No One Cares About Crazy People

by Ron Powers

  Sometimes the grace was even more amazing. Casually hacking around the campus of the city’s community college one early-fall morning, Kevin heard the muted sounds of jazz music coming from one of the buildings. Through the window, he could see some students playing horns, piano, bass, guitar. The door to the room was open, so he walked inside, where he saw several other students on folding chairs, and an instructor with a clipboard. He’d come upon auditions for the campus jazz band. Kevin stood watching near the entrance for a few minutes, then crossed the floor to ask the instructor if he could sign up. He didn’t say he was enrolled at the college, but he didn’t say he wasn’t, either. When his turn came, someone loaned him an electric guitar, and he sat down on a folding chair to play. After he had finished a couple of pieces, the instructor studied him meditatively for a moment, and then remarked (as our son hastened to gleefully email us) that unless Pat Metheny walked through the door, the guitar slot was his.

  The college allowed Kevin to enroll in one noncredit course (music, as it happened) for the sake of legitimacy.

  Things went along fine until Thanksgiving.

  Dean decided to fly home. Kevin asked if he could stay on. In the final instance of our ignoring warning bells, Honoree and I gave him permission.

  Dean and I drove down to Concord, New Hampshire, for a rare getaway together—what the little boy Dean used to call a “vaventure.” We joined John Kerry’s presidential campaign bus there. I had arranged to interview the senator for the magazine of his alma mater, Boston College Law School. The topic was the mother of all softballs: Where (the heck) had he learned his gift for oratory? Kerry, as it turned out, was in no mood for an interview of any kind. He spent most of the allotted time glued to his cell phone, his face turned to the window, talking to his aides and friends about whether he had screwed up his previous night’s televised debate against John Edwards. He seemed to regard the topic of oratory as unworthy of him. The interview—such as it was—never got published.

  It didn’t matter too much. Dean and I had our vaventure. And Kerry lost.

  Honoree stayed in Middlebury. She later admitted to being gripped with terror for Kevin. She telephoned some of Dean’s friends in Fort Collins and asked them to check on our son. They said they would.

  Honoree was right to be terrified, as it proved. After five days with us, Dean returned to Fort Collins. It was dark and cold when he opened the door to the apartment they shared. The apartment was strewn with dirty clothes and dishes. Kevin sat slumped in a cushioned chair, his eyes glassy and unfocused. In broken sentences, he managed to ask his brother, as if Dean had never been away, if he could see the large blue three-dimensional musical note suspended in the air between them.

  Dean called an ambulance to get Kevin to a hospital. His action probably saved his brother from deeper deterioration and possibly from a suicide attempt. I caught the next available flight to Fort Collins.

  Two or three days passed before Dean and I were allowed to visit Kevin. We arrived at midday, lunchtime, and were directed to the psychiatric wing. We saw Kevin in the cafeteria, shuffling along in a line of shuffling patients clutching brown plastic food trays, all of them dressed in thin green scrubs. His eyes found us and he moved his lips in a ghastly parody of his lopsided grin. His lips were flecked.

  The green scrubs jolted me. My son, green-scrubbed and generic, an integer in a slow-moving green-scrubbed undifferentiated mass.

  Apparently he had stopped taking his antipsychotic medication after Dean left the apartment for Vermont. Like so many family members uninitiated in the brutal norms of the psychotic world, we had not entertained the thought of Kevin rejecting his prescribed medicine. With similar innocence, we had assumed that his original diagnosis—bipolarity, whatever that meant, a mood disorder of some kind—was, while unfortunate, at least mild when compared to some of the things that could happen to people.

  It was under these illusions that I had flown west to Colorado, expecting simply to pick up my son and bring him home for some more rest and treatment. It was not to be. The resident psychiatrist attending Kevin, a good one, gave me his diagnosis bluntly on the first day we met. Kevin was schizophrenic.

  Ten days passed before he would release Kevin. The psychiatrist, crisp and professional behind his rimless glasses, was a scrupulous man almost beyond the call of duty. My son was in effect a transient, so there was no time to form a therapeutic relationship. Yet the doctor wanted to accomplish as much as he could in the few days available. This mostly meant introducing a mix of medications every morning and monitoring their effects. The hours between medicating and testing were long. Dean and I took our breakfasts in a coffee shop before he went off to class. I spent the rest of each day walking around, catching a movie matinee, reading the paper. The headline one morning was that Saddam Hussein had been tracked down and lifted from a hole in the ground. I found myself wondering whether he had gone off his meds.

  One day Kevin asked for his acoustic guitar, and I related the request to the nursing staff, knowing that “objects” of any kind were generally forbidden in psychiatric wards, especially objects with strings. To my surprise, the nurses consented. I like to think they perceived the gentleness in him, and the aching need he had to be roused and centered by music. I brought him his acoustic from the apartment. When Dean came with me to the hospital a couple of nights later, he brought his own axe along, and my sons worked up an impromptu gig for the other young patients and their parents in the common room. Both boys lowered their heads over their instruments. It was the first time I’d noticed that they had adopted identical playing postures. Kevin placed the sole of one hospital-slippered foot across the arch of the other, and then Dean did. The people in the room gave them their full attention and clapped between numbers.

  Nothing in my life has ever matched the gratification I always felt watching my sons play together, trading off rhythm and melody in the four-bar blues, exchanging cues with subtle nods, flashing grins at some tiny glitch unnoticed by the listeners. In sublime communion.

  I brought Kevin back home to Middlebury. It was his final airplane flight. Vermont boasts a better-than-average network of mental health services in its counties, and Middlebury was home to a good one. Kevin was assigned a “team,” a consulting psychiatrist and a counselor, and they set up a regimen of meds and “talk therapy” with him. (The latest theories of schizophrenia therapy, as we will see, have rehabilitated “talk” therapy as a useful device and have incorporated it with medications as the most effective treatment.) For his part, Kev was cooperative, polite, and, as always, engaging. He promised to stay on his meds, and he kept the promise. For a while.

  He wanted desperately to make it back to Berklee. The wish consumed him. By then, nearly every thought or wish was a consuming one.

  We reenrolled him in January 2004. He managed to get his old apartment back. By this time we held no illusions about the state of his mental health. Yet we could think of no humane alternatives. To separate him from his music would be cruel; tantamount, without exaggeration, to separating him from his very identity. After reenrolling him, we came back home and hoped for the best. We now lived in a universe of Hobson’s choices.

  Once again, things went well for a while, quite a long while. Days and then weeks passed without a crisis. Kevin began work on a long and sophisticated jazz-guitar suite, recording multiple tracks to give it depth and resonance. He called it “Primoshadino.” I never asked him about the name. Jazz titles are often whimsical. Honoree and I clung to whimsical.

  Late in the spring—before the end of the academic year, but late enough for the major-league baseball season to have started—Honoree and I felt secure enough in Kevin’s stability to plan a weekend trip to Daytona Beach. Honoree’s adored niece, Adrienne, a striking and competent young woman and a rising officer in the Air Force, was getting married there. On a Friday night we checked into a motel near US Highway 1 that ran along the Atlantic Ocean, not far inland from the family hom
e of the bridegroom-to-be. We changed clothes and drove over for a cocktail mixer that would bring the two families together.

  There was merriment and old family tales retold and family photos hauled out of purses and billfolds and a ravishing buffet table, and the party swelled, and we caught up with a happy Adrienne, whose hair was even redder than my wife’s, and Honoree’s mobile phone rang inside her purse, and it was Kevin.

  No crisis this time. Everything was fine. So fine, in fact, Kevin told his mother, that he was taking himself off his meds.

  We got to know US Highway 1 very well that night. We left the party, climbed into our rented car, and, keeping Kevin on the line, drove the road’s length in Daytona Beach for hours, up and back, up and back, up and back, talking to him, pleading with him as headlights in the approaching lanes grew sparser, as Mobil stations and Pizza Huts flicked off their logo lights, as supermarket plazas grew dim. We tried (again and again) the lost cause of reasoning with him: How hard is it to put a pill in your mouth and wash it down with a glass of water? What is the downside?

  It was all duck feathers in the wind. Kevin listened affably, patiently, and then explained again that he was off-meds. Final decision. He was fine now. Case closed.

  Anosognosia.

  I caught a flight to Boston the next morning. Honoree decided to stay behind with the wedding party, but she was wrung out with worry. The phone in our motel room rang that morning as she was showering, and she scrambled out and sprinted for it, skidded across the wet tile floor and hit the baseboard with her foot, breaking a toe. In Boston, I checked into a Howard Johnson’s a block from Fenway Park and a short walk to the Berklee School. The Red Sox were playing an afternoon game. Kevin and I had agreed to meet around three. As I put my hand on the motel-room door to leave, I was frozen by a sudden disembodied roar. It went on and on, yet there was no visible source. I thought of swarms of shrieking demons erupting from the Id. A Red Sox player had hit a home run.

  Kevin was waiting for me at the agreed-on street corner. His lopsided grin was in place and the tips of his fingers were shoved into his pockets. We hugged, and I savored the warmth of his body. I thought of a summer afternoon twenty years earlier at our weekend house in Connecticut, when I had held him, a sleeping infant, on my lap in a chair at the back of our small cottage, his bald head propped in the crook of my crossed knee. I’d been half dozing myself, but I kept my eyes on a robin as it took its sweet time hopping from one end of the yard to the other, through long, dappled grass, and twigs, and acorns, stopping once in a while to pluck at a worm. I didn’t move a muscle beneath my son as he napped on. That had been a good afternoon, in a sweet time.

  Kev was his old self that weekend in Boston—cheery, boyish, happy to see me, the light of the days bringing up the gold in his hair and the blue of his eyes. We were easy together, as we’d always been. We hit some museums and took the MTA to the North End and stuffed ourselves with an Italian lunch. We walked a lot—through the Prudential Center, Boston Common, along the curving borders of the Fenway, following it down to Agassiz Road, over the waters of the Back Bay Fens and into the old Victory Gardens that dated to the urban subsistence-farming years of World War II. We talked casually about a lot of things.

  But when I raised the topic of his meds—the topic that had brought me up to Boston, the topic that chilled me even as I kept it casual—Kevin deflected it. No hostility, no defiance. Meds were just something he didn’t do anymore. After a while I let it go. I made myself concentrate on this otherwise perfect weekend with my son, and I willed my grieving into remission. The next day I called the well-recommended Boston psychiatrist whom Kevin had been seeing, and I asked him if there was anything he could do. The psychiatrist, who had treated his share of gifted and troubled Berklee students, told me there was not. The only choice, a ghastly one, was to let our son “crash” again and hope that he would learn a lesson from it.

  He almost made it to the end of the academic year.

  The inevitable crash didn’t surprise us, but the robotic darkness in the voice on the other end of the line did. Kevin was accusatory and defiant. He believed that we were conspiring against him, and he wanted it to stop.

  Paranoia.

  This time Honoree made the run to Boston. We were trading off on these missions now. She drove to Kevin’s apartment in the Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood. She invited him for coffee. As they walked along the street, Kevin began to believe that his mother was stalking him and told her he was going to call the police. She encouraged him to do so. When the squad car arrived, she explained the situation and the officers escorted our son to a local hospital. He went without resistance.

  A few days there, a handful or two of meds, a haphazard examination by an overworked psychiatric team, and our son was pronounced fit to return home. Along for the ride were the voices that had entered his head. Once we were home, the head psychiatrist at Rutland Regional Hospital informed us that Kev’s condition had deteriorated to schizo-affective disorder.

  The weeks and months ahead formed a mélange that remains painful to revisit closely for the purpose of picking out discrete narrative strands. They were months of hopeful clarity and relapse, hospitalization and release, irrational hope giving way to benumbed acceptance that this was to be the way his life would play out. I had reworked a familiar metaphor to help reassure myself: the membrane. I made myself believe that the membrane supporting his schizophrenia was firm. Of course, it was not firm after all. And then the membrane tore, and our son plunged into free fall.

  There were good moments in his final months. In the fall of 2004 Honoree enrolled him at Castleton College, close enough to our home that he could keep living with us and still play with the jazz band. A new young music director had come in, a saxophonist, and he understood Kevin at once, and invited him into a combo that played around Vermont and New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Sometimes the drummer was Gabe Jarrett, the brother of famed pianist Keith.

  One frigid winter night the combo gathered at a bar in Ludlow, a town about sixty miles southeast of Middlebury. When we arrived, Kevin discovered that he had forgotten the cord that linked his Martin to his amp. I did a quick driving tour of the town’s stores; they were all closed. The bartender remembered a guy who lived up on the hill across the main road, a musician. I ran out the door and across the road and up the hill and knocked on the door and talked the stranger into lending me one of his cords. The combo played great jazz that night, to an audience mostly of men seated at the bar in the next room, drinking beer and glued to sports on ESPN, their rear-end décolletage peeking above their blue jeans.

  He finished composing “Primoshadino.” It is a hell of a jazz suite.

  He remained gentle and endearing. He wasn’t talking much to us, though. He was tuned in to other conversations. We always knew when these were happening. He would look away from us, and his lips would move almost imperceptibly, and sometimes he would flash a trace of his lopsided smile. We comforted ourselves with the thought that the voices were friendly.

  He yearned for the days of Booby, and tried to reconjure that fine band with a bassist and a pink-haired drummer at Castleton College. They called themselves Fall Lineup and played gigs around the state. Kevin always drove. These were nights when Honoree and I sweated out his return home, especially the nights when snow and ice covered the highways. But there was no keeping him from it. And he always made it home.

  He maintained good relations with his in-town psychiatrist and counselor. He never missed a meeting, never complained about the meds he’d resumed taking—or so we thought—never was less than charming and articulate with them.

  Maybe, Honoree and I let ourselves believe, this was the way it would always be. Far from a perfect future, but one we would safeguard as long as we lived. And then, imagined Honoree, ever the optimist, he would find a sweet young woman who would love and take care of him.

  And the winter of 2004 passed, and then came the summer of 2005.

 
19

  Red Sox 17, Yankees 1

  Friday, July 15, 2005, was a date marked on the kitchen calendar. We didn’t often mark dates on the calendar. But this was the night that Dean and I were going to a Red Sox game.

  We could not have picked a more auspicious date. Boston, the defending World Champion, was in first place in the American League East with a 50–39 record. They had finally erased the Curse of the Bambino the previous autumn in a four-game series sweep of my beloved St. Louis Cardinals. That was cool; Dean and I were die-hard Bosox fans now. The visitors were their ancient rivals the New York Yankees, in third place at 47–41, but just two and a half games behind Boston. Johnny Damon, with his flowing mane, was hitting a ton for the Sox at .346. Alex Rodriguez was leading the Ancient Rivals at a .316 clip. The game had all the makings of a showdown.

  I had secured two tickets to this game several weeks earlier. I would pick Dean up at his newspaper office in Montpelier; the two of us would share the driving down to Boston and then back home the same night. None of the family had ever been inside Fenway. The closest I’d come was that motel across the street on my visit to Kevin the previous spring, when I’d listened to the invisible crowd release its home-run roar.

  The portly southpaw veteran David Wells took the hill for the Town Team against journeyman right-hander Tim Redding of the Bronx Bombers that night. The Sox chased Redding in the second inning with the bases loaded and none out, and leading 3–0. Yankee reliever Darrell May got a force-out at third base on a ground ball by “Papi” Ortiz, with Mark Bellhorn scoring; but then Manny Ramirez golfed a fly-ball double off the Green Monster in left to bring home Edgar Renteria, “the Barranquilla Baby.” Trot Nixon, next up, lashed a screaming drive past Melky Cabrera to the center-field wall that was good for an inside-the-park home run. Ortiz and Ramirez circled the bases ahead of Trot, and it was 8–0 Red Sox before all the fans were in their seats. Before it was over, Papi unloaded a grand slam into the right-field seats, his twenty-third round-tripper en route to forty-seven for the season. Dean and I never made it to the game.