My Lobotomy

by Fleming, Charles

  My stepbrother Cleon had warned me about juvie. I think my dad made him talk to me, to try to scare me. He told me it was a terrible place. He gave me the idea that it was just a bunch of big guys hanging off the bars, waiting for a kid like me to show up. He made it sound like any kid who got sent there would be lucky not to be raped or have his throat cut the first day.

  So I was scared.

  I don’t remember how I got there. But I remember arriving at this big, cold, white building, several stories high but almost completely windowless, near downtown San Jose. It looked like a prison.

  They put me in a cell by myself, on the observation unit, and kept me there for three days. I couldn’t see what kinds of people were there. I didn’t know if they were going to be kids like me, or bigger kids, or adults hanging from the bars and drooling and waiting to hurt me.

  There were no bars. The rooms were made of cinder blocks, with a cement floor. There was a bed and a nightstand. There was heat, but not much. The rooms were cold, and the whole environment felt cold. Metal and concrete. The door to the room was metal, with a window in it.

  The only good thing was the food, and there was plenty of it. For the first few days, while I was under observation, they brought it to my cell on a tray. The tray had vegetables on it, but I didn’t have to eat them. I got Jell-O! I remember thinking, Hey, this isn’t so bad.

  After three days I was moved into the regular environment, and placed in unit B-II, which housed about thirty kids. Some of the ones I met were there for real crimes—shoplifting and stealing. But most of the kids didn’t say what they were there for, just like I didn’t say. You didn’t go around bragging about having a lobotomy, or about being thrown out of your house and made a ward of the court. And you didn’t go around asking what the other kids were there for, either.

  Each guy had his own cell. At mealtime, you’d walk down to the day hall and wait there in line. Then they’d march you down to the chow hall. Stand in line. Pick up a tray. They’d throw food on the tray. You’d sit at these long tables with the other guys from your section.

  It was loud and aggressive, just like prison. The big boys would steal the little boys’ dessert. There were fights. It was edgy.

  At first it was very scary. I remember lying alone in my bed at night crying, wishing I wasn’t there, wishing I was home. I missed my family.

  I have a copy of a letter I wrote on February 21, 1963—a week after my arrival. The return address is Howard A. Dully, B-II, Cell 5. In the letter I talk about being questioned by a policeman. I wasn’t accused of anything. But I was able to tell the policeman that I had been hanging out with a boy named John, who had been arrested for breaking into Covington High School and stealing things. I was going to try to sort it all out with my probation officer.

  “John is now here and is sorry he did it,” I wrote. “I am lucky I cut out when he told me what he was going to do. I am going to see my P.O. Thursday. I am not afraid now to tell the truth.”

  I don’t remember any of this—the letter, the break-in, or even who John is. But the weird thing is the letter appears to be written directly to Lou. At the end it says, “Hope you are feeling well, and George, Brian, Kirk and Dad.” The last line says, “I will draw some faces and enclose them in this letter, Love, Howard.” Stapled to the letter is a set of four silly cartoon drawings of someone’s face.

  I guess I was reaching out. I was trying to make Lou love me.

  We were kept busy during the day. We had to study, which I didn’t like—math and English. I was bored. They’d tell me two plus two equals four. I got it. Then they’d tell me that two plus two equals four again. I got it! Or they’d tell me we were going to read a book, and they’d give me the book, and tell me to read it, and then they’d read it out loud. I hated that. You read the book, or you let me read the book. Not both!

  They had a shop class, too, where they taught us to work with plastics. We made things like gear-shift knobs—like the ones I had stolen—for cars we would never own. It was great, even if it was only for an hour a day.

  We had exercise time, too, out in the yard. There was basketball. I didn’t do too much of that. I didn’t like all that running around. I’m sociable when I’m around people I like and understand, and who don’t scare me. At that time, in that place, I wasn’t very sociable. I didn’t make any friends.

  But I did spend a lot of time talking to doctors, psychologists, and psychiatrists. They all wanted to know how I was feeling, what I was feeling, what I was thinking. Well, what do you think? I felt bad. I wanted out.

  I think the authorities wanted me out, too. In March, the Santa Clara County Juvenile Probation Department’s psychiatry division made its report on me. A psychiatrist named Dr. Shoor oversaw my evaluation. His assessment was a little different from Dr. Freeman’s.

  “The minor was brought into the Department by his father after making an unsuccessful attempt to get him into Napa State Hospital,” Dr. Shoor’s report says. “The father declared Howard as beyond control in that he is failing in school, constantly harasses his stepmother, terrifies his younger brother, suspects him of stealing, and stated that he could no longer keep him in his house. This move was triggered off when Dr. Freeman recommended to the father that Howard should have a room outside the home or he would destroy the family.”

  Dr. Shoor went on to review my situation. He noted that I had been very close to my mother, and that she had died when I was young. He said that before my operation “the parents (especially the stepmother) considered him intolerable to live with. It was the stepmother who initially took him to Dr. Freeman.” The report mentions the transorbital lobotomy.

  But the report doesn’t end where most of the other reports had ended. Dr. Shoor wrote that I appeared to be “a seriously disturbed boy.” He said, “The stepmother has always seen him as a problem and not nearly as good as her own sons. In the home at this time he is always looked on with skepticism and is never allowed to be alone with his younger brother. Neither parent feels they can trust him.”

  And so, Shoor concluded, “In the best interest of Howard, he should be removed from his home in that his stepmother seems determined to destroy him.”

  Freeman attended the meeting where these findings were discussed, in the office of my juvenile probation officer, a Mr. W. Ellison. Dr. Shoor was there. So were my parents. Freeman’s notes say that I had been at Juvenile Hall for three or four weeks. I learned later that Dr. Shoor hated Freeman, and hated the fact that he performed lobotomies on children, and wished it was in his power to stop him.

  Freeman didn’t mention that. He wrote in his notes for that day, “I agreed with Mrs. Dully that Howard was a danger in the home, but made no recommendation as regards the solution of the problem.”

  A solution was found, just the same. Because I was not a criminal, because I had not been charged with anything, the people at Juvenile Hall couldn’t hold me. Because they’d determined I wasn’t psychotic, Napa State Hospital wouldn’t make room for me there. Because my dad wouldn’t allow me to be adopted, I couldn’t go live with the McGraws—the only family that seemed to want me.

  So, somehow, the people in charge of my welfare decided I should be sent to Agnews, the great asylum for the insane.

  I was driven from Juvenile Hall to Agnews by a probation officer. Before I got into the car, he handcuffed me—for my “protection.” We didn’t talk on the way over. I was scared. It was just me and one officer, and I didn’t know what to say to him. I liked the idea that I was getting out of juvie, but I didn’t know very much about the place they were taking me.

  I knew it was a mental hospital, for crazy people. That felt weird. I knew I wasn’t crazy. The doctors at juvie told me I was being sent to Agnews because there wasn’t anywhere else for me to go. I remember that one of them told me I might benefit from what the doctors there had to say.

  I didn’t hate that idea. I had liked talking to Freeman. He talked to me, and he listened to me,
and I liked to talk to people who listened.

  Just like at juvie, they put me in an observation ward for the first three weeks. I had my own room, away from the rest of the patients. It was very metallic, very utilitarian. It had a bed and a nightstand, and that was it. After lights-out, every night, they locked the door. For the first three weeks, that was my life. They took me down for a brain scan. They showed me inkblot pictures. They seemed to be studying me. All day long, day after day, I stayed in my room or sat and talked with doctors.

  Life inside Agnews was very routine. Get up early. Make your bed. Breakfast in the chow hall at 5:00 AM.

  Breakfast was hard-boiled eggs, sometimes oatmeal, and toast, not buttered. There was lots of coffee and lots of juice, and I liked that, and the toast was good. They baked their own bread at Agnews, and it was good bread.

  After breakfast it was back to the ward. They’d hand out pills. Most of the guys were medicated. I wasn’t. I was healthy. I was active—or I wanted to be. But it was hard to be active. There was a huge parkland all around us, but until you got grounds privileges you were stuck inside.

  I spent most of the day walking the ward. There was a day room at one end, and a day room at the other, and a big day room in the middle. This was my world.

  The day rooms were usually occupied by the worst of the mental patients. The ones who weren’t in such bad shape had grounds privileges or went to work during the day. They had jobs in the kitchen, or in the bakery, making the breads and the pastries. Some guys worked in the canteen. Some guys worked on the trucks that delivered things around the place. Some guys worked on the hog farm, or had jobs with the grounds crews.

  So the ones who were left behind were the ones in the worst shape—the ones who were psychotic, or catatonic, the ones who talked to themselves, or sat and drooled all day long, the ones who were unreachable.

  Then there was me—the only kid in the entire facility.

  Some of the patients who worked returned for lunch, which was fried baloney, or SOS—that creamed beef on toast that guys in the military love so much—or some kind of sandwich. Dinner was something similar. It was never very good. But you learned to like it or you went hungry. So I learned to like it. I learned to look forward to it.

  After three weeks, the doctors took me out of the observation ward. I was given another private room. I was allowed to roam around on my own. I started figuring the place out. There seemed to be three categories of people at Agnews. First, there were the patients, who were the crazy people. Second, there were the doctors, who were supposed to be taking care of the crazy people. Third, there were the technicians, who wore all white and looked like Good Humor men. Most of them were students who were studying psychology. Their job was to keep an eye on the patients and keep them in line.

  The technicians wore keys on a big key ring that jingled when they walked. You always knew when they were coming. You could hear them jingling from a mile away. They were supposed to keep an eye on us and keep us out of trouble, but they couldn’t exactly sneak up on us, jingling like that. You’d hear them coming, stop what you were doing, and wait for them to go past.

  I spent a lot of time talking to doctors and technicians. The doctors would bring me into their offices. The technicians would come talk to me in the day room, or during mealtime. I’d be doing a jigsaw puzzle, or trying to eat, and they’d start asking me questions. “How are you? How do you feel? Do you know why you’re here? Do you like being here? Do you like the people here?”

  I never knew what to say. I knew there were scary things going on around me. I heard stories. I knew there was electroshock. I knew there were weird medications. I didn’t want anything to do with that stuff. So I tried to answer carefully. I didn’t want to make anybody mad at me. I figured if I told them I thought the crazy patients were peachy keen and fine, they’d think I was crazy, too. So I told them I didn’t like being around the other patients, that I was scared of what they might do to me. They seemed to understand that answer.

  The patients who didn’t work hung out in the day rooms. They had chairs and tables, and a TV going all the time, and you could check out stuff from an office—cards, board games, jigsaw puzzles. A lot of the guys never checked out anything. They were just there.

  Most of them were very sick—too sick for anybody to do anything with them. Most of them were in another world. They didn’t talk, except maybe to themselves. They’d just sit and rock and mutter to themselves, for hours on end. If you tried to talk to them they’d look at you like you were interrupting their conversation—with themselves. They’d wait until you left, then start talking again. I could observe them, but I couldn’t really connect with them.

  There were a couple of other patients I could talk to, but not many. Most of the people at Agnews weren’t people I wanted to be friends with.

  A lot of them were there for alcohol problems. This was before Betty Ford and all the rehab places. If a guy couldn’t stop drinking, sometimes they locked him up in the nuthouse and let him dry out. There were guys like that at Agnews. Most of them were okay. They weren’t crazy. They just had drinking problems.

  I didn’t meet any other guys who had been given lobotomies, or if I did I didn’t know it. No one talked about why they were there. No one asked me. No one seemed to know what had been done to me. No one talked about what had been done to them. Being crazy wasn’t something you talked about, even at a mental institution.

  So I was on my own. Agnews was an adult facility, and I was the only young patient I ever saw there. That made it lonely, and strange. I didn’t make friends, and I didn’t have companions. But I got my own private room, and I was watched the entire time I was there. That meant I was probably safe from anything bad happening to me.

  There was definitely bad stuff happening around me. You’d see guys carted off all the time. Mostly they were patients who had stopped taking their medication and had gotten violent. They’d start a fight, always with a technician. (I don’t think I ever saw two patients fighting with each other.) Four or five more technicians would show up. They’d come down on the guy and haul him off to a lockup ward. It was rubber-room time.

  After I had completed the so-called intake period, I was moved to a ward and finally made a friend. His name was Frank. He was Hawaiian. He was into rock ’n’ roll, so we got along fine. You could check out a record player from the day room and listen to records, if you had any. Frank had good records.

  I remember listening to Ritchie Valens. And Jimmy Gilmore and “Sugar Shack.” And Dion and “Donna the Prima Donna.” I especially liked the slow songs. I’d listen to the slow songs when I was by myself, and I’d cry inside (not boo-hoo, with tears rolling down my cheeks). I was lonely and I liked listening to songs about lonely people. “A thousand stars in the sky/Make me realize/You are my one love…” Stuff like that.

  The technicians must have felt music was important. They had “music therapy” rooms they’d take the patients to. Each one had a piano or an electric organ. There were also electric guitars, and a drum set, and you could check those out. When I tried the drums, it sounded like hell. So I tried the guitar. That wasn’t so bad. I had played the piano a little, and I could figure out a tune on the piano and transfer that to the guitar. I never learned to read music, because I didn’t have the patience for it, but I could play a few things on the guitar.

  But mostly I just listened. Here’s proof of how much time I spent doing that. I figured out you could take the turntable off the record player and wrap a piece of tape around the spindle to make a 45 rpm record play slower, so that the voices were deep and low and sounded like my voice. That way I could sing along. After some experimenting, I found that the perfect speed for my voice was 38 rpm. I knew it was 38 rpm because I would sit, listening to the record, watching it spin around and watching the clock, and I’d actually count the revolutions per minute.

  I had a lot of time on my hands.

  I’d sit and listen to music for hour
s and hours, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, talking a little to Frank, if he was around.

  Smoking was a big thing there. You spent a lot of time smoking. I had started when I was living at home, stealing Lou’s cigarettes when I could, or buying a pack now and then. At Agnews, they gave the patients tobacco and papers for free. It was crummy tobacco, and crummy paper, but it was free, so that’s what most of the guys smoked. You could also buy cigarettes at the canteen, and real cigarettes were like gold. If you wanted to make friends with a guy, all you needed was a pack of real cigarettes. You’d offer a guy a real cigarette and you were in.

  Once I was off official observation, the doctors told me there wasn’t really anything wrong with me. They told me I was okay. They told me that I didn’t really have to be there. They said, “We don’t have anyplace else to send you.”

  That was frustrating. I felt weird, being in a nuthouse but not being nuts. How was I going to get out? If I was crazy and I got better, they’d have to let me out. But if I wasn’t crazy and I was locked up anyway, then what?

  They never told me how long I was going to have to stay there. If they had, I might have gone crazy for real. It was that kind of place. If you weren’t crazy when you got there, you’d definitely be crazy when you left. Especially if you were there like I was.

  Every day, I got up not knowing if today was my last day there, or whether I’d stay so long I would die there. I was just there, trying not to think about the past, trying not to worry about the future, trying to get through the experience one day at a time.

  I lived like that, locked up at Agnews, from one day to the next, never knowing how long I was going to be there, for over a year.

  My dad came to visit about twice a month. He was allowed to take me out of the ward, down to the canteen or onto the grounds. This was like a big vacation. In the whole time I was there, I never once got grounds privileges. I wasn’t allowed to work on a crew, either. That meant I was locked indoors on the ward all day, every day, for the whole time. I was fourteen years old when I went in. It’s hard for a fourteen-year-old kid to be locked up all day long.