The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [80]
I was back to being polite, the well-tempered paranoid. I didn’t have much choice. If I wasn’t polite, they could stick me with those needles or put me back in that little room or take away my visitor privileges or any number of other things. Besides, there didn’t seem to be any urgency or anything to be gained by not being polite, the way there had been before. So I was polite. There was time.
There was a fair amount to be polite about. There were silly rules about where I could and couldn’t be. I had exhibited some fairly alarming behavior, but still the lag between my being trustable and their trusting me was a bit long at times. It seemed to take them forever to believe that I was capable of keeping clothes on or not being combative or able to go anywhere without an orderly watching over me. At several points I was on the verge of saying, “Come on. That’s really not necessary any more.” But I never did, mostly because they always seemed to catch on sooner or later, but also because I didn’t particularly want to be reminded of what a problem I had been.
The big thing I was polite about was what a bunch of fascist no-goodnik stupid creeps they were. Spiritual mud puddles. Tight-asses. Their straightness made a laser beam look like an indecisive snake with a broken back. They utterly lacked poetry or even slight sympathy for anything vaguely poetic. Not so much as a glimmer of anything you could call curiosity about anything. Insight? Forget it. These were beyond a doubt the dullest, least inspired people I had ever run to.
Why on earth had my father and Simon signed me over to their care? What on earth did they think these people could do for me? How on earth could they have signed me over to a man who drove pink Cadillacs, whose clothes and taste and whole being virtually screamed fascist spiritual mud puddle?How could they have been so dull, so unimaginative? I felt more embarrassed for them than betrayed by them.
Doctors and mental hospitals were a mainstay of the corrupt establishment. Mental illness was just a tag used mainly for purposes of oppression. If the staffs of these places weren’t out-and-out evil themselves, they were at least pawns manipulated directly or indirectly by people who were. I had never given my unqualified endorsement to such statements, but they were very much a part of the air I had been breathing for the past few years. Many of my friends accepted such things as unquestionable fact. Just about everyone I knew would feel some sympathy for such views or maybe just guilt for not being able to go along with such noble sentiments.
They were and are noble sentiments. Their happening to be untrue doesn’t affect their nobility, only their usefulness. Maybe hopeful is a better word. It all got twisted into calling some people evil but that’s not how it started. It started as a hope that the pain suffered in mental hospitals was avoidable.
So there I was, subject to the whims of fascists. I didn’t find much to challenge the idea that these people were indeed a part of a no-goodnik oppressive machine of some sort. My only hope was to be polite. As soon as I wasn’t a patient any more, I could be as stupid as they were and get away with it. For the time being, however, I had to be supergood.
Dear Everybody: Well, fuckers, I did everything just like you wanted and now I’ve ended up in a padded cell. What do you say about that? I can’t think of anything I really regret, anything I’d do differently given another shot. The whole idea people are trying to ram into me from a million different angles is that since I’m crazy I must have made a mistake somewhere, but I can’t buy it. The idea is, as soon as