Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [16]
Back out on the sidewalk, the hill back up to the hospital is steep, almost a cliff, and the six blocks looks like a million miles. There are crosswalks and traffic lights. The pack-hunting forces of evil have sunk a million micro grappling hooks and tiny arrows into the muscles of my legs and lower back. I’m following my addict friend, who seems to think this is just another routine walk. He moves his right foot. I move my right foot.
If I just give up and lie down on the sidewalk, which seems like the sensible thing to do, help of some sort will come. I’m never doing this again. The cigarettes in the canteen are fine.
Ever since then, whether I’m dissecting corpses or getting through long gory operations that aren’t going well or taking hours-long board-certification exams, I remember that hill and figure if I made it back up, I can do anything.
We got to the hospital and checked ourselves back in. It was like we were never gone. I had my tobacco and rolling papers and somehow a turning point had been reached and I was going to be okay. Had I freaked out in the store or just lain down on the sidewalk, maybe the world would have become one where I relapse and relapse and relapse and can’t get back to a world where I can learn and hold a job and be okay.
Hollywood Hospital was the last hospital treating alcoholics with LSD. The alcoholics had much better rooms than I did. They had curtains and rugs. I needed to hallucinate and talk to God a little less, and they were supposed to hallucinate and talk to God a little more. I needed a little more bondage of self. They needed a little less.
An alcoholic named Wally tells me I’m not in charge anymore. He says I did a good job and everyone is grateful. I can relax and take care of myself. I’m much relieved.
I talked with Lincoln and Twain and Dostoyevsky and played saxophone with Coltrane. Van Gogh wanted to paint some more and was glad my hands were willing and available. Maybe it was all in my head, but where else is there for anything to be? As the person who bargained God down from nuclear cataclysm to a relatively mild earthquake and stopped Kurt Vonnegut from killing himself, and got to meet all those guys, it was a hard thing to come back to earth and be just a regular mental patient.
Self-portrait, circa 1972
(Drawing by Mark Vonnegut)
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When I left Hollywood Hospital, I looked like hell, weighed 127 pounds, walked with a shuffle because of the meds, and didn’t always react to things at just the right moment, but in there somewhere was a kid who had been tried by fire who didn’t worry anymore about being white bread or a coward.
One of the original author photos for
The Eden Express
(Photo by Peter Vandermark)
chapter 5
Retooling
There’s nothing more likely about a giraffe or a kangaroo or a warthog than a unicorn, but unicorns don’t exist and the others do.
When I came back to the Cape, a million years ago now in 1972, Carl, the guy who had helped me wash the tar and oil off my bike when I was ten, gave me a job watering lawns and carrying rocks for him. I was a slower-moving, much lighter, slightly haunted, sort of clean-shaven version of my former self. After they had shaved my beard at the hospital I grew it back, and then I shaved it off myself when I got back to the Cape. I felt naked. My fingers missed having something to play with.
“The beard made me look heavier,” I explained when people didn’t recognize me at first and did a double take. I was on Thorazine, from which I would be weaned a little at a time if I did well. There had been shock treatment. It was all a little vague. I worried about saying something wrong. Maybe if I relapsed, being crazy and all, I’d be the last to know. It was like I was in a logrolling contest suddenly finding myself in the cold water looking up at the lumberjacks on top of the logs wondering how they walked around like that.
Somewhere in