My Lobotomy

by Fleming, Charles

  I wasn’t a difficult drunk. I didn’t get in fights. I didn’t have hangovers. I didn’t do wild things. I was kind of a happy drunk.

  But my drinking might have gotten in the way of my residence at the halfway house. They had these rules, like curfew. You had to be in by a certain time of night. You had to do things their way, or you were out. So they asked me to leave.

  I had recently met a guy named Dave Sawyer. I was walking down the street. He was driving along in a white Chevy with red flames painted on the side. He pulled over and asked me if I wanted to cruise around. I didn’t have anything better to do, so I said yes. We started hanging around together a little.

  When I got kicked out of the halfway house, Sawyer and his girlfriend, Lynn, invited me to move into their place on Third Street in San Jose.

  It was a studio apartment, which meant there was one big room attached to a little kitchen. There was one bed. It was a big bed, but it was just one bed. There was no hanky-panky, but that’s how we slept.

  Lynn was on welfare. We used her welfare check to pay the rent. I was on government relief—ATD, which meant Aid to the Totally Disabled, or something like that. My check paid for everything else. We used my money to eat and party on.

  Dave and I would take the Chevy cruising, looking for something to do. We’d go pick up girls. We’d go hang out in a restaurant. We’d go drink someplace. It was kind of a dumb way to live. I had nothing to do, and no reason to do it. I had no work ethic, and I never looked for work. I didn’t really have to. The government check came every month. All I had to do was be the guy who had the lobotomy.

  But I couldn’t just go along and not do something. So I started doing something bad, again. I started writing bad checks again.

  It wasn’t some big criminal enterprise. It was just writing checks against funds that weren’t there. I’d open a bank account with a little money, and then start writing checks for larger and larger amounts. Like before, I’d use a check to buy something from a pawnshop, then I’d take it to a different pawnshop and turn it into money. It was an easy way to get some money fast.

  It was also an easy way to get caught, and I got caught. Lynn and I had gone into this bank that was across the street from some city government offices. They didn’t know me in that bank. They didn’t know I didn’t have any money in my account. I knew I could write a check and get some cash.

  But there was a customer in the bank who worked for the police department—in the fraud unit. She recognized me from my mug shot. She tipped the bank off, and someone got the cops over there, and we were arrested before we even left the building.

  It was a Tuesday. They held me overnight, I think, and let me go on my own recognizance the following morning. I hadn’t even bothered to call my dad to see about getting bail. Those days were gone.

  I had already spent quite a few nights in jail. One more night didn’t rehabilitate me. By Friday morning of that same week, I was in trouble again.

  Sawyer and I had been riding around that day in the Chevy. We had guns—a pair of pistols. We had bought them with a bad check at a pawnshop. I’m not sure what we were going to do with them. We weren’t going to rob anybody with them, or hurt anybody, because I was not into anything like that. We weren’t going to rob a bank. I think we had them because when we went into a pawnshop with a bad check, we had to buy something, and there was nothing else in that pawnshop we wanted.

  When a police car came up behind us that Friday morning, I threw my gun out the window. Dave stashed his in the glove compartment.

  That was stupid. The cops pulled us over. They had a look in the glove compartment. They found the gun. Then they looked in the trunk. They found some tools. It was probably just pliers and stuff. But to these cops, they looked like burglary tools. So they arrested us on a bunch of charges, including robbery, burglary, receiving stolen property, and possession of burglary tools.

  Since it was a Friday, I got to spend the weekend in jail. I was released on Monday morning. The charges were all dismissed.

  They let me off, and what got me off again was the lobotomy. Judges probably don’t want to take advantage of the disadvantaged, and it was obvious that I had real disadvantages. The operation put me at a real disadvantage.

  I personally think the real disadvantage was that no one ever taught me how to do anything. I was almost twenty-one, and I had no idea how to take care of myself. So, in a way, I used that disadvantage to my own advantage, by playing on it when I was in trouble to get out of trouble.

  It worked. My arrest record shows one run-in after another. It also shows what a smart-ass I was. I’m listed as having at least seven criminal aliases—like I was some kind of big-time crook. I had told the police that I was Vion Vaccura, Paul Weston, Vion Dully, Vion Dulley, Vion Richard Dix, Richard Dicks, and Kirk Lee Dix.

  Where did I come up with this stuff? I don’t even remember half of those phony names. I remember that Vion Vaccura was a stage name I made up for myself back when I thought I was going to be a rock star. Paul Weston was a guy I knew from school. Kirk Lee was my baby brother’s name. But Richard Dicks, or Dix? I can only imagine that, since my stepbrother George’s last name was Cox, I was making some sort of stupid pun out of Cox and Dix.

  Whatever it was, it didn’t turn the authorities against me. The judge let me off. He let Sawyer off, too. I guess there hadn’t been any bank robberies they could blame us for. They let us both go.

  For Dave, it didn’t last long. He had met a girl who had been at Agnews. She was young and cute and he liked her, and they started going around together. Dave and I were still living with Lynn, and Dave was with Lynn, and this girl wanted Dave to leave Lynn and come be with her. Dave didn’t want to.

  So, the girl turned him over to the cops. See, she was only fourteen or fifteen years old. She looked about twenty-three, but she was a minor. And they had been sleeping together. She told the cops. They came looking for Dave. He got convicted of statutory rape, and he went to jail.

  I stayed on living with Lynn in that studio apartment on Third Street. We were fooling around now, but it wasn’t anything serious.

  Besides, not long after that I met Martha.

  Martha was a big girl with a round face and dark skin and dark hair that she wore in a little page-boy style. She had also been a patient at Agnews. Her whole name was Martha Bishop. Her father was Cecil Bishop and her mother’s sister was a Lankershim. I didn’t know the whole family story, but I knew the Bishop name was famous, and I knew that the Lankershim family owned a bunch of the San Fernando Valley down in Los Angeles. I knew there was money in that family.

  One day me and my old friend Ed Woodson, who I knew from my first halfway house, were riding around in this limousine. I’m not sure exactly what we thought we were doing in the limousine, but we had rented it using a bad check, of course, and we were just cruising around.

  Ed saw Martha and told the driver to pull over. We got into a conversation with her. She saw that we had a bucket of fried chicken in the limo, and she was hungry. We told her we needed some money to pay for the limo, and she had some money. So we made a deal: our chicken, her money. She got in and started eating fried chicken.

  I took her back to my place, and she never left.

  My father had always told me to stay away from the women at Agnews. He said, “Whatever you do, don’t get involved with anyone from that place.” So going with Martha was a way of telling my dad that he couldn’t tell me what to do. I also liked Martha for the sex.

  We drank a lot. We danced a lot. Martha moved into the little studio apartment with me and Lynn, and we set up house. We’d go out, and have these wild nights. After about a year and a half, we decided to make it official. We got married at a Lutheran church in Mountain View. I invited my dad to the wedding, but he didn’t come. Martha’s mom came, but her dad refused, too. My uncle Orville and aunt Evelyn came. Martha’s brother was there. It was a small wedding. Afterward, we went to this restaurant in Palo Al
to for the reception.

  We had such big dreams and ambitions. We were married! We were going to make it together! We were going to live the good life!

  But we didn’t have the first idea how. We weren’t working. We didn’t have jobs. We didn’t know how to get jobs. We both had this checkered past. And we had a way to get along that didn’t require working. I got a government check. So did she. Plus her parents gave her money. So we never had jobs or had to get them.

  After a while we got our own place. Then Martha came into some money from her aunt. Her parents were worried that I’d get all the money, so they used it to buy her a condominium.

  Now we were property owners. The condominium was on Bouret Drive. It had white walls and Chinese red carpets. We moved in and that was supposed to be our life.

  But we didn’t have a life. We didn’t have a real marriage. We had a kind of association. We were just playing at marriage. I wanted to have my cake and eat it, too, which meant I wanted to be with Martha, but I wanted to be with any other woman I could get my hands on. And Martha wanted to be with everybody.

  We stayed together from 1970 to 1975.

  It was not a good time. We got into drugs. We were smoking a lot of marijuana, and doing a drug we called “KJ,” which was a kind of tranquilizer. We were doing “rocket fuel,” which was like angel dust sprinkled on marijuana. I was taking a lot of Dexedrine, too. I had found some outside a doctor’s office, and started taking it. I liked it, so I just kept taking it.

  It was a weird way to live. We had a very drunken, druggy life. We had terrible fights. I became violent, too, which was unusual for me. Maybe it was the marriage, maybe it was the drugs, or maybe it was both, but it was bad.

  We had bought a boat, a little sailboat. It cost eight hundred dollars, and I was paying it off a little at a time, and we’d go sailing out of Santa Cruz. We didn’t really know how to sail, but we’d take the boat out and pretend. One time she did something stupid and almost knocked me overboard. I got so mad that I actually hit her.

  I hadn’t ever hit a woman before. I had practically never hit a man, since I was a kid. It was shocking, even to me.

  Martha got even by having me arrested—not for that, but for other things. She’d get mad at me and she’d call the police and snitch me off, for things like parking tickets and warrants for traffic tickets.

  This happened more than a couple of times. I spent a lot of time in the Santa Clara County Jail. Usually it was just overnight, or for a few days at a time, but I got to know it pretty well. It held between three hundred and five hundred men. They were segregated into sections, and the sections all had names. There was “Max Row,” which was maximum security. There was “Siberia,” because it was cold all the time. There was “Hollywood,” and “Snake Pit,” but I don’t know why they were called that. There was “Queen’s Row,” and everybody knew what that was all about.

  I had been in Max Row for the bad checks. Now I was mostly in Hollywood. It wasn’t so bad, and it wasn’t for long.

  My dad would usually find out I was being arrested, sometimes before the cops showed up. He had continued to do part-time work in law enforcement, so he knew a lot of the police officers. They’d get a warrant to pick me up, and they’d look at my paperwork. They’d see a guy who was really big and who had a lot of arrests. They’d call my dad and say, “We gotta pick him up. Are we gonna have a problem?” My dad would say, “No. He’s a pussycat.”

  It was true. I never resisted. I never gave the cops a hard time. I wasn’t violent with them. I had no capacity for it. I couldn’t really fight. I had studied karate for a short time, with a guy I knew who was an instructor. I got up to blue belt, but then I broke my toe doing a leg sweep. That hurt! I didn’t know karate was supposed to hurt. So I never went back.

  Sometimes my dad would come and post bail. Usually he wouldn’t. One time around 1972, I got arrested for outstanding warrants for unpaid parking tickets and moving violations. I was twenty-three or twenty-four. I knew the bail was about $1,200. My dad came to visit me. He took out his wallet, and he spread out this fan of money—a lot of money. He said, “I’ve got the bail money, right here. I could go in there and bail you out. But I’m not going to. I’m going to let you stay in here awhile.”

  My dad never carried around that kind of money. There was no reason in the world he would have that kind of money on him except to show it to me.

  So that meant he had found out how much the bail was, then he had gone to the bank, withdrawn the money, and come down to the jail to show me the $1,200—just so he could say he wasn’t going to use it to post my bail. He did all that to teach me a lesson.

  I guess I didn’t learn the lesson.

  The next time I got arrested was in Fernley, Nevada, a town to the northeast of Reno. I was up there with Martha and my old pal Dave Sawyer, who had already done his time for being with the underage girl and gotten out. I don’t know what we were doing in that part of Nevada. We had no business in Fernley. But it was nighttime, and we were tired, so we decided to sleep in the car.

  I was in the driver’s seat when the cops rolled up, and the key was in the ignition. I was carrying a suspended driver’s license. So they hauled me in. They let Martha and Dave go.

  The judge said one week in jail or $110. Well, if I’d had $110 I wouldn’t have been sleeping in the car. So I took the week.

  Martha and Dave took the car and left, probably for San Jose. What else were they going to do? They didn’t have any money, either. So it’s not like they could just rent a room and hang around and wait for me to get out.

  I got out a week later. I was alone, and I was a good long way from home. I had a little money in my pocket, but not much. It was enough for me to get either a good meal or a Greyhound ticket back to San Jose.

  But I wanted both. I wanted to go home, but I was hungry, and I wanted a good meal. So I did the only intelligent thing I could think of. I took my money into a casino and gambled it. I figured I could turn it into enough money for the bus ticket and the good meal.

  I lost the money. I had to hitchhike back to San Jose on an empty stomach.

  It was pretty low. But I was used to living pretty low. I had lived on a $120-a-month government check with a wife. When you’ve been at the bottom, nothing looks that bad, and I had been at the bottom for quite a while. The bottom was normal for me.

  But the bottom got worse.

  Freeman had stopped paying attention to me some years before. I don’t know what the circumstance was—did I see him, or did he receive a visit from Lou?—but he made some final notes in late 1969:

  Howard has been out of Agnews for the past year and is making a very unsatisfactory adjustment. He has been in jail on several occasions, and is at present on probation.

  He is conspicuous with his long hair, dirty clothes, and he associates mostly with co-patients of Agnews, and he claims to have married a girl although he is so untruthful generally that it’s hard to believe that any girl would accept him. He sponges on his friends, borrows money from friends of the family. Nobody seems to be able to get through to him, the psychiatric technicians, the parole officers and other officers.

  Freeman was having a bad time, too. His marriage had not improved with the move to California, and neither had his wife’s health. She developed into a full-blown alcoholic. She’d spend the whole day drinking while Freeman was out seeing patients. Freeman had to ask liquor stores in the neighborhood not to sell her booze.

  Two of Freeman’s adult children were living in the Bay Area, and he saw them often. Another of his children, though, had met a tragic end, in Freeman’s beloved Yosemite.

  One summer, Freeman had taken two of his boys for their annual camping trip. They were hiking near the top of Vernal Falls on a hot summer morning when Freeman’s second youngest boy discovered that his canteen was empty. Freeman had forgotten to remind him to fill it. Freeman pointed at the nearby Merced River, and told him to fill it there.

&nb
sp; The boy slipped into the river and began to float downstream, toward the falls. Another hiker, a sailor on shore leave, saw the boy and jumped in to save him. While Freeman and his other son watched, the boy and the sailor went over the falls together—falling 325 feet to the rocks below. It was months before the boy’s body was recovered. Freeman’s wife, traveling in the East, read about her son’s death in a local newspaper.

  Freeman buried himself in work. He continued to believe in the lobotomy, and wrote long papers on its usefulness, despite the fact that new drugs had come along that did a better job, had fewer side effects, and were not irreversible.

  One of the papers was called “Adolescents in Distress” and bragged about the “therapeutic possibilities of lobotomy” on children.

  He started by observing that a lot of teenagers are anxious, but said this was healthy. “A certain amount of anxiety is good for a boy or a girl, in the same way that a certain amount of fleas is good for a dog—keeps him from thinking about being a dog.”

  Freeman reported several case studies of young people he had given lobotomies to over the years.

  One was a boy identified as R.W. He began having problems at fourteen, hearing voices and thinking God and the devil were after him, and became convinced that he was going to die. Freeman gave him a lobotomy in 1958 at Herrick Memorial Hospital in Berkeley. Five years later, he could not care for himself, even though his hallucinations had never returned.

  Another patient of Freeman’s, identified as Carol, was also lobotomized at Herrick around the same time. Her mother was a schizophrenic living at Agnews. Carol suffered from horrible anxiety. Freeman treated her with “intensive” electroshock treatment. When that didn’t produce the desired results, Freeman gave her a lobotomy. A few months later, Freeman could report that Carol was living with her grandmother, helping with the housework, doing well in school, popular with the boys, and not subject to fits of anxiety. Freeman wrote, “The girl’s personality has undoubtedly been changed by lobotomy. Once the anxiety was relieved a lively and friendly personality emerged.”