No One Cares About Crazy People

by Ron Powers

  The prodromal period can last from weeks to several years, and comorbid disorders are very common during this period. The prodrome of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders is characterized as a process of changes or deterioration in heterogeneous subjective and behavioral symptoms that precede the onset of clinical psychotic symptoms.1

  On the sunny Tuesday of June 1, 1999, Dean, Honoree, and I climbed the steps of Middlebury’s new district courthouse. The bricks of its Queen Anne exterior had retained their bright red sheen three years after its completion, contrasting with the purplish old facades of the surviving nineteenth-century buildings facing Court Street to its west. We entered one of the small hearing rooms and seated ourselves around one of two polished counselor’s tables. Above the tables was the judge’s elevated desk.

  We were there to attend the hearing that would determine, after twelve anxious months, whether our son was to be incarcerated for the rest of his adolescence and the first half of his twenties.

  Amy and her family were already seated at the other table. The lawyers for each family were unzipping their briefcases and placing documents on the surface before them.

  We all rose as the judge entered the room. He offered a few preliminary remarks and then invited Dean to make a statement. Dean rose from his chair at the counselor’s table. His new, forlorn, de rigueur white business shirt was already showing some perspiration stains, and his de rigueur necktie was a bit askew. He leaned forward, balancing his weight on the table with his knuckles. I was loathing this moment: the potted pomp of the judicial seal on the wall and the American flag and of my son’s absurd and pointless shirt and tie and of the judge’s impassive face; and the scowls from the other table. All of it.

  Dean’s knuckles trembled on the polished hardwood. I had rarely seen my son afraid, and never this afraid. I wondered whether he could pull himself together. He did. He pushed himself erect, composed his thoughts, and made a brief, dignified speech of regret for his responsibility in the accident and of sympathy for what Amy had gone through. Amy’s parents sat with their scowls in place.

  Dean finished, and a silence overtook the hearing room. At the other end of that silence—I am sure that Dean understood this—lay his path for the next eight years, which could define the path he would travel for the remainder of his life.

  Then I stood up and asked the Court’s permission to put my foot in my mouth.

  Actually, I asked permission to speak, which amounted to the same thing.

  Sanctimonious bloviator that I so often was—am—I thought it would be a good idea to talk about forgiveness. Specifically, I wanted to talk about the healing benefits that forgiving can confer upon the person doing the forgiving. My clarity, or lack of it, didn’t matter. As soon as the word forgiveness passed my lips, I was interrupted from the family’s table with the sharp remonstration: How dare I talk about forgiveness? Dean did not deserve forgiveness! Dean’s recklessness had nearly killed…

  I sat back down again, wondering if hell was going to be anything like this.

  In the seconds of silence that followed, I also wondered whether I had poisoned my son’s prospects for a favorable ruling.

  The judge interlaced his fingers and studied Dean through his rimless glasses. He was an intense jurist, unreadable as most good judges are, a gaunt man in a black robe, his combed black hair whitening at the sides. He seemed to embody the timeless Yankee moral figure.

  “I see hope for this young man,” the judge said at length. These were the first words of human respect that any adult with power outside our family had spoken to or about Dean for more than twelve months. I think that the blackness surrounding my son began to crack apart a little just then, although I have never asked him about it. It certainly cracked for Honoree and me.

  The judge handed down a sentence of three to eight years in prison for Dean: suspended.

  Our son was placed on probation, with conditions that included a fine of twenty-five hundred dollars, five hundred hours of community service, a suspension of driving privileges for one year, the completion of five weekends on the Addison County work crew by the end of the summer, the continuation of his house arrest for a year, and various smaller fines.

  And so Dean’s long road back from perdition commenced.

  Case closed.

  But not Dean’s sense of being swept away helplessly in the river of his life.

  It was Honoree who pulled Dean out of that river and saved him from being swept away forever.

  Honoree never gave up on her faith that eventually the Vermont justice system would listen to a plea that her son’s punishment be tempered by mercy, or at least by common sense. Never one to be rattled in a crisis, she understood the importance of timing and patience. She believed that it would not be in Dean’s interests to make the request she had in mind when the community’s opinion might still be tilted against him by the shamefully misleading posters around town and by the predatory interest of WCAX TV news, with its blinding censorious lights in the courtroom and its mulish insistence on referring to Dean as a “drunk” (on his “own booze,” which, as hearing transcripts show, was one bottle of beer). She waited until the WCAX TV news reporters and crews lost interest in the case and went off to find other stories that would allow them to broadcast the same kind of insinuating questions they’d posed in Dean’s case, such as “If you hold a party and someone gets drunk—on their own booze—are you responsible for any harm they may cause?”

  Honoree waited as long as possible, given that the school year would soon commence, and then went quietly back to work on Dean’s behalf. She insisted to our lawyer that he petition the judge with a plea that our son be allowed to enroll that fall for a postgraduate year at a college preparatory school, instead of remaining confined for the duration of his house arrest sentence. Amy’s parents were present at the hearing on this petition. Her father argued vigorously against lifting Dean’s restraints and giving him a new chance in a new place. “He can find plenty of opportunities right in his own backyard!” this man declared to the judge. Several times I have often wondered whether he heard the irony in his words. Dean had paced in his backyard for nearly a year as opportunities in the larger world floated past, out of his reach.

  The judge set aside the parents’ objections. He granted our petition that he terminate Dean’s house arrest and allow him to enroll in school in Maine.

  And so our son resumed the life of his young, battered, and overstressed mind.

  Dean’s case may have been resolved, with the hope of starting over, but our own trials were to continue. Back in March, in an attempt at reconciliation before Dean’s sentencing, I’d written a letter to the family, asking for a meeting, perhaps mediated by a counselor, where all of us could begin the work of healing. I thought a meeting like this would help both Amy and Dean recover from the physical and psychic trials. Dean spoke many times of his wish to “atone” to Amy, her mother, and her father. The family did not respond to my letter. Instead, on a hot summer afternoon shortly after the judge altered the terms of our son’s sentence, I was mowing the steep bank of lawn in front of our house when I turned to see a white sheriff’s car crawling up our driveway. The sheriff was staring out the window at me through his sunglasses. I killed the lawn mower, wiped the sweat off my forehead, and stutter-stepped down the bank to the patrol car. The sweet aroma of the wet cut grass trailed me.

  I had a feeling of what this was about. We’d picked up on the possibility from our lawyer, although—naive to the end—I refused to believe that this would really happen. More than a year of criminal court penalties and out-of-court maneuvering from Amy’s family surely were enough—especially given the psychological toll extracted from both young people.

  The sheriff stretched his arm through the open window. He was holding a thick envelope.

  “I’m sorry.” He seemed genuinely embarrassed.

  “I understand,” I said. “You’re doing your job.”

  He n
odded and backed down the driveway.

  I opened the packet. Inside was the notice of a civil suit filed against Honoree and me by Amy’s parents. The suit sought to establish criminal negligence on our part, for allowing our “reckless”-driving son to have Honoree’s car that night. The suit would consume three more years of our lives.

  Amy’s parents’ lawyer hired an investigator who canvassed households in neighborhoods inhabited by the parents of Dean’s friends, interviewing them for evidence and testimony that Honoree and I had been negligent parents. After the interviews came the depositions. The lawyer deposed roughly the same pool of people, many of whom were or had been social friends of ours.

  And then the lawyer deposed Honoree and me.

  In November 2003, the family withdrew its suit, citing lack of evidence. Yet the case never disappeared. Traces of it have lingered in cyberspace ever since. When anyone seeking information on Honoree’s scientific career types her name into Google, the first link that appears is to a document bearing her name. The document has nothing to do with her nearly half century of scientific accomplishments. It is a Vermont Supreme Court judgment on some procedural fine points in the misbegotten civil suit that bears this good woman’s name.

  Amy recovered from her injuries. We understood that her restoration to health required weeks upon weeks of painful, disciplined rehabilitation, encouraged and supervised by her parents. Amy had been a promising school basketball player, and her conditioning surely worked in her favor. By all accounts, she remained courageous and cheerful through her ordeal. A few years later, she married and started a family.

  Founded in 1835, the Gould Academy is a small, redbricked, right-angled school in Bethel, a town of two thousand people and as many maple trees in western Maine, near the Androscoggin River and the White Mountain National Forest. Its academic standards are high, and so are its tuition and board. The administrators at Gould were dubious about Dean’s application because of the felony conviction on his record. (I’d glimpsed Dean’s application letter as he wrote it, just long enough to read the poignant sentence “I am not aggressive.”) Again, Honoree refused to surrender the field. She telephoned the academy’s headmaster, William P. Clough III, and talked him into a meeting in his office with herself and Dean. They drove the nearly four-hour route due east to Bethel. Like the judge, Headmaster Clough heard and saw gravitas, intelligence, and sincerity in the young man seated opposite him, and in the young man’s mother. He welcomed Dean into the student body.

  A couple of emails from me to Dean that fall give a suggestion of how things were going for him:

  Subject: your great grades

  Date: Thu, 02 Dec 1999 12:05:45 -0500

  From: Ron Powers

  To: Dean Powers

  Dean,

  Mom just guided me into the Gould page that lists your tremendous grades and your Honors Student status. The physics and calculus scores are stupendous, but then everything is. Congratulations and keep up the outstanding work. With this on your record, there is no limit to what you can accomplish in college. If you don’t watch out, you might even turn into a goddam intellectual. If you feel that coming on, head for the woods.*

  Dad

  Subject: more congratulations

  Date: Thu, 02 Dec 1999 20:01:20 -0500

  From: Ron Powers

  To: Dean Powers

  Dean,

  Mom figured how to code into your personal evaluations for each of your classes. She brought them home tonight and we read them (and re-read them) over dinner. Beyond spectacular. They really appreciate you there, and their praise is stunning. I never heard anything like that during the whole time I was getting educated. Couldn’t be prouder of you.

  Dad

  Kevin, meanwhile, was scheduled to enter high school that same fall of 1999. He was just fifteen and vulnerable to any gossip about his brother that might have swirled around town. The previous year, just six months after the car accident, Amy’s parents unaccountably had invited Kevin to her sixteenth-birthday party at a local restaurant. Equally unaccountably, we allowed him to go. Maybe we saw the invitation as a gesture toward reconciliation and took the bait. After an hour or so, the telephone rang. It was Kevin, who told Honoree that he was feeling uncomfortable at the party and asked that we come and pick him up. We did.

  After that incident, we understood that we needed to get Kevin out of town as well.

  A positive motivation was our younger son’s progress on the guitar. Over the summer of 1999, he had matured in his passion for the instrument and extended his understanding of what it could do. Besides jamming with Dean and continuing his sessions with his teacher, Michael—by now his fast friend, who’d rather sadly confided to us, “I’ve taught him everything I know”—he had been taking weekly lessons in Burlington from a legendary player and teacher named Paul Asbell. As a young musician in Chicago, Asbell had played and recorded with Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Otis Rush. He had resettled in Vermont, from where he’d traveled to various studios to record with Paul Butterfield, Joshua Redman, and Julian Lage. His tutoring pupils had included Trey Anastasio of Phish.

  But Kevin had reached a stage where instruction was not enough. He needed performance experience. In addition to his DownBeat awards, he had appeared onstage by now with his heroes, the Woods Tea Company, and at Middlebury’s Festival on the Green. Yet these were rare, episodic events. He was ready for regular ensemble playing and soloing, and for instruction across the full range of guitar genres. Vermont, as rich in music as it is, was not able to provide this.

  We began looking for music schools. Our first foray had been in early spring, to a prep-level arts academy southwest of Boston. We scheduled a midday appointment with an administration member and arrived in the town the night before. We shared a spectacular pizza, and the next morning we shopped at a mall, where I bought my son a nifty sweater-vest, white with yellow and blue trim, for his interview.

  An hour or so later we found ourselves sitting on folding chairs in the center of an immense, dim, and empty performance room, awaiting the admissions official. Kevin wore his new sweater, and he balanced his acoustic guitar on his lap. At length, the metronomic, echoing clomp of her power shoes announced her arrival. She bolted herself into a seat facing us and glowered at her clipboard. She glanced up at us without introducing herself or offering a welcome and launched into a list of reasons why this academy probably would not be “a right fit” for Kevin. It was as though she had no memory of speaking with Kevin’s mother and arranging our interview appointment. It was, in fact, as though she suspected us of breaking into the building by picking a lock.

  After making it clear that Kevin would enjoy the approximate status of a biblical leper if by some miracle his application were accepted, she invited him to play a demonstration piece.

  I turned to look at my son. We were far enough apart that I could see his entire body hunched in his metal chair, a rabbit in the sights of a blunderbuss. His hands were folded on top of his guitar and his feet were locked tightly beneath him, and he was looking at her with his head slightly cocked, as if trying to fathom why this person was being so unfriendly.

  As for me, I wanted to grab Kevin and walk out. I wanted to read her out at a decibel level the entire campus would be able to hear, on the matter of her unconscionable assault on a child’s nerves and self-respect.

  I held back. A confrontation would only serve to mortify Kevin and probably ruin his willingness to risk any more encounters with people from music academies, and thus any opportunity for further training and encouragement.

  It hurt me physically, in my stomach, but I kept silent and let it go. Kevin, I noticed, was pale. But he absorbed his guitar into position with that beautiful fluid motion of his, and he began to play.

  His brief performance was flawless. It may have lacked the passion and some of the inventivenes
s and deep interpretation that he routinely poured into his playing, but technically, it was beyond reproach. Kevin seemed to be saying, There is a level below which you will not intimidate me. You will not violate my dignity. And it’s possible that Kevin was also saying to the woman: You can’t have my passion, either. You’re not worthy of it.

  We walked out of that dim building into the early-spring snow and mud, and drove away from that campus knowing we would never go back there, not even if invited, not if it turned out to be our only option. I assured Kevin of that during our rather subdued drive back to Middlebury. My sole concern remained whether Kevin would ever again risk the hostility and the humiliation of another audition with someone from a music academy. I needn’t have worried.

  A few weeks later the phone rang at our house and a man with a genial voice asked if he could speak to Kevin Powers. After learning who the caller was, I handed the receiver to my younger son, who glanced at me curiously before taking it. Within a few seconds his lopsided grin had broken out. The caller was a guitar instructor at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Traverse City, Michigan, and he had called to tell Kevin that he had been accepted there.

  Earlier in the year, Kevin had filled out the Interlochen application we’d obtained for him and sent it back, along with the required two videotapes we had made of him performing solos “of contrasting style.” Now he glowed as he told us that the instructor had been very complimentary about his solo work.