Crazy Enough

by Storm Large

  Oh, my God. Cops. Be cool.

  I tried to act sober and casual, like I’m not naked. I pretend I don’t see them. I start looking into the water as if I may have lost an earring or something through some silly accident. I’m just looking for something in the fountain and, whoa, hey! Where are my clothes? Whoops!

  Still playing deaf and dumb to their shouts, I turn to exit the scene, quickly. I’m going to have to make a run for it with my friends. As I high step through the water like a wasted baby giraffe toward freedom, however, I see my friends pointing and laughing, as they run away.

  With my clothes

  Shit. Be cool.

  The cops meet me at the edge of the fountain, one is holding out a dark shirt to cover me. I feign confusion at the cops’ approach, and casually cross my arms to hide my small boobs and say, “I’m really sorry, officers, it’s just so damn hot, you know?” They are both sweaty. One looks like a cat, but starts to turn into an owl skull. The other is so pink I can’t look at him because I see his impending stroke, heart failure, or choking death and I have an urge to comfort him. The poor man had no love in his life and would die alone.

  The peeled owl takes my arm and we start toward the police car.

  “You see, my friends dared me to jump in the fountain and it just seemed like a really good idea, I mean, all those little kids are in their underwear, sir, and . . .” High as I was, I couldn’t help catching glimpses of pinky and owly smirking at each other. They were amused, they might even think I’m funny and like me. I continue as normally as I can manage, “Seriously, if you didn’t have to work today, wouldn’t you want to jump into some water? I mean, Gawd, it’s broiling. Look at you poor boys in your heavy uniforms. Right? Don’t you agree that on a day like today?” The caged backseat of the police car yawned open like a dark medical chamber. Nonono.

  Just then, like an action figure come to life, Stitch appears, her Mohawk cutting through the crowd like a bloody shark fin. She was as bright as the sun and, I thought for a second, she had on liquid reflective black armor. She had my clothes bundled up in my leather jacket under her skinny arm.

  “Hey, officers, I’m sorry, it’s our fault. It’s her birthday and we took her clothes to play a prank on her. I promise I’ll get her out of here right now.” My birthday? God, Stitch was a deep genius.

  The cops were still trying to look serious and hard, but clearly had no interest in processing the stoned and chatty naked kid. They tell us to get out of the area and to not come back. Stitch and I promise they will have no trouble from us, sir, thank you sir, happy Fourth of July, sir, clothes are a lie, sir.

  We damn near pissed ourselves on the T back to Cambridge. I couldn’t help but think how close I came to spending the hottest day of the year in a beige, concrete holding cell packed with screaming bipolar whores, drunken hags, and bag ladies with missing eyes and inexplicable, open wounds, while I tripped my teenage brains out of my mind for lucky number seven.

  Stitch had saved the day all right, and probably my life as well.

  That wasn’t the first, nor last time that Stitch saved my stupid ass from my own stupid assness. She was a powerful creature, one I tried to emulate often. She was so cool that I couldn’t believe she was my friend.

  Later, in my twenties, I was living in San Francisco. I got a drunken message from her about some huge party in Manhattan, Tompkins Square Park. The Drunk Punk-Olympics, where, according to her message, a bunch of folks from the old crew would shotgun beers and attempt made-up sporting events. She promised a great time and absolutely guaranteed vomiting and heinous injuries, as part of the entertainment factor.

  It was great to hear from her, but I was not doing too well when I got the call. I couldn’t make it to New York, anyway, but I promised we’d see each other soon. She lived in my heart and mind as a keeper.

  Nearly ten years after our last exchange of messages, I was in New York at a bar just off Tompkins Square Park, ironically, and even more weird was the fact that the bartender was one of those girls from back in the Harvard Square days who had wanted to kick my ass, but she was happy to see me and we chatted about the good, bad, and ugly old days. “You ever hear from Stitch? Where is that woman these days?” I asked.

  My heart sank at her expression.

  “Stitch got killed.”

  Got killed?

  The bartender went on to say that there was an investigation, but she died six months ago. Supposedly, Stitch was living in London with a bad guy. He was a drug dealer and she had been apparently using heroin pretty regularly. One night, the cops were called to their flat and found her hanging by her neck in the shower. It was believed that the boyfriend had beaten her to death and hung her up to make it look like a suicide. But, nobody seemed to know the truth, and hey, junkies die all the time over nothing.

  Stitch got killed. Even writing it down now seems crazy.

  “I’ve finally figured it out!” Mom said, again, coming into the living room with a stack of books and her best friend behind her. She wanted to play me her new single, and I was lucky enough to be home to hear it. I wanted to walk out of the room, the house, the town, but I had a fresh pack of smokes and I was practicing how to not give a fuck.

  “Lovey is so amazing, I swear,” she said, putting the books on the coffee table. They were all magic books, witchcraft, Wiccan, whatnots.

  “Do tell,” I said, French inhaling.

  Mom took a breath and made her serious, I’m about to blow your mind with this information face. “Okay, you know how I always say the number 43?”

  “In German?” I muttered under my breath to my cigarette.

  “. . . I called you forty-three times; I ate forty-three thousand blueberries? I always say it and I never knew why.” Dramatic pause, looking around. “Until today.” Here’s where, in the movie, everyone perks up, listens expectantly, and the music gets all hopeful, signaling a change in everyone’s fortune. In reality, I light another smoke with the end of my last one and wonder if she has any idea how little I care. I am so far from giving a fuck about what she has to say that I don’t even see her as my mother at all. I am completely separate, staring back at what should be a grown woman, and see instead a child of four, showing me a frog that she is convinced will become a prince once her lips touch it.

  I care nothing for the woman, but start to pity the little girl.

  I was a miserable, angry teenager, sure, but I loved what little scraps I could muscle out of life. Laughing and breathing and music and sex, feeling and fighting and fucking up, I loved it all. The movie in my head was the hero’s journey, where the ugly underdog achieves the impossible, gets the girl, and punches out the bad guy everyone had thought was the good guy, and so on. Mom could only scrape a speck of happiness out of being the sickest person in the room. Like those kids who, when in a race or some kind of game, when they realize they can’t win, instead of trying anyway, they fall down on purpose and act like they hurt themselves so everyone has to stop playing and focus on them.

  I wanted so much to not care, to humiliate and belittle her. To make her see how pathetic her whole reaching for something to be so terribly wrong with her that everyone would, finally, care. I did care though. My heart broke for this tiny little blonde. She had a cold, whistling hole in her, so bottomless that no amount of drugs, hugs, or promises would ever fix her.

  “So, what did he say?” I played along.

  “Four plus three, seven. Stormy, I’m a witch.” Her friend exhaled and stared at my mom, amazed and relieved.

  “A witch.” I said.

  “Yes, sweetie, but I’m a white witch, I’ll only do good spells and love potions.”

  “Mom, the doctor told you this?”

  “Yes! He said it was my subconscious telling me that I am a magic person, and that’s why I have such a hard time fitting in!” She was so pleased with her new thing, I didn’t even have the heart to laugh out loud at her. She and her friend start
ed right into her magic books to look for love spells as I walked out of the house.

  Christ.

  I’m sure Mom thought she could cast a love spell on my dad to win him back. When that didn’t work, Mom thought it a good idea to start dating, while still living with my dad.

  That’ll show him.

  However, Mom’s dating pool was pretty shallow, occupied, mostly, by guys from halfway houses, and friends of friends from halfway houses. She met a nice idiot named Moose. I don’t mean to say folks in the halfway house/rehab/psychiatric outpatient world are idiots, but Moose sure was. I don’t know what his illness or chemical situation was, but he was appropriately massive, hence, I suppose, the name. He also had one of those annoying habits of chuckling after saying absolutely everything.

  “Oh hey there, ha-ha, you must be Stormy, huh huh huh, is your mom home?” Moose said as he stood, taking up the whole entire doorway. It seemed he was oblivious to the fact he was picking Mom up at my dad’s house. Mom trotted down the stairs and stepped in front of me as I stood slack-jawed. She was overly made-up and positively reeked of lily of the valley.

  “Moose, darling! Come in, sweetie. Come in,” she said, extra loudly. Mom wasn’t quite ready for their date, even though she’d been crowing about it all week, so she grabbed one of my dad’s beers, stuck it in Moose’s huge paw, and sent him shuffling into the living room to “hang a tick.”

  In the living room, a Patriots game was on the television, watching said game were my dad and brothers. Moose smiled around the room as he thunked his heft onto the sofa next to my brothers. “Henry, this is Moose,” she said to Dad, with soap-opera iciness. “Wait right here, Moose, darling, and I’ll be right down.”

  Even a blind half-wit would realize he should maybe wait outside at this point. But as huge a moose as Moose was, he was clearly pretty light in the wit department. The idiot cracked open the beer, then, to our collective horror, started to comment on the game, talking at our dad about football, sportsmanship, coaching, no “I” in “team,” and whatnot. My father responded in half words and long exhalations of smoke, the whole time his jaw popping in and out as he clenched his teeth. My brothers and I shot looks at each other, eyes big with disbelief. We sneaked a few looks at our father but didn’t dare look too long for fear of setting something off. The air was tight with rage. The tension froze and flattened my guts. There were so many times we thought Dad would lose it and there would be a tremendous explosion, walls would be pulverized with fists and furious roaring, but so many times the outrage and gut-ripping frustration would just stalk around us like a monster.

  When I couldn’t take any more, I took the dogs for a walk. My usual escape. I was gone a good ten minutes. When I got back, Mom, in a tiny blue dress, was snarkily saying goodnight to my father.

  “Nicetameetcha, Hen! Yeah, ha-ha,” Moose says, sounding like he had genuinely made a new friend. Then they left.

  It was clearly time for Mom to move out. Her parents were finally helping out financially, so she could get her own place. If it hit the fan, an ambulance could be called or something.

  I know my mom did not want to move out. She certainly didn’t want a divorce. She loved my father with an addict’s white-knuckled desperation. Not too terribly appealing to my dad, who just hid from her in plain sight. He was cloaked in an invisible Mom deflecting sheath and nobody could penetrate, except maybe Doug Flutie.

  My dad didn’t want a divorce either. Rather, he didn’t want to deal with having to get the ball rolling himself. He wanted Mom to go away, sure, he wanted the whole thing to go away, but she had nowhere to go, and my dad wasn’t going to send her into the street to become a ward of the state.

  Finally, Mom’s millionaire parents stepped in to help when her songs of “My Awful Children” and “Everybody’s So Mean To Me” went down some spots on the charts and she started pushing her latest single, “I’m An Abused Wife.”

  The only things my dad ever hit were walls and six-packs of Heineken.

  One day, Mom must have been emboldened by some feminist drivel on television or one of her new friends, whom she had convinced my dad was mistreating her. She strode up to my father with her jaw fixed and said, “Henny. I want a divorce.”

  Now, I know, in every wet twist of my red guts, that she hoped and prayed in a fever that my father, confronted with this finality, would say, “No, Suzi, please. No. We can work this out, let’s just talk about this. I don’t want you to go.” In her mind, she had the whole romantic scenario lined up where he would whip off his invisibility cloak, get up and hold her, rocking her gently until all was forgotten.

  “’kay,” came the reply.

  “Stormy’s going to live with me,” I heard Mom say to her friend on the phone.

  “What? Dad?” I looked at my dad, who just mouthed something, looking irritated. There was no discussion. He was so glad she was leaving, if I had to be sacrificed for his comfort, so be it. I barely was around, anyway. Because of the crazy at home, I lived in a dorm during the school year. And, besides every now and then in school or when I got suspended, Dad and I rarely saw each other or spoke. We were strangers, so he was probably happy to see me go, too. He loved me, I know, but he didn’t like me much in those days.

  Mom found a tiny two-bedroom about two miles from my dad’s house, just a bike ride, for me. She could go ahead and think I was living with her, but I planned to squat at my dad’s. He wouldn’t kick me out, or even say anything if he saw me camped on his couch. I was such a runaway cat that he never knew if I was coming or going, anyway. So the whole living-with-Mom hideousness was easily avoidable, I figured.

  My dad was so thrilled Mom was finally moving out, he volunteered John and himself as movers. The morning of moving day I took off, avoiding the house until it was over. I imagined the whole thing would be done by late afternoon, and since I missed moving day (oopsie!), I’d just move later.

  When I walked in near dusk, I found the hallway full of boxes and my brother and father standing around looking very uncomfortable in the kitchen. “What’s up?” I yelled over Henry Rollins shouting in my ears.

  They looked at each other and then at the ceiling. My dad shook his head and went to washing a coffee cup.

  Washing dishes was, and still is, very soothing to my father. Many terrible things have been successfully ignored due to a sudsy sink full of plates, pots, and pans.

  I pulled off my headphones and looked at John. “Maybe you should go check on Mom,” he said.

  I was at the top of the stairs when I heard her sobbing. To my left was the guest room where she had been staying. It was empty. To my right was my dad’s room, where the sobbing was coming from. I stepped into the bedroom. Mom? The sobbing intensified. There were clothes all over the floor with her powder-blue suitcase open and on top of them. I turned towards the sound; my dad’s bathroom door was to my left and open enough to see my mom’s bare ass.

  “Mom?” I pulled open the door.

  She was completely naked and incoherent. Her false teeth were in one hand, the other hand holding her up on the sink. Her face twisted around her mouth in a silent grimace, punctuated with snotty sobs for air. She looked like a grotesque imitation of a three-year-old.

  “Th-eh-they are being s-so-so mean to me!” she keened into the sink.

  “Mom. Get dressed, c’mon, they want to help you.” I went towards her and saw a few pills in the sink. She quickly turned on the faucet and started rinsing off her dentures, washing the pills into the drain. “Mom?”

  “I’m just everybody’s joke around here.” She put her teeth in, giving her wet face some shape again. She plopped backwards onto the toilet, clasping her hands together on her jumping knees. “I don’t wannagooo.” Her tiny wet voice spilled onto the yellow linoleum floor. She was so thin. Only in her forties, but years of cigarettes and metric tons of pharmaceutical mood fixers had aged her flesh to a tissue-thin wrap about her skeleton.

  I
t suddenly occurred to me why she was in my dad’s room naked.

  She must have asked to stay in the oldest known way women ask for things.

  I heard the television go on downstairs and my heart broke for her.

  “Fuck, Mom, it’ll be okay. C’mon, let’s go. I’ll help you. Get up.” I led her up off the toilet and to her clothing pile. She was listing and swaying a bit from whatever she took, but the crying drifted into sniffles and pouting as she pulled on some cheap elastic pants and a girly, button-down blouse with little flowers on it.

  I went to my room and packed a bag to go with her.

  From moving into the tiny two-bedroom on the dead-end street, to when I came home to find the door open, a smear of blood on the stairs and a neighbor telling me an ambulance had been called, had only been two months.

  Right after I graduated high school (read: barely squeezed my porky self through the bars), I got punched in the face by a boy I was desperately in love with and it kinda put me off sex for awhile, so I stopped taking the pill. Once I did, lo and behold, I dropped about ten pounds inside of two weeks.

  At my heaviest, during my years of running with the moose of crew, I was a bit north of 190 pounds.

  Inspired by my new visible wheels of pelvic bone under my remaining chub, I decided to go for it and get as skinny as I possibly could.

  It was the summer I turned eighteen. I hadn’t been accepted to any college or university, not that I tried terribly hard. I just declared I was taking the year off. For what? Whatever. Mostly to starve myself.

  I took a job as a maid in a hotel. Five days a week I would work in my little gray uniform with smock pockets, shaking condoms out of bedding, vacuuming, dusting, hospital cornering, and snooping through people’s toiletries. Every afternoon I would borrow a fashion magazine from the sundries shop, then hit the hotel gym. Pumping my legs for hours on the stairmaster while staring at tiny, bird-boned models. At home, over my bed and dresser was a collage of similar images. My walls were a homage to the professionally hungry. I would stare at those pictures, willing my body to shrink around my skeleton, too.