My father and the local GP were on the verge of hospitalizing her when the demands of making a home for my orphaned cousins more or less snapped her out of it. Later, I asked my mother if she didn’t think the refugee stuff and getting messages from license plates and traffic lights was a little nutty, and she pointed out that it was around the time of the Hungarian uprising and there were lots of refugees. When the orphans/refugees came she decided that messages from license plates and blinking lights were more or less reliable.
Whenever we went somewhere that involved leaving the house for more than a few hours, my mother would pretend to have forgotten something and run back into the house. It would only take a minute or so, but there were prayers and rituals that had to be done to ensure that the house wouldn’t burn down while we were gone. Certain light switches had to be left in the up or down position.
Years later, when I complained to her about the voices, she said, “Why don’t you just go along with them?” Her voices never got nasty the way they do eventually for most people.
My Uncle Jim was on the only commuter train to ever go off an open drawbridge into Newark Bay. This was in 1958, and the conductor, who also died, was either asleep or already dead from a heart attack when the train ran several stop signals and went into the bay on the way into New York’s Pennsylvania Station. Forty-eight people died, including my uncle. His body wasn’t found for a week, so there was at least a hope that he was knocked out or dazed or trapped somewhere, maybe washed up on an island. His wife, Allie, my father’s sister, died of cancer a day and a half after the train went off the bridge.
My father heard about the train wreck on the radio. It wasn’t the usual train Jim took, but when Kurt called his office and Jim wasn’t in, Kurt figured it was possible that Jim had been on the train that had gone into the bay. Jane drove him to the airport, and he headed down to New Jersey.
When my cousins got home from school, my father was there. They had no idea about the train accident. It still wasn’t known for sure that their father was on that train. Their mother died the next day not knowing whether or not her husband was dead. My Uncle Jim could go up and down stairs walking on his hands. No one could believe he couldn’t get out of a sinking train.
The four boys were suddenly orphans. Only the oldest, fourteen-year-old Jim, had known his mother was seriously ill. Steve was eleven. Tiger (Kurt) was eight years old, and Boo (Peter) was only eighteen months. My father packed them up with their two dogs and a pet rabbit, Phee Phee, who bit, and they all came to live with us in Barnstable.
My mother and father, at the ripe old age of thirty-five, struggling financially (ten years prior to Slaughterhouse-Five), took on four more children, two dogs, and a rabbit. Whatever else good or bad my parents did or didn’t do with the rest of their lives, that was absolutely the right thing to do.
There was no way to ask for a replay or argue or complain about Allie and Jim dying. You just had to keep going and do the best you could.
Taking in the orphans turned my parents into instant heroes. Kurt and Jane were looked on with awe and admiration, and everyone wanted to do something to help. It was all over the papers. We fixed up the house some, and my mother became “Aunt Jane” to me and everyone else.
There was no even cursory social-service-type investigation into whether or not this was a family that could or should take care of four orphaned children.
The youngest cousin orphan, Boo, was still in diapers, and he cried and banged his head all the time. He could bounce the crib from one side of the room to the other with ten or twelve head butts. My youngest sister was only a year older than he was and tried to kill him. Jim, the oldest, had had adjustment and socialization issues before his parents died. Shortly after arriving in Barnstable he packed a neighbor’s front door with black powder and lit a fuse to see what would happen. The door blew up.
Our house was huge but had a tiny kitchen and one and a half marginal bathrooms. The Adams relatives, my Uncle Jim’s family, had money but no space for the orphans, so they gave us a new kitchen and laundry room and an upstairs bathroom, but what my mother really needed was help with cleaning and laundry and cooking.
Somehow my mother found Ruby. Ruby was a wonderful baker, especially of pecan sticky buns. They really were very very good, but there was a lot else that needed doing and my mother had a hard time telling people what she needed from them if it wasn’t something they were already inclined to do. I have inherited this from her, along with her gift for visions and voices. So the helping out Ruby could do with the cleaning, cooking, and laundry for the two adults and seven children in a friendly but crumbly two-hundred-plus-year-old house was fit in around the baking of the sticky buns.
My mother asked Ruby if she could make the sticky buns once a week or so and asked us to please not eat them all so Ruby would think that we had had enough, but I could no more not eat all the sticky buns there were than I could fly. Luckily Ruby had a sister and some cousins who were more inclined to cleaning and laundry, so it was worked out that Ruby came once a week to do dinner and sticky buns, and various combinations of her sister and her cousins helped out with the other stuff.
Fifteen years later, at age fifty, my mother tried to get a master’s degree in social work. When she was told that she would have to repeat the first year of a two-year social work program if she wanted to continue, I explained to her that maybe she was being counseled out of the field.
Jane had an utter and complete lack of distance from people with problems. As long as it was all in a book and hypothetical she was okay, but as soon as she met flesh-and-blood people with real problems, she thought long and hard about what could be done and could never escape the idea that she, Jane, should move in with the family and straighten things out and maybe call up Ruby and her cousins to see if they could help.
Before the orphans came, my mother had a friend or two but was mostly having a hard time fitting in. My parents were over-educated midwestern liberals a long way from home with hopes and ambitions that would have perplexed and mystified their neighbors. Most Cape Codders had grown up on the Cape like their parents and their parents before them. They had quiet jobs and inherited a little money they didn’t talk about. The women probably didn’t like that Jane was pretty and our house was rundown. We were not into team sports. We were doing nothing for property values. It was not at all clear what my father did for a living. He was a tall, dark-eyed, gawky, hunched-over guy you wouldn’t just go up to and get to know or talk to about baseball.
The year before the orphans came, some neighbors down the street asked my mother if they could take me to a football game. It must have been at Barnstable High. I went and was fascinated but didn’t have even a little idea about what was going on.
Average looked good to me growing up.
There are a bunch of things my father said that I could, as long as I was very sure he wasn’t around, mimic with close to perfect tone.
“Do you want to be average?”
“Take your friends and shove them.”
“Not world-class.”
I took it as a compliment—maybe I was capable of being world-class if I worked a little harder. It just meant my father had high standards and wasn’t going to gush about every little thing his children did.
One of my sisters, defending a report card, said that C was average.
“Do you want to be average? Sandy’s average,” said my father, maligning our sweet, part sheepdog mongrel. This was my sister Nanny, who I thought for a while might have been average like me. My mother took me aside one day and told me that Nanny had taken some test at school and that she was very smart. I imagined her IQ vanishing up into the stratosphere. “Gee, that’s great,” I said.
I couldn’t help noticing that when you got A’s, grades didn’t matter.
Most of the children I take care of travel. Just about everyone goes to Disney or some version of Florida, or at least they go on long drives to see relatives.
“Uncle K, are we going to die?” asked Tiger, who was nine years old.
My father was not average. He was a better writer than Hemingway or Fitzgerald, but no one knew it yet, which was why we didn’t have any money. The pressure to make money made it so he couldn’t write, so he had to try to sell cars, which he was very bad at. You couldn’t do just anything if you were a genius.
My mother wasn’t average. She was Phi Beta Kappa and had worked for the CIA. She knew my father was going to be famous and it was all going to be worth it. She knew about lots of things before they happened, like my cousins coming to live with us and who was calling on the phone before there was such a thing as caller ID. She would have hated caller ID. No one would have been surprised that she knew who was calling.
My cousins weren’t average. They were orphans who eventually all got to be over six feet tall. My sister Edie could draw like Leonardo da Vinci and seemed never to have worked at being able to do that. My mother said Edie’s hands looked very old. It was like this little girl was going to be born and Leonardo’s hands were sewn onto her at the last moment to some great purpose.
I learned how to play chess young and could beat just about everyone I played, but it was mainly a party trick I didn’t fully understand. Being a good chess player in Barnstable didn’t mean much. I didn’t see any real advantage in being smart. I worried that bigger, less smart people might figure out what I was thinking and beat the crap out of me. I honestly couldn’t understand why so many people played chess so poorly.
My father thought it was fine that I didn’t have friends or play sports. I didn’t know what to think about it. Friendships and sports were like spelling and handwriting—things that were supposed to be easy and that were easy for most people but mysteriously inaccessible to me.
I didn’t want to beat my father in chess because it put him in a lousy mood. So I’d have a pretty good attack going and then try to back off. But I couldn’t make a completely stupid move because he played well enough to catch me at that. I’d sometimes end up with two or three good attacks going and he’d all of a sudden see it and realize that he was utterly cooked. He could throw the board pretty far. I think it was a joke, but my sisters and cousins took it seriously enough to urge me to find a way to lose. Surely I could figure out how to throw a game or two, but it was more complicated than that. I was at least a little afraid to play him until he was about sixty, when his game and mood around chess improved quite a bit.
Once, my parents went out to dinner and on the way home they went to King’s to pick up a mop and some lightbulbs. My father noticed that the music being played over the PA was a waltz. He asked my mother to dance, and they waltzed in the aisle. Before the song was over the music changed to a fox trot, which they handled no problem. The music changed again. Fast, slow, rumba, tango, whatever, my parents danced to everything that was thrown at them. After fifteen minutes of trying to stump the dancers, whoever was watching them through the shoplifting surveillance system gave up and the PA went silent. My parents paid for the mop and the lightbulbs and came home. When they walked through the door they were laughing so hard they were crying.
I had a lot of hope, and in the end I was right, that good things would come out of having my cousins come live with us. Steve was just three months older than me, tall, blond, blue-eyed, and destined to become captain of the football, basketball, and baseball teams, as well as class president. So I learned how to do sports and say hi to people. It was Steve who discovered that I was so nearsighted as to be legally blind. I found out later that when he was pitching in Little League, Steve would go into the woods before games and throw up.
The cousins were a breath of fresh air. I was glad for the company. In my own way I became socialized enough to talk to girls on the phone and play middle linebacker and keep playing even when I had a broken wrist.
When I was eleven my mother sat down on the edge of my bed and explained to me the difference between egoist and egotist. I didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about. I resolved to remember it in case it turned out to be important.
There seemed to be a lot of winking going on when I was growing up. I assumed there must be some good reason why people couldn’t just come out and say things.
When I was sixteen I met Lonnie Crews, a serious kid who wore a black leather jacket and told me he thought he might die young and that once you died you couldn’t learn anymore. I started reading a lot and asking people about what and who I should read. I didn’t want to be stuck with a junior high education. Things started sticking, and what I knew became something I could do something about.
Introverts almost never cause me trouble and are usually much better at what they do than extroverts. Extroverts are too busy slapping one another on the back, team building, and making fun of introverts to get much done. Extroverts are amazed and baffled by how much some introverts get done and assume that they, the extroverts, are somehow actually responsible.
I can pass for normal most of the time, but I understand perfectly why some of my autistic patients scream and flap their arms—it’s to frighten off extroverts. It was on purpose that I didn’t stick out, but I never thought I had a choice. Even when I had a full beard, hair halfway down my back, and was headed out to British Columbia to start a commune, I figured that anyone born and raised the way I was would be doing the same thing; I thought I was white bread.
When I didn’t eat or sleep for two weeks, lost twenty-five pounds, and came to in a nuthouse with labels like schizophrenic and paranoid being thrown around, that was the first thing in my life that seemed not white bread. The downside of not sticking out, not being a high-wire act, was that I didn’t have any excuses. The other thing was that I probably would never be loved.
After the orphans came, I tried to be as little trouble as possible. Breathing a little less air and taking up a little less space seemed like the least I could do. I moved into an attic space over the kitchen that you couldn’t stand up in and told myself and everyone else that I liked it, another wolf den. I tried to breathe next to no air and leave next to no footprints.
A psychotic break is the exact opposite of not taking up much space and being as little trouble as possible.
“Mark’s in the hospital.”
It hurt my feelings that no one, during my first series of breaks, in the seventies, or the last one, in the eighties, ever asked, “What kind of hospital?”
I’ve found it helps a lot to get older. Now when honking cars start sounding like my name or other things happen that could be the voices warming up, I’m not thrilled or terrified. “I’ve got a lot going on,” I say. “You’ll have to wait your turn.”
If I wasn’t optimistic, who was?
(Vonnegut family photo)
chapter 4
Hippie
To live outside the law you must be honest.
—Bob Dylan
I went through junior high, high school, prep school, and college like an unremarkable person. I tried to say things I remembered Steve saying in similar social situations to see if they would work for me. I did a little bit well at sports and then decided sports were unimportant.
I always had a job and I always worked hard. Whether it was mowing lawns or clearing brush or loading trucks, I liked to sweat and get into a rhythm where I could think. I wasn’t sure what thinking was good for, but I was resolved to pay attention to what went through my mind just in case. If I had a job, like pumping gas, where there were lulls in the work, I always had a book to read and argue with.
I took up painting and felt lucky and not particularly responsible when the paintings came out well. It wasn’t like I knew how I did it or thought I could do it again or that I thought painting was important. I did well on standardized tests, but everyone knew how inauthentic they were. I loved pla
ying music but didn’t think I was good enough or had the balls to become a full-bore musician. People said I wrote well. I liked learning about history and literature. I gave up math after nearly flunking calculus in college. I took learning seriously and was probably perfectly prepared for something. Sometimes I thought I was a genius. Sometimes I thought I was a coward and a phony. I got along pretty well with just about anybody. I was serious about being serious and wasn’t about to adopt just any old notion of what that might mean.
My hair got longer and longer. I grew a full beard right after high school and looked as much like Jesus Christ as possible. I was serious about being a hippie, and being a good hippie seemed like a job right up my alley and maybe something I could do better than Steve or Jim or Tiger or my father.
There were drugs involved but not nearly as much as movies about hippies would have you believe. It seemed like almost everyone smoked some pot, but it wasn’t an every-day or even every-week sort of thing. Even then, we knew there was something wrong with people who smoked pot every day. A great many hippies, myself included, managed to get through college without doing psychedelics. Cocaine and heroin didn’t become commonplace until the seventies and eighties. In general, we saw drugs as a possibly useful part of discovery and growth. We looked down on people who were just trying to get blasted.
I acquired a sophisticated appreciation for a few beers now and then, and an occasional bottle of bourbon. Somewhere in there I became a good cook and added knowledge of wine to the things to which I could introduce my friends.
At Swarthmore I majored in religion with the idea of going to divinity school and then maybe the Unitarian ministry, where I would be a comforter of the sick and disadvantaged but mostly a really good professional arguer who argued against war and materialism.
Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So Page 3