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Alcoholism and mental illness aren’t very different and I had both. When I believed that I was well because I worked hard and made good choices … when I believed I was well because I deserved it … I was living in a shoe box. My worries were my enemies, and my best tool was my ability to hold my breath. I was, in fact, a good doctor, and that seemed important, but the importance kept pleading for itself in a way it shouldn’t have had to do.

Amazingly, during or shortly after that last break, something broke through the thick plate-glass barrier between myself and the rest of the world. I didn’t have to stop and think anymore about what a good father or a good friend or good husband would do.

At the end of my drinking I had a baby-poop-brown underpowered Subaru that I picked out in the dark when my underpowered baby-poop-brown VW died. The three cars I’ve had since have been a sleek black Honda Prelude with four-wheel drive, a red pickup truck, and a red Mini Cooper S with racing stripes and the extra thirty-seven horsepower.

Sometimes when we’re stopped at lights, other drivers look at me, and I look back at them like “Who are you looking at?” before I realize it’s my car.

When I could hear music again I noticed Coltrane, Monk, Professor Longhair, Billy Strayhorn, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Aaron Copland, and some others like I had never heard them before. They too seemed to be trying to tell the truth to save their own lives, and I was intensely grateful.

Pelotas

(Photo by Mark Vonnegut)

*Ockham’s razor is useful when choosing between two theories that have the same predictions and the available data cannot distinguish between them. The razor directs us to go with the simplest of the theories. William of Ockham in the fourteenth century: “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate,” which translates as “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.”

chapter 11

Honduras

The real root of all evil is how hard it is to do good.

Two and a half years after my last psychotic break, my wife and I were on our fourth marriage counselor. I had moved most of my clothes to the basement and slept there. We didn’t talk about it. She said things were fine.

An emergency-room doc friend named Max mentioned that he was going on a medical/dental mission to Honduras. I asked if I could come along. I’d have to chip in eight hundred dollars for my travel expenses and go to three or four organizational meetings on the Cape.

Max was a tall, handsome extrovert whom I had known from MGH, but we became friends when we met again in AA meetings when I was first trying to get sober.

I know you, he seemed to yell as he lunged across the room. He was much too big and much too loud. I had kind of hoped that an anonymous program meant that nobody knew anybody. He asked me how I was doing, and I said I knew I was doing great because I had a ton of alcohol in the house and wasn’t even a little tempted to drink it. Max came home with me and poured my half bottles of this and half bottles of that down the sink so that if I slipped, it would have to be on vanilla extract or mouthwash or rubbing alcohol like everyone else. Thanks, Max.

At the organizational meetings, we were told over and over that the people of Honduras would be very grateful. Most of them would have never seen a doctor before. We would not be dealing with worried well people. There would be lots of previously undiagnosed disease and chances to make dramatic saves. Back home the patients were so thoroughly picked over there were more chances to mess up than to do good. Helping people was easier if they hadn’t already been seen by a million doctors. There would be no forms to fill out and no malpractice worries. We had more than three thousand slightly used tennis balls to hand out, donated by tennis clubs on the Cape.

Dentists could line people up and pull their rotten teeth and make them better without a single word being exchanged. Plastic-surgery teams could come down to Honduras and fix cleft lips by the dozen without necessarily getting to know