Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So (9 page)

Painted by Kurt over the dining room mantel in Barnstable, circa 1957

(Vonnegut family photo)

Pickup game

(Photo by Barb Vonnegut)

The Bow Wow Boogie was what we ended up calling our twenty-seven-inning softball marathon that took place the first weekend in August every year for thirty years. Just about everyone on the other team had gone to Harvard, but they wanted to be called the Boston Massacre. One summer in Cambridge they had made themselves into a softball team that was beating teams from the local Boston and Cambridge bars. Their captain had spent his summers in Barnstable and had beaten me for the under-sixteen Barnstable Yacht Club tennis championship, which was as close as I ever got to winning something in organized sports. He brought his team down for a weekend on the Cape and asked Steve, my cousin/brother/orphan, if he could get a team together so they could have someone to practice against. So Steve gathered a bunch of locals, including me. The baseball gods smiled on us and not them that day, and we won. Whenever we wanted to bother them we called them
Harvard
.

When I went to Harvard Medical School, some of my teammates jokingly asked if I’d have to change sides. I was and am anything but ashamed of getting into and going to Harvard, but I found myself shuffling and explaining unnecessarily that it was the only medical school that took me, which was true. It confuses people who didn’t go to Harvard when you try to avoid mentioning it or qualify it. And since you don’t have to do it with people who did go there, all the shucking and jiving you do has to be mostly for yourself.

The other day a patient told me that he had gotten into what was a very good college. “It’s not Harvard,” he said.

“Harvard’s not Harvard either,” I answered.

For the first Bow Wow Boogie I was just off Thorazine and there was no thought that Harvard would be a part of my life except as a place my father had once taught. The Harvard guys were on average a few years younger than we were, they were better athletes, they aged better and won more series than we did. They hit better, ran faster, and made fewer errors, but baseball is a funny game and we had our wonderful moments and days that were all the more tasty because they expected to win and got so pissed when they didn’t. We loved when they whined and snarled at one another.

We looked forward to the game all year, and when it was over we looked back on it remembering and talking about key plays, great catches, big hits. Everybody ran hard, threw hard, swung hard, and played hard, every play, every game. There was nothing
soft
about it. We were storing up things to make us feel good about ourselves for the rest of the year. It was my chance, and one I’m very grateful for, to make up for having gypped myself out of sports when I was younger.

I started out playing second base but switched over to catcher when a rational fear of hard-hit ground balls took hold of me and wouldn’t let go. Catching was hard too. I dreaded having to block the plate and catch the ball when runners churned around third base and headed for home. It cost me the use of my left hand for two months and a minor permanent deformity when two bones in my left hand snapped like pencils. I would have given anything to have held on to the ball, but I dropped it and the run scored. Even when I knew for sure that the hand was broken—it was swollen and misshapen—I splinted it and coached first base and went to the hospital later, after the softball was over.

Toward the end it was like there was a sniper in the woods. Because the signal to lunge left or right and how hard was based on how strong and flexible you used to be and what you used to weigh, things tended to snap on the first step and the unfortunate player gave a yelp, grabbed a knee, and fell down.

It seemed like one year I could throw accurately and the next it was anyone’s guess where the ball would go. I had been walking around with the false idea that if I caught a ball and threw it, I could control where it would go. The Yankees used to have a second baseman like that.

Once, toward the end, we let some of our eighteen- and nineteen-year-old sons play in the Bow Wow Boogie. It was horrible how beautifully they could run and throw.

When I was still young and the ball still went where I thought it would, I drank a lot at the postgame party and woke up at 2
A.M.
at a green light and wondered how long and for how many green lights I’d been sitting there. I’d heard that blackouts were a sign of alcoholism but figured what they meant was
blackouts when something bad happened. They should have said that rather than make normal people like me worry.

A few years before we quit the annual softball ritual, Vinny, the Harvard shortstop, was found dead in his rooming house, sitting in a chair dressed in a sport coat, next to an unopened six-pack. He died without bothering to fall over. We scattered his ashes at home plate the following August. As a medical student, one of the things I noticed about death was how little else happened. The patient who just died lies there quietly and everyone else stops rushing around trying to do something about it.

Vinny, like several of the Harvard softball players, had been good enough at sports to be recruited by several colleges. He had been the fastest, smartest, best-coordinated kid his small town had produced in a decade or so. His romance and charm lay in how well he did with what might have been and how gracefully he accepted what was. What Vinny was not graceful about or accepting of was making errors. He’d yell and swear and throw his glove and pick it up and throw it again. You could be sure that more errors were on the way. Up until Vinny made that first error, his demeanor and play were effortless, calm, and efficient. We spent considerable time trying to get Vinny to make an error as early in the first game as possible.

Trying to play sports as if you were twenty-something when you are fifty-something causes pain and suffering. Bones that years earlier would have flexed, shatter. Fractures that would have healed perfectly in six weeks take twelve and are never quite right. Tendonitis only gets better quickly if you are young. My cousin Steve needs his shoulders replaced and wonders if he should do both at once or one at a time.

I was expecting a slower decline.

——

I didn’t play much baseball as a child. Part of the reason was I couldn’t see the ball. For years I had gone up to the blackboard to read and copy questions. I didn’t wonder why no one else did that. None of my teachers seemed to think it was unusual. I also had far and away the worst handwriting and spelling in the class. Needing to get up to read the board was just one more thing about me that was a little off. Closer up I could see well enough to read and did well on standardized tests.

I got to be almost fourteen before I was diagnosed as having 20/300 vision. My mother asked why I hadn’t complained about things being blurry.

“Blurry compared to what?”

By the time I could see, Little League was done. In the sixties, aggression and competition were somehow implicated as root causes of war and misery and I was left high and dry as a pretty good athlete who loved trying to win whatever game was at hand. With the Bow Wow Boogie, it was a wonderful blessing to play softball every year with these guys who had been the Little League and high school stars. And if I came across a pickup game where they needed an extra player, I whacked the hell out of the ball and could play even more beautifully than I did in August. I don’t think I ever made an error or hit less than .600 in a pickup game. I have never anywhere run across people in their fifties who insist on playing twenty-seven innings of softball in midday August heat.

I can also make game-ending jump shots when I’m playing basketball playground pickup games with strangers but not if I’m playing with people I know.

At the age of thirty-nine, three months sober, recovering from what will hopefully be my last psychotic break and hospitalization,
I threw out a runner at third to preserve the tie in the top of the ninth and then got the game-winning hit in the bottom of the ninth with two outs and two strikes. I felt like complete crap that day and honestly don’t know how I did either thing.

At Vinny’s memorial service someone told me about watching him play football. I imagined a halfback so quick and strong he didn’t really need blockers. And he was gracious and kind to younger kids and kids who weren’t athletes.

What could be more contingent-dependent and improbable than the individual human?

Vinny quit Harvard midway through his second semester when he was accused of plagiarism. Everyone I’ve talked to was quite sure he hadn’t plagiarized, but honor was involved and Vinny preferred quitting school, full scholarship and all, to defending himself. He was a reliable and valued worker, but after Harvard he never did anything, more than barely, briefly, a step above a menial job.

I’ve lived long enough now that if I condense time and look back at people I grew up with who have died, it looks like a minute or so of Antietam. There’s not that much difference between leukemia, heart disease, flying into mountains, and bullets whizzing through the air. Maybe, because so few of my friends have been armed at the time of their death, it’s more like soft-shelled newly hatched sea turtles heading for the water and being eaten by hungry gulls.