Eve Marx

Word Count 1504

The husband and I were having coffee in our cozy built-in breakfast nook. He was scanning headlines on his phone while I whined about a friend of mine having her second or third nervous breakdown.

Why do people reach out to me when they’re cracking up, I complained. And why is everybody cracking up? Is there something about me that attracts crazy people or am I just extra sympathetic to crazy?

He blinked.

It’s kind of true your friends are insane, he said, soberly. Not your acquaintances, but your closest compadres. He reeled off a list of my friends and the various ways they’ve been crazy, some of them certifiably so, like legit, you need to park your ass in a hospital crazy. My friends don’t just suffer from garden variety eating disorders or narcissistic personality or agoraphobia or the kind of free-floating anxiety a lot of middle-aged women experience best managed by a Xanax prescription. A surprising number of my friends are clinically depressed, suffer from manic disorders, are bipolar, have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, are or have been suicidal. A pen pal friend whom I’ve been exchanging letters for three years is serving two life sentences for murder. Homicidal behavior is often linked to a form of psychosis related to schizophrenia. When we first began our correspondence, my husband joked that my pen pal was just like all my other friends, i.e. nuts. The good part about her being in jail was that I could keep her at a distance.

My crazy friends are always colorful. That’s what makes them so attractive. Connie, a glittering, vivid person once got me a book deal ghostwriting an unauthorized Goldie Hawn bio. She called me one day out of the blue after a sixteen-year hiatus to say she was friendless and destitute and living in a Section 8 hotel room in Media, PA. She named a best-selling novel she claimed to have written; she said her agent stole the manuscript from her and attributed it to another author. She ranted about various scurrilous personalities we both knew in publishing and the longer she talked the more I realized her mind was gone and it was hopeless. After we got off the phone, I fretted for days whether I should have offered to send money, visit, take any action. Not long after someone forwarded me her obituary on Legacy.com and it was too late to do anything.

A man in his 70’s I regularly chat with at my local coffee shop shared, or overshared, that he’d just experienced a crack up. He said he’d spent several nights watching a documentary about Sept. 11 and it made him so depressed he wanted to die, like, literally die. He couldn’t stop talking about it. His wife became alarmed and ordered him to see a doctor.

So, you no longer feel like killing yourself, I asked. We’d been discussing the death of our friend, another 70-something coffee shop habitue who neither of us saw much outside the cafe, even though this town is as small as a postage stamp. She downplayed her serious heart condition. We knew she was the lone caregiver of her husband who had dementia and no use of his legs. Apparently, her strength gave out and she was discovered dead as a doornail on her rather secluded front porch, seated at a patio table, her head resting on her arm. The friend who found her said she had a peaceful expression on her face. The terrible part was she was dead a full 24 hours before anyone noticed. Her incapacitated husband was inside the house the whole time, unattended and unable to call for help, dehydrated and incoherent. The really shocking thing we learned was that first responders said there was no medication in the house, not for her heart condition, or his ailments either. There was no wheelchair or walker or even a cane to help move her spouse about. We reckoned she just stopped going to doctor’s appointments or filling prescriptions. She firmly discouraged anyone from coming over to the house even though several people reached out to offer their assistance.

Do you think she was trying to kill herself and her husband on purpose, I asked.

Hard to say, he replied. She might have just felt the way I did, like what’s my reason for living?

My son had a girlfriend when he was in ninth grade who turned out to be crazy. At one point we had to hire a lawyer to handle the situation. I blame myself for ignoring the signs, including that she climbed all over her father when he came to fetch her at our house like he was a tree or her boyfriend. Some of the meaner girls in her class at school circulated a rumor she was intimate with her father. At first, I was upset and indignant on her behalf until her mother became angry with me after I said my son could no longer go to their house but she could visit ours. Her mother screamed down the phone, You can’t do that. Your son is the man of my house. I explained to her that a fifteen-year-old boy could never be the man of her house and went out and bought condoms just in case the girl took it into her head to make him her baby daddy.

If I’m comfortable around crazy people, it’s because of how I grew up. I really don’t want to make this piece about my mother but she totally set the bar. My mother was crazy as a loon, batshit crazy; she was proud of her crazy and wore it like a crown.

I remember one day coming home from school to find her third husband, the one we called Martin, seated in the living room of the apartment we lived in over a dental office. Martin hadn’t been her husband very long. You could say he was still familiarizing himself with the situation. His suit jacket was off and he was in his shirtsleeves, reading a newspaper. Martin was very formal in both his speech and his dress. His everyday speech was peppered with polite and antique modifiers like “perhaps,” and “possibly.” When he wasn’t in his dressing gown, he always wore a suit. Your mother is upstairs, he said as I came through the door. I climbed the stairs to the third floor and found her lying naked in the tub. Her eyes were closed and a washcloth covered her breasts partially submerged in bath water tinged pink and cloudy with shaved hairs and soap scum and what I instantly recognized as blood. My father’s heavy chrome shaver we both used to shave our legs was balanced on the tub’s porcelain lip. The mechanism was open and I could see the double-edged razor blade we’d both used for weeks was dislodged from the casing, resting on a half-melted bar of Dove soap.

What are you doing? I asked.

A lousy job of killing myself, she said. Go away.

I went downstairs to confront Martin who was still reading his newspaper.

She slit her wrists, I shouted.

Shhh, he said, pointing his finger towards the floor to remind me we were above a place of business. It was not quite 3:30 in the afternoon, a busy time for the dentist. The dentist, whose name was Dr. Monaco, was young and handsome. He was unfailingly kind to me even if he was fed up with my mother whom he’d been dealing with for years. He was very familiar with her screaming fits and door slamming and occasional lapses into violence. Long ago he slipped me a key to the dental office to use at night if I needed to barricade myself. More than once he warned if my mother didn’t pipe down, we would have to find a new place to live. I didn’t want that to happen. My mother loved that apartment.

I lowered my voice.

What’s going on, I hissed.

Just calm down, Martin said. You know how she is.

My reaction to my mother’s craziness was to move away. I was seventeen when I started college and we had little interaction for years. While I was in grad school, Martin threw himself over the railing of their 10th floor balcony. His suicide at the time struck me as prudent, not crazy, and I got the sense my mother was jealous of his courage to end his life and angry she’d been abandoned. Less than two weeks after his death, she took up with another Martin who preferred to be called Marty. He lived in her apartment building and was a widower and he had a cat, and for exactly ten years until he died, he found all my mother’s erratic behaviors attractive and charming. Right up to the end of their story, I thought she was lucky to have found someone who appreciated her for exactly who she was.

Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications. She makes her home in a rural seaside community near Portland, OR with her husband, R.J. Marx, a jazz saxophonist, and Lucy, their dog child. Follow Eve on Twitter here.