The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity

by Kurt Vonnegut

  As usual, it seemed like the voices were trying to help, trying to give me some clue about what was going on. As usual, it didn’t help much. Who was and who wasn’t a bastard? What sort of things are gods and bastards going to do? When is now?

  “Now is the time for gods to stand up for bastards.” Hmmmm. Is this good news or bad news? Am I a bastard or am I one of the guys the bastards and gods are going to kick the shit out of? How do you tell? Even biologically it’s hard to be absolutely sure, and I doubt that that’s what’s the issue. It seems too petty for the gods to get caught up in.

  If bastard just means mean nasty people, I don’t see why the gods would feel the need to stand up for them. Mean nasty people seem to be doing just fine without any help. After a certain amount of time of the gods standing up for a bastard, wouldn’t he stop being a bastard and become more and more legitimate? And then wouldn’t the people the gods had not stood up for become bastards? Is a bastard’s legitimate issue a bastard or legitimate? A bastard’s bastard?

  Some sort of social upheaval? It’s only fair but it will probably be pretty violent and ugly. Bastards aren’t called bastards for nothing. But all in all I’m more or less inclined to go along with the idea. It’ll give everyone a chance to walk around in the other guy’s shoes.

  Philosophical sympathies for and against gods standing up for bastards aside for the moment, just where does this leave me? Inasmuch as I am a white middle-class American heterosexual male, I guess I’ll get my ass kicked in. Inasmuch as I’m a down-under hippie revolutionary, alienated from the reins of power and persecuted by cops, I imagine I’m eligible for some sort of aid under the gods-for-bastards program. I guess what it boils down to is whether or not I’ve shat on more people than have shat on me.

  If there’s going to be any fairness to this thing at all, it will have to be on a situational basis. Though I suppose bringing fairness into it will probably be considered whining and not very wise, as most notions of fairness and morality are used against bastards to support the status quo.

  My best bet is probably to rid myself of any notions of entitlement I might have hanging around. Just a little added incentive to carry out the sort of overhaul I’ve always had in mind. What I’ll really get my ass kicked in for is any notion that I’m Virginia’s legitimate lover. That makes Vincent eligible for support under this gods-for-bastards program. The same probably holds true for poor Ma in the Pops-and-new-woman situation. I should just forget Virginia and go bust up someone else’s thing.

  I was sorry I inherited money, but glad my bundle wasn’t a super-whopper. Sorry I owned a car, but glad it was just a VW.

  HOLLYWOOD HOSPITAL. WHAT’S IN A NAME? If you were terribly confused, desperately trying to get your bearings without the faintest idea of where you were or what was happening, if you finally got your mouth and tongue to work right and finally managed to ask “Where am I?” what would be the worst possible thing someone could tell you?

  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, a few junkies, plus a few other misfits. I worried some that my being so different from the others meant they didn’t really know how to deal with whatever my problem was. I had been put in the wrong bin. In a way it was the same for me, but the only way I could get to feel the sameness was by stretching definitions quite a bit. It felt lonely.

  Three days after my commitment, Virginia showed up at the Stevens Street place, all refreshed, full of adventures, new insights and hopes.

  “We’ve got some bad news, Virge. Mark’s in the hospital.”

  She didn’t think even for a minute that maybe I had had an accident. She knew immediately what kind of hospital I was in. My parents and lots of my friends showed a similar lack of surprise. It seems that they all felt I was crazy, but also felt that I had worked out such good ways of dealing with it that I had effectively turned a sow’s ear into a purse. They all hoped I’d be able to keep it up, but feared it just wasn’t possible. It also seems that these feelings depressed the hell out of everyone who cared about me because no one could think of any way to intervene.

  I found all this out later and it was very much news to me. I thought that everyone thought I was strong as an ox. I myself didn’t think I’d ever really crack, especially after finding the farm. But as it turned out the only one who was surprised about my going nuts was myself.

  “You’re
in a mental hospital, Mr. Vonnegut.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I’ve already beat the draft.”

  Simon and Virginia came to visit me every day, but they weren’t allowed to stay very long. I remember the first time I saw them coming down that long, long corridor and the doors were opening like magic and they seemed to be gliding on clouds more than walking. They were gods. All I had for clothes was a sheet draped around me as best I could. The three of us would sit holding hands, creating a conspiracy of warmth and sense against the cold senselessness all around us. They’d very patiently answer my questions. I wanted to know what the hell had happened and was everyone all right, and why couldn’t they take me home with them, and where was I really, and could I see Luke again, and how was Zeke, and and…

  It was all very fuzzy, a little more solid than my hallucinations but not much. Little by little it sank in that I had gone crazy, but especially during their early visits I was pretty sure that the mental hospital bit was just a cover for something much bigger. I felt very much like a hero. I was in pretty wretched shape but it wasn’t for nothing. Because of my efforts countless lives had been saved or ecological disaster averted or a new consciousness had come into the world or or…

  My father visited me two days after committing me, but they wouldn’t let me out of the seclusion room. I remember vaguely realizing he was there and trying to get to the door to talk with him through the little hole, but I kept fainting every time I tried to stand up. He pushed Bruno Bettelheim’s Children of the Dream through the hole.

  I spent seven days in that windowless everythingless room, and then they left the door unlocked some, let Simon and Virginia stay longer, gave me some pajamas, and moved me into an unlocked room in a locked ward.

  THE DOC. Virginia and Simon had told me that Dr. Dale was my doctor. I have a fuzzy recollection of walking up to some doctor-looking person and being totally absorbed by his gold tie clip. I suspected it was the button to end the world so I didn’t touch it. I’m pretty sure it was Dr. Dale. I don’t know who else could be so tasteless as to walk around a mental hospital wearing the button to end the world.

  The first meeting I really remember with the good doctor was when I was starting to be able to speak English again and making a brave attempt to regain some of my dignity. Trying to be very sane, I went up to him and asked if he was my doctor. He said he didn’t think so.

  “You’re Dr. Dale, aren’t you?”

  “Why, Mark, of course. I didn’t recognize you with clothes on.” He had a talent for saying the right thing.

  I often look on him as one of God’s little jokes on me. When I was in desperate trouble, what saved me from a fate worse than death? To what do I owe my life? Was it love, affection, understanding, friends, wisdom? No no no. It was a man who looks like a poor copy of Walt Disney, drives pink Cadillacs, wears baby-blue alligator shoes, and appears to have the emotional depth of a slightly retarded potato.

  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 I recognize my mistake and decide to do things differently, everything will be fine and I can get out of here. Well, shit if I can figure out where I went wrong.

  One thing that makes me suspicious is that everyone seems to have a different idea about what sort of mistake it was I made. Maharishi probably thinks my mistake was not doing my meditation faithfully. Lots of the nurses and orderlies seem to think my beard and my long hair were my real mistake. The other day they helped me out with that by holding me down and cutting it all off. I guess Freud would say I’ve repressed something. Some of my friends seem to think it’s that I wasn’t open and sharing enough. Others think I wasn’t eating the right kind of food. Lots of people are pretty sure it has something to do with drugs. One doctor here has it all figured out that I went crazy because I didn’t try to get a good job and make some sort of contribution to society. The whole reason I got into this mess is that I was throwing away my college education by trying to be a farmer out in the bush. The other morning someone came to the little hole in the door in my seclusion room and told me that if I could just accept Jesus Christ as my savior, everything would be fine. That Jew faggot, Jesus, I wonder where he thinks I blew it.

  Well, I’m sorry, people. I must be the most perverse bastard going but I can’t think of anything I did that I can see as my big mistake. I was trying my damnedest to do the best I could and I don’t feel like reneging on any part of it. Love and kisses, Mark.

  There wasn’t much to do in the hospital. Most of the time I just sat around and tried to figure out what had gone wrong. Oh, what rotten luck, a shitty break. There I was, going along
doing the best I could, and then this happened. Such an impertinence. It’s like I was walking through the woods and a tree fell on me and broke my leg. Well, so much for whatever I happened to be doing in the woods. Now I got to deal with the fact that my leg is broken. Unforeseen, unplanned, a detour.

  But it wasn’t like that. It had a whole other flavor. It fit in so well. My craziness had everything to do with what I was doing. When it happened, it was more like I was stumbling along a dark, deserted road trying to get somewhere and a huge mother limousine picked me up and took me where I was going at a hundred miles an hour, using short cuts I didn’t dream existed. In the end I decided I didn’t want to be there, but if it weren’t for the limousine I’d probably still be on that road, still trying to get there.

  Had farming been what I was doing, things might have been different. Had clearing land or building a house or getting a place set up for goats and chickens, carving a home out of the wilderness, getting gardens ready to plant, been what I was up to, things might have turned out differently.

  There was no way I could have been up to those things, much as I wished I were and tried to make myself be. Let’s face it, someone with a B.A. in religion from Swarthmore, raised upper-middle-class intellectual, living in British Columbia, twelve miles by boat from the nearest electric light, has got to be up to something weird.

  Clearing land, gardening, building the house was all just a front. I was into being good, being right. Truth, beauty, and saving the world, liberation, enlightenment, and salvation. I was playing for the highest stakes I could find. I had been given all the breaks anyone could ask for and more. Generations had spent their lives worrying about money so that I wouldn’t have to. I didn’t have to do anything. So the only way I could do anything was to do something very, very much worth doing.