Crazy Enough

by Storm Large

  So, I practiced being quiet. No fighting with my brothers. No singing any Godspell . . . quiet. When I heard she was on her way home I knew I couldn’t get too excited. I damn near chewed the inside of my mouth bloody, but there would be no “Yay you’re home!” or “Are you home forever?” or tackling hugs or stories about poop or snakes or endless streams of “I love you.”

  When she finally did get home, I was ready. I was hiding in the stairway around the corner from the kitchen, where she sat with the babysitter, Michelle. I had a big bunch of flowers, black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace, and I had drawn her a picture of a horse with a flower in its mouth.

  I had it all planned. I would walk up to her, quietly, I would give her the presents, and then I would bow, without saying a word. Yes. Then I would walk away having shown her sufficient love and yet not budged a single decibel.

  I would wait for a break in the conversation. I would not interrupt. I listened, ready to quietly pounce, or just appear.

  Suddenly I heard my mom crying. Then I heard my name.

  “Stormy hates me because I’m sick,” she whimpered between little, hitching breaths. “She hates me.”

  At the bottom of the stairs, there was a mirror painted to look like the cover of a magazine. It was red and blue and read TIME at the top, then “Man of the Year” at the bottom. From where I stood on the stairs, I could see my face in the mirror. My mouth hung open like a little o. I had never seen myself cry before, but I watched my own face crumple, listening to the accusation. I bit my lower lip. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Be quiet.

  No! How can you say that? I was already in front of her, my kid brains scolding my mouth to stay shut. I crushed the picture and the flowers in my little fists. I wanted to scream at her that I knew this whole thing was my fault and the fact that she thought I hated her was proof right there. I wanted her to know that I knew I was too loud and too much, but when I’m loud I’m just saying I love you over and over again, now being quiet you think I hate you? What am I supposed to do, Mom, don’t you know how this is killing me? But I’m five.

  All I can manage is, “I love you, Mommy.” And dissolve into snotty little-girl tears.

  Roll camera. Mom started crying, Michelle the babysitter started crying, everybody cried.

  Aaand scene.

  That was Mom’s movie. Her movies ended with all the children around the bed of the dying mother who, with her last breath and iota of strength, says the inspirational catch phrase. The children all cry because they realize, finally, what a miracle mother they had all along. Then, she tries the catch phrase again, only gets half of it out, dies, and then starts glowing.

  She lived for moments like that. Tearful goodbyes, bedside vigils, and when her kids cried over her, ka-boom. Oscar time. That was love. The only love she understood, anyway.

  It took a few years of this back and forth for me to figure it out. Shortly after that, I started to be a little glad when she was gone. And, not much later, I started to hate her guts.

  Manic depression: A mental disease that causes mood swings that range from the lows of depression to the highs of mania. More commonly known, in modern terminology, as bipolar disorder.

  The first official-sounding disease I heard in relation to my mom was manic depression. When it looked like she had an actual disease, it made it hard for me to hate her. It was frustrating, but, if she were sick, that meant she could possibly get better. The doctors knew what she had, so they had to know how to fix it, or even make it a teeny bit better at least. Right?

  Just keep her from killing herself and all of us, maybe?

  By the time I was around ten years old, though, Mom had been through a dozen hospitals, scores of doctors, specialists, and drugs by the truckload. And she was not better at all. Au contraire.

  “Your wife is chemically imbalanced,” said the doctor whose expertise was chemical imbalances. “Your wife is classically depressed,” said the depression expert. Schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, mental epilepsy, which still doesn’t even exist. She needs this drug, that drug, this or that treatment, and it will only cost another few thousand dollars . . . more.

  Meanwhile, my father had to pay for all of this with some help from his parents, as insurance didn’t automatically pay for mental-health issues during that time. When mental health was finally covered by the insurance my father had through St. Mark’s, it was highly restricted, and ran out shortly after it kicked in. My dad could barely keep up financially, and was quickly shutting down inside himself. He would lock his jaws and get through each episode, each drama, each time in relatively stoic silence until something would snap. His frustration was always felt, but only seen in flares of temper. Those were rare, but as huge and scary as a grenade going off in a Dumpster.

  “If you don’t come down here and pay what you owe us, we will have no choice but to put your wife out on the street!” shrieked a doctor on the phone one night. It was after dinner, and Dad had just cracked a beer when the call came.

  “Excuse me? You must be mistaken; I gave a check to the business office this morning after I got my wife checked in.”

  The doctor called my father a liar and continued with his threatening. Dad hit the roof. Not only had he paid, he had taken out a loan out against his life insurance policy to do it. “You better get us that money by tonight or she’s out!”

  “You put my wife out on the street and I swear to fucking God, by morning you will be crawling with lawyers!” roared my dad into the receiver before slamming it down. Not surprisingly, they did not kick her out of the hospital. They kept Mom, kept the money, and never offered an apology or an explanation for the doctor’s threatening phone call.

  That was Dad’s reality for most of my growing up, so we never blamed him for losing it now and then.

  Years later, I asked him why he didn’t share with us what was going on, why did he shoulder the whole thing and rage at the world alone. He said simply, “How do you tell a four-year-old that her mommy wants to die?”

  The hospitals weren’t all that bad. One, McLean, was downright opulent. I remember marveling at the nicely appointed rooms, decent food, and celebrity guests. When I was a teenager, visiting Mom at McLean, we went into the dining area, where she introduced me to her new best friend, Ricky. “He’s a singer, too!” she crowed at us both, one hand on my shoulder and the other on his. He was shiny and sad, with trembling hands and a thick macramé head of beaded braids. I wondered if Rick James told my Mom to call him Ricky. I somehow doubted it.

  Mom often had a new favorite person in the whole wide world that she would meet in these hospitals. When we would visit her it would go like this: “Stormy, this is my new bestest bestest friend Sheena. Her husband is a shit and so she tried to jump off of a building, but she’s not going to do that again, are you, Sheeny?” Then they would have a knowing laugh and Sheena would look at her bandaged arms and chuckle as if to say, “Yeah, I’m such a silly pants!”

  Most of my mother’s bestest bestest friends, I could tell, were lifers, either hopeless addicts or so horribly damaged that they could only find connection or community in a medical or chemical environment, and destined be locked up, somewhere, forever. Some of these new friends would want very much to sit near me or hug me in a wrong, hungry way. When those people were Mom’s new friends, I knew never to go to the restroom without my brother walking me there and waiting for me.

  Mom would collect these new favorite people because she was the princess of the ward. She was never ever as fucked up as the poor souls she was bunking with, so she was like a powerful beacon to the rejected and disenfranchised. Build them up and try to love the sick and sad out of them. Mother Teresa for maniacs. A batshit bug light. It always seemed as though she was everybody’s favorite little person in the hospital. I guess that’s why she loved it there so much.

  As glorious as McLean Hospital was, on the other end was a pit of hellish proportions. One hospital was
so bad that my father wouldn’t let us go there at all. I was much older when he told me about it, and it shocked me because I was sure there couldn’t possibly be a place more ghastly than Sadville.

  It was a doctor from Sadville who had threatened to throw my suicidal mother out in the middle of the night if my dad didn’t pay up. It came as no surprise to anyone in my family that this pit of an institution was closed. I would even hazard a guess that some of the people who were in charge back then are either behind bars or mopping up their own shit in a soggy cardboard box under a bridge somewhere in hell. For purposes of describing this particular institution without incurring any potential legal ramifications, or conjuring any demons from its ashes, we’ll call the place “Satan’s Anal Deluge-Ville,” Sadville for short.

  Sadville was a mental institution that looked exactly like you would expect a loony bin to look like had you only seen them depicted in horror films: a monolithic, gulag-type building with walls the color of yellowing chicken bone. The kind of place where, as a kid, you’d stare up at its horribleness from your tiny spot of sunshine, and you’d swear you saw thunder clouds gathering and a flock of screeching black crows or bats flapping around it.

  There was no ping-pong at Sadville.

  I remember one particular visit from when I was nine or ten, and still into visiting Mom wherever she was because I missed her so much. Dad was having a meeting with one of Mom’s doctors, or, for all we knew, having another fight over whether he had paid the bill. Either way, I’m pretty sure he was happy to miss the mess his wife was in at the moment. We were closing in on 1980, the beginning of a terrible time for Mom. There was no better evidence of how hopeless the situation was with her than when she was at Sadville. When Mom was in that hole, things were not good. The place had hardcore security (read: lockdown), as it was home for the dangerous lunatics who were generally called criminally insane. There were thick, scary doors and gigantic nurses with big arms that looked like big legs. Their even bigger legs were stuck into itchy white tights and stomped around under their square asses, barely shifting under the white uniforms. Like blocky, scowling ships, they swept through the wards, checking straps and giving Thorazine enemas.

  The supercrazies were either holed up in the never-get-out ward, or doped up within an inch of their lives in the drooling-medicated-coma ward. Mom was in another section of the hospital, where patients were free to bump into things, rage maniacally at shadows, or stare blankly at the blaring television. Let’s call it the seriously-deranged-but-not-terribly-dangerous ward or, simply, the Unwanted Relative Area.

  We had to sign in at the front desk and wait to be escorted to Mom’s floor. One of the linebacker-shaped nurses would appear like Lurch from The Addams Family, and we would follow her into the elevator and up to the proper floor. The nurse never spoke. She looked like she could flip over a car and eat the passengers, so we never spoke to her either. Once on Mom’s floor, Nursezilla would haul open three massive, medieval iron locks, then pull open the thick metal door with a ka-chunk! Out would waft the scents of stale cigarette smoke and old coffee stink. The industrial fluorescent lighting gave a constant bug-light buzzing, the television was blaring, and there was someone screaming from a locked room.

  The door opened to a long, straight hallway with patient rooms all along it. Immediately on the left was the small TV room. In the hallway were slumped a few catatonic bodies, someone in a broken wheelchair, someone leaning on the wall drawing with her finger, someone else stood swaying in the center of the hallway. I noticed her staring hard at us as we came in.

  She was very thin, but looked like she had been pretty once, with high cheekbones and wide-set eyes. Her hair was a teased blonde-gray mass that would have pouffed around her head like a wiry cloud had she not woven it into two rough braids on either side of her head with childish bows at the end. “Helga the whore” said my brain. She stood in the hallway, staring slack-jawed until she saw my brother John, when she sprang to life hopping like a toddler into a room with a squeak.

  “She has sex prawblums,” spat a fat, wall-eyed woman in front of the television.

  “Hi, Mom!” I said, and went into the common room to give her a hug. Mom was wasted.

  “Hi-, sh-shhweetie,” Mom groggily cooed back.

  The TV room was small and stuffy. There were about five patients already in there watching Donahue, taking up all the seats, so we could only visit one at a time, while the rest stayed near the door or out in the hallway. I went first, while my brother Henry leaned on the wall just inside the door awaiting his turn. Mom was rocking and wobbling in her chair so I held her hands and stood in front of her. “How are you?”

  “Shooo-ooo mush better, babe.” She swayed my hands in hers as if in a dance. “Mu-uuush better. H-hooome soon,” she sang.

  I wanted to leave so badly, run out of there. I loved my mom, but it was all so much. I knew she wasn’t as crazy as all this. She didn’t need to be here. She looked like a tiny, fucked-up, baby bunny, huddled in her chair, flanked by genuinely psychotic humans straight out of central casting. The wall-eyed schizo lady chimed in, chuckling in a slurred south Boston accent, “She’s good naow, but you shoulda seent ’er when theyz brung ’er in heeyuh.”

  With that my mom shook to her feet, swung her arm in slow motion to point at the lady. I saw bruises spreading out from under a wide bandage on her forearm.

  “Don’tchoo talk to my children!!!” She was shaking and crying as the woman cackled and snorted, all satisfied with herself on the couch. It seemed like everyone started to wake up at that point, and make some kind of crazy noise in response to the weird confrontation unfolding during Donahue.

  “Don’tchoo dare!!!” Mom wailed.

  I looked back to the doorway at my brothers. Henry started toward me. I looked at John, I wanted him to come in and intervene, too, but he wasn’t looking at me, or even aware of the medicated mayhem unfolding in the room. He was staring hard at something down the hall. He had both his hands on either side of the door, as if bracing himself. Henry and I do-si-do-ed in front of our weeping mom, so that I could get to the door and he could calm her down. He took her hands.

  “Mom,” he started.

  “She’s soo mean!” she said.

  “Sit down, Ma,” he said calmly as he got her to sit back down. Even at thirteen, Henry had a solid presence, normal and unflappable. He quieted Mom into her chair and everyone seemed to settle back into their haze-and-stare mode. Mom finally noticed my brother was holding her hands and lit up a little as he squatted in front of her, “How are you, Mom?”

  “So-ooo mush better . . . home soon . . .”

  John was still blocking the doorway, looking down the hall, his jaw set and his body stiff. I got to the door and tried to get on the other side of him but he wouldn’t budge. Before he put his hand on my shoulder to turn me to face inside the TV room again, I got a good look at what he was watching.

  Helga the whore had come back into the hallway with a slash of red lipstick on and was in a semisquat plié, knees cranked open to my brother, rubbing herself desperately with the bristles of a paddle hairbrush. John pushed me back in the room by my shoulder, and stood firm. I heard a nurse thump up the hallway to get Helga to stop. I heard little of the exchange other than Helga saying, “But he’s so beautiful!” Then she sang like a child, “Gimme ten more minutes! Gimme ten more minutes!”

  When the nurse got Helga handled, John finally let go of the door and came in. He gave Mom a quick, awkward hug and we were done.

  We were silent all the way home.

  The Seventies

  I looked just like my mom, everyone said so, but, in no time, I grew taller than her. Way taller, in fact. She was five foot two, and by my ninth birthday, I had at least three inches on her. My height, plus my big, smart-ass mouth, made people think I was much older. They also assumed I was tough. Mouthy and fisty, I had started a bit of a fighting habit that was giving me trouble in and o
ut of school. I could shoot my mouth off and back it up with a swift kick in the nuts or a wildly swung roundhouse to the head. I told teachers to go to hell and meant it. I was starting to notice things sucking, and it was ticking me off.

  The whole hospital thing was getting old. My mom had become the weakest girl that ever lived, in my opinion, and she seemed to relish the title. The world echoed with a chorus of “your poor mother,” and Mom would sing backup. She would cry and cry and stare at us all, sucking all the hope and joy out of anything in a desperate, begging need to be the most hopeless of cases, and, “Isn’t it so awful!”

  I learned how to bite holes inside my mouth, say “I don’t care,” and make no big deal about it when she would go lame. By all outward appearances, or as far as I would let any grown-up know, I was doing fine with everything, blissfully ignorant to what was going on with my mother, or stiff-upper-lipping it. I was neither. I was just big, loud, and broken. I had started to hear myself say things I didn’t mean, but couldn’t stop it. I would lie in bed and say, “Fuck you, God.” Slap my hands over my mouth only to hear it ringing in my head on a dirty loop.

  God can hear your thoughts.

  I didn’t mean it, but it played over and over, hissing like a dusty hi-fi in my head. It’s not me, but what if God can’t tell it isn’t me? I don’t really mean it!

  He hates you, too.

  God was going to see to it that I would live a miserable, lonely life for my terrible words to him. I was sure of it. It was like people spreading shitty gossip about you to a teacher or parent that wasn’t true, but nobody believed the truth, because, well . . . it is you, and you are a bad person. Bad people think bad thoughts and bad things happen to those people.

  Terrible voices were tiptoeing through my two lobes all the time. Many nights I would bite my lip and punch myself in the head to try to shut the voices up, but they would just laugh. I would also suffer paralyzing anxiety, knotted stomach cramps, and outbursts. I walked around, constantly feeling like an exposed tooth nerve, but I did everything I could to make the world at large think I was doing just fine. I was a big strong girl.