Running with Scissors Read Online Free PDF

was no house. The canvas was now clean.
    Now, my mother and I would be on our own, like in the movie Alice Doesnt Live Here Anymore or my favorite show, One Day at a Time.
    She would get better in our new Amherst apartment. I would go to my new elementary school, then junior high, then high school, then Princeton and become a doctor or the star of my own highly rated variety show.
    And our dog, Cream? She refused to move. We took her to Amherst with us, but she ran all the way back to Leverett to the old house. The new people who lived there said they’d take care of her. So even she would get a new life.
    Life would be fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal.

THE MASTURBATORIUM
     
     
     
    D
    R . F INCH LEANED BACK IN HIS RATTAN SWIVEL CHAIR AND folded his arms behind his head. My mother sat across from him on the floral love seat and I sat in the armchair between them. My mother’s razor-stubbled legs were tightly crossed. She wore leather sandals with thin straps and tapped her foot in the air nervously. She lit her third More.
    I was twelve but felt at least fourteen, my parents had been divorced for over a year and my mother was seeing Dr. Finch constantly. Not just every day, but for hours every day. And if not in person, certainly on the phone. Sometimes, like now, I would get sucked into one of their sessions. My mother felt it was important that the doctor and I get to know each other. She felt that maybe he could help me with my school troubles. The trouble being that I refused to go and she felt powerless to force me. I think it may have also distantly bothered her that I didn’t have any friends my age. Or any age, really.
    The two friends I had when we lived in the country weren’t my friends anymore. My mother had angered their mothers. So they weren’t allowed to hang around with me. I was never quite sure what my mother did to piss those mothers off. But knowing my mother, it could have been anything. As a result, I was isolated and spent all my time gazing out the window of our rented apartment and dreaming of the day when I turned thirty. Except when I was sitting in Dr. F’s office.
    “As spiritually evolved as I may indeed be,” Dr. Finch said, eyes twinkling with playfulness, “I’m still a human being. A male human being. I am still very much a man.”
    My mother blew a cloud of smoke over her head. “You are a goddamn sonofabitch,” she said. She used her teasing voice, as opposed to her disturbing let’s go to the mall in blackface voice.
    Finch laughed, his face reddening.
    “That may be,” he continued. “Men are sons of bitches. That would make you a sonofabitch, Augusten.” He looked over at me.
    “And you a bitch,” he said to my mother.
    “I’m the biggest bitch in the world,” my mother said, crushing her cigarette out in the soil of the potted jade plant on the coffee table.
    “That’s very healthy,” Finch said. “You need to be a bitch.”
    My mother’s face tightened with pride and she raised her chin slightly. “Doctor, if being a bitch is healthy, then I am the healthiest damn woman on the face of the earth.”
    Finch exploded in laughter, slapping his thighs.
    I failed to see the humor in the situation. As far as I was concerned, my mother was a bitch, period. She was a rare psychotic-confessional-poet strain of salmonella.
    “Do you actually use it?” I said, changing the subject from my mother and back to what we were talking about, namely the room in the rear of the office.
    Finch turned to me. “Absolutely. As I was saying, I am a man and I have needs.”
    I tried to understand. “Do you use it, when? Between patients?”
    Finch laughed again. “Between patients. After patients. Sometimes if a patient is particularly tedious, I will excuse myself to the Masturbatorium.” He picked up a copy of The New York Times from the low glass-topped rattan table in front of his chair. “This morning I have been reading about Golda Meier. An