Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [6]
Later, I could never get used to him dressing nicely and talking nicely and smoothly navigating social situations with people he had taught me to hate. I thought, and still think, he taught me to play chess partly to make sure I didn’t fit in with the locals my age.
When I was ten I told my mother I wanted to kill myself. I was failing at school and sports and fighting every day and had been studying poisons. My mother told me that bright young idealistic people like myself were going to save the world. It was a successful play for time. Before I killed myself I should at least join forces with all the other suicidal ten-year-olds and give saving the world a try. When the sixties came around and there didn’t seem to be any adult plans worth much, I thought my mother’s solution was coming to pass. Making the world a place worth saving was up to the outcasts. Who would have guessed in the fifties that there would be such a thing as hippies?
When I had three psychotic breaks in three months and I didn’t think getting better was possible, my childhood looked particularly dark and dismal. Now, not so bad.
I liked to take my fishing rod and my bike and go through the woods looking for hidden ponds, which I imagined had never been fished before except maybe by Indians a long time ago. Dense rings of brambles and underbrush protected the ponds and fish.
One bright sunny August afternoon I was cruising the dirt back roads that ran along the spine of the Cape and went straight instead of taking the usual left to Hathaway’s Pond. Twenty yards ahead I found myself at a dead end, facing a chain-link fence. At the top there was a two-foot-wide chain-link lip slanted back away from me at a forty-five-degree angle. I threw my bike over the fence. I expected Hathaway’s or some other pond to be more or less ahead of me.
Hathaway’s was one of the town’s bigger ponds and one of the few that had anything like a sandy beach. Toward the end of my childhood, the powers that be decided to poison the pond so that they could get rid of the pickerel and bass and horned pout and turtles and stock it with trout. I had bad dreams about grown-ups killing all the pickerel in Hathaway’s Pond—it was death on an unimaginable scale. It would have broken my heart to see the fish I had been trying to catch strewn around dead.
Why were trout better than pickerel and horned pout?
I stumbled up onto a divided four-lane highway. I couldn’t have been any more surprised if I had found China. It had to be over a hundred degrees up there, at least twenty degrees hotter than it had been on the sandy, pine-shaded dirt road. A maintenance crew was spraying thick, hot oil on the shoulder, probably to keep the weeds down. Turning left would have brought me to the Barnstable Road overpass and familiarity within a hundred yards or less, but I chose to go right. Maybe it was to go with the traffic instead of having to face it.
The oil was awful. I checked the chain-link fence every so often, hoping for a break. I tried to ride my bike, but it was all gummed up with oil. I had to push it. Maybe I should have left it there and come back for it. I was going through the spit-warm water in my canteen quickly. Vacationers streamed off the Cape past the quaint ten-year-old boy with a fishing rod bent over his bike pushing it through the oil and dirt in the hundred-plus-degree heat. No one in his right mind would have stopped to let this dirty little boy and his bike into their car. I existed without an explanation. I was out of water.
I pushed my gummed-up bike along the burning shoulder of a divided limited-access highway for 2.7 miles before I saw Howard Johnson’s and the Route 132 exit. The Howard Johnson’s was the only place we went out to eat as a family, and that had only happened once. It didn’t go