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My father had been teaching creative writing at Harvard and had seen Dr. Kirk a few times, which is how I got to see him the first time around. My now impeccably dressed in Brooks Brothers clothing father, increasingly recognized and recognizable with his multi-book contract and growing bank account, told me in a letter that he enjoyed the Harvard experience because it gave him a chance to know people who were at home in the world.

Kurt the pained loner seemed to be gone, but was he really winking at me like it wasn’t for real as he went to fancy places with fancy people? Was he really a representative of loners and misfits? Where was I at home? Would I be called upon to rule a small but very nice planet in some faraway galaxy once my apprenticeship on Earth was done?

From the team owner’s box, where I sat with my father, I watched Pelé play soccer and score a goal with a bicycle kick over his head for the New York Cosmos. After the game I went to the locker room and got to see Pelé’s feet. They were the widest, most amazing feet I’ve ever seen. I tried not to stare. I almost went to a cocktail party given by a game-show host. Were my father and I playing out some hysterically funny joke we couldn’t talk about?

The landscaping went well. I got a job substitute teaching at Barnstable High. That went well. I wrote a short article that got published.

I started painting again. The paintings were much lighter, mostly landscapes. I found that I liked watercolors better than oils. People actually liked my watercolors enough to buy them. I loved painting but I never felt like I was talented the way my sisters and my father were. Art came easily to them. They were graceful. My paintings were more peaceful than theirs, but painting for me will always be like trying to get up out of a tar pit while I’m fighting off Africanized killer bees.

Someone, maybe me, asks me what I would have liked to have done if it hadn’t been for the sixties and all that and being mentally ill. I thought back to when I was nine or ten.

I should have been a doctor.

Part of getting better from being crazy included the realization that my life might be a lot longer than I had thought and that I probably wasn’t going to get out of anything by having the world end or Western civilization collapse.

It was too bad I was twenty-five, hadn’t taken the right courses, and had this mental health history. I had a mental health history, the way other people might have a suitcase.

I wondered how I’d do taking math and science courses again. It seemed like my brain was back and working well, maybe even better than it had been for a while. I thought I had stopped doing math and science because they were so German and responsible for so much death and destruction.

I should have been a doctor.

When I started taking premed classes at UMass Boston, I was thrilled to find that I could do math and science again.

My illness became a compass of sorts. I could ask myself whether something was leading me away from or closer to being crazy. There was less of the “six of this, half dozen of that” that had made up so much of life.

Marijuana seemed to have been working hand in glove with the damn illness and trying to do me in, so I stopped that without regret or difficulty. Part of what saved my life was my strong reluctance to part with money. I tried cocaine once and liked how chatty it made me, but I wasn’t about to part with hundreds of dollars just to be chatty.

If you take good care of any disease by eating well, sleeping well, being aware of your health, consciously wanting to be well, not smoking, et cetera, you are doing all the same things you should be doing anyway, but somehow having a disease makes them easier to do. A human without a disease is like a ship without a rudder.

I cleaned up my diet, avoided sugar and caffeine, got regular exercise, and took medication as prescribed and vitamin B12 shots once a month. Being normal with a vengeance was a big step up from being mentally ill, but it wasn’t without its problems.