Another Kind of Madness

by Stephen Hinshaw

  As for my own start of college, ominous clouds occluded the Boston skyline as we exited the turnpike in our station wagon. In Cambridge, heading up Massachusetts Ave. toward Harvard Square in the steady rain, vans and trucks appeared through the windshield wipers, young people lifting boxes from tailgates and trunks, covering their heads with jackets or newspapers. Was I really one of them?

  The next day was sparkling, early fall in its glory. “Will you be scared, Steve, living in a dorm like this?” Sally asked as we walked up the three flights to the suite in Massachusetts Hall. The sign on the side revealed its date of origin, 1720.

  “I think it will be kind of cool,” I replied, a bit too jauntily.

  For our final dinner we found a restaurant in another part of town. It was festive, the air outside soft. But with the farewell looming, the scraped feeling inside my eyes and throat had thwarted my appetite. We finally headed back to campus. Glimmering in the moonlight, the silent Charles River was on our left. Just a few more minutes and my new life would begin.

  The problem was that my legs seemed to be cast in cement. Who would I be once I was outside this sticky sense of duty and familiarity, this tangle of awkward silence? Which was stronger—the force pulling me toward a different life or the one holding me in the car, the gravity of a heavier planet?

  Harvard Square had little traffic at 10:00 p.m. Dad made a sharp right turn into the Yard, the gate open all day for cars to drop off eager freshmen before orientation. We were the last ones there in the darkness. As he pulled to a stop, the car held a ghostly silence.

  “Thanks for everything, everybody,” I managed to say in a hoarse whisper; “I can’t believe you drove me all the way out here just to see me off.”

  “We’ve had a good time here in Cambridge, haven’t we?” said Mom.

  “I’ll miss you all,” I replied.

  “I’ll miss you, Stevie,” Sally said, as my heart tugged until it almost snapped. Images flooded my mind: the tiny girl who bit my arm, my constant companion on family trips, our made-up language when we were young, her ballet recitals, our cats. The calls to the house years ago when friends of the family would ask: “Is this Steve or Sally? I can’t tell your voices apart!”

  Dad looked proud but tired. It would be a long drive back to Ohio the following day. “All best, son,” he said, reaching back to shake my hand.

  Just as I prepared to say farewell to Mom I saw her shoulders shaking up in the front seat. A moment later her whole body heaved. Chin down, arms limp at her sides, she had burst into silent convulsions. The tears streamed down her cheeks, her face wracked in despair. Everyone froze. Who had ever seen such emotion from her? Finally she sat up.

  “I was overcome,” she murmured, embarrassed. I awkwardly reached across the seat. “Stevie, we’re so proud,” she said, trying to smile.

  “Good-bye, Mom; I love you.” I gave her the best hug I could at my cramped angle. Too late, it dawned on me what kind of support I’d been for her the past 17 years.

  “Good-bye, Steve, we all love you.”

  I somehow left the car, turning to wave as three hands appeared through the car’s windows. The taillights slipped away as Dad entered the flow of traffic. There’s no way I could have stayed back, I told myself. With rubbery legs I lurched forward and pulled on the heavy door of my building. Had it been recast in lead? But once on the stairs, with each successive step I felt lighter, almost buoyant. Reaching the fourth-floor landing, I placed the key in the lock.

  I was thinking of pre-med, maybe psychiatry or neurology. Those books of Freud I’d started to read in high school, discussing all that goes on in the mind of which we’re not even aware, had pulled me in. I played freshman football, trekking across the bridge each afternoon to the mentholated smell of balms and athletic tape. I went to weekend parties in Harvard Yard, hardly believing how much some of the guys could drink, the sweet scent of marijuana pouring out from dorm windows. I’d overcome enough inhibitions to try both.

  A notice about freshman seminars had caught my eye, especially the one on social deviance, a year-long course on behavior outside social norms, blending psychology, sociology, and anthropology. To get accepted, applicants had to be interviewed. At the small office in Harvard Yard, Dr. Perschonok was intense but kind, with a sharp nose and wrinkled brow. Once an idea took hold, his pensiveness gave way to delighted enthusiasm. Through his thick Eastern European accent he began with a few general questions and then politely inquired as to what form of deviance most interested me.

  I opened my mouth but no sound emerged. Flash-frozen, I was back in right field, immobile. In what seemed forever but lasted perhaps 15 seconds, the shame spread over me like a rash. If I’d had any experience at all in discussing the realities of mental illness, I would have spoken of my father’s experiences and perhaps the puzzle of serious mental disorder more generally. But I drew a blank. Clearly, I wouldn’t get into this seminar or any other. Breaking the agonizing silence, Perschonok gently suggested a topic or two to help me recover. Defeated, I skulked from the room. I felt like walking further west, perhaps to Ohio.

  No surprise as I rushed to the notice board the next day: My name was not among the admitted group of ten students. Yet a small waiting list appeared at the bottom, with my name somehow included. Each time I went back to check, I’d moved up the list. Some of the original acceptees must have found other courses. By the end of the week I’d miraculously moved to the top group.

  Excitement filled the air, with radical ideas in psychology and politics dominating discussions, the stimulation constant. But who was I? A Midwestern carryover into football and pre-medicine, or an increasingly long-haired student with a few ideas? There was a faint vibration ringing through my mind, the faint pedal point of a distant melody. I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  Before returning to Ohio for Christmas, I wondered what gift to get for Dad. Intrigued by the seminar on social deviance, I thought of one of its readings, R. D. Laing’s The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, his philosophical and psychological treatise on the nature of schizophrenia. I was enthralled by its premise, that mental illness was the result of social forces and communication styles. Sure that Dad would be intrigued by its ideas, I purchased the paperback.

  On Christmas morning I wondered whether I still belonged in the rituals I’d experienced since boyhood. When Dad opened the wrapping paper of my gift in the family room, over by the tree, he looked as though he’d been slapped, averting his eyes and mumbling a hollow thanks. Something had struck a nerve, but what?

  A few hours later, the household was getting ready for our holiday dinner. As I walked through the living room I heard Mom and Dad nearby in the study, their voices furtive. “Why do you think he got me this book?” Dad asked, shock in his voice.

  “Well, he knows something,” Mom replied.

  “Yes, he must,” Dad murmured. But if I did know something, I wasn’t sure what. How much did I know before I knew?

  Back in Cambridge in early January, the winter yielded a few magical days after snowstorms, the river frozen over, trees covered in white. Inevitably, though, everything turned to gray slush within a day. Two months later I walked through campus, spring threatening to emerge from the bleak skies. Pools of shallow, dirty water covered the ground, replacing the ice from a few weeks earlier. Bustling, I felt almost clammy in my sweater but the wind was frigid whenever I stopped at a corner. I looked toward the river just in time to see a sharp ray of sunlight pierce the cloud cover. Reflexively, I raised my hand to shield my eyes.

  Arriving on my landing, I couldn’t see the key I’d retrieved from my pocket. Shutting my eyes, I tried to will away the inevitable, but the lightning bolt of light was now in place. After additional full-on migraines in high school—always in the spring, always following the experience of glare—I knew all too well what was coming. Twenty minutes later, like clockwork, the pain began to pierce the side of my skull. The worst part was always the
inevitability, the certainty that nothing could prevent what was to come. After a few immobile hours, I felt again that I’d swallowed the contents of a swamp. Rushing to the bathroom, I heaved and retched over the toilet. Finally, I descended into a numbed sleep.

  In the morning I lifted myself up out of my bed. I was back to normal but not just normal. Colors were vivid, tastes sensuous, the air fresh with possibility. My whole being had a brisk vitality. Why couldn’t my body and spirit be this vibrant every day? I was astounded at the utter difference between debilitating pain and the transcendence afterward. The extremes were baffling.

  *

  Back from spring break, and after my dad opened up about his mental illness, things seemed strangely familiar but at the same time everything was different. For a few days I wasn’t sure of my whereabouts. Was I actually in Cambridge? Or still lingering in Columbus? Or perhaps inside Norwalk Hospital, listening to screams on the ward all night long?

  Rushing to class the following week, I stopped in my tracks. At the upper edge of my vision I made out faint yellow-green buds emerging from the branches of the ancient trees filling the lawn, the late-arriving New England spring finally here. Peering into a pale canopy of hope, I clutched my secret covenant. Years in the making, the fortress of silence surrounding my entire life had been shattered by Dad’s words. In its wake lay an underground river, strong and swift, the current propelling me on a wave of family, history, and perhaps even hope. I now had a mission: to understand Dad’s experiences and the mysteries of serious mental illness. His secrets had been locked inside him for years, as though preserved in amber. Who else had ever heard him talk like that?

  But as the weeks went by dread competed with hope, as I sensed the family legacy of mental illness closing in around me. All my planning and control, each of my small accomplishments: Maybe they were just a house of cards, ready to collapse in the next breeze. By the early 1970s my twin and adoption studies had debunked the myth that parenting practices cause schizophrenia. Instead, genes were the main culprit. Deadly strands of DNA must lurk inside each of my cells, counting down to the end of my sanity. But when would it happen?

  In high school I’d read Lost Horizon, a novel Mom taught and loved. After his plane had crashed in the Himalayas in the 1930s, the main character, Conway, discovered the hidden enclave of Shangri-La, protected from the world and its growing conflicts. Orienting to the mystery of the lamasery, he began to feel at peace. The High Lama soon told him of the miraculous nature of the setting: People who stayed there attained the ability to live for hundreds of years, approaching immortality. Unlike anyone else who’d ever heard the news, Conway was intrigued, embracing this miraculous opportunity. Finally nearing death, the High Lama appointed Conway as his successor. Filled with a blend of honor and apprehension, Conway hesitated, unsure whether he could manage the responsibility.

  I identified, realizing that I’d been appointed to solve Dad’s lifelong problems. Our talk had released a small dose of poison from the plastic skins of those long-ago balloons. Once out in the open, might it convert into an inoculation small enough to build protection and immunity? Or was it lethal?

  The hardest times came at night. From my narrow dorm bed I wondered how Dad survived those months in mental hospitals. Mental hospitals! The worst places in the world, I was certain, stark settings for those who’d reached the point of no return. Some of his fellow inmates, with their misshapen heads, were society’s hidden freak show, banished to live forever out of everyone’s sight. When might I join the damned, next in line to lose control over my mind?

  Each second I lay awake compounded the last. Vultures circling their prey, thoughts of Dad’s madness crowded my mind. Through the fractured logic of the wee hours I became convinced that if I remained sleepless until dawn, I’d reach a divide. The morning light would be a signal that I’d crossed into irrationality, the chaotic flow of my thoughts unchecked. The only weapon was to hold on, white-knuckled, and try to sleep. Fighting panic, I somehow drifted off. In the morning I was shocked when my mind was still intact. But how many more nights could this go on?

  Daytime brought possibilities. My energetic roommate Bill worked as a Big Brother at Columbia Point, one of Boston’s worst housing projects. While there, he’d learned that a mom with two young boys but no dad in sight needed help. I took the T to meet them. There was something about boys needing guidance that drew me in. Jerry was eight but his eyes already had a probing, adult look. He pushed limits but showed real wisdom, craftiness interleaved with insight. Bobby, six, floated above the ground when he walked, his thin limbs lighter than air, his long blond hair a tangle. Over the next three years, on Sunday afternoons I showed them where to put their fingers on the laces of a football. We might take the train downtown to the Museum of Science or aquarium, ending up at their mom’s crowded housing-project apartment, once they’d moved to South Boston. I saved up and got Bruins or Celtics tickets high in the nosebleed seats, the cigarette haze half-masking the players below. In the spring I found bleacher seats at Fenway for the Sox. I owed something to the world for my gift of sanity, as long as I had it.

  That spring Barb told me that she’d met someone else back at college. For a day or two I was crushed but soon felt relief. Not that I could ever end a relationship myself. The thought of initiating a break-up felt like ejecting myself into the blackness of space, drifting without oxygen through eternity. Yet Barb had done the work for me.

  I half-dreaded the parties and mixers I attended, never quite knowing what to say for small talk. But at one, across the river at Boston University, I met a tall freshman who seemed intriguing and felt an instant spark. We walked the wet streets, talking until late. Heading to her dorm to pick her up the following weekend, I felt almost sophisticated in my corduroy sport jacket and faded jeans. Later that evening she filled me in, furtively, about her former boyfriend, an older guy from the Navy. “You can’t believe the feeling when a guy you’re into slowly undresses you. Every nerve in your body is exposed.”

  Excited beyond belief, I wondered if I could rise to the challenge. But our quick love affair overwhelmed me. What might it mean to be that close to someone? Could I tell her what I’d learned from Dad? In the end I couldn’t bring myself to call her back. Loneliness was better than exposure.

  Vietnam, how the brain processes information, the origins of creativity: Each evening dorm conversations grew intense. The grass I smoked took the edge off my worries, as excitement filled the spring air. The social deviance seminar was reaching its conclusion, probing why societies form ingroups and outgroups and whether psychoactive medications are overmarketed agents of social control or needed treatments for biologically based forms of mental illness. Scrambling, I tried to ride the crest.

  In late May, the athletic department announced a meeting for freshmen intending to try out for varsity football in the fall. The whole thing felt like past history but the memory of my near-miss in tenth grade was close at hand. I entered the classroom to see a crowd of eager guys awaiting instructions from the assistant coach. Yet there was something about the way my stomach was feeling, plus all that congestion inside my head, that blocked my focus. I listened for a few minutes but coursework beckoned. Realizing that this chapter of my life was over, I tiptoed to the door. Just as I put my hand on the knob, the coach spotted me, as his derisive words rang out: “Look, men, there’s one who’s not sure he can stand the heat.” The sound of laughter filled my ears.

  Back in my room I tried to study but couldn’t concentrate. Exhausted but strangely wired, I went to bed on the early side but my head was too clogged to sleep. The pattern had started back in ninth-grade football when I was a defensive back, trying to tackle a running back downfield who had already made a big gain. Knocked down by a blocker and lying on the ground, I tried to grab the runner’s leg but another kid’s shoe got under my faceguard, his cleat almost crushing my nose. It wasn’t broken but I’d had trouble breathing ever since.

&nb
sp; My runaway thoughts took over: Just as the first pale morning light would appear behind my curtain following a sleepless night, I’d drop over a sharp edge, my mind spiraling out of control. The pattern was clear. Dad ended up at Norwalk after three nights without sleep, beginning his lifetime of mental illness. How could I just wait out a descent into madness? I had to do something.

  I remembered my migraines. When the pain reached its peak, the only relief was to give in to the crippling nausea and crouch by the toilet until my insides nearly burst. Maybe now, if I could rid that crud from my stomach and clear the congestion from my head, sleep might come. What other option did I have?

  As though in a trance, I hauled myself out of bed, hoping my roommates were asleep. I chugged some water from the faucet to make sure there was something inside to throw up, having digested dinner long ago. I looked down at the smooth white porcelain of the toilet and the dingy tiles of the bathroom floor. I bent down, my knee aching on the hard surface, leaned over the toilet, and stuck my fingers down my throat, way down, the way I sometimes had to during the final stages of a migraine when I couldn’t get it all out despite the raging nausea. What choice did I have? I was convinced that my sanity depended on it.

  The first gags and retches ended up in a futile cough. But I kept at it and the eruptions began to convulse my body, yellowish mucus and bile spewing forth into the glistening water. Gasping, I rinsed out my mouth, washed my hands, and stumbled back to bed, where, exhausted, I fell asleep. My eyes were tinged red in the morning. My body may have suffered but the purges had saved me. Hadn’t they?