Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So (4 page)

Hathaway’s was one of the town’s bigger ponds and one of the few that had anything like a sandy beach. Toward the end of my childhood, the powers that be decided to poison the pond so that they could get rid of the pickerel and bass and horned pout and turtles and stock it with trout. I had bad dreams about grown-ups killing all the pickerel in Hathaway’s Pond—it was death on an unimaginable scale. It would have broken my heart to see the fish I had been trying to catch strewn around dead.

Why were trout better than pickerel and horned pout?

I stumbled up onto a divided four-lane highway. I couldn’t have been any more surprised if I had found China. It had to be over a hundred degrees up there, at least twenty degrees hotter than it had been on the sandy, pine-shaded dirt road. A maintenance crew was spraying thick, hot oil on the shoulder, probably to keep the weeds down. Turning left would have brought me to the Barnstable Road overpass and familiarity within a hundred yards or less, but I chose to go right. Maybe it was to go with the traffic instead of having to face it.

The oil was awful. I checked the chain-link fence every so often, hoping for a break. I tried to ride my bike, but it was all gummed up with oil. I had to push it. Maybe I should have left it there and come back for it. I was going through the spit-warm water in my canteen quickly. Vacationers streamed off the Cape
past the quaint ten-year-old boy with a fishing rod bent over his bike pushing it through the oil and dirt in the hundred-plus-degree heat. No one in his right mind would have stopped to let this dirty little boy and his bike into their car. I existed without an explanation. I was out of water.

I pushed my gummed-up bike along the burning shoulder of a divided limited-access highway for 2.7 miles before I saw Howard Johnson’s and the Route 132 exit. The Howard Johnson’s was the only place we went out to eat as a family, and that had only happened once. It didn’t go well. I ordered a 3-D burger, a two-patty triple-decker precursor to the Big Mac. I can’t remember exactly what went wrong, but I might have been stuttering or laughing or chewing gum when the waitress asked me what I wanted, or maybe it was something one of my sisters did. We left under a cloud. My father went stiff and red whenever there was a hint of public humiliation.

Pushing my gummed-up bike was by far the hardest thing I had ever had to do. Swimming home across the pond worrying about snapping turtles after my boat sank moved into second place. I was relieved when I made it to the exit and the shoulder wasn’t oiled. I was able to ride the bike a bit, pop into the woods, and follow the path to the house of my only friend, Carl, where we cleaned most of the oil off the bike and myself with kerosene. Carl didn’t ask any questions, and I didn’t try to explain anything.

Twenty years later I would take care of two brothers at the Shriner Burn Institute who caught fire when they were washing tar off their bikes with kerosene somewhere in Texas. One of them had no hands or face left.

I rode my bike home, and it was like nothing had happened.
Once I was oriented again it was hard to believe that I really hadn’t known where I was, and I would have been embarrassed to admit it.

When I was twelve years old Kurt took me with him to a science-fiction writers’ convention in New Milford, Pennsylvania, at a camp on the Delaware River. It was just the two of us. A mean-looking judge ran the motel and diner where we stayed.

“I’d hate to come up in front of him,” said Kurt, who’d gotten some virus and was throwing up bile on the side of the road. “Will you look at that? It just keeps coming. There’s nothing down there, and it keeps coming. Will you look at that?”

There was nowhere else to look.

There was a woman with scraggly, greasy, gray-black hair at the conference who said, “Get that kid out of here,” talking about me. I guess she had something important to say to her fellow science-fiction writers that she didn’t want a twelve-year-old to hear. I got up and went down to the Delaware River to fish.

I cast my red-and-white spoon lure out toward a twenty-five- to thirty-foot-long serpent, but it was much too far out. My twelve-pound test line would have just snapped anyway. I knew right away that I could never tell anybody about this and wondered if maybe Kurt and some of the other writers, maybe the one with the damp, scraggly hair, could have or would have set something like this up to see what a twelve-year-old boy would make of a twenty-five- to thirty-foot-long serpent swimming down the Delaware. I fixed them by saying nothing.

We also met a guy who owned a waterfall and made a living showing it to people.

When Kurt tried to sell Saabs, he usually did the test drive with the prospective customer in the passenger seat. I tried to tell him to not go around corners so fast, especially if the customers were middle-aged or older, but he thought it was the best way to explain front-wheel drive. Some of them were shaken and green. He didn’t sell a lot of cars.

“Maybe you should just let them drive,” I suggested.

When I was ten Kurt asked if he could borrow the three hundred dollars I had saved up from my paper route. Ten years later he went from being poor to being famous and rich in the blink of an eye. No one, except him, ever quite got used to it. He felt that rightful order was being restored.

I grew up thinking everything would be perfect if we just had a little more money. Instead the money just blew everything apart. Humans will money themselves to death the same way some dogs and fish will eat themselves to death. If the rich were truly so productive and useful, they wouldn’t have so many hired-gun talking heads with talking points, foundations, and institutes. Eventually most kings come to believe in the divine right of kings.

Once he was famous, people gathered around my father like hungry guppies around a piece of bread. There was never enough Kurt to go around.

Toward the end of his life he told me that he was glad he had been able to restore the family fortune. It surprised me that such
a thing mattered to him. It didn’t seem like an important enough goal for him to worry about. But he had grown up living in a nice house with a cook who taught him how to read, in a nice neighborhood with an architect father doing what he liked and being well paid for it. All that had ended abruptly with the Depression and his parents losing their savings to a stock scam.

The thing I’ve always loved about my troubled paternal grandmother—who I imagine as not yet troubled back then—was that when informed by her husband that they were broke she said, “Okay. Let’s spend the summer in Europe.”

And they did.

At some point in my childhood, my father gave us all code names. He was Boraseesee. My mother was Mullerstay. I was Kindo. If we were ever trapped or captured and wanted to let one another know that it was really us, we could use these names. It was a long shot, but when I was locked up, Kindo tried hard as hell to get word out to Boraseesee and Mullerstay.

We all want to believe that we’re in a sheltered workshop with grown-ups nearby.

When my father came to see me the first time I went crazy, I was sure it wasn’t him. My father was taller and thinner than the stand-in they sent, and he used a fake name to order a cab. I played along, figuring the trip to see me was too dangerous for Kurt to be able to make it. Crossing time zones wasn’t the half of it.

I was twenty-one when
Slaughterhouse-Five
was published. I mostly didn’t live at home anymore, so it was like watching
from afar when the money hit. My sisters grew up as the children of a famous writer. I did not.

The people who lived around us on the Cape had more money than we did. What my father saw as a brief period of wrongful relative poverty was my childhood, to which I was firmly attached and of which I was and remain intensely proud.

After the Coming of the Orphans.
I am on the far right.

(Vonnegut family photo)

Why would a couple in their early thirties with only two children and another on the way buy a sixteen-room house? Living in a house so much bigger than a family with three kids needed became a part of my mother’s religion. We had all the standard rooms plus a porch big enough to play Ping-Pong on, a study for my father, a study for my mother, seven bedrooms, and a secret stairway leading to a room we didn’t know what to call. There was a spacious attic with windows looking out over a pond and the marsh and a barn to fix up someday. It was a glorious magical house because my mother made it so, at least partly to force her nuttiness and the world to coexist.

The year before my aunt and uncle died my mother would get up at night and stockpile blankets and food in the attic. When my father asked her what she was doing she replied that the refugees were coming. She was getting messages from license plates and traffic lights.
The refugees are coming
.

My father and the local GP were on the verge of hospitalizing her when the demands of making a home for my orphaned cousins more or less snapped her out of it. Later, I asked my mother if she didn’t think the refugee stuff and getting messages from license plates and traffic lights was a little nutty, and she pointed out that it was around the time of the Hungarian uprising and there were lots of refugees. When the orphans/refugees came she decided that messages from license plates and blinking lights were more or less reliable.