The Eden Express (22 page)
Authors: Mark Vonnegut
A clinical psychologist’s view of the situation might be that before Warren got into the act I was not actively suicidal or combative. Afterward I was. My paranoia, previously vague and intermittent, almost playful, became full-time focused and anything but playful.
Paranoia was the best way to deal with my situation, the most hopeful way to make any sense of the things that were happening to me. If there was no sense to what was happening, no intention, malignant or benign, then there was no hope. Would you rather be chased by a pack of wild dogs that were hungry or a pack of dogs that had a master who could, if he wanted to, call them off?
Warren himself was hauled off to the nut house a few weeks after I was. As I found out later, it wasn’t his first such trip. An interesting footnote to the whole thing is that he was picked up by the cops from the lawn in front of the Stevens Street apartment. The diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenic. A couple of weeks after that, a freak wandered in off the street claiming that God had led him there. He wrote poetry all over the wall and had busted out of a nut house somewhere in Ontario. I don’t know what it was about the Stevens Street apartment, but the odds of such a chain of events says something.
SUICIDE. The twenty-four-hour watch system broke down from time to time. I remember coming out of a long blank during which I had made love to every living thing, ingested gallons of every poison known to man, and called the devil’s bluff in a game a lot like seven-card stud in an end-of-the-world bacchanal. I was still moving but Simon and everyone else was out cold. I had relived the history of man and it was mostly ugly, brutal, and macho. My dead grandfather was
congratulating me on winning. I was the toughest bastard who had ever lived and my forefathers were very proud of me.
congratulating me on winning. I was the toughest bastard who had ever lived and my forefathers were very proud of me.
I got up and went into the bathroom. The mirror in there was the best way to broadcast back to planet earth.
“First I’d like to thank all the billions of people, animals, and plants who made this possible.”
Looking in the mirror I could see that my body had become a composite of all bodies. Half my face was Asian, an arm and a leg were black. But it was more subtle than that. Everything that had ever lived had contributed their best cell to make what I now called me.
I tried to open the bathroom door but it wouldn’t budge, and I finally understood what I had to do. My life had been spiraling toward this place and moment, pulled closer and closer to the vortex, and now I was there. I cheerfully drew myself a nice hot tub, found the razor blades they hadn’t hidden very well and a gallon jug of Clorox. I wasn’t unhappy or bitter, I was humming tunes from “My Fair Lady.” I thought it would be lots of fun to see if I really could kill myself, but Simon interrupted my little party before I could decide whether it would be better to slash my wrists and then drink the Clorox or vice versa.
At other times suicidal longings came from desperate unhappiness, but everything was so confused I couldn’t do a decent job of it. I’d become convinced that something like sitting in a certain chair, looking crosseyed at a psychedelic poster while I chanted Om and clicked my heels together, would do the trick. It became very hard for me to tell when I was committing suicide and when I wasn’t.
I had thought a fair amount about suicide before I went nuts. It was often in connection with thinking about what sort of positive move I could make toward solving the problems of the world. The only way out of the mess the world was in that I could see was to have fewer people. Maybe killing myself and thereby making one less
mouth to feed, one less body to clothe, one less excuse for the
New York Times
to kill trees, would do more good than anything else.
mouth to feed, one less body to clothe, one less excuse for the
New York Times
to kill trees, would do more good than anything else.
I believe now that if I placed a twelve-gauge shotgun in my mouth and pulled the trigger, I would cease to have consciousness. I find it a comforting belief. Much of the terror of then was that I had done that or the equivalent and it hadn’t worked.
Before the crackup, suicidal impulses had been prodded by my mortality: Since some day, why not now? But suicide now sprang from desperate fear of immortality. I kept dying and maintaining some form of consciousness.
Down from one fifty-five to about one twenty-five pounds, deaf, dumb, and blind, convulsing in my own puke, shit, and piss. If something wanted me to suffer, how much more could they want? If there was a finite amount of suffering in the world, I was sparing someone somewhere something. I was a first-rate safety valve.
I don’t pretend to know any more than anyone else about what happens after death, but if there is such a thing as hell and it’s anything like some of the things I went through when I was nuts, and you can avoid it by doing things as pretty as not coveting your neighbor’s ass, by all means, DO NOT COVET YOUR NEIGHBOR’S ASS.
At some point I gave up clothing. It was just too sticky and confining, almost like drowning. No clothes would have maybe been OK if I hadn’t taken it into my head to make a break for it. André and Simon tackled me before I got very far, but a neighbor saw me and told them if he saw me anywhere near his kids, he’d shoot me. Other neighbors were going to call the cops about all the noise I was making, but the Sunshine Boys always managed to calm them down. Somewhere in there I threw a huge rock through the living-room picture window.
Gradually it became clear even to Simon that they might have to put me in a hospital, if only to save their own sanity.
TEA PARTY. Twelve days without food or sleep, twelve very active days, hadn’t done wonders for my physique. Even when my eyes were seeing fairly straight, I had a hard time recognizing myself in the mirror. I looked a lot like pictures of refugees from Hitler’s concentration camps. I wasn’t as alarmed by the weight loss as amazed and curious. But there were so many amazing curious things happening that I didn’t spend much time on it.
My friends were alarmed. Mental illness being a myth and schiz a sane response to an insane world was all well and good, but this kid’s about to starve to death.
As we found out later, death by starvation wasn’t a far-fetched possibility. According to doctors at the hospital, another week or two would have done the trick. In the good old pretranquilizer days a fair number of schizies went that way. A few still do. Your brain, only about 2 percent of your body weight, consumes 20 percent of your energy. No one’s brain is moving like a schizophrenic’s, not to mention the calories burned running amuck. Stop eating, make it a twenty-four-hour, no-time-out day, and you’ve got one hell of a quick weight-loss program.
How to get some food into Mark? Their opening ploys were simple enough. Cook food for everyone, give me a plate too, and make like it was a normal meal. The funny thing was how uninterested they were in their own food. All I had to do was shift my weight slightly or lean forward, all eyes would rivet on me and my plate. I teased them some. Pick up the fork, get a little rice on it, start bringing it toward my mouth (you could have heard a pin drop), drop the fork back on my plate, and roll on the floor laughing. It was just too damn funny. Besides, I knew full well that thousands of Bengalis bit the dust for every bite I took. Besides, there wasn’t much point in eating when I wasn’t really hungry.
Having everyone so eager to have me eat might have very logically led to thoughts of poison, but it didn’t. Even though it smelled a little strange, I knew it was real food. To have eaten it would have proved I was just another jerk raving his brains out, that the world was unsavable, that humanity had no class. Explaining how would take a lot more space than it’s worth. Take my word, it was crystal clear.
Later, when I did feel sure they were poisoning me, I hummed down my tea without a second thought. Refusing the poison would have been exactly like accepting the food.
Since the communal dinners were such a flop, they tried a few more things and eventually arrived at the tea party. The tea parties were anything but casual. They were ceremonial rituals. Everyone had his assigned place. The furniture was arranged just so. Seven yellow candles, no electric lights. I sat dead center on the big couch in my sheet, which was the most they had been able to get me to go along with by way of clothing for some time, Simon on my right, Sankara on my left. Sy and André had the seats on either side of the couch. The tea consisted of one huge mug placed in front of me. After a bit of ceremonial rambling I’d gulp down the tea and spit back the last swallow, which was then passed around and theoretically drunk by the others.
That the tea tasted a bit strange wasn’t wholly attributable to my disordered perceptions. It was loaded with vitamins, protein concentrate, brewer’s yeast, and anything else they could think of. My sense of taste was as badly screwed up as all my other senses, which had a lot to do with my giving up food in the first place and is also why so many schizies think they’re being poisoned. I don’t care how much you trust the people around you, you trust your own senses more. It sure don’t taste like tomato juice.
I was very grateful that they were poisoning me. As usual, I was looking at things in more than one way, but I couldn’t see anything but good coming from it. First, I had reached the point where whenever
I could think straight enough to want anything, I wanted to die. They were putting me out of my misery.
I could think straight enough to want anything, I wanted to die. They were putting me out of my misery.
Second (a bit more complicated), at each tea party they concocted a new and yet more deadly poison. Each segment of humanity mixed up what to them was “poison” and flew it into Vancouver. If I drank it and survived they’d come over to our side, they’d believe that pain and fear were unnecessary, that nothing was poisonous. Some of the poisons were of the pedestrian sort, like cyanide and arsenic, but more often I was drinking distilled hatred and guilt, racism, greed, and the like. My body might be useless in terms of the things I wanted to do with it, but it had been transformed into a filter through which all the poisons of the Earth could pass and come out sweet and pure as spring water.
This of course was all beside the point to my friends. They were just grateful to have stumbled on a way to get some nutrients into a starving friend.
FATHER. “Good night, sweet prince, whoever you were or thought you were. Please let me go, Mark.” Dad.
Of all the awful news I was dealing with, Virge’s death in the earthquake, impending nuclear holocaust, my father’s suicide hit me hardest. None of my friends came right out and told me. Things hadn’t exactly been going my way and it looked like I’d pretty much had my quota of news. But I knew.
From as early as I was old enough to worry about such things I had worried about his either drinking himself to death or blowing his brains out. He had hinted at it fairly broadly from time to time. Sometimes I thought the only thing holding him back was fear of how it would affect me. “Sons of suicides find life lacking…”—Rosewater.
Being still able to talk with him took some of the sting away. He actually seemed pretty cheerful. Maybe he had somehow driven me
nuts just so he could say good-by and explain a lot of things he hadn’t been able to before.
nuts just so he could say good-by and explain a lot of things he hadn’t been able to before.
“I’m sorry about this, Mark, but think how hard it would be for me to resist this sort of thing. I just wanted to dance with you once before I left.”
How can it be true
That I’m talking to you
In a way so like never before
It’s a trick
It’s a snap
Someone saw through the crap
We’re in a whole nother ball game
I’m calling on you
With a Jewish Hindu
I forgot to use the phone
There’s nothing to do
The shit’s hit the fan
Would you rather waltz or cancan?
I don’t understand
How I’m holding your hand
But it sure beats being alone
I cheated I lied
Found what’s inside
I broke all the rules
Used illegal tools
It should have been done long before
I was always convinced
That my words should be minced
But now it seems things have changed
The thought that it matters
Gives my heart patters
Who’s trying to tell me it’s so?
That there’s something to gain?
From this ass-busting pain
Is a thought I’d rather not think
That the world could be saved
By the terrors I’ve braved
Is worse than the terrors I’ve braved
I finally said fuck it
I don’t want to buck it
I’m tired of being alone
That I’m talking to you
In a way so like never before
It’s a trick
It’s a snap
Someone saw through the crap
We’re in a whole nother ball game
I’m calling on you
With a Jewish Hindu
I forgot to use the phone
There’s nothing to do
The shit’s hit the fan
Would you rather waltz or cancan?
I don’t understand
How I’m holding your hand
But it sure beats being alone
I cheated I lied
Found what’s inside
I broke all the rules
Used illegal tools
It should have been done long before
I was always convinced
That my words should be minced
But now it seems things have changed
The thought that it matters
Gives my heart patters
Who’s trying to tell me it’s so?
That there’s something to gain?
From this ass-busting pain
Is a thought I’d rather not think
That the world could be saved
By the terrors I’ve braved
Is worse than the terrors I’ve braved
I finally said fuck it
I don’t want to buck it
I’m tired of being alone
We had some more substantive talks, mostly about World War II for some reason, but most of it was dancing and giggling. It was lots of fun.
Even then, a few days away from death by starvation, having zilch earthly control and quite a bit of earthly pain, lots of very nice things were happening. I could hallucinate my saxophone and any side men I wanted. Coltrane, Philly Joe, Cannonball, Paul Chambers, Bill Evans, and I whiled away many an hour with the most nectar-sweet, hard-ass-funky music ever. I did some solo stuff so beautiful I couldn’t stop crying. Monk and I funked out some lovely duets. Dylan dropped in one day, Mose Allison the next. With them I just lay back and listened.
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