Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So (8 page)

(Photo by Peter Vandermark)

When I came back to the Cape, a million years ago now in 1972, Carl, the guy who had helped me wash the tar and oil off my bike when I was ten, gave me a job watering lawns and carrying rocks for him. I was a slower-moving, much lighter, slightly haunted, sort of clean-shaven version of my former self. After they had shaved my beard at the hospital I grew it back, and then I shaved it off myself when I got back to the Cape. I felt naked. My fingers missed having something to play with.

“The beard made me look heavier,” I explained when people didn’t recognize me at first and did a double take. I was on Thorazine, from which I would be weaned a little at a time if I did well. There had been shock treatment. It was all a little vague. I worried about saying something wrong. Maybe if I relapsed, being crazy and all, I’d be the last to know. It was like I was in a logrolling contest suddenly finding myself in the cold water
looking up at the lumberjacks on top of the logs wondering how they walked around like that.

Somewhere in there my father left my mother and the Cape for good and went to live in New York. It was somehow about writing. He said that taking on the orphans, his sister’s children, had cost him his wife and peace and had been hard on me and made it hard for him to write. It didn’t ring remotely true then or now. He was just a guy who couldn’t blend in and had to keep making up different stories about it.

In the ten years prior to the orphans he had published one novel and a bunch of short stories without coming close to making a living at it. The roughly ten years disrupted by orphans produced
The Sirens of Titan; Mother Night; Cat’s Cradle; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; Welcome to the Monkey House;
and
Slaughterhouse-Five
. Not so bad.

As soon as I got out of the hospital after my first series of breaks I started writing about what had happened to me. Writing is very hard mostly because until you try to write something down, it’s easy to fool yourself into believing you understand things. Writing is terrible for vanity and self-delusion. It wasn’t therapy as much as trying to tell a story that took me by surprise, plus there weren’t a lot of people beating down my door with alternative plans for what I should be doing.

I imagined neighbors saying, “I think he’s writing in there.”

“Whatever. As long as there’s no screaming or broken glass, he can do whatever he wants.”

In the middle of the illness I had promised to try to remember and tell the truth. One of the first pieces of mail I received after
getting out of the hospital was from a magazine wanting to publish a story I didn’t remember writing, which I took as a helpful, possibly divine hint about what the hell I might be good for.

I thought the fact that people could get well from serious mental illness was good news and worth writing about. It was good news that it was more about biochemistry and neurotransmitters. There should be no shame or blame. They were illnesses like other illnesses.

It crossed my mind that if I was able to tell the story well enough to get it published and it sold well, I might make some money and it might be the end of shame and blame and stigmatization. The medical model would reign supreme. Unequivocal diagnostic tests would be available shortly. Medications without side effects would come along a little later, and mental illness would become a thing of the past.

It was not impossible that an accurate understanding of mental illness would lead to world peace and universal prosperity. Without writers fooling themselves about what their books might accomplish there would be no books at all.

Once a week and then every two weeks and then once a month, I drove up to Boston to see my old friend Dr. Kirk. Before, I had been doing due diligence, checking out whether it was crazy to try to set up a commune in British Columbia. It seemed odd that a psychiatrist working at Harvard in the sixties and seventies had a crew cut and looked like a Marine. His appearance was a testament to my open-mindedness. My Harvard
crew-cut psychiatrist had said that my plans to set up a commune in British Columbia were just fine and, in fact, probably what he himself would be doing if he was my age. Now I was seeing him for permission to take a little less Thorazine. Our relationship had range.

“How are you sleeping? Eating? Any voices? Ideas of reference?”

“Not me, boss.”

“Let’s go down to fifty milligrams three times a day.”

Today, if I was lucky, I’d see a case supervisor monthly and maybe a psychopharmacology nurse every three months. Clinical guidelines would mandate that I be on antipsychotics for at least five years. The medication I was on would be determined by who paid for lunch and what deal was cut between my health insurer and the pharmaceutical industry.

It didn’t seem all that special at the time, but the fact that a doctor and I were left alone to figure out what was best for me was a lifesaving miracle.

My father had been teaching creative writing at Harvard and had seen Dr. Kirk a few times, which is how I got to see him the first time around. My now impeccably dressed in Brooks Brothers clothing father, increasingly recognized and recognizable with his multi-book contract and growing bank account, told me in a letter that he enjoyed the Harvard experience because it gave him a chance to know people who were
at home in the world
.

Kurt the pained loner seemed to be gone, but was he really winking at me like it wasn’t for real as he went to fancy places with fancy people? Was he really a representative of loners and misfits? Where was I at home? Would I be called upon to rule a small but very nice planet in some faraway galaxy once my apprenticeship on Earth was done?

From the team owner’s box, where I sat with my father, I watched Pelé play soccer and score a goal with a bicycle kick over his head for the New York Cosmos. After the game I went to the locker room and got to see Pelé’s feet. They were the widest, most amazing feet I’ve ever seen. I tried not to stare. I almost went to a cocktail party given by a game-show host. Were my father and I playing out some hysterically funny joke we couldn’t talk about?

The landscaping went well. I got a job substitute teaching at Barnstable High. That went well. I wrote a short article that got published.

I started painting again. The paintings were much lighter, mostly landscapes. I found that I liked watercolors better than oils. People actually liked my watercolors enough to buy them. I loved painting but I never felt like I was talented the way my sisters and my father were. Art came easily to them. They were graceful. My paintings were more peaceful than theirs, but painting for me will always be like trying to get up out of a tar pit while I’m fighting off Africanized killer bees.

Someone, maybe me, asks me what I would have liked to have done if it hadn’t been for the sixties and all that and being mentally ill. I thought back to when I was nine or ten.

I should have been a doctor
.

Part of getting better from being crazy included the realization that my life might be a lot longer than I had thought and that I probably wasn’t going to get out of anything by having the world end or Western civilization collapse.

It was too bad I was twenty-five, hadn’t taken the right courses, and had this mental health history. I had a
mental health history
, the way other people might have a suitcase.

I wondered how I’d do taking math and science courses again. It seemed like my brain was back and working well, maybe even better than it had been for a while. I thought I had stopped doing math and science because they were so German and responsible for so much death and destruction.

I should have been a doctor
.

When I started taking premed classes at UMass Boston, I was thrilled to find that I could do math and science again.

My illness became a compass of sorts. I could ask myself whether something was leading me away from or closer to being crazy. There was less of the “six of this, half dozen of that” that had made up so much of life.

Marijuana seemed to have been working hand in glove with the damn illness and trying to do me in, so I stopped that without regret or difficulty. Part of what saved my life was my strong reluctance to part with money. I tried cocaine once and liked how chatty it made me, but I wasn’t about to part with hundreds of dollars just to be chatty.

If you take good care of any disease by eating well, sleeping well, being aware of your health, consciously wanting to be well, not smoking, et cetera, you are doing all the same things you should be doing anyway, but somehow having a disease makes them easier to do. A human without a disease is like a ship without a rudder.

I cleaned up my diet, avoided sugar and caffeine, got regular exercise, and took medication as prescribed and vitamin B12 shots once a month. Being normal with a vengeance was a big step up from being mentally ill, but it wasn’t without its problems. As soon as someone who has been crazy can pass for normal, he is offered a witness relocation program with a new diagnosis and a new childhood if necessary. Everyone needs reassurance that the beast has been contained. If you’re going to go nuts over and over, why bother to get an education, a job, or a date for Saturday night?

I had a number of notes to self about voodoo, ESP, and other forms of belief in things unseen that seemed related to the voices and ideas of reference. These things were harmless for others but not so good for me. I’d had my fill, and then some, of “Wow.”

Having a not entirely reasonable expectation that things will go well turns out to be exactly the sort of delusion that increases your chances for success in this world, be it getting into medical school or whatever. If in fact you are skating on thin ice, the last thing you want to do is slow down and think about it. Once I made it through the process and was actually admitted to medical school, my unreasonable expectation that things would go well became retroactively reasonable.

I bought some Brooks Brothers clothes. I regained the twenty pounds I’d lost and then some. I had a mustache for a while and then ended up clean-shaven. I looked younger than I was. There was a chip on my shoulder the size of Montana, but nobody noticed. Why had such a nice guy like me been so rudely put upon and interrupted?

I had three more articles published. I was running and lifting
weights. I had a girlfriend. Someone wanted to publish my book. I enrolled at Harvard Medical School. I was a goddamned panzer division. I’ll never know if a less disciplined, less vigilant, less muscular me would have done as well. I was burning the candle at too many ends and getting away with it.

I should have been a doctor
.

Note to self: Being Kurt’s son, being an ex–mental patient, getting into Harvard, having written a book, and being a doctor are all things that in and of themselves do not make a life. If you lean on them too hard, you’ll find that there’s not much there. But if you add up enough things that aren’t in and of themselves enough, it almost starts to add up to something.…