Track 7: It’s So Nice to be Insane by Jeanne Sharp
My parents’ house in the Seattle suburbs – the only home I’d known between birth and age 18, and the place I’d returned to for the next twenty-five years after that – ceased to be a home sometime between February and August of 2019. After two bad falls and worsening dementia, my 90-year-old father could no longer live safely in the late-60s split-entry house, and my 81-year-old mother could no longer care for him and the five-bedroom place that had been much too large for the two of them for the better part of two and a half decades.
Mom had spent those twenty-five years talking about downsizing, about moving to a retirement home or a condo somewhere – someplace without a yard to maintain or extra square footage to keep clean. Dad seemed to agree at first, accompanying Mom gamely to tour retirement communities, but he would freeze at the inflection point, always finding reasons not to move forward or being so insufferably rude to the staff that my mother was too embarrassed to follow up. My older brother and I joked that if Dad ever left that house he would do it feet first, and we were right – after his second fall, he went to the hospital by ambulance, then to a nursing home, and finally to an apartment with Mom in a nearby senior community, the durable power of attorney Dad had signed years before finally allowing her to make decisions for both of them without his unhelpful opinions and obstruction.
In early August, Mom called to inform me that the house was going on the market soon and that if I wanted any of its contents I’d better come and claim them. I hadn’t spoken to her since February, when my father had shoved me in a moment of delusional rage and I’d realized I couldn’t continue to bear witness to her denial of his deterioration.
But the love never waned and she and I found a way to forgive each other. When she called, I booked a flight, a rental car, a hotel room, and a portable storage unit and made the journey to Seattle from my home in Arizona, the milder northwest climate a welcome respite from the brutality of Tucson’s summers.
The woman Mom had hired to conduct an estate sale had staged the things she thought I might want in the garage for me to look through, and I spent a solid five days sorting and packing, filling boxes with items I wanted to bring home and putting everything else in piles to sell, donate, recycle, or trash. I put my airpods in and kept my head down, listening to music and pausing only when I was hungry to DoorDash myself some lunch from the old Burgermaster drive-in. I spent the evenings getting blind drunk at some Irish pub or other, chasing single-malts with Rainier beer and texting a former situationship that I was stupid enough to believe was still my friend – just throwing the proverbial spaghetti at the wall to see which dissociation techniques worked best. I fled from my history even as I sat mired in it every day.
A couple of days into the exercise of curating my past, I found my old clock radio: a General Electric “P’jammer.” It was a boxy little pastel-colored thing with a headphone jack and a red digital clock display, and it had once had a set of coordinating earbuds tucked away in a little compartment on the side. The earbuds were long gone, but the radio was still in good shape. I remembered GE making this same radio in a boys’ version: red, black, and royal blue, calling it the “Nite Jammer,” and I laughed at the idea of gendering something as gender-neutral as a clock radio. As I stood in my parents’ garage, turning this once-sacred object over in my hands, I started to hear Helen Reddy’s Angie Baby in my head.
You live your life in the songs you hear
On the rock ‘n’ roll radio…
And when a young girl doesn’t have any friends
That’s a really nice place to go…
My parents had bought the radio for me in 1987 or 1988 during a Friday evening trip to Fred Meyer, and it had remained on my nightstand even after I moved out for good a decade or so later. While still at home, I kept it tuned to KPLZ 101.5, one of the two competing top 40 stations in the region at the time, listening to the morning deejays as I got ready for another day of middle school and the afternoon drive-time deejay as soon as I got home. I called to request songs and spoke to the 6 pm to 10 pm deejay often enough that he would sometimes put me on the air.
(Mark, if you’re reading this: I bet you didn’t know when you went into broadcasting that you would become a de facto therapist for an awkward, lonely tween girl, but I’m so grateful you were there.)
I remember my peers not really knowing what to make of me: the chubby, brainy girl with the weird fashion sense and even weirder sense of humor. I spent more time writing in my diary, imagining scenes and transcribing dreamed-up conversations, than I did having actual conversations with people my own age. I preferred solitude and my rich inner life to socializing. My imagination ran deep and wide, spinning up fantastic scenarios and vivid daydreams. I danced to my favorite songs and pictured myself beautiful, popular, and on the arm of some famous pop star or my latest middle school crush. My radio was my sense of belonging in a world that did its level best to make me into a wallflower – the songs were my best friends and the deejays whose voices crackled over the airwaves my protectors.
Every night at 9:30 on the dot, Mark would open the phone lines for fifteen minutes for something called “Mark’s Moment of Mush,” inviting listeners to call in with dedications. He would read them off, rapid-fire style, at 9:45 and then play a romantic song, encouraging listeners to “mash, grope, and moan.” The phone lines were always jammed, so I never tried to call in a dedication, but I listened faithfully, hoping against hope that I’d hear my name – an aural love note from whatever local boy I was crushing on at the moment. I never did.
Lovers appear in your room each night
And they whirl you across the floor
But they always seem to fade away
When your daddy taps on your door…
Angie, girl, are you all right?
Tell the radio goodnight….
I often forgot to set the sleep timer on the radio, so it would still be playing at two or three in the morning. I can remember my mother tiptoeing into my room, ghostly in one of her shimmery nylon nightgowns and smelling of Nivea cream, to turn it off. Over breakfast, she admonished me to not leave it on all night, insisting it would disrupt my sleep. I always said I was sorry and promised to use the sleep timer, but it was only a matter of time before I forgot again, waking at 3 a.m. to lower the volume just enough so Mom wouldn’t hear it. Just enough so I could still listen to the disembodied voice of the late-night deejay as he took calls from Seattle’s night owls and played the songs I loved.
Stopping at her house is a neighbor boy
With evil on his mind
'Cause he's been peeking in Angie's room
At night through her window blind
I see your folks have gone away
Would you dance with me today?
I'll show you how to have a good time, Angie baby…
I met Toby in seventh grade, on a band trip from Seattle to Oregon City for a competition. He was in eighth grade, recruited by the band director to shoot video of our performance. He took the seat across the aisle from me on the charter bus that ferried us and our instruments from Seattle to Oregon and introduced himself. We talked almost nonstop during the bus ride and even played miniature golf together when our group stopped for lunch in Hazel Dell.
Mean girls who knew of my well-publicized crush on another boy teased me mercilessly about Toby, accusing me of two-timing this other boy: a boy who had already made it clear he didn’t like me. Toby, on the other hand, was funny and sweet, jokingly putting his arm around me at one point and moving across the aisle of the bus to the vacant seat beside mine. We talked about every possible thing and I played songs for him on my Walkman.
After the band trip, I wrote in my diary that I thought of him as a “friend-boy” and not a “boyfriend,” and I never saw him again anyway. But a few weeks into my eighth grade year, I got a phone call from him. He was in high school now and sounded different – his voice had deepened and there was a worldliness to the way he spoke that made him seem like a stranger.
“Are you still as beautiful as I remember?”
What? I must have stammered something in response, something that registered my surprise.
“Of course I thought you were beautiful, why do you think I sat next to you on the bus?”
This sudden romantic attention thrilled and terrified me all at once, my heart racing from fear or anticipation or maybe some of both. Toby asked if he could come over and hang out after school one day. I went along with the idea, even though I knew I’d get in so much trouble if my parents found out I’d had a boy over when they weren’t home. Toby started playing songs for me over the phone and telling me which ones he wanted us to slow dance to, his voice gravelly and seductive.
We made a tentative plan for him to come over later that week, but when I hung up the phone, I panicked. Something in the way he spoke felt dangerous, predatory – he didn’t sound like the Toby I’d met the previous school year anymore – and the intensity of the desire I heard in his voice was too much for my fourteen-year-old psyche.
When he walks in her room, he feels confused
Like he walked into a play
And the music's so loud, it spins him around
'Til his soul has lost its way
And as she turns the volume down
He's getting smaller with the sound
It seems to pull him off the ground
Toward the radio he's bound, never to be found
The day before Toby was supposed to come over, I called and left a message on his answering machine canceling our planned meeting. I never heard from him again after that, but a small part of me still wonders what became of him and if the trajectory of my life would have changed if we’d met when I was a few years older.
On a random afternoon the following summer, my father heard me singing softly to myself in between improvised lines of dialogue that corresponded to whatever daydream I was engrossed in, and he cornered me in our basement, his face reddened with the fury that always simmered just beneath the surface.
“Jeanne Louise, if you don’t stop talking to yourself like that, people are going to think you’re schizophrenic.” His voice was like acid, dripping with contempt. My whole body jolted, my stomach dropping to my shoes as anxiety and embarrassment washed over me.
I tried to respond, but words wouldn’t come. Instead, I stood there frozen, static until he went back to whatever he’d been doing – and then I fled to the sanctuary of my bedroom and my radio. I barely understood mental illness back then, and my father’s bizarre upbraiding was more than enough to frighten me – he was still an authority figure and I had no reason to question his rebuke. If, as he said, people would think I was insane, then maybe I really was.
I didn’t know then about the mental illness that had colored my father’s existence since his own teenage years, so I couldn’t see that he was probably projecting. I didn’t yet understand that his abusive, controlling, critical nature was both a symptom of his disease and the only way he knew how to keep it in check. I couldn’t have known that his strangle-hold on logic and reason was his lifeline – and that any deviation from the same was a warning, a sign of trouble. And I certainly didn’t know that the boy I’d been so afraid to meet up with was probably less of a danger to me than my own father.
The headlines read that a boy disappeared
And everyone thinks he died
'Cept a crazy girl with a secret lover
Who keeps her satisfied
It's so nice to be insane
No one asks you to explain
Radio by your side, Angie baby…
Standing in my parents’ garage in 2019, I began to realize that the house had been both a refuge and a prison, more haunted than I could have understood when I was younger. I tucked the P’Jammer – this inviolable relic, my one-time portal to a world where I was loved and chosen – into a box with some other things I wanted to bring back home to Arizona. It ended up in my home office, where it sits atop a small chest of drawers beside my desk, waiting patiently for those rare occasions when I turn it on and spin the dial to find a good station.
It still works perfectly.
Jeanne Sharp (she/her) is a writer who has done everything but write for most of her adult life, but she's finally working on an actual memoir. To pay the bills, she has worked for 26 years in the nonprofit space. She lives in the desert and can be found on IG, Threads, and TikTok at @that_jeanne.
