Crazy Enough (14 page)

Whoa, come back, okay.

The giggles kick in. Giddy, nervous snickering that gives way to hysterical, total, pee-leaking, laughter. Like a crazy bag of tickle bugs bust open in my chest. I would laugh at anything and everything. Cancer? Child prostitution? A five-year-old with no arms or legs turning tricks to pay for chemo? Hilarious!

Reality vaulted from under my feet, and the world became a swimming, sweaty cartoon. Trying to suppress the maniacal giggling, I started going off on my friends. “It is so fucking hot, you guys. Why the fuck are we wearing so many damn clothes?”

We all had on studded leather motorcycle jackets and army boots. I had on a torn-up black thermal shirt and army pants. It was very important you wore the required punk-rock attire, the grubbier and more torn up, the better. But, on such a muggy hot day, it was, as they say in Boston, re-tahded. We were walking around under heaps of unnecessary fabric, growing heavier by the minute in the heat. It was completely ridiculous. I suddenly felt a bolt of truth, logic, clear and unarguable, blast to the surface. I leveled my wide-pupiled gaze to my fellow revelers and spoke my truth: “Clothes are a lie.”

It occurred to me that our outfits, everyone's outfits, were just costumes declaring wordlessly to the world who and what we were; who and what we would and wouldn't do, what we listened to. It was like waving our own little flag for our own little fucked up country, but underneath it all we were the same! Smooth and simple, scared and yearning little meat tubes full of poop, hopes, and fears and now, most important, we were all, collectively as one, fucking unbearably hot. Sweating like hot dogs in our stupid,
societally appointed declarations of identity! I say, fuck that! Say it with me!

“Clothes are a lie!” My friends laughed, repeating my battle cry. I tore off my jacket, flopped onto my butt in the grass to yank off my boots. I looked at my partners to join me. No? No one? Really? I went to unclip my studded belt, smiling, “C'mon you guys. Let's do this!”

“Clothes are a lie!” They were now crowing and laughing but staying totally dressed. I yanked open my belt with a ta-da! And they cheered. I knew I was going to be on my own in this, but I was high, on fire, and diamond-hard committed.

There's always that one standout moment, good or bad, in every acid trip, that one recalls forever, and right now it was mine.

And it was time for my pants to come off.

I was so high everything made sense. I was Susan B. fucking Anthony, Iggy Pop, and Patti Smith. I was Bill Murray when he gives that awesome speech in
Stripes,
and later, he gives a similar speech in
Meatballs,
when he gets everyone to chant, “It just doesn't matter! It just doesn't matter!” I was a liberator. I was taking off my clothes
consciously
. I was stripping for freedom, throwing off the shackles of society, and peeling away my own teenaged ego. It was my insane-dependence day!!!

“Nice underpants,” Stitch guffawed.

Uh-oh.

Because of my mother's literal and figurative absence, nobody ever took me shopping for clothes, certainly not for underwear, so I had on threadbare, butter-yellow little kid underwear with light blue baby turtles all over the butt. I'd had them since I was eleven. Not terribly punk rock.

I soldiered on; I was on a mission. Self-consciousness was for
those nine-to-five slaves with clean fingernails and love lives. I was free and there was no going back. Besides, I'm already mostly naked and I don't wanna look like an asshole. I was officially crazy and committed.

I start to notice other people in the park, the clean normal people, I notice them noticing me. It's scary and wonderful. As soon as I peel off my sticky shirt, I hear the unmistakable shrill mom voices calling to their kids. Someone yelled, “Oh, my Gawd, what is she
doing
?”

I yell, once more, triumphantly, “Clothes are a lie!” My friends cheered, sounding like a throng, a stadium of adoring fans, and I am winning. Arms pumping skyward, I go bounding straight into the reflecting pool, singing “Flight of the Valkyries.”

In case you didn't know, running naked in public can really heighten a trip.

I could actually
feel
the attention, shocked eyes, glued all over my every pore and crevice. The fatty air felt like a thing that slid past me. I was very aware of my bones jostling in my wet body meat. The water ahead of me shimmered with spirits. Was I there yet? Am I doing this? Images were all stop-motion photography of shuffling medicine men in huge skull masks in a conga line, the concrete lip of the reflecting pool looked like the rim of a massive sandpaper toilet.

Sailing over the lip of the pool I plunged into the water and splooshed about six big strides into it. The water was knee deep, scummy, and spit hot.

Suddenly, I snapped back, momentarily sober. My bare feet slipped and squashed, and I felt warm old pennies in the slime.

I stood still for a moment in the foul, bleach-scented tea and thought, What if the Christians put sulfuric, flesh-eating acid in this
fountain to keep people out? Oh, my God. My legs. Am I gonna clack out of here on bleached and exposed femurs?

I kept looking down to check if my skin was bubbling and foaming. No. I check again. I start to giggle. Shit.

Acid? Acid? I reach down to touch check. Whoa, is that guy gonna drive into the fountain?

I focused my eyes best I could. About fifty feet in front of me on the other side of the pool, two big, loud men jump out of their dark car pointing and shouting at me to come outta they-ah.

Oh, my God. Cops. Be cool.

I tried to act sober and casual, like I'm not naked. I pretend I don't see them. I start looking into the water as if I may have lost an earring or something through some silly accident. I'm just looking for something in the fountain and, whoa, hey! Where are my clothes? Whoops!

Still playing deaf and dumb to their shouts, I turn to exit the scene, quickly. I'm going to have to make a run for it with my friends. As I high step through the water like a wasted baby giraffe toward freedom, however, I see my friends pointing and laughing, as they run away.

With my clothes

Shit. Be cool.

The cops meet me at the edge of the fountain, one is holding out a dark shirt to cover me. I feign confusion at the cops' approach, and casually cross my arms to hide my small boobs and say, “I'm really sorry, officers, it's just so damn hot, you know?” They are both sweaty. One looks like a cat, but starts to turn into an owl skull. The other is so pink I can't look at him because I see his impending stroke, heart failure, or choking death and I have an urge to comfort him. The poor man had no love in his life and would die alone.

The peeled owl takes my arm and we start toward the police car.

“You see, my friends dared me to jump in the fountain and it just seemed like a really good idea, I mean, all those little kids are in their underwear, sir, and . . .” High as I was, I couldn't help catching glimpses of pinky and owly smirking at each other. They were amused, they might even think I'm funny and
like me
. I continue as normally as I can manage, “Seriously, if you didn't have to work today, wouldn't you want to jump into some water? I mean, Gawd, it's broiling. Look at you poor boys in your heavy uniforms. Right? Don't you agree that on a day like today?” The caged backseat of the police car yawned open like a dark medical chamber.
Nonono.

Just then, like an action figure come to life, Stitch appears, her Mohawk cutting through the crowd like a bloody shark fin. She was as bright as the sun and, I thought for a second, she had on liquid reflective black armor. She had my clothes bundled up in my leather jacket under her skinny arm.

“Hey, officers, I'm sorry, it's our fault. It's her birthday and we took her clothes to play a prank on her. I promise I'll get her out of here right now.” My birthday? God, Stitch was a deep genius.

The cops were still trying to look serious and hard, but clearly had no interest in processing the stoned and chatty naked kid. They tell us to get out of the area and to not come back. Stitch and I promise they will have no trouble from us, sir, thank you sir, happy Fourth of July, sir, clothes are a lie, sir.

We damn near pissed ourselves on the T back to Cambridge. I couldn't help but think how close I came to spending the hottest day of the year in a beige, concrete holding cell packed with screaming bipolar whores, drunken hags, and bag ladies with missing eyes and inexplicable, open wounds, while I tripped my teenage brains out of my mind for lucky number seven.

Stitch had saved the day all right, and probably my life as well.

That wasn't the first, nor last time that Stitch saved my stupid ass from my own stupid assness. She was a powerful creature, one I tried to emulate often. She was so cool that I couldn't believe she was my friend.

Later, in my twenties, I was living in San Francisco. I got a drunken message from her about some huge party in Manhattan, Tompkins Square Park. The Drunk Punk-Olympics, where, according to her message, a bunch of folks from the old crew would shotgun beers and attempt made-up sporting events. She promised a great time and absolutely guaranteed vomiting and heinous injuries, as part of the entertainment factor.

It was great to hear from her, but I was not doing too well when I got the call. I couldn't make it to New York, anyway, but I promised we'd see each other soon. She lived in my heart and mind as a keeper.

Nearly ten years after our last exchange of messages, I was in New York at a bar just off Tompkins Square Park, ironically, and even more weird was the fact that the bartender was one of those girls from back in the Harvard Square days who had wanted to kick my ass, but she was happy to see me and we chatted about the good, bad, and ugly old days. “You ever hear from Stitch? Where is that woman these days?” I asked.

My heart sank at her expression.

“Stitch got killed.”

Got killed?

The bartender went on to say that there was an investigation,
but she died six months ago. Supposedly, Stitch was living in London with a
bad
guy. He was a drug dealer and she had been apparently using heroin pretty regularly. One night, the cops were called to their flat and found her hanging by her neck in the shower. It was believed that the boyfriend had beaten her to death and hung her up to make it look like a suicide. But, nobody seemed to know the truth, and hey, junkies die all the time over nothing.

Stitch got killed.
Even writing it down now seems crazy.

“I
've finally figured it out!” Mom said, again, coming into the living room with a stack of books and her best friend behind her. She wanted to play me her new single, and I was lucky enough to be home to hear it. I wanted to walk out of the room, the house, the town, but I had a fresh pack of smokes and I was practicing how to not give a fuck.

“Lovey is so amazing, I swear,” she said, putting the books on the coffee table. They were all magic books, witchcraft, Wiccan, whatnots.

“Do tell,” I said, French inhaling.

Mom took a breath and made her serious, I'm about to blow your mind with this information face. “Okay, you know how I always say the number 43?”

“In German?” I muttered under my breath to my cigarette.

“. . . I called you
forty-three
times; I ate
forty-three
thousand blueberries? I always say it and I never knew why.” Dramatic pause, looking around. “Until today.” Here's where, in the movie, everyone perks up, listens expectantly, and the music gets all hopeful, signaling a change in everyone's fortune. In reality, I light another smoke with the end of my last one and wonder if she has any idea how little I care. I am so far from giving a fuck about what she has to say that I don't even see her as my mother at all. I am completely separate, staring back at what should be a grown woman, and see instead a child of four, showing me a frog that she is convinced will become a prince once her lips touch it.