Resilience

by Jessie Close

  Living downtown without a man in my life caused me to fall into my old habits. Each evening, I would meet my girlfriends at a restaurant and bar called Boodles to let off steam. Suzy would join us. We would congregate at the end of the bar, where there was a group of green-velvet-covered stools unofficially reserved for us. Liza Hella, a concert pianist and former San Francisco model and actress, Suzy, and I were the regulars. Sometimes my friend Pam Roberts, who produced documentary films, would be there, as well as some other women who owned downtown businesses. On some weekend nights, after the bar closed, we would move to Suzy’s house. The three of us were blondes, and we began getting quite a reputation for our antics and partying ways. At Boodles, I made fast friends with several men, as only drunks can do, over many drinks. Most were local businessmen who stopped in for a nightly drink or two. I told myself that I needed the adult company, but I was really after the alcohol.

  As I had predicted, the two businesses that I was managing had to be shut down, and I was out of work. Because we were living above them in a tiny apartment, I needed to find a new house for us. I was tired of walking everywhere and tired of living with three dogs and two children in such close quarters. I had to walk the dogs very late at night so no one would see they were off lead. Through a friend, I met Mike Shafer, a roofer with broad shoulders, huge biceps, and wild, long hair. We decided to share the cost of renting a house. I developed an immediate crush on him and started acting seductive. I would find one of his T-shirts lying around the house and breathe in his scent. I decided to try to get him into bed, but despite my efforts Mike spurned my advances. That had never happened before, and I was incredibly frustrated, but I learned that I could actually become friends with an attractive man without bedding him.

  Seven-year-old Mattie adored Mike, especially when he would hoist her up onto his shoulders and “gallop” from our house down the street to a Dairy Queen for ice cream. He taught her how to ride a bike. She also continued to see her father, Noah, who took her out for meals and on jaunts to visit his family.

  Mike tolerated Calen but mostly avoided him because his actions were growing more and more bizarre. One afternoon Mike and I were in the kitchen discussing whether or not we needed a new refrigerator when Calen burst in and lunged toward me.

  “What the fuck are you saying about me?” Calen screamed.

  Mike stepped between us. I couldn’t physically control Calen, who by then was six feet tall and weighed more than 175 pounds. Mike could, if he needed to. Calen glared at us and left the room without saying another word.

  Mike and I decided to buy a house together on Rouse Avenue because I had good credit and he had the cash. Calen moved into a loft above a garage next to the house. Mattie, Mike, and I each got our own bedroom.

  Almost immediately, Calen’s moods worsened. He looked haggard and was lost in his own thoughts. By the fall of 1998, nearly all Calen’s friends had stopped coming to see him. Even his three-legged border collie, Jack, seemed to sense something wasn’t right and began hanging out in the house with us instead of in Calen’s garage-loft bedroom.

  The Bozeman psychiatrist treating Calen prescribed a strong antipsychotic, Seroquel, commonly used to treat bipolar disorder. But it didn’t seem to help.

  Unsure how to help Calen and with no job to keep me occupied, I began spending my days watching the clock, anxiously waiting for happy hour at Boodles. It was my escape. But my coming home late, drunk, and noisy soon got on Mike’s nerves, especially since his roofing job required him to leave the house before daybreak. I promised that I would be quiet when I came home, and I meant it, but I was always tipsy when I got in and I was always loud.

  Calen recognized that he needed help, and he asked me to take him to a naturopath in Bozeman because he had become suspicious of his psychiatrist. The naturopath told Calen that his body was out of harmony physically, mentally, and spiritually. The first step to getting in sync was to stop taking his antipsychotic medication and begin using only natural plants and minerals as remedies. This naturopath further advised Calen that his mental confusion was being caused by his liver, which had fallen out of whack because of the deep-seated anger that Calen felt toward Tom and me for divorcing.

  Calen bought it hook, line, and sinker and immediately stopped taking Seroquel. He went on a strict natural diet, as prescribed by the healer. Within days, Calen was in even worse mental shape.

  Frantic, I persuaded Calen to visit a counselor, since he didn’t want to return to his psychiatrist. He didn’t like the medication his psychiatrist was prescribing for him. He hated how drugged it made him feel. The counselor told me that he thought Calen would benefit from going on a “personal vision quest.” Calen would be left in the mountains with only the barest essentials. Surviving on his own for three to four days would force him to take a hard look at himself and eventually help him stop his “negative behavior.” Thank goodness Tom and I refused to allow Calen to go on this “quest.” We realized that this counselor knew nothing about serious mental illness, even less than we knew, which was not much.

  One afternoon when Calen and I were sitting in the living room, my friend Pam dropped by for a visit. Calen was sitting on the couch, rocking back and forth while keeping his feet frozen in one spot. The pupils in his blue eyes were so dilated that they looked jet black. Pam saw him and asked me to leave the room.

  Then, when Pam asked Calen if he was feeling okay, he burst into tears and told her that he was hearing voices.

  “What are they telling you?” she asked.

  “That I don’t know anything. I’m stupid. I’m a piece of shit.”

  “Calen. Don’t listen to them. You’re not stupid.”

  “They’re watching me, too,” he added.

  “Who? Who’s watching you?”

  “Them. They have eyes everywhere. They’ve hidden cameras in the walls.”

  Pam took me aside. “I think Calen has schizophrenia,” she said. “You need to get him help, get him to a psychiatrist.”

  I didn’t know what schizophrenia looked like, but my firstborn could simply not have it.

  My father also was concerned. “Jess,” Dad said during a visit, “you’ve got to do something.”

  By Thanksgiving, everyone in my family knew Calen was mentally unstable. Yet no one seemed to know what to do about it, or if they did they didn’t tell me.

  When I mentioned that Pam thought Calen might have schizophrenia, the reactions in my family were pretty much the same. Schizophrenia? That was an illness for other people, people we didn’t know, people locked up in asylums. It wasn’t something that could happen in our family and definitely not something that could happen to my son. There were two cases of schizophrenia in the Moore family, but we didn’t talk about them. These individuals had been sent to live in asylums, and one, younger than me, had died. I remembered this cousin and had loved her when I was young. She had been a sweet girl. Schizophrenia? No. This couldn’t be something Calen would be saddled with. Not Calen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I needed to check on Calen. I’d not seen him all day. Living with him had become a torment. Every encounter between us sparked an argument. I drank a glass of vodka to steady my nerves and started toward the garage.

  Mike had installed pull-down steps that led upstairs, and as I started to climb them I called out softly, “Calen.”

  He didn’t reply, and I felt a pain shoot through my stomach. A few days earlier, Calen had asked me to watch his dog, Jack, while he went for a drive. As soon as Calen drove away, I had a terrifying thought. Oh, my God, he’s going to kill himself! He never left Jack behind. I kept imagining the worst; I had never felt so out of control. I didn’t know where he could have gone, but I didn’t want to call the police, so I spent hours pacing, calling friends, and screaming out loud in our house in total frustration. Calen came home hours later, completely unaware of my anguish. I could feel those same fears bubbling within me now.

  I had not been to
the loft for some time, and when I peeked through the trapdoor, what I saw shocked me. A single dangling bulb gave the room an eerie glow, and as my eyes adjusted, I noted that Calen had painted on every wall. He had covered one with bright red paint, turning the untouched white drywall into giant letters spelling out the words lunatic red.

  Two grotesque figures—neither male nor female—decorated another wall. They reminded me of scary monsters.

  “Calen,” I called.

  No reply, but I saw his stocking feet sticking out from under a blanket on the futon that served as his bed.

  “Calen,” I repeated, this time a bit louder. “It’s Mom. Say something.”

  He raised his head and looked at me. The rings under his eyes, along with his blank expression, hollow cheeks, and distant stare, gave me an instant chill. He looked like a living ghost.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked, trying to be as nonthreatening as possible.

  Calen sat up, snatched a cigarette from a half-empty pack on the nightstand, lit it, took a long drag, and then defiantly blew the smoke directly toward me at the other end of the loft.

  I asked, “What are you doing? Are you okay?”

  “Get out!” he snapped.

  “Excuse me?” I responded. I hadn’t said anything that warranted his disrespect.

  “Get out of my room, you bitch!”

  “Calen, please, Calen…” My body was shaking.

  “Get the fuck out of here!”

  “Calen! Don’t talk to me like that!” I yelled.

  He glared at me and snapped: “Get the fuck out of here, now!”

  I was watching my son, but I told myself that it really wasn’t Calen. I didn’t know who this boy/man was.

  “Stop it, please!” I screamed. “Why are you acting like this? Please, please, please just stop this!”

  His face was filled with hate. “Get out now!”

  I backed my way down the stairs and returned to our house. There was nowhere to put this pain. Nowhere to release it or vomit it up—nothing. Nowhere. I poured myself another vodka.

  “Mommy,” Mattie said. “Is Calen all right?”

  “No,” I said. “Get to bed.”

  “But Mommy,” Mattie said, her voice a whine, “I don’t want to go to bed right now. Mikey and I are watching a show!”

  “I don’t care,” I said, louder. “Just get in bed.”

  “I need to brush my teeth first.”

  “No. I told you to go to bed. Now!”

  Mike came into the room. “I’ll get her in bed; it’s okay.”

  “No,” I told him. “It’s not okay. I don’t know what to do for him!”

  “I don’t know, either,” he said. “But I’ll get this girl to bed.”

  I called Calen’s father, Tom. Because of his job, he’d moved from Utah to Helena, Montana, some two hours away.

  “Calen’s worse,” I reported. “He was screaming at me now. Telling me to get the fuck out of his room. I can’t do this anymore. I’m afraid.”

  I could tell from the tone of Tom’s voice that he assumed I was being melodramatic. This was not the first time that I had called him about Calen, and I suspected he knew I’d been drinking.

  “I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Tom said reassuringly.

  “He’s sick!” I exclaimed.

  Our call ended moments later in anger and frustration.

  Sander and two friends from St. Paul’s School were going skiing in the Austrian Alps during spring break, and they invited Calen to go with them. Two adults would be chaperoning three sixteen-year-old boys and Calen. I felt relieved when my sons boarded a flight for Europe. I was emotionally devastated, and I have no idea why I let Calen go except for some kind of magical thinking on my part—that this trip would cure him.

  When Glenn learned that Sander and Calen would be gone for several days, she invited Mattie and me to fly to London, where she was finishing shooting a sequel to the 1996 Disney movie, 101 Dalmatians. The new film, aptly titled 102 Dalmatians, had Glenn reprising her role as the villainess, Cruella De Vil.

  Mattie and I were having a wonderful time with Glenn when I received a panicked call from Sander in St. Anton, Austria. Calen was having a mental breakdown. He believed that Sander and the others were trying to feed him “alien meat” and that St. Anton was actually a Hollywood movie set. Calen didn’t want to leave the hotel room. One of the chaperones, who had a relative with schizophrenia, was using her experience to keep Calen calm, but Sander was scared.

  I telephoned Tom in Montana. It was 3:00 p.m. in Helena on a Friday when he answered.

  “You’re closer to Austria,” he said. “Sounds as if you need to go get him and bring him home.”

  “Tom, I can’t do this!”

  I was hysterical and in no condition to rescue Calen. Besides, Glenn and I were worried that if I did go, I wouldn’t be able to handle him.

  “Jessie,” Tom said, “I don’t have a passport.”

  “I’ll talk to Glennie,” I said. “She’ll know what to do.”

  Within a few hours, Tom was booked on a flight to Los Angeles that Glenn had arranged. From there, he boarded a red-eye to New York’s JFK airport, arriving Saturday morning. A courier met him with a passport, and he boarded a jet leaving for Austria that same afternoon. Glenn had arranged everything from London. She’d gotten Tom a passport, fast, by calling US Senator Ted Kennedy, who had pulled the necessary strings.

  At some point during all this, Tom spoke to Sander, and they came up with a ruse to get Calen to the airport. Tom landed, passed through Austrian customs and immigration, and walked into the terminal, where Sander and Calen were waiting. He walked up behind Calen and said in a casual voice, “Hello, Son,” as if nothing were amiss.

  Tom told Calen that they needed to go home. Although Calen didn’t want to leave his brother, he went with his dad. Miraculously, they returned to Helena without incident, arriving on a Monday. Mattie and I left for home, too.

  To this day, I’m amazed at how smoothly our family rescue operation went, and I give all the credit to Sander, Tom, Glenn, and Senator Kennedy. We were lucky to have the connections to make it happen.

  Rather than staying alone in the Bozeman loft, Calen stayed with his father in Helena and agreed to see a psychiatrist there. The doctor put Calen on a cocktail of mood stabilizers and antipsychotics. Tom also persuaded Calen to join several community youth sports teams to keep him busy.

  Tom telephoned me with updates, and we assured each other that we were doing everything two loving parents could do, but as the days passed it became clear that nothing was working. Tom told me that Calen would pace endlessly, smoking and talking to himself. He would drive around searching for a “portal” in the mountains that would take him to another dimension. His doctor upped the medication, but it only seemed to make him more distant.

  Tom read an ad in the Helena newspaper about a group called the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), whose members were mostly parents of children with mental illnesses. He went to a meeting and called me afterward, excited about what he had learned. A father whose son had schizophrenia had spoken during the meeting about how his son had to be repeatedly hospitalized until he eventually had gotten better. It was a “lightbulb” moment for Tom. He realized that schizophrenia was not like a cold, which you could recover from after a few days. It was a serious and debilitating illness, but with treatment you could get better.

  Tom felt that Calen was so sick that he needed to be hospitalized, but he was afraid that Calen wouldn’t agree. Under Montana law, Calen couldn’t be forced into a psychiatric hospital unless he posed a danger to himself or others or he became so incapacitated that he couldn’t care for himself. Despite his odd behavior, Calen wasn’t violent. Tom decided to talk to Calen about going into a hospital, but Calen didn’t believe he was sick. Instead, he announced that he had been chosen to participate in an epic battle between good and evil. He spoke about different realities, alternate universes, an
d kept mentioning the Real World as opposed to the world that he was currently stuck in.

  When Tom asked him what he meant by the Real World, Calen explained that “they” were trying to keep him from getting into the Real World. They were trying to keep him confused in his current world.

  “Who are they?” Tom asked.

  Calen eyed him suspiciously but didn’t respond.

  Tom kept talking to Calen and eventually wore him down. He agreed to go to St. Peter’s Hospital, which had a small, locked inpatient behavioral health ward. Tom had called the staff about Calen, and when they arrived a hospital psychiatrist greeted them at the door. The doctor explained that he wanted to do a series of tests to determine if Calen had a brain tumor or another kind of physical ailment that was interfering with his thoughts. Calen agreed to be tested and voluntarily signed himself into the hospital, much to Tom’s relief. Calen would later tell us that he had agreed to go to the hospital because he thought the portal to the Real World—the portal he was searching for—might be inside it.

  While nurses took blood samples, Calen counted the squares on the wallpaper, repeating out loud, “Red square, white square, red square, white square.”

  He told the nurses, “Christ’s blood is different from everyone else’s blood. It’s different from aliens’ blood, the Real World blood.”

  Tom called me after he left Calen, and for only the second time in my life I heard him sobbing. My eighteen-year-old firstborn was locked in a hospital mental ward. I felt as if all this was my fault. I felt like I was carrying several hundred pounds of guilt on my shoulders. I had struggled for years with my own mood swings, and I knew intuitively that I was responsible for passing along my flaws to my son. Science might not be able to specify what causes severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, but there was no question in my mind that Calen had inherited a damaged gene that had been embedded in our DNA and could be traced back to “crazy” Uncle Seymour Hyde, who had taken hostages at gunpoint in Manhattan and rode naked through the Greenwich countryside. This was not my crazy uncle, though. This was my son, and I had done this to him. It was the worst feeling a mother could have.