My Lobotomy

by Fleming, Charles

  So me and my dad would go down to the canteen. He was allowed to visit for an hour, or an hour and a half. He’d buy me stuff. We’d walk on the grounds, underneath those big cypress trees. He says we played tennis—I think he only says this in order to remind me that I was no good at it, and that he was frustrated by my refusal to concentrate on the game—but I don’t remember that. I remember sitting in the canteen.

  We talked, but we didn’t talk. There was a strange silence between us. I would ask how things were going. No matter what I asked, he’d say, “Fine.” I wanted to hear what was going on with George, and Brian, and Binky. I knew Binky had gotten married, and moved back into the house with his new wife. I figured George was finishing up at Covington. So I’d ask, “What’s going on with Bink?” And he’d say, “He’s fine,” and change the subject.

  My father found these visits difficult, too. He found it difficult to talk to me. He thought I was acting unhappy because I wanted to hurt him. He thought my whole attitude was one of “I’m going to make you feel bad because I feel bad.”

  I don’t remember it that way. I wasn’t trying to make him feel guilty. I was trying to make him love me. I felt like I had been thrown away. I wanted to know that he wanted me back again.

  So, sooner or later, I would always ask him when I was going to be able to go home. And he would answer every time, “Soon.” I’d ask when soon was. He’d say, “Not now. I can’t take you home now.”

  I never asked why. I knew why. And after a while I stopped asking altogether. It was too painful to hear the answer. It hurt my feelings. It was bad to feel that unwanted. Maybe if I had been crazy, or thought I was crazy, it would have been easier. I would have known they had to keep me locked up because I wasn’t right in the head. But it wasn’t like that. I had to stay there because my parents didn’t want me at home and no other place would take me.

  So I stopped asking.

  I never had any other visitors. I didn’t see Lou, or my brothers. I never got any letters. Maybe that was some kind of policy, like they didn’t want you to think too much about home, or else you’d run away.

  I never sent any letters, either, but I wrote a lot of them. I wrote to my dad, and to Lou, and to my friends and my girlfriends. I’d tell them how much I was thinking about them, how much I was missing them, how much I loved them and cared for them, and how much I wanted to come home. I wrote letters like that to Lori, the girl whose window I broke when I was at Covington.

  But I never sent any of those letters. I knew it wouldn’t do any good. My dad made it clear that I wasn’t going anywhere. I knew that the thing between me and Lori was over. What was I going to do, ask her to wait for me? That would not have been cool. I was in a nuthouse!

  The time went slowly. It was agonizing. To make the time pass—to keep from going crazy for real—I made up stuff. I pretended. I told myself that I was in the army, like in boot camp. We were all getting ready to go overseas for the big invasion. All the other guys were going over with me. Our movements were restricted, because the invasion was top secret. I conned myself into thinking I was getting out when the invasion came—tomorrow, or the next day, or next week, but soon.

  I pretended like that for the whole year I was locked up.

  Freeman seemed to think Agnews was good for me. He wrote in his notes on June 7, 1963, “Howard has been at Agnews for about 3 months now. He has adjusted quite well to the hospital.” I guess that meant I wasn’t trying to kill myself or anybody else. Since I don’t remember seeing him at Agnews, I don’t know how he knew anything about it, except if Lou was making reports—and she wasn’t visiting me, either. As far as he was concerned, putting me in Agnews and keeping me there was the best thing in the world for me.

  Then, quite suddenly, it was over. One morning the word came that I was leaving Agnews. I was being sent to a place called Rancho Linda.

  Rancho Linda School sat high in the foothills to the east of San Jose. It was surrounded by fruit orchards and framed by eucalyptus trees, and it overlooked the city of San Jose and the entire Santa Clara Valley. Covering twelve acres, and built in the same low bungalow style as my elementary school and junior high school, Rancho Linda had classrooms, dormitories, dining halls, play areas, and a swimming pool. It was a privately run institution, and it had been open for less than a year when I got there.

  Rancho Linda was conceived as “a residential center for special education,” according to pamphlets advertising the place. It was “designed to meet the special education requirements of mentally and emotionally handicapped children and adolescents,” and to deal with “educational, social and emotional deficits as they affect the learning process.” The school offered “a 24-hour controlled atmosphere designed to minimize anxieties.”

  I am not sure whose anxieties they were designed to minimize—probably the parents’, who were paying four hundred dollars a month to have their kids there—but the “24-hour controlled atmosphere” meant that Rancho Linda was a minimum security facility where the patients, or students, were kept under close watch twenty-four hours a day. There weren’t bars on the windows, or armed guards, and you were allowed to roam the facilities, but it was clear that the students were confined to the compound and not expected to leave—unless they were planning to run away and never come back.

  After Agnews, it felt like summer camp.

  There were 110 kids there at that time, half boys, half girls, with kids as young as six and as old as seventeen or eighteen. The dorms were separated by gender and by age. There were six beds in each dorm room. Each kid had his own bed and his own closet with a clothes rack in it. Every two dorm rooms had one bathroom between them, so twelve kids shared each bathroom.

  The doors were all electronically wired, and there was a big board down in the main office with lights on it that showed which doors were open (green light) and which doors were closed (red light). This was their security system. After lights-out, there was a bed check. All the doors were shut, and they were supposed to be kept shut. Sometimes there was another bed check. Sometimes the person in charge would just sit in the office looking at the big board. If all of the lights on the board were red, that meant the doors were all shut. If one of them turned green, that meant someone was leaving the room.

  As a further security precaution, the dorm rooms were segregated by how difficult the kids were to handle. “D Unit” was for the bad boys. Kids would be put in there for coming to class late, for not cleaning up their rooms, for goofing around in class—stuff like that.

  I spent a lot of time in D Unit.

  At first I was really happy to be at Rancho Linda. The people were very friendly. The chow was incredible. Sometimes, if they didn’t run out of food, you could even go back for seconds.

  The classes were lame, just like most of my classes had always been, but these were extra lame. There was no algebra. There was no geometry. (To this day, I couldn’t really tell you what geometry is.) There was English, and history, and art. There was music. But the classes were all too easy for me. It was like they wanted the classes to be easy so every kid could pass, so they could pat themselves on the back and say what a great job they were doing educating the kids at Rancho Linda.

  I don’t know what most of the other kids were doing there. With some of them, it was obvious. There were some physically handicapped kids, especially the little kids, where you could see they had leg braces or whatever. But with most the kids, you never really knew. Some of them seemed a little slow, but there had been kids at Covington who seemed pretty slow, too. They mostly seemed like misfits, kids who couldn’t get along, kids who had no place else to go.

  I had no way of knowing it at the time, but some of the counselors at Rancho Linda didn’t think I belonged there. One of them, a guy named Napoleon Murphy Brock, told me years later that he always thought I’d been sent there for the wrong reasons. “We didn’t think there was anything really wrong with you,” he said. “We thought the right diagnosis would h
ave been, at most, emotionally disturbed—because of something wrong with the home environment. This was a school for mentally retarded kids, and kids with autism, and with all kinds of physical impairments. You just didn’t seem to be going through the things they were going through. You didn’t require the medications they required.”

  Because of that, maybe, Rancho Linda was an easy place for me to be successful. There were only about five cool guys in the whole school. The rest were sort of geeky. And there were about thirty girls in my age group. So it was easy for me to become one of the cool guys, right off.

  For one thing, I was bigger than everybody else. I was as big as most of the counselors. Plus, I’d been around a little bit. I didn’t tell people about my lobotomy, or about being at juvie, or about being at Agnews, but I knew stuff the other kids didn’t know about how the world worked. Figuring out Rancho Linda was a snap.

  A brochure from the early Rancho Linda days promised “off-campus events including fairs, rodeos, beach parties, professional sports events, bowling, movies, plays, visits to industrial plants, public recreation areas, zoos, ranches, government and armed forces facilities.” Students would participate in “swim meets, intramural games, hikes, picnics and Friday night dances.”

  I remember the occasional dance, but I don’t remember doing many other things from that list. We did get taken down the hill sometimes to a place called the What’s It Club in Santa Clara, which was run by an ex-policeman who was friends with one of the counselors. It was a drinking place, except when we were there. For us, it was just sodas and dancing.

  So there wasn’t a lot you could do for fun at Rancho Linda. We took hikes in the hills around the school. There was a running team, and I ran cross-country, but I don’t remember us ever competing against another school. There was the swimming pool. But there wasn’t much to actually do.

  So that left smoking and sex. Those were the two things you weren’t supposed to do, and we all wanted to do them. I figured out how to do them both.

  Getting cigarettes wasn’t that hard. There was one girl at the school who was old enough to smoke, and her parents would bring her cigarettes. We’d steal them from her, or she would give them to us. There was one counselor who, if he had to drive you down the hill to go to a doctor’s appointment or dentist appointment, would let you buy cigarettes. There was another counselor who left cigarettes in her car, unlocked, all the time. I think she was leaving them there for us, because it was almost always a full pack, and we’d take it one day and there’d be a fresh pack there the next day.

  You weren’t allowed to smoke at the school. You especially weren’t allowed to smoke in the dorms. But that’s what we did. We’d open a window and smoke standing next to it, blowing the smoke out. Every once in a while we’d hear one of the night counselors coming and we’d throw our cigarettes out the window and jump back in bed. There was one counselor, a Japanese guy named Yamaguchi, who’d stick his head in the door. The room would be full of smoke. He’d say, “You boys not been smoking in here?” And we’d say, “Oh, no, Mr. Yamaguchi, not us.” And he’d leave us alone.

  Standing by the window and smoking got me thinking: If no one catches me smoking by the window, I bet no one would catch me sneaking out the room by the window, either. So one night I popped the screen and climbed outside. The windows were not wired like the doors were. No one knew I had left the room. So I wandered around. The next day, I told one of the girls I might be coming by for a visit.

  By the time I figured out how to escape the dorm at night, I had already been fooling around with girls at Rancho Linda. I had been with a girl named Susan. She had a big bust and, like a lot of the girls at that time, wore her hair bobbed, like a backup singer from The Ronettes or some band like that. She was aggressive, and she was easy, and I’d be lying if I said there was any other reason I went with her. She made it happen. But she didn’t really know how to make it happen, and neither did I. So we didn’t really have intercourse. We did a lot of making out, but we didn’t go all the way.

  For that, I had to wait for Annette.

  I had a real crush on her. She wasn’t like Susan. She was something special. She was very bubbly and outgoing, and cute. Some guys might have said she was a little heavier than she should be, but not me. I always liked girls with a little meat on their bones, and she had that.

  I don’t know what she was doing at Rancho Linda. There certainly didn’t seem to be anything wrong with her. Maybe she was a discipline problem at home. Maybe she was like me, and no one knew where to put her. I never asked. Just like at Agnews, no one at Rancho Linda ever asked.

  I wanted her so badly. I didn’t know what to do about that, any more than I did with Susan, but Annette was so beautiful that I was willing to make a complete fool of myself trying if I ever got the chance. Then I got the chance.

  The first time it happened, I was lying in bed pretending to be sick. The other kids were in school. I didn’t want to go. So I faked sick. While the other kids were in class, I was alone in my room.

  Annette heard I was sick, and she came down to see how I was doing. She got a bathroom pass or something, and snuck down to visit me.

  I was scared to death. I was really into Annette. Plus, I didn’t want to get caught. I was already on D Unit. You couldn’t go anywhere from there but out. I didn’t want to get into trouble. And I was scared of what I imagined we were about to do. I was afraid she would see that I didn’t know what I was doing. I was afraid I’d look like a nerd.

  We had already hugged and kissed and messed around a little, but I didn’t really know how to go any further. I’m not sure Annette really knew, either.

  But we were alone and we had time. Annette got into bed with me. We had thirty minutes together before she had to leave. Somehow we figured it out. I don’t know if Annette was a virgin before that day. But neither one of us was afterward.

  It was wonderful. It was so exciting. I felt like a man. I felt like I had crossed over. I wasn’t a kid anymore.

  I knew the word was going to get out. I wasn’t going to tell anyone—I knew that you didn’t do that, and besides, I didn’t want to get caught. But I thought Annette would tell her friends.

  She told. Within a day, the other girls knew what had happened. Pretty soon some of the guys knew, too. Now I could walk around like I owned the place. I had arrived.

  Then, almost as fast, I had a big scare. Annette was pregnant. First she told all her friends what had happened. Then she started saying she was pregnant.

  I knew it had to be me, because she hadn’t been with anybody else. But I also couldn’t figure out how it was possible. I mean, we were together one time. How could she get pregnant? Also, how could she be so sure so soon? It had only been about three days. Could a girl know she was pregnant in three days?

  That shows you how much I knew. Of course it turned out she wasn’t pregnant, and everything was fine.

  These escapades became my big thing. Every night I was on a Mission: Impossible kind of mission—to bust out of my room and sneak up to one of the girls’ dorms.

  After dark, after the bed check, I would take the screen off the window in my room and crawl outside. I’d sneak across the campus. Then I’d usually have to climb a fence, or climb the side of the building and crawl along the roof, to get to the girls’ dorm.

  I took it seriously. I’d even wear dark clothing in order to blend in with the surroundings. Sometimes I’d hear someone coming, and I’d have to lie down and hide. One night I heard footsteps so close to me that I knew I was busted. I hit the deck and lay in the gravel, and waited for what seemed like forever. Then the footsteps went away.

  That’s the way it was at Rancho Linda. And it wasn’t just me. I don’t know if I was the first guy to bust out and go visit the girls, but I wasn’t the last. Pretty soon it seemed liked everybody was doing it. We all had our schemes. To get around the bed checks, you’d roll up a bunch of clothes and stick them under your sheets. Then you’d
slip out. The bed checks never came more often than thirty minutes apart, so you knew you had a half hour to take care of business. Sometimes you’d sneak out and get up to the girls’ room and be back in fifteen minutes. Sometimes it was an aborted mission—when you got out and found someone patrolling outside. Or you’d get to the girls’ room and open a screen and someone would scream. Or you’d find the window locked.

  We were successful a lot of the time, I think, because Rancho Linda was a new facility with a young, inexperienced staff. They hadn’t figured out yet what we would be up to, so they hadn’t figured out how to stop us.

  I went up to Annette’s room the first time maybe a month after our first experience together. Then word got around that I was in the know as far as the sex thing went. So pretty soon there were these other girls paying attention to me. Susan was interested in me again. So was Cindy. She was a very aggressive girl. Some people said she was a slut. They called her a whore. So, it wasn’t good to be caught with Cindy. But it was very good to be alone with Cindy.

  Annette found out these other girls were interested in me. She got jealous and broke up with me. So, I was with Susan for a while. Then Susan found out I was interested in Cindy, so she wouldn’t have anything to do with me for a while. And so it went. I guess I thought I was a stud. What did I know?

  I made friends with a guy named Ron. He was cool. He was Latin, and he had a waterfall haircut. He might have been at Rancho Linda for physical problems. He had a bad arm—one arm didn’t work right. And we had gotten to be friends in a weird way. We were playing around and I pushed him down and hurt his leg. We weren’t playing that hard, so I didn’t know why it hurt him. But he went to the nurse, and he wound up in the hospital. It turned out he had some kind of weird bone infection. That’s why his leg hurt when I pushed him down. They said if he hadn’t found out about the infection when he did, he would have lost the leg.