Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So (29 page)

So one month short of my sixtieth birthday I became an orphan. I had lost my mother twenty years earlier. I was no longer on deck. There’s nothing quite as final as a dead father.

Right after the memorial service, my good friend Terry and I were in Times Square with our backs against a wall, watching the sea of humanity surge by. Terry asked why I was smiling.

“I’m just watching all these people who have made something out of nothing.”

A day at the beach

(Photo by Barb Vonnegut)

I started hunting wild mushrooms when I was allowed to get up and move around after an operation to save my left eye, a consequence of the twenty-seven-inning August softball madness. My retina detached in protest of my being dehydrated and fifty-two and running around crashing into people. That was the year after I shattered two bones in my hand. It was like I couldn’t take a hint. A week after the operation I was allowed up and could walk around but was supposed to only look down. So I became a hunter of wild mushrooms.

When they were drawing up the medicines to keep me quiet for the operation, and I’d been twelve years without a drink or a drug, I knew the little syringe was fentanyl, a very pure, highly addictive narcotic.

“How much do you weigh?”

“Three hundred twenty-seven pounds.”

“You carry it well.”

I was surprised that I didn’t enjoy it more. It was sort of bright and giggly, but I felt like I was being made to stay inside and watch cartoons on a sunny day when I wanted to go out and play. It didn’t help being in a hospital and knowing they were poking and cutting my eye, and that I had just signed a piece of paper that said I knew I might go blind.

When I needed operations on my knees the orthopedist offered me the option of doing it under local anesthesia.

“You’re kidding, right?”

I was looking forward to being unconscious.

There’s a moment right after you swallow the first bite of a new mushroom that you are 99+ percent sure is okay when the less-than-1 percent chance that it’s not looms large. There’s a halo of attention around eating a new mushroom that can last for days.

On a spring walk with my dog, Ella, I noticed a dozen or so black morel mushrooms under a tree in the yard of a house about a mile from ours. There was a car in the driveway and a light on. Before I knew what I was doing, I was gathering up the mushrooms and stuffing them into my pockets and the dog-poop bag I usually bring along. My dog was whining and looking around nervously. Like she doesn’t cause me plenty of embarrassment pooping wherever she likes, chasing after other dogs.

I could have come back at night. What if the people at home looked out and maybe even recognized me? Maybe I was even their pediatrician? Whether you know the people or not,
knocking on their door to ask if you can take mushrooms they probably didn’t know were there seems too strange. I grabbed the mushrooms and took off quickly but not so quickly as to attract attention. I found several more morels on my way home. They were delicious.

Once you’ve risked death or social embarrassment by eating something and it tastes good, it strongly rewards all the steps that went before so that time, place, shape, color, and weather all acquire richness and meaning.

I read the sentence over and over. I can’t figure out exactly where the error lies.

“I think I’m getting the hang of it,” said my wife, picking up another mushroom. This was prior to the
unfortunate incident
. I was gratified that she was taking an interest in my hobby. You can spend a lifetime not seeing mushrooms, but once you see them, you will always see them. It’s not something you can just stop. Seeing mushrooms takes place somewhere between the brain stem and the cortex. My head will snap around sometimes when I’m driving, and I’ll realize that I must have seen something that looked like a mushroom and I wonder which one.

Once you notice mushrooms, it’s hard to not want to do something about them, even if it’s only to know what their name is. But eventually knowing about them leads to eating them. I was surprised to read descriptions of the smell, texture, and taste of some of the most thoroughly unappealing, unappetizing, and even deadly poisonous mushrooms. There are some
very dedicated people, a good deal crazier than me, walking around the woods. If I was going to put my life and bodily organs at risk, it was only going to be for something that tasted really good.

The porcini or cep mushroom,
Boletus edulis
, is at or very near the top of everyone’s list. They can grow up to a foot across and weigh more than two pounds, and they are virtually impossible to confuse with any poisonous mushrooms. Prior to the
unfortunate incident
, I found, cooked, and ate many very good-tasting mushrooms, some of them rated almost as good as
Boletus edulis
, and I found a few that might have been the porcini. I couldn’t be sure because they were well past their prime and most of the way back to being dust.

Wild mushrooms spring up overnight and are fit for eating for a day or two, three at the most.

There’s a house in my neighborhood with surveillance cameras and warning signs and big black Lincolns that come and go. The house is set way back and the lawn is huge. What if there were porcini mushrooms growing on that lawn? Would I black my face and come back in the wee hours? Could I train my dog to fetch mushrooms? Were those cameras real? Did the people in the house have a sense of humor? Did they like mushrooms? If it was a Mafia guy, maybe he remembered porcini mushrooms from his childhood and I’d be in the position of having to be damn sure and cooking them just right, hoping against hope they weren’t the bitter boletes. Bitter boletes aren’t poisonous, but they look like porcini and taste horrible. The Mafia guy would be trying to spit this bitter taste out of his mouth. “Porcini, my ass.” And I’d be going for a ride somewhere.

Collecting mushrooms sounds so gentlemanly.

While they say there are no surefire ways to identify poisonous mushrooms, avoiding the ones that glow in the dark and smell like death seems like a safe practice. Yet there are mushrooms that smell like rotting fish that cook up nicely. The fact that some of the very poisonous amanitas taste good goes against much of what I hoped to be true about life. I imagine some poor, fatally poisoned SOB talking to fellow mushroom collectors on his deathbed. “At first I didn’t think it tasted like much, but then …”

Ever since taking me to have my stomach pumped, Barb has had a negative attitude toward my fascination with mushrooms. I’ve explained to her that the mushroom I ingested only rarely causes fatalities and then it is usually in older debilitated people with kidney or liver failure. Debilitated older people with kidney or liver failure have no business eating wild mushrooms unless they are utterly and completely sure of their identification.

In the interest of being helpful I tried to give a neighbor some information about some edible mushrooms growing in his yard. “Sautée them in butter and a little garlic salt,” I offered. He was polite enough but didn’t seem likely to take personal advantage of his good luck. Nor did he offer to let me pick them.

When you walk through the woods, how much of the living matter there is animal, including bugs and birds and all? Two to three percent. Plants, trees, bushes, moss, grass, and flowers—most of what you see and think of when you think of a walk in the woods—make up 15 to 20 percent, depending. The rest is all a very quiet, nearly invisible world of fungi. The mushrooms you see aren’t so much the tip of the iceberg as dewdrops on top of the ocean.

The mushroom growing out of my neighbor’s stump was the
Armillaria mellea
or honey mushroom, so called because of its honey color rather than a sweet honey taste.
Armillaria
is in many ways the most successful organism on the planet. While most mushrooms are recyclers that break down dead or dying plants and return the raw materials to the earth, the honey mushroom will take down perfectly healthy trees and sometimes an entire forest. Most of the organism consists of small black cords that travel miles and miles and miles. The mushrooms you see are the flower of a much much bigger organism. There’s a single
Armillaria
that covers most of Oregon and some of northern California. In Europe there’s an
Armillaria
that stretches from Tuscany to just outside of Barcelona.

I don’t want to make people worry and it seems on the face of it wrong to conceive of a mushroom as having intent, but it makes basic good sense to be careful about being too sure what a thousand-mile-long, three-billion-ton, contiguous, ten-thousand-year-old organism that eats forests and can cross mountains and rivers is and isn’t up to.

Mushrooms have six genders, one that is sort of male, two that are sort of female, and three that are something else.

Straight-out without a lot of qualifiers, I should admit that I am not a careful person. The fact that I have managed to achieve certain things doesn’t matter. That I am aware of my uncarefulness isn’t as helpful as you might think. My parents were told by the principal of West Barnstable Elementary School and my teacher that I was a bright boy whose spelling was in the retarded range and whose handwriting was the worst they’d ever seen. I find it embarrassing that I spell so badly. I will do almost anything to avoid being embarrassed, but no effort either on my
part or on the part of any teacher has ever dented my utter bafflement when it comes to choosing which letters to put down, how many, and in what order.

Somewhere in high school I came across Mark Twain’s statement that it shouldn’t be held against someone if they know more than one way to spell a word. Years later, at a conference on ADHD, a colleague said that Huck Finn had ADHD and would be treated today and have a better life. I said that the best that treatment could achieve would be to make him into a second-rate Becky Thatcher, and we should worry, at least a little, about that.

I had actually hoped that wild mushrooms might be helpful with my uncarefulness, that the stakes involved might have an alerting focusing effect.

First you have to be scanning for mushrooms as you walk along. If you’re not looking for anything, maybe you won’t see anything. If you look for mushrooms, maybe you’ll see other things, but at least you’re looking—I think that’s what I thought—and then you find something mushroom-like. And here’s where I thought the carefulness would come in: I would be picking and maybe eating something that would either taste incredibly good or would poison me.

I was so pleased with myself when I found what I thought were sweetbread mushrooms because they weren’t all chewed up by insects the way so many of the edibles were and because there were so many of them, which meant maybe I’d be able to make wild mushrooms for a big group.

When I was gnawing on this nondescript piece of crap that was supposed to be bread-like and delicate, it didn’t occur to me that I could have been wrong about the identity of the mushroom.
I was going to write the authors in question to tell them that the sweetbread mushroom had an indifferent taste and a disagreeable rubbery texture.

Fifteen minutes or so after eating the new mushroom, which I did not serve to my wife, thank God, my heart started racing, painful muscle spasms seized the back of my throat, and sweat started pouring off me. I remembered seeing a picture of a mushroom, one of the ones with a skull and crossbones under it, that was called the sweating mushroom. Funny name, I had thought.

“I think I might have made a mistake with the mushrooms,” I said softly.

“What’s that, dear?”

“I think I made a mistake with the mushrooms,” I said too loudly, an octave above where I usually speak. Had I been sure I had ingested a less-than-fatal dose, I would have just gone quietly to bed, turned out the lights, and hoped for the best.