It's Kind of a Funny Story

“Thanks, Mr. Janowitz.” And I picture it in my mind: me going back to school. My little group of friends—only they’re not even my friends anymore—buffered by this new collection of girls who like me because I’m depressed and teachers who are sympathizing and the suddenly nice principal. It’s something I want to get excited about. But I can’t.

“See, was that so bad?” Dr. Minerva asks. And I have to admit that it wasn’t. But it was kind of like getting told that the prison is happy that you’ve been granted a temporary reprieve but we’ll be right here with open arms to take you in when you come back.

“The plan right now is to discharge you Thursday, Craig, and I’ll be here to talk to you on Wednesday, all right?” Dr. Minerva asks. I shake her hand and thank her. I tell her what I tell her when I feel really good about talking to her, which is that she knows how to do her job. Then I go back to my room and draw some brain maps. I’m excited for tonight, for Armelio’s big card tournament.

thirty-five

“O’kay!” says Armelio. “Everybody here?”

We’re back in the activities lounge. Johnny, Humble, Ebony, and the Professor are here. Everyone shaved today—it turns out that the shaving rule is only enforced on weekdays—and they look ten times better. Even Rolling Pin Robert, pacing the halls outside, looks serviceable. I’ll have to remember that: shaving can make even a psych patient look good.

“Huh.” Johnny exhales. “Bobby’s still at his interview.”

“Yeah,” Ebony says. “Craig lent him a shirt. You’re so nice, Craig.”

“Thanks.”

“When are you going to do more of your art?”

“Maybe tonight, after cards.”

“That’s right, buddy, cards is what we need to focus on,” Armelio announces. He stands at the head of the table, which is covered with paint drops, crayon marks, and ink smears over uneven wood. In the middle is a plastic container with the buttons, separated into four even partitions. It looks like at some point the buttons were ordered by size or color, but now they’re all mixed up—every conceivable hue, shape, and ornamentation. They look like jewels.

“I don’t want any of my buttons missing at the end!” Joanie says from the back. She’s at the other table, reading a romance novel and supervising.

“That’s right, we’re still looking for the Blue Button Bandit,” Humble says. “Anybody who can suddenly keep their pants up, we’re going to be very suspicious. Watch out for Solomon, that means. And Ebony.”

“I told you once, stupid, to stop talking about my pants.”

“Okay, everybody ready?” Armelio asks. “Take your buttons!”

Our hands dive into the middle of the table, grabbing fistfuls. We pour the buttons in front of us and use our fingertips to spread them into a one-button-thick layer. Armelio gets to judge whether we have an equal amount.

“Humble, put back six buttons. Ebony, put back ten. Johnny, what’s going on, buddy? You have like two hundred buttons too many!”

“I got a button bonus,” Johnny says, and just then Bobby comes into the activity room.

He moves with his normal loping gait, leaning back with my shirt on. He stops at the end of our table, makes sure he has our attention, raises his right hand, shakes it in the air like he’s doing a magic trick, and then slams both his fists down on the table so his arms make a ‘V’ shape, as if he were Chairman of the Board. He grins:

“I got it.”

Silence holds the room.

Joanie starts the clapping from the back, slowly, but with reverence and purpose. Then Armelio joins in and the tempo starts to spiral.

“All right!”

“Congratulations!”

“Hooray for Brooklyn scumbags!”

“Bob-by! Bob-by!”

In a small room, eight people clapping can be a lot. The posters seem to shake with the applause. As it gets louder there’s howling and hooting and cheering. Tommy gets up and gives Bobby a bear hug, the kind that you can see between two men who’ve known one another for twenty years, who’ve been Fiend One and Fiend Two, for whom one’s victory counts just as much for the other.

“Bobby, buddy, you the man!” Armelio walks over to the hugging pair and smacks Bobby’s back, nearly toppling Bobby and Johnny.

“Wait a minute,” Bobby says. He extracts himself from the hug and holds up his right hand. “Before we get too crazy, ‘cause I see the buttons are out, I gotta thank this young man over here.” He walks toward me. “This kid literally gave me the shirt off his back—this blue one right here—and he didn’t know me from Adam, and there ain’t no question, without him, I wouldn’t have gotten this home. This new home.”