06.25.03

Literarily Crushed

Posted in Uncategorized at 9:49 pm by Beau

With nothing better to do with my days and nights right now, I’ve taken on another whimsical fascination, one that’s addled my Gemini brain like just about every other time it’s happened. I think I’m sort of in love with Augusten Burroughs. I mean, I love Jeff but I sort love Augusten, too right now. I knew it for sure when I was IM’ing Gatsby’s Ghost today and bemoaned Augusten Burrough’s self-confessed ‘stable relationship’ with his partner of four years. “It just figures,” I thought to myself and slammed my mental fist on my mental desk I keep neat and tidy up in my head. “All the good ones are taken,” I finished. Of course I know that I’m taken too, I’m just saying, it’s hard for me to fantasize about someone in any kind of realistic way when I know they have a boyfriend hanging around interfering; and not just a boyfriend but someone who he qualifies his relationship with as ‘stable’ which to me means they’re just not even into looking around for greener grass. Then again, when you have to use a qualifier, isn’t that a signal that maybe something’s amiss? Maybe there is some room to squeak? It doesn’t matter, though. I hear ‘boyfriend’ and that’s it, the fantasy is sort of over. Still, my fascination has held on and bloomed into a beautiful, fragrant obsession.

I came to know Augusten Burroughs (“or is it Auggie to his closer friends and maybe someday, me,” I wonder) three beautiful days ago when I started reading his first memoir, Running With Scissors, which promised me a tale of pedophilia and a whole lotta crazy but you know, in a funny way. I was intrigued as I live for horrifying despair masked in humor. But when I started the book the words paled to what I found in his author bio on the back cover. Not to be too shallow, but lets be anyway; he’s a total who-ha hottie. He’s a snack. I can overlook a lot of bad literature for a humpy author and he has it in spades. Then in the author bio, it said he lives in New York City and immediately my mind starting wondering, “I wonder if I could bump into him? I wonder if he’d meet for lunch?” You can do this with celebrities of any kind of media in NYC. The city lends itself to fulfilling astronomical odd chance meetings. I mean, out of 4 million people in the city daily, why shouldn’t we bump into one another? He probably hangs out at all the clinical research lunch bars I do, right? So I dove into the memoir, finishing up this morning first thing and it was all it promised to be and more: pedophilia, really super-duper crazy, but funny. Also, it contained the most interesting (and admittedly bizarre and sad) childhood events and I became even more in love with him because he had the childhood I’d never had; one interesting event after another. While writing my memoirs, I would rhapsodize over the incessant feeding and watering of my father’s exotic bird collection including pheasant, quail, and bob-whites, Augusten is standing in the bathroom of his shrink/adoptive guardian with the whole family reading the turds floating in the toilet bowl. I mean, how can mine even compare?

So then today, after I finished the book, I Googled his name in hopes of finding out a little bit more about him and by God, he’s got a website all to himself and he’s brave enough to not just have his author readings, bio sketches, and tour dates, he’s got pictures and lots of them. Never mind over half are of his boyfriend, who not for nothing, is also a fucking hottie (dammit) there is also their dog and all the trips they go on and so forth and so on and thus the bloom of my obsession flowered hard right around 1pm today. The flush of the crush stayed on into this evening and in a fantastically honorific and rather touching moment, I ripped out his Entertainment Weekly IT biography from last week where he’s standing barefoot at the bottom of a drained pool and stuck it in the book to have for all time.

But like all obsessions of mine, this one is arcing and heading for home soon. In the picture from EW, as I was scoping out minute details a common observer might overlook, such as package size (you can’t tell, I think they Photoshopped out the tell-tale hang shadow) and whatnot, I noted a very icky and worked over right foot. I thought I saw dirty toes and a bunion. I can’t tolerate bad feet in others because mine are too gross to even describe. I need some superiority in the ones I long for and bad feet…my God, I just don’t know (a noticeable package might have taken the edge off the feet thing for me, though, I think). I shouldn’t be surprised, though. My last literary crush, excluding Sarah Vowell, who as a woman could only flirt around the edges of a mad crush, was Donald Antrim who wrote one of my all-time favorite books, The Hundred Brothers. Also a great book and also a woofy author’s photo that had me hooked right away. He set my gaydar off immediately though I have no idea what his preference was and again, that sort of wrecks the fantasy for me in the long run. I took his obsession all the way to an author’s reading and signing night at Barnes&Noble one night a few years ago. I was as nervous as a bee in springtime, looking around the room for him and trying to see who he came with or who was there with him, as if I had some psychic way of figuring out who he was sleeping with and what my chances were. I told Jeff I was just in love with the book, which inconsequently was his newer one, The Verificationist, which I could hardly finish from all the strange plot twists having centered on some guy having an out of body experience over a syrupy pancake dinner with his work colleagues. When Donald Antrim finally got up to read, I was enraptured UNTIL, under careful scrutiny and looking for his package which was hidden behind the podium, I noticed he had a facial tick; a constant and significant nose wrinkle like he was sucking back a snot wad. I don’t hold this against him, but it was enough coupled with the unreadable but still very coolly titled book, that my crush faded and I moved on.

I don’t know exactly where my thing with Augusten Burroughs will lead? Right now it’s back to Borders tomorrow so I can pick up his new memoir, Dry, where he talks about getting sober, not something I tend to think of as particularly hot but then again, I wouldn’t have thought that about decoding poop in the toilet and look what he did with that. We’ll just have to see. As it stands, he was having his last book signing in Manhattan tonight which I only found out late enough today to not be able to swing it. All the better for him, I suppose since I’d be using all my untapped, undeveloped psychic energy to push his boyfriend down behind the new non-fiction aisle and kick him in the head for having such good universal luck as to land a hottie author. Oh well.

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