PART 8 : SIX NORTH, TUESDAY

 

Chapter 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 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.