SelfAbsorbed.ME : ‘It’s Your Life, We Just Write it Funnier’

Women cumulate many groups of female friends over a lifetime: childhood friends, sports friends, high school friends, international friends, college friends, work friends, partying friends, writer friends – the list goes on and on. The mystery remains who in this colorful array of female acquaintances will be the first to get married? Move to a suburb? Have a baby? The answer to these questions is rarely who you’d expect.

On a notoriously long phone call with Bartok this past weekend; we noted that the winner of the marriage race is going to be someone we’d have defined as kids as an unlikely candidate. This is the story of Linanimal, an eccentric female friend of ours who attended high school with us in Italy.

Why the name Linanimal? While this works as a codename, this is in fact what we often called her years ago. Her proper nickname began with an “L,” and we called her “the animal.” These two concepts were abbreviated and the ‘Linanimal’ was born. Linanimal was a high school female version of your stereotypical class clown. Her goal seemed to be the identifiable ‘outrageous one’ in every situation. She strived to make people laugh, and especially to make her close female friends laugh, a task she succeeded in, whether it was signing her credit card receipts at the local restaurant with the signature “S & M is good for me,” sexually eating muffins, or doing obscene things with bananas in museums on school field trips.

I fear not all of this humor was planned on her part. The animal was on tons of whacko medication that none of us had even heard of. She did have a stash of Adderall that circulated the school during exam time, but most of the pills she sucked down weren’t even stuff an adventurous high school druggie would want to sample. I never knew if she was crazy because she failed to take her meds regularly, or if it was actually the meds that made her hyperactively irresponsible.

I guess I’ll never know.

Linanimal was somewhat of an international as she had previously lived in Germany and spoke the language well. In English, she was often difficult to understand as she was eating 90% of the time and usually had her mouth completely full. Despite this fact, she remained remarkably thin. We found her simultaneously disgusting, entertaining, and somehow lovable – like a pet bulldog. Her sense of adventure was unparalleled; she explored new places with an ungraceful vigor and pushed the envelope until we all squealed with discomfort. Ultimately, we adored her for how far she went each and every day to make us cry with laughter.

While Linanimal was attractive (at least when her mouth wasn’t catapulting forth crumbs), she seemed basically A-sexual. She took no romantic interest in Italian men or our male classmates, although she would often excitedly hump furniture for our amusement. When Linanimal dressed up and swiped on eyeliner she was undeniably hot. Her wardrobe was sassy for a fifteen-year-old’s and we shared clothes. Bartok in fact, still to this day has one of her black halter-tops that never found its way back to Linanimal’s closet. Yet even decked out in a black evening dress, the animal surrendered to her inner comedian, whether by flashing her leopard skin bra or throwing her high heels into a nearby Italian military camp.

The animal’s Italian host family had an apartment right in the center of the city, which placed Linanimal at the center of most social activities. If you wanted to stay out all night, go clubbing, get drunk, or generally misbehave, sleeping over at the Linanimal’s infamously messy lair was a must. On any given Saturday night, half our high school would be technically “sleeping over” at her place. The good news is none of our parents ever communicated with each other and therefore remained oblivious to the fact that “sleeping over at Linanimal’s” was code for indulging in every illegal activity known to teenagers. The bad news was that if you weren’t tight friends with the animal, you ran the risk of getting locked out of her apartment and wandering the city streets till dawn. The basic rule remained that Linanimal’s apartment keys were always left outside the front of her house in a large plant. Whenever Linanimal would leave a bar to go home, there’d be a general chorus from everyone at our school:

“Remember to leave the keys in the plant! Leave the keys in the plant!”

As Linanimal wasn’t stable and appeared drunk at all times, we’d chant this to her continuously as parents would give instructions to a small child. We always knew that on a whim, if feeling evil, she might take the precious apartment keys inside with her, rendering the rest of us homeless for the weekend. Stumbling up the steps of Linaminal’s apartment at five in the morning I remember all of us secretly praying, “please let the keys be in the plant, please let the keys be in the plant.” Seventy percent of the time they were, thirty percent of the time you ended up sleeping in the drained fountain in the nearby piazza Rialto and taking the five thirty am bus back home.

Looking back, I commend Linanimal for being in the business of outrageous fun. Some of my fondest high school memories involve her at the focal point. She was one of the few students with a laptop that played DVDs, which meant every school field trip (of which there were a lot) the ‘cool kids’ got to chill with her on the back of the bus watching films beyond our years like Pulp Fiction, the notoriously scary K.I.D.S, and Boogie Nights. If in class, she’d sit in the front of the room with her computer and we’d watch the movies on silent with subtitles.

Linanimal referred to our school principal as “MoFo” (the abbreviation of ‘mother fucker’) often to his face and had a flair for making Italians as uncomfortable as humanly possible by utilizing her weird faces, broken Italian, and unusual eating habits. She once screamed at the top of her lungs at a pricey restaurant when served fish with the head still intact. And her general outrageousness extended beyond school grounds. She had the nasty habit of purposely dripping candle wax from her apartment window onto cars parked in the street below, often ruining the vehicle’s paint job. Linanimal also got a kick out of cleaning her room by throwing garbage out her bedroom window. These things caught the attention of the Italian police but she eventually got out of jail time by paying some sort of fine, a fine of which she ultimately only paid half. Note: Everything in Italy is negotiable.

When winter break arrived, the school broke down into various groups of friends that decided to vacation together. Bartok and I set off for Florence and Linanimal was determined to assert her independence by traveling somewhere by herself. We weren’t allowed to leave Italy without hefty paperwork from our actual parents. But our headmaster MoFo’s pesky rules were not going to stop Linanimal from going to the one place that people like her should never be allowed to go.

Yep, you guessed it.

Amsterdam.

To Be Continued…