Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So Read Free Page A

the vine forest and out the other side, where the abandoned apple orchard and old foundation were. I could hit that wall of green at a full run with a knife and fishing rod and disappear. I doubt anyone could have followed me even if they saw where I went in. I built wolf dens in the vine forest next to the pond and imagined I could live there if I had to. My mother was storing canned goods and water in the crawlspace under the house in case of nuclear war.
    I was mostly left alone to figure things out. If I’d been raised by wolves, I would have known a little less, but not much less, about how normal people did things. My notions about how tobrush my teeth, what could be left out of the refrigerator for how long, and where knives and forks and spoons went were odd. Having been raised by wolves would have given me an excuse. But I just had beautiful, slightly broken, self-absorbed parents like a lot of other people. One of the things I couldn’t figure out was why I had such lousy handwriting and why I couldn’t spell.
    I fought at school almost every day during grades three, four, and five. I won most fights and was never mad or emotional about it. It was just the way it was.
    What I liked best about the stories of children raised by wolves was that everyone snuggled in together in a nice warm den. And then there was the part when the people find you and teach you how to talk and wear clothes.

    I had a rich, full, and seemingly complete world before I knew much. My father tried to explain about sex to me when I said “Fuck you” after a chess game. I said it in a perfectly cordial way; it was something I had heard and was trying to use in a sentence. Kurt told me something about going to the bathroom in the same toilet that sounded highly improbable.
    When I knocked a few dozen bricks out of a partitioning halfwall under the barn and started making a bomb shelter, it was meant as a present to my father. It was something I thought he would have gotten around to eventually. I was surprised that he wasn’t more pleased. He thought that knocking those bricks out made it more likely that the already wobbly barn would fall over.
    At this time in my life, my father was a proudly antisocialman who spent most of his time at a typewriter, reflecting negatively on his neighbors and society, throwing in things like “Goddamn it, you’ve got to be kind.” The emphasis was on the
Goddamn it
. He was proud of the fact that I had no friends.
    Later, I could never get used to him dressing nicely and talking nicely and smoothly navigating social situations with people he had taught me to hate. I thought, and still think, he taught me to play chess partly to make sure I didn’t fit in with the locals my age.
    When I was ten I told my mother I wanted to kill myself. I was failing at school and sports and fighting every day and had been studying poisons. My mother told me that bright young idealistic people like myself were going to save the world. It was a successful play for time. Before I killed myself I should at least join forces with all the other suicidal ten-year-olds and give saving the world a try. When the sixties came around and there didn’t seem to be any adult plans worth much, I thought my mother’s solution was coming to pass. Making the world a place worth saving was up to the outcasts. Who would have guessed in the fifties that there would be such a thing as hippies?
    When I had three psychotic breaks in three months and I didn’t think getting better was possible, my childhood looked particularly dark and dismal. Now, not so bad.
    I liked to take my fishing rod and my bike and go through the woods looking for hidden ponds, which I imagined had never been fished before except maybe by Indians a long time ago. Dense rings of brambles and underbrush protected the ponds and fish.
    One bright sunny August afternoon I was cruising the dirtback roads that ran along the spine of the Cape and went straight instead of