Flavors of Crazy

photo by Midnight-digital.

She was crazy. Utterly nuts. I knew even before I had officially met her. I could tell when I first saw her behind a booth at a software conference in Las Vegas. She was one of those six foot tall, leggy women in a tight tee-shirt of a software vendor, as though she was one of the programmers, peddling a handful of flyers to the throngs of computer geeks. Black hair all tangled up in a bird’s nest, and these little black eyes like pebbles in her face. I sensed it right away; she was a bipolar carnival perched atop her high heels. For some reason I had always been drawn to the crazy ones. Later that night at the conference party I saw her again, only this time the roles were reversed and she was the target audience, with the computer geeks marketing their come-on lines and clumsy attempts at flirtation. After a few gin and tonics, I felt a need to assert myself as the alpha male of this inferior gene pool and took my shot. She ended up bar hopping with me and one of my coworkers, even though she didn’t drink. Mixed poorly with her meds, I figured, but she had no problem watching me drink for eight hours, and then followed me back to my hotel room.

Only flashes of memory, like some “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” montage, the silhouette of beauty that turned monstrous in too direct of lighting, the fuzziness of alcohol giving way to flashes of lucidity, disorientation, regret. Were those wrinkles and scars in the dark, or did the alcohol send me off into some kind of delirium? Who was this wrapped in the bed sheets the next morning? She quickly got ready in the bathroom and left, leaving a lipstick message on my mirror “Bye Sweetheart” with a heart drawn underneath. That was my first clue that she had a flair for the dramatic.

I was too hung over to attend that day’s conference sessions, but she had the vendor floor to work. She called me later that afternoon and came by the hotel lobby to talk, saying she didn’t want me to think this was a regular occurrence for her, that she was recently divorced and going through some stuff, and that there were no expectations, but she thought I was somebody special and sweet. Some shit like that. We hugged when she left and exchanged business cards.

The next week at work, I got a package mailed to me. It was a vintage Batman lunchbox (must have been something I said during my drunken binge), filled with Halloween themed decorations: orange and black tissue paper, confetti in the shape of pumpkins and black cats, a CD of Halloween songs like “Monster Mash” and “Werewolves of London.” There were homemade cookies, and stickers of ghouls and goblins on the inside of the lunchbox. I got razzed by the guys in the office, but it made me smile. I thanked her in an email, and she responded that she just happened to be in town for a vendor exhibit next week, so we could go on a real date if I was interested. I thought “Sure. Why not?” I resisted offering her to stay at my place, and found out which hotel she would be staying at.

I should have suspected something was not right when her hotel was nowhere near the convention center. She said she needed to find one with an oven. I found out why when I picked her up. She had baked me three dozen cookies. She apologized for how many there were, but she wasn’t sure if I’d prefer the chocolate cookies with white chocolate chips, or the traditional chocolate chip cookies with walnuts. I usually don’t go for nuts, but it looked like tonight I would be stuck with one that night.

I’ll skip describing for you the obligatory dinner, or how despite all of the warning signs I was still attracted to her, and that if she lived halfway across the country, I couldn’t really be in that much danger, could I? Instead, let’s jump ahead to the post-sex pillow talk at my place.

She had been bulimic at one point in her teenage years, then an obese binge eater, and now she had some sort of band wrapped around her stomach that had turned her skinny. The skin hung off her bones like an old blanket, in places. There were scars on the insides of her thighs where excess skin had been removed. Jesus Christ, what was I thinking? Why didn’t I go after a nice normal girl, like Christine’s friend, the geeky one with horn rimmed 60’s glasses, but kind of cute and funny? But in a moment, even this unhinged woman would be rejecting me.

After she told me about her bulimia, did I offer her a hug? I thought; okay, this just happens to be her flavor of crazy, compared to all of the other flavors out there, including my own. I clinically listened, nodded my head much like I imagined a therapist would do, and stayed at a safe distance. But she needed more. A sad sympathetic face and a tilt of the head. A hug. An “awww, come here you,” with arms held out.

When I missed my cue, she turned on me. Accusations flew. Why did I seem so stand-offish, now? Why didn’t I show more emotion? I tried to cover with stories of my own scarred childhood, an emotionally distant father, and how maybe I was unconsciously trying to become like him; a rock, an island. Why did I always conjure up Simon and Garfunkel lyrics when a woman put me on the defensive? It didn’t have much effect on her though, and she went on bitterly about the flat-lined men in her life, making me feel increasingly guilty until I felt like I was in some long term relationship when this was ONLY DAY THREE with this person.

Then I found my honesty and spoke up, “No I am not comfortable with you spending the night, and yes I think you’re a little bit crazy for baking me a batch of three-dozen cookies and sending a Halloween box to my work, and yes I think it would be a good idea if I drove you back to your hotel room right now!”

During the tense car ride to her hotel, she informed me that she would be flying out immediately, that there was no conference and that she had spent all of this money just to come see me, but good riddance to me. When I got back home, I sighed a breath of relief. Okay, brush my teeth: two times. Shower: two times. Wash the bed sheets: three times. She was almost erased, except the cookies hung around for another week. She made damn good cookies.

Postscript: She mailed two CD’s shortly afterwards. One was a forty-five minute burned monolog of how angry and hurt she was. Odd that she felt the need to capture this in a recording rather than an email or letter. Also odd how she somehow looped around from a tirade about that night and how cruel I was, to an introspection of her self-worth, to how I was so wonderful and caring on that first night when I was drunk at the convention, to eventually how I showed characteristics of an innocent, sensitive side that she would miss. I thought about posting it on YouTube. The other CD contained every possible cover of the song, “I am a Rock.” She was clever; I had to give her that.