Crazy About You

CRAZY ABOUT YOU

Randy Attwood

(c) 2011 by Randy Attwood

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PROLOGUE

Dear Suzanne,

One thing I’ve learned in my profession is that the telling of a thing should wait for its proper time. The time has come, daughter, for me to tell you how you got your name.

Love,

Father

INTRODUCTION

Children who grew up on military bases are called Army brats. Asylum brats were those few of us who grew up on the grounds of state insane asylums where our parents, who worked there, had housing provided by the state. We weren't shoved from base to base, state to state, country to country, so we couldn't claim we didn't put down roots. Instead, we were buffeted between the bizarre personalities among whom we lived, if we chose to know the lives of those mostly benign inmates–excuse me, patients–from whose lunacy our parents earned their livings.

My sister, Sally, ignored them. Not me. I got into trouble early in my life by making the acquaintance of so many of those twisted souls. My mother almost had a heart attack when I wandered away at the age of four and showed up back at her door holding the hand of a huge man who wasn’t insane, just retarded. He had had the good sense to bring me home before I had gone too far away. For his good had deed he was screamed at by my mother, who called the campus police, who hauled him away, tears streaming down his big, uncomprehending face.

When I was nine I got swept up in the scheme of one loony who told me that if we collected 100,000 cigarette wrappers, the tobacco company would redeem them for a wheelchair. So when I could, I joined him in scrounging for the cellophane wrapped papers and tying them up in neat packets of fifty each. Finally, Dad called several tobacco companies and broke the news to me that there was no such offer. I helped the patient finish the task anyway. Several good things came from this nutty venture, however. When the 100,000 number was reached, the guy seemed to recover his wits enough to be discharged. I never took up smoking, and a couple years later the discharged patient sent the hospital a wheelchair.

The hospital was located three miles outside of a small town that was in the middle of a state in the middle of the nation. It was the dumping ground for the retarded, the senile, the schizos and the paranoids, the brain-damaged, adolescent dopers, the suicidal-depressed, the manics, maniacs, and the perpetually confused. And one building, the Pinel Building, the one with barbed wire around it, housed the criminally insane. It even had its own small hospital ward, and Dad had an auxiliary dental office there. Patients were never taken from the Pinel Building unless they were judged to have become mentally competent to stand trial for their crimes, or, if they had been committed because they had been found innocent by reason of insanity for their crimes, released when they became sane, which didn’t happen very often. If ever.

They said it would happen to Michael Fromme, who at the age of fourteen had killed his mother, father, little sister, and brother, and then sat in the house with their dead bodies until a neighbor happened upon the scene and called the sheriff. Since he was a juvenile, he couldn’t be tried as an adult, so he was committed to the Pinel Building for the Criminally Insane until he was 18, at which time, if he was judged to be mentally sane, he would be released. He could even claim the farm of the family he had murdered.

Dad had worked on his teeth and found him to be perfectly normal. Now that he’s killed his family, Dad had said.

I kept trying to write a folk song about it, but nothing was coming. It was teaching me just how hard those simple little ditties were to compose.

It wasn’t easy recruiting people to work as attendants in the Pinel Building because most of the patients weren’t perfectly normal at all. They were perfectly dangerous. So the attendants and nurses who worked there were paid more. They were a group apart. A little pitied. A little feared. A little envied.

The whole insane asylum was the principle economic force for the small town nearby. Farming was in decline. But there would always be nuts to take care of. America seemed to produce a bigger crop every year. Nepotism at the hospital was rampant because the town was so small you couldn’t help but hire someone’s brother, sister, uncle, aunt, or cousin.

Although the town needed the mental hospital, it also resented it. After all, it wasn’t much fun to come from a place whose name was synonymous with being crazy. When our high-school basketball team went to other towns for games, there always would be a group of students from the opposing side in the stands waving their finger in circles at the side of their heads and screaming, at the top of their lungs in the shrillest falsetto as we were introduced: Woo-woo!

The superintendent of the whole affair was a psychiatrist who lived in the nicest house on the grounds. He wasn’t seen much. He presented the budget before the state legislature and went to a lot of national conferences. Dad himself was away for the week I’m about to relate, making his annual trip to a national dental conference. Being the only dentist for such a large and heterogeneous population as the asylum provided gave him several dentally interesting cases to present each year.

For a while, Mother had tried to convince Father to go into private practice, but he said he liked not having to worry about patients paying their bills. He could decide what the best course of treatment was for them without regard to whether they could afford it or not. Socialized medicine existed. You just had to be nuts to get it.

So eventually, Mother ran away. I thought I might turn that into a simple little folk song, too.

All in all, Larned State Hospital made for interesting formative years.

Chapter 1 Friday

You’re not really going out with Jake LaRue, are you? I asked my sister. It had to be a joke.

He happens to be one of the few guys willing to drive out to this nut farm to pick me up.

I couldn’t believe she was serious, but her pug nose was pointing up higher than before, as if by challenging her it was I who was stinking up the room instead of her by dragging into the house even the name of Jake LaRue.

Jesus, Sally, Jake LaRue drives around in that car of his with panties hanging from his mirror, I told her, mentioning, for the first time between us, that unmentionable undergarment word. I had to send a signal this was a serious conversation.

Are you worried about my virtue, Twerp Face? my sister asked, saying virtue in a way that made it sound like it was a vice.

Did you tell Dad? Does he know this guy? I’d try a different strategy, an appeal to higher authority.

Does Dad ask my permission to date his nursies?

That’s different. He’s an adult.

I happen to be eighteen.

If you can’t do better than Jake LaRue, you ought to give it up. Another appeal, this one to her vanity.

I find him kinda of cute. And that car of his is so cool. He spends all his time on it. He makes more in one race than you do in a month washing dishes at the creepy cafeteria here. He’s let me ride along.

Jesus, Sally, if Dad knew you went draggin’ with that guy you’d be grounded the rest of the school year. I was down to my last strategy–threats.

Well, Dad’s not going to find out, is he? And if he does, I’ll know you were the snitch. Then I’ll have to tell him about the time you brought your little fruitcake friend from the juvenile delinquent ward over here and sang songs to her, or whatever else you were doing down there in your room.

Suzanne needed to get away from her ward, and it’s called the Adolescent Rehabilitation Unit. All I did was play the guitar for her and we sang some songs, I said, acting as if I hadn’t tried to kiss Suzanne and been turned aside and I could explain perfectly well to Dad why I had had a girl patient down in my basement bedroom. Like hell. Sally knew when she had me by the balls. If Dad found out, he’d kill me.

She pressed the advantage, Do you know how sick I am of hearing you singing in the basement, imitating Peter, Paul and Mary? I swear, if I hear you sing 'Puff, the Magic Dragon' one more time, I’ll break that damn guitar. And since you think you’re so qualified to criticize who I date, who are you taking to your junior prom? Which, I believe, is only a week away.

She did know how to sink her fangs into a raw nerve, a knack sisters seem to be born with.

I haven’t asked anyone yet.

Because you’re scared they’ll all turn you down. You know what we call guys who can’t get a girl to go to the prom with them? They’re dweebs. You’ll be a twerp and a dweeb. Maybe that little fruitcake friend of yours would go to the prom with you.

Through clenched teeth, the position into which my mouth usually was forced when talking to my sister, I said, Suzanne’s not a fruitcake. Just confused. She comes from a really messed up family.

A kind of howling stopped her response. It sounded as though it came from a long way away, but knowing it was a human voice made it feel closer than it really was. I knew it was just Frank. He liked to talk to the coyotes. They were the only creatures who really listened to him. Except for you, Brad, he had told me once.

Sally didn’t say anything about Frank’s howling. My sister’s face told of the disgust she had for any human being who would make such a noise.

What do you think our family is, the paragon of normalcy? she pointed out. How many normal families live on a nut farm? But does it make me pick at my palms until they bleed? Christ, how can you stand to be around her?

The only thing I liked about arguing with Sally was that in her anger she’d slip and let her intelligence show. Otherwise my sister never would have let anyone know she even knew the word paragon. She was a C student who could have made As. She read more than she let people know, but she thought showing her smarts would scare off boys. She was probably right. Cute and nasty, guys could like; cute and smarter was just too scary.

I so happen to think I may be of some help to Suzanne. Her palms are almost healed from the last episode. If you knew why she picked at her palms, you might have a little more compassion, if you’re capable of human feelings, which dating Jake LaRue proves you’re not.

The honk of the horn broke up another stimulating conversation with my sister. Jake LaRue–not the name, but the person–was really there.

Can’t he even come to the door to get you?

Little Mr. Twerp Gentleman, aren’t you, Dweeb?

She started to leave. It was time to try threats again.

Dad said I was in charge while he’s away. Be home by midnight. I’ll tell this time. I will, Sally. I mean it. Jake LaRue. Christ.

Listen, I’ll be home when I please. And I really don’t care if you tell. It’ll just prove that Bradley Ethan Adams is an absolute little twerpie dweeb of a brother. Her indignant, but cute, pug nose swung away from the stink I was raising and pointed toward the door. Her body followed. Try as she might to be mean, the pose could never destroy her basic cuteness. She would fight that all her life the way other women would fight their weight. And the nastier she got, the more it made you appreciate just how cute she looked.

The door slammed and I watched her run to the cherry-red, chopped and channeled '49 Chevy. Three sets of white panties were hanging from its mirror. Sally’s blonde ponytail bounced behind her. Her pink dress clashed against the deep color of the car. I wondered if she’d worn her pink panties, the ones I’d seen hanging on the line in the basement laundry room. Jake LaRue would like that, the bastard. I could see his weasel-sharp face grinning at Sally as she ran toward him. His pale, lemon-yellow, blond hair was slicked back into a full duck tail. I hated thinking about him standing around his locker Monday morning sniggering before his group of goon friends. My sister’s name being the cause of the snigger. Predictably, he squealed away, the car motor’s deep roar broke the quiet of the early evening on the hospital grounds. Quiet except for Frank, still howling at the coyotes, who were starting to answer back.

Mother said Sally and I were born too close together. We had argued since we were little. Mother said when we were in high chairs she had to feed us separately or we’d engage in food fights. One of my earliest memories was of Sally biting my hand to make me let go of a cookie I had taken from her. Sally used to beat up on me when I was little. One of my fondest memories was the year I turned 10 and realized I was as big as she was and I beat the crap out of her. Mother had to pull me off. But not before I got even for about six years' worth of pinches, slaps, shoves, and beatings. So then we moved into the verbal arena.

Years later we would become close friends the way a lot of brothers and sisters become friends after they’ve spent the first twenty years unleashing furies on each other that baffle their parents. Now we call each other once a week and can tell by each other’s tone of voice if something is wrong and usually wring it out of the other.

I remember that after Sally roared off with LaRue I had wondered how Mom was getting along. I was still concerned about her; I had her Phoenix phone number and thought about calling her. But the sadness in her voice had been obvious the last time I called. She had tried to hide it by saying how happy she was I called. But she didn’t sound happy at all. And in a way, I was glad she wasn’t happy. She had run away two years ago with a doctor exiled from Cuba. Dad divorced her for desertion. He had just started dating again six months ago, and was going through an amazing number of nurses who worked at the mental hospital. He would be a good catch. His daughter was about to graduate from high school and leave home. I had only one more year left at home before I’d be gone, too.

He’d need some companionship for when we were gone. And most of the nurses were young enough to start a new family with. I could have a new half-brother or sister, and one nicer than the full sister I now had to endure. But when he said this year’s dental convention was in Phoenix, it had sparked a hope in me that he might see Mom again; that something could happen and they’d get back together. But the whole business depressed me. Usually when I was depressed I’d get a plate of Oreo cookies, some milk, and retire to my room in the basement to re-read my Uncle Scrooge comic books or play my guitar. But I felt the need for a little companionship myself. It was Friday night. They’d let the adolescent patients stay up a little longer in the rec room. The staff knew me over there, and I was welcome to join the kids who had been committed by their parents or the state to the Adolescent Rehab Unit on the Rush Building. I’d play the guitar and some of the kids liked to sing along.

I saw Suzanne sitting by herself in the corner of the rec room with that look on her face that meant she was trying hard not to pick at her palms. Ronald Dilman, the attendant in charge, was leering at two teenage girls playing Ping-Pong on a table scarred with notches on its sides. Three guys were slouched on the threadbare institution sofa watching Ponderosa where some fools finally had riled Hoss into beating them up. Dilman looked away from the girls to check me out. He looked like an older Jake LaRue. He had a flat-top but let the sides grow long into a duck tail. His mouth was in the shape of a perpetual smile, but he wasn’t smiling. He recognized me and let me go sit beside Suzanne.

Hey, what’s up?

I took one of her hands in mine. Ronald jerked his head up to watch us. The scabs were almost gone and the pink healing skin looked paper thin. It wouldn’t take much picking to cause them to bleed again.

I wanted to kiss the palm. I wanted to