Things do not even out.
There are no people anywhere who don’t have some mental illness. It all depends on where you set the bar and how hard you look. What is a myth is that we are mostly mentally well most of the time.
The bad behavior of others constitutes an attractive nuisance to someone recovering from mental illness. You need all your energy and wits for things that matter. Beyond a certain point, gathering further evidence of the hurtfulness and shortcomings of one’s family, employer, et cetera is like eating the same poisonous mushroom over and over and expecting that sooner or later it will be nutritious.
If recovery from mental illness depended on the goodness, mercy, and rational behavior of others, we’d all be screwed. Peace of mind is inversely proportional to expectations.
It’s possible within any given moment of any given day to choose between self and sickness. Rarely are there big heroic choices that will settle matters once and for all. The smallest positive step is probably the right one. Try not to argue. If you’re right, you don’t need to argue. If you’re wrong, it won’t help. If you’re okay, things will be okay. If you’re not okay, nothing else matters.
A world without prejudice, stigma, and discrimination against those who have or who are thought to have mental illness would be a better world for everyone. What so-called normal people are doing when they define disease like manic depression or schizophrenia is reassuring themselves that they don’t have a thought disorder or affective disorder, that their thoughts and feelings make perfect sense.
There’s a Path, 1999
(Painting by Mark Vonnegut)
Honeymoon
(Photo by innocent bystander)
chapter 15
Bricks and Lobsters
If you need a drink, have one before the ceremony. We won’t have any alcohol at the house. We took all the money and blew it on soft-shelled crabs, oysters, and barbeque.
—our wedding invitation
There had been fourteen years between my third and fourth breaks. Fourteen years after the fourth break I was very relieved that nothing untoward seemed to be happening in my head. Barb, who I knew was trouble the minute I saw her, and I decided to get married after five years together. We bought a two-hundred-year-old barn and carriage house with major structural issues and a lot wrong with the rest of it too. More sensible people would have torn it down and started over.
When I was telling a neighbor what he could do with a big maple tree that was dying—make planks out of the trunk, use the smaller branches for firewood and the scraps for kindling, plus the sawdust could be mixed with compost and used to grow mushrooms—my wife said I sounded like a male version of Martha Stewart.
It’s more about Doctor Zhivago. If I’m careful to not waste things, especially things that have to do with heat and staying warm, I’ll never have to go out in a blizzard and come home with a few pathetic pieces of pine ripped out of a fence.
Trash costs three dollars a barrel to remove. All the landfills are closed, and you can’t get rid of a pickup-truck-load of brush for less than $150.
When Omar Sharif went out into the freezing Russian winter to search for fuel to keep his sickly, starving wife and child from freezing to death, he came back with three ¾-inch boards of plain pine, the combined caloric content of which was probably less than what he wasted opening and closing the door. Taking into account the high ceilings and inefficient stove, it probably wasn’t a net gain.
But it wasn’t nothing. He couldn’t have known that those boards were what he was going to find. At least he came back with something, but if he had come back with three or four dry oak logs and had an airtight stove, it would have been a whole different story. It was really just a plot device, a way for him to meet his brother, Alec Guinness.
I don’t want to throw away building scraps and then need kindling and not have any.
I’ve had people of questionable immigration status tell me in broken English that el doctor shouldn’t be burning building scraps for heat.
“Have you ever seen Doctor Zhivago? El Doctor Zhivago?” They look back blankly.
Bogden was one of my workers who actually had a visa; it was a student visa but a visa nonetheless. Bogden was Polish, the brother of an old girlfriend of Ralph’s. Ralph was a carpenter who agreed to help me out with projects and teach me some carpentry as long as I never called him or yelled at him for not getting things done.
Bogden is worse off than the Spanish-speaking guys because no one learns Polish in high school. The deal with Bogden was that Ralph would bring him to our house in the morning and he would work like a bull for ten dollars an hour until you didn’t have anything more for him to do. You could drop him at any T station and he’d find his way home.
The first few jobs I gave Bogden were ripping out brush and hauling piles of heavy things from one place to another. It was hard to keep up with him. An overgrown tennis court was turned into something you could almost play on. The tools were lined up like punctuation marks whenever a job was done.
I was making a little brick patio in my backyard.
“Wooooden hammer?” Bogden said, watching me bang bricks into place with other bricks, chipping both the banged and the banger brick.
“Yes. A wooden hammer would be nice, but I don’t have one.” I actually did have a wooden hammer, but I didn’t know where it was.
“Oh. Too bad,” said Bogden.
“When you’re done sweeping off the tennis court and getting all the stone dust out of the truck, maybe you would like to try the bricks? Does Bogden know bricks?”
“Try bricks? …Sure.”
When I got back from an afternoon of pediatrics, Ralph had picked up Bogden. The tools were neatly lined up: brush hook, mattock, rake, pitchfork, and my wooden hammer—God knows how he found it. The small terrace I had been struggling with was laid out perfectly. It was level and the joints were tight. It looked like it had been there for a hundred years. Bogden knew bricks. I started ripping up most of what I had done before to redo it.
Barb took Bogden to the T that night and came back telling me that he was an engineer but that there wasn’t much work for engineers in Poland. He was not married but had a girlfriend. I could have worked with him all day every day for months and not figured out that stuff.
“He said that in Poland everybody knows bricks. And then he said, ‘Shouldn’t it be “In Poland everybody knows about bricks”?’ ”
Since I took up carpentry I measure children much more carefully, sometimes to 1/32 of an inch.
I have a thing about Russia and Russians. In a past life I was beaten and left to die by the Cossacks or Stalin’s goons. My hovel has been burned. I have no idea where my family is. Three of my children died from diphtheria the spring before. The birches have new leaves. It is snowing. I cry tears of joy.
Nikolai is a good man with a good heart and was very much trying to do something nice for us by taking Barb and me and our son out on one of his charter boats. He knew that I loved boats and didn’t have one and loved to fish but didn’t get to go fishing often. He appreciated that I was honest and available and worked hard at being a good doctor to his kids. I didn’t give him a hard time about not wanting to immunize his children. I believe very much in immunization but don’t see it as a deal breaker. The less arguing I do about it, the more likely the kids will end up immunized.
“The children of irrational parents need good doctors too, Nikolai,” I said. He liked that.
After catching some cod, two bluefish, and an undersized striped bass that we threw back, Nickolai wanted to dive for some lobsters before calling it a day. We anchored a hundred yards off of a beautiful little island that’s been proposed as a liquefied natural gas terminal and watched Nikolai’s bubbles. He was down there a half hour and came up out of breath with three mesh bags full of lobsters.
Understanding favors in a second language isn’t always easy.
I’m sure he would have preferred that they
were bigger. There were twenty-three very small lobsters. The biggest one was maybe six inches long. They were basically big crawfish. He wouldn’t have had to stay under so long if they’d been bigger. I was encouraged when he checked the undersides for eggs and threw one back.
We had talked earlier about declining fish stocks, and he had said, “Fishermen cannot catch so many fish to deplete. If are not enough fish, is chemicals and pollution from too many people.” I agreed.
Nikolai grew up in Siberia the son of some of the “fewer but better Russians” Stalin talked about when asked if he felt bad about the purges. He had big hands and was muscular but small and thin in a way that spoke of caloric deprivation either of his mother during her pregnancy or of him early in his infancy, maybe both. He was about five feet four inches tall. You could pour all the calories you liked into Nikolai, and they would never stick. Born in a different place and time, he would have been well over six feet tall. If they keep growing at their current percentiles, his son will tower over him and his daughter will be roughly his height.
Fishing charters was only one of the things Nikolai was up to. He was a mechanic and engineer working on a better way to start bio-diesel engines. It made sense to me. I’ve never known a Russian who was up to just one thing.
I asked a little nervously about measuring the lobsters.
“Are better this way. Only measure these lobsters need is on the fork in your mouth.”
Someone who had grown up starving in Siberia could be forgiven a different attitude toward what you should and shouldn’t eat, but I’d been arrested before for taking quahogs that were allegedly too small and knew how humorless and difficult resource-conservation officers could be. And the lobsters were really tiny. I wondered what my wife was making of all this. She seemed to be in endurance mode, unusually quiet.
I tried to divide them into a pile for my family—three or four—and a pile for his family—all the rest.
“I never eat them,” he explained succinctly. “Kids and wife don’t like them either.”
They were all for us.
I could just see the cop who might stop us doing a double take before opening the cooler. “Any relation to Kurt? Aren’t you a pediatrician? Didn’t you do some ads for Blue Cross?”
Maybe there was a fine of a thousand dollars apiece for possessing lobsters this small, maybe there wasn’t. I didn’t know for sure but would have supported such a law. What possible excuse could there be for riding around with a cooler nearly full of cod and bluefish topped off with twenty-plus tiny lobsters?
I’d bake some of the cod for dinner. Whatever cod we didn’t eat that night could be frozen. The bluefish I could smoke. Nikolai had put little rubber bands on each of the lobsters’ claws so they wouldn’t tear one another apart in the close quarters of the cooler.
We had gone on the trip expecting a two- or three-hour deal that had turned into seven. Our three-year-old had held up well. It would be good to get home. We said our goodbyes. With the cooler in the back of the pickup truck, I readjusted my mirrors and drove very carefully, not too fast, not too slow, no U-turns. Our son fell asleep instantly. The truck was very quiet.
A few minutes into our trip home I looked over at my wife. “We’ve got to try to let the lobsters go.”
“Do you think they can live?” They’d been on ice but out of water a couple of hours.
“They’re alive now. We have to give them a chance.”
The only place I could think of with deep-enough water was a popular fishing dock. Lugging a cooler down the dock and liberating baby lobsters might attract attention. I’d have to get all those rubber bands off—a chance at life with banded claws wasn’t much of a chance. We’d stick out like a whole hand of sore thumbs throwing lobsters out of a cooler on a fishing dock. Sure there’s a Russian fisherman….
If there had been one or even two or three of them, it wouldn’t have been so bad. The large number spoke to callous indifference and criminal intent.
I don’t stick out. I’m exactly average height, an average amount overweight, with brown hair and brown eyes. I worry about being in the wrong place at the wrong time or not having the right identification. The thought of being caught with these lobsters was almost worse than death itself.
“I think there’s some pretty deep water off a breakwater down behind a car dealership in Weymouth.”
We found the parking lot and watched in silence for a few minutes to see if anyone was around. I climbed halfway down the breakwater dragging the cooler, slightly twisting an ankle before I could find a place to steady it and myself. One by one I took off the bands and threw the lobsters into the water. I could see them lying there, not moving, for a while, but then they jerked around and seemed to recover.
I knew from having found lobsters in marsh pools while quahogging that they don’t need a lot of water. They were less than a hundred yards from Quincy Bay, where there were lots of other lobsters, but if this was the end of the line, at least they had one another. We were out of there.
“I think that they’re okay, but maybe I should have given them one of the bluefish,” I told my wife as I got into the truck. Our three-year-old was dead to the world, asleep, strapped into his car seat. “I’m going to tell Nikolai that they were the best lobsters we ever ate.”
The world that went forward from that moment was a world where we, at some small—but not zero—risk to ourselves, set free twenty-three small lobsters somewhere off a parking lot in Weymouth rather than eating them, which would have been the easier thing to do.
We are saltwater ocean people.
(Photo by M. Oliver Vonnegut)
Never lie down with your children to get them to sleep.
(Photo by Barb Vonnegut)
chapter 16
The Rope
Don’t just do something. Stand there.
—Dr. Elvin Semrad
The grandfather of a thirteen-year-old boy I’d taken care of since he was a baby asked if he could talk to me before I saw his grandson.
“His mother hung herself last Friday.”
The grandfather was bringing up the boy because the mother, whom I had never met, couldn’t stop drinking.
“Was she ever able to get any sobriety? Was she ever able to take care of him?” I asked.
“Not really. It’s probably a blessing for her that it’s over.” He never mentioned that the mother his grandson had just lost was his daughter.
The boy was very small and said to be retarded because of fetal alcohol syndrome. As soon as I figure out what you should say to a thirteen-year-old boy whose mother has just hung herself, I’ll let you know.
“I’m sorry about your mom.”
“……………………………….”
“Alcoholism is a terrible disease.”
“………………………………….”
“It’s a terrible disease that killed your mother.”
“Yeah, Doc. That and the rope around her neck.”
Prescribing a pill is far and away the quickest way to bring closure to a patient encounter. No prescription hangs in the air begging. Often the patient says, “So, are we done?”
I had no pills for the boy with the hung mother.
I spent much of my childhood worried that Kurt would kill himself. Whether or not I’d be ready to lose my father was something I had started asking myself almost as soon as I knew there was such a thing as death. From time to time, in an almost conversational tone, he mentioned that he might commit suicide. There didn’t seem to be much anguish involved. My mother was understandably preoccupied with whether or not my father might kill himself. She believed more than he did that he would someday be a famous writer, and she promoted and clung to that belief as a way to make sure that he didn’t kill himself. His mother had allegedly killed herself. I say allegedly because not everyone thought so and I wanted that doubt to lessen the chances of my father doing the same.
My father had thick, dark, curly hair r
ight up until the end. When gray started to creep in he was nearly eighty. I thought maybe he was having gray highlights put in so people would stop mentioning how thick and black his hair was.
No one is going to look at me and say, “Look at the bald guy,” but I have less hair than I used to. When I saw a circular little bit of shiny skin showing through the top back of my head in a photo, I thought there must be some mistake, that the light must have hit my head in a certain way and made it look like a bald spot.
Once upon a time, my hair was not only thick but halfway down my back as well. I’m not sure my hair would even grow that long anymore. It gets lonely and wispy a few inches from my scalp. I used to have hair. Now I have these here and those over there. When I was younger, one place on my head was pretty much like any other. I’ve had more than my share of hair but had hoped for more than just being able to pass for not bald.
I wasn’t really accusing my barber of anything when I mentioned the “indicator strip.” I had suspected for some time that the hairs just to the left of the middle part became annoyingly long and unmanageable four or five weeks after a haircut so I would know I was supposed to go back and get another one. I thought it might be a small trade secret and was curious to see what Al would say about it.
Al had been cutting my hair for years, but he and I didn’t usually talk much. The lack of mandatory chatting is something I value in a barbershop. People do talk there. It’s banter about sports mostly, but if you don’t want to, you don’t have to talk. I tried some more upscale places to get my hair cut a long time ago, but even when I had an appointment and was on time there was something awkward about how I came through the door or checked in or said I had an appointment that led to my sitting awhile listening to the snipping and whispering while easier, more graceful people got their hair cut.
Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So Page 14