled if the book—or the books—didn’t do well. I mean, you can’t control it. Again, it’s just one of those things you can’t control. jack
& ginger on the screen
LD: I feel so enlightened now. All that sounded so healthy. [laughs.] Hey, what’s up with the film version of Scissors? Julianne Moore is in it, right?
AB: Yeah, she is. LD: Is that finished? Is that in post-production now?
AB: No, no, no. It’s not finished yet. I think it’s going to start shooting—I think Ryan Murphy told me it’s going to start shooting in January, I think. The first draft of the script is done and he’s going to make some revisions on that. I’ve read it and he did a great job. LD: Is he the guy who writes and directs Nip/Tuck?
AB: Yeah. That’s his little baby, one of them. I like him a lot. He’s not an established film director, but I just have a gut instinct about the guy. To me, that’s just as important. And he had a similar mother, so he totally got her [Augusten’s mother]. I mean, it’s different, the treatment of the book is different because it’s a whole different media, you know? And I wasn’t expecting it to be slavishly devoted to the book, but it’s a lot closer than I expected, actually. A lot of the dialogue is just lifted up from the book. He’s switched some stuff around and made it great. It’s going to be a great film, I think. I think it has a chance to be a great film. I mean, Julianne Moore, though, she could just sit there. She’s got one of those faces that’s just very interesting to watch. LD: Anyone else we’d recognize?
AB: I don’t know who else has agreed officially. I think, Cate Blanchett. I think she’ll play Hope. Like I said, I’m not sure, though.
Dremousis Augusten Burroughs 27
shocking as a jagerbombing
LD: Can anything still shock or repel you? Or have you heard everything?
AB: Things do shock and repel me and they’re not the things you’d think. For example, my friend the undertaker [from Magical Thinking and Dry] sent me a link, and he was saying, “You should adopt kids.” So he sent me this link and it was page after page of little boys and little girls and each one had a little profile. Like, “This is Jeremy. He likes to play football and do things other kids like to do, but due to severe abuse, he has issues and wakes up one or two times a night with nightmares.” And these are like six year old kids, five year old kids, four year old kids, and one was a teen who wanted to be a championship BMX racer. And I was up until four o’clock in the morning looking at their pictures and I spent all day today looking at their pictures and it’s the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen. It’s absolutely devastating. Devastating, and it shocks me. Those faces. And because it’s a web site, I just want to click, “Add to cart. Add to cart. Add to cart.” LD: Yeah.
AB: That just shocks and horrifies me. People who have appalling greed shock me, things like that shock and horrify me. It’s things like that. It’s not physical deformity and stupid reality TV show kind of stuff. It’s more like… LD: …like genuine horror.
AB: Yeah. I get shocked at people’s blindness sometimes and I get shocked by the level of shallowness I sometimes see in the culture. Things like that.
“I’m grateful for a lot of things. One is not being a drunk wreck. Or losing all four limbs in some ridiculous East Village bus accident that I was so destined for.” —Augusten Burroughs
28 armchair shrink vol. 8 |
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blue motorcycles are random
LD: How do you think your readers feel when they meet you?
AB: When people meet me, many times they’re very surprised because they expect someone who is kind of wacky with seven piercings and very hip and cool and New York City, and I’m not. I’m like the guy who prepares your taxes or a dentist. I’m very conservative and boring in a lot of ways. My brain is incorrectly formed, and I’m shaped like a tube. Plus, I’m an alcoholic, a ‘survivor’ of childhood sexual abuse, was raised in a cult and have no education. So, really, if you think about it, the only thing that separates me from the guy with the stinky foot and no teeth is a book deal and some cologne. LD: What fictional character would you like to meet, and why?
AB: Well, I chose a dead author instead of a fictional character because dead authors become fictional characters after a while. So, Ernest Hemingway. And I would tell him, “Ernie, you’ve got to listen to me. I’m from the future and I know things. After you’re dead, Thomasville is going to create an entire line of home furniture based on your name. You need to stop this from happening, now. Someday, you’ll be known only for your coffee tables and credenzas.” LD: How did the last good book you read end up in your hands and why did you read it?
AB: House by Tracy Kidder. It’s a fascinating book about the complex emotional and physical process of building a house in Western Massachusetts and I read it because...I’m building a house in Western Massachusetts. LD: What section of the newspaper do you read first?
AB: The first page, to see what new terror has occurred. LD: What makes your favorite pair of shoes better than the rest?
AB: I have almost no interest in shoes. But I do have an answer to this question: Gucci loafers. Because not only are they incredibly comfortable, but they have tire-tread soles, so they are indestructible. You can wear them with suits, jeans, a mesh thong bathing suit if you want, I suppose. They never wear out. The $300 price horrified me at first. But since I’ve owned them I’ve gone through at least double that figure in sneakers. LD: What is your astrological sign? If you don’t like what you were born with, what sign would you change to and why?
AB: Scorpio. I would prefer to be something other than a bug.
Dremousis Augusten Burroughs 29
kamikaze lifestyle
LD: Your childhood was so chaotic, and you arrived in New York at 23 with practically nothing. What coping mechanisms did you use to get by?
AB: I didn’t have really any survival skills except my instincts. I declared bankruptcy when I was 23. I got myself so heavily into debt with my credit cards because I did not have a sense of any fiscal responsibility. I had racked up in one year $63,000 on cocktails at the Odeon (a restaurant in TriBeCa) on AmEx. That’s a lot of cocktails, and that was just one place. LD: Do you believe people can be predisposed to alcoholism? Your dad was an alcoholic.
AB: I think that a lot of alcoholics tend to be very obsessive. I’ve always had certain tics. Alcohol for me was all about pouring my drink in my favorite Santa mug, taking a sip, looking at it. It itched my brain that the level of the glass had gone down from the sip. I’d have to fill it up again. Same thing with smoking: I would smoke. I’d hate it, so I’d put it out and light another one. Four packs a day. I couldn’t stand to smoke them down. I think obsessive behavior is definitely genetic. And I think alcohol, like anything, can be learned through your parents. I don’t know if alcoholism is genetic because it’s a man-made substance. It would be like having a genetic predisposition to CD players. LD: You describe a bender in the opening of “Dry,” when you and Jim start out at the Cedar Tavern the night before a big meeting with Fabergé, a major client of your firm. You could’ve so easily gotten home by 11, and all of a sudden it’s 4:30 a.m. and you’re at the karaoke bar—what happened there? Why couldn’t you extricate yourself?
AB: I really had no control over it. That’s how it was every night for me, although I’m proud to say I never did return to a karaoke bar. But it was always something. I would plan to drink only until 11 or 12, but it would never actually happen. The few times that I didn’t drink for a night, or alcohol wouldn’t have the desired effect of numbing, I’d be overwhelmed with emotions, usually grief, and it was just really upsetting. It freaked me out because I felt like a wreck inside, like my structure was rotting and alcohol was sort of the glue holding me together. In a lot of ways, I felt like it was the only thing allowing me to function. In fact, it was the opposite. I was able to function despite it.
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mimosas are trees
LD: How old were you when you first checked into rehab?
AB: Thirty. I’d been drinking for 11 years. I’d been sober about two years before I relapsed. LD: You relapsed as your best friend Pighead was dying. Did it feel like a temporary fix?
AB: I didn’t really have the foresight. I was just thinking about immediate gratification. I did not want to be present for what was going on at all. I used to live in fear of relapsing when I got out of rehab because I’d been brainwashed as if it were a thing that could happen, an external force. Relapse, relapse could be just around the corner, be careful. What are your relapse triggers? A whole sort of gun-and-violence feeling, like a holdup. It’s not a holdup at all. It’s an absolute decision. LD: When you first went into rehab, were you ready to be dry?
AB: The first time, I didn’t have really any other relationships beyond Pighead. He was everything to me, so all of a sudden that’s gone. I did not have skills and the network of support that I would have needed to be sober and I kind of slipped away from A.A. I didn’t have any reason to stay sober, I felt. LD: What did you do when you started drinking again and ran into people from your A.A. meetings?
AB: I used to buy liquor from two different liquor stores in the neighborhood because I would buy a bottle of Dewar’s every night. I didn’t want to buy it at the same place because I felt like an alcoholic, but I figured every other day is a little easier. Sometimes I was already drunk when I’d go out to get my liquor. I can remember going to the store on Second Avenue between Ninth and 10th streets and seeing someone from A.A. as I was walking back. The person was crossing the street and looking at me, and I recognized in their eyes that they knew exactly what was in my bag. I’d obviously gained weight. I bloat up; my face gets really big and round. LD: When you get rid of one addiction, do you take on another one? Do people get addicted to meetings?
AB: Yes, they get addicted to meetings. Some people go once, twice, three times a day. It’s not healthy. Get the fuck out of the basement, get your ass out of the folding chair and get a life. That’s the kind of recovering alcoholic I never wanted to be. You’ve just got to push yourself to do things you wouldn’t normally do. I was lucky in that I had writing. I could totally channel everything into writing and if I wasn’t writing, I could read. I have a lot
Dremousis Augusten Burroughs 31
to catch up on because I have no education. I never had a chance to relax in my life because I’d been working, panicked about not having money, because I’ve lived in squalor when I was growing up so I’ve always been very panicky about being homeless. I never had a chance to relax and read a book. I don’t think I read a book until I was 24. I read a lot now that I’m sober. LD: Do you have any indulgences now that you’re not drinking?
AB: I chomp nicotine gum. I’m going to end up with half a jaw. on the rocks
LD: What do you make of those three old guys sitting at the bar over there, hunched over their highball glasses? They’ve been here since I got here at noon.
AB: I know the comfort of a highball at 1:30 in the afternoon on a Wednesday. It happens in the dark. It is blindingly bright outside, and yet in here, it is like pupil dilation-land, and the music is slow jazz and the walls are brick and it’s been unchanged. Nine-11 did not happen in this room. People don’t die in this room. They are in another world. The fact that it is Wednesday in New York City in the summer is irrelevant in here. The funny thing about bars is that they are a lot like little A.A. rooms. You walk through a door, and you enter a place that’s just outside of society. One place serves cocktails, and one is full of people who are bitter that they don’t get to have them anymore. But they’re very similar. There are a lot of regulars here. I came here a few times when I was drinking, before I’d go out to the Odeon. It feels profoundly familiar. Those guys over there are probably here for the night. They’ll have a burger at 8, go home and have a few more drinks and then pass out and do it again. closing the tab
LD: Last question: What’s up next?
AB: What’s up next? I’m just now finishing it. It’s the next book after Magical Thinking. Right now I’m calling it Possible Side Effects. And it’s [hushed voice]
more stories.<
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33
Chronicling his barely-survived youth with an Anne Sexton-wannabe mom, a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? dad, and an adoptive father/therapist who divines prophecy “reading” feces, Scissors is disturbingly hilarious and sears itself into the reader’s brain. —Litsa Dremousis
Augusten Burroughs
Running
With
Scissors
an excerpt from the first chapter
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, espe-
cially 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
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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 pull-
ing 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.
Burroughs Running With Scissors 35
“You have a very creative mother,” she says.
accept her Academy Award. Her eyes are trained on
“Instant shoulder pads.”
me, her smile all mine.
The blow-dryer continues to tick like a clock,
“You run up those stairs just like Cream.”
counting down the seconds. Hot things do that.
Cream is our dog and we both love her. She is
Sometimes when my father or mother comes
not my father’s dog or my older brother’s. She’s
home, I will go down and stand near the hood of
most of all not my older brother’s since he’s
the car to listen to it tick, moving my face in close to
sixteen, seven years older than I, and he lives with
feel the heat. “Are you coming upstairs with me?”
roommates in Sunderland, a few miles away. He
she says. She takes her cigarette from the clamshell
dropped out of high school because he said he
ashtray on the back of the toilet. My mother loves
was too smart to go and he hates our parents and
frozen baked stuffed clams, and she saves the shells
he says he can’t stand to be here and they say they
to use as ashtrays, stashing them around the house.
can’t control him, that he’s “out of control” and so I
almost never see him. So Cream doesn’t belong to
I am fixated on the dryer. The vent holes on the
side have hairs stuck in them, small hairs and white
him at all. She is mine and my mother’s. She loves
lint. What is lint? How does it find hair dryers and
us most and we love her. We share her. I am just
navels?
like Cream, the golden retriever my mother loves.
“I’m coming.”
“Turn off the light,” she says as she walks away,
I don’t want her to leave.
I smile back at her.
creating a small whoosh that smells sweet and
chemical. It makes me sad because it’s the smell
mother is leaving and she doesn’t want her to go
Cream is sleeping by the door. She knows my
she makes when she’s leaving. “Okay,” I say. The
either. Sometimes, I wrap aluminum foil around
orange light from the dehumidifier that sits next to
Cream’s middle, around her legs and her tail and
the wicker laundry hamper is looking at me, and
then I walk her through the house on a leash. I like
I look back at it. Normally it would terrify me, but
it when she’s shiny like a star, like a guest on the
because my mother is here, it is okay. Except she
Donnie and Marie Show.
is walking fast, has already walked halfway across
the family room floor, is almost at the fireplace, will
her ears twitching, then she closes her eyes again
be turning around the corner and heading up the
and exhales heavily. She’s seven, but in dog years
stairs and then I will be alone in the dark bathroom
that makes her forty-nine. Cream is an old lady dog,
with the dehumidifier eye, so I run. I run after her,
so she’s tired and just wants to sleep.
certain that something is following me, chasing
me, just about to catch me. I run past my mother,
table and throws them into her leather bag. I love
running up the stairs, using my legs and my hands,
her bag. Inside are papers and her wallet and ciga-
charging ahead on all fours. I make it to the top and
rettes and at the bottom, where she never looks,
look down at her.
there is loose change, loose mints, specs of tobacco
from her cigarettes. Sometimes I bring the bag to
She climbs the stairs slowly, deliberately, remind-
ing me of an actress on the way to the stage to
Cream opens her eyes and watches my mother,
In the kitchen my mother takes her keys off the
my face, open it and inhale as deeply as I can.
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“You’ll be long asleep by the time I come
You can stand on it and reach and you might be
home,” she tells me. “So good night and I’ll see you
able to pull a leaf off a tree, or a sprig of pine.
in the morning.”
living room, behind the sofa to look out the large
“Where are you going?” I ask her for the zil-
My mother is pacing. She is walking through the
lionth time.
sliding glass door down to the driveway; she is
“I’m going to give a reading in Northampton,”
walking around the dining-room table. She straight-
she tells me. “It’s a poetry reading at the Broadside
ens the cubed glass salt and pepper shakers. She is
Bookstore.” My mother is a star. She is just like that
walking through the kitchen and out the other door
lady on TV, Maude. She yells like Maude, she wears
of the kitchen. Our house is very open. The ceilings
wildly colored gowns and long crocheted vests like
are very high. There is plenty of room here. “I need
Maude. She is just like Maude except my mother
high ceilings,” my mother always says. She says this
doesn’t have all those chins under her chins, all
now. “I need high ceilings.” She looks up.
those loose expressions hanging off her face. My
mother cackles when Maude is on.
tires. Then, lights on the wall, spreading to the ceil-
ing, sliding through the room like a living thing.
“I love Maude,” she says. My mother is a star
There is the sound of gravel crackling beneath
like Maude.
“Finally,” my mother says. My father is home. He
“Will you sign autographs?” She laughs.
will come inside the house, pour himself a drink
“I may sign some books.”
and then go downstairs and watch TV in the dark.
My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes
I will have the upstairs to myself. All the win-
everything she says sound like it went through a
dows and the walls and the entire fireplace which
curling iron. Other people sound flat to my ear;
cuts straight through the center of the house, both
their words just hang in the air. But when my
floors; I will have the ice maker in the freezer, the
mother says something, the ends curl.
hexagonal espresso pot my mother uses for guests,
Where is my father?
the black deck, the stereo speakers; all of this con-
“Where is your father?” my mother says, check-
tained in so much tall space. I will have it all.
ing her watch. It’s a Timex, silver with a black
leather strap. The face is small and round. There is
and off. There is a panel of switches on the wall
no date. It ticks so loud that if the house is quiet,
before the hall opens up into two huge, tall rooms.
you can hear it.
I will switch the spotlights on in the living room,
illuminating the fireplace, the sofa. I will switch the
The house is quiet. I can hear the ticking of my
I will walk around and turn lights on and off, on
mother’s watch. Outside, the trees are dark and tall,
light off and turn on the spotlights in the hallway;
they lean in toward the house, I imagine because
over the front of the door. I will run from the wall
the house is bright inside and the trees crave the
and stand in the spotlight. I will bathe in the light
light, like bugs.
like a star and I will say, “Thank you for coming
tonight to my poetry reading.”
We live in the woods, in a glass house surround-
ed by trees; tall pine trees, birch trees, ironwoods.
I will be wearing the dress my mother didn’t
The deck extends from the house into the trees.
wear. It is long, black and 100 percent polyester, my
Burroughs Running With Scissors 37
What is lint? How does it find hair dryers and navels?
favorite fabric because it flows. I will wear her dress
collection of nickels, dimes and quarters, each of
and her shoes and I will be her.
which has been boiled and polished with silver
polish while watching Donnie and Marie or Tony
With the spotlights aimed right at me, I will clear
my throat and read a poem from her book. I will
Orlando and Dawn.
read it with her distinctive and refined Southern
inflection.
I want to be a star, like my mother, like Maude.
I will turn off all the lights in the house and go
I love shiny things, I love stars. Someday,
into my bedroom, close the door. My bedroom is
deep blue. Bookshelves are attached to the wall
mirror squares I bought with my allowance. The
with brackets on either side of my window; the
mirrors have veins of gold streaking through them. I
shelves themselves are lined with aluminum foil.
stuck them to the doors myself.
I like things shiny. My shiny bookshelves are lined
with treasures. Empty cans, their labels removed,
room and stand in its light, looking at myself in the
their ribbed steel skins polished with silver polish. I
mirror. “Hand me that box,” I will say to my reflec-
wish they were gold. I have rings there, rings from
tion. “Something isn’t right here.”
our trip to Mexico when I was five. Also on the shelves: pictures of jewelry cut from magazines, glued to cardboard and propped upright; one of the good spoons from the sterling silver my grandmother sent my parents when they were married; silver my mother hates (“God-awful tacky”) and a small
The sliding doors to my closet are covered with
I will aim my desk lamp into the center of the
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Little Boy Blue Navy Blazer
My fondness for formal wear can be traced to the womb. While pregnant with me, my mother blasted opera on her record player while she sat that the kitchen table addressing the SASs to The New Yorker. Somehow, on the deepest, most base genetic level, I understood that the massively intense music I heard through her flesh was being sung by fat people dressed in cummerbunds and enormous sequined gowns.
When I was ten, my favorite outfit was a navy blazer, a white shirt
and a red clip-on tie. I felt I looked important. Like a young king who had ascended the throne because his mother had been beheaded.
I flatly refused to go to school if my hair was not perfect, if the light
didn’t fall across it in a smooth, blond sheet. I wanted my hair to look exactly like the mannequin boys’ at Ann August, where my mother shopped. One stray flyaway was enough to send the hairbrush into the mirror and me running for my room in tears.
And if there was lint on my outfit that my mother couldn’t remove with
masking tape, that was a better reason to stay home than strep throat. In fact, the only day of the year I actually liked going to school was the day the school photo was taken. I loved that the photographer gave us combs as parting gifts, like on a game show.
Throughout my childhood, while all the other kids were starting fights,
playing ball and getting dirty, I was in my bedroom polishing the gold-tone
Burroughs Running With Scissors 39
mood rings I made my mother buy me at Kmart
and listening to Barry Manilow, Tony Orlando
and turned off her white Olympia typewriter. Then
She led me into her study, took a seat at her desk
and Dawn and, inexplicably, Odetta. I preferred
she quickly checked the cap on her bottle of Wite-
albums to the more modern eight tracks. Albums
Out before clearing her throat and lighting a More
came with sleeves which reminded me of clean
cigarette. I sat on the twin bed she had converted
underwear. Plus, the pictures were bigger, making
into a sofa with throw pillows and an Indian bed-
it easier to see each follicle of Tony Orlando’s shiny
spread.
arm hair.
“Ready?” she asked
I would have been an excellent member of
“Okay.”
the Brady Bunch. I would have been Shaun, the
She crossed her legs, resting the side of her wrist
well-behaved blond boy who caused no trouble
on her knee as she leaned forward and read from
and helped Alice in the kitchen, then trimmed the
the page. “Childhood is over. My youth. And bonds
split ends off Marcia’s hair. I would have not only
with people I have loved are broken now. My grief
washed Tiger, but then conditioned his fur. And I
ascends into the clouds. And those tears that fall
would have cautioned Jan against that tacky brace-
from the sky build the land anew, even the dead
let that caused the girls to lose the house-of-cards
climb from their graves to walk with me and sing.
building contest.
And I…”
My mother chain-smoked and wrote the con-
She read for many pages, her voice perfectly
fessional poetry around the clock, taking breaks
modulated. She practiced reading her poems out
during the day to call her friends and read drafts of
loud into a microphone that she kept in the corner
her latest poem. Occasionally she would ask for my
of the room on a stand. Sometimes, when she
opinion.
was visiting her friend Lydia or in the living room
trimming her spider plants, I would borrow the
“Augusten, I’ve been working on what I believe
could be the poem that finally makes it into The
microphone and stuff it down the front of my pants,
New Yorker. I believe it could make me a very
examining myself from every angle in the mirror.
famous woman. Would you like to hear it?”
looked up at me and said, “Okay, now I need your
I turned away from the mirror on my closet door
When she was finished reading her poem, she
and set the hairbrush on my desk. I loved The New
honest reaction. Did it feel powerful to you? Emo-
Yorker because it featured cartoons and ads. Maybe
tionally charged?”
my mother would get her poem published right
next to an ad for a Mercury Grand Marquis! “Read
question was, “Wow. That really does seem like
it, read it, read it,” I bounced.
something you’d read in The New Yorker.”
I knew that the only correct answer to this
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She laughed, pleased. “Really? Do you really
“No, son. I’ve got too much work to do.”
think so? The New Yorker is very selective. They
“Later can we play checkers?”
don’t publish just anyone.” She stood and began to
My father continued to scan the page with his
pace in front of her desk.
red pen, making a note in the margin. “No, son. I
told you, I’ve got a lot of work to do and later I’ll be
“No, I really think they would publish this. All
the stuff about your mother pushing you back-
tired. You go out and play with the dog.”
wards into the heart-shaped goldfish pond in the
backyard, the thing with your paralyzed sister, that
sleep. Can’t you play one game?”
was great.”
got a lot of work to do, I’m tired, and my knee is
She lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply.
“But I’m sick of the dog. All she wants to do is Finally he looked at me. “No, son, I can’t. I’ve
“Well, we’ll see. I just got a rejection letter from The
acting up.”
Virginia Quarterly. So that worries me. Of course,
if The New Yorker did accept this poem, your
swell, so he would have to go to his doctor and
grandmother would see it. I can’t imagine what she
have it drained with a needle. He limped and wore
would say. But I can’t let her reaction stop me from
a constant pained expression on his face. “I wish
publishing.” Then she stopped pacing, placed one
I could just sit in a wheelchair,” he used to say. “It
hand on her hip brought the other one holding the
would be so much easier to get around.”
cigarette to her lips. “You know, Augusten. Your
mother was meant to be a very famous woman.”
was take the garbage to the dump. “Augusten,” he
called from downstairs in the basement. “If you
“I know,” I said. The idea that someday we
My father had a bad knee. Arthritis caused it to
The one activity my father and I did do together
might have our own stretch limousine parked in the
load the car up, I’ll take you for a ride to the dump.”
driveway instead of that awful brown Dodge Aspen
station wagon was so thrilling that I almost couldn’t
to the basement. He was wearing a red-and-black
stop myself from screaming. “You will be famous,”
checkered field coat, hoisting two green plastic
I told her. “I just know it.” I also knew I wanted
bags over his shoulders as he winced in pain.
tinted windows and a mini-bar in the back.
“Make sure the top is closed,” he warned. “You
I slipped on a mood ring and ran downstairs
My father was otherwise occupied in his role of
don’t want that bag breaking open and spilling
highly functional alcoholic professor of mathemat-
garbage all over the floor. That would just be a
ics at the University of Massachusetts. He had pso-
nightmare to clean up.”
riasis that covered his entire body and gave him the
appearance of a dried mackerel that could stand
toward the door.
upright and wear tweed. And he had the loving,
“Jesus, son. Now don’t drag the bag. You’ll tear the
affectionate and outgoing personality of petrified
bottom and we’ll have garbage all over the place. I
wood.
just warned you about that.”
“Can we play checkers,” I whined, while he sat
I dragged one of the bags across the floor
“You said check the tops,” I said.
at the kitchen table grading papers and drinking
“Yes, but it should go without saying that you
vodka from a tumbler.
can’t drag a garbage bag across the floor.”
Burroughs Running With Scissors 41
He was wrong. I’d seen the commercials for
Hefty garbage bags on TV.
“They won’t break,” I corrected him, dragging.
“Now, Augusten. You’ve got to carry that bag. If
you can’t behave and carry that bag, I won’t let you come to the dump.”
I sighed deeply and carried the bag out-
side to the Aspen, then returned to the basement for another. We tended to let the garbage collect for weeks, so there were always at least twenty bags.
When the car was filled, I squeezed into the
front seat between my father and one of the trash
The one activity my father and I did do together was take the garbage to the dump.
bags. The sour smell of old milk cartons, egg shells and emptied ashtrays filled me with pleasure. My father, too, enjoyed the aroma. “I rather like that smell,” he commented as we made the six mile trip to the public dump. “I wouldn’t mind living next to a landfill one bit.”
dirty after I polished it with Windex for three hours.
“No, son. Now stop touching that filthy thing and
At the dump, my father and I opened the rear
hatch of the station wagon and all of the doors.
get back in the car. And don’t touch your face now
Perched on the ledge overlooking the pit where
that you’ve got those coffee table germs all over
we threw the bags, the car looked poised for flight.
your fingers.”
Its doors were like wings and the grille in the front
seemed to be smiling. Here, I was free to pull out a
Why?”
bag, drag it across the ground and then hurl it out.
said through clenched teeth, “we don’t know who
Afterward, we drove past the gray cinder block
My mood ring went black. “Why can’t I have it? My father sighed, exasperated. “I told you,” he
recycling building where people left remains of
that dirty thing belonged to. We just finished taking
their broken baby strollers, rusty stoves and un-
the trash out of the house. We don’t need to be
wanted dollhouses.
bringing more trash in.”
ing a chrome coffee table with a chipped, smoked-
I sat pressed against the unlocked door, miserable. It was
glass top.
my secret hope that the door would fly open on
the highway and I would tumble from the car,
“Please, can I take it home?” I whined upon see-
“No, we’re not taking any of that stuff home. You
don’t know where any of this garbage has been.”
rolling onto the highway where I would be crushed
beneath the tires of the Barstow onion truck behind
“But it’s still good.” I knew I could hide the chip
by fanning a display of magazines on the surface,
us. Then my father would be sorry he wouldn’t let
like in a doctor’s office. And it certainly wouldn’t be
me have the coffee table.<
contributors
Contributors 43
Augusten Burroughs was born Christopher Robison in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of the late John G. Robison (a former philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts), and poet and writer Margaret Robison (who sent Burroughs to live with her psychiatrist’s unorthodox family in western Massachusetts). Burroughs chronicles many of his quirky childhood experiences in his memoir, Running With Scissors, which not only made the New York Times bestseller list, but has also been adapted for film. Burroughs’ writing centers around the fantastic and the mundane, which he delivers in a matter-of-fact style. In addition to Scissors, Burroughs penned a second memoir, Dry (2003) about his experience during and after alcohol rehabilitation, and the novel Sellevision, also slated to become a feature film. In addition to his books, Burroughs’ writing has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers around the world including The New York Times, House
and Garden, BlackBook, New York Magazine, The Times, Bark, Attitude, Out
page 33 Excerpt from Running with Scissors
and a monthly column for Details magazine. He lives in New York City and Amherst, Massachusetts, with Dennis Pilsits, his partner of many years, and their two French bulldogs, Bentley and The Cow.
Litsa Dremousis wrote, directed, and produced the plays, If I Wake
Before I Die and 9:00 in the Afternoon. Her work appears in McSweeney’s, The Believer, BlackBook, Paper, MovieMaker, Poets and Writers, Paste, The Black Table, Bookmarks, Kitchen Sink, Skirt, Cranky, and on NPR. In addition to Augusten Burroughs, she has interviewed JT LeRoy, Sherman Alexie, Tim Blake Nelson, Amanda Koster, Stacey Levine, and Alien Crime Syndicate’s Nabil Ayers. She read her McSweeney’s piece, “An Open Letter to Keith Richards’ Immune System” on NPR in April and her short story, “A Young Irene Dunne, Maybe,” at the Seattle Art Museum in May. Recent work includes an interview with The Long Winters’ John Roderick in The Believer and a cover story on Death Cab for Cutie for Paste. She is a winner of BlackBook’s Hemingway Short Story Contest.
page 21 Selections from Augusten Burroughs’ Magical Way of Thinking (blacktable.com)
44 armchair shrink vol. 8 |
the back matters
Rob giampietro is a designer, writer, and filmmaker. At Winterhouse Studio, a design firm owned by Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel in Falls Village, CT, Rob’s client work included projects for Princeton Architectural Press, NYU School of Journalism, and The New England Journal of Medicine. Since moving to New York City in Fall 2002, he has worked for Pentagram, the New York Times Magazine, and Hearst Publications. In January of 2004, Rob joined Kevin Smith to found Giampietro+Smith, a design studio based in New York City. Giampietro+Smith’s current clients include Gagosian Gallery, Knoll, Princeton Architectural Press, and the United Nations. Rob is an adjunct faculty member in the Communication Design program at Parsons School of Design and a contributor to Emigré and dot-dot-dot. He is a gradu-
page 3 On Arranging Books by Color (published by Picador, 2002)
ate of Yale University.
Robert hass was born in San Francisco and was encouraged by his older brother to become a writer. Their mother’s alcoholism became the topic of Sun Under Wood, his 1996 poem collection. He graduated from St. Mary’s College in 1963, followed by a MA and Ph.D. in English from Stanford University. He has taught at University of Buffalo, St. Mary’s, and University of California, Berkeley. Hass has served two terms as the United States Poet Laureate (1995–1997). He regularly lectures across the country for diverse groups, “places where poets don’t go,” he says. Hass promotes poetry, literacy, and environmental awareness and writes a regular column about poetry for the Washington Post. Among his critical works are writings on James Wright and Edward Taylor. His published books of poetry include Field Guide,
Praise, Human Wishes, and Sun Under Wood.
page 5 The Problem of Describing Color (The New Yorker)
Contributors 45
Erika Meitner was born Queens, New York. She is a first-generation American: her father is from Israel; her mother was born in Germany. She attended Dartmouth College, Hebrew University, and the University of Virginia, where she received her M.F.A. in 2001. In addition to teaching creative writing, she has worked as a dating columnist, an office temp, a Hebrew school instructor, a computer programmer, a lifeguard, a documentary film production assistant, a middle school teacher in the New York City public school system. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in
page 13 Homeroom (Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore)
Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications including The Southern Review, Slate, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Mid-American Review, and Barrow Street. Her first book, Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore, won the 2002 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and was a finalist for the 2004 Paterson Poetry Prize. Tom Moore and teaches sixth grade in the Morrissania area of the South Bronx and contributed his article to The Slate Diary, a weeklong electronic journal.
page 11 The Students Get the Last Word (slate.com)
Rachel Zucker was born in New York City. The daughter of storyteller Diane Wolkstein and novelist Benjamin Zucker, she was raised in Greenwich Village and traveled around the world with her parents on Wolkstein’s folktale-collecting trips. After graduating from Yale with a B.A. in Psychology, Zucker attended the University of Iowa where she received her M.F.A in poetry. Zucker’s first full-length collection is Eat-
ing in the Underworld (Wesleyan 2003), a series of poems that follows the narrative arc of the myth of Persephone. Her second collection, The
Last Clear Narrative, a cross examination of marriage and motherhood, was published by Wesleyan in 2004. Zucker’s poems have appeared in many journals including: 3rd Bed, American Poetry Review, Barrow
Street, Colorado Review, Epoch, Fence, Iowa Review, Pleiades and Prairie Schooner as well as in the Best American Poetry 2001 anthology. She is currently working on a novel and, along with poet Arielle Greenberg, is co-editing Efforts and Affections, an anthology of essays by women poets about mentorship.
page 1 Letter(Persephone to Demeter) (Eating the Underworld)
Kelly M. Murdoch-Kitt, the journal’s designer, kept New York in mind while selecting the typefaces used for this edition of Armchair Shrink. The text was set in Cheltenham and Knockout, two American typefaces that, like the writers in this issue, are tied to New York. Cheltenham is based on the original 1896 design by Bertram Goodhue, who created it for use by a New York printer, the Cheltenham Press. It was redrawn by Kevin Dresser and the newer adaptation is used today by The New York Times. Knockout was designed by the Hoefler & Frere-Jones foundry, located in New York City. Six years in production, Knockout is a redevelopment of their first typeface, Champion Gothic. Knockout continues in Champion’s tradition of providing fonts built around a ‘width axis,’ now extending into wider and narrower territories. Knockout additionally has a ‘weight axis,’ so weight and width may be changed independently of one another.
11.2006
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A Journal of Prose and Commentary Volume 8
In this volume: Augusten Burroughs Litsa Dremousis Rob Giampietro Robert Hass Erika Meitner Tom Moore Rachel Zucker
A Journal of Prose and Commentary