Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So (24 page)

My wife and I had both come from damaged, damaging childhoods, and both of us desperately wanted to be normal and thought that being married to each other would be a ticket away from where we didn’t want to be. She liked the very un-needy Clint Eastwood–type man I had tried so hard to be. She had bragged to her women’s group about how little trouble I was.
Now, suddenly, I was a jumpy mess who needed a drink and couldn’t have one. It was embarrassing for both of us that I had gone nuts and thrown those rocks out of the aquarium at her and been hauled off to the hospital in a straightjacket. You can’t go from being someone who drinks at least a little bit every day to someone who doesn’t drink like it’s wearing different clothes and cutting your hair shorter. She was a perfectly okay woman whom I didn’t feel loved by. I would have done anything except drink to have my own goddamned feelings matter less.

What possibly could happen to a forty-five-year-old man with two kids that would make getting divorced come out okay?

At my most pathetic, when I felt lost and very sorry for myself and was no longer in charge of making breakfast and packing lunches for my boys, I set up a bird feeder on the ledge of my apartment overlooking a parking lot and no birds came.

End of the Lane
, 1991

(Painting by Mark Vonnegut)

Use all the armor.

(Photo by Barb Vonnegut)

O
ur medical school graduation speaker was a Jesuit psychiatrist who made me laugh and cry at the same time. At least one person in the world understood why I had become a doctor. So I made a mental note, with my two-year-old son, Zach, sitting on my lap, that should I ever need a psychiatrist again, he would be the guy.

I started going to Ned as a patient in the fall of my internship year, right after my sister had a psychotic break that started with voices and not being able to eat or sleep after giving up drinking. At one point she lay down in the aisle of an airplane so that the Black Jesus and White Jesus could talk to each other. I had zero clue drinking was a problem for her. I just thought she was unhappy some of the time because she was married to a jerk.

Harvard’s health services had taken me off lithium halfway through my second year, when I discovered during anatomy that
my thyroid was enlarged. After an ultrasound and a bunch of blood tests, it was determined that I had benign nodular thyromegaly and that the lithium the “vitamin doctors” had put me on might have something to do with it. I had some unsatisfactory sessions with the medical school shrink, who was annoyingly smug and fatherly. He didn’t have a diagnosis for whatever it was that had caused the three psychotic episodes in British Columbia, but going off the lithium was fine with me. I felt pretty much okay and all set forever.

When my sister got sick I hadn’t taken lithium for two years and my thyroid was still three times its normal size and lumpy. I was shaken and upset because no one else in my family seemed to be able to get it together to deal with anything and because there were too many dead-ringer parallels between my sister’s psychosis and mine and I still had no name for whatever it was I had. This was in 1979, eight years after my initial episodes. How could I be so sure I was finished with it if I didn’t know what it was?

I was the model of efficiency helping my sister in New York, at least partly because I was looking forward to telling Ned how it went.

I don’t tell Ned everything. The truth about the voices, my grandiosity, and flights of ideas would just upset him. He might feel the need to do something about them, and it would take more time than I have to reassure him that I’m really all right.

NED
: “So what about thinking that people don’t know who you really are or that the radio is talking about you or to you?”

ME
: “Not me, boss.”

The truth about the voices is that once you’ve heard them, they are always there, just more or less offstage and more or less
intelligible. Once you’ve been talked to by voices, it’s not possible to go back to a world where talking to voices is not possible. Having been crazy, I know that God can, if He wants, run me like a toy train.

NED
: “Do you ever ask God to help you with a diagnosis?”

ME
: “No.”

I actually had tried that and found out that physical diagnosis wasn’t one of God’s strengths. To be precise, what He said was, “Why do you think I created Harvard? I wouldn’t have bothered to send you to medical school if I knew you were going to come back to me with questions about physical diagnosis. You already know the patient doesn’t have appendicitis. Don’t bother me with crap like this again.”

“But… ”

So if I’m really so all right, why do I go see a psychiatrist at all?

Over the years I’ve come to care about Ned, and I think I go mostly to make sure he’s okay. He comforts me about my increasingly balky memory and moodiness by assuring me that his memory and tendency to fly off the handle are worse than mine. It works for me.

I still consider myself an early-Christianity scholar on a spiritual quest that happened to lead to medical school. Ned and I don’t talk much about early Christianity, but we could. I have a problem with Saint Paul, who never actually met Jesus, and with whoever it was who wrote the book of Revelation (it was definitely not Saint John). I also take issue with the idea that Jesus, after the Crucifixion and Resurrection, started working out and riding horses and having second thoughts about the Sermon on the Mount and the beatitudes. Where did this new muscular Christ come from? What are the four horsemen of the apocalypse
so pissed about? What situation could possibly be made better by unleashing war, pestilence, famine, and death?

Passing for normal hasn’t been a problem for me for a while now. I know how to dress and act and how to not exactly tell the truth about what’s going on. I could pass off the things that happened to me when I was crazy as just a bunch of craziness, but the problem is, when I’m trying my best to tell the truth to myself, I’m not sure I didn’t bargain God down from nuclear cataclysm to a relatively mild earthquake and stop my father from killing himself. I’m glad I got to meet and talk to Dostoyevsky, van Gogh, Beethoven, Freud, and Abraham Lincoln and continue to count them as good friends.

There was one thing I was very sure of in early sobriety, and that was that I shouldn’t talk to the woman who casually complimented my haircut one day. I knew that my friend Max knew her phone number—he owned the apartment she was living in—and I didn’t want not having her phone number to be the reason I wasn’t calling her. You have to wake up very early if you want to try to outthink me.

We had had a few tentative dates after we were recruited to help out an underpowered softball team. I think it was the IT-support department of Boston University. I was coaching first base, and she hit a solid line drive in the gap between right and center field, so when she got to first I told her to go to second. She stopped dead in her tracks, turned to me, and said, “Don’t tell me what to do.”

We were married six years later.

——

It hasn’t escaped Barb that I go to my psychiatrist mostly to see how he’s doing. She’s not sure I shouldn’t see someone else.

“They’d have problems too,” I point out. “Then I’d have two psychiatrists to worry about.”