Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [15]
I swear I was trying to be cooperative, but it didn’t look that way from the outside.
In a month or so, with a lot of medication, I’m well enough to leave the hospital. So I do, but without any medication. Within two weeks I’m back to hearing voices and not eating or sleeping and being a bizarre frightened frightening soul whose friends take him to the hospital in Powell River. Lots of people there seem to wish me well, but they are all speaking in code. The Royal Canadian Mounties bundle me up and fly me back to Vancouver in a little Cessna and drive me in a police ambulance to Hollywood Hospital. I really didn’t know I was supposed to keep taking that medicine. No one made that clear to me. Really.
Hollywood Hospital? If I’m supposed to calm down and take this seriously and stop connecting dots like I’m on a quiz show, the least they could have done is not drag me off to some supposed hospital, supposedly named Hollywood.
——
At that time how a schizophrenic was going to do was thought to depend on how well he had done before—pre-morbid adjustment. When I was doing well it seemed like my childhood and parents hadn’t been so bad. If I took a turn for the worse, so did my past. Sometimes the commune and being a hippie worked in my favor but usually not. Somewhere in there they cut my hair and shaved off my beard to show me how much I looked like Hitler. A doctor later apologized for that and told me there would be no more forced haircuts or shaves.
I’m getting better again, taking medication, doing my very best to be a good patient, but then out of the blue, the chain-link fence that surrounds the hospital pulls me toward it, wraps around me, and is going to crush me. Everything is all twisting turning roller-coaster topsy-turvy, too much meaning, voices, too much to do when what I’m doing is my best to stand still. Maybe my childhood wasn’t so good. Maybe my parents did things wrong. Maybe I’m not going to get better.
Was it my fault I didn’t have a better pre-morbid adjustment?
At some point in there I try to tell my father that I’m feeling better, and he says that he wouldn’t nominate me as Mr. Mental Health quite yet. I want to ask him if he is in the running or just one of the judges.
Years later, Kurt was hospitalized for smoke inhalation after he was in a fire probably caused by falling asleep smoking. I went into the William Randolph Hearst Burn Center in New York and said, “Hi, Dad. It’s Mr. Mental Health. How’s the best-looking guy on the burn unit doing?”
There came a fateful day I needed cigarettes and walked a couple hundred yards down the hill from the hospital to buy tobacco and rolling papers from a convenience store. I think we had permission to leave the hospital grounds. I was with a heroin addict who was trying to be my friend and had earlier fought the orderlies twice on my behalf, once when I was being taken upstairs for shock treatment. I tried to tell him not to bother, that things were playing out the way they should.
I have money on account at the hospital canteen/snack bar. They have plenty of cigarettes, but they aren’t my cigarettes. Sportsman tobacco in a clear plastic jar is what I want, if they have it, and rolling papers. The hauntingly beautiful girl behind the counter looks so like an old girlfriend she might really be her. I’m fingering my money in my pocket and don’t see any Sportsman tobacco. I can’t be the first nut from the hospital up on the hill to wander into her shop. My friend the heroin addict looks like a mental patient for sure.
Was there a protective force field or special air at the hospital that I wasn’t yet ready to be without and maybe whoever gave us permission to walk down the hill didn’t know about it? I ask for Sportsman