The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  PREFACE TO THE 2002 EDITION

  PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION SCHIZOPHRENIA

  Chapter 1 - TRAVELING HOPEFULLY

  Chapter 2 - ARRIVING

  Chapter 3 - ROUNDS TWO, THREE, AND GOING HOME

  Chapter 4 - LETTER TO ANITA

  AFTERWORD

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE FOR MARK VONNEGUT’S

  THE EDEN EXPRESS

  “A searching, vivid account…of the inside of a schizophrenic breakdown, the struggle to recover, to understand.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A painfully honest document of life in transition.”

  —Time

  “A remarkable book.”

  —The Atlantic

  “Mark Vonnegut’s remembrance of what it was like in the 1960s is not only a memoir about his loss of political and social innocence, and ours, but a surprisingly good-natured trip through his own head.… A highly readable, touching, and affectingly vulnerable book.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Considerable courage and endurance lie behind this unpretentious and enlightening memoir.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “His description of his schizophrenic experiences are not only convincing from a clinical standpoint but are written in an engaging style, with an admirable lack of self-pity. His story is worth reading.”

  —Library Journal

  “A disarmingly open, engrossing, oddly graceful chronicle.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  To Mark Adin Boles. If not for you I wouldn’t have bothered to fight.

  To my father. Without you I wouldn’t have known how to fight.

  To J. Ross MacLean. Without you I never would have stopped fighting.

  FOREWORD

  A MOVIE ACTOR TELEPHONED me a couple of years after this book was published. We had never met, but he knew my son had gone crazy and then recovered. His own son was going crazy, and he was in need of advice. He asked how my son was, and I told him Mark had just graduated from Harvard Medical School. He said, “Some remission!” I said, “We were lucky, and I certainly hope you will be lucky, too.”

  That was the best I could do back then. That is the best I could do right now. Put another way: Some people survived going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Others didn’t. The turbulence is really something.

  My son Mark’s most unsociable performance when bananas, and before I could get him into a Canadian laughing academy, was to babble on and on, and then wing a cue ball through a picture window in an urban commune in Vancouver, British Columbia. It was only then that his flower children friends telephoned me to say he was in need of a father.

  God bless telephones.

  Mark’s dear mother Jane Marie, née Cox, now dead, a Quaker and, like Mark, a graduate of the Quaker college Swarthmore in Pennsylvania, would often tell him that he was supposed to save the world. His college major had been religion, and he had not yet considered becoming what he has indeed become, a pediatrician. One seeming possibility before he went nuts was that he study for the Unitarian ministry.

  He was then twenty-two, and I myself was a mere spring chicken of forty-seven, a mere thirty-two years ago. By the time Mark and I went in a hired car from the house with the busted picture window in Vancouver to what turned out to be an excellent private mental hospital in nearby New Westminster, he had at least become a jazz saxophonist and a picture painter. He babbled merrily en route, and it was language, but the words were woven into vocal riffs worthy of his hero John Coltrane.

  While we awaited Mark’s admission in the front lobby of the Canuck loony bin, which, one has to say, had the therapeutically unfortunate name “Hollywood Hospital,” Mark dug both hands into a big bowl of sand and cigarette butts. When a male nurse appeared to greet us, Mark started painting a picture with his filthy fingers on the bosom of the man’s white uniform. The nurse couldn’t have been nicer about that.

  So Mark eventually recovered his sanity, as, so I am told, the movie actor’s son did not.

  And I recall now a time when I pondered buying from a gift shop a pretty object sacred to believers in a faith I knew nothing about. Only kidding, I asked the woman who waited on me if she thought it would bring me bad luck if I treated it disrespectfully. Only kidding, she replied, “That depends, I would think, on how many hostages you have given to fortune.”

  I found her answer so unexpectedly eloquent and poignant that I supposed it to be a quotation. I have since looked it up. It was written by Francis Bacon, and reads in full: “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.”

  Indeed, indeed!

  Last summer I was sitting on the back porch of one of seven hostages I gave to fortune. This was right before sunset, so all shadows were long. We faced a pleasant but featureless meadow, not all of it his property, bounded by darkening woodland several hundred yards straight in front of us. And this former hostage, this pediatrician, this saxophonist and painter and writer and chess player, and father of two grown sons, said our children, meaning America’s children, were in those woods.

  Mark Vonnegut, MD, who had to take a lot of pre-med courses before he got into med school, said the children would have to cross that unmarked meadow before they could join us on our porch as grownups. He said new technologies had removed all guide posts from the meadow, so it was no longer a simple matter to decide what to do with a life. And there were moreover landmines between them and us.

  I said, “Doc, you were so crazy a third of a century ago. How come you’re so obviously OK now?”

  And he said, “My case was a mild one.”

  KURT VONNEGUT

  April 30, 2002

  New York City

  PREFACE TO THE 2002 EDITION

  IT’S EASY TO FORGET how intense the ’60s were.

  If you had told the twelve-year-old boy who was me growing up on Cape Cod that Jack Kennedy would be shot and killed, that Martin Luther King and then Bobby Kennedy, all three bearing extraordinarily reasonable peaceful messages of hope and change, would also be shot and killed, that my father, whom I knew principally as a guy who muttered over a typewriter and sometimes tipped over the chess board if there was no better move, would become a counterculture hero, and that I, myself, would have a BA in religion, a full beard, and hair halfway down my back and set out to establish a self-sufficient commune twelve miles by boat from the nearest road or electric light in the Coast Range of British Columbia I would have doubted your sanity.

  Over and over, the hopes and dreams and chances of many in my generation for any kind of ease or routine went from bad to worse. We did the best we could.

  National Guard troops really did fire on and kill college students.

  There was an ever-widening range of what might happen next. We did the best we could.

  Most of our parents and professors, who were experiencing all this newness and trauma at the same time we were, lost confidence they had advice or help worth giving.

  We truly didn’t know that drugs were bad for you. How could we have known for sure that drugs weren’t good? For many of us experimenting with drugs was more a matter of covering all the bases in a search for what might be helpful and positive. Getting high or escaping was not the point.

  It wasn’t that hard to live without electricity and other conveniences on next to no money. I loved working sun up to sun down building a house, cutting firewood, and making a garden. Even if I didn’t really know how to do these things, and made many laughabl
e mistakes, it was a welcome change from arguing about how to end war, and racism, and poverty. And I didn’t have to worry that my efforts were somehow subsidizing death and destruction. The biggest problems were boredom and getting along with the other people.

  By the time I started hearing voices, ten years later, it was just one more thing. I assumed that everyone was hearing voices. I asked someone on the couch next to me, “So what do your voices tell you?” They got up and walked away.

  At the time I would have endorsed the radical notions of R. D. Laing that insanity was a sane reaction to an insane society. Leaving the insane society to set up an independent self-sufficient commune seemed like a very sensible noble brave thing to do—plus it figured to be good for my mental health. Had I gone crazy in Boston or New York I would have blamed my culture and society without a second thought. The arguments were all packed, polished, and ready to fly.

  Looking at mental health problems the same way we look at other medical problems is factually correct—the best bet for reducing the disabling symptoms and the only way to lessen the stigma and blame that traditionally double or triple the pain.

  There is nothing good about being mentally ill except that it gave me a strong and undiluted desire to not be mentally ill. That has been useful. Being so useless has made me permanently grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to be useful. Being so unable to take care of myself has made me glad for the time I’ve not had to be dependent on the wisdom, good intentions, and skills of others.

  I’m honored that people still want to read a book I wrote twenty-seven years ago. I wish I had been able to write another book between then and now. I’m still trying. But my biggest joy and best education and proudest achievement has been being able to show up for work and life and not cause too much trouble a day at a time in spite of my hysterical, somewhat dramatic, nature.

  MARK VONNEGUT

  September 2002

  PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION SCHIZOPHRENIA

  MOST DISEASES CAN BE separated from one’s self and seen as foreign intruding entities. Schizophrenia is very poorly behaved in this respect. Colds, ulcers, flu, and cancer are things we get. Schizophrenic is something we are. It affects the things we most identify with as making us what we are.

  If this weren’t problem enough, schiz comes on slow and comes on fast, stays a minute or days or years, can be heaven one moment, hell the next, enhance abilities and destroy them, back and forth several times a day and always weaving itself inextricably into what we call ourselves. It can transform only a small corner of our lives or turn the whole show upside down, always giving few if any clues as to when it came or when it left or what was us and what was schiz.

  If it seems I tell too much here and too little there, I’ve honestly done the best I can. I honestly don’t know which parts of what follows are schizophrenia, just my particular schizophrenia, living in our times, trying to be a good hippie, or whatever.

  If I had had a well-defined role in a stable culture, it might have been far simpler to sort things out. For a hippie, son of a counterculture hero, B.A. in religion, genetic biochemical disposition to schizophrenia, setting up a commune in the wilds of British Columbia, things tended to run together.

  1

  TRAVELING HOPEFULLY

  It is a better thing to travel hopefully than it is to arrive.

  —R. L. Stevenson

  JUNE 1969: SWARTHMORE GRADUATION. The night before, someone had taken white paint and painted “Commence What?” on the front of the stage. The maintenance crew had dutifully covered it over with red, white, and blue bunting, but we all knew it was there. We sat there more or less straight-faced, listening to how well educated we were, how we were supposed to save the world, etc. Most of us were wearing arm bands to let the world know exactly where we stood on the war. “What a swell bunch of moral people,” thought I. “With us on the loose, corruption and evil don’t stand a chance.”

  To pass the time, to try to figure out where I was and get some sort of lead on what the hell to do next, I had written my own commencement address.

  “Members of the class of ’69, parents, faculty, etc., greetings. Here we are on a fine sunny June day to celebrate and commemorate the graduation of 207 fine young men and women from this fine institution of higher learning.

  “One of the things I’m taken by when I look out on a group like this one is how hard people have tried to do nice things for you. The financial cost of your education alone is staggering, but it doesn’t begin to tell the story. In a process that goes back generation upon generation countless sacrifices have been made in your name. The list is endless. It ranges from World War II to making do with margarine instead of butter. You’ve been given the best of everything from prenatal care to college professors. Your grandparents, parents, teachers, and others have burned a lot of midnight oil trying to figure out how to make life more pleasant for you. One of the things they came up with is a liberal arts education, which is what today is all about.

  “By and large, you’re not a thankful lot. A lot of you feel terribly cheated and that a liberal arts education is a pile of shit. You feel you’ve been conned into wasting four years of precious time. I don’t find your bitterness entirely misplaced. After all, here you are at the ridiculous age of twenty-one, with virtually no real skills except as conversationalists. Let me remark, in passing, what fantastic conversationalists you are. Most of you have mastered enough superficial information and tricks of the trade to be able to hold conversations with virtually anyone about anything. This is one of the reasons you’re such big hits at your parents’ parties. Being a good conversationalist is really what a liberal arts education is all about.

  “Well, as I was saying, your bitterness is not entirely out of line. For one thing, no one has the faintest idea about what you should do next. But lest you be too bitter, let me point out that knowing a college education is a pile of shit is no small lesson. There are many people who don’t know it. In fact, probably most people don’t know it. There is surely no better place to learn this lesson than at college. In any event, you can console yourselves by knowing that you won’t waste time and make fools of yourselves later in life thinking how different it all would have been if only you had gone to college. Now that you have your degree, you can say what a pile of shit college is and no one can accuse you of sour grapes.”

  My girl friend, Virginia, was in the audience with my parents, watching me and my classmates receive our precious advice and shiny new degrees.

  “Well, Virge” (which is what I usually called her), “I imagine seeing a moving ceremony like that must have taken care of any silly notion you might have had about dropping out.”

  She wasn’t thinking that seriously about dropping out. She had only a year to go and had seen too many friends get hung up explaining, justifying, and agonizing over whether or not to go back. Dropping out was too much work. The most efficient thing to do was get it the hell out of the way.

  Our plans were vague. We had been offered a place to stay in Boston for the summer. We hoped we could find interesting jobs and I’d find some way around the draft. Virginia would go back to finish at Swarthmore and then we’d see what came up.

  VIRGINIA. There was something about us that fitted together. Tumblers moved and we locked together. There were some dreadfully unhappy times, but we both needed other things more than happiness. It was those other things that we were all about.

  Virginia, Virginia, Virginia, how did my life get so mixed up with yours? It was spring, my senior, your junior year. I was lonely. So were you. We started walking together and talking together, mostly me talking, babbling on like an utter fool, wishing you’d say more and trying to get up the nerve to kiss you. It wasn’t like it had been with other girls at all. For one thing, you weren’t pretty at all the way other girl friends of mine had been pretty. You were pretty but a weird pretty. Your legs were much too perfect to be quite human.

  You were very different f
rom other women I had been attracted to. Had I met you earlier I would have thought you were almost ugly, nose much too big and poorly defined, narrow, low forehead, cheek-bones high and spread, but you carried it all with such grace and dignity. Most women seemed to be either attractive or unattractive and that was that. I have never before or since met anyone who was as beautiful to me when you were beautiful or as ugly when you were ugly. Your awesome range transfixed me, and always those legs which were too perfect to be quite human.

  Everything about you seemed like a magnet. The house you rented with five other girls was the spawning of a new spirit. The five guys and I who rented a house a few miles away were all weird, but we were weird in a boisterous individual way that seemed sure to die as soon as school was over. There was a unity to your weirdness that went beyond all eating out of the same refrigerator, vegetarian communal meals, and heavy political raps, which were admittedly all new to me. I and most of my friends agreed with you point by point all down the line, but there was something beyond the points that was very different. In any event, I didn’t waste much time hopping aboard to try to figure out just what this difference was all about.

  Our first date, if you can call it that, came out of one of my increasingly frequent and doubtless unsubtle wooing visits to your house. We were all having a quiet cup of tea.

  Everything seemed peaceful and nice. You went into the kitchen and suddenly all hell broke loose. Someone hadn’t washed the dishes. Your voice was short and clipped, your face set, your eyes filled with total disgust. Everyone scurried around meekly, trying to stay out of your way. It was an impressive show.