Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) Read Online Free Page A

crazy, long before I had a son, and finally killed herself, I blamed chemicals, and I still do, although she had a terrible childhood. I can even name two of the chemicals: phenobarbital and booze. Those came from the outside, of course, the phenobarbs from our family doctor, who was trying to do something about her sleeplessness. When she died, I was a soldier, and my division was about to go overseas.
    “We were able to keep her insanity a secret, since it became really elaborate only at home and between midnight and dawn. We were able to keep her suicide a secret thanks to a compassionate and possibly politically ambitious coroner.
    “Why do people try so hard to keep such things a secret? Because news of them would make their children seem less attractive as marriage prospects. You now know a lot about my family. On the basis of that information, those of you with children contemplating marriage might be smart to tell them: Whatever you do, don’t marry anybody named Vonnegut.
    “Dr. Bruetsch couldn’t have helped my mother, and he was the greatest expert on insanity in the whole State of Indiana. Maybe he knew she was crazy. Maybe he didn’t. If he did know she was crazy after midnight, and he was very fond of her, he must have felt as helpless as my father. There was not then an Indianapolis chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, which might have helped. One would be founded by my father’s only brother, Alex, who was an alcoholic, in 1955 or so.
    “There—I’ve told you another family secret, haven’t I? About Uncle Alex?
    “Am I an alcoholic? I don’t think so. My father wasn’t one. My only living sibling, my brother, isn’t one.
    “But I am surely a great admirer of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Gamblers Anonymous, and Cocaine Freaks Anonymous, and Shoppers Anonymous, and Gluttons Anonymous, and on and on. And such groups gratify me as a person who studied anthropology, since they give to Americans something as essential to health as vitamin C, something so many of us do not have in this particular civilization: an extended family. Human beings have almost always been supported and comforted and disciplined and amused by stable lattices of many relatives and friends until the Great American Experiment, which is an experiment not only with liberty but with rootlessness, mobility, and impossibly tough-minded loneliness.
    “I am a vain person, or I would not be up here, going ‘Blah, blah, blah.’ I am not so vain, however, as to imagine that I have told you anything you didn’t already know—except for the trivia about my mother, my Uncle Alex, and my son. You deal with unhappy people hour after hour, day after day. I keep out of their way as much as possible. I am able to follow the three rules for a good life set down by the late writer Nelson Algren, a fellow depressive, and another subject of the study of writers made at the University of Iowa. The three rules are, of course: Never eat at a place called Mom’s, never play cards with a man named Doc, and most important, never go to bed with anybody who has more troubles than you do.
    “All of you, I am sure, when writing a prescription for mildly depressed patients, people nowhere as sick as my mother or my son were, have had a thought on this order: ‘I am so sorry to have to put you on the outside of a pill. I would give anything if I could put you inside the big, warm life-support system of an extended family instead.’ “
    That was the end of my speech to all those mental health workers in Philadelphia. They said afterward that I had
shared,
and that they hadn’t expected me to
share
(i.e., to spill the beans about myself and my own family). I had with me copies of my son’s own comments on his scary case, which I passed out to anyone interested. They can be found as well in the Appendix to this book, where I have put a lot of other stuff which, if not so segregated, might slow us down. (I have also sped things up by putting digressions,