Possible Side Effects

Augusten Burroughs

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781843545224
• eBook ISBN: 9780857895240
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Running with Scissors comes Augusten Burroughs's most provocative collection of true stories yet. From nicotine gum addiction to lesbian personal ads to incontinent dogs, Possible Side Effects mines Burroughs's life in a series of uproariously funny essays. These are stories that are uniquely Augusten, with all the over-the-top hilarity of Running with Scissors, the erudition of Dry, and the breadth of Magical Thinking. A collection that is universal in its appeal and unabashedly intimate, Possible Side Effects continues to explore that which is most personal, mirthful, disturbing, and cherished, with unmatched audacity. A cautionary tale in essay form. Be forewarned--hilarious, troubling, and shocking results might occur.

The Wisdom Tooth

It had been three years since our last vacation and Dennis insisted we take some time for ourselves. He was thinking: ocean, an inn with a fireplace in the bedroom, multiple appetizers, possibly romance.

I was thinking, What about the dogs?

“They’ll stay with Sheila and her family,” he said, as though this were a perfectly acceptable solution.

The idea of taking a holiday sans pets was a terrifying proposition. I have come to feel something beyond love for our two French bulldogs. I have developed an unnatural dependency on them. Besides, who else will know they require somebody to put on a rubber cat head mask at least once a day and run around the apartment making deranged meow sounds?

“But I will miss them,” I said. The simplicity of these words belied my true feeling, which was desperation.

“It’s good to miss them. Because then you’ll enjoy seeing them again.”

I said, “But I enjoy seeing them now.” I was trying to smother my panic. It’s not a good idea to let your spouse know you don’t want to go on vacation alone with him because you will miss the animals too much. This is exactly the sort of thing you must never do.

He looked at me in a way that suggested finality. Body, dropping through trapdoor, rope around neck. Fini.

He had a point and I knew it. We did need time to be together. Without a small animal, plucked from nature, between us. Whenever we get into bed, Bentley gets into bed and slides between us. Then The Cow tries to climb up on the bed, but because he’s short, he only butts his head against the mattress. When I kiss Dennis, Bentley licks our faces and Cow steps on our heads.

I said, “It will be great.” This was my way of saying, You win. And also, I love you.

Dennis is the person who organizes everything in our lives. To the casual outsider, it would seem grossly unfair. He owns a company, he handles all our money, he manages our lives. While I sit and write, Dennis does everything else. When I try to accept additional responsibilities, I make a mess and he has to fix whatever I broke.

So Dennis spent some time online and decided: a rocky island. An old inn. With a fireplace in the bedroom.

It was perfect.

He showed me pictures of the inn he’d found and indeed, it did appear perfect. The photo revealed a room filled with antiques, quilts and—yes—a fireplace.

However, there was something else about the inn that was not shown in the pictures online at the Web site.

Something we discovered only when we arrived.

Something that made me whisper to Dennis upon arrival, “I want to leave. Right now.”

Walking in the front door of the inn revealed the innkeeper to be a doll collector.

Standing there in the foyer, on the inch-thick maroon carpeting, I stared directly at a human baby girl doll, seated in a high chair. Behind her on a bookcase, a row of little girls, all in Victorian dressing gowns and little black flats.

Now maybe I’m just ultrajudgmental, but I really feel that only two groups of people have any business collecting dolls: little girls and grown women who lost all their children in fiery car accidents.

Other than these two exceptions, doll collecting is just plain creepy.

“Welcome, please come in to the parlor. I’ll give you some paperwork and then give you the grand tour and then you can get settled in your room. How was your drive, was it okay?” she asked. She was a nice enough woman. In her early fifties, short, efficient hair. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Dennis said, “The drive was really beautiful,” at the exact same moment that I said, “The drive was very long.” I was trying to hurry things along. I wanted to be left alone.

She looked between us, “Oh! Okay. Well, it was long but it was beautiful. Well, I’m happy it was beautiful.”

I gazed around the room and my eyes stopped dead on a little boy standing in the corner. This was a particularly eerie doll. Life-sized and blond-haired and blue-eyed. I saw a little Nazi boy, pockets probably stuffed with scissors and retractable blades. My grandfather on my mother’s side was rumored to be half Jewish, which practically makes me Jerry Seinfeld’s brother, and thus wary of blond German boys with their hands out of sight.

All around the room, dolls. Little dolls in a display case between the windows. A doll on the sofa right next to us. Two dolls sharing a seat behind the innkeeper’s chair.

And then on the tabletops, framed photographs of her own children.

As Dennis filled out the forms and made small talk with the woman, I became lost in a fantasy of the innkeeper’s children. Imagining how mentally ill they must be as a result of having a mother with this curious fetish.

Did they feel like pets, her children? Did they feel competitive with the dolls? Did they hate them? Had these two boys in lacrosse uniforms never been able to invite a single friend over, for fear of shame?

A few moments later, we were all standing and she led the way into the adjoining room, where meals were served. “Breakfast is at seven,” she said.

I don’t wake up at seven, let alone eat. Let alone eat in a doll collector’s strange house. My idea of breakfast is two Advil washed down with Coke. Not pancakes made by somebody else’s mom.

“We might skip breakfast,” Dennis said. “We’re not big breakfast eaters.”

Oh, thank God for him, I thought.

The woman’s smile dropped. “Oh. You’re not? Oh. Because I make them myself. Waffles. You don’t like homemade waffles?”

It was pitiful. But it worked. Dennis said, “I love waffles. Well, maybe we’ll have breakfast after all.”

At last, she dragged us to our door and gave us the key. “If you need anything at all, just call out for me,” she said.

We thanked her, then stepped inside the room and closed the door.

Dennis immediately whispered, “Holy shit.”

I said, “Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. She’s listening.”

“This is really weird,” he whispered.

“I hate this,” I said. “I wish we were at a chain hotel. I can’t stand this level of scrutiny.”

And then Dennis looked crestfallen. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have known you’d hate this place. I never should have booked a room at an inn.”

I immediately hugged him and told him that it was perfect. The room, I said, was adorable. There was a fireplace! And we were on vacation! And it wasn’t like we were going to spend all our time in the room.

Then I moved to the window and lowered the shade. It was early evening and I didn’t like the thought of the innkeeper crouching outside the window with a doll, watching.

Dennis and I are so much alike that he was doing the very same thing, at the other window. “I bet she watches her guests,” he was saying.

I love the way he thinks.

The room was decorated with original and reproduction Victorian furniture. I love antiques—slant-top Chippendale desks from the 1700s, a nice William and Mary table. But I’ve never been fond of Victorian furniture. Especially particleboard Victorian furniture.

But the room was the nicest in the inn. It was a room that many couples on their honeymoon occupied. And I had to wonder, was she horrified to have a couple of guys in here? Gay guys? Was she thinking, “I hope they don’t get AIDS on my sheets?”

Well, I was thinking similar thoughts. I was thinking, “That bitch better not have any dolls in here. Because if I find one, I’m taking the head and leaving the stalk behind.”

Which gave me an idea, so I said to Dennis, “Imagine if we went through the house tonight and removed all the heads.”

And Dennis said, “Or took just the pants off the dolls, so they were all naked from the waist down.”

Surely, someone had done this before us?

It’s just inconceivable to me that such a doll-infested inn could remain free of such hateful pranks. Certainly, some guest before us had contemplated removing all the heads and placing them on sticks, lining the walkway up to the house? I cannot be the only person to be so tempted.

“Well, well, well,” Dennis said, and I turned.

He was crouched down next to the bed, rummaging through a stack of journals. “What are those?” I asked.

“These are like guest books. I guess she just leaves them here and people write notes in them. That’s what the pens here are for.”

He was paging through one of the books and read, “ ‘What a beautiful room. And such fine service. Our honeymoon was an enchanting memory which we shall soon never forget.’ ”

“Oh my God,” I said. Suddenly, this was my favorite room in all the world.

Dennis was laughing. “Okay, okay, hold on. Listen to this one. ‘Thank you so much for making our special vacation very special.’ ”

Dennis sat down in the chair with the journal and began to really read it, as one might read The New York Times. Page by page. Laughing.

I unpacked my essentials: pain killers, Nicorette nicotine gum, my computer. The truth is, I wouldn’t be able to relax in the room until I was medicated, on my back, chewing gum, and online.

I was relieved—almost high—to discover that being on an island in no way interfered with my ability to check e-mail. Had I been unable to check e-mail, I would have suffered through the vacation. I’d told Dennis as much in the car, on the way up.

“But what if I can’t log on?” I whined.

“You’ll be able to log on, don’t you worry.”

“But what if I can’t?”

“You will.”

“But if I can’t?”

And finally, Dennis had been forced to promise that if I couldn’t log on, we would go right back on the ferry and then drive into Boston and stay at a major hotel. Which appealed to me, so in a way, I was hoping not to be able to log on.

As I wrote to my friend Russell in Manhattan, Dennis continued to read from the journals. Then he suggested, “Maybe we should write something.”

I turned away from my laptop to face him. “Like what?”

He said, “You know, like well, we could say ‘She watched us. We saw her outside. I think that’s weird.’ ”

I said, “I have a pen right here in my bag.”

But could we stop at just one message?

Could we not also write, “There’s something about the dolls. One of them is different. It’s hard to explain. The one in the living room, near the fireplace. She had blue eyes when we checked in, but now both her eyes are missing.”

And if we wrote that, why not then write, in different colored ink, “I’m not sure, but I think I saw the innkeeper’s husband masturbating in the woods. Like I say, I can’t be sure. But my husband and I are packing the car and leaving. It’s 2:37 A.M. I hope the person reading this is okay.”

We spent the next afternoon driving around the island, making ourselves sick with real estate envy. And not just for the thirty-million-dollar waterfront homes (circa 1790), but the modest inland shacks one could pick up for an easy million.

This is the most pristine New England geography you can possibly imagine. And then, it’s an island. For someone like me, somebody who has large vacant holes where character should be, the island filled me with profound need. But I was smart enough to understand that unless I, too, recorded a song that someday became a catsup jingle, it was unlikely I’d ever be able to afford living here.

But that evening, things changed, when the possibility of a lawsuit arose.

We were having dinner at the Harbor House restaurant, located in one of the large hotels on the harbor. A sumptuous luxury hotel I longed to stay in the moment we saw it.

“Sorry,” Dennis said. “I didn’t know about this place.”

“I love our inn,” I lied.

We were seated in a booth.

Probably because we were there in the off season, the restaurant was empty. Which I actually liked. I was able to enjoy the clean interior design without being distracted by the celebrities and political leaders that surely filled the place in summer.

We both ordered prime rib and clam chowder.

As I bit down on a potato in the chowder, a large cracking sound filled the empty room.

It was the sound, more than the sensation in my mouth, that horrified me.

I spit a mouthf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Pest Control
• Bloody Sunday
• The Sacred Cow
• Team Player
• Killing John Updike
• Attacked by Heart
• The Wisdom Tooth
• GWF Seeks SAME
• Mint Threshold
• Locked Out
• Getting to No You
• Kitty, Kitty
• Peep
• Taking Tests, Taking Things
• Unclear Sailing
• Moving Violations
• You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby!
• The Forecast for Sommer
• Try Our New Single Black Mother Menu
• The Georgia Thumper
• Little Crucifixions
• What’s in a Name?
• The Wonder Boy
• Fetch
• Mrs. Chang
• Julia’s Child