Crazy Enough (11 page)

There was a hideous, muffled screaming and pounding coming from inside the shit sarcophagus. Hawaiian Punch's wife came running towards the fallen thing with her hand on her face, but stopped short when the stink choked her away. The cops held their breath, righted the thing, and H.P. came stumbling out, looking for someone to kill. Starchild was long gone. Half the people in the immediate area were laughing, the rest too horrified by the scene to move to or fro. I was in full paroxysm and looked guilty as hell, so Keith and I bolted to the Cambridge Common.

In the middle of the Common, a park across from Harvard campus, stands a monument with Abe Lincoln standing inside. All around this monument, several thousand well-heeled WASPs milled about with their pet names and trust funds as the sun went down.
Keith and I laughed hysterically over the horrendous spectacle we had just been privy to, as we clambered up into the monument. I don't know how no one saw us do it; the park was packed with alumni-ratti, but we crawled under the old president's bronzed legs, and fucked like kids without a future.

B
y the time I turned sixteen, my brothers and I hardly went to see Mom in the hospital anymore. We wouldn't even go to bring her home. She would get rides back to our house from friends or just take a cab.

We barely spoke to her parents anymore, either. There was no official conversation between them and my father about Mom's staggering health-care costs, but after the separation was official and divorce was imminent, they were finally helping with her bills. Which was nice, since my father, a teacher, was struggling and mom's parents were multimillionaires.

My brothers and I always felt that our maternal grandparents—we'll call them the Banks—blamed us for Mom's troubles. God knows what Mom told them about us when she was with them. She probably sang her favorite,
my children hate me
song, but what she told us of her
life with them, she made it sound like she was raised in an evil yacht club full of stiff-jawed, overprivileged rapists who made her young life a silk-upholstered hell.

Mom was adopted a little before her fourth birthday, from an orphanage near Yale University. Mr. and Mrs. Banks were a wealthy couple from Snob-Ascot, Connecticut, and had one natural son, Dicky. It might have been because of Mrs. Banks' delicate health they adopted a little girl instead of having another baby. Mom was about seven or eight when Mrs. Banks number one died of brain cancer.

Enter Mrs. Banks part
deux.
The second Mrs. Banks was a gourmand and a highly paid interior decorator. She did a room in the White House and bought tchotchkes for the Shah of Iran. She was a friend of the family, and recently widowed, so she and
her
natural son, Claude, moved in. Daddy Banks has his son, Mommy Banks, hers, and then there's little Suzi. The girl the dead lady wanted.

Now, everything Mom told us about her life, growing up a Banks, was clearly mommified. It's not so much that it was
all
total delusional bullshit, but so much of what came out her mouth about
anything
was baloney, that one had to take it with a grain of salt. Or maybe, a ton of salt, like, as much sodium as one might find
in
baloney. So I can't really say much about her childhood other than the obvious: She was raised with loads of money, was a debutante, sent away to schools, given horses and French tutors, and then sent to Paris to study dance, where she met my dad. I can't really speak to the alleged abuse, rapes, neglect, and satanic nannies who drugged her, or any of the other colorfully horrific things that supposedly happened to her at the Banks house. However, I can tell you about my personal experiences with the Banks.

Mr. Banks was a hoity-toity CEO or some such thing for a fancy hospital in New York City. I have no idea if my uncle Dicky ever actually had a job, but I'm certain he suffered a rope burn or two while docking his yacht in various ports of call. The other uncle, Claude, seemed nice enough, but we barely ever got to know him.

For a while, we would spend every Thanksgiving at their house in Connecticut, where we were sequestered in the downstairs apartment. Not a bad place to hang while the grownups got crocked upstairs. There was a wall of closets to go through, full of old pictures, board games, plastic horses, and croquet mallets. We would play Chinese checkers, usually, or ding around on the old sixties-style organ that had a built-in rhythm machine. Pop, waltz, and calypso were a few of the selections. Push a button and a cheesy booping pattern would play to accompany whatever number you planned to rock on the keys.

The kids would eventually be called to walk, not run, up the stairs, thickly carpeted with a lush, leopard pattern, into the wide, airy living and dining room. The house would be jammed with family and friends of the Banks, people whom we would only see at Thanksgiving, then never see or hear from for the rest of the year.

I think we stopped going there by the time I was nine. I remember wanting to like them but, even as a little one, I got the impression my brothers and I weren't liked very much by most of the people there. Grandfather Banks, throughout dinner, would get redder in the freckles and gruffer in his voice. I suppose he was very funny because many of the grownups would laugh at things he said. In a room full of drunken partygoers, he would snarl jovially at me, “Hey, Stormy! C'mere. Hop up in my lap! Atta girl! Hey, you wanna see smoke come outta my ears?”

Being in his lap was always weird because I was fairly sure the
man hated me, but, when a grownup pays attention to you, and is holding your little four-year-old person in their lap, that's a sign of affection, right? And, of course, I wanted to see smoke come out of his ears!

“All right, now, I'm going to take a drag off my cigarette and you're going to push on my chest with both hands, okay? Ready? Watch my ears now!”

He had big, red, sticking-out ears. I wondered if the smoke would puff out or maybe, hopefully, he could somehow make smoke rings. He took a drag, and I pushed and watched, and I didn't see. . . .

“OWWW!”

While I stared at his ears, he'd puff his cigarette to a glowing cherry, then quickly poke the lit end into the back of my hand. I yanked my hands away as he laughed two lungs full of smoke at me. Everyone would laugh, I guess, because, it was a grownup joke. I must admit it was a neat trick, because I fell for it more than once.

Regardless of whatever the truth was about the Banks and my mom's childhood, it was clear that a lot of her loneliness, and her unfixable broken heart, had taken hold partly on their watch.

The longer I lived, the more I understood why she needed to be sick. And why a new diagnosis was like a new crush, and she would fall all over it like a swooning teenager.

“I've finally figured it out! They know what it is!” Mom announced, catching me in the living room one afternoon. “I have
alters
.” The timing on her diagnoses blend together a bit, but I know I was at least at an age where I did not give a flying fuck anymore, and John had his own place, so I must have been around fifteen.

Multiple personality disorder was a big one for Mom. She was positively giddy with it. It was as intoxicating to her as her other go-to malady, bone cancer. More on that later.

She could barely contain her enthusiasm as she explained how, like in the movie
Sybil,
there were these different personalities, or
alters,
that would come out and make her do and say crazy things. According to Mom, the most extreme case of MPD her doctor had ever heard about involved a woman with nearly two hundred personalities. While I burned holes in the television with my eyes, trying to tune her out, Mom went on to marvel at herself because she, Suzi Large, somehow, had amazed her medical team by having more alters than that other woman, thus beating that record. “By forty-three percent,” she said.

The doctors were so confused at the intensity of her disorder, yet her ability to still function, somewhat, that one of them was going to cite her condition at his next lecture and her case would end up in yet another medical journal.

Wow, so I guess you win and congratulations are in order.

“It explains everything! The voices, the wobblies, how I suddenly can start speaking fluent German.”

The
wobblies
we knew about. They were dramatized dizzy spells that, we believed, were used as an excuse for her to fall down on purpose, in public. Weddings, graduations, or funerals, pretty much anywhere people were gathered or participating in an event geared toward loving and celebrating somebody who wasn't my mother. The
fluent German
thing was a new one. When she tried to show us, she seemed to be parroting all of the German one could learn by watching
Hogan's Heroes
. “Nein! Dummkopf! Schnell! Macht schnell!”

Mom's award-winning multiple personality phase lasted quite some time, as it was creepy, and people had heard of it. She got a load of mileage out of the disorder.

My brother John was the best of all of us at forgiving Mom and her curiously revolving ailments. As much as she pissed him off and
broke his heart, he would visit her in the hospital long after the rest of us had given up.

During Mom's “schnell dumkopf” period, John brought his new girlfriend over to visit Mom in her temporary digs at some halfway house. Mom met the girl, made tea, and some small talk. The young lady was studying to be a nurse and, though her focus was on pediatrics, she had taken some psychology classes and oh, yes, she had heard about multiple personality disorder.

Green light.

Not long after tea, Mom excused herself for a minute and came back with crayons and paper, plopped on the floor, and cooed like a toddler, “Sumbuddypwaywiffme!” John must have wished he could blow away like a palm full of talcum powder. John's girlfriend, however, was new to all the many splendors of Mom, so she snapped into nurse mode. She crouched in front of Mom and said firmly, “If Suzi is in there, I'd like to talk to her. May I please talk to Suzi?”

My brother burned against the wall he was leaning on, grinding his teeth into stony little nubs, as he watched Mom dip her head as if nodding out, then looking up and around, feigning confusion, saying, “Oh, oh my. How long have I been on the floor?” Then to John, “Are you all right, darling? Did Mommy scare you?”

As loyal and diligent a son as John was, I think it was about a year before he ever saw or spoke to her again. I, on the other hand, was more than ready to cut her off forever.

Even though Mom allegedly had a cast of thousands within her, not a single one was very motherly. So naturally I sought the affections of other mother types and, thankfully, struck gold with a few.

The first and longest-running momstitute was Daphne's mom, Annie Leavitt. In the early days of Mom's illness, Annie and the Leavitt family made me feel totally at home whenever I had to stay over.

Annie was a biology teacher and easily one of the most knowledgeable people on the topic of all things in existence. Any bug, bird, rock, cloud, bone, leaf, she would know its name, origin, purpose, and, in most cases, an historical anecdote about it. A true Anglophile, she was also a badass gardener, and kept a girly mass of flowers growing in all directions in her sunny backyard all spring and summer.