Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [7]
Pushing my gummed-up bike was by far the hardest thing I had ever had to do. Swimming home across the pond worrying about snapping turtles after my boat sank moved into second place. I was relieved when I made it to the exit and the shoulder wasn’t oiled. I was able to ride the bike a bit, pop into the woods, and follow the path to the house of my only friend, Carl, where we cleaned most of the oil off the bike and myself with kerosene. Carl didn’t ask any questions, and I didn’t try to explain anything.
Twenty years later I would take care of two brothers at the Shriner Burn Institute who caught fire when they were washing tar off their bikes with kerosene somewhere in Texas. One of them had no hands or face left.
I rode my bike home, and it was like nothing had happened. Once I was oriented again it was hard to believe that I really hadn’t known where I was, and I would have been embarrassed to admit it.
When I was twelve years old Kurt took me with him to a science-fiction writers’ convention in New Milford, Pennsylvania, at a camp on the Delaware River. It was just the two of us. A mean-looking judge ran the motel and diner where we stayed.
“I’d hate to come up in front of him,” said Kurt, who’d gotten some virus and was throwing up bile on the side of the road. “Will you look at that? It just keeps coming. There’s nothing down there, and it keeps coming. Will you look at that?”
There was nowhere else to look.
There was a woman with scraggly, greasy, gray-black hair at the conference who said, “Get that kid out of here,” talking about me. I guess she had something important to say to her fellow science-fiction writers that she didn’t want a twelve-year-old to hear. I got up and went down to the Delaware River to fish.
I cast my red-and-white spoon lure out toward a twenty-five- to thirty-foot-long serpent, but it was much too far out. My twelve-pound test line would have just snapped anyway. I knew right away that I could never tell anybody about this and wondered if maybe Kurt and some of the other writers, maybe the one with the damp, scraggly hair, could have or would have set something like this up to see what a twelve-year-old boy would make of a twenty-five- to thirty-foot-long serpent swimming down the Delaware. I fixed them by saying nothing.
We also met a guy who owned a waterfall and made a living showing it to people.
When Kurt tried to sell Saabs, he usually did the test drive with the prospective customer in the passenger seat. I tried to tell him to not go around corners so fast, especially if the customers were middle-aged or older, but he thought it was the best way to explain front-wheel drive. Some of them were shaken and green. He didn’t sell a lot of cars.
“Maybe you should just let them drive,” I suggested.
When I was ten Kurt asked if he could borrow the three hundred dollars I had saved up from my paper route. Ten years later he went from being poor to being famous and rich in the blink of an eye. No one, except him, ever quite got used to it. He felt that rightful order was being restored.
I grew up thinking everything would be perfect if we just had a little more money. Instead the money just blew everything apart. Humans will money themselves to death the same way some dogs and fish will eat themselves to death. If the rich were truly so productive and useful, they wouldn’t have so many hired-gun talking heads with talking points, foundations, and institutes. Eventually most kings come to believe in the divine right of kings.
Once he was famous, people gathered around my father like hungry guppies around a piece of bread. There was never enough Kurt to go around.
Toward the end of his life he told me that