There’s no whispering at my barbershop. Al couldn’t whisper on a bet. We’d had some conversations before, actually more like contests to see if we could remember the same things about old Red Sox teams and Elvis Presley.
We talk more now, and what broke the dam was my asking him if he deliberately leaves a lock of hair just to the right of my part that becomes unmanageable four or five weeks after a haircut so I know when I’m supposed to come back.
He was a little surprised.
“Not really. We don’t leave an indicator strip or anything like that,” he said after a pause, during which he just stood there with scissors and comb in his hand. I thought that that would be the end of it, but then he started talking. “This is really a Dorchester haircut I’m giving you, not a Hyde Park haircut at all. Your hair is thinning on top. Not bad. But it’s less noticeable if I leave a little more on the sides and shape it down. When you have a lot of hair it doesn’t really matter how you cut it.” He has a toupee.
We both agree that being in good health and looking good for guys in our sixties is better than the alternative, but that what we really want is to look good and be nineteen.
There was something wrong with me besides hearing voices and jumping through windows, besides schizophrenia or manic depression or schizoaffective disorder. What was wrong with me was that I couldn’t love or accept love.
Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
It seemed unfair that someone who worked as hard as I did to be right about so many things should be unloved. There were people who liked me or seemed to like me, but what if I wasn’t a doctor, hadn’t published a book, wasn’t Kurt Vonnegut’s son? The truth is, I was terrified and wouldn’t have trusted or accepted love if it came and sat in my lap—especially if it came and sat in my lap. I didn’t have the faintest idea who I was. Publishing a book, getting into medical school, and getting to be a pretty good doctor saved my life and kept me barely alive, but by the time I went crazy for the fourth and, I hope, last time, my soul was on life support.
I had a prayer that went, “God, whatever I am, let it be for good.” By my mid-thirties it had morphed into “God, what the f—— am I?”
Now I’m sixty-two. My first child is thirty-two. His son is walking and talking. If you don’t want to miss life, don’t blink. Somehow having my awesome willpower come up short against alcohol got rid of the three-inch-thick Plexiglas separating me from the rest of the world. I can now love and accept love.
I get to see people at their best. No one wants to be a lousy parent. I’ve seen hopeless narcissists become good parents and stop being narcissists. I didn’t think that was possible.
The best parents are poor people who have a little bit of money and rich people who have had a little bit of poverty.
By the time he is twelve years old the average child has heard about drugs, alcohol, and unsafe sex so often that the messages are blocked before reaching consciousness. He has also been told over and over that if he works hard and gets good grades things will go well for him, which is a lie. Drugs are a way to be dead but just for a little while.
I find I can sometimes break through the glaze of boredom by saying things like “If you’re having trouble making decisions, maybe you should smoke a lot of marijuana.” Or “The great thing about not having a drinking problem is that you can drink yourself into a blackout whenever you like.” Or “Safe sex is better than no sex at all.” These can lead to useful conversations.
All you have to know about the power of will and choice is that most drug addicts can’t stop, even when they want to.
Not infrequently, a boy will hand me a cup of pee that couldn’t have come from him because there are vaginal cells in it or signs of a period or a urinary tract infection. The first sign of something wrong is often that the temperature of the pee is closer to room temperature than to 98.6. Another clue is when the person being tested tells his parent that he’ll go wait for them in the car.
“Go get John. I have to talk to him,” I say.
The parent knows better than to ask why and retrieves the invariably bristling, sullen “What is up with this lame doctor?” patient.
“It’s not your pee,” I say.
“It’s not my pee?” Shock, outrage, and denial.
“It’s not your pee.” This can go on for a while.
“How can you tell?”
“It’s too cold. And it came from a girl. If your parents think you need a drug test and you can’t beat the test with someone else’s pee, you don’t have a gift for getting away with things.”
“Are you going to tell my parents?”
“No, you are. I’d rather not deal with your parents directly. The only reason for me to test your urine for drugs is to help you stay clean when you’ve decided that’s what you want. The fact that you’re fifteen years old trying to pass off someone else’s urine as your own means to me that marijuana is probably not your friend and might get in the way of whatever else it is you want your life to be about. Did you pay for this pee or was it from a friend?”
On the Internet you can buy fake pee to pass drug tests that comes in a realistic penis container so that when the test is strictly monitored, which means someone is in the bathroom with you and watches the pee go into the cup, you can squeeze the pee into a cup from the fake penis.
I don’t monitor my patients giving urine, mostly because my job is hard enough without hanging out in bathrooms with adolescents who are trying to pee. Partly I’m trying to give them a shred of privacy and dignity, and partly I’m curious as to whether, given the chance, they’ll try to give me someone else’s pee. Catching them at it, especially early in the process, especially when I’m not really trying, has led to conversations in which the patient actually ends up caring about whether or not he does drugs. Sometimes.
When the urine drug screens I send out are negative, sometimes it’s even because the patient involved isn’t doing drugs. Consider all the possibilities.
If I see someone and I don’t recognize him because all the softness and pinkness has melted out of his face, I assume he’s doing drugs. Addictive drugs take all your little problems, like having a difficult family or feeling insecure, and trade them in for one big problem, having to have drugs. Childhood isn’t fun for everyone. One of the attractive things about drugs is that they give children a way to stop being a child. Bye-bye pain and fear; hello addiction.
If there is a last judgment, if there’s an outside chance of a last judgment, do you want to be standing there with someone else’s pee?
Parents tend to think that a negative or positive drug test accomplishes more than it possibly can. If their child has clean urine, all is not necessarily well. If the test is positive, very few children, confronted with proof of drug usage, will stop. They can’t. I care about the results of the drug test, but the real goal is for the child to have a life that doesn’t involve being in my office, handing me a cup of urine that might not be his.
A positive drug test is an opportunity for collaboration. If we can’t come up with clean urine, we’re going to have to keep doing tests that cost money and take valuable time out of our day. The easiest way to come up with negative drug tests is to stop doing drugs, but it goes better if you let the child think of that on his own. Then not doing drugs is no longer a moral issue but a practical, cost-effective way to deal with the annoying problem of having illegal drugs in your urine.
“Hey, Jack, this is Dr. Vonnegut. I’ve got some good news and some bad news. There’s no more THC in your urine and that’s great, but now there are some cocaine metabolites in there.”
“I wonder how those got in there?”
“I don’t know, Jack, maybe you left the window open or something, but now we have to do another test. Cocaine is a whole different deal. Are you still talking to Frank? Going to those meetings? Do you want to come in and talk to me about it or just go over to the lab and pee?”
Most of life is a soggy mess,
but you can make the world a very different place. As hard as addiction is, it’s always possible to quit and change your perception of the world from one where you do drugs and just about nothing good is possible to one where you don’t do drugs and good things can happen.
Twenty-five years ago, when I had a patient with a drug problem it was a big deal. I called people and they returned my calls and my patients got treatment. Treatment doesn’t exist now, not because it wasn’t effective, but because it’s less expensive for insurers to let addicts and their families drift into poverty and join the ranks of the uninsured.
If not helping a fourteen-year-old addict won’t come back and bite us in the ass, what will?
“It’s not your pee. And if you weren’t doing drugs that woman over there who is crying and has been calling me on the phone so much, your mother, wouldn’t have brought you to my office to hand me someone else’s pee that you had to secretly cradle the whole car ride over.”
My generation should be given credit for proving beyond all shadow of a doubt that drugs are bad for you.
Dad, 2004
(Painting by Mark Vonnegut)
chapter 17
There’s Nothing Quite as Final as a Dead Father
We do, doodily do, doodily do, doodily do
what we must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must,
muddily do, muddily do, muddily do, muddily do,
until we bust, bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922–2007)
Kurt was more like an unpredictable younger brother who refused to grow up than a father. He was a wonderful writer and capable of great warmth and kindness, but he fiercely defended and exercised his right to be a pain in the ass on a regular basis.
My last gift to him was a complete bust. He was a famous Luddite who refused to use email or have anything to do with word processors till the very end. So when I came across a manual Olivetti typewriter on eBay that looked exactly like the one on which he had typed most of his novels, I thought he might want to hang it on the wall like a piece of art or the head of an animal he had hunted. I was not suggesting he return to writing. It was supposed to be for his eighty-fourth birthday. He wasn’t exactly easy to shop for.
When I opened the package, the typewriter was in horrible shape and had a script typeface, which I was sure Kurt would make fun of. I started searching harder and found that Olivetti made a modern manual typewriter. I ordered one and, because time was short, requested that it be shipped directly to his house, but then they put it on back order, and it wouldn’t be delivered till a month after his birthday. So I canceled the order, but somehow it didn’t die and a huge, heavy crate arrived at my father’s door two months after his birthday.
“It’s the size of a goddamned switch engine. I don’t want it. I’m done writing. What do I want with another GD typewriter?” he said. What kind of an idiot would send me a typewriter? was the barely unspoken message.
“I canceled the order a long time ago. Let me get Eli to come over and move the damn thing for you. The idea was to appreciate it as a machine and maybe put it on the wall. I had no idea it would be so big. It certainly wasn’t to make you write again. It was a lousy idea. I’m sorry,” I said. Cut your son a little slack.
Part of me wanted to have a real switch engine delivered to his door for comparison.
My twenty-five-year-old son and his wife and my wife and our four-year-old were in New York City in our hotel, thinking of easy places to take Kurt for dinner. When I called him and offered him some choices, he said he didn’t want to go out. So maybe we’d just come over and Eli and his wife and the rest of us could say hello before we went out. But it turned out that Kurt wanted to see me but nobody else. He was eighty-four so we cut him some slack, but the truth is we’d been cutting Kurt slack for forever. He’d been just as capable of being unreasonable and ungracious when he was fifty-four. So because I’m a saint and a martyr and didn’t know how else to be a good fifty-nine-year-old son, I hobbled crosstown on crutches since I couldn’t find a cab and the traffic was bad. He left the door open and came toward me but barely looked at me when I let myself in.
He’d been arguing with his wife, Jill, which was maybe why he was in such a lousy mood. She stayed in the kitchen and didn’t greet me.
He’d been thinking about the right-wing religious groups who were so into the Ten Commandments and wondered why they weren’t into the beatitudes.
I proposed that they were picking a fight and practicing being an angry mob. The reason the Democrats lost Florida in 2000 was that the Republicans had the better-drilled, better-armed, and more-prepared-to-fight mob. Most individual members of the mob, so eager to have plaques of the Ten Commandments in courthouses, couldn’t name more than three of them.
I liked, a little too much, that he thought I might be right. At the age of fifty-nine, hobbling across Manhattan on crutches for conditional approval from my father was okay with me.
His wife came into the living room and picked a fight about whether their adopted daughter, Lily, should be made to take her medicine. She appealed to my expertise as a pediatrician.
I asked what Lily, who was then already in her twenties, liked to do and whether or not she thought the medication might help her on her own terms. Jill said something else. Kurt said that if this discussion continued he would leave. Jill continued calling Kurt irresponsible. Kurt fled upstairs, holding his head and wearing the facial expression of someone in hell in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Jill complained about Kurt fleeing. Kurt came back downstairs and talked about how Bush should be impeached.
I counted it as a good visit and took a cab back to my family in Times Square.
There were a few more phone calls, but that was our last visit. He left me with the blessing of things to do for him, like being his medical proxy. It fell to me to be the one with him in his last days. I played music and told jokes I thought he’d like.
“If this doesn’t wake him up, he’s not waking up.”
He didn’t wake up. I was able to enforce some elements of decorum around his deathbed. His suffering was not dragged out. Without me acting as his proxy, no one wanted to be responsible for the death of an icon. He was not shipped to a futile neuro-rehab in New Jersey.
So I took care of my father like my father had cut through the crap and taken care of me thirty-six years earlier in British Columbia. I was glad to be able to repay the favor. He took responsibility for hospitalizing me, and I took responsibility for letting him go.
My father gave me the gifts of being able to pay attention to my inner narration no matter how tedious the damn thing could be at times and the knowledge that creating something, be it music or a painting or a poem or a short story, was a way out of wherever you were and a way to find out what the hell happens next and not have it be just the same old thing. It’s better to live in a world where you can write and paint and tell a few jokes than one where you can’t.
All the arts are ways to start a dialogue with yourself about what you’ve done, what you could have done differently, and whether or not you might try again. Whether or not you want to make a living or can make a living at it, people who consistently bother to try almost always get good or at least better.
Kurt was always trying to reach a little beyond what he was sure of. His refusal to find a groove and stay there when he was famous and successful was admirable, but it was also because he dreaded what life would be if he stopped being creative, honest, and willing to be awkward.
So one month short of my sixtieth birthday I became an orphan. I had lost my mother twenty years earlier. I was no longer on deck. There’s nothing quite as final as a dead father.
Right after the memorial service, my good friend Terry and I were in Times Square with our backs against a wall, watching the sea of humanity surge by. Terry asked why I was smiling.
“I’m just watching all these people who have made something out of nothing.”
&
nbsp; A day at the beach
(Photo by Barb Vonnegut)
chapter 18
Mushrooms
Since I always do what I always do, I must be doing it again.
I started hunting wild mushrooms when I was allowed to get up and move around after an operation to save my left eye, a consequence of the twenty-seven-inning August softball madness. My retina detached in protest of my being dehydrated and fifty-two and running around crashing into people. That was the year after I shattered two bones in my hand. It was like I couldn’t take a hint. A week after the operation I was allowed up and could walk around but was supposed to only look down. So I became a hunter of wild mushrooms.
When they were drawing up the medicines to keep me quiet for the operation, and I’d been twelve years without a drink or a drug, I knew the little syringe was fentanyl, a very pure, highly addictive narcotic.
“How much do you weigh?”
“Three hundred twenty-seven pounds.”
“You carry it well.”
I was surprised that I didn’t enjoy it more. It was sort of bright and giggly, but I felt like I was being made to stay inside and watch cartoons on a sunny day when I wanted to go out and play. It didn’t help being in a hospital and knowing they were poking and cutting my eye, and that I had just signed a piece of paper that said I knew I might go blind.
When I needed operations on my knees the orthopedist offered me the option of doing it under local anesthesia.
“You’re kidding, right?”
I was looking forward to being unconscious.
Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So Page 15
