Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So (6 page)

Once, my parents went out to dinner and on the way home they went to King’s to pick up a mop and some lightbulbs. My father noticed that the music being played over the PA was a waltz. He asked my mother to dance, and they waltzed in the aisle. Before the song was over the music changed to a fox trot, which they handled no problem. The music changed again. Fast, slow, rumba, tango, whatever, my parents danced to everything that was thrown at them. After fifteen minutes of trying to stump the dancers, whoever was watching them through the shoplifting
surveillance system gave up and the PA went silent. My parents paid for the mop and the lightbulbs and came home. When they walked through the door they were laughing so hard they were crying.

I had a lot of hope, and in the end I was right, that good things would come out of having my cousins come live with us. Steve was just three months older than me, tall, blond, blue-eyed, and destined to become captain of the football, basketball, and baseball teams, as well as class president. So I learned how to do sports and say hi to people. It was Steve who discovered that I was so nearsighted as to be legally blind. I found out later that when he was pitching in Little League, Steve would go into the woods before games and throw up.

The cousins were a breath of fresh air. I was glad for the company. In my own way I became socialized enough to talk to girls on the phone and play middle linebacker and keep playing even when I had a broken wrist.

When I was eleven my mother sat down on the edge of my bed and explained to me the difference between
egoist
and
egotist
. I didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about. I resolved to remember it in case it turned out to be important.

There seemed to be a lot of winking going on when I was growing up. I assumed there must be some good reason why people couldn’t just come out and say things.

When I was sixteen I met Lonnie Crews, a serious kid who wore a black leather jacket and told me he thought he might die young and that once you died you couldn’t learn anymore. I started reading a lot and asking people about what and who
I should read. I didn’t want to be stuck with a junior high education. Things started sticking, and what I knew became something I could do something about.

Introverts almost never cause me trouble and are usually much better at what they do than extroverts. Extroverts are too busy slapping one another on the back, team building, and making fun of introverts to get much done. Extroverts are amazed and baffled by how much some introverts get done and assume that they, the extroverts, are somehow actually responsible.

I can pass for normal most of the time, but I understand perfectly why some of my autistic patients scream and flap their arms—it’s to frighten off extroverts. It was on purpose that I didn’t stick out, but I never thought I had a choice. Even when I had a full beard, hair halfway down my back, and was headed out to British Columbia to start a commune, I figured that anyone born and raised the way I was would be doing the same thing; I thought I was white bread.

When I didn’t eat or sleep for two weeks, lost twenty-five pounds, and came to in a nuthouse with labels like
schizophrenic
and
paranoid
being thrown around, that was the first thing in my life that seemed not white bread. The downside of not sticking out, not being a high-wire act, was that I didn’t have any excuses. The other thing was that I probably would never be loved.

After the orphans came, I tried to be as little trouble as possible. Breathing a little less air and taking up a little less space seemed like the least I could do. I moved into an attic space over the kitchen that you couldn’t stand up in and told myself and
everyone else that I liked it, another wolf den. I tried to breathe next to no air and leave next to no footprints.

A psychotic break is the exact opposite of not taking up much space and being as little trouble as possible.

“Mark’s in the hospital.”

It hurt my feelings that no one, during my first series of breaks, in the seventies, or the last one, in the eighties, ever asked, “What kind of hospital?”

I’ve found it helps a lot to get older. Now when honking cars start sounding like my name or other things happen that could be the voices warming up, I’m not thrilled or terrified. “I’ve got a lot going on,” I say. “You’ll have to wait your turn.”

If I wasn’t optimistic, who was?

(Vonnegut family photo)

I went through junior high, high school, prep school, and college like an unremarkable person. I tried to say things I remembered Steve saying in similar social situations to see if they would work for me. I did a little bit well at sports and then decided sports were unimportant.

I always had a job and I always worked hard. Whether it was mowing lawns or clearing brush or loading trucks, I liked to sweat and get into a rhythm where I could think. I wasn’t sure what thinking was good for, but I was resolved to pay attention to what went through my mind just in case. If I had a job, like pumping gas, where there were lulls in the work, I always had a book to read and argue with.

I took up painting and felt lucky and not particularly responsible when the paintings came out well. It wasn’t like I knew how I did it or thought I could do it again or that I thought
painting was important. I did well on standardized tests, but everyone knew how inauthentic they were. I loved playing music but didn’t think I was good enough or had the balls to become a full-bore musician. People said I wrote well. I liked learning about history and literature. I gave up math after nearly flunking calculus in college. I took learning seriously and was probably perfectly prepared for something. Sometimes I thought I was a genius. Sometimes I thought I was a coward and a phony. I got along pretty well with just about anybody. I was serious about being serious and wasn’t about to adopt just any old notion of what that might mean.

My hair got longer and longer. I grew a full beard right after high school and looked as much like Jesus Christ as possible. I was serious about being a hippie, and being a good hippie seemed like a job right up my alley and maybe something I could do better than Steve or Jim or Tiger or my father.

There were drugs involved but not nearly as much as movies about hippies would have you believe. It seemed like almost everyone smoked some pot, but it wasn’t an every-day or even every-week sort of thing. Even then, we knew there was something wrong with people who smoked pot every day. A great many hippies, myself included, managed to get through college without doing psychedelics. Cocaine and heroin didn’t become commonplace until the seventies and eighties. In general, we saw drugs as a possibly useful part of discovery and growth. We looked down on people who were just trying to get blasted.

I acquired a sophisticated appreciation for a few beers now and then, and an occasional bottle of bourbon. Somewhere in there I became a good cook and added knowledge of wine to the things to which I could introduce my friends.

At Swarthmore I majored in religion with the idea of going
to divinity school and then maybe the Unitarian ministry, where I would be a comforter of the sick and disadvantaged but mostly a really good professional arguer who argued against war and materialism.

Our parents and teachers were demoralized by the war and how imperfect America, the world’s last best hope, was turning out. After the Ohio National Guard loaded up with live ammunition and killed four students at Kent State, no one knew what to expect or where things were going. Mainstream jobs and careers seemed beside the point, and how long was corporate America going to last anyhow? I and a dozen or so friends at college came up with the idea of starting a commune in British Columbia. We thought about it and talked about it and bought books about it and talked some more, and it seemed more and more like the best thing—maybe the only thing—to do. Parents, professors, and psychiatrists we consulted all seemed to think it was a reasonable idea. They had nothing better to offer.

We were going to take a shot at making of this world a paradise or know the reason why such a thing couldn’t be done.

So in 1971, along with a bunch of similarly idealistic, longhaired hippies, I traveled across the continent and managed to buy eighty acres twelve miles back from the coast. We camped out while cutting down lumber and building a shelter. It wasn’t as hard as we thought it was going to be. We managed to keep ourselves warm, entertained, and well fed. There were lots of people doing similar things in similar places up and down the coast and back East. Whether or not Western civilization was about to collapse, it had to be good news that setting up independent alternative communities was doable. We were proving it was possible to achieve escape velocity.

We ground our own flour, ate tons of wild fruit, caught a two-pound trout every cast, and bought some goats from a woman named Cougar Nancy. I shot a few grouse with my .22 from back home. We were almost self-supporting. We had living expenses down to sixteen cents per person per day, and we had enough money left over after buying the place to keep going for at least another year. Then maybe we’d have to draw straws to see who had to work at the pulp-and-paper mill to support the rest of us. We’d take turns. Maybe we could gather and sell smoked trout and some of the abundant wild fruit and chanterelle mushrooms and fiddlehead ferns.

“Wild is better than organic—don’t trust food that needs people” was going to be our motto.

Building buildings, cutting firewood, hunting, gathering, cooking, cleaning up—there was no lack of things to do. We were setting up a beachhead for all our friends and family who were for the moment stuck back East or in the cities. We were ready for the storm.

Most of us were in close touch with our parents. It’s a myth that hippies on communes like ours were at war with their families. Parents would have had to be nuts to look at the world as it was then and tell their children to clean up, get a job, find a nice mate, have some children, and stop complaining. It was like we were mainstream, cover-of
-Newsweek
cultural warriors, and then all of a sudden we were dropped like a bad joke, silly dead-end hippies.