The Eden Express (34 page)

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Authors: Mark Vonnegut

BOOK: The Eden Express
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Our first few visits were fairly disjointed. I tried to explain what I thought was being done to me. They were draining my blood and replacing it with something else and changing the lines on my palms and…
My mother didn’t argue with any of my crazy notions and even elaborated a bit on the milder ones involving astrology and palmistry. My mother is one of the world’s greatest empathetic suspenders of disbelief. If there’s a thread of sense woven into a vast tapestry of nonsense, my mother will find it. And even if there’s not, she’ll spend forever and a day looking, always assuming that it’s her denseness and not any lack of sense.
Just after I recovered I thought my mother’s attitude and behavior had been a big mistake. “Ma, the first time you visit someone in a seclusion room, you don’t read their palm.” But the more I think about it, the less I think it was a mistake. Arguing with them wouldn’t have made the crazy ideas go away, and being willing to talk about them gave me a chance to get them all out where I could look at them. It made at least part of my insanity a lot less hellishly lonely.
She talked Dr. Dale into letting Virginia visit me and they’d show up together like clockwork every afternoon. They spent lots of time together talking over their visits and plotting my recovery. They were an ideal visiting team.
 
When I recovered enough to care about where I was, my first reaction was to be pissed off at the hospital. If only they had given me a few pills to take along, this whole thing could have been avoided.
If anything, I was less patient than before. There wasn’t much magic about pills three times a day. What did I need all these jokers for? Why don’t they just give me the fucking pills and let me the fuck out of here?
Then they seemed to loosen up a little. Dale told me about what he thought was wrong with me, what could be done about it, what the pills did. What I had was schizophrenia. It was probably genetic. It was biochemical. It was curable. It might have something to do with adrenaline metabolism. There were dietary adjustments I could make that might help. Dope wasn’t such a hot idea for someone like me.
I was skeptical about some of what he said, but I accepted much of it and was glad to at last be told something. All the same, I was still angry. Why hadn’t they told me any of this earlier, the first time I was here? I still didn’t think of the hospital as a good place to spend much time, but I gained at least a marginal faith that they were trying to help me and a glimmer of hope that they might know what they were doing.
I also found out that my legal situation was quite a bit more complicated than it had been last time around. My first stay I was, technically at least, a voluntary patient. This time I had arrived in a straitjacket accompanied by four Royal Canadian Mounties armed with, among other things, commitment papers signed by three doctors. They could lock me away for years. I decided to work on patience again.
I doubt if the staff would believe how hard I worked at being patient or that I worked at it at all. They steadily maintained that I was the least patient patient they had ever seen. “Look at Mary. She’s been here for years. She’s not jumping to get out of here.” Somehow I didn’t find Mary a very attractive model.
Impatience was a symptom, so I did my best not to mention anything about getting out or thinking that maybe I was ready for grounds privileges or that I was anything but tickled to be a patient at Hollywood Hospital. I read a lot of novels, wrote a lot of letters, drew a lot of pictures, played the old piano as often as I could, tried to develop relationships with patients and staff, all the time saying over and over to myself, “Patient, patient, patient.” I used it like a mantra in meditation. Very careful to keep it quiet and make sure my lips weren’t moving. “Patient, patient, patient.”
 
Poor Dr. McNice. Hollywood Hospital’s saving grace. The man who allowed us to salvage a bit of dignity.
No hippie, to be sure. But at least he didn’t drive Cadillacs and wear baby-blue alligator shoes. There wasn’t much chance of his actively joining our quest, but we knew he had sympathy and understanding and hope for what we were doing. He had in his eyes a vague apology for not being more like us, an ever-so-faint hint of self-contempt for an even vaguer cowardice.
Poor Dr. McNice. He had tried to be a good doctor much the same
way I had tried to be a good hippie. He had acted reasonably and compassionately. He honored noble precepts.
Now he averted his eyes whenever we passed in the hall. He avoided me, my parents and friends as politely as he could. When cornered, he was evasive.
We figured that Dale must have given him hell for letting me get away, and then when I returned a few weeks later in even worse shape than I had been on my first admission, McNice was lucky to still have a job. Dale must have given him strict orders to have nothing whatsoever to do with my case.
And it was my fault. Poor me. In spite of myself, I was the most telling argument against all that he and I and all my friends and humanitarians everywhere wanted to be true.
I looked in a mirror. “Mark, you’re the best argument fascism ever had.”
I had worked my way out of the locked wards. Even had all my own clothes back. I was in one of the best rooms. I had been supergood for what seemed like an awfully long time. The doctors said I was doing well. The nurses and orderlies thought likewise. The patients all thought I was OK. My mother and Virginia seemed to think I was OK.
All Dale would say when I hinted about getting out was that we’d talk about it later. He started getting stingy with his information again. Maybe he just didn’t have any more. It was back to “You’ve been a very sick boy. We don’t have all the answers.”
 
I found myself sobbing uncontrollably, scared to death they were going to catch me at it and lock me up in that little room again.
I was crying because, among other things, I was doubtful that they were ever going to let me out. They were very much “them” and I was cracking under the strain of trying so hard to be patient and
not knowing how long I’d have to keep it up. Sure enough they caught me at it. “I suppose it’s not manly to cry. I suppose this means I’m nuts.” But they didn’t zap me into the little room. The nurse even sat down and comforted me some and said crying was OK. It didn’t mean I was crazy. It didn’t mean I wasn’t a man. I cried with her holding my hand for a while.
Then Ray showed up. I think the nurse asked me if I’d be more comfortable talking with a man.
I had seen Ray around the hospital before but never really talked with him. He looked maybe a couple of years older than I. He was my version of what I would have been had it not been for the war, dope, the draft, America, Virginia, whatever this biological condition was that they kept talking about, and a few other things. I too would have been a bright, earnest, clean-shaven young man, very possibly a clinical psychologist. My feelings toward him were a mixture of envy and superiority. He seemed so naïve. I didn’t know whether to thank or hate whatever it was that had me turn out differently from him.
“A whole lot of shit happened to me all at once.”
The talk I had with Ray wasn’t all that extraordinary except that it was the first time I had talked about things in a down-to-earth way. He was the first person whose attitudes toward what I was going through seemed remotely related to mine. I felt that he liked me. It was the first time I had felt that in a long time, too. I didn’t feel threatened or abused or greatly misunderstood.
“My woman went off and balled another man… My parents are breaking up…
“A whole lot of shit happened all at once,” was what it all boiled down to.
I talked some about the hospital and not understanding at all how the score was being kept. What sort of things did I do that were considered crazy? What sort of things did I have to do to be considered well?
I talked about feeling horny and wishing there was some way to get laid. I talked about there being nothing to do and wishing I could at least take some long walks. I asked him why they had held me down and shaved off my beard and cut my hair. Wasn’t that maybe not such a hot thing to do to someone who was having a hard enough time identifying with his body and trying to believe this wasn’t a repressive institution, hostile to everything that had ever meant anything to me?
He offered to take me on a walk the next day. It was a nice walk. We talked about a lot of things. I loosened up and felt much better.
After my walk and talk with Ray, I was given unlimited afternoon and evening visitor privileges, and allowed to go out with friends for whole afternoons. Simon, Kathy, Jack and André from Stevens Street all dropped in from time to time, never more than two or three at once. Sometimes I’d go on a picnic with Virginia and whoever else was visiting. I was still feeling shaky but less and less so, and I was more and more eager to get the hell out of the hospital.
My mother went to visit an ailing uncle in California. She and I agreed that I was in good enough shape that she didn’t really need to hang around any more. We were all just waiting for that slowpoke Dale to realize I was OK and let me go.
 
And then, seemingly out of nowhere, all hell broke loose again and I was back in that fucking little room. No visitors, no clothes, no one would even talk to me through the little hole, no nothing.
McNice came in one day with three of the meanest orderlies. I had been utterly alone for days.
“I think I’m dead, I’m dead, aren’t I?” pleading and grasping for his arm.
“Yes, I know you feel like that.” He left quickly. The orderlies held me down and jabbed another needle in my ass.
The third crackup was different from the first two. In lots of ways it was the worst.
Not much fun or funny happened the third time I cracked. Maybe it was because I cracked in the hospital and there was no running room, no slack, no chance for the Eden Express to get up a decent head of steam.
Maybe it was because I really didn’t want to go crazy then. I really tried to stop it and couldn’t. Both other times there had seemed to be some point in it.
I was running out of excuses. My father hadn’t committed suicide. Virginia was OK. My mother was OK. Spring was on schedule. Life seemed to be going on. I had taken all those silly little pills. I hadn’t touched anything remotely dopelike. I had followed all doctor’s orders faithfully and here I was back in that fucking little room again.
Maybe it was just the repetitiveness of it. Once was an accident, twice a coincidence, but three? A habit. Three strikes. Three points define a circle. A closing one. There had been a few weeks between cracks one and two and just a little over a week between two and three. This was how I was going to spend my life.
My suicide attempts became more frequent, more pathetic, and more sincere. Before I had danced with death, loved death, hated death, teased death, been teased by death. Now I was rolling on the floor in my own shit, clumsily trying to strangle myself. Before there had been elements of hope and nobility. By dying I could help others live, bring back the sun, teach some truth. Now I just wanted to die.
I was running out of material. I had been back and forth over my life so often and so thoroughly there was nothing left. I had been Hitler, Napoleon, Lincoln, Jesus, Joan of Arc, Bob Dylan, Billy the Kid, Bach, Wagner, Shakespeare, and Nietzsche, to name a few. I had been through every novel I had ever read and a few I hadn’t at least twice. Movies likewise. I had said everything I ever wanted to say to
everyone I wanted to say it to. I had made love to everyone and everything and been made love to in turn and fucked and been fucked. Longings I hadn’t dreamed of had been fulfilled. I had no more unfinished business.
 
POWER. Just before my third crack-up, I learned that Joe had landed in a nut house and was going through electroshock. It was another hint that “delusions of grandeur” was at least partly a misnomer. I remembered that Warren, the aspiring guru, had also wound up in a nut house shortly after his encounter with me. I felt shitty as hell about Joe being in the hospital. Warren, I felt, had it coming.
Both had played somewhat similar roles in my crack-ups. They were both primary males. Each had been some strange combination of father, devil, and God. Both had tried to cure me. I had had the feeling that these guys were both trying to use cosmic clout. My reaction in both cases was the same: No hard feelings, fellas, but this time you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.
Uncanny feats of memory, physical strength, spiritual power, agility: I’d be inclined to dismiss them if there weren’t so many instances supported by people who were there. In fact, I’d feel much more comfortable about the whole thing if I could dismiss all the spooky stuff as delusions.
Maybe it was just that I was able to create an atmosphere which destroyed people’s customary expectations, an atmosphere in which miracles could flourish. Anyway, it spooked the hell out of me. I even managed to spook a few doctors and nurses. That’s impressive spooking, considering the extensive spookproofing those people go through and all the antispook drugs they pumped me full of.
Somehow I managed to stumble onto some tricks of the holy-man trade. Call it cosmic disability compensation, a bonus dividend accruable on ego disinvestiture.
I doubt that I had much to do one way or another with the California earthquake or what was being broadcast on the TV or any of the numberless other things I felt responsible for. But I wouldn’t have taken such bizarre notions as seriously as I did if it hadn’t been for the smaller-scale miracles that were undeniably real. My notions of what I was and was not capable of were blown to smithereens.
I had some help from my friends. In
folie à deux
a crazy person is able to convince another person of his bizarre notions. Why not
folie à cinq, six, sept, huit?
My smaller-scale miracles worked on those around me much the same way they worked on me. When I started acting like I could control the weather or raise the dead, they couldn’t rule it out.

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