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

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 wasblackouts 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