You Better Not Cry

True Stories for Christmas

Augusten Burroughs

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781848872479
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857896506
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

From the #1 bestselling author of Running with Scissors and Dry comes a
A wonderfully twisted collection of true Christmas stories. Of course you've eaten too much chocolate at Christmas, but have you ever eaten the face off a six-foot-stuffed Santa? You've seen gingerbread houses, but have you ever made your own gingerbread block of flats? You've woken up with a hangover, but have you ever woken up lying next to Kris Kringle himself? Augusten Burroughs has, and in this caustically funny, nostalgic, poignant, and moving collection of true stories, he recounts Christmases past and present - as only he can. With gimlet-eyed wit, Augusten Burroughs shows how Christmas can bring out the worst in us and sometimes - just sometimes - the very, very best.

Silent Night

POSSIBLY BECAUSE I hadn’t had a drink in ten years, I no longer peed in the kitchen sink, blew my nose on my T-shirt, or wet the bed. I was now fully domesticated with a family that included one Dennis, two French bulldogs, a station wagon, and a septic tank. I’d even had my first colonoscopy. It just doesn’t get more grown-up than that.

So, was it possible that I hadn’t done anything for Christmas since just before George died?

That was ten years ago.

One decade.

This was not “a healing interim”; it was pathologically morbid.

It was perhaps time for some jolly.

Dennis and I had spent two years building our home in western Massachusetts—plaster walls, beadboard ceilings, and paint imported from Holland. Even the inside of each closet had layers of crown molding that had been cut by hand. As my brother so aptly put it, “It’s a house suitable for queers.”

My older brother and I built our houses at the same time on the same street, just two doors apart. Ours was the gay house, with oiled soapstone counters and a wild-flower garden lit by a copper gas lantern barely bright enough to help you see the keyhole on the door; his was a hetero cement-clad monolith with an active steam pipe over the front door and xenon vapor gas discharge exterior floodlights that illuminated his wooded backyard like an Ikea parking lot.

With each imported-from-Cincinnati brass push-button light switch plate we installed, I felt six Phillips-head screw revolutions farther away from every bad thing that had ever happened to me. Tentatively, I began pretending I was entering the “After” stage of my life—the part with brocade window treatments and shiny German faucets. Where the worst thing that could happen was getting into a discussion with another shopper at Whole Foods over the last container of edamame.

Even my taste in furniture buffered me from catastrophe—I liked old things. Chairs and tables with nicks and stains and dents. I liked seeing where the split leg of the dresser had been so carefully glued back together. And I loved the table beside the sofa; if you put a glass of water on it, the glass would gradually slide onto the floor. Otherwise, you didn’t really see that it was lopsided. I figured, if this crap can survive all those other families for so many years, surely it can survive one of me for just this life.

A major benefit of building a house with Dennis is that he made a lot of the choices, and they were very fine choices. In fact, everything I loved about the house had been his idea. It occurred to me that if some Suburban-careening dot-com bitch chatting away on her cell phone happened to plow into him on the Merritt Parkway, sending our little Audi somersaulting into Vermont, I would find a certain measure of comfort in this house, which contained so much of him. This ran counter to my experience with George, whose mother had cleaned and emptied the apartment within hours of his body reaching room temperature.

Dennis and I had been together for six years. And nothing horrible had happened. It was the longest I had ever gone in my life without needing an emergency room, a law enforcement official, or a funeral home. A Christmas tree would be the bow on the package. More than anything else, it was a symbolic way of saying, “Disaster? I am no longer your bitch.”

The more I thought about it the more I felt I was almost owed a real and proper Christmas.

Dennis, however, was less than enthusiastic about the whole idea. A tree would shed needles and make a mess. Besides, we didn’t own any ornaments or lights, not even a tree stand. “And a fresh tree is going to need watering. Are you going to be the one making sure it has fresh water every day?”

“It’s not a pet, it’s just a dead tree,” I cried.

But there was something else. His name was Jesus.

Dennis was an atheist. He didn’t believed in God, so the idea of celebrating the birth of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior felt entirely absurd, like throwing a bar mitzvah for the Easter Bunny.

Now, I was about as far from being Christian as a person could be while still living outside the walls of a supermax prison. I didn’t believe in God, either. But wasn’t that all the more reason to saw down a living tree and truss it with environmentally unfriendly lights? Shit, we could even make it an olive tree.

“Look,” I said, “I just want a little tree. With some pretty lights. And a few sparkly balls. We don’t even have to have a star on top if that’s too Jesus of Nazareth for you.”

He knew I could talk him into almost anything. “I don’t want to celebrate the big Christian holiday,” he mumbled, frowning.

“I’m not suggesting we set up a nativity scene on the mantel and then go bomb an abortion clinic. I just want a little tree. That’s all.”

And when he smiled just a little, I added, “Come on, it will be fun.”

The smile was still there but his eyes flashed with caution.

I had used that exact phrase—it will be fun—about going boating on the Connecticut River with my brother early in the summer. Dennis had never learned to swim and hated the water, but he figured it would be okay “for an hour or so,” and reluctantly agreed.

The grim, fatiguing seven-hour boat ride was not merely a memory for him, but a ropy psychic scar.

Finally, I just told him, “I have always loved Christmas. Even when I was in my twenties and trying to be very cool and anti-Christmas, secretly, I still loved it. And I know that’s kind of idiotic, but there you go. I mean, I buy all of it: the cheesy music, the gaudy lights, and the spray snow, especially the spray snow. So the thing is, I have loved Christmas my entire life, and yet? Every single one has really been kind of hideous. Or maybe hideous isn’t the word. Maybe it’s more like, cataclysmic. It’s like I have a genuine Christmas curse or something. All I want is just one good, normal, happy holiday. A little one.”

His eyes had softened and he walked over to the counter and grabbed the car keys. “Ready to go get our first Christmas tree?”

The smell of fresh balsam was overwhelming as we stepped out of the car. Atkins Market, a former roadside apple stand that got ambitious and now peddled lobster tails and clever mustard, had a parking lot full of fresh-cut trees.

Ropes of soft white bulbs lit the area and the ground was thick with needles and sawed-off lower branches. It was this makeshift cocoon of bare-bulb lighting along with the tree carnage and balsam-stained air that made me realize, this was like the animal-friendly equivalent of a whaling vessel.

Standing beneath that halo of light, I suddenly felt observed. I imagined Greenpeace activists hiding in the darkness of the surrounding orchard, waiting to pummel us with sticks and frozen Granny Smith apples.

But Dennis knew certain veal recipes by heart; he experienced no ethical confusion over the tree bodies and immediately located the one perfect tree.

Everybody else had overlooked it or they would surely have taken it. There was only a week until Christmas and I had thought we’d be lucky to find one that didn’t look like a wood chipper got to it first. Instead, we got a tree so beautiful, you’d swear it came from a box. The apron was exactly symmetrical, as though it had been formed by a meticulously calibrated robotic extrusion nozzle and not the random, seemingly drunken hand of Mother Nature herself. That crazy old bitch gave us the California redwoods; true. But right along with it she whipped up some naked mole rat.

We hoisted the tree onto the roof of the car and secured it on the ski rack with bungee cords. “Let’s head over to Target and pick up some decorations,” Dennis said.

But when I saw this tableau—the Audi wagon, the fake-looking real tree, the snow blanketing the landscape, smoke from Atkins bakery ovens curling into the air in soft, sweet plumes—I thought, This is ridiculously perfect.

Simultaneously I felt actual g-forces inside my chest as I was ejected from my life, suddenly on the outside looking in; an observer. Though many things could be said about my life over the years, ridiculously perfect would never have been among them.

I simply could not trust any kind of perfection, not even the ridiculous variety.

After cleaning up the 498,000 individual needles that had scattered everywhere when we dragged the tree inside, I made a display of fetching a pitcher and giving the tree some water. To prove that I could.

Crouched on the floor, trying to angle the pitcher under its wide lower branches and getting my hand smothered with sticky sap and my eyes stabbed with needles, I realized, This fucker really is like a pet, only a super-dumb one. All it could do was need attention and remain upright while looking pretty. Though, hadn’t I dated many guys who had even less to offer?

After this, I went upstairs to the bedroom and my laptop. I was in terrible withdrawal, having been offline for hours. Surely, there’d been an earthquake or a major molestation; perhaps even the announcement of an unsuccessful conjoined twin surgery. Essentially, I just needed a good bedtime story.

Dennis came up to bed sometime later.

I woke up on my right side, facing away from the wall of windows. I thought: It’s bright. I’ve overslept. And I had, it was nearly eight thirty. The dogs were nestled deep into the down comforter. Bentley, who was normally awake at first light, excited about his morning walk, merely glanced at me as I climbed from the bed and walked to the next room.

Dennis was sitting at his desk. He was working and appeared to have been awake for hours. “Oh, hi there,” he said. “I didn’t hear you wake up.”

“Just now. Did you not sleep? Why are you already up?”

He nodded at the stack of papers, envelopes, and bills on his desk. “The Amex bill. So...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Author’s Note
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• You Better Not Cry
• And Two Eyes Made Out of Coal
• Claus and Effect
• Ask Again Later
• Why Do You Reward Me Thus?
• The Best and Only Everything
• Silent Night