Crazy Enough (27 page)

“Yeah, yeah, you're a little biased, lady, go to sleep.”

“I'm a dying woman and what I say is gospel.” More struggled laughing. “You're bigger.”

“I love you, Mom.”

“Love you, too, honey.”

Right after she died, I drove from Sonoma back to San Francisco, and broke up with Michael. I started couch surfing at friends' houses, my van, and wherever I could between tours. While on a break in Los Angeles, I ran into a friend in a successful band out of Portland, Oregon. He was playing at the Universal Amphitheater and would I want to come to the gig, then party with them at the Mondrian Hotel on the strip afterward?

Sure. I was homeless anyway. Why not be homeless in a swanky Hollywood hotel for a few days, eating room service, playing rock star? My band split back to San Francisco, I stayed. Then it happened.

I had met the man before and there was no connection, but all of a sudden, the air, the temperature, what I had eaten or drunk that day, the pot brownie he ate, the white on white on white linens in the room . . . who knows. All I can say, at some point during the night my heart and all the meat, fat, and gristle around her, went
boom
.

Mr. Whoopass.

I fell hard, harder than ever before. End-of-the-world, teenaged I-would-die-for-you, Prince, “Purple Rain” hard. I wanted to kill him, eat him, set his bones on fire, and fuck his ashes.

We didn't have sex, though. He was married. He told me that he and his wife were unhappy and separating. Yes, it's an old song, not just sung by touring musicians. However, I wanted so badly for his line to be true, I swallowed it whole. And then some.

But, separated or not, I wasn't going to fuck a
married
man. Not at the Mondrian, anyway. Not where everyone who's anyone cheats on their special someone with some wannabe nobody. No. I didn't want to cheapen what I felt to be the kind of life-changing love I was falling into with this man. I was classier than that, so I
didn't fuck him until a few months later, at the
much classier
Four Seasons in La Jolla.

If you're going to go ho, go full-on bag, I guess.

We fucked in a mad fever for three days. Afterward, he had to go to Nevada and I had to get back to San Francisco. My band was headed to the East Coast to do a showcase for the big management company in New York.

When we said goodbye in San Diego, we agreed that we shouldn't talk until a clear decision was made about his marriage. Should they decide to split, give me a call, should they manage to work it out, we'll always have La Jolla, and see ya. My body was bitten and bruised, looking like I had passed out naked in bear country covered in potato chips. During the string of shows in Boston, New York, New Jersey, and Philly, the bruises had faded, but I started to feel funny.

My band got back from the East Coast in August, and by that time I was really feeling tired and, just, off, and I was late.

No way.

It happens sometimes when you're on the road, not eating or sleeping properly. I bought a pee stick. The little pink plus sign in the pee stick window said yes.

Fuck.

I made an appointment for an official pregnancy test at the Women's Needs Center, and decided to not tell anyone. But, after a band meeting, I went to Michael's apartment, the same apartment we had shared for years, for a cup of coffee.

“Dude, are you pregnant?” he said, out of nowhere.

“What? Ha-ha. No. God! Why would you even ask me that?” I had tried to avoid people I knew for fear of giving away my condition. Involuntary tears sprang from my face instantly, each one screaming
like a cracked-out cartoon character, “Ye-es! She's pregnant! She's preg-naaant!”

“Shit.” I slumped in my chair.

“Oh, Dude. Do you know who the father is?” he asked, reaching for his cigarettes.

I nodded.

“Is the father . . . married?”

One nod before the sobbing started.

“Duuude.” He sighed a long plume of smoke.

Michael didn't judge me, though I knew he was disappointed. He was a great friend, took care of me, and let me stay there as long as I needed, before and after.

After the doctor gave me the official, “Yes, you're pregnant, and no, you can't stop being pregnant by swearing that much. Come back on the twelfth,” I was shown a picture of my ultrasound. I guess they wanted me to think about my choices, or my options, or something. And I did think about it. The little black-and-white picture looked like a dot floating around some cold cuts. The Dot, that's what I called it. Dot.

This wasn't the first time I had seen the Dot; I had been pregnant once before. He was the first man I took up with after I got off heroin. Not only did he not do drugs, he was a drug counselor! Plus all he wanted to do was fuck all day and night. No way! Me too!

He was a stunning male specimen, and that beautiful, demanding cock of his was the perfect kickstand to prop up my sagging self-esteem. I didn't know what a sociopath was and hadn't heard about sex addiction yet. What could possibly go wrong?

About two months in, I started to feel funny. I was exhausted and sore. I could barely keep my eyes open much past sundown. The day I came home from a doctor's appointment, Kickstand was watching porn in my room.

“Hello!” He said with the phoniest happy soundtrack playing behind him, a pile of naked licking girls moaning at him from the screen.

“I'm pregnant.” The words fell with a dull thud. “Which one are you watching?”

“Whu . . . ?”

“No Man's Land Six?”
Awesome.” I crawled into my loft bed, five feet off the ground. It had a tiny sitting area below it. Kickstand shot up from under the loft and stared at me, his eyes shark flat.

“You told me you couldn't
get
pregnant.”

That's what I had thought, too; years ago, a doctor had told me my cervix had some scarring and my uterus was tilted. If I ever wanted to have children, he advised, I would need some corrective surgery. I took that to mean, “Continue to fuck irresponsibly, young lady!”

“Look, don't worry about it. I got it, okay?”

“Yeah, I was gonna say.” He went back to the lesbian orgy on television. Later, he woke me up pushing my legs apart with his knees cooing, “Well, at least now we don't have to worry about you
getting
pregnant.”

The day I had that first abortion was one of the most painful, terrifying, and humiliating days I had ever experienced. And, while I lay in my bed, after the whole ordeal, shaking and bleeding into an adult diaper, Kickstand wanted to comfort me. When I say “wanted” I mean to say “demanded” and when I say “comfort” I mean to say “fuck.”

When I told him it was a medical impossibility, he said a blowjob would be sufficient and why was I being so selfish?

So, with Kickstand's performance on my mind, I had decided not to tell Mr. Whoopass of my condition. He was doing his thing, being
married, and I was doing mine, being a mess, and putting on a happy face while dying on the inside. Mr. Whoopass was a lovely man, and I was pretty sure he loved me, but I was still too terrified to make the call. Michael and the few friends who
did
know were pressuring me to, though. If we were ever going to be friends, they said, I needed to tell him the truth. The truth that I'm an overly fertile idiot? Yeah, I'll get right on that. I knew they were right, though.

During the agonizing lead-up to the twelfth, when the Dot and I were scheduled to part ways, I went on a road trip to see my best friend in Los Angeles. She was a better human being than I had ever pretended to be, and being around her always helped. A stunning, red-haired, former model, who, after growing disenchanted with the shallow fashion world, shaved her head and traveled to Tibet to help a bunch of refugees get to Dharamsala. She went on to the American University and wrote for
Mother Jones
. Later, she taught English in one of the toughest public schools in Los Angeles, but that September, while the ashes of my stupid life were sputtering, she was going to have a small gathering at her apartment in Los Angeles to celebrate her birthday, as well as her rebirth day.

She had been deeply entrenched in studying the Torah, Talmud, the Zohar, and other Jewish tomes, so she could become Orthodox, the ritual of which was to go into a deep pool of rainwater, called a “mikvah,” then, blessed by a rabbi, you emerge a brand new human. Wiped clean and pure. God, if only . . .

Why the heck she wanted
me
in her life at that time is still a great mystery to me. I suppose, if you can't be a good example, be a great cautionary tale.

She, too, told me that I should tell Mr. Whoopass about the Dot. I still refused, even though I knew she was right.

My whole six-and-a-half-hour drive from San Francisco to her
birthday party in Los Angeles went like this; “Okay, if I can hold my breath until the next speed limit sign, I'll call him. Oooh, bummer, didn't make it. Not going to call him.” Then, “If, the next song on the radio is a Rolling Stones song, then I'll call him. Nope. The Who. Not gonna call him.”

Finally, pulling off the 101 into West Hollywood, I looked at my little phone and said, “Okay, if he calls me today, I will tell him.” We hadn't talked since early August, nearly a month before, and though the conversation was sweet, we had recommitted ourselves to never speak until he really wasn't married anymore.

So, I knew I was safe. There was no way he would call me, until he did two hours later.

“Hi!” he said, bright as morning. After some awkward small talk, he asked, “I was just wondering if you were okay.”

My brain churned through the people who knew I was pregnant, and whether there any way or connection to him that he may have heard. “Sure, I'm great!”

“You've just been on my mind a lot and I had a crazy dream about you.”

You said if he called today you'd tell him.

“I know we aren't supposed to be doing this, I just, I don't know,” he said.

Yes, you do know. I don't know how, but
. . . “Well . . . I . . .
do
kind of need to tell you something.”

“Okay.”

Deep breath.
Do the right thing
. “Okay. Here goes, ahem . . .”
Lie! Lie!
“I used to be a man. There, I said it.”

“Wh . . . what?”

He's chuckling!
“Yeah, see, a long time ago, I was a hockey goalie up in Montreal. My name was Gunther, and, well, I was amazing.
But during the Olympic trials in the eighties, I made this amazing, game-winning save but my cup slipped out of my jock and, you know, wham! Oh, it was awful.”
Good, please keep laughing. Please do
not
hate me . . .

“Hey, Storm . . .”

“Wow. I feel so much better having told you . . .”

“Okay, okay. What are you talking about?”

Don't tell him don't tell him.

“I'm pregnant.”

Shit.

“Hello?” I held my breath.

“I know,” he said, sighing.

“You know? How the fuck do you know?”

“The dream I had. You were having our baby. I was holding your hand in the hospital room; you were in labor.”

“That's the dream you had??”

“I was awake, actually. It was more like a head rush. I was in the garage working on my car and I stood up from leaning over and, I don't know, I saw it.” Great. He's a psychic. He would later have a dream about the man I started sleeping with to get over
him
. “Listen, let me send you some money . . .”

“Absolutely not.”

“Come on, I can't be there, so let me pay for it.”

“No.”

“Storm, please . . .”

“If you can
dream
my address then you can send me money. Look, I'm fine, I fucked up, and I'm paying for it. You go back to trying to fix your marriage and forget we even talked about this.”

Bad enough I was knocked up by a married man but to have him secretly mail me his married man's money to “take care of it” just
sounded too gross. I wanted him there, I wanted him to come hold me, I wanted a future. Acting tough was my only move.

He turned out to be pretty resourceful and found a way to get me some money after all. He also insisted that, since he couldn't be there, we should lift the no-talking rule. “I need to know you're all right, okay?”