This is Crazy

Sitting here at my favorite coffee shop, I can see a child out on the patio who is talking to the water meter. He looks to be about three or four. He first addresses the dial, then the coiling pipe with his fat little finger, giving the system a good talking-to. You can get away with that sort of thing when you’re that age. It’s a bad look when you’re forty-two.

Recently Rachael and I stayed the night in New Orleans, at a half-decent little hotel next to the airport. Flying from Jackson, Mississippi, to almost anywhere else can take multiple connecting flights, and quite often I am flown directly over my destination and have to backtrack. I’ve grown tired of it. So now I drive two and a half hours to NOLA and pay for a hotel and long-term parking.

The night before my flight we watched Seinfeld—“the show about nothing”— and played a card game called “We’re Not Really Strangers,” which is just a series of deep questions you can ask friends to really plumb the depths of your relationship. But Rachael had agreed to go down to New Orleans and stay the night with me in the ugly, industrial part of the city, far from the French Quarter and its jazz. There were very few perks in her agreeing to go, and that in itself said something about our friendship.

One card asked us to share embarrassing truths about ourselves, which was difficult. Where do I even begin? I sorted through my options as I would decide on an outfit. Take one out of the closet and hold it out at arm’s length. Compare two of them side by side in the mirror. At last I picked a medium-sized embarrassment, one that I thought showed some vulnerability on my part but also wasn’t too raw. Something I’ve come to terms with. I settled on the embarrassing fact that I talk to myself.

You’ve probably heard people react to such a statement with some line like, “Well, as long as you don’t answer yourself! Haha!” Imagine their laughter sort of trailing off as they realize I’m not laughing with them. I’m just staring. They clear their throats and rattle their straws around in their drinks, and I’m not even blinking.

I talk to myself (and answer) with full-on gesticulating and emoting, and I've done it my whole life. I’ve had weighty conversations with the imaginary versions of people I know and also people I’ve entirely made up. I have worked out numerous conflicts this way and—would you believe it—I have come out the winner every time. I silence my opponent with the profundity of my rebuttals and they—disembodied not-persons—go away wiser, better disembodied not-persons.

In more passionate moments—say, in the car, rolling down Lakeland Drive, trying to explain to One-Shoe McGoo why the insurance industry is whacked—I have become aware of how unhinged I would appear to the silent observer. I have caught myself mid-sentence and have slowly pressed my fingers to my lips with a kind of horrified awakening. “Dear God,” I think. “What is wrong with me?” And, unfortunately, I have not said that in my head.

When I was a child, I once caught my mother doing the same thing. She was gesticulating over a pile of clean laundry. She was dealing out facts by chopping the air, dividing an argument with the blade of her hand. I laughed at her. I chopped the air like a tiny ninja—skya!—and, to her credit, she just laughed it off and quietly folded the laundry. And I never caught her talking to herself again.

I read somewhere that talking to myself is a sign of intelligence. Albert Einstein supposedly did it. But so did Gollum. Being homeschooled meant there were long stretches of time when all the other children in my neighborhood were gone, and I would chip away at the solitude by playing out elaborate stories with my stuffed animals, giving them all high-pitched Muppet voices. And we’d really get into it. The tiger would bully the other toys, and the rabbit would interject and take up for them.

Or I’d trudge through the wet grass on my little bicycle, churning my knees like pistons, cutting ruts through the dewy grass of my neighbors’ front yards, and all the while I’d be talking to some invisible sidekick. For we were police. My brother was a cop, and for my 7th birthday he gave me a miniature, battery-powered bullhorn that clipped onto the handlebars of my bike. It blasted the siren of three different kinds of emergency vehicles and also had a PA system with a little push-to-talk microphone on a curly black cord, so that the whole neighborhood could hear me say, “Get outta the way! This is police business!”

The first time I engaged in a heated conversation with myself is what we now call a core memory, although I don’t know why I’ve held on to it. I was arguing with the teenager next door who couldn’t breathe through her nose. She towered over me, which offered me a constant view of the metal brackets that ran across her teeth like barbed wire. She liked to sneak her stepfather’s beer and then run around naked in the moonlight.

If we’re being honest, I wasn’t talking to the girl so much as about her. Even though most days she was miles away at school, I was just a teensy bit afraid of her. I pleaded my case to the short, rotten fence that ran behind our backyard. I broke a stick across the belly of a pine tree. I talked to the Advocate Invisible that I think also embodied my stuffed rabbit. You’ve probably had people tell you to find the courage to speak to someone by imagining them in their underwear. I had peered out my bedroom window and saw the girl fully exposed to the moon, and it actually didn’t make her any less intimidating.

She had two grandmothers that I knew of: her mother’s mom and her stepfather’s mom. Her mother’s mom was just the larger Russian doll of her daughter and granddaughter. Angry. Also with some kind of restricted sinuses that, in her case, gave her the voice of a goose honk.

The other grandmother came a little less often because she lived farther away—so far away that her son would pick her up from the airport. Another core memory of mine was once when she stepped out of her son’s gray Astro Van and called my name and threw her arms wide open and I ran to her.

“I think she’s an angel,” I told my mother. I was in this phase where I was wrestling with the concept of heavenly beings. Mom had taught me the verse about entertaining angels unaware. The step-grandmother was from somewhere beyond my understanding, and so nice to me, and those were my two criteria for an angel. She must’ve been short, because even at the age of seven I barely fit under her chin. Mom did not agree that she was an angel, but when the old woman talked to me, she’d gesticulate with the movements of an opera singer. Her hands would lilt on the air or she would clasp them, as if in a burst of gratitude. She was always talking to the sky, singing a kind of constant song to someone just above and beyond me. I do not even remember the things she said. Just the celestial way she said them.

On the last night of one of her visits, she came to my bedroom window and left a gift on my windowsill. She would’ve had to find her way in the dark with only a single street light and the moon that had seen some awful things in its time. She would’ve had to wade through the boxwood shrubs and tread the unstable mulch of our flowerbed. She would’ve had to have known which window was mine.

The next morning, as she was flying home, flitting from one airport to another like a smooth stone skipping along the water, I awakened to the gift outside my window: a cotton bit of crochet work, round and flat and soft and white. But also hard to assign to any particular purpose. A doily? A drink coaster? She also left me a note that told me about how she made it. “I took a bit of yarn and crochet needles,” she said. As if something this small and simple was actually beyond belief.

I still have that doily-coaster thing, which I will be glad to show you below. Its function now is to give proof of what I could almost dismiss as a made-up part of my life. I don’t even remember the old woman’s name. I’m sure she’s been gone quite some time now. I keep her gift in a metal lockbox along with three or four arrowheads and a fossilized megalodon’s tooth. Yesterday I took her gift out of the box to photograph, and when I was done I pressed it to my nose and found that it had the scent of perfume on it. Thirty-five years rolling around in a metal box with flint and mineral and chert and somehow it smelled like roses.

“That is crazy,” I thought. And I did not say it in my head.