Our parents and teachers were demoralized by the war and how imperfect America, the world’s last best hope, was turning out. After the Ohio National Guard loaded up with live ammunition and killed four students at Kent State, no one knew what to expect or where things were going. Mainstream jobs and careers seemed beside the point, and how long was corporate America going to last anyhow? I and a dozen or so friends at college came up with the idea of starting a commune in British Columbia. We thought about it and talked about it and bought books about it and talked some more, and it seemed more and more like the best thing—maybe the only thing—to do. Parents, professors, and psychiatrists we consulted all seemed to think it was a reasonable idea. They had nothing better to offer.
We were going to take a shot at making of this world a paradise or know the reason why such a thing couldn’t be done.
So in 1971, along with a bunch of similarly idealistic, longhaired hippies, I traveled across the continent and managed to buy eighty acres twelve miles back from the coast. We camped out while cutting down lumber and building a shelter. It wasn’t as hard as we thought it was going to be. We managed to keep ourselves warm, entertained, and well fed. There were lots of people doing similar things in similar places up and down the coast and back East. Whether or not Western civilization was about to collapse, it had to be good news that setting up independent alternative communities was doable. We were proving it was possible to achieve escape velocity.
We ground our own flour, ate tons of wild fruit, caught a two-pound trout every cast, and bought some goats from a woman named Cougar Nancy. I shot a few grouse with my .22 from back home. We were almost self-supporting. We had living expenses down to sixteen cents per person per day, and we had enough money left over after buying the place to keep going for at least another year. Then maybe we’d have to draw straws to see who had to work at the pulp-and-paper mill to support the rest of us. We’d take turns. Maybe we could gather and sell smoked trout and some of the abundant wild fruit and chanterelle mushrooms and fiddlehead ferns.
“Wild is better than organic—don’t trust food that needs people” was going to be our motto.
Building buildings, cutting firewood, hunting, gathering, cooking, cleaning up—there was no lack of things to do. We were setting up a beachhead for all our friends and family who were for the moment stuck back East or in the cities. We were ready for the storm.
Most of us were in close touch with our parents. It’s a myth that hippies on communes like ours were at war with their families. Parents would have had to be nuts to look at the world as it was then and tell their children to clean up, get a job, find a nice mate, have some children, and stop complaining. It was like we were mainstream, cover-of-Newsweek cultural warriors, and then all of a sudden we were dropped like a bad joke, silly dead-end hippies.
There were Vietnam vets on communes in British Columbia. They were more than welcome. If there was any spitting on troops done, it was by hired provocateurs desperate to make sure that pacifism didn’t gain a foothold and cripple our ability to defend ourselves.
Celebrating the beauty and fullness of life, we had a house and food and a winter’s worth of firewood cut. Maybe all the things we had been told had to be the way they were didn’t really have to be that way. We, who had been the best and the brightest, the National Merit scholars, and the students of the week and captains of the teams … were setting up a way of being that could survive without poisoning everything. We believed that we had been given the chance to be heroic. It was like Mission: Impossible, where the tape self-destructs and the powers that be deny all knowledge of our mission and say we were just a bunch of silly hippies.
There was a wonderful feeling of having enough and being enough. Right before I stopped being able to eat or sleep and the voices started, I knew that I was enough. Where I was, what I did, who I was with, and what they did was all enough. It was true and simple, and I was about to get the living crap kicked out of me for figuring it out.
I could feel my thick Old Testament hair lift in a good wind. Life had its bumps, like my parents splitting up and an unfaithful girlfriend and most of the firewood I had cut and split getting rained on instead of drying out, but it didn’t seem like anything I couldn’t handle. I was like a Russian peasant who’s been beaten and left for dead in a ditch by the tsar’s henchmen after they burn the family hovel. I pulled myself to my knees and saw the beautiful green of the first leaves of spring, and then …
zap—snap—crackle—pop
Like 5 to 10 percent of humans, I go crazy. I’m twenty-three years old.
There are overwhelmingly rich, beautiful feelings of universal brotherhood. All of a sudden I can’t eat or sleep.… I’m hearing voices.…I’m not sure who I am or where I am.… Maybe I caused an earthquake.… Maybe my father killed himself.… Life is over.
Then it turns out that I’m in a psychiatric hospital, which is not good but is better than what I thought was happening.
When I was asked if I was hearing voices—“Is the radio or TV talking directly to you? Can others read your mind?”—it was a relief to finally be talking to someone who knew what was going on.
It was probably because my mind was just feeding me back material I had put into it, but it felt like I was able to survive psychosis and maybe save the world because I had read the novels I had read and knew what I knew.
“I’ll try Russian Literature for four hundred.”
“Early Christianity for the whole ball of wax.”
There were times when I was crazy when I was perfectly all right. I’d be locked in a windowless room with an observation hole in the door wrapped in a sheet and think, “Why can’t someone come talk to me now?” Whenever I was okay, I wanted to make the most of it, since I now knew what being not okay was.
It’s explained to me and my friends and family that I have schizophrenia, but I’m young and healthy and did well prior to getting sick, so there’s a chance I’ll get better. I’m treated with major drugs; electroconvulsive therapy, affectionately known as shock treatment; and massive doses of vitamins that don’t do much beyond underline the idea that what I have is a medical problem.
——
The commune we started in British Columbia was not a failure because I went crazy, and it didn’t last forever. Nature turned out to be more merciful and bountiful than it might have been. We were independent, we were mostly well, we were mostly happy. We did at least as well as most people in their early twenties.
Among the things I grew up thinking about mental illness was that it was caused by other people or society treating you badly. I also knew that once people were broken they didn’t usually get better and that the ones least likely to get better were paranoid schizophrenics, which is what I seemed to be. Paranoids are able to incorporate anything that happens into their worldview, which works against them.
I swear I was trying to be cooperative, but it didn’t look that way from the outside.
In a month or so, with a lot of medication, I’m well enough to leave the hospital. So I do, but without any medication. Within two weeks I’m back to hearing voices and not eating or sleeping and being a bizarre frightened frightening soul whose friends take him to the hospital in Powell River. Lots of people there seem to wish me well, but they are all speaking in code. The Royal Canadian Mounties bundle me up and fly me back to Vancouver in a little Cessna and drive me in a police ambulance to Hollywood Hospital. I really didn’t know I was supposed to keep taking that medicine. No one made that clear to me. Really.
Hollywood Hospital? If I’m supposed to calm down and take this seriously and stop connecting dots like I’m on a quiz show, the least they could have done is not drag me off to some supposed hospital, supposedly named Hollywood.
——
At that time how a schizophrenic was going to do was thought to depend on how well he had done before—pre-morbid adjustment. When I was doing well it seemed like my childhood and parents hadn’t been
so bad. If I took a turn for the worse, so did my past. Sometimes the commune and being a hippie worked in my favor but usually not. Somewhere in there they cut my hair and shaved off my beard to show me how much I looked like Hitler. A doctor later apologized for that and told me there would be no more forced haircuts or shaves.
I’m getting better again, taking medication, doing my very best to be a good patient, but then out of the blue, the chain-link fence that surrounds the hospital pulls me toward it, wraps around me, and is going to crush me. Everything is all twisting turning roller-coaster topsy-turvy, too much meaning, voices, too much to do when what I’m doing is my best to stand still. Maybe my childhood wasn’t so good. Maybe my parents did things wrong. Maybe I’m not going to get better.
Was it my fault I didn’t have a better pre-morbid adjustment?
At some point in there I try to tell my father that I’m feeling better, and he says that he wouldn’t nominate me as Mr. Mental Health quite yet. I want to ask him if he is in the running or just one of the judges.
Years later, Kurt was hospitalized for smoke inhalation after he was in a fire probably caused by falling asleep smoking. I went into the William Randolph Hearst Burn Center in New York and said, “Hi, Dad. It’s Mr. Mental Health. How’s the best-looking guy on the burn unit doing?”
There came a fateful day I needed cigarettes and walked a couple hundred yards down the hill from the hospital to buy tobacco and rolling papers from a convenience store. I think we had permission to leave the hospital grounds. I was with a heroin addict who was trying to be my friend and had earlier fought the orderlies twice on my behalf, once when I was being taken upstairs for shock treatment. I tried to tell him not to bother, that things were playing out the way they should.
I have money on account at the hospital canteen/snack bar. They have plenty of cigarettes, but they aren’t my cigarettes. Sportsman tobacco in a clear plastic jar is what I want, if they have it, and rolling papers. The hauntingly beautiful girl behind the counter looks so like an old girlfriend she might really be her. I’m fingering my money in my pocket and don’t see any Sportsman tobacco. I can’t be the first nut from the hospital up on the hill to wander into her shop. My friend the heroin addict looks like a mental patient for sure.
Was there a protective force field or special air at the hospital that I wasn’t yet ready to be without and maybe whoever gave us permission to walk down the hill didn’t know about it? I ask for Sportsman tobacco in a clear plastic jar and rolling papers, and the beautiful girl smiles and finds exactly what I’m looking for and I have the correct change.
Back out on the sidewalk, the hill back up to the hospital is steep, almost a cliff, and the six blocks looks like a million miles. There are crosswalks and traffic lights. The pack-hunting forces of evil have sunk a million micro grappling hooks and tiny arrows into the muscles of my legs and lower back. I’m following my addict friend, who seems to think this is just another routine walk. He moves his right foot. I move my right foot.
If I just give up and lie down on the sidewalk, which seems like the sensible thing to do, help of some sort will come. I’m never doing this again. The cigarettes in the canteen are fine.
Ever since then, whether I’m dissecting corpses or getting through long gory operations that aren’t going well or taking hours-long board-certification exams, I remember that hill and figure if I made it back up, I can do anything.
We got to the hospital and checked ourselves back in. It was like we were never gone. I had my tobacco and rolling papers and somehow a turning point had been reached and I was going to be okay. Had I freaked out in the store or just lain down on the sidewalk, maybe the world would have become one where I relapse and relapse and relapse and can’t get back to a world where I can learn and hold a job and be okay.
Hollywood Hospital was the last hospital treating alcoholics with LSD. The alcoholics had much better rooms than I did. They had curtains and rugs. I needed to hallucinate and talk to God a little less, and they were supposed to hallucinate and talk to God a little more. I needed a little more bondage of self. They needed a little less.
An alcoholic named Wally tells me I’m not in charge anymore. He says I did a good job and everyone is grateful. I can relax and take care of myself. I’m much relieved.
I talked with Lincoln and Twain and Dostoyevsky and played saxophone with Coltrane. Van Gogh wanted to paint some more and was glad my hands were willing and available. Maybe it was all in my head, but where else is there for anything to be? As the person who bargained God down from nuclear cataclysm to a relatively mild earthquake and stopped Kurt Vonnegut from killing himself, and got to meet all those guys, it was a hard thing to come back to earth and be just a regular mental patient.
Self-portrait, circa 1972
(Drawing by Mark Vonnegut)
———
When I left Hollywood Hospital, I looked like hell, weighed 127 pounds, walked with a shuffle because of the meds, and didn’t always react to things at just the right moment, but in there somewhere was a kid who had been tried by fire who didn’t worry anymore about being white bread or a coward.
One of the original author photos for
The Eden Express
(Photo by Peter Vandermark)
chapter 5
Retooling
There’s nothing more likely about a giraffe or a kangaroo or a warthog than a unicorn, but unicorns don’t exist and the others do.
When I came back to the Cape, a million years ago now in 1972, Carl, the guy who had helped me wash the tar and oil off my bike when I was ten, gave me a job watering lawns and carrying rocks for him. I was a slower-moving, much lighter, slightly haunted, sort of clean-shaven version of my former self. After they had shaved my beard at the hospital I grew it back, and then I shaved it off myself when I got back to the Cape. I felt naked. My fingers missed having something to play with.
“The beard made me look heavier,” I explained when people didn’t recognize me at first and did a double take. I was on Thorazine, from which I would be weaned a little at a time if I did well. There had been shock treatment. It was all a little vague. I worried about saying something wrong. Maybe if I relapsed, being crazy and all, I’d be the last to know. It was like I was in a logrolling contest suddenly finding myself in the cold water looking up at the lumberjacks on top of the logs wondering how they walked around like that.
Somewhere in there my father left my mother and the Cape for good and went to live in New York. It was somehow about writing. He said that taking on the orphans, his sister’s children, had cost him his wife and peace and had been hard on me and made it hard for him to write. It didn’t ring remotely true then or now. He was just a guy who couldn’t blend in and had to keep making up different stories about it.
In the ten years prior to the orphans he had published one novel and a bunch of short stories without coming close to making a living at it. The roughly ten years disrupted by orphans produced The Sirens of Titan; Mother Night; Cat’s Cradle; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; Welcome to the Monkey House; and Slaughterhouse-Five. Not so bad.
As soon as I got out of the hospital after my first series of breaks I started writing about what had happened to me. Writing is very hard mostly because until you try to write something down, it’s easy to fool yourself into believing you understand things. Writing is terrible for vanity and self-delusion. It wasn’t therapy as much as trying to tell a story that took me by surprise, plus there weren’t a lot of people beating down my door with alternative plans for what I should be doing.
I imagined neighbors saying, “I think he’s writing in there.”
“Whatever. As long as there’s no screaming or broken glass, he can do whatever he wants.”
In the middle of the illness I had promised to try to remember and tell the truth. One of the first pieces of mail I received after getting out of the hospital was from a magazine wanting to publish a story I didn’t remember writing, which I took as
a helpful, possibly divine hint about what the hell I might be good for.
I thought the fact that people could get well from serious mental illness was good news and worth writing about. It was good news that it was more about biochemistry and neurotransmitters. There should be no shame or blame. They were illnesses like other illnesses.
It crossed my mind that if I was able to tell the story well enough to get it published and it sold well, I might make some money and it might be the end of shame and blame and stigmatization. The medical model would reign supreme. Unequivocal diagnostic tests would be available shortly. Medications without side effects would come along a little later, and mental illness would become a thing of the past.
It was not impossible that an accurate understanding of mental illness would lead to world peace and universal prosperity. Without writers fooling themselves about what their books might accomplish there would be no books at all.
And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. —Ecclesiastes 12:12 (King James Version)
Once a week and then every two weeks and then once a month, I drove up to Boston to see my old friend Dr. Kirk. Before, I had been doing due diligence, checking out whether it was crazy to try to set up a commune in British Columbia. It seemed odd that a psychiatrist working at Harvard in the sixties and seventies had a crew cut and looked like a Marine. His appearance was a testament to my open-mindedness. My Harvard crew-cut psychiatrist had said that my plans to set up a commune in British Columbia were just fine and, in fact, probably what he himself would be doing if he was my age. Now I was seeing him for permission to take a little less Thorazine. Our relationship had range.
“How are you sleeping? Eating? Any voices? Ideas of reference?”
Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So Page 4
