Crazy Enough

by Storm Large

  “Hi! Oh my god you rocked so hard! That was awesome! I want you to tattoo me!”

  “Hi. Um. What?” James was suddenly there and flanked me, so I relaxed a bit. “You want me to . . . ?”

  “Tattoo me!” Turns out, she wasn’t holding a pen; it was the point of what looked like bouquet of dentist’s tools duct taped together. With her other hand she hauls up her tank top, “Right here! I won’t even feel it!” She drew an air circle over her skinny torso, indicating a rather large area across her pronounced rib cage.

  “Um. No, I think that’s, ah, a bad idea. Unsanitary. You know? You want some stickers?” Behind her in the dark was a looming figure, smoking, not coming too close but paying attention to the exchange. He was hanging back, but I knew he was with her.

  “She’ll totally do it,” it said from the shadows.

  “I’ll totally do it! Totally! It won’t hurt. Come on!” she begged. “Just your name, I want your name on me!”

  Without fans, a musician is only a bunch of hot air in the dark. Most fans are simply glad to see you live, but some are hell-bent on meeting you, touching you, having a moment with you, and then there exists that special handful, who wants to peel you and dance around in the moonlight wearing your skin. This pasty little wastoid didn’t want to hurt me, but she clearly wanted me to hurt her by helping her getting tetanus. I felt pretty powerful and powerless at the same time.

  Moreover, I wanted none of it, but I wanted to treat this bony little bag of bad decisions sweetly.

  “What if I just write my name on you with a nice, soft Sharpie marker?”

  “Oh. OK. Oh! Then I’ll just get it tattooed on me! Awesome! Totally do it!” Everyone watched as I pulled out a black marker and she held her shirt up her side. “Do it big, too! Yeah!”

  Maybe, because I was tired and punchy, I decided to draw my name so huge on her little body that she would never get it needled in. When I was done, it essentially was a half corset. “Yeah, awesome!”

  The S was central on her sunken belly, then the T, then the O was the size of a football from the top of her hip bone to her armpit, then R then M up and down her back.

  We all admired my penmanship, as it was very neat and well balanced.

  My thinking was that she would never be so fucked up as to get that tattooed on her. Because that would be insane.

  “There you go, sweetie. You hungry? You look like you could use a sandwich.”

  “No way, I’m so fine! I’m totally gonna get this put on me right now! You rock!” She scuttled back to the looming man and they both hopped into a car. “You rock!!!!” she called from the passenger side as they pulled out.

  “You know she was serious, right?” James said.

  “No way, man. There’s no way she’ll get that tattooed on her. That’s just nuts.”

  “Uh huh,” he said as he went into the van.

  The events surrounding the Lilliputian loony tune showing up at our next gig, four hundred American miles and one dozen moose warnings later, are a might too nasty for my beloved editor to allow here. They involve a maxi pad, a boot, and a mix of fake blood and feces that all end up in someone’s mouth. However, I can tell you, James was right. She was serious.

  The Pipsqueak Pez Dispenser not only showed up, but she pounced on stage and grappled a quick, bony hung onto me. As she went into a stage dive, we saw the loose corset of bandages peeking out from her tiny half shirt.

  The Ugly: We toured a bit of the West Coast and were drawing larger and larger crowds in San Francisco. My favorite place to play was the Paradise Lounge on 11th and Folsom Streets; it was my home away from home. I loved the place so much that I swore the day the Paradise Lounge closed down would be the day I moved away from San Francisco for good.

  We had a gig at my beloved Paradise this one night when I was sick as a dog with a hideous lung infection. During a vocally dramatic moment on stage, something hacked out of my infected lungs and caught in my windpipe, kicked up into my throat and stuck there, wildly itching and choking me. I dropped to the floor as the crowd and band lost it simultaneously, the band going through its usual smashing sound wall of booming chords and huge cock wagging, the crowd surged forward, caught up in the electric crushing and my crawling across the floor, heaving.

  “ROCK ’N’ ROLL!!!” A girl screamed from the front. The crowd thought I was having some epic moment onstage where I couldn’t even handle gravity, and I must have been convulsing because I was so fucking into it! “Yeah, Stoorm!!!”

  I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t stop hacking. The thing, whatever it was, was in a perfect spot to gag and choke me at the same time. I’d inhale to get a blast of air behind it and a tickling trail of its slime would thread back down my esophagus making the cough harder and more desperate. I had about nineteen seconds to get whatever it was out of me so I could get to the verse.

  I had a roll of toilet paper on stage, in front of the kick drum, for blowing my nose and wiping up my fever tears. I grabbed a heaping wad of it and shoved it against my mouth and with a mighty retching “Haaack!” up came the offending item out of my mouth, ker-plunking into the ball of toilet paper. I looked at it through my bleary eyes and was stunned. It was a grayish, sea-anemone-looking glossy lump of something with protrusions sticking off it, laced with a light bit of blood. It was bigger than a lima bean, had some weight to it, too.

  That’s when I saw her.

  She was a slip of a boy girl, short hair sticking out in spikes from under her baseball cap. She stared hard at me, looking serious, as she extended her hand towards me in a gimme-that gesture.

  She wanted my loogie.

  I shook my head no. She nodded, oh, yes. I shook my head again, No, no, no. She nodded with matching vigor. Horrified, I slowly held the tissue wad out to her. Her eyes lit up as if I were handing her a ball of folding money that would save her life. She snatched it out of my hand and held it in both of hers with a look of purest adoration and gratitude.

  Afterwards, I crumpled in my drummer’s car, shaking and sweating with full-on flu, I waited for the rest of the band to come out so I could go home. In my fevered fog and twanging aches, I chuckled at the thought of someone building a shrine to my goo. On the way home, my drummer marveled at the level of crazy some of our fans were getting. I couldn’t talk, but I smiled in agreement, knowing that I must be doing something right.

  “Your mom is a good person; she just isn’t acting like a good person these days.”

  That was the gist of the letter that my dad sent to each of my brothers and me, over the winter of 1999. It was right after the night when, during a horrific blizzard, Mom got hold of my brother Henry in one of her, “I don’t know how many pills I took, I think I see a tunnel . . .” calls. Henry, with a sick baby at home, had gotten in his car and nearly killed himself skidding through the blinding snow. He reached Mom’s apartment just in time to see her being wheeled, high and blathering, into the ambulance that beat him there.

  It was a diplomatic way to say ignore your mother, she doesn’t care for anyone’s comfort or even safety when it comes to her bullshit dramas. We already knew Dad felt that way, but it was striking to see him actively convey anything out loud about her. Mom had been long dead and buried in Dad’s head box, he never uttered her name nor made any reference to her since what seemed like forever, but since one of us almost died again at her behest, he had to speak up.

  He was preaching to the choir, as far as I was concerned. Mom had been dead to me so many times that it was easy to toss dirt on that grave again. Mom had pulled the “Gotcha” on me not too long before I got that letter, so, let the dead-to-me lay.

  The Gotcha was a neat trick Mom would pull whenever I got soft. I’d start feeling a need to reconnect, try to have a relationship with her. This would happen every couple of years. She would be sweet and open, seem healthy, changed, and would sprinkle my heart with tickles of hope for a new beginning. I love you, too, Mom. Then
within twenty-four hours there would be a medical meltdown, a tear-soaked snit, some heinous drama that I would find myself in. Like a bait and switch, but instead of a con man showing you a real watch, then switching it for the bogus one, I would be shown a mom to reach for, only to be given a screeching infant who wants to rip your heart out.

  Around a year after getting away from Billy and the Demons, and I was on a healthier path, I came back to Southborough for a visit. Mom was in a halfway house. It had been a year or so since I’d been in touch with her, but I figured I was in a much stronger place, so I went to see her.

  The word was that Mom was doing much better in her new situation, but I was, as usual, cautious, not wanting to get my hopes up. Slowly, as we chatted, though, I relaxed a bit. She seemed all right. We had tomato soup with grilled cheese sandwiches. I met her new cat, and Mom appeared to be relatively balanced. She seemed to be doing well. We made plans to go to the mall the next day to shop and have lunch. “I’ll give you a call and then come pick you up, say noon?”

  “Sounds great, darling.”

  Shopping and lunch, like real mothers and daughters do.

  Around noon the next day I call her up. “Hey, Ma! You ready to hit the mall?”

  She’s sobbing. “I-I . . . I’m sorry Stormy . . . p-please don’t yell at meee!”

  “What happened? Are you okay, Mom . . . what’s going on?” She sounded desperate, like someone had just let her have it, hurt her feelings, thrashed her with a car antenna. “Mom?”

  “Pleeease!! I know, I know . . . I’m sooorry! Don’t be mad at me, I’m so sorry!”

  Then I heard another voice in the background, “Suzi. Hang up. You don’t have to listen to that.” My blood instantly torched ablaze.

  Gotcha.

  She was putting on a fucking show for someone in the room with her. Selling the old “my daughter is so mean to me” ploy. I smashed the phone and raged through the house.

  Fool me once, shame on you, fool me forever . . . ? Well? Getting your heart broken and then to have your broken heart bamboozled over and over, over bullshit, made me nuts. She could get me on the phone every once in awhile, pretending to be dying or getting some sucker social worker to call me, sounding like a doctor, telling me she was dying. But I rarely spoke to her. So, when I got my dad’s letter, I didn’t need to be told again.

  Somewhere in the spring of 2000, my band, now called Storm, Inc., was in the studio, tracking some new material. Though I was still stubbornly independent, the band was doing really well; we were more professional, businesslike, and tighter.

  The songs had improved as well, so I was excited to record them. This particular time in the studio, however, for some reason, things just kept going wrong. The tape would get fucked up, the guitar couldn’t get signal, speakers got blown. It was a friend’s studio, far from a slick operation, but we were still paying for the time that was ticking by, getting us nowhere. I was getting pissed.

  Finally, when it looked like we were good to lay down some basic tracks, the power went out. The whole studio went black.

  “Fuck!” I shouted in the dark, kicking something near me.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll get it!” said the engineer’s voice, but I was already headed out to smoke a cigarette and fume in the parking lot. I went to get my smokes out of my bag and saw my pager.

  There were three 911 pages from a 617 area code. Massachusetts plus nine one one equals Mom. My pager had voicemail so I checked that first. A stern woman’s voice was telling me my mother was in the emergency room and was in dire condition. “This is so-and-so from such and such hospital, call me immediately.” According to the time stamp, the voice message had been left only fifteen minutes earlier.

  The studio was dead, but the phone in the office was fine. “Such and Such Hospital,” chirped the woman who answered.

  “I’m looking for So and So, this is Storm Large returning her call.”

  “Just a moment.” Hold. “She’s gone for the day.”

  “She only called me fifteen minutes ago and said it was an emergency.”

  “I’m sorry. She’s gone.” I suddenly felt an old tired rage twitch its whiskers in me.

  “May I ask, is this person . . . a doctor?”

  “No ma’am, she’s a social worker.”

  A fucking social worker 911 paging me, sounding like a doctor, again to tell me how my mom is in dire condition, again, and she needs to talk to me . . . why?

  My hatred for some of these self-important social workers was hard earned. I imagine it is probably a thankless gig, lots of snooty doctors looking down on you, stinking bodily fluids looking up at you waiting to be sopped up and sanitized. Mom’s doctors were starting to give her the “Yeah, right, lady” treatment, so she went to work on the second string for their sympathies. She even got one to pretend she was a therapist when I came to visit her once.

  “You’re mother’s in here,” she said holding the door open to a small room near the nurse’s station. Once inside she closed the door heaving her porky self onto a table. Then, with her well rehearsed therapy voice, asked, “So, Stormy, tell me why you hate your mother.”

  “Huh? Mom?”

  My mother sat in the corner opposite me in full regression, staring at a spot a foot in front of her jumping knees, squeezing both her two balled up hands between them. She bit her lip like a kid caught in a lie, awaiting punishment.

  “Suzi, do you have anything you’d like to say to Stormy?”

  Mom shot a miserable glance up at me then back to the floor, “I think Stormy is a-angry w-with me.” She pouted and struggled.

  “S’cuse me but are you even a doctor?” I said to porky so-not-a-doctor.

  Just then mom wailed, “DON’T HATE MEEEE!!” She then threw herself onto the spot she was staring at to bang her head against the floor at the cadence of her chanting, “Stu-pid! Stu-pid! Stu-pid!”

  “GO GET SOMEONE YOU FUCKING IDIOT!” I screamed. She ran out. Nurses ran in. I left. Mom stayed.

  After that, whenever a social worker would call on my mother’s behalf, I would redline into fuck you very much in zero point suck it seconds.

  “Is there a Suzi Large in the hospital somewhere?” I ask, trying not to spit the word fucking between every fucking word.

  “Please hold.” Holding, smoking, hating, waiting.

  “H-heeellooo-ooo?” Mom putting on her weakest voice.

  “Mom?”

  “Hello, darling.” Her award-winning, “I’m so weak but I will sound strong for you, dear,” voice.

  “What’s wrong, Ma?” I ask, knowing exactly what’s wrong.

  “Are you alone?” The windup . . .

  “Yup. All by myself. What’s up?”

  The deep sigh, aaand the pitch, “I have bone cancer, darling.”

  The crowd goes wild!

  “And I want us to handle this like a family. I don’t want to do what Bitsy did.”

  My aunt Bitsy, Dad’s big sister, had kept her diagnosis a secret from her kids until it was certain she wasn’t going to win the fight. I thought it was a classy move by a brave lady. Mom, on the other hand, would have loved nothing more than to see us tearing our hair out every day, beating our chests at her bedside to the rhythm of beeping hospital machines, until the fake cancer took her.

  “Wow. That’s terrible. Okay. Well. I gotta go, Ma, talk to you soon, okay?”

  “Stormy. Are you all right?”

  “Fabulous. You just worry ’bout you, okay? Great, talk to you soon. Buh-bye.”

  Christ.

  At home, my voicemail was full, fake doctor so and so with the fake emergency, a call from each brother and my father. I called him back.

  “Hey, sweetie.”

  “Hey, Pop, what’s up?”

  “I think your Ma is in pretty bad shape.”

  “No. I talked to her. She just has bone cancer again.”

  “Actually, sweetie,” sighing,
“the doctor thinks it’s actually something this time. They might need to do surgery to find out what it is. I think John is on his way to the hospital to get some more answers, but stay by the phone tonight, okay?”

  My father actually sounded concerned. Is this real? I got off the phone and grabbed a beer and paced around my apartment

  Is this real? She’s dying this time? All my rage and bitterness toward my mom did its old slow turn on myself, stinging me like a scorpion committing hara-kiri.

  Great. Now who’s the asshole? She’s going into surgery and . . . what if she doesn’t wake up? What were my last words to her? Some jackass typical “I don’t care about you, Mom, die from whatever you want” comment. Christ. Now she’ll die alone, under anesthesia without anybody who cares about her in the slightest, to hold her hand or show her there’s something worth waking up for.

  When my phone rang again, it was my brother John.

  “Hey, Sis.” The familiar gruff voice of my big brother sounded exasperated.

  “Hey John, what the fuck . . . ?”

  “I went to go see Ma and she’s all propped up in a room like a princess. She’s fine, she just has a friggin’ tummy ache.”

  “. . . and bone cancer. Don’t forget the bone cancer. I hear it stings.” We both laughed our old callous laugh. “So she’s okay?”

  “She’s fine. She just wants attention.” He sounded disgusted. “I’ll call you when I hear something, if I hear anything.”

  Whipsawed again, like a doll being shaken by a frenzied dog. My temper spiked. “You know what, John? I actually don’t think I ever want to know anything about her at all. Unless she’s dead, okay? I’m serious. I’m calling Dad and Henry and telling them the same thing. She has yanked us around for the last fucking time.” I told my dad and left Henry a message. “I don’t even want to even know if she’s in the hospital, or sick or anything, ever again. I only want to hear about that woman if she’s dead, and I only want to hear it from you guys, a real fucking doctor, a coroner, or a cop, okay? I love you. Good night.”