Sleeper Crazy

Everyone has at least one intensely crazy friend. They’re good to have around: fun for parties and, an excellent addition to your posse in sticky situations -- like when people want to kick your ass for using words like “posse.”
Sometimes your crazy friend is easy to pinpoint -- that one throwing whiskey glasses at people in the bar? Yeah, that’s probably her (unless, you know, there’s one on the other side of the bar actually setting people on fire, while catching the thrown tumblers in his mouth. Though, if that’s the case, you probably have bigger concerns than figuring out which of your friends is the ‘wacky’ one).
Other times, though, “THE crazy friend” is bit harder to identify. In these cases, it might behoove you to take a deep look inside -- perhaps YOU are crazy friend. If you took that “look inside” in any sort of literal sense, you are definitely the crazy friend. If you have sufficiently scoured each of your personal orifices (orifi? ew.) and found not even the tracest amount of crazy, you may have what we in the industry (yeah, there’s an industry of crazy...just stay with me here -- i haven’t been writing in a while) call, “a sleeper.” The sleeper is someone who appears normal, nay, wholesome, from the outside, but who secretly dreams of someday being a baton-twirling cannoli chef in Vermont (the least wholesome of the 48 contiguous states - if only you knew). The sleeper is dangerous because you never know when the crazy will escape; it might be during a street brawl, when you need it, or it might be when she’s supposed to be performing an emergency tracheotomy on you, in which case you need her head to be in its place.
I met my secretly crazy friend at college. She lived in the all-girls dorm with some of my other friends freshman year, and I thought she was just a cute little Italian city girl.
Wonderful and amazing, yes, but also relatively normal.
Until we went to the secret bar of death.
Back in December, we were out with some friends. We didn’t know everyone there, and it was getting to one of those points in the night where we were all just sort of staring at each other and wondering how lame we would look if we went home early. Finally, one girl took the initiative and said she was heading out. Everyone else -- a group of decidedly UNCRAZY IN ANY WAY friends -- offered to escort her to wherever she was going. We’re not really that nice, but it was on the way to the subway.
We came to a dark street. On the dark street there was a dark door -- all black, no windows, no signs. She knocked, then stood back (a trick that was, I later learned, for the benefit of the hidden security cameras), and a small man in a fedora appeared, looking as though 1939 were just on the other side of that magical portal. Dazed by the turn of events (so THIS girl is crazy friend? why didn’t anyone tell us?), we all trooped in to what was, essentially, a secret speakeasy.
I was dark. It was empty. People smoked -- a sure sign that this place was above (or below) the law. Every wall was plastered with the eeriest of eery mixtures: childish kitsch and cigarette smoke, with maybe a dash of evil thrown in. A moldering Bart Simpson doll leered at me from above the fridge. It was missing an eye, and combined with the beard-like pattern of grime creeping up around its jowls, it looked like a particularly-scurvy-ridden pirate. An equally-bedraggled Raggedy Anne nailed up (nailed! they probably did that to actual children in this place!) next to him played the role of pirate wench. Hula hoops, pressed tin ice cream ads and a corner full of mismatched crutches (for people whose knees got broken in this place?) created a decor that House Beautiful might describe as “retired, feeble-minded, killer chic.” It was like every skeezy flea market in the city had vomited in this place.
I turned to a friend and stage-whispered, “This is how people die!” I was poised to hear the sound of a chainsaw revving up behind one of the mysterious doorways, or to have manacles fly up out of the bar to entangle us. I have seen movies, my friends -- i know how this stuff works.
Photographs of happy young drunks grinned at me from every wall -- the owner, we discovered, had a keen interest in the art of photography. I wondered if it was wise to keep photographic evidence of one’s victims, and then I realized that, if no one ever escaped, it didn’t really matter what they saw.
“We need to leave,” I hissed desperately, trying to look nonchalant when the gaze of the fedora’d proprietor swept in our direction.
“No, this is too weird -- we have to stay,” Giuliana shot back -- sidling up to the bar.
I gave her the bug-eye of fear. She came right back with the bug-eye of excitement -- pure crazy seeping out of her pupils. They had that sheen that you see on over-caffeinated children or American Gladiators with the scent of blood in their nostrils. She would be no help to me tonight.
Two other men passed the security camera test and came in. One was a “bartender,” meaning he was allowed to step behind the bar and toss us Heinekens, Budweisers and Heineken Lights for the reasonable fee of $5 a pop. There was no Bud Light -- the only part of the night that gave Giuliana pause. “Heineken, Heineken Light, Bud...and no Bud Light?” she squeaked, her sense of propriety clearly shaken but the lack of symmetry in the beer selection.
“Nah, but we have vodka tonics.”
“Um...Heineken Light.”
And that was that. Completely at ease, she turned to the other man who had come in and struck up a conversation. He smelled pretty, like gardenias, and jolted by the complete non-threatening-ness of such a thing, we all started talking about his lovely odor.
I imagine it’s what groups of dogs do when they all get together -- stare dumbly around then spend five minutes going, dude, what did you roll in? Although i also imagine that scents like poo and dead animals are of more interest to said group of dogs.
Not to be distracted from my completely rational state of terror, I managed to pull my other friends out of their perfume-induced trance and remind them that our lives were in increasing peril with every minute we spent here -- pretty smells or not. But when we turned to G, she was deep in conversation with eau de gardenias guy, and waved off our offer of escape, safety and continued existence.
We turned to the one who had guided us there -- the pied piper of slow creepy death -- and, from the lap of proprietor she motioned that G would be totally fine.
So, being the good friends we are, we ran. G stayed, apparently not even aware of the possibility that she might be sold into white slavery later that evening, hand squeezing gardenias to make intoxicating perfumes for the wealthy.
I guess the crazy badasses of the world don’t worry about things like that.