The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [78]
I suppose that, my mind being in the shape it was, I would have managed to get something strange out of whatever anyone said. I would have anagrammed almost any name into something perfectly wonderful or perfectly terrible. But Hollywood?
That one didn’t need much work. It didn’t call on my knowledge of medieval mysticism or Russian lit.
After chewing on that awhile and getting my words to work right again: “Hollywood where?”
“Fifth Avenue.”
I was too dazed to manage another question but the orderly volunteered some additional information. “New Westminster.”
“Tower of London, man for all season.” At last, a use for my liberal arts education.
If being in Hollywood on Fifth Avenue in New Westminster isn’t being caught in a time-space warp, what is?
“It all fits except where is Iowa City?” But the orderly was gone and the door was locked.
Well, so here I am in a mental hospital. It took a while for it to sink in. In a way, I knew it all along. Simon and my father had talked about it and I had been able to pick up on some of what they were saying. The nurses and orderlies, the little room, the needles in the ass, it all added up: mental hospital.
It took a while before I was able to pay much attention to the fact. I was all taken up with voices, visions and all. I vaguely knew I was in a mental hospital but it wasn’t any different from being anywhere else. Where I was was beside the point.
Little by little, with the help of massive doses of Thorazine in the ass and in my milkshakes (which was all they could get me to eat), little by little it started mattering to me where I was and what was going on.
For a while I was convinced that the whole thing I was going through was my father’s way to help me give up cigarettes. Here I was, thinking the end of the world or worse was happening and what was really going on was all about cigarettes. It was like the Trafalmadorians getting the earthlings to build the Great Wall of China to send a little message to a second-string messenger carrying a message that just said hello.
Some lesson. “Cigarettes, Dad?” “Cigarettes, Mark.” “Shit, Pa, who would have guessed?” “Well, it took you quite a while, Mark.” But then when I said I wouldn’t smoke any more and they still wouldn’t let me out of my little room, I got suspicious that cigarettes weren’t the whole story.
Little by little it sank in. It was all on the level. This was a real mental hospital with real doctors and nurses. It wasn’t some weird put-up job designed by my father or anyone else.
The only weird thing about this hospital was that I was a patient here. Everything else made sense. All the other patients fit nicely into my idea of what mental hospitals were about. They were all victims one way or another. They had been dealt lousy parents, lousy jobs, lousy marriages, lousy friends, lousy educations. They hadn’t had breaks. No one really loved them. I just picked up bits and pieces, but it all kept adding up the same. I’d see a husband or wife or mother come in to visit them and I’d wince in pain as the various pictures of what their lives had been came together. Their craziness, their being in a mental hospital, was so understandable. Good, brave people who had done the best they could until it was just all too much.
What was my excuse? What more could I have possibly asked from life? For them there was some hope. Call it therapy. A change of job, some understanding of themselves and the people around them: given half a break, these people could make it. Maybe if they got eighty acres back in the mountains or something.
Most of the patients were older. I was the only one there with long hair or a beard. Some discarded old people, a lot of middle-aged people who had gotten messed up with alcohol,