On "Crazy," and Living With a Crazy Person

"Crazy" once meant something, but thanks to overuse, it's a blanket term for anything weird, non-traditional, or abnormal.

I admit that I, too, am guilty of stretching "crazy" like a sheet of Saran Wrap I cut too short to fit that uneaten slice of pizza destined for the back of my fridge. It's crazy that I still can't eyeball the correct amount of Saran Wrap. It's crazy that I'm too cheap to tear off a new sheet, so I apply a smaller "patch" sheet that doesn't really stick right. It's crazy how I'll react when I notice the patch peeling off in the fridge. And it's crazy that I'll probably end up throwing out that crazy slice in a day or two anyway.

Crazy, right?

During my freshman year at college, I lived in a dorm containing four-person suites, each suite a pair of two-person rooms separated by a narrow bathroom. The bathroom could be accessed by any of the four people, but you and your roommate were able to lock the door separating your room and the bathroom, if you wished. (In the bathroom there was a stall shower, two sinks, and a toilet in a very small "room" with its own door that could also be locked.).

After my first semester one of my suitemates moved out, and the remaining suitemate was assigned a random roommate. When I showed up in January, a day before the dorms officially reopened, I met the new guy.

It was my first experience with someone crazy.

"Oh, pish-posh," you might be thinking. "He couldn't have been really crazy." Which is an understandable thing to think. Up until that point, I'd thought I'd met crazy people. In fact, I myself had been been called crazy numerous times, and I'll even admit today  several times during my life that sometimes I get a little crazy.

But John was crazy. Like, really crazy.

The Time I Was Almost Possibly Horribly Assaulted by Frat Guys

His dying regret was being unable to personally
run over Hitler with his wheelchair.

Franklin Roosevelt once said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Considering FDR lived most of his adult life in a wheelchair while putting himself through four presidential elections and carrying on at least one affair while married to a cousin who also happened to be Eleanor Roosevelt, the guy clearly was one of the more fearless people who ever lived.

But I've had fear. Several kinds:

• The fear that the angry black cricket in my basement will locate me before I locate it. 
• The fear at Disney World during the Tower of Terror ride, which required special tools to pry my carpal-tunnel-locked grip on the so-called safety bar.
• The fear in bed, haunted with the visions of Nazi face-melting the night after I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The kind of fear I'm writing about today is a different kind of fear, a fear you experience right before something really really horrible is going to happen. That something hasn't happened yet, but it's the anticipation that ratchets up the horror.

Shoulda Coulda Woulda, Part 1

So, like, what was that smoke monster again?

Loose ends. Unsolved mysteries. These are the things that can keep you up at night, or cause traffic accidents while dwelling on them as you navigate rush-hour traffic on the Long Island Expressway.

I don't mean broad enigmas like "Where is Jimmy Hoffa buried?" or "What the hell was Lost really about?"; I'm blogging about dilemmas of a personal nature, like:

• How different would my life had been if I'd accepted that job in Chicago?
• Why did Grace really break up with me?
• Why does my physical appearance resemble that of "Uncle" Fred more than of my father?

Eventually, some of these mysteries will be solved (hopefully before either Fred or your father is on his deathbed) and some won't (Grace's restraining order against you won't expire until 2075). Here's an example of one of the unsolved mysteries from my own life.

Then We Sent a Spirit Into My Dorm-Mate's Stereo

If he looked more like this Hurley, we
would have played different pranks.

So there I was, blogging about the time I conspired to nearly disintegrate the digestive and colorectal systems of one of my college dorm-mates, whom I'm calling Hurley due to his physical resemblance to the Lost character, when I remembered another prank we pulled on the guy, which I'll share with you now.

TRUST ME, HE DESERVED IT
I haven't even really begun this post, and I feel like I'm turning Hurley into some kind of poor martyr, but believe me, the guy could dish it out as good as he could take it. There are a couple of incidents I can mention but I won't, mainly because I like the guy and this blog is The Anthony Show, not The Guy Known On The Anthony Show As Hurley Show, that would assure you that he wasn't always the poor victim.

BUT ANYWAY
Unlike the Ex-Lax brownies incident, which required a small amount of planning, the next prank came about completely by accident when Hurley purchased a very expensive sound system for his room.

The Ex-Lax-in-the-Brownies Prank

It helps if you picture a less-smiley
version of this guy.

The post I delivered on Friday jarred a few additional memories from my college years, so I think I’ll be sharing some of them in the near future...like today.

The following tale involves a friend of mine whom I’ll refer to as Hurley, because if you were a fan of Lost and were able to flash back in time like many of the principals on that show, you’d instantly recognize the resemblances between my friend and the character portrayed by Jorge Garcia.

My Hurley was about five-foot-eight, 250 pounds or so (I never had the opportunity to weigh him), and usually wore his long wavy Cuban hair in a ponytail so thick that it seemed to defy gravity as it stuck straight out of his head.

Hurley was an area native who lived close enough to the university to be a commuter but, lacking car and driver's license (if I accurately recall), he lived down the hall from me during freshman year, then moved in with some guys from Brooklyn directly across from me.

Hurley was a friendly fellow but was also aggressive when it came to entering our rooms and eating our food. Rather than conduct an intervention with Hurley regarding his behavior, we decided to prank him.

The Time My Roommate Climbed Into Bed With Me

Writing this post reminded me of Bosom
Buddies. If Skip and I had to wear dresses
to stay at the dorm, it would have made
a much more interesting tale.

Man, I really suck lately when it comes to updates. But enough about me. Well, not enough about me. Here's a Story about something that happened to me in college.

It was sophomore year, and I was living in the dorms. The way my particular building worked, you lived in a two-person suite that was connected to another two-person suite via a bathroom that connected both rooms. For my freshman year I was randomly paired with a guy named Eric, who was (and, I believe, still is) from a town in south-central New York called (I'm not making this up) Horseheads.

(The town, outside of Corning and Elmira, was near another curiously named area called Big Flats. I liked to ask Eric if that's also how you described the women that lived there. Yes, there was a time when my jokes were actually worse than they are now.)

He and I were as different as a Horseheads resident and Long Islander could be — when he read my full-of-vowels name off the "This is your roommate" card over the summer, he expected to meet a guy who drove an Iroc and wore wifebeaters all the time, he later told me — but we made a great pair of roommates, so we chose to be roommates in the same room for sophomore year.

Our suitemates were a similarly mismatched pair of fellas who I'll call Ken and Tim. Eric and I expected to become closer to Tim over Ken, because on the first night Ken mentioned how much he liked to smoke what he called "the herb," and back then I was an almost militant teetotaler. But for reasons I'll explain in another post, we ended up being friendlier with Ken, Tim ended up befriending some guys in another dorm and moved in with them for sophomore year, and Ken filled the open slot with his friend Skip, who hailed from way-the-hell-upstate Ogdensburg, which probably was to Horseheads what Horseheads was to Manhattan.

Skip was, and as far as I know still is, a blast. But he liked to drink. A lot.

By sophomore year I'd loosened my standards on drinking, so the actual imbibing didn't bother me. But it was the result of his drinking that led to the incident that is the source of this post. So, now that I've finally completed this prologue, let's get to the Story.

On "Crazy" Women, Part I

Yes, I know that Janet Leigh wasn't the
psycho, but I'd probably date her
anyway if she were.

Yesterday a female co-worker asked, "Would you be willing to date a very hot woman if she were crazy?"

Because it's hard for me to answering a question without first asking a question, I asked in reply, "Define crazy."

"She's calls you all the time, won't leave you alone, she's clingy, that sort of thing."

Because it's even harder for me to answer any question with brevity, the following is based on the answer I gave.

First of all, answering questions like these can be very difficult unless the answer is preceded by, to paraphrase the Sports Illustrated football writer Peter King, "I think I think." (The writer Peter King shouldn't be confused with the congressman Peter King, who displays a lot more certainty when he expresses his opinions. I don't actually say "I think I think," because I would sound crazy to talk like that, even though I might just start to include that phrase in my conversations from now on anyway, but the point that's taking me forever to make is that there are decisions about which you can only speculate, because you don't know how you'd actually react if you faced such a choice in real life.

In other words, I'm not in a position to date other women, and haven't been for than 13 years in a civil-contract sense, even longer in a Get-my-ass-whupped-if-I-went-out-with-another-woman sense. However, with all that in mind, here (finally!) is how I'd answer the question.

Lists of Lists, Volume 5: Jobs Edition

Not this Jobs.

How many jobs have you had? Two? Three? I've had several. So many, in fact, that my resume was once three pages long, until a career consultant told me that a three-page resume is for braggarts and lunatics, and I've since found a way to pare it down to a pair of pages.

My lists in this post will concern some of my job history, for instance:

ADDRESSES OF THE MANHATTAN-AREA EMPLOYERS FOR WHOM I'VE WORKED

1. Two Park Avenue
2. 200 Park Avenue
3. 200 Madison Avenue (the same employer as 200 Park; the office moved)
4. 611 Broadway
5. Two Penn Plaza (on two separate occasions, at the same company)
6. Somewhere on either West 21st or West 22nd, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues 
7. 45 West 18th Street (the same employer as West 21st/22nd; the office moved)
8. 130 Fifth Avenue
9. 1176 Avenue of the Americas

Scanning that list of addresses, more than looking at my resume, makes me realize I've worn out a lot of shoe leather during my career. If they wanted to do a bus tour of All The Places Where The Anthony Show Once Worked, it would take about three hours to hit everywhere, not counting the lunch break at Gray's Papaya.

The "Park & Ride" Story, Part 2

This is what it feels like: a wax bonfire.

So anyway, for what it's worth, I turned 40 today.

But enough about present-day me. Let's get to the second part of the story about the time I went to the Park & Ride near the Long Island Expressway and had a couple of interesting encounters.

When we ended the previous story, my friend Chuck freaked out when two otherwise harmless gentlemen revealed to us that they were gay, and he hauled ass out of the parking lot.

I'm not sure what Chuck was afraid of, because I don't think we were in danger of unsolicited sodomy from 10 feet and two layers of car door away. Somehow, though, I was able to convince everyone to return to the scene of the no-crime. Before we returned, Tony insisted we switch seats so I could ride shotgun so it would be easier for me to handle the conversation.

Once we returned...

Notes on Stupid, Including My Own, Part 3

I might be related.

Yeah, so, here we are again. Another round of things I've done that I've regretted doing.

We all do stupid things, but I always assume that my things are stupider than everyone else's stupid things. I can't imagine my co-workers having suffering as many lapses in judgment as I have. Then again, when I watch COPS, which as you I know I do as often as I can, I realize how stupid people can really be.

Because when a guy is pulled over in a stolen car containing several packets of meth, you know that this isn't the first time this has happened, nor it will be his last. This proves a point that I've been making for some time: If you want to feel better about yourself, watch COPS.

Then again (yet again), it's kind of sad that I have to compare myself with drug-addled car thieves. But hell, you take what you can get. So, here we go!