Crazy Enough

by Storm Large

  It finally did.

  In studying to be an anorexic, I noticed some of the models weren’t particularly pretty, but they were nearly void of flesh. Angular and feline, I imagined they were probably invited to parties every night and given cocaine to be kept upright. One of the big lessons I got from my schooling, at that point, was, if you were beautiful, someone would love you. It made perfect sense.

  Step one: Stop eating. During that first summer out of St. Mark’s, I figured out how to stop eating by taking trucker speed and smoking Camel Lights. I could get away with one piece of dry toast and a half of a honeydew melon every day. So what if my hair was falling out? The Portuguese ladies I worked with at the hotel yelled at me over their lunches. “You too skinny, Tormenta, you gon’ get sick!” I loved it. I was so thin people were worried? Cool!

  Dad was in New Hampshire all summer, again, but when he came home for his weekly check-in, I noticed him acting funny around me. He then came home a little more often. He’d make food and put it in front of me, or bring me greasy beach-vendor food from the water park and stare at me while I barely touched it.

  He wants you to stay fat so nobody will want you.

  It was challenging to not eat around him under those circumstances as he would get angry when I said, “I’m on a diet, Dad, I can’t eat this stuff.” Or, “I already ate, Pop, I’ll eat it later . . .” Though I hadn’t been given any free cocaine or partied with any rock stars yet, one thing was clear: the skinny thing was working.

  One morning my dad woke me up. “You going to work today?” I was confused as to why he was home, let alone in my room. I had an alarm clock, after all, and of course I was going to work. The condoms and fashion models were waiting for me. Then I realized I was wet. Or my bed was wet . . . warm . . . is the window . . . ?

  “Are you okay, sweetie?” he finally asked, waking me up from my delirium.

  “Agh can’t move, Da.” My voice sounded like I had a duck’s egg in my throat, and my throat felt like a hot football full of boar bristles.

  “Okay, well, I’ll tell your work you’re staying home again today.”

  “Agahhhn?” I gurgled.

  “He said you didn’t show up yesterday, either. I only came down from Boarsie for a minute and thought it was strange that your car was here, and . . .”

  I was floating in a thick mist of foam rubber and salted pretzels ripped open and steaming. But I’m face down in the grass . . . so tired . . . just if I could roll over and . . .

  “. . . and you better goddamn start eating something god dammit you’re goddamned emaciated.” He left my room. Later I heard his car pull out to head back north.

  I had blacked out, sweating, and had not moved for thirty-six hours.

  Lying in my damp, fever sheets, I stared at Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and other impossibly beautiful creatures in my collage of anorexploitation over my bed. Thumbtacked among the images was a homemade food chart. What I ate, versus how long I worked out. There were Magic Markered stars next to most days, but there were a few with angry scrawl, “BAD!” “FAT!” and “YOU SUCK!” next to the days where I ate more than five hundred calories.

  Swimming in and out of consciousness, I wondered faintly if I had overdone it. It gave me a strange contentment, thinking that maybe I had. I pinched around my tummy at the skin there, bruised from constantly pinching-an-inch . . .

  You are still fat and ugly . . . and alone.

  Mom was thrilled. She was staying in a halfway house in the next town, and somehow heard that I was sick and not eating. Perfect for her because I wouldn’t be able to get away in my weakened state. She would have me all to herself for some horrendous talks of menstruation and tit-grabbing awfulness. Any illness of mine was better than hers because, I guess, she could throw on her Mom cape and save the day.

  When I was little, I used to get these things called “tummy attacks.” Whenever Mom would be home from the hospital, I would get horrific stomach cramps and tremors. I would sit, crumpled on the toilet and scream into my sleeve from the shocking pain. Mom would always swoop in with medicine and hugs and trips to the doctor. She would fill the house with loud, dramatic phone calls to friends about how worried she was, and “What is a mother to do?”

  It was hinted that maybe some chemical or other was getting put in my food to create some drama (intestinally for me, maternally for her). There is no proof of that, but it could very well be that the stress of her comings, goings, staying and staying away, made us all sick. John had horrible migraines and Henry also suffered terrible stomach ailments around that time.

  I had mononucleosis, strep throat, and was completely anemic.

  “Have you been eating?” asked the doctor, looking at me over his reading glasses, holding the paper with my blood-test results.

  “NO. She’s gone CRAZY on a diet and NEVER eats.” Mom strained her mother muscles at the doctor, flapping her mom cape.

  “Mom. You don’t live with me. I eat all the time.” To the doctor, “I eat all the time.”

  “I’m your mother and your mother KNOWS.”

  “Christ.”

  “Well, Storm, you are severely anemic and fairly underweight. I don’t see you getting better anytime soon unless you start eating a little . . . um . . . more.” As he looked at me, Mom swiveled in her seat toward me with a dancer’s flourish. Now they were both staring at me. He stared like a doctor, she, like someone trying to win an awkwardly-imitate-somebody-weird contest.

  “And YOU will DO what the doctor says, young lady. I’ll make sure she eats today, I’ll take her straight to Friendly’s.” My stomach scrunched up at that. Friendly’s, Mom’s favorite public-humiliation theater. Tampons and French fries and alters OH MY!

  Christ.

  The doctor didn’t react to my mom, he kept his eyes fixed on me, so I stared right back at him. “And, Storm, if I hear of you not eating, or of you losing any more weight, I will have you hospitalized, you will be hooked up to an IV and force-fed. Do you understand me?”

  HOSPITALIZED? I really am skinny.

  I tried not to smile.

  “Yes, absolutely, Doctor.” I was already planning what to wear into the city as soon as I could stand up without feeling faint. Cutoff jeans, combat boots, and a baggy Black Flag T-shirt. I wanted to see if anyone noticed how sick I was.

  Not only did EVERYONE notice, but I actually got flirted with as if I were a completely new girl! No one had seen me in months, since I was working forty hours a week, and obsessively killing myself slowly with pictures of skeletal teenagers and trucker speed.

  To this very day, I have never had more boys hit on me than I did while I was Ribs McGee . . . I looked like a great dane in a leather jacket, but boys strutted around me like black-clad pigeons, making up excuses to talk to me.

  The only one who didn’t like it was Keith. He hugged me hello then smirked, “Dude. You feel like a xylophone.”

  I can’t say if it was my newfound scrawniness that suddenly made me the prettiest pony in the paddock, or if it had something to do with being so disastrously weakened by caloric deficit, that I was, for once, quiet. I was so tapped I could hardly talk, let alone get up, so I guess it made me really easy to catch or knock over.

  My guitar player, Scotty, tells me that skinny, insecure chicks are great because they’re easier to nip off from the rest of the herd, they tire quickly, and need to lie down a lot.

  I was finally skinny, but had no energy to have sex with anybody. I got some free cocaine from horny guys, but that just led to erection-less make-out sessions.

  Then there was that weird hole in my face. It looked like a scrape, but stayed wet, it wouldn’t scab over. And I, for the life of me, couldn’t figure out what it was.

  “Impetigo,” the doctor said flatly.

  “Whaff’s dat?” I said, my mouth full of banana. I wanted him to see me eating so as not to raise suspicion at my unchanged weight PLUS a weeping
sore on my cheek. It was a genius idea, I thought, until he prescribed an antibiotic I had to take WITH FOOD, as it blared from its label.

  Pretty tricky, that doctor. I basically had strep throat, on my face, weighed around 135 pounds, and was finally getting tired of being sick all the time when the topic of acting school came up.

  Suddenly, Grandmother Banks took an interest in my future, and suggested I audition for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. I don’t know how she was connected there, but I sent in an application, interviewed, did two monologues, and sang a song. I moved to New York City and started school in the spring of 1989.

  From St. Mark’s School to St. Mark’s Place.

  The American Academy of Dramatic Arts was a much better situation than St. Mark’s. It was a place, I thought, where I could turn my natural tendencies and abilities into viable skills. Where loud and annoying were the raw materials for brilliant and hilarious! I also assumed that I would fit in there, that the school would be full of folks like me: loud, flamboyant, slutty, lonely, and weird . . . hinging on nuts. I was also going to be in New York City! Finally and officially, living away from home and all the headaches that haunted it.

  AADA was, and still is, a great acting school. They taught me, in no time at all, that I was a horrible actor, one; two, I hated most other actors; and three, though I loved attention, I hated acting in general. Plus, I found, just like at any school before, there was an unwritten, yet obvious, law of beauty favoritism. My first year in New York, the weight came shuffling back to live all over me, save for my boobs and butt, earning me a few barbs of “ugly fat chick,” “fat pig,” and my favorite, “You have such a pretty face . . . ,” then trailing off, suggesting the sad and sorry business going on inside my stretchy black clothes made me a blight on the eyes.

  For the first few weeks in New York I slept on a cot in the Banks dining room. They had a sweet one-bedroom apartment on Sutton Place, very posh. But I was not their favorite person, I could tell. I didn’t even resemble the kind of person they could even like a teeny little bit. They were only in New York half the week, though, so I tried to stay out of their way, and be as quiet as possible when they were there. I even tried to earn my keep by cooking for them, but my welcome quickly wore out. Grandfather Banks did not care much for my cooking, or me. So I split. I found a place to stay on East 36th Street, close to school. And I found a place where I fit in that was not so close to school; in truth, it was worlds away.

  Nobody asked for IDs downtown, so I could go anywhere. There was no shortage of filthy good time hangs in Alphabet City, and The Alcatraz was my favorite. It was a rock ’n’ roll bar on the corner of St. Mark’s Place and Avenue A. The beautiful bartender there, Raff, became my best friend in New York, and she remains so to this day. Raff was also the raven-haired “Queen Vixen,” one of the singers in The Cycle Sluts From Hell, a female-fronted metal band that ruled the Lower East Side. Their hit single was “I Wish You Were a Beer,” and they toured with Motorhead. I couldn’t believe she was my friend. Raff and I would drink and smoke and fuck and snort whatever came across our faces. There were loud rock shows and sticky strip clubs, drag queens and dealers, bathroom three-ways and bar fights.

  I had found my people.

  That wasn’t the case at school. While enjoying my lowlife, rock ’n’ roll dirtbaggery, I started to feel out of place in the sensitive, bookish atmosphere of school. I wasn’t any good at acting, nor did I have the slightest clue how to improve. The only acting I was any good at was my haughty who-gives-a-fuckness. My teachers there were some of the best, and I honestly wanted to do better, to be better, but I didn’t get it. Despite all my bravado, I envied my classmates, those serious, gazelle-bodied actresses, clip-clopping their dainty golden hooves through the halls. I felt like a big, loud jackass among them.

  But I could sing my big, loud jackass off, and that was the only thing going for me at the Academy. Someone at school told me that I was built for Broadway. I assumed that meant fat, but a good singer.

  In 1989, though, the biggest shows were Phantom of the Opera, Cats, and Les Miserables, and boooring! The higher ups at school thought me a perfect candidate for that world. I could think of nothing more ridiculous. I wanted to do well at school, and make my dad proud, but, just like with crew, I felt myself being touted for being amazing at something I hated.

  Suffice to say, I was not buying the whole Broadway angle. I wanted to be Joey Ramone, not Judy Garland. To my mind, those Broadway musicals were huge, garish pageants of lame. They were way too clean, pretty, and controlled with tidy, wind-up endings. And, from what I could tell, those singers weren’t getting to do coke and fuck on pool tables, so it clearly wasn’t for me.

  Sadly, neither was being in a rock band. It never even occurred to me to try. Even though I was pretending to be all rock ’n’ roll, slamming shots and lines, crawling through the rock ’n’ roll landscape of Alphabet City, I never considered myself worthy of being in a band. You had to be hot to be in a band. I wasn’t hot or cool, or at-death’s-door skinny, like all the beautifully wasted denizens of The Cat Club and CBGB were.

  But in my new, yet familiar, community of misanthropes and freaks downtown, I settled easily into becoming completely fucked up again. I drank until four in the morning, did blow to keep going, and would have to sweat through my scenes and schoolwork. Every Wednesday was Tommy Gunn’s night at Cat Club, where Raff’s band played along with other punk and glam-rock bands. Some were god-awful, but everybody rules when everybody’s wasted, so it was always a good time. Every Sunday was rock ’n’ roll church at the Limelight, a rock club housed in a real church. Raff and I would sit in the attic VIP lounge under the spires, and laugh at the models and eyeliner pirates who would be keeling over from drink and AquaNet.

  In the late eighties, early nineties, there was a trashy, junkie glam thing going on. The rock ’n’ roll clubs were crawling with big, sprayed hair and torn-up tight black rags of denim or leather. Old-school rockers, self-styled like legendary punk rockers Iggy Pop, The Ramones, then Dead Boys, Lords of the New Church, they were giving way to a new school of flashy California glam like Motley Crue, Guns N’ Roses, and LA pretty boy waste-oids. Fashionwise, it made for the perfect storm of street-hardened punk and kinda gay and fluffy. We called those boys “eyeliner pirates.” And they filled the Limelight every Sunday for our jeering entertainment, and the occasional men’s room tonsil romp.

  The VIP lounge at Limelight is where I first encountered Jägermeister and chicks.

  The first girl I ever slept with was a dangerously young, fox-faced fibber named Dizzy. Her mom called her “Kippy,” though her real name was Karen Weitz. She could smoke cigarettes with her vagina at sixteen and could swing her Lilliputian, butter-cream body into any lap, party, or club she wanted, anytime. Dizz was always on the guest list, and was as full of shit as a girl that young and that beautiful could be. I adored her. I also adored Jägermeister, but that love affair ended badly.

  “It’s herbal,” Raff cackled as we slammed cold shots of the German syrup in the dark church attic strewn with cum-soaked couches and wannabes, “It’s good for ya!”

  That was the battle cry all night as more shots would arrive at our little corner. “You want some more? It’s herbal!”

  Jägermeister. The name means “Master of the Hunt,” and they aren’t kidding. One can only assume the Germans called it that because the shit sneaks up on you and beats your brains out. The only other thing I know of that still hunts like that (besides date rapists) are Gila monsters.

  As soon as you start limping, it’s pretty much game over. Before you know it, you’re waking up naked in a Denny’s bathroom with bruised brains, a phone number on your leg, and a thank-you note on your back, both written in barbecue sauce.

  Raff was a beautiful badass. With her Cherokee cheekbones, big dark eyes, and a satin mane of long inky hair, she always looked like an album cover. Her recent ex-boyfriend was a tall, l
anky, handsome, dumb-as-a-bag-of-hammers fuckwit. Theirs was an ugly, public breakup. He hurt her, so I hated him, and wished him harm.

  A few weeks before Raff and I discovered Jäger, her dumb-fuck ex had thrown her belongings out of her fifth-floor apartment window. I got the tearful phone call and went right away to her place on Avenue B. Some of her stuff had fallen into a neighbor’s yard, so I clambered over the fence between the buildings and found her jewelry box.

  I was feeling around for her necklaces and rings in the scrubby grass when I heard a metallic click very close by.

  “What the fock you doin’ theya?” came a dry croak of a woman’s voice.

  “I’m just looking for my friend’s stuff.” I froze on the ground.

  Raff had been shining a flashlight from her yard over the fence.She called down to the voice in the dark. “My crazy ex threw my stuff out my window and some of it’s in your yard, I’m sorry we woke you up.”

  “Ya didn’t wake me, I’ve had a gun on ya for ten minutes,” she chuckled. “Youz can look in the mawning, get the fuck outta my yad now.”

  The fact that DumbFuck nearly got me killed was still fresh in my mind, weeks later, when Raff and I were hanging hard with the Master of the Hunt. We were stumbling out of a cab at her place, when she slurred, “God, every time I see that fuckin’ bike . . .” The fuckin’ bike was a motorcycle given to both Raff and DumbFuck, but he decided to keep it for himself. “I should fill the fucking tank with corn syrup, I swear.”

  “Huh? This bike here?” I asked, before horse-kicking it against the brick wall of her building. I loved making her laugh, and her cackling echoed through the concrete night world we stood in, as I bounced the motorcycle back and forth between my cowboy boot and the wall. Later, we listed all his known diseases in bold, magic markery block letters across his apartment door. Served him right for breaking her heart and staying in the same building.