Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [12]
I recently started to wonder what had become of Billie Jeanne. What had she been doing since getting Dumped by America? I missed her and I wanted to find out. Maybe she’d lost herself in alcohol and drugs, or become a nun, or been involved in some spectacular double suicide. I imagined her life as a Grey Gardens of delusion, Billie Jeanne as a fading beauty waiting for a prince who never came knocking. Oh, Billie Jeanne, what had we done to you?
Billie Jeanne, in her rawness and realness, was the best televised representation yet seen of an archetype that’s haunted the margins, and sometimes the center, of my life since I hit puberty: the Crazy Girl. This type of person—starved for attention, pale, lovely, brilliant but unaccomplished, and either consciously or unconsciously manipulative—sparks my deepest wellspring of desire. When you’re with a Crazy Girl, at any moment your life could be a carnival of sexual, intellectual, and spiritual gratification, or it could be a dirge of drunken late-night phone calls, hastily sent e-mails full of emotional recriminations, long, meaningful soppy glances, and subtle betrayals ending in alienation and unhappiness. That’s what most of my relationships were like before I met my wife. Billie Jeanne made me nostalgic for pointless complications.
There’s a difference, I should note, between the Crazy Girl and the Psychotic Girl. I’m not talking about Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, Rebecca De Mornay in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, or whichever Single White Female was totally barkers. Those characters, while compelling, don’t appeal sexually or emotionally in the long term, and were obviously created by guys with problems. The Crazy Girl’s torments are subtler, her revenge is quieter, her invasion of your soul more insidious.
Evidence of this type still abounds in our culture. John Edwards saw his public life end at the hands of a grown-up Crazy Girl, as she compared him favorably with the Mahatma and gave him an unwanted love child. In the second season of 30 Rock, Alec Baldwin fell in with Crazy Girl guest star Jennifer Aniston, who gave him the best sex of his life accompanied by almost unimaginable emotional torment. These women have power, but it’s a kind of Soviet-era nuclear power, with the continued threatening of a core meltdown.
We tend to encounter them most often in our twenties, though they appear at other times in our lifecycle as well. One Crazy Girl in particular, possibly the Craziest Girl, made me view Billie Jeanne with even deeper passion and sympathy. I met her when I was in my early twenties, and we were both bottom-feeders in the highly lucrative world of Chicago improv comedy. She had almost translucent skin, an ability with the folk guitar, and an Ivy League wit, making her an rara avis in a subculture where the majority of the women were wacky bigboobed blondes from Schaumburg. Most of the guys wanted to dink her, but I, as a professional writer and a putative intellect, got into the inner circle.
That afforded me the privilege of spending the night at her house from time to time. We stayed up late—talking, soothing, and petting each other’s hair. But she didn’t allow me to go any further, because, she said, she didn’t think we had much chemistry. I’d fall asleep next to her, our arms barely touching, my crotch ready to explode from the tension. At around three a.m., she’d take a deep, sighing breath, roll over onto an elbow, and start to gently brush my lips.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” she’d say.
“Of course not,” I’d gasp.
But it meant everything, and we’d often make out half asleep until dawn. I’d feel so complete. Mid-morning, I’d