Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs Read Free Book Online Page B

into the bag, but it was empty.
    “Oh, I forgot.” He reached under his seat again and brought out two brochures. They were for Batesville caskets:
“Committed to the Dignity of Life.”
    I flipped through the stiff, glossy pages. There were bronze caskets, wood caskets, caskets with glass tops like coffee tables. The latter seemed ideal for the dignified ambassador who finds himself accidentally and fatally sideswiped by a UPS truck.
    He made a left and headed uptown. “Hypothetically,” he began, “which would you choose?”
    I’d already mentally selected my model. “The posted-cornered Hanover in cherry.”
    This surprised him. “Really? I would have pegged you as a stainless steel sort of guy.” He spoke this out of the corner of his mouth, leading-man style.
    I was charmed.
     
    When I was with him, he was an eccentric entrepreneur. But as soon as we parted, he became an undertaker again.
    I couldn’t help but dwell on the fact that I was dating somebody who had held somebody else’s decapitated head in his hands. Who regularly tied string tight around the end of a dead man’s penis so that fluids didn’t leak out and stain the tuxedo pants. I was dating somebody who had stitched a suicide’s wrists shut after the fact. All with the same two hands that rubbed my back between the shoulder blades, in exactly the right spot.
    The only other people who have had experiences similar to those of this man were locked inside institutions for the criminally insane. The difference is, this guy gets business cards.
     
    In honor of our eleventh date, he gave me a Mexican death puppet. A little paper-maché skeleton that he sat on top of the television. Silly, not scary. Innocent. Or so I thought.
    A week later, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa were dead. I moved the death puppet off the television, afraid that in another week’s time, Katie Couric, Jerry Seinfeld, Oprah—whoever appeared on TV that week—would be claimed by the puppet. I set it on the floor, in an area I figured to be just above my nasty downstairs neighbor’s head.
    In some ways, it was comforting to date an undertaker. He had this -whole mortality thing out of his system. He didn’t brood like a tortured artist with a subconscious death wish. He didn’t taunt death by driving sports cars around sharp corners with his eyes closed. Death wasn’t a mysterious notion that he romanticized. Death didn’t rule his life; life ruled his life.
    He lived remarkably in the moment, laughed easily. Being with him was like putting your mouth on the lip of a juicer dish while the oranges were being mashed. As he would say, “This is realtime, baby.” In a way, he seemed more alive than other people. Maybe this is why I dated him. Or maybe I thought he would protect me from Death since they shared an office. Maybe I felt that if he liked me enough, he could talk his buddy the Reaper out of taking me, pull some strings. Or perhaps I was just testing my own limits, like when you’re a kid and you stand in the dark in front of the bathroom mirror and shine a flashlight under your face to try and scare yourself:
I’m dating an undertaker. . .. Ahhhhh!
Then again, I might have just liked him for him, and this undertaker thing was just what he did for a living. That’s simple enough, right?
    Except why would somebody do this for a living? Why woulda
gay
somebody do this for a living? Had he not seen enough death already?
    Why not run a coffee bar, design fabrics, program computers, or install alarm systems? What kind of a person has as a goal in life the desire to delay the decomposition of human bodies, dress them in formal wear, and display them in anticorrosive boxes? Did he attend a funeral as a child and say longingly to himself, “Someday . . .”
    And, more important, why would I date this kind of person?
     
    At first, my friends reveled in the novelty of the concept. “Does he make you take cold showers before sex and tell you to lie very still?”