Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So (25 page)

The difference between me and crazy people who have not done well is
not much
. Melville Weston Fuller Wallace III was one of my mother’s favorite friends of mine. We met working together at a restaurant when we were both seventeen. He lived mostly at our house one summer, and one of my sisters had a crush on him. One Fourth of July when I was nineteen I was visiting with him at his parents’ New York apartment. I had had too much to drink, and he was shushing me and taking care of me. He was no more or less schizophrenic than I was, but that’s his current diagnosis. He was a pretty good painter and a pretty good musician. I had my first episode three years later. He had his a year after that, when he was twenty-three. He and I have both been married twice. He’s homeless now and writes me heartbreakingly difficult-to-decipher letters and sends me beautiful geometric watercolors.

I went looking for him once in L.A., along the Santa Monica boardwalk. It had been so long since I had seen Fuller that I had no idea what he might look like. I talked to about twenty people who might have been Fuller, and many of them thought they probably knew who I was talking about, but no one was sure. I showed them his paintings and said that he played the flute.

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)

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.