My crazy act worked. I made the doctors think that I needed to be there. After three weeks or so, they made their recommendation, and I was allowed to stay. I was allowed to not go to prison.
I guess I figured that once they knew about the lobotomy, the doctors and technicians would give me a break. The funny thing is, it never occurred to me that if I convinced them I was crazy, I would have trouble convincing them later on that I was not crazy. It didn’t occur to me that it would be hard to get out of Agnews. I wasn’t worried at all about showing the doctors I was normal.
I should have been. Here I was, back at Agnews, a couple of months shy of my eighteenth birthday. It would be more than two years before I was on the street again.
This time around, I was more mature, less fearful. The first time in had been like One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Now it was more like McHale’s Navy.
I had grounds privileges now. There were trees and lawns and benches. As long as you didn’t get into trouble, as long as you didn’t try to hurt anybody or try to hurt yourself, you could wander around on your own. It was kind of like when I was a kid, when I would go walking along the railroad tracks or take my bike up into the hills.
There was even a bus you could take from the Westside campus, where I was, to the Eastside campus. That’s where they kept the really crazy people. The bus ride was probably more than a mile, and it felt like being in another world. You could ride that bus and walk around the Eastside and feel like you were in a different city.
I spent a lot of time wandering around at Agnews on my own. Maybe I’d never have gotten into trouble if I’d been alone all the time, but…
But you met guys at mealtime. You met guys in the day rooms. Most of them were people you didn’t want to know. But I made a couple of friends. I met a guy named Steve Alper.
Steve had been sent to Agnews for some behavior problems. He was skinny and about a foot shorter than me, and he was willing to go along with my schemes, which was very cool. Like always, I needed a partner. I needed a front man. Just like with the great train-station robbery, I always wanted someone around who, if things went wrong, would get caught and then not snitch me off. At Agnews, the second time I was there, that was Steve.
We began to hatch some scams.
The people at Agnews distributed tobacco and rolling papers to anyone who wanted them. But most guys hated the roll-your-owns. They’d pay a lot for real cigarettes. If they didn’t have canteen privileges and no one was visiting them and bringing them stuff, they had no way to get real cigarettes. Steve and I had canteen privileges, but we didn’t have any real money.
So we cooked up a scam where we could get some money and some real cigarettes in the bargain.
First we’d go to the canteen and buy a pack of cigarettes. We’d open it carefully and take all the cigarettes out. We’d refill the pack with twenty roll-your-owns, and reseal the pack so it looked brand-new. Then we’d sell that pack, as new, to another patient.
If the guy who bought the cigarettes was crazy enough, he didn’t notice. If he was just sort of crazy, he might think, Hey, these cigarettes are a mess. If he was normal, he might realize something was wrong. So he’d probably take the cigarettes to the canteen and say, “Hey! These are roll-your-owns!” Usually the guy in the canteen would just give him another pack—of real cigarettes.
Sometimes we did that ourselves instead of selling them. It worked so well that after a while we’d just sort of stuff the pack with paper and tobacco. We’d tell the guy at the canteen that there might have been a mistake at the factory.
I thought it was hilarious. It was like these people didn’t think we were intelligent enough, or shrewd enough, to figure out any scams. We were in the nuthouse. How smart could we be? So they didn’t have any defenses against these little schemes.
There were alcoholics on the ward, and some of them had ways to slip off and buy booze and sneak it back. Some guys drank. Some guys sold liquor. But because it was the 1960s, a lot of people were interested in drugs, too. Some guys sold drugs. Some guys just handed them out. I was given some acid one time. I had what you’d call a bad trip. Later on I took some “orange sunshine” someone gave me, and that was okay.
Since people were interested in drugs, there were ways to make money off them. A friend and I figured out how we could sell marijuana to some of the younger girls at Agnews. Only it wasn’t marijuana. Where would guys like us get marijuana? It was just grass cuttings from the lawn. We’d get some of that and dry it out and roll it up in cigarette paper and sell it. We charged one dollar a joint. These girls would come back and tell us what a great trip they had. They wanted more. So me and Steve would string them along. We’d say, “Well, we can get more, but it’s going to take a couple of days. And it’s going to cost you.” Then we’d dry some more grass.
Far more than drugs or alcohol, I was interested in sex. Just like at Rancho Linda, there was plenty of sex at Agnews.
The dormitories were segregated into boys and girls, men and women. The mealtimes were segregated, too. But the classrooms were coed, and so were the grounds. So you could meet girls. You’d see them in class and talk to them afterward. Or you’d see them in the canteen, or sitting on a bench, and you could strike up a conversation.
Getting them alone was a little harder. But it wasn’t impossible. Once I was interested in a girl and I knew she was interested in me, I’d go down to the canteen. There was a pay phone there. I’d call the front office and say, “So-and-so has a visitor.” Then I’d hang up before they could ask who the visitor was, and I’d head out into the hallway to intercept the girl before she got to the front office. She did have a visitor—me!
To be alone, you’d go for a walk on the grounds. You could take that bus over to the Eastside. Over there the patients were so much crazier that you could do almost anything and no one paid attention.
After a while I figured out which bathrooms were never used. There were some that no one ever went into. That’s where I’d take my girls. Usually, because there wasn’t much time and there wasn’t anyplace to lie down, we wouldn’t have actual intercourse. We’d just fool around.
Sometimes I had the real thing, though, like I did with a woman named Ellen. She was older than me, probably in her early thirties, and she was just as into sex as I was. We’d get on the Agnews bus together and go over to the Eastside, where no one knew us by sight. We’d wander around the buildings until we found a place that seemed deserted. We’d have sex in the stairwells. We needed privacy, of course, but we also needed time, because she wore really complicated undergarments—a girdle, and a brassiere that fastened with a million metal hooks—and it took forever to get them off.
I was interested in anyone who was interested in me. This wasn’t like with Annette. I would go with anyone who was available and willing. I went with girls my age, and girls who were older. One time I went with this one lady—I don’t even want to think about how old she was. Pretty old, though. I’m embarrassed to even remember that.
Daily life at Agnews wasn’t difficult. They fed you all right, even if there were rumors about what went into the food. (We heard they put saltpeter in the meals so no one would have any sex drive. They must not have put enough in there for me.) At night you’d watch TV and drink coffee. You got up at five. You went to bed at nine. In between, you played cards a lot. Sometimes no one was around to play with you. I played a lot of solitaire. I played a lot of war—with myself.
After a while, they trusted me enough to give me a job. Part of the deal at Agnews was if you wanted grounds privileges you had to work a job. At first, I cut hair. I guess I wasn’t very good at it. By the time I got through with them, everyone had the same haircut. So I didn’t last too long at that. Later on, I worked in the bakery, on the hog farm, in the laundry, and in the storerooms. Most of it was boring, stupid work. You didn’t really learn anything. You didn’t learn enough to get a job on the outside. It was just your way of paying for your keep. If yo
u didn’t like it, you could stay confined to your room, which would have been terrible.
There was a lot of hanging out, a lot of time spent just hanging around doing nothing, shooting the breeze. With some of the guys this was okay, and with some of them it wasn’t. There was one guy who teased me a lot about sex. He would say I had never had sex with a girl. I’d say that wasn’t true, that he was wrong about that. So he’d start asking me questions about it—did I do this, or did I do that? That made me pretty uneasy, so I stayed away from him. I stayed away from anyone who talked about sex. Some guys just gave me the creeps.
But Steve and I got to be friends, and partners. We sold that marijuana together. We did some embezzling, too.
We somehow managed to steal some paperwork from the accounting office, which was the place that banked and disbursed patients’ money. I filled out the paperwork. Steve got access to the official stamp. Then he took the paperwork down to the accounting office. When he came back, with his head down and his hands behind him, I thought he’d gotten busted. Then he smiled and showed me his hands. Three hundred dollars!
Another time I cooked up a scheme to sneak out of Agnews. I forged some paperwork requesting that I be allowed to visit my grandmother—Daisy, my mother’s mother—in Oakland. I made it look like she had called and made the request. I took the papers in to have them approved. My grandmother didn’t actually know anything about it, but I wanted to get out for a few days and have a field trip away from San Jose. I filled out the same kind of paperwork for Steve. We were let out of our wards, and walked to the bus pickup. The Greyhound bus came once a day to the clock tower building. We rode it up to Oakland.
When I was a kid, visiting my grandmother Daisy was a big deal. She still lived in the huge family home on Newton Avenue. It was dark and stately, and felt like money. Sometimes on family visits my uncle Hugh and uncle Gordon were there, and I liked seeing them. But after my father married Lou, we saw my mother’s side of the family less and less. My father said bad things about Gordon, and he always felt like Daisy had looked down on him as not good enough for my mother. Maybe seeing them reminded him how much he missed my mother, too. As the years passed, Brian and I were hardly ever taken to see our grandmother anymore.
So when I snuck out of Agnews my grandmother was happy to see me. She had kept up her letter-writing campaign, trying to find out what they were doing to me, and not getting answers that satisfied her. She was relieved to know I was all right. But she seemed surprised that I was able to get to Oakland on my own when I was supposed to be locked up.
Steve and I did that enough times that it turned into an inside joke. When he and I and two other guys formed a little rock band, we called it “Granny’s Place.” I was the guitar player, Steve played keyboards, another guy played drums, and another guy played bass. We worked up a few songs, like “Louie, Louie,” “Wipeout,” “Walk, Don’t Run,” and “House of the Rising Sun.” We were good enough that we got to play one of the Agnews dances. They had a real band come in, but when the band took a break we got onstage and did our songs. That was our only gig.
If I’d wanted to, I could have filled out that paperwork and left Agnews for good. But I always came back. Why not? I had nowhere else to go.
Mostly I stayed out of trouble with the staff there, but I did get written up for little things—cutting class, or taking off from work. I never got caught for selling grass, or for going with girls. I never got caught for the embezzling or anything else serious.
But I was a suspect one time in a serious crime that I had nothing to do with. Someone had hot-wired a truck, driven it over to the administration building, broken into the room where they kept the patients’ money, stolen the safe where all the money was kept, got the safe onto the truck, and taken it out onto a field. They busted into the safe and made off with a bunch of money.
The administrators thought I was behind this. They brought me in and questioned me. I thought it was a great caper, but—me? How could I do any of that stuff? I didn’t know anything about hot-wiring cars, or breaking locks, or cracking safes. And how would I do all of that stuff while I was in my bed, on a locked ward, and still sleeping when they came to talk to me about it? It didn’t make sense. Maybe they didn’t have any other suspects.
Throughout all this, I had one really good reason not to get in trouble. There was a doctor at Agnews who believed in using electroshock therapy as punishment. Everyone knew about it. I think the technicians wanted us to know about it. They wanted us to know what was in store for us if we got out of line.
Steve was one of the people who got out of line. He was friendly with me, but with other people he could be real belligerent. He was a fighter. One day they took Steve out and kept him for a while. A week later, I heard he was out—but they’d moved him to a new ward. They had given him the electroshock.
When I saw him again, he wasn’t right. I don’t think he was ever right after that. The treatment was supposed to “calm” patients down. In Steve’s case, the calm was only temporary. Years later, Steve would be sent to jail for shooting a wino in the eye with a BB gun after the wino had passed him a bottle of wine that someone had urinated in.
I was afraid of electroshock. I was scared of the medications, too. I had no experience with that, and I was afraid they’d start giving me something that would make me crazy—like the other guys I saw on medication. I didn’t know that the doctors had decided not to give me electroshock because I’d had the lobotomy. So my fear of it was very real.
My dad still came to visit me almost every other weekend. He was trying to make up for what happened, I think. He was trying to make it all right.
Other than my dad, my other grandmother, Grandma Boo, was my only visitor at Agnews. She would come once in a while. For some reason she would always come really early in the morning and sleep in her car until visiting hours.
I never saw Lou. I never saw my brothers. When my dad visited, he didn’t seem to want to talk about them. He didn’t want to talk about me going home. I had given up any ideas about that. I knew they didn’t want me there. I knew I couldn’t get out of Agnews. I had stopped fantasizing about it, too.
The guy who held the key to me getting out of Agnews was Dr. Shon.
Shon was this balding, bookworm-looking psychiatrist with black-rimmed glasses. He was a nice guy. He dealt with me like it was all a big joke. He’d call me “Mr. Dully,” like I was an adult, but it was kind of like he was making fun of me. He’d say, “Well, Mr. Dully, how are you enjoying life here at Agnews?” like he was the owner of a hotel and was asking me whether I was having a good time.
I saw him once a month. He’d ask me questions. Hours and hours of questions. He’d show me inkblots and ask me what I thought of them, or what I saw in them. He never said what he thought about my answers. He’d just nod and ask another question.
After a while, he told me he knew I didn’t belong at Agnews. But he also told me I couldn’t leave.
I would say, “How can you say that? How can you tell me I don’t belong here but I have to stay here anyway?”
He’d smile and say, “That’s just the way it is.”
The time dragged slowly. It was frustrating to be at Agnews. I didn’t know what I could do to make them understand I wasn’t crazy, except what I was already doing. And I didn’t know how to get out except by showing them I wasn’t crazy. But that wasn’t working. If Dr. Shon knew I didn’t belong there, but told me I couldn’t leave, how would I ever get out?
I didn’t think of running away, or escaping, because I couldn’t imagine where I would go. I didn’t think of suicide, either. I was never self-destructive that way. I might have been tired of living, like the song says, but I was also scared of dying. I did not want to die, as lonely or scared or sad as I ever got. I never thought about killing myself.
But it was hard, watching the clock, getting through the days.
Sometime in the middle of 1968—I have no papers on this period of
my life, and I wasn’t keeping any kind of prison diary at Agnews—Dr. Shon made me an offer. He told me that if I could stay out of trouble for three weeks, he’d arrange to have me released. This meant no trouble. I had to go three weeks without screwing up in any way. I couldn’t get written up for anything.
That sounded easy. For some guys, it would have been. For me, it was hard. I almost made it, several times. But then I’d get written up for some little infraction or other, ditching a class or not coming down for a meal or something like that.
After a while, Shon decided to let me go anyway. He said, “You’re leaving.” He didn’t say why. He didn’t say where. He just said, “We’re arranging for your release.”
I didn’t think I was going home. I didn’t think I’d ever go home. I didn’t think they could send me back to Juvenile Hall. I was too old. I didn’t think they were sending me to prison for the checks, because they told me that was all taken care of.
So I wasn’t all that surprised when they said they were sending me back to a halfway house.
I was excited. I had been locked up at Agnews for more than two years. I couldn’t wait to get out. I was free again.
At least for a little while.
In the spring of 1969, I was moved from Agnews to a halfway house at 884 Jackson Street in Santa Clara, a little white clapboard house not far from Santa Clara University.
It should have been an easy life. I was free. I was taken care of by the government. I got a check every month for $120, which paid my rent and gave me some walking-around money.
But they had rules, and I didn’t like following the rules. I was a nonconformist.
Not like the antiwar protestors. I wasn’t like them at all. I didn’t want to be associated with them.
But I wanted to be associated with something. I always did. I knew I wasn’t normal. But I wanted to be normal. I wanted to be thought of as normal.
I looked sort of like a biker. I was six feet seven inches, and I weighed about 190 pounds. I had a big bushy mustache. So I started hanging around that Spartan Hub again, drinking with the Gypsy Jokers. Now that I was almost an adult, I could drink more freely. I still didn’t like it all that much. I didn’t like the taste. But I liked the buzz. I liked Budweiser. I liked the girlie drinks, too. I started drinking sloe gin fizz. That was my drink.
My Lobotomy Page 18