Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So by M.D. Mark Vonnegut

without its problems. As soon as someone who has been crazy can pass for normal, he is offered a witness relocation program with a new diagnosis and a new childhood if necessary. Everyone needs reassurance that the beast has been contained. If you’re going to go nuts over and over, why bother to get an education, a job, or a date for Saturday night?
    I had a number of notes to self about voodoo, ESP, and other forms of belief in things unseen that seemed related to the voices and ideas of reference. These things were harmless for others but not so good for me. I’d had my fill, and then some, of “Wow.”
    Having a not entirely reasonable expectation that things will go well turns out to be exactly the sort of delusion that increases your chances for success in this world, be it getting into medical school or whatever. If in fact you are skating on thin ice, the last thing you want to do is slow down and think about it. Once I made it through the process and was actually admitted to medical school, my unreasonable expectation that things would go well became retroactively reasonable.
    I bought some Brooks Brothers clothes. I regained the twenty pounds I’d lost and then some. I had a mustache for a while and then ended up clean-shaven. I looked younger than I was. There was a chip on my shoulder the size of Montana, but nobody noticed. Why had such a nice guy like me been so rudely put upon and interrupted?
    I had three more articles published. I was running and liftingweights. I had a girlfriend. Someone wanted to publish my book. I enrolled at Harvard Medical School. I was a goddamned panzer division. I’ll never know if a less disciplined, less vigilant, less muscular me would have done as well. I was burning the candle at too many ends and getting away with it.
    I should have been a doctor
.

    Note to self: Being Kurt’s son, being an ex–mental patient, getting into Harvard, having written a book, and being a doctor are all things that in and of themselves do not make a life. If you lean on them too hard, you’ll find that there’s not much there. But if you add up enough things that aren’t in and of themselves enough, it almost starts to add up to something.…

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

    (Vonnegut family photo)

    Pickup game

    (Photo by Barb Vonnegut)

chapter 6
Bow Wow Boogie
    The older we get, the better we were
.
    —United States Marine Corps motto
    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