Crazy Enough

by Storm Large

  Crew, by all appearances, attracted young lesbians. Everyone’s sexuality is pretty malleable during the agony that is being teenager. However, I can say with confidence, while I was doing the sport, there were many vagitarians in those sleek and skinny boats. I, too, like girls from time to time; I consider my sexuality as opportunistically omnivorous. If it tastes good, I’ll eat it. However, I tend to go for field hockey player types.

  I rowed for weeks in early summer in upstate New York, training for the Junior Nationals. Every day, there were speed trials and long, heavy workouts. Every night, I would smoke out my dorm window and wonder what the fuck I was doing there.

  I was in a two-man boat with a superhuman girl, a solid chunk of muscle with a mop of bright blonde curls named Kara. Kara was a star athlete in just about anything she put her body behind. She had a healthy competitive sense, she wanted to win, but she primarily wanted to outdo herself and be better every time. She was the most outstanding teammate anyone could have hoped for.

  God must have been mad at her for something, though, since he threw her in that little boat with me.

  Kara was a tough little nugget, but built out of pure sunshine. She had a gruff and easy laugh, and her fine sportsmanship also made her a fount of encouraging talking-tos, bitten with her old New England vernacular. On the water, she was a teacup Clydesdale, grunting and huffing, her body and breath in perfect synch. I, on the other hand, was always hocking up gray tobacco loogies into the lake and complaining about the weather, or the breakfast, or the air, my huge feet, and so on. Kara would bolster cheer and accentuate the positive! Eliminate the negative! She would try, anyway.

  Kara should have drowned me. I totally deserved it.

  On our last day in New York, there was a regatta for placement in the Nationals. We were a shoo-in, as our times had been stellar all week. I even noticed other teams checking us out with a sliver of intimidation, nodding our way: “That’s them.” Apparently, we were the ones to beat.

  The boats you row in for crew are long, slippy blades, built for speed. They are also super lightweight and eggshell delicate. Just before the finish line, there were warning buoys to let you know you were headed into the final stretch. The buoys were a signal to pull your strongest, but to keep a good eye open because, just past the finish line, were some old dock posts. Should you overshoot the line, you might hit one and utterly demolish your shell. It had never happened before, we were assured, but they had to warn us just the same.

  Ten two-man boats lined up at the starting line. Kara was in the zone, muttering some ass-kicking mantra about winning to herself. I wanted a cigarette and suddenly had to take a shit.

  “Oars at the ready!” The ref’s voice echoed over water.

  “I gotta poop!” I laughingly whispered.

  Kara’s back cringed, “Ugh.”

  I pinched the urge back up into me.

  We were in position for a racing start. You never start a race with a full stroke. You do a racing start, which are quick, explosive half-strokes; the head oar barks them out. Then you go to three-quarters stroke, then full. The whole start takes maybe seven seconds to get to your top speed. Kara and I were in position, ready, set, 3 . . . 2 . . . 1.

  “Bang!” The starting gun cracked through the morning air and our boat launched out of the line. Muscles bulged all over Kara’s back all the way up to her bright-blonde ponytail. I pulled in synch with her, my guts up into my chest, and my breathing ragged.

  “One half! One half! One half! Three quarters! Three quarters! Pull! Fucking pull! Pull!” Kara called out the strokes. My job, since I was in the rear, was to keep an eye over my shoulder every few seconds to make sure we were going straight.

  I’m not sure if we were winning, but we were damn close. We were easily going to place and then be on our way to the next heat that would send us to the Nationals. After that, the Olympics. That’s where Kara’s head was. Unfortunately for her, my head wasn’t fixed on winning anything that day. I’m pretty sure my head was quite a distance up my own ass.

  We whooshed past the warning buoys and were in the final stretch, I glanced over my shoulder and saw the finish line, but the view from inside my rectum was, of course, obscured.

  “Wane off! We’re gonna hit a post!” I said, Kara pushed her oar up and we coasted until she looked back.

  “That’s the finish line, not the posts! We haven’t even finished! Racing start!” Kara screamed a new start but it was too late. Four boats swept past our coasting shell and we didn’t even place.

  I threw the race. Not sure if it was a conscious decision, but I disappointed my coach and teammate to the point of sickness. I ended up driving back to Boston with a different team because I couldn’t face my own. Kara and our coach drove separately.

  Looking back, the whole trying-to-fit-in thing just wasn’t me. I was good at some stuff, even great at some of the things most kids would have loved to have been able to do at all. But the competitive angle, the trying to win, the be your very best, felt like an iron maiden–type torture device. Kara and my coach were lovely, and I only encountered terrific people on this quick and clean detour, but my dark, twitching insides still felt like all I could be was a loser. So I lost.

  Though I would have loved to have skulked off into a dark comfy hole to be null and void, my crew adventure had one more stroke. I was driven to and dropped off at Harvard University for Crew Camp. I imagine it was just like one of those awesome camps my brother Henry often got to attend. I stayed at the university, woke up at six in the morning, ate breakfast, then trudged to the fancy boathouse to haul the big shells into the water. I miserably rowed every day on the Charles River with the rest of the Izod-clad moose.

  They were all really nice, and very excited for this great opportunity. I was a loser and a bad one at that. My head and mouth rang with so many who cares, I can’ts, fuck its, and why bothers, that no one wanted to even talk to me there. Coaches bristled when I was around and the other rowers barely tolerated my presence.

  So, I’d run off at night to bum change off strangers, get high, and fuck whomever, come back wasted and stinking of weed, beer, and boys.

  It didn’t take me long to get kicked out. I stayed out all one night doing coke and taking Xanax. Then, my fuck buddy, Keith, and I broke into someone’s basement to have sex and pass out. I showed up just in time for practice, only to be confronted by the head coach telling me I had to leave. The good news was the cops weren’t called.

  Bad news, my dad was.

  He swore and shook and asked me what my fucking problem was as I packed up my room. He moaned and kept saying over and over how he had fucked up as a father. We walked across the yard and out through the university gates into Harvard Square. Me with my bags slung over my back and him with a lit Viceroy pointing at me while he yelled. I tossed my bags into his car as he continued to rail on me. Some street kids I knew were looking on, one of whom I had slept with. He smirked wickedly as my dad noticed them watching us.

  “What the fuck are you looking at, you fucking freak?” He pointed at the kid. The kid’s smirk spread into an evil grin, with many terrible things to say behind it.

  “Don’t,” I said to both of them. “Dad, just go home. I’ll see you later.”

  “Fucking freak,” he said again, to everyone in earshot, as he slammed into his car with my bags in the back and took off, leaving me on the sidewalk.

  Looking back now, I guess it was odd that my father would just leave me there, with no place to stay that he knew of. Southborough was forty-five minutes away by car, and I had no car. He was well aware that I had been kicked out of camp, so I couldn’t stay at Harvard anymore. Dad was inconsolable with rage and, clearly, didn’t want to see me for awhile.

  At least that was something I could do right, I could stay away from home like a pro. As I watched him drive away, my heart broke for him. And, though I was relieved I wasn’t in the car with him right then, I knew I wou
ld make him proud of me one day. I remember clearly thinking, I’m fucked up right now, Dad, but one day, you will be proud to tell people that I’m your daughter.

  One of those fucking freaks my father hated so much was one of my dearest friends. Her name was Stitch, and she saved my life.

  I was sixteen and I still had a mind to lose. My sanity was careening on a mad rolling bike with no handlebars, and I was blindly flailing into an inevitable belly flop into the abyss. But not until my twenties. I could still go crazy my way and collect all the exclamation points life could swing at me. So I decided to go crazy, officially, a week or so after my sweet sixteen. Fuck Dr. Lovey.

  There were loads of girls in the punk-rock scene who wanted to kick my ass for one reason or another, mostly because I was so loud and uncool, but I had one or two aces on my side.

  Stitch was a super badass, had never lost a fight, and, for whatever reason, she was my friend. She looked six foot nine with her Marlboro-box-red Mohawk and greyhound lean body. She was a few years older than me, but had a job at a nightclub and her own apartment on Mission Hill. I would often crash with her in exchange for cooking spaghetti and canned white clam sauce (my specialty at the time). We would eat, drink beer, smoke tons of pot, and talk about music, fights, and whatever we dreamed for ourselves in the future.

  Stitch knew that I was going crazy, and she thought it was cool. She wanted to see it happen.

  And it did, on the Fourth of July, 1985.

  It was an established fact, or rather, someone read somewhere, that if you take acid seven times you are thereby clinically insane, so, for a pile of fucked-up kids, it was a celebration when one of us would hit lucky number seven.

  My birthday had been just a few days earlier. My sweet sixteen. Everyone had forgotten about it. Dad was up at Boarsie, Henry was at awesome camp, and John was anywhere he wanted to be. Eventually, I got a call from Henry, a hug and a joint from John, and my dad left me a present on the sofa on one of his microvisits, before he split again. It was a poster of a kitten sitting in a wine glass. He was still pissed at me for the whole crew thing.

  So on June 25, 1985, I made myself a key lime pie that I ate, by myself, while drinking a stolen bottle of dry vermouth. That night I ended up in the backyard, with my arm around my dog Rosie, hacking up bitter green foam and crying like a girl.

  A week or so later, I get a few hits of acid and decide to share it with Stitch. She told me about the whole clinically-insane-after-seven-trips factoid, and we were both into it. My brain was going to go bye-bye anyway, so why not help it along?

  It was the Fourth of July, and it was bloody hot. Hot like deep in a panting dog’s mouth hot. Everything in Boston looked smudged with a piss-yellow halo of hanging, soggy air. The plan was for me, Stitch, and a couple other kids to hang in Faneuil Hall to trip, scare children, beg for change, then hit Harvard Square at sunset to drink bagged 40s and watch fireworks over the Charles River. Then we could all pass out in the park. A perfect teenage day.

  Once in Faneuil Hall, the acid churning in our empty bellies, we made our way to the Christian Science Center. The CSC was a great place to have a picnic and enjoy a summer’s day if you were normal. It was also an ideal location to get all twisted on drugs, if you were a jackass punk with a middle finger for a moral compass. There was an impeccable little grassy park stretching away from a massive reflecting pool and a fountain. The park was dotted with small ornamental trees and an adorably manicured path. We parked ourselves under some rare maple tree, and went on to stare at normal people.

  We were surrounded by Ronald Reagan’s America. The clean people trying to stay all clean and look normal. Our very presence was a ringing fuck you. We were a handful of angry little turds floating in their Perrier, and we loved it.

  The drugs started to tingle and shake me loose from my mid-spine, into my chest and up my throat. I felt a gag rise but a swig of cold Coke knocked it back down. When that wild juice starts kicking open your spackled brain holes, there isn’t a lot of nuance to your thinking. There are those fleeting sweet and terrible moments where you think that you may not come back from this trip.

  The visuals swim and expand. The first thing you notice is how utterly repulsive some humans look. Facial features get blown way out of proportion, babies look like mewling larvae, and any woman with makeup on was a greasy horrible clown whore that eats raw bacon with her huge clawed hands.

  Whoa, come back, okay.

  The giggles kick in. Giddy, nervous snickering that gives way to hysterical, total, pee-leaking, laughter. Like a crazy bag of tickle bugs bust open in my chest. I would laugh at anything and everything. Cancer? Child prostitution? A five-year-old with no arms or legs turning tricks to pay for chemo? Hilarious!

  Reality vaulted from under my feet, and the world became a swimming, sweaty cartoon. Trying to suppress the maniacal giggling, I started going off on my friends. “It is so fucking hot, you guys. Why the fuck are we wearing so many damn clothes?”

  We all had on studded leather motorcycle jackets and army boots. I had on a torn-up black thermal shirt and army pants. It was very important you wore the required punk-rock attire, the grubbier and more torn up, the better. But, on such a muggy hot day, it was, as they say in Boston, re-tahded. We were walking around under heaps of unnecessary fabric, growing heavier by the minute in the heat. It was completely ridiculous. I suddenly felt a bolt of truth, logic, clear and unarguable, blast to the surface. I leveled my wide-pupiled gaze to my fellow revelers and spoke my truth: “Clothes are a lie.”

  It occurred to me that our outfits, everyone’s outfits, were just costumes declaring wordlessly to the world who and what we were; who and what we would and wouldn’t do, what we listened to. It was like waving our own little flag for our own little fucked up country, but underneath it all we were the same! Smooth and simple, scared and yearning little meat tubes full of poop, hopes, and fears and now, most important, we were all, collectively as one, fucking unbearably hot. Sweating like hot dogs in our stupid, societally appointed declarations of identity! I say, fuck that! Say it with me!

  “Clothes are a lie!” My friends laughed, repeating my battle cry. I tore off my jacket, flopped onto my butt in the grass to yank off my boots. I looked at my partners to join me. No? No one? Really? I went to unclip my studded belt, smiling, “C’mon you guys. Let’s do this!”

  “Clothes are a lie!” They were now crowing and laughing but staying totally dressed. I yanked open my belt with a ta-da! And they cheered. I knew I was going to be on my own in this, but I was high, on fire, and diamond-hard committed.

  There’s always that one standout moment, good or bad, in every acid trip, that one recalls forever, and right now it was mine.

  And it was time for my pants to come off.

  I was so high everything made sense. I was Susan B. fucking Anthony, Iggy Pop, and Patti Smith. I was Bill Murray when he gives that awesome speech in Stripes, and later, he gives a similar speech in Meatballs, when he gets everyone to chant, “It just doesn’t matter! It just doesn’t matter!” I was a liberator. I was taking off my clothes consciously. I was stripping for freedom, throwing off the shackles of society, and peeling away my own teenaged ego. It was my insane-dependence day!!!

  “Nice underpants,” Stitch guffawed.

  Uh-oh.

  Because of my mother’s literal and figurative absence, nobody ever took me shopping for clothes, certainly not for underwear, so I had on threadbare, butter-yellow little kid underwear with light blue baby turtles all over the butt. I’d had them since I was eleven. Not terribly punk rock.

  I soldiered on; I was on a mission. Self-consciousness was for those nine-to-five slaves with clean fingernails and love lives. I was free and there was no going back. Besides, I’m already mostly naked and I don’t wanna look like an asshole. I was officially crazy and committed.

  I start to notice other people in the park, the clean normal people, I notice them noticing me.
It’s scary and wonderful. As soon as I peel off my sticky shirt, I hear the unmistakable shrill mom voices calling to their kids. Someone yelled, “Oh, my Gawd, what is she doing?”

  I yell, once more, triumphantly, “Clothes are a lie!” My friends cheered, sounding like a throng, a stadium of adoring fans, and I am winning. Arms pumping skyward, I go bounding straight into the reflecting pool, singing “Flight of the Valkyries.”

  In case you didn’t know, running naked in public can really heighten a trip.

  I could actually feel the attention, shocked eyes, glued all over my every pore and crevice. The fatty air felt like a thing that slid past me. I was very aware of my bones jostling in my wet body meat. The water ahead of me shimmered with spirits. Was I there yet? Am I doing this? Images were all stop-motion photography of shuffling medicine men in huge skull masks in a conga line, the concrete lip of the reflecting pool looked like the rim of a massive sandpaper toilet.

  Sailing over the lip of the pool I plunged into the water and splooshed about six big strides into it. The water was knee deep, scummy, and spit hot.

  Suddenly, I snapped back, momentarily sober. My bare feet slipped and squashed, and I felt warm old pennies in the slime.

  I stood still for a moment in the foul, bleach-scented tea and thought, What if the Christians put sulfuric, flesh-eating acid in this fountain to keep people out? Oh, my God. My legs. Am I gonna clack out of here on bleached and exposed femurs?

  I kept looking down to check if my skin was bubbling and foaming. No. I check again. I start to giggle. Shit.

  Acid? Acid? I reach down to touch check. Whoa, is that guy gonna drive into the fountain?

  I focused my eyes best I could. About fifty feet in front of me on the other side of the pool, two big, loud men jump out of their dark car pointing and shouting at me to come outta they-ah.