The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Worth doing. I was into something worth doing.

  FAITH. If there had been less faith maybe I never would have gone nuts.

  “I believe in you. Yes, I believe in you.” A chorus sometimes comforting, sometimes cruel. It was nice to be believed in but it also meant that all the awful things I thought might be going on were going on. People were saying “yes” to my worst nightmares.

  “I believe in you. Yes, I believe in you.” Sometimes it was my father, sometimes it was Simon. Sometimes it was Virginia. Sometimes it was God, sometimes it was Jesus. Sometimes the whole world seemed to be singing to me in chorus, “I believe in you. Yes, I believe in you.” Sometimes people really said it.

  “I believe in you.”

  Well, that’s just fine, mighty nice, but what, just what is it about me you believe in? Is it that I’m some sort of messiah or simply that I shouldn’t be shot or simply that I’m still alive? That I’m very special or just one of the guys? That I can perform miracles, that I’ve got a direct line with God, that what I’m saying and doing is right, or simply that everything will come out right in the end? That I’m not acting this way just because my parents broke up or Virginia balled Vincent or I’ve sinned somehow and am being punished? That I’m a racist sexist fascist chauvinist pig? Or that even if I am it’s OK and you still like me? That I shouldn’t be committed to a nut house? I mean, believing in me is swell but could you be a little more specific?

  “We believe in you. Yes, we believe in you.”

  That’s real nice, but just what does this belief entail by way of implication for action? Are you going to just sit there believing in me or are you going to do anything about it? Does it just mean that you won’t sell me down the river or that you would sell your mother down the river for my sake? Would you sacrifice an arm or maybe just a little finger?

  “We believe in you. Yes, we believe in you.”

  I’m not sure believing in me is such a hot idea. I think maybe you ought to consider the possibility that anyone who really believes in me might end up having to go through what I’m going through.

  “We believe in you. Yes, we believe in you.”

  I think maybe you ought to look into the possibility that I’m being used as some sort of Judas goat. Something built me up as believable in and has now taken over my body. I’m not really in charge any more. I think maybe you ought to consider that maybe killing me would be the best thing.

  “We believe in you. Yes, we believe in you.”

  HOPE. If there hadn’t been so much hope I might never have gone nuts. If we hadn’t all believed and hoped that the world could be a much better place. That pain and suffering was unnecessary. That there really was a way.

  AND CHARITY. Maybe if everyone hadn’t been so polite, so reluctant to make any sort of judgment.

  MICKEY MOUSE. One thing I noticed about the lag between being trustable and being trusted is that the doctors are always the last to catch on. The first to realize you’ve gotten better and start to treat you accordingly are the other patients. The realization flows up the hierarchy rather than down. After the patients catch on, then the maintenance staff and the lower orderlies realize you’re OK, and so on through the various orders of nurses until the news reaches the doctors.

  It works the same for relapses. Doctors and nurses continue to treat a briefly recovered patient as well days after the other patients realize the poor joker’s completely out of his mind again.

  The doctors and nurses seem to realize some of this more or less consciously. They take their cues from other patients and the less professional staff. As soon as they see patients willing to talk to and treat another patient as improved, they check it out.

  Most of how you’re treated in Hollywood Hospital, and I suspect most others, is determined by how you are dressed. If you have on a suit and tie, there’s no such thing as a locked door. With nothing but a sheet, there’s no such thing as an open one. I started at ground zero. I didn’t even have a sheet. Moving up the ladder was painfully slow. Slippers are the first goodie after the sheet. If you continue to be good, you get the most ridiculous, ill-fitting pajamas you can imagine. If all goes well after that, you get better-looking pajamas and more mobility. Then come ridiculous pants, and so on and so on till you start getting some of your own clothing back, and then the big day when you get shoes. Shoes are the biggest day in the career of a patient.

  All this saves the staff a lot of time. They can just look at a patient and know they’re dealing with a “pajama, stage 3” and act accordingly.

  It’s possible to cheat, which I did every chance I got. You go to the bathroom ostensibly to wash your hands when someone a few levels above you is taking a shower and borrow his clothes—instant promotion. You get visitors to smuggle in a decent pair of pants—suddenly a whole new wing of the hospital opens up to you. Clothes alone don’t always do the trick. You’ve got to stand next to a locked door with just the right sort of aloof impatience and walk with just the right stride or a whole week’s progress can be wiped out in nothing flat.

  You play mommy-daddy games for all they’re worth: But Dr.… said…or Nurse…has been letting me…again with the right impatience, the right tone of voice.

  It seemed awfully Mickey Mouse. I complained a lot about it, but at the time I appreciated it as a nice change of pace, a game whose rules and objectives were transparent and trivial. Trying to get out of the mental hospital was a nice vacation from being a good hippie, battling the forces of darkness, trying to figure out if an apocalypse would be a good thing or a bad thing.

  I had blown my cool. I had done a lot of silly things, things that would have made sense if what I thought was going on had been right, but I had been wrong. The world wasn’t ending. There was plenty of oxygen to go around. Virginia hadn’t died. My father hadn’t died. Extraordinary measures weren’t called for. I’m OK.

  There was nothing to do at the hospital. As soon as I was OK, I was bored. I wrote some, played the broken-down piano in the day room, read some, talked to some of the patients and staff some, but mostly I just wanted to get out.

  What were they doing for me? Pills three times a day. No doctor saw fit to try to explain what had happened to me or what if anything I should do to avoid its happening again. A doctor named McNice and I had some very pleasant, urbane, sophisticated chats about Russian literature, religion, and a lot of other stuff. We sat around making sense out of all the apparently senseless things I had done. I knew that the things I had done made sense. It was nice that he didn’t just throw it all out as crazy. He had a certain respect for it, the sort of respect it deserved. I didn’t learn anything I didn’t know already but we had pleasant enough conversations.

  If you had broken your leg, would you be trying to “deal with it”? Forget about it. You were sick and now you’re well. Me thinking, talking to myself. At the hospital they gave me no such advice or any sort of advice at all. By intention or default I was left pretty much in a vacuum to figure things out on my own.

  “What happened?”

  “You’ve been a very sick boy. We don’t have all the answers.”

  Treating it like a broken leg was probably good advice. I tried to stick to it but it went very hard against my grain. I had had a long career and a lot of fun making mountains out of molehills, milking experiences for all they were worth. A life in prison out of eighteen hours, a marriage with lots of kids from a casual affair, genocide from stepping on an ant, and on and on. And here I had a real live mountain to try to turn into a molehill.

  No one else seemed inclined to treat it like a broken leg. Everyone had their own little theories, but there was a consensus of sorts. The consensus was that whatever else it might be, it was definitely “heavy.” It wasn’t like a broken leg. There’s nothing heavy about a broken leg.

  Heavy heavy heavy. It wasn’t just my comrades in arms, fellow hippie freaks. When the doctors told me they didn’t have all the answers, the nurses, the orderlies, fello
w patients, my parents, everyone, all their faces seemed to be saying, “Heavy, heavy.” If I had broken my leg, would the doctors have bothered to tell me they didn’t have all the answers?

  My father flew up from the “real” Hollywood, where they were making a movie of Slaughterhouse Five, and spent a day visiting and taking me out to lunch. He, like everyone else seemed to think the whole thing was very heavy. I was feeling OK and just wished everyone would just forget about it or treat it like a broken leg.

  Mark went bonkers. What does it mean?

  I just couldn’t get into thinking about it much. So much had happened, I had so much more raw material than anyone imagined, that I could spend the rest of my life sorting it out and just barely scratch the surface of “What does it mean?”

  Maybe I didn’t think much about it because of all the Thorazine they had pumped into me. Thorazine makes thinking pretty unprofitable proposition. Or maybe when enough people tell you you’re crazy you lose a certain amount of interest in trying to figure things out. Who wants to take a nut’s word for something even if that nut happens to be you? Another thing was that being in a nut house was small change compared with most of the things I had been convinced were happening. “Oh, I’ve been committed to an institution for the mentally disturbed. Well, if that’s all it is, why bother me with it? I was worried for a bit there that something bad had happened.”

  GETTING OUT. The first time was a funny combination of running away and being discharged.

  Dr. Dale, who was in charge of me, had to go to some conference in Hawaii. He was going to be gone only a week and left orders that I was not to be discharged until his return. In the meantime, Dr. McNice was in charge of me.

  I had been ready to leave as soon as I got there. I recognized that that might have been foolish. I had been in strange shape and a mental hospital was as good a place as any to put me. But that was then, a whole two and a half weeks ago. I was OK now. I didn’t want to spend an extra minute in that place.

  If I stayed in that hospital till Dale got back I’d go nuts again. Those stupid rules, those stupid nurses, stupid orderlies, that awful food, all those nuts wandering around doing crazy things. Also, there was no guarantee that I’d be let out as soon as Dale got back. All he had said was that we could talk about it then.

  How could I convince a man who drove Cadillacs, wore baby-blue alligator shoes, etc., that I was sane? Why should I have to?

  I recognized his brief absence as a golden opportunity that might not come again. Dr. McNice was a soft touch for mysticism and literature and had a bit of sympathy for hippiedom. A liberal. If there was one thing my life had taught me, it was how to manipulate liberals.

  I didn’t think I was being tricky or devious at the time. I was just trying to have the reasonable thing happen: my getting the fuck out of the nut house.

  After a few more urbane chats about medieval mystics, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jung, and the fallacies in Freud’s essays on religion, we decided my brain was in working order.

  “I feel fine. I have a place to go with good people who love me and want me back.”

  What liberal, especially after such a nice chat, could say no? According to Dr. McNice, I had my walking papers. The staff was split. The nurses seemed to run about two to one against my being dischargeable. The orderlies were two to one in favor. I packed up my things and did the best I could to avoid the controversy.

  Virginia was going to pick me up in the morning. Back to the farm, back to Zeke, back to where life made sense.

  I asked some nurses who were in charge of such things to fill me in about what the pills I had been taking were and if they would give me some to take along in case I started getting shaky again. I met with no real information, a firm “no” to taking any pills with me, and thinly veiled threats about cops. I split during the opposition’s coffee break. It was March 7. Three weeks of Hollywood was plenty.

  If disease was a cleansing process I was some clean. My ideals, hopes, friends, and life style had all come through it with me. We had been tried and had come forth as gold.

  We wasted no time. After a brief visit to Stevens Street, we were on a ferry an hour or so after my exit. Virginia had Simon’s car.

  If misunderstandings between Virge and me had had something to do with my going nuts, that was all going to end. I was going to be straight out with everyone about everything, but especially with Virge about sex.

  “Virge, our sex life has been a disaster from the word go. Part my fault but part yours too. You’re all screwed up about men. Every time I’ve tried to talk about sex, you get rigid as a board. Don’t you know you’re denying yourself and it sure isn’t doing me any favors?

  “And other stuff too. Ninety percent of your new-age liberation stuff is full of shit rhetoric masking a scared little girl. Probably half the things I think are all screwball, but that’s ’cause I had to figure them out all by myself with no outside feedback. Whatever else happens, I’m not going to keep any of this shit buried inside any more.”

  She didn’t seem terribly interested in responding to any of this. Maybe there was something that eclipsed this stuff and made it irrelevant.

  “Mark, you’re sane, you’re very sane,” was about all she could muster. She seemed afraid of me. I had never seen that before.

  There were several things that needed asserting. I was not crazy. I had not been permanently damaged. I was no god-damned invalid. Being dismissed, coddled, or humored was not my idea of a good time. I wanted to fight all the screwy conclusions people might want to draw from my going bonkers. Conclusions about me, the farm, Virge, my parents. Conclusions about the past, about the present, about the future. I’ve never been much of a conclusion fan anyway, and the ones people seemed most likely to draw were simplistic and insulting to boot.

  Energetic and tough as nails as I was, there were several things worrying me. One was what had gone on in all those blanks. I knew about the picture window, running around naked, and a few other antics, but had I seriously hurt anyone, possibly even killed them? Had I unforgivably insulted anyone? Those blanks could have been filled with anything.

  Was medical information being withheld from me for my own good? A brain tumor? Something incurable that was going to land me in the bin over and over again and again no matter what I or anyone else did or didn’t do?

  And what had happened to the rest of the world while I was away? Was there news about my family or friends or the world situation that I’d be told about as soon as they decided I could take it?

  Would everybody be afraid of me?

  And still in the back of my mind was the suspicion that, crazy as I had been, there were some very real and valuable things back there, and just what did that mean?

  It was a lovely day for a ferry ride. So nice to walk around without nurses and ass-busting orderlies everywhere.

  Simon and good old Car Car were waiting in the parking lot at the Works. The place had changed ownership, which upset me some. I wondered about the wonderful waitress I was sort of in love with. I wondered if she was unhappy about it, though I figured she’d do just fine wherever she was, whatever happened. The mill stacks were, per usual, spewing forth their poison puke. B.C.’s prime minister called it the smell of money. The world’s largest pulp mill, using three times as much water a day as New York City. What kind of neighbor was that for Eden? Just one more thing my going crazy hadn’t managed to put much of a dent in. Nixon was going to visit China. That was a step in the right direction, but there were just as many cars on the road as ever. My parents were tentatively getting back together, but I didn’t really know whether I wanted that or not. Bengalis were still starving. I don’t remember what the Dow Jones was doing. Virginia was treating me with a new respect, a new caring. Maybe something good would come out of all this.

  We went out to Prior Road. Virginia and Simon got into his car and I into mine. It was the way I wanted it. Being trusted to drive my car alone was a big step. They drove behi
nd me, which bugged me slightly. I wondered if they had planned it.

  Zeke was waiting for us at Prior Road, in exile from the farm because Tanga was in heat. He was suitably excited and thrilled to see me. Did Virge think I was faking it, working at appearing beautiful by loving my dog? Fuck you, Virge. If you can fuck Vincent, I can play with my dog. I’m jealous? I’m competitive? I’m brakes? I’m holding you back? This feeling ain’t just in my head. You yourself have admitted how sane I am. I said nothing but resolved not to bury it any more. If this was to be the new age of honesty, etc., I’d be fucked if I was going to play straight man to everybody else’s liberation any more. Especially Virginia’s.

  I was a little wary about Simon. What was in those blanks? I knew he had been with me through most of them. What did he think: Was he afraid of me? Disgusted with me? Could he trust me? What was our new relationship to be like? He seemed pretty free and easy and I was greatly relieved.

  We were each other’s complement, which was why we had made such a good team going backward in time. No points of friction. If I felt like stomping Vincent it was because he struck me so much as a parody of myself in questionable taste.

  Prior Road. What did they know? What did they think? It felt good to be back. Back to a wood stove, back on my turf. Back with my people. When Virginia and I took a little walk she told me she wasn’t comfortable there. She was worried that the folks there might consider her responsible for the hell I had been through.

  NICK FROM COLORADO. There was this guy Nick. Nick was from Colorado, which he announced like it was important somehow. The first time I looked at him I felt the hair on the back of my neck start to rise. This guy was trouble. He had blue eyes, which didn’t help, and long red hair like Columbus, who had fucked this continent in the first place. He was skinny as a rail and didn’t smoke cigarettes. I tried my best to treat him like everyone else, but the case against him kept building and building. He wasn’t like everyone else. For one thing, he was the one guy there who had just mysteriously showed up. Everyone else I had met before or was well known by someone I knew. They all had good credentials. But who the hell was this cat and what was he doing here?