Page 5 of The B!tch is Bad

Chapter Two

Patience

I was already jonesing doing the New York Times crossword puzzle.

In my office at the bud and breakfast, I enjoyed doing the puzzle on the computer. I knew it was nerdy, but I liked displaying that aspect of myself. It was a true side of me, so I didn’t have to fake it very much. Being well-read was nothing to be ashamed of.

It started with a little zap to the brain. They’re officially called brain zaps when you go off an antidepressant suddenly without tapering down, but at first I didn’t remember that. It feels like a tiny lightning bolt complete with zipppp sound effects piercing your cerebral cortex. Seriously.

At first I cried out, slapped my hand to my skull. Getting up from my desk, I went to the sliding glass door that opened out onto the half-dry lake bed. It usually soothed me to look past my glassy Trick of the Light room, each room named for a strain of Lytton’s medicinal marijuana, past the long dock where elk drank and bathed. People under umbrellas at picnic tables enjoyed a hit of flower. But the zaps wouldn’t stop. When I opened the slider to breathe deeply of the fresh mountain air, that’s when it struck me.

I was in withdrawal from my antidepressants.

Shit on a shingle!

I couldn’t handle this. In addition to the brain zaps, I realized I’d already become morose the past twenty-four hours. Last night in my beautiful room I’d become paralyzed with fear. You know, when you’re terrified of the unknown and can’t decide whether to fight or flee, so you choose paralysis instead. Should you shoot the crap out of the fear, or turn tail and run? I was trapped in this for several hours until the Ambien took effect and I was able to sleep.

Fuck fuckity fuck fuck!

Pippa’s giant mutt Monstro even got up from her office bed and lumbered out to see what the fuck. I sank into a deck chair and with trembling hands scrunched her ears. Dogs, the bigger the better, were always a giant solace to me. I’d been forced to leave mine behind when I came to Mormon Lake, and I’d kind of adopted Pippa’s dog. She spent the night with me many a time.

I ran my lips against her skull, and the bright warm fur was more calming than a thousand ocean waves. Glancing at my watch, I saw my heart rate was a hundred and nineteen. Horrible. Yet I didn’t know how to proceed. I had no antidepressants and hadn’t seen a doctor in Arizona who could prescribe more. I was stuck. I wanted to cremate my brain and go back to Square One. Yet I was so afraid of doing something idiotic, I often wound up doing something worse.

Then I started hearing voices. Blah blah blah Patience blah blah Patience. What in the name of Thor’s Freaking Hammer was going on?

“Oh, Monstro!” I cried into her fur, to get up the courage to chase the voices.

I don’t know how I did it, but I sucked it up and entered the lobby where Pippa held court. I practically tiptoed, I was so freaked.

Some bald man with a Roman nose and horn-rimmed glasses said, “I’ll pay Fox double.” Was I hallucinating now? This guy looked just like a man I’d had a romantic dream of the night before.

That hipster poseur Sean Wildstar told the man, “Hey! We’re in this together. You can’t bid against me.”

I finally unfroze. “Why do I keep hearing my name?”

It didn’t comfort me the way some of them gasped, and then they froze like I’d busted them in a mutual masturbation scene. I knew that propeller-head Wolf Glaser, always hanging around bumming weed. I liked him though. I tended to collect damaged people like myself. Even the Veep of the Bare Bones motorcycle club, Lytton Driving Hawk, stared at me with a slack jaw.

I said with more determination, “Why are you talking about me?”

Forever good-natured, Wolf pointed at what looked like a painting covered with brown paper. Pippa gripped the edge of it like it was preventing her from falling into a swamp, her jaw grim. Wolf said, “The girl in this painting. She looks just like you.”

Now my jaw dropped. I walked closer a few steps while Pippa stuttered, “Ah, but we know it’s not you. Right?”

“No,” said the hot, compact man. “She really does look like you. Incredible the resemblance.”

Pippa was trying to haul the painting behind her desk, but Lytton stopped her by grabbing the other side of it. In the tussle, some of the paper fell away, revealing the messy bun of my formerly blonde hair.

Holy water sprinkler. It was the gouache Alfred DeStory had done of me in Chicago.

I knew that in a flash, even only seeing my hair. Who could forget that sweltering, dripping week when DeStory kept trying to get me to lower the sheet, just one inch, just another inch? I’d only been sixteen but was provider for my family. So you better know I lowered the sheet. A bit. While my mother waited in the next room, entertaining groupies.

Lytton said, “Let’s see the resemblance.”

Pippa said, “Let’s not. I don’t want to look at this thing all day long. Patience. Let’s take it to storage.”

“But I want it!” Wildstar crowed.

The bald man said, “I’ll give you double what Fox paid!”