Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [62]
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