by Storm Large
R.J. was a huge black skinhead. He was six foot three and so mountainously muscled that you could almost hear his crisp white undershirts whining at the strain of holding him all in. I know most skinheads espouse some racist leanings, but R.J. didn’t care. He liked the clothes. “I like to look clean,” he’d say. We never got it on; our brief but colorful friendship was during my sexless, pre-hot-sauce era. Even though we were strictly friends, he called me “the Goddess.” I loved it. Plus, he made me feel small.
One evening we were walking arm in arm, laughing at something or other when some skinny guy walking by, spat at our feet, and said, “Fucking nigger lover.” And kept walking.
“What? What fucking year is it?” I yelled, and started to turn around. R.J. held my arm tight, and turned me back forward.
“Nah, nah, fuck that guy. I’m walking with the Goddess.” He later said he knew the guy and not to worry about it, so it was forgotten, until weeks later.
“It’s R.J., Goddess! Can I come up?” his voice crackled through the intercom.
“Sure!” I buzzed him in, and he stumbled through the door panting and laughing.
“Oh, my God . . .” He could barely catch his breath from his laughing. He leaned his long, heavy body against my door and laughed.
“What . . . what?” I started to giggle, too. He leaned over, shaking his head. He propped himself up on his knees, his face stretched around his joker mouth. He could barely talk.
“You, you remember that, that dude? Oh my gaw . . .”
“Who, what dude?”
“The dude . . . The . . . guy said ‘nigger lover’, that skinny dude.” He leaned his heft against the door, nearly composing himself, panting.
“Yeah, yeah . . . Come on, R.J.! Whahappened?” I leaned over, too, and put my hand on his shoulder. The laughter, at that point, was just making more of itself. No way was it going to be this funny. “Sorry . . . uh . . . man, so, I seen him down by Tompkins an’ he starts talking shit, and, so, I hit him right?” More laughter. “And . . . and . . . oh, my GAW! I guess I did it too hard . . . cause . . . cause . . .”
“Come on, you’re killin’ me, man!” I laughed.
“His eye came out!” Tears streaming down his face, he pretty much “bwaaa-haw-hawed” at the floor. I felt my face drop in an instant.
“His eye . . . ?”
“C-came out! Oh, my god . . . and . . . and . . .”
I stood up straight, trying to imagine what else will he think is funny, and how the fuck can you punch someone’s eye out? “Eyeballs are big, man! It was like . . .” He made a squishy noise and gestured his hand to one of his sockets, suggesting something the size of a wet plum burst from the guy’s skull. I couldn’t swallow. “Can I crash here tonight? It just happened.” He was finally calming down but still wore a huge, dopey smile.
“Of course, sweetie.”
“I gotta wash my hands. Thanks, Goddess! Oh, my gaw . . .” He shuffled into my bathroom and I heard him lose it again over the running water.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his story was not funny at all, but I let him sleep on the floor next to my bed. In the morning we had pierogi at the little Russian café on my corner, said “See you later” to each other. I don’t think I saw him at all after that.
“Emergency phone call for Storm Large. Storm Large, please call the admissions office. Emergency phone call,” crackled the intercom in school. I was in the library, in the basement of the academy, brushing up my Shakespeare, and jerking off.
Mom. Shit.
She must be dead again.
I hadn’t talked to the Banks since they had encouraged me to not be around them anymore, so I was surprised when the receptionist in the admissions office told me to call my grandmother.
“Your mother’s in New York. You should see her,” said Mrs. Banks.
“What’s she doing here?”
“I had her hospitalized at (insert name of famous mental hospital) and signed her up for electroshock therapy,” she said.
What? “Um . . . I’m sorry . . . what did you say, Grandmother?”
“I signed your mother up for electroshock therapy. ECT. They say they’re getting great results with it, and your mother says that it’s what they recommend since they’ve finally figured it out; they know what’s wrong.”
“You are out of your fucking mind. You are going to let your daughter fry . . .”
“Don’t you talk to me like that, young lady. The doctor said . . .”
“Fuck the doctor and fuck you.”
Click.
My brothers and I always felt that the Banks blamed us for Mom’s troubles. But the fact that Grandmother Banks signed Mom up for some draconian, head-frying treatment wiped away any guilt associated with them. I didn’t know much about ECT then and I still don’t, but in my mind it was like the electrical version of blood-letting.
It killed me, a little, to think of my mother’s childlike body being strapped down with wide canvas belts, to have God knows how many volts of juice shot through her, popping and sizzling through her sad little melon. Her five foot two body arching rigid, jumping against the restraints, choking, and making spit bubbles around a rubber mouth guard.
She was in the hospital in New York for a few weeks, but I never went to visit. I had told her, and everyone, long ago, that I would never set foot in any hospital for any Mom reason ever again. I was doing well on my own. I had stumbled, and was still lost, but I was away from her, and the me that had started acting like her. I wasn’t about to have her sudden proximity suck me back into her movie.
I stuffed all the guilt and fear into a corner and let New York drown out the rest.
My brother John did go see her. He later told me he was glad I didn’t. He described it as though he was sitting with an old fuzzy grape someone had taught how to mumble.
As we went into final exams, it started to hit me that I was going to have to go home, as there were no prospects for me in New York. I was pretty sure I sucked eggs at acting in everyone’s opinion, and the only singing people wanted me to do was music that sucked eggs, in my opinion.
Final exams at the academy were, naturally, performances. My music final was to sing “Bali Ha’i,” from South Pacific: A low, sad promise of a faraway land you could escape to. A siren call to leave your shitty life and languish in orchid-scented sunshine. My class had to get up one at a time and sing their bit, get their grade, and sit down to watch the rest. As my fellow singers got up one by one to perform, the combination of their maudlin music and the growing knot in my chest about leaving New York started to get to me.
As my turn was approaching, I had to run into the bathroom several times to splash water on my face and slap myself, to stop welling up like a girl. Crying completely cuts your vocal range in half, and if I was going to drag my sorry ass back to Southborough a loser again, I was at least going to be a loser with her very first run of straight As.
My turn. I stood at the piano. “Mos’ people live on a lonely island . . .” I began. So far so good, I’m not sucking. Close your eyes, breathe, all good, you got this. “Caught in da middle of a foggy sea . . .” My dad just wants me to do well. I want to make him proud one day, and he loves this song. “Mos’ people long for another island, one dat they know they would like, to be . . .” The tears started. That winging ache in the back of my throat stretched around to my lips and water shimmered across my lower lids.
Fuck. Keep your eyes closed.
“Bali Haaaiii will call you . . .”
I managed to hold in my tears until the very last Bali Ha’i, and then a single tear traced down my cheek. Perfect, I thought . . . dramatic, yet controlled. I opened my eyes to see half my class weeping and my music teacher rising from his seat at the piano, eyes shining, to bang his hands together at me, heaving, “Yes. YES!” I promptly lost it and fled from the room.
A plus.
My acting final was an intere
sting piece in which I played the dead sister to a girl conflicted about life, death, and the drama that unfolds between the two. I was the singing narrator, the invisible observer slash commentator. I got a stunning final grade and wild applause.
Mom, who had been released from the famous shock-therapy hospital just in time to make a spectacle of herself at my graduation, was in the front row of the small theater. She shot up out of her seat at the precise moment when the show was about to end, yet
her sudden lurch upward would snap a few necks in her direction. Just as my lungs were expelling the final moments of sound in the show, the big finish, the closer, all eyes and hearts on me, the dead girl . . . my mom managed to scream “That’s my baby girl! ” before falling onto the lap of another parent, one tit in her hand, “Whooop! Oh, heavens!”
The academy’s graduation ceremony was in a nice, cushy theater in the West Forties. Graduates would walk up on stage, people would clap and nod, diplomas handed out, then the newly anointed degree holder would walk the rest of the way across the stage, pageant-waving. That one trip across the boards would be many of our first, and most of our last, footfall on any Broadway stage.
I wore an expensive, sequined minidress my aunt Bitsy had bought me as a graduation present, but my hair was in a wet ponytail and I barely had time to put on makeup in the cab uptown. My name was called; there was respectable applause and nodding from my classmates and those in attendance. I walked across the stage, chubby, pale, and sparkling. In my head, I looked like a homeless person who had stolen a dress from a showgirl to wear to the unemployment office. I took the diploma from the school president, thanked her, and smiled. People clapped. As I walked the rest of the length of stage, I heard my mom howling again from the wings, “Yaaay, Stormee! Whooops! Oh . . . ex-cuse me! Oh! That’s my baby girl!”
She fell again outside the theater.
While she was talking very loudly to my classmate who had helped her up, I hugged my dad. “Dad. Mom is, she’s fucking . . .”
“Taking over? Yeah, I know.” He smiled his squinty smile, crushing his cigarette with a twist of his foot.
We looked at each other and, in a moment, I completely understood my father. He knew all too well the madness and sadness I was running from. I was too sensitive to fashion myself with an invisibility cloak, or use the locked box of bad feelings trick. That’s why he let me run. There were many sleepless nights for my dad, wondering if the phone would ring and it would be me in the ER instead of his crazy wife. However, even though I scared the crap out of him, he let me run because it was the only thing I could do. He would have run if his conscience had allowed it. His insides were elsewhere, surely, but his person stayed, numb and tethered, with a vow to protect and love and all the hogwash that comes with the traditionally ingrained, Episcopalian, Baby Boomer mind.
As much purposeful fucking up as I had done, I always swore that, one day, I would make him proud. And in that moment, I realized he always had been; he was just waiting for me to be proud of myself. I had astonishingly lived, schooled, and worked in New York City, on my own, and not only hadn’t died, I actually had done all right.
I was twenty-two years old.
Heroin in twenty pages.
Or, confessions of the most terriblest junkie ever.
I had no good reason to move to San Francisco, other than my buddy was driving across country to go to school there and wanted help driving and some company. There is no better way to get yourself to hate another person or get them to hate you, than to stick yourselves in a packed Honda Civic to hurtle yourselves a few thousand miles for several days. But it was a free ride, I had a place to crash in this new, uncharted city, and it was the farthest point I could drive to, away from almost every stupid mistake I ever made, without needing a passport.
Two days before we left, I packed two Hefty bags full of clothes and belongings, and went into the living room to sit with my dad. “I’m not coming back, Pop,” I said to the television we were both watching.
“I kinda figured.” He sighed, and handed me a small box. Inside was a gold St. Christopher, inscribed on the back, “Bali Ha’i.”
Now, my family isn’t religious, but we were firm believers in St. Chris.
When traveling, one should always have a St. Christopher around one’s neck, on their person, or, at least, in the vehicle. He is the patron saint of safe travel because, as my grandmother, Neeny, would tell it, “He spirited the baby Jesus up onto his shoulder, and forged a raging river.”
The drive to San Francisco took three days, during which I made a mental list of priorities.
Stop eating again.
Get laid.
Find an agent.
One was easy enough, as I had no money or job prospects. Two was also pretty easy, as a new girl in town is almost as hot as one that’s moving away. The third one was tricky, though; in my estimation, the only pretty I was, was pretty chubby. So I’d stop eating, get a job, find someone to screw, then find an agent.
Priorities.
I got dropped off on Dolores Street and met my new roommates—a couple of trust-fund fashion brats from New York who would screw all day, hide out in their darkened bedroom, and go, almost daily, to Western Union to pick up scads of cash wired to them from one or both of their parents.
Right around the time I started looking for a new place to live, I had fucked, roughly, twelve guys in a little over a month and took a meeting with the agent in town who had the biggest ad in the yellow pages.
“Well, you’re pretty,” he said after looking at my headshots and résumé.
On the wall of his small Market Street office were headshots of, supposedly, his clients. One I thought looked like a guy from a Fritos ad. “I mean, you have a very pretty face.”
Slumping in my chair, trying to look hungry, I sucked in my gut and bit the insides of my cheeks to fake some bone structure. “See, the thing is, you’re kind of big.”
“I lose weight really fast, I just had to gain some weight, recently, because my doctor told me, well, I was, you know, anorexic,” I said, a little too loud.
“We don’t want you unhealthy, Storm.” The “we” he was referring to, I assumed, were all the pretty people in the headshots. “And, besides, it’s not your weight I’m referring to. You are bigger than most male actors. Do you think Tom Cruise wants to get up on an apple crate to kiss you?” My cheeks popped out from between my molars as I laughed. I imagined Tom Cruise as a pocket-sized Pez dispenser person.
“Is he really that little?” I chuckled. The agent didn’t even smile.
“No. You are that big.” Ah. He swiveled his chair to face out his window. “Really, all I can see for you is if, I don’t know, someone is looking for a warrior woman who rides in on a zebra to kill the men.”
“Is there anything like that right now?”
“No,” he said in a way that sounded like goodbye.
Xena was still a few years away and across the international dateline.
As I left the agent’s office I saw a sign in the elevator that read, “$500 a week!!” I followed it up and discovered that I could put my acting degree to good use by selling people subscriptions to the San Francisco Chronicle on the phone.
I didn’t take any other meetings, or even look into other agencies. But why should I? He said exactly what my head was saying to me. He and his gorgeous, multiheadshot wall said “You’re big,” but he meant, “You’re nothing, you won’t go anywhere, you are fat and ugly and stupid and . . .” I already knew that to be so. Even though I would never be successful, at least I wouldn’t be wrong.
Then I met Billy the genius.
He looked like Lenny Bruce, smoked unfiltered cigarettes, and was the best guitar player in the world. I knew this because he said so, and he was a genius. He was so amazing that he stayed in his room all day tracking his intricate guitar music, and never played in front of people, because he knew he’d blow their minds.
He was brilliant and haunted, and he wanted to hang out with me! An amazing haunted genius wanted my company? I must not be that fat, ugly, stupid, or suck that bad after all.
When he admitted to me that he had gotten himself addicted to heroin, accidentally, well, I was so honored. I decided to help him. He saw me as sweet, naïve, and lovely, so I figured the best way to get him off smack was to show him how ugly it was.
By doing it myself.
A lot.
I sure showed him, because in no time we were bickering over lumps of black tar heroin in his stinking flat. I was blotchy and swollen and scared to leave. But I wasn’t a junkie. I was in love.
Heroin is a sneaky, sneaky bitch.
She’s like this mysterious girl you meet at a party, everyone is intrigued by her, but she only wants to talk to you. She lights up when she sees you and pulls you into an intimate exchange. She is achingly beautiful, strange, and, as you get closer to her, you find she has a fascinating dark past. She makes you feel loved and safe and untouchable. Special.
The more you go to her, however, she starts to go a little gray. She doesn’t light up anymore when she sees you, and the harder you try to bring back that light, the colder and more distant she gets. Soon you can tell she’s sick of you and your whining, she obviously wants to be somewhere else, with someone, anyone else, someone more interesting, stronger, and not so fucking needy.
I was a terrible addict. When I say “terrible,” I don’t mean I was a super hard-core, shooting up in my eyeballs, trick-turning, gold-tooth-selling junkie, I mean to say I was a loser among real addicts. I could still sort of eat, I kept my apartment, and, though I called in “sick” a lot, I never lost my job.
I never shot up. I’d cook the tar (called “chiva”) in a spoon with water as if I was, but instead I would just snort the hot, dirty liquid with a straw or a broken pen. The shit was nasty, too. Chiva tasted like a combination of Easter-egg dye, coppery blood, and fresh throw up. I would gag and heave and throw up every single time I used, but I never officially ODed. My heart never stopped and I never went to the ER to get the adrenaline shot. Suffice to say, I was not a real junkie. Real junkies are always almost dying, constantly. I was light-years from being a hardcore addict. I only got addicted as a sad side effect of trying to get my real junkie boyfriend to love me.