Crazy Enough (33 page)

Every gut in my torso grew legs and thundered upward through the sparkling hot-pepper fizz of the big red booming yesyesYES, screaming bloody stars blasting up my spine, punching behind my face to explode. Tremors flapped in my muscles like towels snapping off sand, my eyes strobed, dimmed, and a whoosh roared in my ears, then falling, hot dead heavy, dissolving like a mouthful of raspberry sugar . . . and gone.

It could have been hours or ages later, but I realized only moments had passed when I heard him say, “Why are you crying?”

Shit.

It's near impossible to look cool when you come, anyway, let alone when you start weeping like a jerk. Much better to just stare at the other person, come spattered and panting, and say, “Yeah . . .
and
?”

But some old wound had dislodged from my subconscious and shook me. I was crying, hard, and I felt like an idiot. “I . . . I'm sorry.”

“No, no, what's going on?” He was really a great guy despite the rough exterior and cannibalistic tendencies. “Did I . . . ?”

No, you didn't hurt me, you egomaniac. It's bad enough I'm crying here but I'm not going to let you think you hurt or scared me in any way; put the macho bullshit down.
“I'm sorry . . . I, no, you're great, I . . .” Fuck. No matter how you sliced it, he was going to leave here a superhero and me the weeping soft damsel.
Fuckfuckfuck.

“Hey, shhh, it's cool, just breathe. C'mere.” He scooped me up and held me as I wound down, still shaking and crying. Finally, smoothing out and calming my breath, I said, “I saw it.”

“Saw what?” he purred into my hair.

“A broken heart. I know what it is.” He lay me back down and wiped the tears still leaking down my cheeks into my ears. He was sitting up on the couch now; my legs were stretched around his hips. “It doesn't break because it's
broken,
or damaged, it bursts open with
everything you've ever wanted, hoped for, hurt over, loved. It bursts open because it's
full.
”

“Uh-huh.” He was stroking my throat and I felt him growing hard again.

What is it with guys and the weak, injured girl thing?
“It bursts,” he said to the temperature of my skin.

I wiped my face with both hands and curled my hips up to meet his. Yes.

Yes.

I decided to go back for my fifth session of RET. I was convinced that I had experienced a major heart-burst moment. That, combined with my semiconscious, near dreamlike state, I must have concocted the image out of the feelings, and then panic did the rest. My heart had burst, and drained like an abscess. This time I would fill it with positive affirmations and swell that sucker up with some hope.

The worst was over. The rest will be cake. Seven more.

“Right, left . . . Right, left . . . All ze way around. Around. Around. Up. Up. Up. UP. And relax . . . You are complete, the world welcomes and loves you. You are pure love.”

“OW! Fuck! GODDAMMIT!” I lunged forward again, gulping in a panic. “No!”

“Iz it your mother?”

“No . . . ugh . . . no.” The fist in my chest throbbed as I stared to my right. “If my mother had multiple personalities in life, would she have them in death, too?” I kept staring, struggling for a full breath.

“No. I think zat can only be for a living person.”

“No? Okay . . . ugh . . . then . . . who's that!” She looked
wide-eyed where my eyes were fixed. To my right was a scrawny man, dressed in seventies work clothes; he had brown hair and thick mustache. I knew what had happened to him the moment I saw him.

“What's going on?” he asked me. He seemed a little upset, agitated, like he'd been waiting for a long time

“I don't know what's going on,” I said to him. “I think you're dead, I'm really sorry. Maybe you, um, should go to the light?”

“I want you he-ah now!” The therapist clapped me back again.

I could not get out of there fast enough. I paid her, thanked her, and ran to my car crying.

Great. Fantastic. Mom dies and the crazy jumps out of her and into me like a fucking ghost. This is it. I've fucking lost it.

“You're fine,” Delta said. Delta was a psychic counselor, and the first person I called. “Now, tell me what you were doing when you saw all this.”

I went back over the how cool the therapy was, how it was really working, all the great feelings of simultaneous hope and calm, all leading up to the nosedive into seeing dead people. “Jesus, honey,” she said.

“Am I going to be haunted forever?”

“Oh, honey, no, no, no.” Delta laughed. She was a former model. A stunning, willowy blonde monument and she had the beer-soaked chuckle of a pure blue-collar broad. “You're fine, but, seriously? No more RET. That shit's too intense for you, honey. You're way too sensitive.”

She went on to explain in therapist terms about how, kind of like an acid trip, RET was a shortcut through your brain's natural defenses. The tricking your eyes back and forth allows you to go into an “awake” dream state so your rational mind is essentially asleep. No guard at the gate, so to speak, so you are far more open to suggestion. In the case of
a combat soldier, who is so traumatized by what he or she has seen and done, RET is an ideal tool to get through that hardcore soldier mind. For a sad, sensitive girl with mommy issues? Well, it's not unlike using a chainsaw to get a little bug out of your eye.

“Storm, honey, your mother died. It's a big deal. The only way to go through it is to just go through it. There aren't any shortcuts. I'm sorry.”

No shortcuts is right. I'm not really a joiner, but it seems like the seven stages of grief are a place everyone gets to be a part of at some point. And they sure do take their fucking time ticking by. Shock and denial, check. Pain and guilt, oh yeah. Anger? Anger was the stage I got to where the record started skipping. It took very little for me to go from zero to homicidal in the few months following Mom's funeral. God help anyone who heckled me at one of my gigs at Dante's. I got into a shouting match with a guy in the balcony who threw ice at me. I grabbed a cube, shoved it in my pants, wiped my sweaty rear with it and threw it back at him.

“Suck on that, you fuckin' dweeb!”

A woman at the bar asked the bartender, my friend, Adam, “Um, is she always this crude?”

“Yup.”

“Could you ask her to tone it down a little?”

Adam looked at the woman and smiled. “Well, you can go ahead and try to, darlin'.” To which she popped open her cell phone to call her client and recommend that he not come to Dante's for his after-show party.

Her client was Prince. Oops.

Some huge, Paul Bunyan–looking dickhead grabbed my ass at a poker game and I sent his beer flying out of his hand when I spun him with an open-handed roundhouse to the head.

Then I was asked to co-emcee an event with Dennis Rodman. It was all fun until I nearly got into a brawl with some guy in his entourage. He was a hanger-on, a nobody, a remora. You know those fish that hang around under a shark to snag the bits of meat the shark misses, or drops, but are too pussy to go get their own? Yeah, that was this guy. And he was harassing this sweet girl who just wanted me to give her a little birthday spanking. Long story short, I threatened to disfigure him and Rodman had to break it up.

Anger hung around for a long time with his stupid drunk friends, depression and loneliness. Not on the list, but somehow at the party was insomnia. I had to take sleep aids most nights to get any rest at all. They helped a little bit, but one morning I woke up with nasty-looking bruises on my leg, a headache from Hell, and an odd pain in my asshole area. I looked at my boyfriend, who was staring at me from his side of the bed, with a funny smile on his face. “I'm not entirely sure you
want
me to tell you what happened last night,” he said.

Apparently I had blackout rugby hooligan sex with him, jumped up and ran straight into a wall, fell over backward holding my knee, and laughed maniacally, “Owwwwww! My head!”

I wonder if that would fall under “upward turn” in the list of seven stages. Because things actually did start to improve after that.

I
n the early spring, following my mom's funeral, I got a call from somewhere in 310.

“Hi! We saw a video of you performing and would love for you to audition in person for a new TV show called
Rock Star, The Tommy Lee Project
.” He went on to describe the show, a contest for rock singers to vie for the lead position in a, as of yet untitled, supergroup. “Can you be in Seattle mid-March?”

My band was still doing all right, but certainly needed a shot in the arm. The call got me excited, but cautiously so. So many of these things had passed in and out of my life. You know how, describing the month of March,
it comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb?
The same goes for most of those promising-sounding opportunities. Only they come in like the best thing ever! And go out like an oily fart.

But I always treated every
yeah, right
like a possible
yes,
and whether it led to a cool gig or a sorry disappointment, it always led me forward. So, forward ho.

The auditions were at the Crocodile Café, a decent-sized rock club in Belltown. There was a line around the block when I got there and I instantly wanted to just drive the three hours back to Portland and blow the whole thing off. It was embarrassing, all these people, up and out on a wet, cold morning, hoping to get discovered. I was one of
them
?

I already had a decent career; I was living off music as my main source of income. I didn't need this.

This is reality TV, the lowest common denominator of exploitation of the stupid and fame-hungry. I should totally take my dignity and go home.

I parked my car but kept it running. I stared at the line and began to feel incredibly lame as it became inevitable that I would be joining the other reality television hopefuls in their cold and soggy line.
Not cool.

I felt like I was on a collision course with this ridiculous idea. The trick was to get my head around all the pros and cons, then decide if it was worth the risk to my reputation and credibility. Both of which didn't matter, in the grand scheme of things, since I was never cool to begin with.

For some reason, there is something detestable about an artist who wants to do well, to actually
live
on the work that they do. Most artists who become popular are often considered sellouts or poseurs, and not
real
artists. Like we all have to be all van Gogh, cut ourselves to pieces, and suffer in an insane asylum until the voices tell us to shoot ourselves in the head. He was one of the greatest painters ever, in my uncool opinion, but does suffering in squalor validate you as
an artist? Kurt Cobain died miserable, making it seem like he felt the songs he wrote, songs that struck a chord with damn near a whole generation, were somehow fraudulent because of their commercial success.

Cool or not, it's kind of important that you are liked by at least
some
people in order to make a living off your art, whatever form it takes. Nobody buys your art, you're punching a clock, schlepping drinks, or digging ditches somewhere. That's reality.

Hard and thankless as it can be, sometimes, I so love what I do, I can't pretend that I'm not having a blast. Again,
not cool
. But I'd rather burn than be cool, any day.

After much deliberation, I probably said “Fuck it” a couple of times, out loud to myself. Let the hipsters hate. That's what they do. They already thought I sucked for being popular in Portland.

I walked into the front room of the club to get my number and sign in. “Oh, Storm Large, you made it! We were hoping you'd make it.
Love
your video,” said the beautiful blonde at the sign-in table. She was all golden warm California-riffic and a striking contrast to the soggy pale Northwest rockers milling around.