Crazy Enough (28 page)

I wasn't all right by the time I got to the mikvah, but I was pretending to be, for the benefit of my best friend and the rabbis who were officiating at her rebirth. Standing in the temple, watching my friend forging a deeper connection to God, I took a shot at praying. I closed my eyes, held my belly, and had a little chat with the Dot. “Hey, I'm really sorry about this, but you can't stay here this time. I can barely take care of myself, let alone another little human, and you deserve better.” I then swore to God if the Dot ever returned, under any circumstances, I would bring it into the world and do whatever I could to give it the best life possible. That was the deal.

I closed my eyes and held my belly. The sun was shining and God was blessing my best friend. I hoped God had a little room in his ears to hear me. I opened my eyes and looked down at my big hands on my belly and, for a split second, saw a tiny hand grab my index finger, hold on, then let go.

An hour or so later, there was an earthquake, a small one. Happens all the time in LA, but I took it as God shaking on the deal.

I drove back to San Francisco a day later, feeling even more pregnant and crazy. Crying intermittently, nausea chewing into my guts, then giving way to desperate, animal hunger. My face had plumped and softened and my boobs looked like they were having an
allergic reaction to shellfish. I absolutely hated myself. I felt the Dot was good with our deal, and was moving on, but I was still miserable.

I decided I needed one day of silence, of introspection, meditation, and really try to find a little peace with everything. I would take water, some fruit, and a blanket to the beach, sit by myself and stare at the ocean until I forgave myself. The calendar in my head flipped its pages.
What's today? The ninth, okay, driving back to San Francisco today, tomorrow, the tenth, band business, my appointment is the twelfth, so the eleventh. Tuesday.

When I got home I took out my real calendar and a pink high-lighter. I drew a small heart inside of a bigger heart, to mark the day. Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

September 12, I was sitting in the crammed waiting room of the Women's Needs Center, shoulder-to-shoulder with mostly younger girls, the majority of whom were weeping. All of us were staring up at the television listening to the good folks at CNN talk about how those sorry souls were mercifully unconscious or dead before they even got close to the ground. Well, thank God for that.

I looked down and stared at a parenting magazine one girl was thumbing through, “Lose That Baby Fat!!!” chirped the banner across the cover photo of a lithe and tight mommy jogging with her pink-cheeked miracle in an aerodynamic, off-road stroller. I wondered if that mommy was working out today.

“Storm Lang?”

“Large.”

“Really? Wow. Okay, come with me, please. “

It wasn't until a few days later that I got my day at the beach.
The news screeched with discovered plots to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge, to sprinkle anthrax out of helicopters, of a Mau Mau style uprising of Muslim extremists. No one was safe. We were at war, and we should run out and get as much fucking duct tape as we could carry.

I walked barefoot through the cold autumn sand. The sky frowned gray and hard like angry old men beating the drums of war. The Pacific Ocean looked pissed off, too, with big, black waves, slapping, judging. I stood, small and bleeding, surrounded by beautiful, terrible, and huge.

I was a scoured and empty wrapper from some cheap candy bar nobody wanted. Not even close to that tall-walking, loud-talking, hard-rocking motherfucker that no one could touch. My fans thought I was a badass, a ninja, and a killer. Was that ever me? Or had I just been in a crazy panic for these last few years, so blinded and deafened by the me on stage I couldn't notice the weak loser I had always been?

It didn't matter. All that I had been was no longer me, anyway. The me I had built out of fear and fuck yous was gone. I sunk to my knees into the sand, cried and was nothing. Prayed, cursed, and apologized and was nothing. Thought about New York, the lives lost, about how the world was exploding, and I was . . .
a girl
crying alone in the sand. Useless. Nothing.

“I am nothing.” I said into the wind. Somewhere, another, kinder voice answered from nowhere and everywhere.

“Exactly.”

I
always swore that I would leave San Francisco for good when Paradise closed down. And I was pretty sure that would never happen, the owner, Robin, and his pal and manager, Terry, were institutions in my world. But times were tough for live music.

Times were tough in the city for nightclubs in general. Under Mayor Willie Brown, some fancy, and hastily built, lofts sprang up around and on top of rock clubs and bars. Rumor had it that the zoning in South of Market, where most of these clubs did business, had been changed from light industrial to mixed use.

It's a lot of building code and policy hoo-ha, but the outcome simply was: Rich people bought real estate in and around buildings that housed these establishments, only to be shocked,
shocked
that those establishments, with their neon bar signs and marquees that
announced “Live Music,” actually
had
live music, served alcohol, and were open late. So, of course, the very upset, fancy new neighbors went about trying to oust the riffraff, the riffraff being musicians, bartenders, waitresses, security, and a ton of other folks who work in the nightclub world, who were there first, and had been there all along. It had always been okay to make a ruckus down there in South of Market. But seemingly out of nowhere, the new, bourgeois dot com kings and queens were having hissy fits and getting clubs shut down. They did this by calling the cops when anyone would take a guitar solo or take out the recycling at three in the morning.

Rose was gone, the management company in New York stopped returning our phone calls after September 11, my band was essentially bust. I hadn't spoken to nor heard from Mr. Whoopass. I was single, homeless, bandless, and didn't have anything keeping me in San Francisco. It was time to look for friendlier territory to park my van.

Funny how the Universe eavesdrops on everything you say, even think, and sometimes delivers it all, in exact detail, to the real world.

My second-to-last gig in SF was in December. I sang a few songs at my friend's birthday at the Café Du Nord. A man named Frank was in the audience. He told me that if I were ever in Portland to come by his club, Dante's; he would give me a job if I moved there. A week later, my sound engineer, El Fay, told me she was going on a month-long tour, and could I watch her house and her dog, Willma, up in Portland for the month of January.

I had toured through Portland a bunch of times in various bands and always loved the wet, wide, green spaces dotted with some city bits. The smell was lush and fertile with tendrils of roasting coffee and smoke. I also loved the crabby pale residents, every one of whom seemed to be in a band.

Mr. Whoopass lived in Portland.

My last show in San Francisco was New Year's, goodbye 2001, hello 2002, at The Fillmore. Not a bad sendoff.

While headed north on the 5, my phone rang twice. One was Terry at the Paradise Lounge. “Come to the club. They're shutting us down and we're drinking the inventory.” And the other was Mr. Whoopass to tell me he was getting a divorce and “Oh, you're going to be in town? What are you doing on Friday?”

“D
on't you think you should visit Mom?” my brother John would say, periodically, over the six years I lived in Portland pretending she was dead.

“Nope,” was my regular reply, and John never pushed. He was the only one of all of us who kept up with her. He knew how she was, and where she was. Henry was now a father of two and had fired Mom years before. He had tried to let Mom babysit, to let her be a grandmother, but his new wife put a stop to that. There were a few mishaps with bad driving, one involved a lit cigarette ending up in the kid's car seat, and the other was about some chemically induced blackout where she rolled her car after dropping off his three-year-old son.

Nobody blamed Henry for keeping himself and his family a good distance from Mom, after that. Mom would never meet his third child, a beautiful baby girl named Amelia.

John faithfully remained in contact with Mom. I made him promise to never tell her where I was, give her my phone number, or tell her anything about me, and he always kept his word. Every now and then, Mom would give a card to John, to give to me. He would ask me if I wanted it, if I said yes, he would mail it to me himself.

In her loopy girly handwriting, I'd read about how she was, and what she'd been up to. For years, I got updates this way. There was never any begging, just a sincere promise that things were different. “I am so much better, Stormy.”

She told me how she had started making beaded jewelry, had successfully lobbied the powers that be at her facility to put in a small putting green for the residents, had begun an annual fundraising picnic with donated BBQ and live music, and how she was really kicking ass from her little wheelchair.

They were brief little updates. They were all chatty and positive. And not a single one of them mentioned how she had to have her leg amputated.

It had happened some years before. Because of the paralysis, she couldn't feel the bone infection from an undetected fracture in her thigh. When the doctors discovered it, it was too late, so off it went.

Her friend wrote to tell me, in an email, how she was doing really well despite her situation, and wondered if I would ever come see her. “She's doing so much better, Stormy.”

But I was living in Portland, now, happy, healthy. My new band, The Balls, was becoming a Portland institution in the mere three years it had been in existence. Mr. Whoopass and I were living together. He played bass in The Balls and we had been performing every Wednesday at Dante's, to more and more packed and whacked crowds. We were in demand in Seattle and in San Francisco, and life was good again.

“You'll be here in August, anyway, you should really think about seeing her. She's doing so much better, Sis,” John kept insisting.

I hadn't seen Mom in nearly six years. A long stretch of safe distance, she
could
feasibly be better, but could she really be that different? I am always suspicious when someone talks about how much they've changed;
trust me, you can believe me, would I lie to you
. . . all those words are red flags to me. Red flags with bold, black lettering, spelling the word,
bullshit.

However, despite the fact that there was a vast, flapping field of red bullshit flags around Mom, she hadn't told me about her amputation. Not once, didn't even tiptoe around it with her one good leg. The Mom
I
knew would have found the closest handicapped accessible rooftop from which to crow, “Stormy hates me because I have only one leg!”

Maybe the rumors were true and she
was
different.

The plan was lunch. Outside on the facility lawn, where I could easily escape if needed. John picked me up at Dad's. We went to Whole Foods to buy some snacks and sandwiches for our picnic, then we went to go see Mom, the one-legged stranger.