THE CRAZY ONES

She's crazy.

Fucking crazy.

Certifiably loony.

My viola player, that is.

Elle and I got her stoned, after three whole hours of straight, sober music-making. I kept my word and didn't get high before the session. Halfway through, I mentioned my sobriety and Katie said, "Oh, it's okay." I guess she and Elle had a talk about work habits in the home studio when I wasn't around.

Anyway, she took a hit, and it didn't do anything to calm her down. She was still hyper, busting stream-of-consciousness jokes that straddled the lines of taste, anxiously prancing about the living room, tickling ivory keys and laughing her pretty little ass off, singing off-key background vocals and trying to keep a straight face, smiling like a Cheshire Cat and strutting around in black butt-hugging bell-bottoms, her black mane coiffed carefully around her pale, oblong face...

She's a rock star.

Not like Holly Golightly, aspiring to be a rock star. Katie is the real thing.

She's wild.

I think I love her.

No surprise there, I suppose. People who know me very well are sighing in disbelief, shaking their heads, saying, "Here he goes again-- when will he learn?"

I don't know why I love the crazy ones. Maybe because they make me seem sane in comparison. Maybe because they light up a room with incandescent fire and every man wants to take them but only a few have the nerve to approach. Maybe because she is brilliant and a musical prodigy who is driven by a complex need to create.

After we got high, the session went on and on, until 4:30 in the morning, when we finally had a satisfactory mix of the rough demos. The three of us were so excited, because the music has made a total right turn from where it was at the end of last year. Thanks to Katie's endless urge to record music, Elle's songs have morphed into post-punk late-'70s New Wave roughshod chestnuts, and they show signs of improving with time.

We kept on laughing. I haven't laughed this hard in a long time. Katie is a crack-up. Mind you, I know that she is totally insane, out of my league, and will most likely break my heart into a zillion pieces. But it's a fun ride right now.

I'm not worried about emotions coming between us, because when it comes to the music, I don't cross the boundaries. I like to keep it professional in that sense. The minute anything happens outside of the creative circle, it all changes. I have recent proof of this-- Eve and I were kosher until we played Hide The Salami again. Now look at us.

I don't want to go that route again. Instead, I'll be content to be in the company of a true madcap, the kind of girl who will drive men insane and then leave them twirling in her dust, off to the next adventure, the next conquest, the next band...

Katie gave me a ride home. On the way, we were grooving to the tracks we had laid down, mixed onto CD. We didn't talk about much of anything except how cool the music is becoming.

"I've been in tons of bands," she said, as she negotiated the uneven streets of North Hollywood. "But this one is by far the best one so far. Elle is really something else. And I've never had a chance to record anything and hear it back right then and there. Usually, I'm at some nasty music producer's mercy, and he won't let me hear the tapes until I've blown him or something like that." She bursted into a toothy grin, followed by insane, gutteral bellowing.

She looked at me, waiting for a reaction. I just smiled.

"Sorry," she said. "You must think I'm sooo gross..."

Indeed, she is gross. She had an idea to devote an entire track on one song to the sound of a fart. Then she demonstrated how the fart would sound. I threw in the suggestion of reversing the fart, so that people could play it backwards and hear the subliminal message. The girls fell on the floor laughing.

Elle is really happy about the enthusiasm that Katie brings to the sessions, but I can see that she also gets a little impatient with her, because Katie is an unstoppable force of nature with which to be reckoned. Elle is mellow, laid-back, a chill kind of girl. If our band were the movie Night Shift, then Elle would be Henry Winkler to Katie's Michael Keaton.

Does that mean I'm Shelley Long? No, I'd like to think I'm Ron Howard.

The only calm moments that I could see came when Katie was laying down her viola tracks. For a few seconds, her face would go blank, as if channeling Joan of Arc or some other patron saint of feminism, and her playing would say it all. She can play anything you ask her to play. She thinks about how it's going to sound. She gets it in one or two tries, then tracks it until she is satisfied.

Unlike most geniuses, she knows when to step back and accept the result, even if it isn't to her immediate liking. Usually, what she produces is stellar to begin with, so it's not like she's being lazy. I think it's because there isn't enough time in the day to contain her passion, her ideas. She's always on to the next thing, no matter what. Reigning her in can be exhausting, but also entertaining.

At one point, Elle and I were telling her to "get trippy" with her viola. I don't think she ever gets asked to "get trippy", so when she let loose, it was with a sheet of ecstatic white squealing noise, high-pitched and hellacious, a wailing wall of catgut and bowstring colliding with atonal melody and classically-trained skill.

I told her about The Velvet Underground and John Cale, the electric viola player. Katie claimed she'd never heard of them.

"You're from the East Coast and don't know about The Velvet Underground?"

"Nope."

"Lou Reed?"

"Is he a bass player?"

I wiped my brow, almost not sure if she was putting me on or not.

"What about Andy Warhol?"

"I've heard of him," she said, smiling again, that demented grin shining wide.

"They were his band," i said. "Ever heard 'Sweet Jane'?"

"Cowboy Junkies, right?"

"Right... and wrong. It's a cover."

"Ohhhhhhhhhh," she said, in recognition.

"'Heroin'?"

Elle, who also was from New York and had never heard of The Velvets, chimed in. "I've heard that song. There's viola in that song?"

I sighed. "You ladies have a lot to learn. I'll make you both a CD mix of the best of The Velvets. It'll change your lives, I guarantee it."

The girls always seem flummoxed when I say things like that. They like me, yes, but they cannot understand my humor or my POV sometimes. They don't know if I'm for real or putting them on. I say everything with such a deadpan that they wonder if I'm having fun at their expense or not. But they appreciate that I'm not the typical guy, trying to control the session out of a sense of ego. I sat there a lot of the time, letting them do their thing, adding coments only when an impasse had been reached.

At the end of the night, when Katie dropped me off and I was ready to leave, we were listening to a song that I'd written. Katie put lyrics to it, and Elle will sing the final version. Katie's lyrics are about sleazy L.A. producers who want to impress lovely young starlets and musicians with promises of fame and fortune. Right now, the vocals are done by Katie, who (despite her awesome talents) is a bit tone-deaf in the singing department. No matter, the raw idea is there, and will be developed further.

Anyway, she complimented me on the music. "This is a great song," she said. "The music speaks. What did you write this song about?"

I couldn't recall. Then, it hit me-- in 1999, when I was dating Jeanie, we had an argument and afterwards I sat in my room, playing guitar. I came up with this riff, and I ended up programming drums and adding bass and keyboards. But the lyrics never came to me-- I have a problem writing songs music first. If I have lyrics first, the melody is easy to tailor to the words, but the other way around leaves me stumped.

Thus, this song about an ex-girlfriend was incomplete, because I could never marry words to the melody. I explained this all to Katie as I stepped out of the car.

"Well, thank your ex for helping you write this song," Katie said, grooving to the song as it blared from her two-seater convertible coupe.

I wanted to say more-- I alwasy want to say more. But then, I would be just another guy who wants to sleep with her, in her eyes. True, I do want to sleep with her, but that's because I have a penis and testicles. In my mind, though, I know that the best way to appeal to these types of girls-- the crazy ones, that is --is to offer them something that they have never experienced before.

Any guy can hit on a girl, and most of the time their advances get rejected. But it takes some real skill to get a girl to come after you. That's what I am comfortable with, and it doesn't always work. Still, I'd rather be a gentleman and wait for a bigger payoff than try to be something I'm not and strike out right off the bat.

I'm not interested in conquering a woman. I'm more interested in occupying their minds, the same way that they occupy mine. I reciprocate the intrigue that they stir up inside of me. Instead of trying to be hopelessly male, I turn down the machismo and go straight for their soul. It's a bigger bounty, to be sure, and it takes time to stake out, but it's worth every moment.

Katie drove home, and no doubt she didn't get to sleep until the sun rose. If I had any money, food in my fridge, or alcohol to drink, I would have asked her to come inside for a bit. But that's not in the cards right now, and I'm too tender and raw from my exploits with Eve to devote anything other than collaborative interest to Katie.

I went to sleep around 5:30, with my cat Otis curling up next to me and begging to be petted. He must've smelled the girls on my clothes-- ever notice how, no matter how bad of a man-stink you've got on you, once you enter a girl's apartment you end up smelling nice? That's what Otis was picking up on, needless to say.

Katie is crazy, but I won't let her drive me there yet. Instead, she can drive me home from late-night sessions. I can live with that for now.