Crazy Enough (19 page)

We trekked down the stairs and into the early evening. The
streets were full of people enjoying the long-awaited warm dark that held promise of a fat hot summer coming. I loved the streams of bodies flowing around me like water through stones, rolling down sidewalks of the city. A never-ending, head-down dance of avoidance and do-si-dos with strangers, New York.

Eyeliner pirate went to buy smokes and said he'd meet me back at the Alcatraz. “Sure you will,” I said to myself, turning down St. Mark's from First Avenue. “That guy probably never wants to see me again, not alive at least.”

As soon as I got to the bar I beelined to Raff, who laughed in disbelief “Oh, nooo! He was so cute! Oh, well, at least you aren't celery-butt anymore.” (Celery-butt was our pet name for celibate.) “You were driving me nuts. Uh-oh.” She looked over my shoulder, so I turned around just in time to see the porn parrot enter the bar. Before I could go to him, give him a hug, reassure his manly status, Raff croons across the bar, “Hey! Welcome back! You wanna beer, or maybe some hot sauce?”

At the beginning of my second year at the academy, I moved from midtown to East 12th Street and First Avenue, to be closer to where I felt at home. I loved my colorful new neighborhood. The same gaggle of Hispanic guys was always in rotation on my corner. One day, they asked nicely, “Oye, Blanca, smoke?”

“Sure!” said my stupid white ass, as I tapped out two cigarettes for them. They chuckled and took the smokes and tucked them behind their ears. I thought it was weird and kind of rude, as I got to my door, I heard them ask a bunch of other people for smokes. It took me a couple of days to realize they were selling crack.

After some time of me walking by them and chatting with them in Spanish (something I actually managed to learn in high school), they realized I was not going to buy crack, nor was I going to narc on them. I was “Blanca” (white girl) and they were “Hijos” (young boys). Drug dealers are supposed to be terrible people, I know, and my Hijos were probably guilty of some hairy shit, but my block was always safe.

I always walked home from school. The academy was, and still is, on Madison and East Thirty-second, a healthy walk. I would grab dinner to go, stop somewhere for a beer, get home, and try to learn lines or do whatever homework I had for the next evening. Walking twenty-plus blocks at night in New York City is much like walking during the day in most other places. The streets were bright, the stores open, and you were rarely, if ever, alone on the block. One time, though, I had stayed out at a bar fairly late and was ambling home, whistling Mozart's “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” I often would whistle or hum to keep myself company during my long walks home. Every so often, others picked up the tune and whistled with me as we flowed down the sidewalk, a clot of strangers, sharing a moment.

This night there was just me and my whistle. “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” can sound pretty creepy echoing around a wet street with few people around. It's especially creepy when you hear someone whistle with you, and you can't see them. At around Twenty-third Street I picked up the pace, kept whistling because I didn't want to look scared.

A girl spooked is like blood in the water. I kept on and took a jagged route to see if he was, indeed, following me. When I couldn't pretend any more, I turned to see my whistling partner, and saw a man walking behind me to my left, half a block back. He stopped whistling when I spotted him.

I have a vivid imagination, coupled with knowing how fucked some
people can be, so, by the time I got to Sixteenth Street, I had already played the scenario, the police telling my dad that they had found a pair of ears in a bag at a construction site. I switched the tune to “Ode to Joy.”

I decided he was an actual threat when I ran into a bodega to buy some soup and falafel, and he waited on a far street corner until I came out. I beelined down First Avenue; I was going to go straight to the Alcatraz, someone would be there who knew me and would walk me home or chase the dude off. As I approached my street, I saw my Hijos. “Oye, Blanca! Que tal?”

I told them in Spanish that there was a guy following me and I was scared to go home in case he saw where I lived. One of them, whom I assumed was in charge, told me to go on home and don't worry. He then made a quick sharp whistle and in a minute two other Hijos came out of nowhere “Bueno, go home, Blanca,” he said, once he eyeballed the guy.

Mine was only four buildings toward Avenue A from First Avenue, but as I got close to my door, I heard a scuffle behind me. I couldn't make out what they were saying, but the four drug dealers were on that guy like a rash. No punches or any violence broke out, not as I watched, but they roughly ushered him off the block and out of sight.

“Yeah, they don't want any cops comin' 'round here, Goddess, it fucks with their business,” my friend R.J. told me over pizza a few days later.

“You think they killed the guy?” I asked.

“Nah, nah . . . just, prob'ly, um,
encouraged
him to never return.” He chuckled.

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.