Take Five: Four Favorite Essays Plus One Never-Before-Seen Essay by Augusten Burroughs

Author:Augusten Burroughs
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781429958547
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Published: 2012-06-08T11:58:35+00:00

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Obsessions with television talk shows, movie stars, mirrors, and anything gold-plated had defined my personality from an early age. This trait baffled my highly educated and bookish parents. Whereas my mother loved teak, I favored simulated wood grain. My father’s appreciation for old farm tractors was an interesting counterpoint to my fixation on white stretch limousines and Rolls Royce grills.

Although my parents couldn’t stand each other day to day, the one thing they did agree on was that I was very different from them. “Where did you come from?” my mother asked me one afternoon as I used a Q-Tip to clean between the links on my gold-tone Twist-O-Flex watchband. Or “Where on earth did you ever hear of such a thing?” my father wanted to know when I told him that even the plumbing in the toilets was made of solid gold at the Vanderbilt’s Breakers mansion.

At Christmas, my mother decorated our tree with strands of cranberries and popcorn that she strung together herself, Danish Santas, and antique clear light bulbs. I, on the other hand, saved up my allowance for a good five months for my own artificial Christmas tree, which I kept in my bedroom, festooned with silver tinsel, thick ropes of gold garland, and lights that flashed spastically and constantly. I bought spray snow, which I applied in artful, yet natural windswept patterns, to my windows. I illuminated my tree with my desk lamp, as though it were on a set.

In preparation for my television acting debut, I watched commercials incessantly, committing them to memory and reciting key phrases endlessly to my parents.

“Can I help you fry the chicken?” I mimicked in a high-pitched southern girl’s voice.

“I wanna help,” I countered in a different high-pitched southern girl’s voice.

Then, imitating their mother, I said, “I don’t fry chicken anymore. I use new Shake ’N Bake.”

I loved to sing jingles. “That great Pepsi taste. Diet Pepsi won’t go to your waist. Now you see it. Now you don’t. Oh, Diet Pepsi one small calorie. Now you see it. Now you don’t.”

Sometimes I got the words wrong, but my intentions were true.

“Let’s get Mikey to try it. He won’t eat it; he hates everything!”

My father, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, couldn’t bear my constant performing. “Jesus, son. What’s the matter with you? If you don’t stop that noise, you won’t be in any commercial at all. You’ll be right back in your room practicing penmanship.”

This muted me, briefly. Long enough to contemplate his sudden death and wonder how I would ever be able to produce convincing tears. Onions, I’d heard, could do the trick if you applied just a small bit of the juice right under your eye. I went into the kitchen and tried this myself, thrilled with the weepy, sincere results. Oh Dad! Boo-hoo-hoo.

My mother was slightly more understanding. “He’s amazing the way he can just memorize every commercial on the air. You have to admit, he does seem to be made for acting.”

And with those words, my mother had cursed me.

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