It's Kind of a Funny Story

“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 initiative, 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.