Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [65]
Twenty-five years ago, when I had a patient with a drug problem it was a big deal. I called people and they returned my calls and my patients got treatment. Treatment doesn’t exist now, not because it wasn’t effective, but because it’s less expensive for insurers to let addicts and their families drift into poverty and join the ranks of the uninsured.
If not helping a fourteen-year-old addict won’t come back and bite us in the ass, what will?
“It’s not your pee. And if you weren’t doing drugs that woman over there who is crying and has been calling me on the phone so much, your mother, wouldn’t have brought you to my office to hand me someone else’s pee that you had to secretly cradle the whole car ride over.”
My generation should be given credit for proving beyond all shadow of a doubt that drugs are bad for you.
Dad, 2004
(Painting by Mark Vonnegut)
chapter 17
There’s Nothing Quite as Final as a Dead Father
We do, doodily do, doodily do, doodily do
what we must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must,
muddily do, muddily do, muddily do, muddily do,
until we bust, bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922–2007)
Kurt was more like an unpredictable younger brother who refused to grow up than a father. He was a wonderful writer and capable of great warmth and kindness, but he fiercely defended and exercised his right to be a pain in the ass on a regular basis.
My last gift to him was a complete bust. He was a famous Luddite who refused to use email or have anything to do with word processors till the very end. So when I came across a manual Olivetti typewriter on eBay that looked exactly like the one on which he had typed most of his novels, I thought he might want to hang it on the wall like a piece of art or the head of an animal he had hunted. I was not suggesting he return to writing. It was supposed to be for his eighty-fourth birthday. He wasn’t exactly easy to shop for.
When I opened the package, the typewriter was in horrible shape and had a script typeface, which I was sure Kurt would make fun of. I started searching harder and found that Olivetti made a modern manual typewriter. I ordered one and, because time was short, requested that it be shipped directly to his house, but then they put it on back order, and it wouldn’t be delivered till a month after his birthday. So I canceled the order, but somehow it didn’t die and a huge, heavy crate arrived at my father’s door two months after his birthday.
“It’s the size of a goddamned switch engine. I don’t want it. I’m done writing. What do I want with another GD typewriter?” he said. What kind of an idiot would send me a typewriter? was the barely unspoken message.
“I canceled the order a long time ago. Let me get Eli to come over and move the damn thing for you. The idea was to appreciate it as a machine and maybe put it on the wall. I had no idea it would be so big. It certainly wasn’t to make you write again. It was a lousy idea. I’m sorry,” I said. Cut your son a little slack.
Part of me wanted to have a real switch engine delivered to his door for comparison.
My twenty-five-year-old son and his wife and my wife and our four-year-old were in New York City in our hotel, thinking of easy places to take Kurt for dinner. When I called him and offered him some choices, he said he didn’t want to go out. So maybe we’d just come over and Eli and his wife and the rest of us could say hello before we went out. But it turned out that Kurt wanted to see me but nobody else. He was eighty-four so we cut him some slack, but the truth is we’d been cutting Kurt slack for forever. He’d been just as capable of being unreasonable and ungracious when he was fifty-four. So because I’m a saint and a martyr and didn’t know how else to be a good fifty-nine-year-old son, I hobbled crosstown on crutches since I couldn’t find a