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 SOAPBOX: Movin’ To The Burbs
It's obvious from Running With Scissors that I had a steaming piece of shit of a childhood. So it’s odd that I decided to, with my boyfriend Dennis, buy a house in the area where I grew up in what was essentially a cult. But I like the idea of living on the same cul-de-sac as my brother and being near my 14-year-old nephew. He’s the same age I was when Running With Scissors took place, except he isn’t being molested by 30-year-olds and his biggest dilemmas in life are getting the “cool” cartridges for his Xbox and GameBoy and moving up through the ranks of the Boy Scouts.
My adulthood was spent in major cities—San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and New York City—but now Dennis and I own a new house on a new street with shiny new lawn sprinklers. When you think of suburbia, strangely you think of our house. Of course, you probably hope that I’m not your neighbor. The first thing I did when we moved in was landscape and plant a bunch of big pine trees. It’s not the neighborly thing to do, putting up a bunch of huge plants between your house and your neighbors’ houses.
You’d think that people live in the suburbs for more privacy, but what I find really surprising is how many cops are around. It makes me paranoid. There’s very little crime, but I went online because there’s a daily police log of “crime,” like one posting which read, “Four people in photocopy shop turn out to be employees,” or, “Man on path waiting for dog.” That means someone looked out their window and saw man standing on the path and called the police. I can picture how, when the police approached him, Man On Path Waiting For Dog said, “I’m waiting for my pooch who’s taking a fucking dump in the woods.”
I’m law-abiding, but I have this cloud of suspicion that follows me around, like the stinky character from Peanuts. I guess I look incredibly guilty, which in the suburbs translates to being stopped constantly when I leave a store, as if I stole something or beat someone senseless in the back of the store with a can of green beans. One time Dennis and I got pulled over driving back to our house. It was the middle of winter and we had our fog lights on, my thinking being that we could illuminate the black ice on the road and not skid out of control and crush some little girl on her bike. Now, why a kid would be out in 15-below weather is beyond me, it could happen. But we got a ticket anyway.
However, when you live a really abnormal kind of life, you tend to look at “normal” things like suburbs and houses with fascination. I’ve never really “fit in,” not even in gay life, so I look to other things like chain stores, which are abundant in the suburbs, to connect with other people. I enjoy buying Tide in bulk just like everybody else. But Amherst is a liberal town and it doesn’t like chain stores. There’s a bison farm near our house and there are protests that are constantly in the papers about saving the bison farm. See, Lowe’s wants to move in and buy the land, and I almost want to make my own protest sign: “You can’t fix a leaky pipe with a bison, bitches! Bring in Lowe’s! And bring in Best Buy while you’re at it!”
And sometimes it hits me: You live on a cul-de-sac, dude—what were you thinking? There’s a lawn that needs to be mowed now, and I’m still trying to figure out how that’s going to happen. Luckily, at the grocery store we go to there’s a bulletin, and I discovered a little poster one day: “Responsible teenage girl mows lawns and petsits.” It has these little phone number tabs on the bottom and I wanted to tear them all off so I could have her completely to myself, like my own suburban slave. Because you know if I were forced to operate a lawnmower, one of the neighborhood kids would “accidentally” end up in the blades.
Augusten’s latest collection of “true stories,” Magical Thinking, is out this month from St. Martin’s Press. Check out augusten.com for his upcoming book tour dates and for more info on one of our favorite writers.
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