The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity

by Kurt Vonnegut

  GETTING OUT RIGHT. “This time we’re going to do it right.” Virginia said it so often I started thinking there might be some sort of hidden meaning or message. “This time we’re going to do it right. We’re not going to make the mistakes we made last time.”

  I, for one, wasn’t all that sure we had made mistakes. They were the ones who blew it. If they had given me a little more information and some pills, everything would have been fine.

  If we had just listened to Dr. Dale, everything would have been OK. That was certainly the version he and lots of the other staff were trying to put over. He never came out and said it in so many words. He didn’t have to. We all felt it hanging over our heads.

  When I was finally released from the hospital, I bore little resemblance to the dynamo of assertion I had been on my first release. I had nothing but a feeling of extreme fragility and vulnerability and a little hope that some day things would be different.

  I didn’t adjust well to being fragile and vulnerable. Virginia or my parents or anyone else could break me inadvertently. Just a slight bit of human clumsiness and snap.

  I was once again completely financially dependent on my parents. There were the hospital bills, and the prospects of my being able to handle any sort of job in the near future seemed slim. Dale said at least a year.

  I was cramping Virginia’s style, the farm’s style, everyone’s style. And for what were all these people going out of their way? A hollow, shaky shell that didn’t know what to think about anything.

  We got a little apartment in Vancouver. Dale said it wasn’t such a hot idea to just head right back up to the farm. Virginia still kept saying, “This time we’re going to do it right.”

  My mother and Virginia took care of most of the arrangements. I just sort of dragged along.

  Taking Thorazine was part of doing things right. I hated Thorazine but tried not to talk about hating it. Hating Thorazine probably wasn’t a healthy sign. But Thorazine has lots of unpleasant side effects. It makes you groggy, lowers your blood pressure, making you dizzy and faint when you stand up too quickly. If you go out in the sun your skin gets red and hurts like hell. It makes muscles rigid and twitchy.

  The side effects were bad enough, but I liked what the drug was supposed to do even less. It’s supposed to keep you calm, dull, uninterested and uninteresting. No doctor or nurse ever came out and said so in so many words, but what it was was an antihero drug. Dale kept saying to me, “You mustn’t try to be a hero.” Thorazine made heroics impossible.

  What the drug is supposed to do is keep away hallucinations. What I think it does is just fog up your mind so badly you don’t notice the hallucinations or much else.

  My father sent me an article in Psychology Today on an experiment with schizophrenics to evaluate the effectiveness of Thorazine. The conclusion was that patients who before their illness had been well socialized, able to make friends and function effectively on a social level, actually recovered more quickly without Thorazine than with it. People who had been all fucked up before their illness benefited from Thorazine.

  I was so fucked up on Thorazine at the time that I had a great deal of difficulty figuring out to which group I belonged, but I knew I hated Thorazine.

  I managed to cheat on the Thorazine some. Very whimpy unheroic cheating. I deliberately misinterpreted what some nurse had said and skipped a few days. I felt great. My mother and Virginia both remarked on how fast I was recovering and how chipper I was getting. The spirit of our little apartment jumped a hundredfold. I wasn’t cramping anyone’s style any more. I even got chipper enough to tell them why I was so chipper. They were a little worried about that, but I was so obviously in a good state of mind they almost started questioning Dale’s judgment.

  When I went to see Dale that week it was far and away the nicest visit we’d ever had. He said I was making a remarkable recovery, I was putting on much-needed weight, color was coming back into my face, I was in better shape than he had ever seen me. If I just stuck with his regimen and kept improving, I could maybe visit the farm for a few days in a couple of weeks.

  He was so pleased. I was so pleased. Virginia and my mother and all my friends were so pleased. In this atmosphere of seemingly unanimous, universal pleasedness, I told him I didn’t need so much Thorazine. I told him, in fact, that at least part of the reason everyone was so pleased was that I had stopped taking it and I was sure I could recover much more quickly without it.

  He became a lot less pleased and came on with his antiheroics theme again. I showed him the article my father had clipped from Psychology Today. He wasn’t impressed.

  He called my mother and Virginia into the office. He explained that under no circumstances was he going to take any chances with my health. “Remember what happened last time?” Blah, blah, blah, etc.

  So I was back on Thorazine again.

  On Thorazine everything’s a bore. Not a bore, exactly. Boredom implies impatience. You can read comic books and Reader’s Digest forever. You can tolerate talking to jerks forever. Babble, babble, babble. The weather is dull, the flowers are dull, nothing’s very impressive. Muzak, Bach, Beatles, Lolly and the Yum-Yums, Rolling Stones. It doesn’t make any difference.

  When I did manage to get excited about some things, impatient with some things, interested in some things, it still didn’t have the old zing to it. I knew that Dostoyevsky was more interesting than comic books, or, more accurately, I remembered that he had been. I cared about what happened at the farm, but it was more remembering caring than really caring.

  After I had been out of the hospital a few weeks, Dale said it would be OK for me to go up to the farm for a weekend. Jack was down visiting us so I went up with him for a few days.

  Jack came into his own after I went nuts. His approach was very much no bullshit. He analyzed pretty accurately how the hospital worked and we talked about what parts of it could be incorporated into the farm. There was no mysticism from Jack, no flashy cosmic theories of why I had gone nuts or flashy any-other-kind of theories either. He didn’t think I needed spiritual guidance or T-groups. He didn’t want to love or teach the craziness out of me. For him it was a simple engineering problem. He was ready to build a padded cell. We even talked about it some. If electroshock worked, he was ready to price the equipment and learn how to use it.

  He didn’t like the idea of depending on a man who drove Cadillacs and wore baby-blue alligator shoes. If we needed a mini-mental hospital to be independent, he’d build one.

  Jack became a dynamo of energy. He took on leadership roles left and right. I loved it. I didn’t have much energy myself and felt I could sort of glide along behind and let this hot knife cut the butter. Jack was saying lots of things that I wanted to say but for various reasons couldn’t. Energy, vested interests, who listens to former psychotics anyway?

  The thrust of Jack’s thrusts was that we had a farm and not Eden or some half-baked hippie summer camp. Further, that we really didn’t have a farm but a rather pathetic little vegetable garden and a lot of land that needed lots of work. Our house was a bad joke, our goats were shitty goats. All the dogs except Zeke were less than worthless.

  The trip to the farm was fairly uneventful, although without Jack’s dynamism it might have been otherwise. The farm had been going through a decidedly strange phase. There had been a lot of visitors, four of whom were toying with the idea of becoming permanent. Not much work was getting done. The original crew and the visitors were all suffering from various forms of the heavies. A couple of the newcomers, and even Simon, were pretty sure they saw ghosts. There was tension in the air and a lot of talk about it. Maybe the whole problem was sexual repression, lots of talk about that. There were some stabs at novel couplings, straight mate swaps, homosexuality, three- and four-somes, and lots of talk about that and wondering why not everyone in a big heap. Then there were the old faithful heavies of “Why’d Mark go nuts?” and “What kind of a place is this farm going to be anyway?”

&n
bsp; Jack filled me in on what had been going on in a very matter-of-fact way. Without his briefing, Simon’s version of the news probably would have given me the hoodoos.

  “…Heavy changes…getting it on…coming together…ghosts… heavy vibes…ghosts…” It could have meant almost anything, but knowing who had done what with whom and how it had turned out helped keep my imagination within bounds.

  How it had turned out was all the newcomers scattering to the winds and the old-timers coming down to town to catch their breath. Jack had come to visit Virge and me while Simon and Kathy hung out at Prior Road. John Eastman took care of the animals for a few days.

  After our brief visit with Simon, Kathy, and the folks at Prior Road, Jack and I headed up the lake to relieve John.

  We told the ghosts to get the fuck away from us if they knew what was good for them, and walked around talking about the various things we had to do to get this place in shape.

  After three very down-to-earth pleasant days at the farm, planning and good talks with Jack, playing with Zeke, as noble and beautiful as ever, Jack and I headed back to Powell River. He took Kathy and Simon back up the lake and I hitched down to Vancouver.

  When I told Dale about visiting the farm, he chided me. I was supposed to have gone for only two days and I was supposed to have had Virginia with me. He accused me of trying to play hero again.

  I apologized without knowing what I was apologizing for and warned myself about trying to make any sense of it. I wasn’t supposed to think. I was just supposed to follow doctor’s orders.

  We left the apartment and moved back up to the farm toward the end of June. It was OK with Dale as long as I promised to come to see him every two weeks.

  It was hard to be graceful. I felt weak and burned-out. I was being watched. I was being treated with kid gloves. I needed it. I hated it.

  There was no way for things to be right. I needed time. Everyone around me needed time. Time to get stronger. Time for everyone to relax.

  Balancing. Too much pressure, I’d crack. Too little, I’d never get any strength. One day I’d feel tough as nails, fed to the teeth with people tiptoeing around. The next day I’d find myself shaking, holding my knees, ready to hang it up and check myself back into the nut house.

  When I went back to the farm, I don’t think I had any real hope of making it my life any more. It was more like I owed myself and everyone else there a graceful exit. It was like getting back up on a horse after you’ve been thrown. It was like a lot of things, but it wasn’t much like Eden. It was the best of a lot of lousy alternatives.

  Getting well outside the hospital seemed a lot like getting well inside. The dos and don’ts made no sense. My friends’ judgments of what were good and bad signs were as ridiculous as the hospital’s. There was no percentage in trying to get people to understand. It probably wasn’t possible and it seemed like what had gotten me into trouble in the first place.

  I went back to the farm because I knew it. I knew the hopelessness of my heroism there. The farm knew the hopelessness of my heroism back. There was nothing I’d be tempted to try there. I had tried it all. I had been burned. It had been burned.

  Other places, other people would tempt me and me them.

  The experiments of spring had all the makings of a superhippie summer.

  It was a nothing summer. Thank God it was a nothing summer. Thank Simon, Kathy, Jack, and Virginia that it was a nothing summer. Thank me.

  I did to the farm what Thorazine was doing to me. I was a down.

  Clay Foot was my new private name for myself. Ol’ Clay Foot don’t go around saying stop that shit or I run amuck. Ol’ Clay Foot he just walk into a room not sayin’ much at all and everybody be cool. Just like that. Ol’ Clay Foot he don’t have to say nothin’.

  There was a moratorium on heaviness. Everyone went back to sleeping with whoever they had slept with before I went nuts. New visitors weren’t exactly discouraged, but we weren’t out recruiting either.

  Three months of nothing later I headed East. I was feeling pretty strong. The trip had Dale’s blessing. He said I had made remarkable progress but I still had to avoid being a hero, I still had to keep taking Thorazine, I ought to see a shrink now and then; but all in all he thought I was out of the worst of it.

  Three months of nothing isn’t quite fair. After the dynamism and pitched battles of being crazy, it would have been hard for anything to move me much.

  I started writing. I built a chicken coop. I had a few minor fights with Virge. Things happened, but nothing that called me out. There were some visitors and guests, but they were all reasonable, relatives or close friends mostly. No out-of-the-blue wanderers. No superfreaks. No cosmic messengers or extraordinary chess players.

  I left saying I’d be back in a couple of months. I knew it wasn’t true and I suspect everyone else knew it too. I wasn’t fleeing painful memories or friends and a way of life that I feared might drive me nuts again. I felt and still feel that without the farm and those friends I would have cracked sooner and healed more slowly than otherwise. I was leaving because I was well.

  I felt strong in a way I had never felt before. I was curious about this new strength and there wasn’t enough variety at the farm to give it a thorough testing out.

  It seemed that virtue was no longer compulsory. I had spent a lot of my life trying to figure out what “good” was and trying to do it. It had seemed that my state of mind, mental health, was directly tied to how much “good” was in my life, which would have been fine if the process hadn’t been such a progressively demanding, implacable one.

  In the beginning I couldn’t take physical violence. In the end I couldn’t cut firewood. I didn’t want to move or breathe for fear of harming microbes. My life became more and more an instant-karma replay. There was no way to be good enough. My friends had gradually become as monstrous as the SS, and the farm as hectic and frightening as New York City. I had had a certain amount of hope in this process. I assumed it was happening to everyone and that, sooner or later, the same feelings that made me incapable of handling rush-hour traffic would render the Air Force incapable of dropping bombs.

  I was so convinced of the connection between my mental health and “goodness” that something’s upsetting me was enough to make it evil. The world’s sinfulness and horror matched step with my ever deteriorating shit tolerance.

  Looking back at those changes in my life I can now see much more than the “good” I saw at the time. Along with all my new sensitivities and deep concerns came a peculiar immunity to love that my family, friends, and lovers had for me. I thought about, talked about, and needed love very much, but whenever I got it, it touched me less and less. Which led me to assume that it wasn’t really love. If I had ever come to see that Virginia really loved me, which I see very clearly now, I doubtless would have found some excuse to put several thousand miles between us.

  Because they made me feel better, trusting nature, letting it be, etc., were all part of being good.

  But nature had apparently intended me to spend the rest of my life chained to a wall, or, barring intervention, to rave my brains out and starve to death. Philosophical niceties were swept aside. Biochemistry and these funny men calling themselves orthomolecular psychiatrists were my new buddies. The more the vitamins took hold, the less my mental health depended on being good and the more curious I became about what life out there would be like this way.

  I’m pretty sure I could live in a plastic condominium with a wife I didn’t love and lots of bratty kids, drive six hours a day in rush-hour traffic to work at a boring meaningless job, and mutilate cuddly little puppies in my spare time without its putting much of a dent in my mental health. I wouldn’t like it but it wouldn’t drive me nuts.

  Before, nearly everything I did was to nurture my mental health. Becoming a religion major, politics, hippiedom, the farm, all made me feel a little less shaky. The ironic thing is that my big theme as a religion major had been the crassness and o
ther drawbacks of morality under threat of damnation. Insightfulness, honesty, etc., under threat of mental illness is much the same game. As much as I value the experiences and lessons of both the mild and decidedly unmild parts of my travels with schizophrenia, it’s nice to be back on my own. In any event, my mental health doesn’t give me many clues about how to act any more.

  Another reason for leaving was that it was time for Virge and me to go our separate ways. It wasn’t so much that I had changed as that we had been through so much together and knew each other so thoroughly. Ideally a couple reaches that degree of emotional fullness and exhaustion with the general exhaustion of old age. We were an eighty-year-old couple stuck in bodies in their early twenties.

  Leaving Zeke behind was the toughest part of coming East, but there wasn’t any way around it. He was healthy, safe, and happy being king of the farm. There would have been all that traumatic traveling and I didn’t have the faintest idea where the hell I’d end up living. Virginia, Simon, Kathy, and Jack had all come to respect and love him as much as I did. They would have squawked like hell if I tried to take him with me. Besides, he wasn’t a pup any more, he was getting sort of set in his ways. I had put Zeke through odysseys aplenty. He had found his niche, it was time for me to go find mine. If it turned out to be one where he could be half as healthy, safe, and happy as he was at the farm, I’d be back to get him in a flash.

  The farm went on. Jack dropped out about six months after I did and went down to Los Angeles to become a carpenter. Kathy lasted a few months beyond his leaving and then became a schoolteacher in Vancouver. Simon and Virge turned out to be the true diehards. They kept the place going with various newcomers through another two winters.

  By the time they left, the house was warm and tight and had running water, a much expanded, productive garden replaced our pathetic first efforts, funky Blue Marcel was replaced by a very fast, dependable inboard, a big beautiful barn was nearing completion, and a tractor did much of the work we had once done by hand.