My father’s mother was a dangerously crazy woman. Not in that good home style fun happy crazy kinda way. No I mean full on batshit “what the fuck is wrong with you” crazy.

She lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and every now and then she would try to convince my parents to let me go spend a weekend there with her. I always tried to get out of it. Her apartment wasn’t the problem though. She was.

Didn’t like her, didn’t trust her.

So, as it happens, I get sent out there one night. We were hanging around, where hanging around meant she sat in her bedroom and watched TV, while she went through some old clothes, where old clothes meant “from before we had fire”. Her TV Remote, which I was not allowed to use, was a single button “clicker”. Yeah, the TV wasn’t so shiny and new. The channel went up, until, like an 8-track, it came back to the start. The click was dead fucking serious, too.

*CLICK*

“Oh this show!” she would lament.

*CLICK*

“Oy.”

*CLICK*

*CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK*
*CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK*
*CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK*
*CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK*

“Oh wait what was that?”

*CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK*
*CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK**CLICK*

“Ok.”

Then she’d get up and go back to dragging out outfits that were made of some proto-fabric and colored by hand, I think. I was hungry. I was a kid. I asked for food. She glared at me and told me there were walnuts in the living room.

Now, when you’re a kid you have a love/hate relationship with walnuts. At least I did. I didn’t like them because it was a bunch of work for little nut, but I loved them because in order to eat them I had to, get this, utterly destroy them. Hells yeah!

Anyway. I was eating walnuts and grumping when a bit got caught in my throat. I started to choke and cough and generally not breathe while my Grandmother came out, took a look at me and said “Just breathe.” before going back to what she was doing.

I laid there, no shit, and hacked and sputtered for a few minutes until I could breathe again and swallow. She didn’t seem to care much. I demanded to go home. She said no.

I remember trying to leave for myself. I want to say, and I remember this, going home. I do not exactly remember how I got there: if she relented, if my parents were even called, did I blow a trucker for a ride back to Manhattan, I have no idea.

I think my father eventually demanded I be sent back home. Saying this will now prompt my mother to read this and call me and demand that is not how it happened. Which probably means it was, for the record.

Anyway, since then I can not eat walnuts much. Even thinking about them makes the back of my throat itch. I also developed a decent allergy to many nuts (though not peanuts and the like, you know, legumes) but I am not sure if that is fully mental or not, since it has gotten me when I didn’t know it was involved.

Regardless. Bitch was crazy, yo.