Magical Thinking Read online

  As I sat, the power locks on the doors engaged. I looked to make sure the knobs were still there, that the door could still be unlocked manually. One does not want to encounter customized door locks on a blind date with an undertaker.

  “The name Pogo mean anything to you?” I asked, sliding my eyes toward him.

  “Huh? Who?”

  Pogo the Killer Clown aka John Wayne Gacy. Serial killers often admired each other’s work. Though seldom did they wear Hawaiian shirts. “Never mind. Nice shirt,” I commented.

  He looked pleased. “Thanks. It’ll look great on the boat.”

  “Boat?” I asked as he pulled away from the curb.

  “Uh huh,” he mumbled as he made a left down a side street. “I got a little mail-order business on the side. Small-space ads in The National Enquirer, that kind of thing. Last Christmas I sold twenty thousand units of Trixie the Christmas Pixie. She had illuminating wings and a glow wand.”

  I noticed he wore boat shoes and no socks.

  “Yup. One more hit like Trixie, and I’ll be behind the wheel of a thirty-foot Sea Ray with twin MerCruiser diesel inboards.”

  I fingered the red, green, and white tassel that hung from his dashboard.

  He didn’t need to see my face; the disdain emanated from my fingers. “I’m an Italian from the Bronx,” he said. “Gimme a friggin’ break.”

  “No, I like it. I like that your people have such pride.”

  He stopped at the light and shot me a dirty look and a hmpf. “Here, I brought you a present.” He pulled a plastic bag out from under his seat and dropped it on my lap. He smiled like a cat with fresh chipmunk blood on his whiskers.

  I reached into the bag and pulled out an ice pick. The price was still stuck on it: $2.99.

  “Wow,” I said. “This is cool. Pick, ice pick. You’re very clever.”

  “There’s something else,” he said.

  I peered 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 would a 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?” Ha-ha-ha, all around. Eventually that became “Are you still seeing that undertaker?” As if I were still laughing uncontrollably at a joke to which the punch line had been delivered twenty minutes ago. “But isn’t it . . . depressing?” I told them about the T-shirt with the garish hula girl emblazoned across the front. I told them about his smile, one of his best features. They nodded suspiciously.

  One night, I went to his office to fool around. We’d never done it there before. His “office” was a large brownstone. He was wearing red boxer shorts when he answered the door. “Got the whole place to myself, all five floors.”

  I hesitated briefly before stepping inside. “Are you . . . alone?”

  He gave me a puzzled look, like What do you think, dickwad?

  “No. I mean alone, alone.”

  He pulled me inside and closed the door behind me. “Oh, that. No, we got a full house tonight.”

  I cringed slightly and took a peppermint from the bowl near the door. The idea that we were not alone was one thing. The idea that we were not alone yet were the only ones alive was quite another.

  We went at it on a sofa in a viewing room on the third floor. Afterward he said, “I think this is the room where we held one of the Kennedys’ funerals. I forget which one.”

  Rose Kennedy instantly appeared above my head shrieking and brandishing her rosary, attorneys on either side of her.

  “Wanna go downstairs to the refrigerator?” he asked.

  Normally, two boyfriends might “go downstairs to the refrigerator” and grab a beer after sex. This refrigerator was not that kind of refrigerator.

  “Ready?” he asked as we stood in front of the large steel door.

  I nodded.

  He opened the door and turned on the light. Four bodies lay on steel gurneys, covered by sheets. I stepped inside the room.

  He walked to one of the gurneys and lifted the sheet to peer at the face. “This fella was in the prime of his life. Thirty-two. Drug overdose,” he said. There was pity in his voice but not real sadness. It was almost like he was looking at a beautiful sports car that had been totaled on the interstate. And I thought, Maybe that’s just how all these dead bodies become after a while, like so many wrecked cars.

  I, however, had not had
the numbing luxury of seeing a career’s worth of dead bodies, and I felt queasy at the thought of starting now. “I don’t want to see him,” I said, folding my arms across my chest. Instantly, the novelty of dating an undertaker vanished in the frigid air.

  “You should,” he said. The undertaker does not drink or do drugs, and I have a long history of doing both. The undertaker does not want me to become one of his clients.

  I approached the body.

  “It’s okay,” he said as he pulled down the sheet.

  He was a very handsome, athletic man. He looked to be sleeping. I followed the contours of his face with my eyes. It felt wrong for me to see him like that. It felt like theft.

  “Maybe he thought he’d do just a line or two,” the undertaker said. “Or maybe he did so much that it seemed normal. But see how his muscles are? This guy worked out. He was probably at the gym the day before yesterday.”

  All I could say was “That’s amazing,” because it was. It was somehow almost holy, seeing the man like that, naked and gone.

  “That’s just life. Only this one ended too soon.”

  “Great,” I said. “A profound undertaker.”

  “Who gives great head,” he added.

  “This is so twisted.”

  “Welcome to the world. Ain’t it a pisser?” We left the room. And we kissed for a long, hungry time.

  AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR

  A

  fter work today I went to Daphnia, my usual barber at the Astor Place barbershop. Astor Place is the geographical region in New York City where the West Village intersects with the East Village. Somehow in the late eighties, Astor Place became trapped in time. As a result these few blocks are filled with people who still consider safety pins to be a fashion accessory. The people who live around here tend to favor black leather, studs, and Mohawks. While people from Omaha may come to Astor Place and think, Gosh, now these must be what you call the ‘hip’ people, Manhattanites view the residents of this area more correctly as heroin addicts who have aged poorly and are stuck in the past. The Astor Place barbershop itself was here long before Astor Place was cool, in any decade. And Daphnia was probably here for opening day. Jacob Astor himself likely pinched her ass after she trimmed his mustache.

  Daphnia looks like Sophia Loren after some decades of terrible luck. The same raven-colored hair, teased high into a dome. But Daphnia’s hair is dented at the top, as though she banged her head on the shelf where she keeps her combs and clippers. Daphnia has a similar beauty but ignores it. Although this time her eyeliner wasn’t smeared, so maybe she was having an okay day. I sat down in her chair and took off my baseball cap, and she said, “Same thing?” and I said, “Yeah, same thing.” Same thing being short on the sides, flat on top, natural in the back. I hate that line they give you in the back, the one that goes straight across, dumbing down the haircut. It’s so technical college.

  She zooms the clippers over my hair as usual. But then she does something she’s never done before: she buzzes all over my ears, even the lobes, and way, way down my neck.

  And I’m thinking, This is really bad. It’s starting. The hair where you don’t want it. That’s when I noticed how shiny my head looked, like a baby crowning. My balding skull saying “Here I come” through the ever-thinning hairs on top.

  And this, despite the fact that I drench my scalp with Rogaine every time I stand in front of a mirror (about two dozen times a day). The Rogaine makes my scalp itch madly, which is probably my genetic material mutating. So when I’m forty-six, I’ll have to have my cancerous scalp removed and replaced with hip tissue.

  Women just smirk at baldness, as if it’s cute. How adorable would they find it if they began to lose their breasts in their late twenties? If both tits just shrunk up—unevenly I might add—and eventually turned into wine-cork nubs. Then it would be a different story. Then men would get the pity they deserve from women, as opposed to the smirks. There would be little ribbons you could wear on your jacket for Baldness Awareness Month. There would be marathons where people wept openly as bald men crossed the finish line, smiling and wiping sweat from their fleshy heads.

  As far as I’m concerned, baldness is the male breast cancer, only much worse because almost everyone gets it. True, it’s not lifethreatening. Just social-life threatening. But in New York City, there is no difference.

  Now if I had thick Italian hair, as opposed to this crappy, vague Nordic hair, I would probably just buzz it off like the rest of the fags. And I wouldn’t care, because then it would be by choice. So I’m thinking maybe I should just get my head tattooed to look like very short stubble. Nobody would know unless they got very close to me. And my intimacy issues prevent that.

  “You okay?” Daphnia asked while she was brushing my neck and ears with her whisk broom.

  “Yeah, I’m just annoyed by how fast I’m losing my hair.”

  She laughed. “Is fact of life for the man.”

  I scowled and looked at her breasts.

  Then I went home to write terrible ad scripts for an awful new product. I was recently teamed up with an art director whom I privately refer to as Dim, as in “Look, Dim forgot to wear shoes today!” He’s the sweetest guy, and he has absolutely no annoying attitude. On the other hand, he’s difficult to work with because things like space distract him. The other day I caught him sitting in his chair looking up, then all around, as though for a fly. Then he fixed his gaze on the wall, cocking his head slightly to the right, a puzzled look on his face. I stood in the doorway to his office and stared hard at him, thinking he’d sense my attention and snap out of it. Finally I said, “Everything okay?” And he said, “Isn’t it weird how you can’t see air? But it’s there.”

  So I’m working with him on a butterlike product called, beautifully, BenCol. It prevents your body from absorbing eighty percent of dietary cholesterol. Thus the name, a shortening of “beneficial to cholesterol.” Despite the fact that it sounds like an allergy medicine or a laxative, I must make it sound like a miraculous breakthrough, accidentally discovered on a farm in Denmark. Not a trick of science but a gift from Nature.

  The strategy reads: “So pure, it’s odorless. Natural, because it’s derived from trees.”

  So I’m trying to write something that’s spare and elegant and slightly magical. But really, I’m wasting my time. Because they don’t want elegant and magical. They want shit, in their own proprietary color. They want this, I’m sure of it:

  VIDEO:

  Amy Irving, star of Yentl, stands in a sun-drenched gourmet kitchen (brushed-steel appliances, cherry cabinets, an island with a granite countertop), waving her hand over dishes of prepared food items: eggs, steaks, lobster, fried chicken.

  VOICE-OVER:

  Hi. I’m Academy Award nominee Amy Irving. And I’ve got incredible news! Now, all the foods you know and love can actually lower your cholesterol by fifteen percent—guaranteed! Introducing BenCol. A revolutionary breakthrough, discovered in Nature. BenCol is a rich, creamy spread that’s sweet and delicious. Use it just like butter, and it lowers your cholesterol throughout the day. In two weeks, your cholesterol will be fifteen percent lower—or your money back.

  We called it BenCol because it’s beneficial to cholesterol. But you’ll just call it delicious.

  VIDEO:

  Amy bites into a drumstick, eyes wide with pleasure.

  SOUND EFFECT:

  Crunching chicken skin.

  SILENT SUPER:

  BenCol—for deliciously lower cholesterol.

  So that’s exactly what they want. In the old days—the eighties—this kind of advertising was referred to as “Two Cs in a K.” Which translates to: two cunts in a kitchen. Although this spot uses only one cunt, the formula is the same.

  I can’t believe this is my career: mad-scientist fake butter. And I just wonder whether in five years the FDA will discover (oops!!!) that it causes some sort of untreatable cancer or additional limb growth.

  I really wouldn
’t have such a problem with it if a normal food company were the manufacturer. I could almost buy into the whole idea if it came from Kraft or General Foods. Except this stuff comes not from the kitchens of Sara Lee but from the labs of a leading drug manufacturer. It doesn’t take quantitative focus groups in shopping malls to know that people do not want an artificial butter from the makers of America’s favorite synthetic broad-spectrum antibiotic agent.

  After Olestra (may cause anal leakage), people are a tad suspicious of products that do things that are too good to be true in the natural world.

  I tell this to the account people, and they say, “But it comes from trees!”

  To which I reply, “Yes, and so does napalm and rubber cement. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to spread them on my English muffin.”

  And poor Dim doesn’t understand my resistance. He lumbers into my office like a child with a few canine chromosomes and says, “Hey. Wanna brainstorm? Maybe we can make it rain, he he.”

  I tell him, “After my nose stops bleeding.”

  This causes his face to fall. “Oh, wow, man. Sorry. Yeah, sure.” And he backs away.

  Is it me? Have I finally rotted to the core? It’s like my passion for advertising is directly related to my hair. The more hair I lose, the more I detest my job. My life is going bald.

  Last weekend, I spent Sunday in a Starbucks writing Amtrak TV spots. I was drinking double espressos and really trying to be positive instead of enraged and spoiled. One of my problems is that I have completely disconnected those blue envelopes my paycheck arrives in with doing any actual work.