William Peter Blatty - Crazy

Where do I begin? The seventh grade at St. Stephens on East 28th Street in 1941, I suppose, because thats where and when I first met Jane, back before we grew up and she started disappearing and then reappearing in someplace like Tibet or Trucial Oman from where shed send me picture postcards with tiny scrawled messages in different-colored inks such as, Thinking of you sometimes in the morning or Angkor Wat really smells. Joey, dont ever come here for a vacation, but thered be only a day between the postmarked dates and sometimes no difference at all between them, and then all of a sudden shed reappear again looking years younger, which is nothing, I suppose, when compared to that time when supposedly she levitated six feet off the ground when she thought they were running out of Peter Paul Mounds candy bars at the refreshment counter of the old Superior movie house on 30th Street and Third Avenue back when there were el trains rumbling overhead and a nickel got you two or three feature films, plus a Buck Jones Western chapter, four cartoons, bingo and an onstage paddleball contest, when supposedly a theater usher approached her and told her, Hey, come on, kid, get down, you cant be doing that crazy stuff in here! and right away she wobbled down to the seedy lobby carpet, gave the usher the arm and yelled, Thats the same kind of crap they gave Tinkerbell! but then I know you have no interest in any of these matters, so fine, lets by all means move on and go back to the beginning.

Which comes at the end.

Medication time.

Its December 24, 2010, and Im sitting by a window in a tenth-floor Bellevue Hospital recovery room staring down at a tugboat churning up a foaming white V at its prow in the East Rivers death-dark suicide waters and looking like its hugging itself against the cold. Hi ya, kiddo! The pudgy and diminutive Nurse Bloor breezily waddles into my room, a hypodermic syringe upraised in her pudgy little staph-infested fingers. She stops by my chair and I look down at her feet and I stare. Ive never seen a nurse in stiletto heels. She glances over at something I sculpted a couple of days before and says, Hey, now, whats that? and I tell her that its Father Perraults wooden leg from Lost Horizon , but she doesnt pursue it, nor does she react to my laptop computer: she has read Archy and Mehitabel and knows that sometimes even a rat can type.

Okay, a teensy little stick, she says.

I yelp, Ouch!

Oh, come on, now, dont tell me that hurt!

Well, it didnt, but I want to puncture her starched-white pride and maddening air of self-assurance. She scowls, slaps a Band-Aid on the puncture and leaves. Sometimes growth of the soul needs pain, which is something I have always been on the spot to give.

The pneumatic door closes with a sigh. I turn my glance to my desk and the gift from Bloor thats sitting on top of it, a foot-tall artificial Christmas tree with different-colored Band-Aids hanging from its branches. For a moment I stare at it dully, and then I shift my gaze to the dry and abandoned public pool down on the corner of First Avenue and 23rd where I almost drowned when Paulie Farragher and Jimmy Connelly kept shoving me back into the pools deep end every time I tried to climb up and out for air and I swore any number of choking, coughing blood oaths that if God let me live I would track them to Brazil or to China or the Yucatan, anyplace at all where I could offer them death without the comfort of the sacraments. Yes. I remember all of that. I do. I remember even though Im eighty-two years old.

Again.

Are you Joey El Bueno?

I was packing up my book bag after class when I looked up and saw this really pretty girl with reddish hair that she wore in pigtails with green-and-yellow smiley-face barrettes at the ends.

Yeah, thats me, I said. Why?

So youre the one! she exclaimed.

The girls jade green eyes were slowly tracing all over my face with a look of awe, if not loony adoration.

I said, Im the one what?

She said, The Mask!

Instantly I knew that this girl was crazy.

The Mask referred to something I had done in fifth grade. We had this new teacher, Miss Comiskey, a pretty nineteen-year-old who had never before taught a course in anything unless it was absolute futility, and who seemed thoroughly convinced that our only path to knowledge was in reciting some fact at least one hundred times, such as Lake Titicaca is the largest lake in South America. Bad enough, but even worse when our tall, wrinkled, thin-lipped principal, old gaunt-faced Sister Veronica, walked in like some animated withered leaf for a check on how Comiskey was getting along and the boys in the class couldnt make it through the word Titicaca without totally losing it, which of course was pretty much a big nothing when compared to the quiet, ever-overhanging terror all the boys in the class had to live with the following year when our teacher was a nun and shed ask us questions and wed have to stand up to give the answer at a time in our lives when almost anythingthe swish of a dress, hearing someone in the street saying Tondelayo, which was the name of Hedy Lamarrs character in White Cargo might produce an instantaneous and irrepressible outward sign of our interest, such as happened quite often with the hot-blooded Johnny Baloqui, the tall and dramatic-looking Spaniard among us, and I can still see him standing there, his eyes wide with panic, and yet always with his chin held proudly high in some awesomely courageous but doomed attempt at projecting matador haughtiness and cool while he stood there like a stork with his right leg lifted high and bent inward toward his crotch in this ludicrous Marx Brothers effort at concealment, while at the same time assuring the nun in charge in quiet tones that General Wolfe defeated General Montcalm in the Battle of Quebec in 1759. Once hed looked off pensively and frowned as he added in a murmur, At least I think thats the date.

This last was Baloquis attempt at Gaslight.

So now, The Mask, I echoed dully.

The Mask.

Driven stark raving mad by the endless recitations in Comiskeys class, I played the hook for a week, smashing open a piggy bank with a leftover, rock-hard, four-day-old frozen tamale that Pop had concocted for Sunday dinner and then going to Times Square to see first-run movies like Gullivers Travels , which wouldnt get to the Superior for six more years, but not having the instincts of Jean Valjean I got caught red-handed when my father, in a break from habit, decided to pick me up from school for no rational reason that I could divine, unless it was to vault me to the head of the list of Top Ten Stupidest Grammar School Criminals. So it was back to Miss Comiskey and her Give Me the Boy and Ill Give You Back His Remains school of learning, which was doubtless the inspiration for future North Korean interrogation techniques. Well, I took it for another two weeks until one rainy Monday morning when I took my seat in the back of the room, folded my hands on top of my desk and sat silent and motionless and looking straight ahead while ignoring the excited whoops and giggles and chatter all around me. I was wearing a frighteningly realistic wraparound mask of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. In fourth grade Sister Joseph had made us study his picture to show us how freaking well-off we all were and to quit complaining about the piled-on homework, and so after much practice making masks of Dick Tracy, Barney Google and Maggie and Jiggs out of cutouts provided by the Sunday Journal-American, my hands had fairly leapt to the Merrick Challenge and I waited now, silent and unmoving, for Comiskey to come into the room, which she soon enough did, and Ive got to say the first reviews were a rave: first the Eeek! and the electrified raised hair just like Little Orphan Annie in the comics, then the shouts and the orders and hysterical threats of what would happen unless I took off the mask right now! But I didnt. I just sat there like a statue, still looking straight ahead with my hands clasped and resting on the top of my desk. Sister Louise would by now have been whacking my knuckles with a ruler until Id clearly grasped the limits of innovation, but my silence and statue-like, eerie lack of motionnot to mention the maskunnerved Comiskey to the point that her hands were shaking. She bolted from the room and came back with Sister Veronica, who after taking one look at me dismissed the class and sent down for Miss Doyle, her office assistant, because Doyle had studied psychology in school. Just a little under four feet tall, Doyle had worn the same ratty pink cardigan sweater every day for all the years that Id been at St. Stephens, plus this foot-long, huge wooden cross that dangled from a metal chain of thorns around her neck. There was also the matter of her dyed-green hair. She gimped into the room, took me in with a glance, and then, folding her arms across her chest, turned to Sister Veronica and said, Why am I here?