“That’s true,” she said. “Maybe it’s better to just forget it.”
PHLEGMED BEFORE A LIVE AUDIENCE
A
LTHOUGH BOTH NATALIE AND I LACKED THE ABILITY TO play piano, we were gifted at manipulating others into playing for us so we could sing. Three of Finch’s patients played well enough to follow the sheet music we placed in front of them. Of these three, Karen was the best because she was tireless. Whether this quality was innate or caused by improper dosage of her medication, she would happily play the theme from Endless Love five times in a row and then move without fuss into a rousing rendition of “Somewhere.” When Karen would begin to complain that her fingers were getting tired, Natalie would pull a Snickers bar or a joint out of the patch pocket on the front of her skirt. This would usually keep Karen playing, but sometimes she would just become very stubborn after an hour and a half of steady keyboard work. In these cases, Natalie would resort to bribery. “You know,” she would say temptingly, “I could call my dad and see if he could see you later this afternoon. I’m sure he would.” Pause. “If I asked him.” This usually got at least another medley out of her.
It was our goal to become an international singing sensation, on a par with Peaches ’N Herb or the Captain and Tenille. When there was no patient around to play piano for us, we practiced upstairs in Natalie’s room by singing along to Stevie Nicks albums. The problem was, Stevie was sometimes hard to understand and Natalie had long since lost the liner notes to the album. So I would lie on the floor with my head next to the speaker and Natalie would stand with her finger poised over the needle.
“Wait, I can’t understand that—play it again,” I’d say, scribbling furiously to keep up. “Is she singing ‘just like a wine-ringed love’ or ‘white-winged dove’?”
Natalie would drop the needle on the record, causing it to screech. “Hold on, here it comes.”
The verse would play and again I couldn’t understand. “Fuck it, I’ll just write something in.”
After I finished transcribing, with dubious accuracy, the words to our favorite songs, we would sing them over and over as we watched ourselves in the mirror on Natalie’s dresser.
“My arms look so fat,” Natalie would comment. The problem was, she was holding a curling iron up to her mouth to simulate a microphone and this doubled the girth of her arms, which were plump to begin with.
“Well, we’ll use stands,” I offered. “We won’t ever take the mic out of the stand.”
Natalie would then toss the curling iron on the bed. “That makes sense. Good thinking.”
Sometimes we would drag the fan upstairs. This would create a sort of Stevie-Nicks-in-a-wind-tunnel look that we especially loved. “I wish I had a carpetbag,” Natalie would say, as her feathered hair blew back away from her face.
Our dedication to our craft was relentless.
“Knock it off you two, I’m trying to sleep,” Hope would sometimes complain in the middle of the night. Of course, this just made us turn the stereo up louder.
If we happened to be in rehearsal downstairs in my room and a neighbor padded across the lawn to rap gently on the window and ask us to please be more quiet, Natalie might simply lift her skirt and mash her vagina against the window while extending her middle finger.
We had dedication. We had, we were positive, enormous talent. What we needed was a captive audience.
And what more captive an audience could one ask for than the permanent inmates of the Northampton State Hospital?
“I think it’s a fantastic idea,” Dr. Finch said.
“You think they’d let us?” Natalie asked. The prospect of a live audience had caused her face to flush and small bumps to rise on her forehead. She scratched madly at her face.
“I should think they’d be thrilled that two talented young performers had offered their services, free of charge.”
We wanted to press him for more encouragement, but the power of the TV was too strong and he was nodding off to sleep.
“This could really turn into something,” Natalie said, her eyes slightly wild.
I agreed completely. “Maybe it’ll make the papers. Do you know how to write a press release?”
The bumps had spread to her upper arms and she scratched them. “No, but Hope does.”
“I know it’s not Broadway, but it’s a beginning.”
Our next step would be contacting the entertainment director for the hospital. This proved to be more difficult than we had anticipated, mainly because there was no such thing as an entertainment director at the Northampton State Hospital. There was only a depressed fat lady behind the front desk who looked at us hopelessly when we made our inquiry.
“I’m not sure I even understand what you’re asking,” she said.
Natalie exhaled, trying to manage her impatience. “I told you, I’m from Smith College and he’s from Amherst. We’re music students and we’d like to perform for your patients. As a special treat.”
“Uh huh,” the woman said doubtfully. “Hold on a minute and I’ll see if I can find somebody.” She scanned a piece of paper that was taped to the desk next to the phone and punched in an extension. She turned her head away from us and spoke softly.
“Don’t worry,” Natalie said. “If worst comes to worst, we can make my father call somebody. He knows people here.”
The reason he knew people there was because the whole family used to live on the hospital grounds, back before Finch had his own practice. Natalie’s first memory of home was of being in that very hospital, surrounded by lunatics. In fact, it had been her father’s dream to someday have his own psychiatric hospital. When this didn’t happen, he did the next best thing. He allowed his house to fall into a state of disrepair and then he invited patients to live there. I always wondered if the fact that the Finch children had been raised in a mental hospital was the reason their threshold for weirdness was so high.
“Somebody will be with you shortly. Would you . . .” she started to say something, maybe offer us a tiny paper cup of water, but changed her mind.
“Thanks,” Natalie said.
We moved away from the desk and stood near the door. It seemed wise to stand near the door in case we had to make a sudden run for it. There was no telling who was on the other end of that phone.
A moment later, a robust nurse appeared. She walked with the gait of a horse wrangler and her forearms were thick and muscular, like she’d had loaves of French bread implanted under the skin. “Hi. I’m Doris. How can I help?”
Natalie repeated the lie that we were music students from Smith and Amherst and that as part of our study, we wanted to sing at the hospital.
Doris’s first reaction was one of practicality. “We don’t have an auditorium,” she said.
Natalie said, “That’s okay. We can sing right on the ward.”
I was glad she spoke the lingo.
“We don’t even have a piano,” Doris said.
One glance around the lobby of the dilapidated building and it was easy to see that a piano wasn’t all they didn’t have. Running water was doubtful. This place was getting a lot of sponge-bath action, and that was about it.
Natalie cleared her throat and smiled. “That’s fine. We could sing a capella.”
“I don’t know that song,” Doris said.
“It’s not a song. That’s a technical term. It means we could sing without any instruments. Just our voices.”
Doris placed her hands on her hips and cocked her head slightly to the side. “Let me get this straight. You wanna come here and sing for the patients and you don’t need any musical instruments. Just the two of you, just singing?”
We nodded.
“For free?”
We nodded again.
Doris considered this for a moment but there was obviously something bugging her. “Can I ask why?”
I was beginning to wonder that myself.
“Because it’s excellent training,” Natalie answered automatically. “
We need as much experience before a live audience as possible.”
Doris laughed. “I don’t know how live your audience is gonna be. But if you wanna come up and sing, I don’t see why not.”
We left feeling manic with excitement, like we’d been booked on The Today Show. “We are gonna blow them away,” Natalie said as we trudged down the hill.
“God, what should we sing?” I said.
“Good question.”
I mentally ran through our repertoire. Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” might cause somebody to have a flashback. “Enough Is Enough” was good, but we really needed percussion to make it work. Plus there was always the danger that it would hit a nerve and spark a riot. “Somewhere” from West Side Story? No, that would just remind them that they, too, wanted to live somewhere else.
“What about ‘You Light Up My Life’?” Natalie suggested.
Wow. That was a surprise. “Are you serious?” I said.
“Why not?”
That song demanded an incredible vocal range. “You think we can do that one?”
Natalie was strident with confidence. “Totally.”
And that is how it came to pass that Natalie and I performed “You Light Up My Life” live, in front of a captive and highly medicated audience.
When we arrived at the hospital a week later, Doris led us onto the locked ward and into a large, open room with bars on the windows and furniture that would have remained unscathed in a typhoon.
Some of the patients were seated by their own free will. Others were strapped to their chairs or guarded by one of three orderlies. These were twenty, twenty-five of the most dismal, most tragic lost souls I had ever seen collected in a room at once.
Instantly, all stage fright vanished. I felt utterly at home.
Doris had done her best to arrange a sort of stage for us, created by moving the various wheelchairs and chairs into a half-circle. Natalie and I stood in the center of this half-circle and I looked out at the faces. Heads slumped against shoulders, mouths open with drool hanging, eyes rolled back in their sockets and tongues that seemed unnaturally long. One or two of the patients rocked steadily in their chairs. A few expressed hostility at being corralled.
“Fuck this shit,” spat a nasty old man. I was relieved that he was one of the ones being guarded by an orderly because his eyes were not as dim as some of the others and I worried he was capable of some sort of outburst.
“No, no, no.” This was chanted by a woman with the hairiest face I’d ever seen, except on a dog. Even her forehead was fuzzy.
Did they not allow these people mirrors? Were the mentally ill somehow infused with an extra portion of hair-growth hormones?
Natalie cleared her throat.
I looked at her and we nodded. It was time.
Our voices trembled at first, because of our nerves. Anytime you perform in front of a live audience for the first time, this is bound to happen. But by the second verse, we were both completely absorbed in the song. Natalie’s voice was truly beautiful, soaring high against the perforated ceiling panels. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine a spotlight on my face, bathing me in color. I imagined a hushed audience wearing expensive earrings, tissues poised beneath their eyes.
Which is why the wet smack was such a shock to both of us.
“Fuckers.” It was the hateful old man, the one without teeth, I now saw. He’d coughed deeply, productively, and spat in our direction.
Because we were standing so close together, his phlegm hit us both. In the face.
It was deeply repulsive.
And we did the only thing we could possibly do. Or at least Natalie did.
She spat right back at him.
HERE, KITTY KITTY
I
WAS ASLEEP ON NATALIE’S WHITE FOTAKI RUG WHEN I WAS startled awake by a rapid knocking on the door. I reached up and slapped Natalie’s stubbly calf, which was hanging over the mattress. “Someone’s at the door.” “Natalie, Augusten,” Hope whispered through the door. “Open up.” Natalie moaned, her feather earrings stuck to her cheek. “What time is it?” She reached over and turned her alarm clock around, knocking the Zippo on the floor. “Jesus Christ, it’s not even five in the morning.” She blinked at me with her puffy, tired eyes, then climbed out of bed, dragging the sheet with her and wrapping it around her shoulders.
I sat up and my mouth tasted horrible, like stale pot, beer and Cheetos. The exact combination of ingredients that had caused me to pass into unconsciousness on Natalie’s floor.
Natalie opened the door and yawned. “What do you want?”
Hope was in her nightgown clutching Freud to her chest.
“What are you doing with that poor cat?”
She stepped inside the room and Natalie closed the door. “Freud’s not well,” Hope said. Her face was pained, deeply concerned.
Quickly, I scanned the cat for signs of a fight—dried blood on its fur, a chunk of ear missing. “She looks fine,” I said.
“She’s not fine,” Hope snapped. “I think she’s dying.”
“Oh, no,” Natalie said, climbing back into bed, the sheet twisted through her legs. “Hope, just take a Valium and go back to sleep. Your cat is fine.” “No, she’s not. She’s dying. She told me.”
It seemed like I was still stoned. “What?”
“She woke me up fifteen minutes ago. I was dreaming about her, dreaming that she was eaten by a white glob. It was just awful, you guys. It was a nightmare. And then all of a sudden, I woke up and she was curled up right next to my face. Purring.” “Hope, what are you talking about?” Natalie lay a pillow over her head, covering her eyes.
“Don’t you guys get it?”
“Get what?” I said. “Get that you’ve finally gone completely insane?”
“Freud was sending me a message through my dreams. She was telling me that she’s dying.” Hope was trembling and Freud struggled to break free of her grasp. But Hope kept moving her arms in such a way that the cat was trapped.
I tried to enlighten her. “Hope, Freud wasn’t talking to you through your dreams. She’s just a fucking cat.” “She’s not just a cat.”
“Go back to bed,” Natalie said. She reached for the light to turn it off.
“Wait,” Hope said. “I’m serious. I really need to do something. Please.”
Natalie sat up. She ran her fingers back through her hair and coughed. “Okay, what do you want us to do?” I looked at Hope.
“Well, I don’t know.”
I said, “I’ll go with you to the vet tomorrow so you can have her checked out.” Hope shook her head. “No, I don’t want any strangers near her right now. She needs to be home. I need to comfort her.” I burped. “Well, I don’t know. There’s nothing you can do about it tonight. You should just take her back down to your room and go to sleep.” “But what if I have the dream again?”
“You won’t,” I told her. “You never dream the same thing twice.”
“That’s not true,” Hope said. “I have a lot of dreams again and again.”
“Look, Hope. There’s nothing you can do tonight. Go back to bed. This is fucking insane.” The cat made a gurgling sound.
Eventually Hope did go back to bed and Natalie turned off the light. “Can you believe her? She’s just so weird.” “What’s the matter with her?” I said.
Natalie turned the light back on. “I need a cigarette.”
I reached over and grabbed my pack, then tossed it on the bed.
Then we cracked up until Natalie had to run into the bathroom because she was going to pee in the bed.
For the next three days, Hope would not let Freud out of her sight. Or her arms.
“Hope, don’t hold that cat over the stove like that,” Agnes scolded. “Her tail could catch fire on one of the burners.” There was nothing Natalie or I could say that would make Hope understand that the only suffering her cat was experiencing was her.
“You can’t hang that thing around her neck. It’s too heavy.?
??
“But Natalie, this way she can’t get lost. I can hear her wherever she goes in the house.” The necklace, made of two jar lids and a length of red yarn, was secured around the cat’s neck. The lids clanked together whenever the cat moved.
“What are you doing to this cat?” the doctor bellowed when it leapt up on his lap, fleeing from Hope.
“Dad, Freud’s sick,” Hope said, catching her breath.
“Leave this poor animal alone,” was all he said before nodding off in front of the TV.
On the fourth day, the cat’s condition worsened. According to Hope, Freud again contacted her during REM sleep and said that she had hung on for as long as she could, she really just needed to be left in peace so she could die now.
“Has anybody seen Hope?” I asked that afternoon. I needed a ride to the Hampshire Mall so I could fill out a job application at Chess King and Hope was the only one who could drive me there.
“I haven’t seen her all day,” Agnes said, scrubbing at the dining room table with vinegar and newspaper. “Last time I saw her she was downstairs in the basement”—she used her fingernail to scrub something off the table—“with the cat.” I turned around and looked at the door to the basement. “Hope?” I called out. When I didn’t hear any answer, I opened the door. It was dark. But then just as I was about to close the door, I heard something, a faint scratching sound. I flicked on the light and started down the stairs.
Hope was lying on the floor with her head next to a yellow plastic laundry basket. She appeared to be dead. “Hope, are you okay?” “Mmmm? Who?” she mumbled sleepily.
“Hope, what are you doing down here on the floor? People have been looking for—” That’s when I saw the whiskers. They were poking out of the slats of the laundry basket, flicker, flicker, flicker.
I leaned forward and peered inside the basket. Freud was pressed against the side of it, her nose trying to poke through. “Hey cat,” I said gently. Then, “Hope, what’s going on in here?” Hope slowly sat up. She brought her finger to the side of the basket and tickled Freud’s whiskers. “Poor kitty.” “Why is she in the laundry basket? And why do you have this dollhouse on top of it?” Hope looked up at me and her face told me that something dreadful had happened. It was the face you might wear if you had to tell a parent that their child had met unfavorably with a python.