Running with Scissors (31 page)

“What? What’s this about?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you in person when I see you.”

In the same way that a tornado rips the roof off a double-wide trailer, leaving the occupants dazed and staring at the clouds from the splinters of what used to be their living room, it was over.

“I am no longer going to have anything to do with Dr. Finch or any member of the Finch family.” We were sitting in her car, the old brown Aspen station wagon. She was smoking a More and I was smoking a Marlboro Light. She looked calm, almost flat. And she didn’t seem crazy.

“What are you talking about?” I noticed a suitcase on the backseat and next to it her straw wide-brim hat.

“This has been building for many years, Augusten. There’s much you don’t know or understand about my relationship with Dr. Finch. But for years, he has been medicating me in a way that I have come to see as unhealthy and, well, very wrong.”

“What?”

“And years ago, when I had that psychotic episode in Newport, do you remember?”

I nodded slowly, as if underwater. This was moving too fast and everything she was saying was a complete blur.

“He raped me in that motel room.”

“
What!?
”

“The doctor has been controlling me, manipulating me emotionally and with drugs. He’s a very sick man and I’m just now seeing this.” She tossed her burned-down cigarette out the window and lit another. “I know this must come as a shock to you, but it’s been building. I need to go away now, on my own, to do some thinking. He’s very, very angry with me. I need to get away for awhile.”

I felt deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I also felt my default emotion: numbness. “You know, I have to go back inside. I don’t know what to make of any of this.” I climbed out of the car but my mother reached for me.

“Please. Wait. I’m sorry, this must be extremely upsetting to you. It is to me. But I’m right about this, Augusten. He’s a very dangerous man and I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to see that. I wish you’d—”

I pulled away, slammed the door and ran back upstairs to my apartment. When I came in the door, Natalie was standing in the center of the kitchen, looking at me. “I just got off the phone with my father,” she said. “Your mother has finally completely lost it.”

I told Natalie what my mother told me. “Bullshit,” she said. “Augusten, your mother is a complete mental case. Look at you. She just abandoned you when you were twelve, sent you to live with my family. And you’re going to believe
her
?”

“I don’t know what to believe,” I said.

“Believe
me
,” she said. “I know my dad. I know he’s a little weird. Okay, a lot weird. But he’s not sick or crazy. He’d never rape your mother or drug her. That’s absolute fucking bullshit.”

But I believed what my mother said. I believed it in my guts. After all, more than once when I’d gone to his office complaining of my general misery, he’d reached behind his head and handed me the first sample bottle his fingers landed on. Mellaril, Ativan, Valium, Librium, Lithium, Thorazine. I’d taken them all as if they were candy corn. As for the rape, well, Dr. Finch did seem like a pretty horny old fat man. I thought back to his masturbatorium, his many “wives.”

Natalie knew in which direction I was leaning. She could sense it because she knew me so well. “Don’t let her warp your mind,” she said.

“This is just so . . . shocking,” I said.

“Yeah,” she agreed sadly. “It’s shocking alright.”

The rest of that evening, we barely spoke. Something had happened between us. Sides had been formed. Natalie wanted me on her side. She wanted me to drive to her dad’s house in the morning, declare my loyalty, disown my crazy mother. And my mother wanted . . . what? She wanted to be left alone, I guess. She certainly didn’t want me involved with the Finches anymore.

But Natalie was a Finch. And she was my best friend.

“It’s going to be difficult for us,” Natalie said just before we went to bed. “We’re caught in the middle of this. It’s going to be very hard to remain friends. This is big, Augusten. You’re going to have to decide.”

So it came to this: Was I a turd-reading Finch? Or was I my crazy mother’s son?

In the end, I decided that I was neither.

In the middle of the night, without saying good-bye, without packing my things, I moved out of our apartment feeling like a spy, or rather an actor from daytime television
playing
a spy. I took my backpack and drove to Motel 6 where I spent the night.

I didn’t call Natalie the next day. Or the day after that. I swam in the urine-tainted indoor pool and ate Cheese Nips from the vending machine. Natalie and I, we needed a little time apart, I figured, until this thing was sorted out. When I finally called her, she was very upset. “Where the fuck are you?” she said, furious.

“I’m staying at a motel. I needed to get away.”

“My father is very upset with you. He feels that you’re taking your mother’s side in this. And he needs your support because he wants to have her committed to a hospital.”

A creepy feeling spread over my arms. Like watching a horror movie and suddenly knowing the killer is upstairs hiding in the closet, has been there all along. “I don’t think she needs to be committed to a hospital,” I said.

“What motel are you at? We’ll come and get you.”

I hung up the phone.

That week, I found an affordable apartment located in a slum in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The top floor of the building was without windows, but at least I had hot water. And because I was accustomed to living with vermin, the mice didn’t bother me.

I also found a job as a waiter at a Ground Round restaurant in Northampton that had just opened up.

“Hi, my name is Augusten and I’ll be your server,” was the only thing I needed to keep in my mind. I entered a period of sleepwalking. A low-intensity time where the worst thing that could happen to me was that I spilled French onion soup on my apron. I felt safe, even though the restaurant was in Northampton, because none of the Finches would go there. It wasn’t within walking distance of the house.

In secret, my mother rented her own apartment in rural Sunderland, miles from the Finches. “Dorothy is under Dr. Finch’s spell and there’s nothing I can do to get her out of it,” she told me in a phone call. Her girlfriend believed my mother was having a complete mental collapse and she was so upset, she was staying at the Finches’ house. My mother arranged for a mover to clear all her things out of the apartment. When Dorothy returned to the house in Amherst, it was empty and my mother was gone.

I took an inventory of my life: I was seventeen, I had no formal education, no job training, no money, no furniture, no friends. “It could be worse,” I told myself. “I could be going to a prom.”

But there, glittering in the distance of my mind, was New York City. It seemed to me that New York was the place where misfits could fit.

Maybe Bookman had known this.

So I served patty melts and chicken salads and potato skins and whiskey sours. And I walked around in a trance, daydreaming about Manhattan. Trying to see if I could picture myself there among the skyscrapers and hot dog vendors.

And I could see it.

I had no idea how I would ever get to New York or what exactly I would do once I arrived, but I knew that if I could save enough money to make it there for a week, somehow I’d figure out a way to stay.

And as I cleared Thousand Island dressing from the table with my rag, noticing that yet again I’d received only a fifty-cent tip, I understood one thing more clearly than I had ever understood anything before.

Of course
I can make it in New York City. There’s no way New York could be crazier than my life had been at the Finches’ house in Northampton, Massachusetts. And I survived that. Unwittingly, I had earned a Ph.D. in
survival
.

I had a vision of Liza Minnelli in a black leotard singing, “
If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere
. . .” and then tossing me a black top hat that I expertly catch and place on top of my head, astonishing all of Broadway with my debut in the stage version of
New York, New York
.

Running parallel to this vision was another in which I am crouched down in the back of a police cruiser parked on a side street in Greenwich Village. I am giving a blowjob to a fat cop on the verge of retirement. He waves ten dollars in my face and gasps, “Fifteen if you swallow.”

Who knows?

In the opening sequence to
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, Mary’s in a supermarket, hurrying through the aisles. She pauses at the meat case, picks up a steak and checks the price. Then she rolls her eyes, shrugs and tosses it in the cart.

That’s kind of how I felt. Sure, I would have liked for things to have been different. But,
roll of the eyes
, what can you do?
Shrug
.

I threw the meat in my cart. And moved on.

EPILOGUE

D

r. Finch
lost his license to practice medicine after the American Medical Association found him guilty on charges of insurance fraud. Despite this, many of his patients remained in treatment. He died from heart disease in 2000.

Agnes
lives in a nursing home.

Natalie
graduated from Holyoke Community College and applied to Smith. Not only was she accepted, she was accepted with a full scholarship. She graduated magna cum laude with a double major: psychology and voice. She later earned a postgraduate degree and works in the field of public health.

Hope
continued to live at home and work for her father until the time of his death. She has since left the Northeast.

Fern
, the minister’s wife, is divorced and now lives in Sonoma, California, where she runs a bookstore geared toward the recovery community.

Dorothy,
my mother’s former girlfriend, is married and has children. It is my understanding that her husband does not know of her past relationship.

Poo Bear
sells RVs in Western Massachusetts. He is married and has children.

My mother
lives alone in a small apartment on a river near the Massachusetts and New Hampshire border. Because of a major stroke, she is paralyzed on one side of her body and is dependant on aides. She continues to write poetry and has been published in a number of small disability and women’s journals. We are estranged.

In 1998,
my father
was involved in a serious accident, rolling his Range Rover and breaking his neck. Although mobile, he retired from his position at the University of Massachusetts. Sober for more than twenty years, he leads a quiet life in the same town as my mother, though he lives there with his second wife of nearly twenty years.

My brother
is divorced, lives with his longtime girlfriend and has a son. He owns a successful exotic car dealership in Springfield, Massachusetts. A few years ago, I sent him a Nikon as a gift. I had a hunch that he would enjoy taking pictures, safe behind the lens. This turned out to be true, and my brother is now enjoying a blossoming second career as a professional photographer.

Neil Bookman
was never seen nor heard from again.