Crazy

Sometimes, when I think life is getting the better of me and my brain, I remember a conversation I had with a hardscrabble Janis Joplin fan, who happened to be my employee. Carol was from New York and had fading rose tattoos on her arm. She’d tell me about how pushed around Janis had been and how all those people in Port Arthur, Texas had something awful coming to them in the next life. Come to think of it, she looked just like Janis. I liked Carol, especially when she told me stories about how her mom got caught cheating or when she stopped in the middle of the Long Island Expressway to rescue a kitten she named Freeway. Carol had one of the biggest hearts I have ever known.

It had been a particularly stressful week and I said to Carol in a rather flip way that I thought I was going crazy. Carol stopped smiling and her face fell into a grave visage of her normal self. She said as seriously as possible, “No, you are not going crazy. If you say to yourself ‘I’m going crazy’ you’re not going crazy.” It turns out that Carol spent 15 years working in asylums in and around New York City. She had seen “real crazy.” Some of the stories she told me at the book counter that day were shocking.

At the end of her words she looked me directly in the eye and said, once more and with feeling,

“Real crazies never think they are crazy. If you ever think to yourself, ‘I’m going crazy’ you are absolutely not going crazy.”