Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [44]
But there was something about the intensity of the vision that alcohol was not my friend. I would have rather eaten putrid flesh off the bone than had another drink. Just because I could drink and be okay with it didn’t mean I had to drink.
The next Christmas I took a big bite of coffee cake that was loaded with bourbon and spit it out against the wall.
“Walnuts,” I said to the startled bystanders. “I can’t stand walnuts.”
At a certain blessed point you are able to just not drink without thinking about it all the time.
I wasn’t sleeping. There were times when I went several days with no sleep at all.
My mother was slowly relentlessly crushed from the inside and eaten up by her cancer. Together we wrecked two Christmases in a row.
“Uncle, uncle, uncle, damn it. Didn’t anyone hear me call uncle?”
I was acutely aware of a gritty stiffness twisted into every muscle of my body, as if I was on a spit being roasted over a slow fire. It came and went without there being anything I could do about it. I was painfully aware that I couldn’t drink, which is what anyone in his right mind would have done. God bless the moments when I felt all right.
After I’d been hanging out at home for a few months, a doctor who admired The Eden Express and ran a small psych hospital in Florida offered to pay an honorarium and for my whole family to fly down to Disney World if I would come talk to their staff and patients. I enjoyed being a professional and trying to give them their money’s worth. I didn’t tell them I had been crazy again and was just a few months out of the hospital.
I ate steamed blue crabs off of newspaper-covered picnic tables and liked that a lot. Maybe this was what Tigger does best.
Shortly after that, my partners let me come back part-time and then full-time. It was a huge relief to be doing something I knew how to do and could get paid for. Maybe in some sense I was and still am addicted to taking care of other people’s problems. Faced with sick children and worried parents again, I felt useful.
There was nothing to do for my mother except to be with her as much as possible while she was dying. When she looked around the Cape house, which she had treated more like a friend and co-conspirator, she was radiant and proud and whole. She had come from very little and created a great deal for many, many people. At the end, she toned down the “Aunt Jane” and acknowledged what my sisters and I had been through. She talked without rancor about Kurt and she said she was glad I didn’t drink anymore. Her initial response had been “Oh no, you’re not an alcoholic. You’re a nice boy.”
During the Bow Wow Boogie that year, three months clean and sober, in the ninth inning of the final game, I threw out a runner trying to go to third on a dribbler out in front of home to preserve the tie. Then I drove in the winning run with a single in the bottom of the ninth. It was no more or less likely than the Red Sox that same year going on their incredible run to get into the World Series and then blowing it with the soft grounder that went through Buckner’s legs. Baseball was something to count on in this crazy world.
With mental illness the trick is to not take your feelings so seriously; you’re zooming in and zooming away from things that go from being too important to being not important at all. So I was watching my thoughts in a detached way. I could zoom in or out to see how they looked without trying to change them. If I was lucky, I might find things that could be part of how I try to tell the truth.
The first truth is that none of the thoughts going by are worth drinking