Crazy Enough by Storm Large Read Free Book Online Page B

couldn’t do it. All my emotions whipped and jumped through me like a pack of cracked-out monkeys. I was convinced that I felt more than anybody else. Not only my own, but I could also feel other people’s feelings, too. Though I tried on the mantra “He who cares the least wins,” trying not to feel, for me, was crazy making.

    Back at Sadville, John and I sat in the car, hot as a fevered ear from baking in the parking lot. I broke down, hot tears spitting through my stinging eyes. “Something’s got to give, and it was almost her . She did it again; I can’t believe she did it again.”
    John must’ve thought I meant the attempt itself. I didn’t. I meant that I had just started to get my footing that summer, where I couldlaugh and be okay with the way things were. Giving the world the finger from a nice, sarcastic place to hide. Mom got her sad, little girl fingers into my guts, to fuck me up again. “I fucking wish she’d done it, man, fuck her.” She got me to care. Again.
    Gotcha.

S ince I knew I was going to lose my mind, I figured the best thing to do was lose my virginity. Fast. I wasn’t super attached to it anyway.
    In the provincial enclave of Southborough, Massachusetts, there was a lot of chatter one year about the white van . Ask anyone who was around St. Mark’s School in the seventies and say, “Remember the white van ?” Chances are someone will, and say, ‘“Oh yes, the rapist.” By all accounts, nobody was ever raped by anyone in any white van, but it was a hot topic for awhile, and Mom loved it. Rape was a big thing with my mom. It’s how she told me about sex.
    â€œI’m going to catch snakes.”
    â€œOh, no, you’re not. You’ll get raped.”
    â€œGod, Mom. There is no guy in a white van at the pond.”
    â€œThe answer is no.”
    â€œ Mom! ”
    â€œHe will hold you down and stick his penis right in your vagina,” Mom said, as if there would be a dramatic swell of music and we would go to an Ovaltine commercial. I was eight, and I knew it was horseshit.
    â€œAnd what if I like it?” I said in a snotty voice to Bowser in bed that night, pretending I was smarting off to my mom. Bowser was my huge teddy bear I practiced making out with.
    Fast forward to twelve years old. My childish ideas of sex were not at all on par with my advanced ability to please myself. I was a genius masturbatrix. But though I knew what everything was and where everything went, I had no tangible idea of how it was all supposed to happen.
    Thank god for porn.
    Watching grownups have sex with no subtlety or innuendo, just straight up doing it, was a huge leap in my awareness. The film was Candy Goes to Hollywood . Not a terribly clever story, or superattractive people, but in the twenty odd minutes I sat glued to it, I learned everything I needed to know about sex before I actually did it. The only bummer was, I was getting this deep education while wedged, shoulder to shoulder, between my mom and my aunt Bitsy.
    My father’s family lived in rural Pennsylvania, about five hours from Southborough. We spent some summers and many Christmases there. My grandparents and aunt and uncle lived in these huge old farmhouses, filled with generations of antique furniture, silver, and gleaming lemon-oiled wood floors. There were wide fields and golf courses, tennis clubs where we could have watercress tea sandwiches with the crusts neatly trimmed. It was a blue-blooded WASP-y land, but my dad’s family were farmers and railroad workers and some of the best people I had ever known. My aunt Bitsy, Dad’s sister, was a tall, gorgeous blonde with a filthy sense of humor and a heart too bigfor this world. She had the porn tape hidden in the study, behind the red- leather encyclopedias.
    The details of how I ended up watching the porn with my mother and my dad’s sister I cannot recall. However, I remember