Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So (28 page)

“Hey, Jack, this is Dr. Vonnegut. I’ve got some good news and some bad news. There’s no more THC in your urine and that’s great, but now there are some cocaine metabolites in there.”

“I wonder how those got in there?”

“I don’t know, Jack, maybe you left the window open or something, but now we have to do another test. Cocaine is a whole different deal. Are you still talking to Frank? Going to
those meetings? Do you want to come in and talk to me about it or just go over to the lab and pee?”

Most of life is a soggy mess, but you can make the world a very different place. As hard as addiction is, it’s always possible to quit and change your perception of the world from one where you do drugs and just about nothing good is possible to one where you don’t do drugs and good things can happen.

Twenty-five years ago, when I had a patient with a drug problem it was a big deal. I called people and they returned my calls and my patients got treatment. Treatment doesn’t exist now, not because it wasn’t effective, but because it’s less expensive for insurers to let addicts and their families drift into poverty and join the ranks of the uninsured.

If not helping a fourteen-year-old addict won’t come back and bite us in the ass, what will?

“It’s not your pee. And if you weren’t doing drugs that woman over there who is crying and has been calling me on the phone so much, your mother, wouldn’t have brought you to my office to hand me someone else’s pee that you had to secretly cradle the whole car ride over.”

My generation should be given credit for proving beyond all shadow of a doubt that drugs are bad for you.

Dad
, 2004

(Painting by Mark Vonnegut)

Kurt was more like an unpredictable younger brother who refused to grow up than a father. He was a wonderful writer and capable of great warmth and kindness, but he fiercely defended and exercised his right to be a pain in the ass on a regular basis.

My last gift to him was a complete bust. He was a famous Luddite who refused to use email or have anything to do with word processors till the very end. So when I came across a manual Olivetti typewriter on eBay that looked exactly like the one on which he had typed most of his novels, I thought he might want to hang it on the wall like a piece of art or the head of an animal he had hunted. I was not suggesting he return to writing.
It was supposed to be for his eighty-fourth birthday. He wasn’t exactly easy to shop for.

When I opened the package, the typewriter was in horrible shape and had a script typeface, which I was sure Kurt would make fun of. I started searching harder and found that Olivetti made a modern manual typewriter. I ordered one and, because time was short, requested that it be shipped directly to his house, but then they put it on back order, and it wouldn’t be delivered till a month after his birthday. So I canceled the order, but somehow it didn’t die and a huge, heavy crate arrived at my father’s door two months after his birthday.

“It’s the size of a goddamned switch engine. I don’t want it. I’m done writing. What do I want with another GD typewriter?” he said.
What kind of an idiot would send me a typewriter?
was the barely unspoken message.

“I canceled the order a long time ago. Let me get Eli to come over and move the damn thing for you. The idea was to appreciate it as a machine and maybe put it on the wall. I had no idea it would be so big. It certainly wasn’t to make you write again. It was a lousy idea. I’m sorry,” I said.
Cut your son a little slack
.

Part of me wanted to have a real switch engine delivered to his door for comparison.

My twenty-five-year-old son and his wife and my wife and our four-year-old were in New York City in our hotel, thinking of easy places to take Kurt for dinner. When I called him and offered him some choices, he said he didn’t want to go out. So maybe we’d just come over and Eli and his wife and the rest of us could say hello before we went out. But it turned out that Kurt wanted to see me but nobody else. He was eighty-four so
we cut him some slack, but the truth is we’d been cutting Kurt slack for forever. He’d been just as capable of being unreasonable and ungracious when he was fifty-four. So because I’m a saint and a martyr and didn’t know how else to be a good fifty-nine-year-old son, I hobbled crosstown on crutches since I couldn’t find a cab and the traffic was bad. He left the door open and came toward me but barely looked at me when I let myself in.

He’d been arguing with his wife, Jill, which was maybe why he was in such a lousy mood. She stayed in the kitchen and didn’t greet me.

He’d been thinking about the right-wing religious groups who were so into the Ten Commandments and wondered why they weren’t into the beatitudes.

I proposed that they were picking a fight and practicing being an angry mob. The reason the Democrats lost Florida in 2000 was that the Republicans had the better-drilled, better-armed, and more-prepared-to-fight mob. Most individual members of the mob, so eager to have plaques of the Ten Commandments in courthouses, couldn’t name more than three of them.

I liked, a little too much, that he thought I might be right. At the age of fifty-nine, hobbling across Manhattan on crutches for conditional approval from my father was okay with me.

His wife came into the living room and picked a fight about whether their adopted daughter, Lily, should be made to take her medicine. She appealed to my expertise as a pediatrician.

I asked what Lily, who was then already in her twenties, liked to do and whether or not she thought the medication might help her on her own terms. Jill said something else. Kurt said that if this discussion continued he would leave. Jill continued calling
Kurt irresponsible. Kurt fled upstairs, holding his head and wearing the facial expression of someone in hell in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Jill complained about Kurt fleeing. Kurt came back downstairs and talked about how Bush should be impeached.

I counted it as a good visit and took a cab back to my family in Times Square.

There were a few more phone calls, but that was our last visit. He left me with the blessing of things to do for him, like being his medical proxy. It fell to me to be the one with him in his last days. I played music and told jokes I thought he’d like.

“If this doesn’t wake him up, he’s not waking up.”

He didn’t wake up. I was able to enforce some elements of decorum around his deathbed. His suffering was not dragged out. Without me acting as his proxy, no one wanted to be responsible for the death of an icon. He was not shipped to a futile neuro-rehab in New Jersey.

So I took care of my father like my father had cut through the crap and taken care of me thirty-six years earlier in British Columbia. I was glad to be able to repay the favor. He took responsibility for hospitalizing me, and I took responsibility for letting him go.

My father gave me the gifts of being able to pay attention to my inner narration no matter how tedious the damn thing could be at times and the knowledge that creating something, be it music or a painting or a poem or a short story, was a way out of wherever you were and a way to find out what the hell happens next and not have it be just the same old thing. It’s better to live in a
world where you can write and paint and tell a few jokes than one where you can’t.

All the arts are ways to start a dialogue with yourself about what you’ve done, what you could have done differently, and whether or not you might try again. Whether or not you want to make a living or can make a living at it, people who consistently bother to try almost always get good or at least better.

Kurt was always trying to reach a little beyond what he was sure of. His refusal to find a groove and stay there when he was famous and successful was admirable, but it was also because he dreaded what life would be if he stopped being creative, honest, and willing to be awkward.