by Ned Vizzini
“You’re a yuppie!” Humble yells, and he picks up the dog doo and throws it at her head. “A stupid yuppie with no respect for anybody!”
“Aaaagh!” The Professor holds her face. “He broke it! He broke my nose!” The dog doo has bounced all the way across the room and Joanie jumps over it lightly as she beats a hasty retreat.
“Uh-oh,” Armelio says. “Now you guys did it. We were having such a good card game.”
Harold comes into the room with two big guys in light blue jumpsuits, Joanie behind them. Humble raises his hands. “What? I didn’t do it!”
“C’mon, Mr. Koper,” Harold says.
“I can’t believe it!” Humble says. “She insulted me! It wasn’t even my dog poop! I didn’t have the weapon!” He starts pointing at Bobby. “He’s an accomplice. If I’m going, he’s going.”
“Humble, you have three seconds to get over here.”
“All right, all right.” Humble throws down his cards. “You guys have fun with your buttons.” He’s escorted out by Harold and the security guards, getting a resounding slap on the butt from the Professor. She still has one hand on her face, claiming that she’s bleeding, but when she removes her hand there isn’t any kind of mark. Joanie sits back down at her table.
“You all saw what happened. He attacked me,” the Professor says.
“Yeah yeah, we saw, Doomba,” says Armelio.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re the Doomba; we all know you are.”
“What’s a Doomba?” I ask.
“If you asking, maybe you’re a Doomba, too!” Armelio looks mad. This is the first time I’ve seen it.
“Huh,” Johnny breathes.
“Craig ain’t no Doomba,” Bobby says. “He’s on the level.”
“Aren’t I the winner yet?” asks Ebony.
“How can you have so many buttons?” asks Armelio. “You’re not winning any hands!”
“It’s cuz I don’t over-bet,” Ebony says, leaning over, and a stream of buttons comes roaring out of her top.
“Whoops!”
They keep coming—a mountain spilling over the ante pile. She starts laughing and laughing, showing us her very neat and clean gums while she howls: “Ooooooh, I got you! I got alla you!”
“That’s it,” Armelio says, throwing down his cards. “Every Monday the card tournament always gets messed up! I quit!”
“Do you resign your position as President?” Bobby asks him.
“Forget you, buddy!”
My tongue hurts from so much biting. It might not have been a regulation game, but it definitely had as many emotional ups-and-downs as the poker on TV. I clean up with Bobby and Joanie. Tonight, when I get in bed, I’m too busy wondering about what a Doomba is, and when Ebony stuck the buttons in her breasts, and what that even feels like, and Noelle and the fact that I get to see her tomorrow, to do anything but sleep.
thirty-six
The next day Humble isn’t around for breakfast. I sit with Bobby and Johnny, collect my shirt, perfectly folded, and put it on the back of my chair. I drink the day’s first “Swee-Touch-Nee” tea and ask what they did with Humble.
“Oh, he’s happy. They went and gave him some serious drugs, probably.”
“Like what?”
“You know about drugs? Pills?”
“Sure. I’m a teenager.”
“Well, Humble is psychotic and depressed,” Bobby explains. “So he gets SSRIs, lithium, Xanax—”
“Vicodin,” Johnny says.
“Vicodin, Valium . . . he’s like the most heavily medicated guy in here.”
“So when they took him away they gave him all that stuff?”
“No, that’s what he gets normally. When they take him away they give him shots, I bet. Atavan.”
“I had that.”
“You did? That’ll knock you right out. Was it fun?”
“It was okay. I don’t want to be taking stuff like that all the time.”
“Huh. That’s the right attitude,” says Johnny. “We got a little sidetracked by drugs, me and Bobby.”
“Yeah, no kiddin’,” Bobby says. He shakes his head, looks up, chews, and folds his hands. “Sidetracked isn’t even the word. We were off the face of this planet. We were holed up twenty-four hours a day. I missed so many concerts.”
“I’m sorry—”
“—Santana, Zeppelin, what’s that later one with the junkie, Nirvana … I coulda seen Rush, Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, everybody. All this back when it cost ten bucks to get in. And I was too much of a garbage-head to care.”
“What’s a garbage-head?”
“Somebody who does anything, whatever,” Bobby explains. “You give it to me, I’d do it. Just to see what it was like.”
Jeez. I’ll admit that it sounds a little sexy. I see the appeal. But maybe that’s why I’m in here, to meet guys who take the appeal away.
“Do you think Humble stages scenes so he can get drugs?” I’m spreading cream cheese on a bagel now. I started ordering bagels x2 for breakfast; they’re far and away the best option.
“That’s the kinda thing you just can’t speculate about,” Bobby says. “Oh, here comes your girl.”
She rushes in with a tray and sits down in a corner, drinks her juice, dips at her oatmeal. She glances over at me. I wave as lightly as I can, so people think maybe I have a spasmodic twitch. I haven’t seen her since Sunday; I don’t know what she did all of yesterday. I don’t know how she eats if she doesn’t leave her room. Same with Muqtada. Maybe they deliver food to her? There’s still so much I don’t know about this place.
“Huh, she is a cutie,” Johnny says.
“C’mon, man, don’t be saying that. She’s like thirteen,” Bobby says.
“So? He’s like thirteen.”
“I’m fifteen.”
“Well, let him say it, then,” Bobby says to Johnny. “Leave the thirteen-year-olds to the thirteen-year-olds.”
“I’m fifteen,” I interject.
“Craig, you should probably wait a few years, because sex at thirteen can mess you up.”
“I’m fifteen!”
“Huh, I was doing stuff when I was fifteen,” says Johnny.
“Yeah,” says Bobby. “With guys.”
Pause. If Ronny were here, he would say it out loud: “Pause.”
“Huh. This food sucks.” Johnny pushes his waf fles aside. “Kid,” he says. “Just do this for me. If you get with her, freak her a little bit. You know what I mean?”
“Stop it,” Bobby looks at Johnny. “You got a daughter that age.”
“I’d set him up with my daughter, too. Probably do her good.”
“Wait, how do you guys even know about this? I only talked with her once, and it was really short. Nothing happened.”
“Yeah, but you came into the activity center with her.”
“We notice everything.”
I shake my head. “What’s going on today?”
“At eleven the guitar guy is coming. Johnny here’ll play.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Huh, if the inclination hits.”
I finish up my bagel. I know what I’m going to do until the guitar guy comes: I’m going to make brain maps. I kind of have an audience now. Joanie lent me some high-quality pencils and glossy paper since I helped her out with clean-up after the card tournament debacle, so I can draw whenever I want. When I do, people line up to watch me work. Ebony is my biggest fan; she seems to like nothing better than to sit behind me and see the maps fill out in the people’s heads; I think she likes them more than I do. The Professor is big into them too; she says my art is “extraordinary” and I could sell it on the street if I wanted. I’m branching out into variations: maps in people’s bodies, maps in animals, maps connecting two people together. It comes naturally and it passes the time and it feels a little more accomplished than playing cards.
“I’m gonna work on my art,” I tell the guys.
“If I had half your initia
tive, things woulda turned out different,” says Bobby.
“Huh, yeah; I want to be you when I grow up,” says Johnny.
I walk out with my tray.
thirty-seven
The guitar guy’s name is Neil; he has a black goatee and a black shirt and suede pants and he looks totally stoned. He comes in with a vintage-looking electric guitar—I don’t know brands, but it looks like something the Beatles would have had—and plugs it into his amp on a chair before we file in. There’s something I didn’t expect in the room— instruments on all the seats around the circle—and people run for the ones they want. We have visitors today, nursing students who are learning what it’s like to work in a psych hospital, and they wade in with us and take seats and mediate disputes over who gets the bongo drums, the conga drums, the two sticks you bang together, the washboard, and the coveted seat by the electric keyboard.
“Hey, everybody!” Neil sways. “Welcome to musical exploration!”
He’s playing simple chords in a studded beat that I think is supposed to be reggae, and after a while I realize it’s “I Shot the Sheriff.” He starts singing and he’s just got a terrible voice, like an albino Jamaican frog, but we chime in as best we can with our voices and whatever instruments we ended up with.
Armelio bangs on his chair with some sticks and gets bored, leaves the room.
Becca, the big girl, asks if she can trade her bongos (the little ones) for my congas (the big ones), and I switch. I try to play the fills that come after the choruses in “I Shot the Sheriff’and Neil recognizes that I’m trying, gives me a chance to shine each time, but I can’t pull them off.
Noelle, directly across from me, shakes maracas and her hair, smiling. I occasionally fire off a bongo fill just for her but I’m not sure if she notices.
The star of the show is Jimmy.
I didn’t have any idea that the high-pitched noises he made were singing. Once the music starts he goes right into the Jimmy-verse, banging against his washboard and letting it all hang out in a piercing falsetto that’s surprisingly on key. The thing is, he doesn’t sing “I Shot the Sheriff.” He sings only one phrase:
“How sweet it is!”
Doesn’t matter where the song is or what it is; Jimmy will hum along to the tune as necessary, and then, as soon as there’s a break that he can be heard over, remind us: “How sweet it is!” He sounds a little like Mr. Hankey from South Park. The nursing students, who are all West Indian like Nurse Monica, and young, unlike her, absolutely adore him and give him big smiles, which increases his activity. Jimmy may have only a few sentences in his repertoire, but he knows to keep going when pretty girls pay attention to him.
I send out a fill for him. He sings back. I’m convinced that some part of him knows we came in together.
When “I Shot the Sheriff” finishes in a crescendo of percussion that seems destined never to end (everybody wants to hit that last note, including me), Neil starts in on the Beatles: “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” “I Feel Fine.” The Beatles are apparently the cue for people to get up and dance. It begins with Becca, at Neil’s left. A nursing student pulls her up, she leaves her conga aside and starts wiggling her big butt in the middle of the circle—we yell out encouragement. She turns red and grins, and when she sits down, it’s Bobby’s turn—he moves like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, shaking his hips with a laconic tilt, turning his feet more than his body.
Johnny refuses to dance but bobs his head. The nursing students dance with one another and with Neil. Then it comes around to me. I hate dancing. I’ve never been good at it and I don’t mean that in the traditional scared teenager way: I’m really not good.
But a nursing student has both her hands out to me, and Noelle is across the room.
I put my bongos aside and try to think about what I’m doing as I do it. I know that you’re not supposed to think about dancing—what is that stupid expression, Sing like no one’s listening, dance like no one’s watching?—whatever. I want to dance like Bobby did, and I know the way to do that is to move my hips, so I focus there and think a lot. I don’t think about my arms. I don’t think about my legs. I don’t think about my head. I think about shaking my hips back and forth and then in and out and then in circles, and all of a sudden the nursing student is behind me—I had my eyes closed—and there’s another one in front of me, making a Craig Gilner sandwich, and I’m dancing as if I were one of those cool club guys with two chicks—heck, I have two chicks.
I hold out my hand to Noelle in a fit of confidence. She gets up and we go to the middle of the floor and shake our hips at each other, never touching, never talking, just smiling and keeping our eyes locked. I think she’s actually looking to me for tips, so I mouth to her: “Shake your hips!”
She does, her arms as out of place as my own, hanging at her sides with nowhere sexy to go. Where are you supposed to put your arms when you dance? It’s like the Universal Question. I guess you’re supposed to put them around someone.
When it’s Jimmy’s turn to dance, he gets up, throws down his washboard, and puts his finger over his lips at Neil. Neil stops playing. Jimmy does a pirouette over the unaccompanied wild percussion that we’ve built up and lands on his knee: “How sweet it is!”
thirty-eight
When Neil’s guitar is packed up he comes over.
“Good job with those drum fills.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I haven’t seen you before. What’s your name?”
“Craig.”
“You had good rhythm; you got people moving. Ah, I hope you don’t mind me asking this but . . . why are you here? You seem pretty, you know, good.”
“I have depression,” I say. “I had it really bad. I’m getting out in two days.”
“Great, wonderful, that’s great to hear. I have a lot of friends with that.” He nods at me. “Once you’re out, do you ever think you might consider … volunteering in a place like this?”
“Volunteering with what?”
“Well, do you play instruments?”
“No.”
“You probably could. You have a good musical sense.”
“Thanks. I do art.”
“What kind of art?”
I lead him out of the activity center past the nurses’station and the phone, to my room, where Muqtada is in bed.
“Craig, I hear you all in music room,” he says.
“You should have come.”
Neil smiles at him: “Hello.”
“Hm.”
I pull my stack of my brain maps out for Neil. “I do these.” I give him a whole armful, maybe fifteen of the best of them by now. The one on top is a duo, a guy and girl with a bridge connecting the cities in their minds.
“These are cool” Neil says. He flips through them. “Have you done these for a long time?”
“That depends,” I say. “Ten years or a couple days, depending on how you count it.”
“Can I have one?”
“I don’t know if I can give them away for free.”
“Ha! Listen, for real, here’s my card.” Neil pulls out a simple black-and-white business card that identifies him as a Guitar Therapist. “Whenever you’re out of here, and I’m sure it’ll be soon, give me a call and we can talk about volunteering, and—I’m serious—I might like to buy some of these. How old are you? You should be on the teen floor, right, but they’re renovating?”
“I’m young,” I say.
“I’m glad you came here and got the help you needed,” Neil says, and he shakes my hand in that way that people do in here to remind themselves that you’re the patient and they’re the doctor/ volunteer/employee. They like you, and they genuinely want you to do better, but when they shake your hand you feel that distance, that slight disconnect because they know that you’re still broken somewhere, that you might snap at any moment.
Neil leaves the room and I spend the rest of the day drawing and playing cards with Armelio. Around one-thirty I call Mom, tell her abo
ut the sing-along and the card tournament and how I danced, and she affirms that I’m sounding better and that she heard from Dr. Mahmoud that Thursday is a solid day and she and Dad will be ready when it’s time to pick me up. Even though it’s only a few blocks back to my house, they have to pick me up in person.
In the late afternoon, while I’m playing spit with Armelio and getting crushed, Smitty pops in and tells me I have a visitor.
I know it’s not Mom or Dad or Sarah; they’re coming tomorrow for one last time, when Dad brings Blade II. I hope to God it isn’t Aaron or one of his friends.
It’s Nia.
I see her through the big window in the dining room, looking like she’s been crying or she’s about to cry, or both. She comes slinking timidly down the hall and I walk away from Armelio without a word to go up to her.
thirty-nine
“What are you doing here?” I ask, then pause. That’s really a question other people should be asking me.
“What do you think?” She has on light makeup that makes her lips sparkle and her cheeks a slight Asian red; her hair is drawn back to accent the curved proportions of her face. “I’m here to see you.
“Why?”
She turns away. “I’m having a really hard time right now, okay Craig?”
“All right,” I get in step with her. “Come on, the best place to talk is over here.”
I lead her through the hall with a familiarity and confidence that she seems surprised by. I guess I’m a veteran here now. Sort of an alpha male. Which reminds me: still no Humble.
“Here.” I sit her in the chairs where I sat with my parents and Noelle. “What’s going on?”
She puts her hands on her knees. She has on a little beige combat outfit with black boots; she looks like a Soviet soldier recruit. The light comes in behind her and makes her skin sparkle. I’ve seen her in this get-up before; it’s one of her particularly hottest ones: when you bind up little breasts in guy-type clothing they’re just that much more intriguing.