Crazy Enough by Storm Large

had a job, but I’m certain he suffered a rope burn or two while docking his yacht in various ports of call. The other uncle, Claude, seemed nice enough, but we barely ever got to know him.
    For a while, we would spend every Thanksgiving at their house in Connecticut, where we were sequestered in the downstairs apartment. Not a bad place to hang while the grownups got crocked upstairs. There was a wall of closets to go through, full of old pictures, board games, plastic horses, and croquet mallets. We would play Chinese checkers, usually, or ding around on the old sixties-style organ that had a built-in rhythm machine. Pop, waltz, and calypso were a few of the selections. Push a button and a cheesy booping pattern would play to accompany whatever number you planned to rock on the keys.
    The kids would eventually be called to walk, not run, up the stairs, thickly carpeted with a lush, leopard pattern, into the wide, airy living and dining room. The house would be jammed with family and friends of the Banks, people whom we would only see at Thanksgiving, then never see or hear from for the rest of the year.
    I think we stopped going there by the time I was nine. I remember wanting to like them but, even as a little one, I got the impression my brothers and I weren’t liked very much by most of the people there. Grandfather Banks, throughout dinner, would get redder in the freckles and gruffer in his voice. I suppose he was very funny because many of the grownups would laugh at things he said. In a room full of drunken partygoers, he would snarl jovially at me, “Hey, Stormy! C’mere. Hop up in my lap! Atta girl! Hey, you wanna see smoke come outta my ears?”
    Being in his lap was always weird because I was fairly sure theman hated me, but, when a grownup pays attention to you, and is holding your little four-year-old person in their lap, that’s a sign of affection, right? And, of course, I wanted to see smoke come out of his ears!
    â€œAll right, now, I’m going to take a drag off my cigarette and you’re going to push on my chest with both hands, okay? Ready? Watch my ears now!”
    He had big, red, sticking-out ears. I wondered if the smoke would puff out or maybe, hopefully, he could somehow make smoke rings. He took a drag, and I pushed and watched, and I didn’t see. . . .
    â€œOWWW!”
    While I stared at his ears, he’d puff his cigarette to a glowing cherry, then quickly poke the lit end into the back of my hand. I yanked my hands away as he laughed two lungs full of smoke at me. Everyone would laugh, I guess, because, it was a grownup joke. I must admit it was a neat trick, because I fell for it more than once.
    Regardless of whatever the truth was about the Banks and my mom’s childhood, it was clear that a lot of her loneliness, and her unfixable broken heart, had taken hold partly on their watch.
    The longer I lived, the more I understood why she needed to be sick. And why a new diagnosis was like a new crush, and she would fall all over it like a swooning teenager.
    â€œI’ve finally figured it out! They know what it is!” Mom announced, catching me in the living room one afternoon. “I have alters .” The timing on her diagnoses blend together a bit, but I know I was at least at an age where I did not give a flying fuck anymore, and John had his own place, so I must have been around fifteen.
    Multiple personality disorder was a big one for Mom. She was positively giddy with it. It was as intoxicating to her as her other go-to malady, bone cancer. More on that later.
    She could barely contain her enthusiasm as she explained how, like in the movie Sybil, there were these different personalities, or alters, that would come out and make her do and say crazy things. According to Mom, the most extreme case of MPD her doctor had ever heard about involved a woman with nearly two hundred personalities. While I burned holes in the television with my eyes,