A third patient, A.W., had been in very bad shape before her surgery, also at Herrick, and was in pretty bad shape afterward, too. It wasn’t clear whether she had benefited in any way from the lobotomy.
The fourth patient was identified as R.C. Like me, he had received his lobotomy in 1960 at Doctors General Hospital in San Jose. Prior to his surgery he had been housed for several years at the Langley Porter Clinic, and later at Agnews, where he had spent most of his time in bed. He was hostile and had feelings of sensitivity and inadequacy. After a series of forty electroshock treatments brought him only “fleeting” relief, Freeman performed the lobotomy. He was able to report, with real enthusiasm, that R.C. returned home right after the surgery, became more cheerful and alert, and got along better with his older brother. “His feelings were less easily hurt, and he seemed less self-conscious. He is now in a period of rehabilitation at Goodwill Industries. Thus within a year the young man has made more progress socially than in the preceding ten.”
This guy almost sounds like me. Trouble at home, trouble with his brother, and after surgery stuck in a go-nowhere job with Goodwill.
But he’s not me. The R.C. in this paper, and the A.W., are Richard and Ann, the kids who drove with me to Freeman’s disastrous meeting at Langley Porter Clinic when we were all booed off the stage.
Freeman doesn’t mention that in his report. In fact, he cheats a little. He says in his report that Richard suffered from “helplessness,” characterized by his typical comment on everything: “I’m doing the best I can.” But he suggests this was a problem before the surgery. In fact, that’s what Richard kept saying on the stage that day at Langley. That’s what freaked those doctors out.
Freeman’s career wasn’t going well at all. The embarrassment at Langley Porter, he later said, had a serious effect on his reputation. Added to it, Freeman had attempted to do to another child what he had done to me, and he had gotten in trouble for it.
On May 31, 1961, five months after the trip to the clinic, he wrote to several of his old colleagues, including James Watt, the surgeon who had assisted him in all his early lobotomies, asking for support.
Dear Jim,
I am being savagely attacked by the Chief of Pediatrics at the Palo Alto–Stanford hospital for even recommending a lobotomy in a 12-year-old boy who, according to my lights, is going to end up in an institution. This pediatrician has convinced the executive committee of the medical staff of Palo Alto that I should be denied renewal of membership on the staff. That seems to put me in the class of the abortionists and the rapists, the drug users, etc. I would appreciate it if you would write to [him] indicating that lobotomy is a recognized method of treatment of emotionally disturbed children, and not a heinous offense.
Several of his old associates wrote letters in his defense, but the campaign was not successful. Freeman’s membership to the hospital was not renewed. A couple of years later, he was also asked to leave El Camino Hospital—which he personally had helped build—because of his use of electroshock on a woman who had been found wandering the streets. She was brought to El Camino by the police, and was incoherent. Freeman administered an “emergency” electroshock, without conducting a proper examination, or getting permission from her family, or taking head X-rays, or observing the hospital’s traditional two-day waiting period.
Then, in 1967, Freeman made his last medical mistake. He had agreed to perform a lobotomy on a woman he had first met in 1946. She was among his first lobotomy patients. The operation was a success, but she had suffered some relapses. Freeman conducted a second lobotomy in 1956. Now she was back for a third.
This time it didn’t go well. Freeman had her admitted to Herrick. During the surgery he ripped a blood vessel in her brain. She began to bleed. She died a few hours after the surgery.
Freeman was seventy-two. That was his final lobotomy.
But it wasn’t his final word on the procedure. Freeman had continued to communicate with his former patients—remember those Christmas cards?—and he now began touring the country, visiting with them, examining them, comparing their lives now to their lives before the lobotomies. He logged thousands of miles in a specially equipped camper van, another version of his famous Lobotomobile. It’s like he was looking as hard as he could for evidence that his surgery was as useful as he always insisted it was, and that the patients who didn’t get better were the exception instead of the rule.
His health was failing. Freeman had been treated for cancer several times in the 1960s, always bouncing back and returning at once to work. After his wife died, he continued to live alone in the San Jose area. He continued to hike in the Sierras, returning often to Yosemite.
He may have suffered from depression, or anxiety, himself. He once told an interviewer that he had taken a dose of nembutol, which is a very powerful and highly addictive barbiturate, to help him sleep—every single night for more than thirty years. He didn’t consider himself an addict, he said, because he had “rarely” needed more than three capsules a night. He said, “I have found it most helpful.”
In 1972, Freeman’s cancer returned. He was hospitalized in San Francisco in May. He fell into a coma and died in the hospital, with his children at his side, a month later.
Martha and I had broken up. I don’t know where she went. I wound up living in a dirt lot.
I had hooked up again with Ed Woodson. He was working as a night watchman at a used-car lot down on Stockton Avenue, near the old Del Monte canning factory. Between shifts he lived in an empty lot by the railroad yard.
It was a big clear lot, shaded by a huge pepper tree, about twenty feet from the street and about thirty feet from the railroad tracks. A few abandoned cars were scattered around. There was a bunch of us who lived there, sleeping outside.
At first, it was fun. It was like being cowboys. You slept outside on the dirt in blankets. When it rained, you’d grab a blanket and climb into one of the abandoned cars. It was cozy. There was an old Corvair that I could sleep in. If it rained, or if I was with a girl, I’d spend the night in there.
We spent our time drinking or finding money to drink with. You’d spent part of the day looking for food, part of the day trying to get cleaned up, part of the day trying to get money for booze, and the rest of the day and night drinking.
If you had a little money, you could buy a shower at a place called Truckadero on First Street. It was a truck stop and they sold showers there. If you were hungry, there was an A&W root beer place across the street. You could get a hot dog there real cheap. I ate a lot of hot dogs. If you wanted to drink in a bar, there was a place called Pedro’s just up the block. I spent a lot of nights in Pedro’s boozing it up.
Getting money for booze was like our job. We’d find stuff to sell, and we’d steal it. We’d take these huge metal plates from the old Del Monte cannery and haul them over to a scrap-metal yard and sell them for money.
Those were hard days.
Somewhere in there I met a girl who was hanging around with Dave Sawyer. Her name was Laurie. Dave had always been trying to get my girls away from me. This time I got his girl away from him. She had a little apartment in University Square, over by Santa Clara University. I moved in. We lived off my welfare money, which wasn’t really enough to pay the rent and keep the lights and telephone on and buy food. So, I quit drinking to save money.
We lived that way for more than a year, then she left me—for a girl. Not long after, I found myself in another place, living with a girl named Claire. That lasted a few weeks. Then I was back on the lot with Sawyer and the other guys. I went back to hanging out in Pedro’s.
One of the regulars was a girl named Christine Heriman. One night in 1977 she invited me to join her and a friend. We had a few beers, then went across the street to another bar. Christine started feeding me Black Russians. By the time Christine invited me to come home with her, I was so drunk I couldn’t remember who I was supposed to be with—her or her friend. She said I was with her.
&n
bsp; Christine was a dark-eyed, curly-haired woman with a big smile. She was big all over. I liked that. I liked girls who looked like they ate regular. She looked like she ate plenty. When we got to her house, I took a look in her refrigerator. There was a plate of pork chops. I took one look at those pork chops and said, “Howard’s not going to go hungry for a while.”
Love has to start somewhere. For me, it started with the pork chops.
But the next morning I had a kind of rude awakening. I got up to use the restroom. I saw baby furniture in the spare bedroom. She had a kid? Later that day, I met the kid. He was a cute toddler named Justin. Christine told me that his father had split. He and Christine had never gotten married.
That was good enough for me. I moved in.
Christine was pretty good at taking care of herself. She wasn’t shy about asking for help. She was good at borrowing stuff and not giving it back—stuff like cash. She had a special way of getting people to help her and then not care if she never returned the favor, or the money. That’s how we lived.
Christine and I had our issues right from the start. She was a lot like Lou. She was headstrong and willful, and she didn’t have a lot of compassion. But I used her as my even keel.
For a while we managed these apartments called the Rock Springs, on Rock Spring Drive. We lived in the front unit, and we took care of the other units.
But it was like living in Peyton Place. Chris decided things weren’t working out with us. She moved out. That same day, I moved in with a girl named Janice who lived across the street. Then Chris ran off to Lake Tahoe with a guy who lived in one of the Rock Springs units. They got married. But two weeks later, Chris was back in town. She wanted me to move back in. I moved back in. The man she had married, it turned out, was gay. The marriage was never consummated, and it lasted only two weeks.
Then Chris decided we had to get out of town, to get away from all the people we knew, so we could start to live better. We moved to Bend, Oregon. We were going to change cities and change our lives.
It didn’t last long. Six months later, we were back. We moved in with Chris’s sister Cindy and her husband, Henry, on the east side of San Jose. Henry was an ex-con. He and Cindy had one son. Cindy had a son from another relationship. Henry didn’t work. I wasn’t working. Chris wasn’t working. Cindy was a dispatcher for an ambulance company. Somehow the four of us, with the three little kids, lived in a two-bedroom house.
Then we had to get our own place. Chris was pregnant. I was the father.
This was a big surprise to me. I had been told, since Agnews, that I couldn’t have children, that I would never have children. Maybe they told me that because they thought I shouldn’t have children, but that’s not the way I heard it. If I was with a girl, I never took any precaution, and all through the years I had never gotten anyone pregnant—as far as I knew.
Then Christine got pregnant, and in 1979 we had a son. I named him Rodney, after my father. He would be Rodney Lester Dully—the Lester was for Chris’s father—instead of Rodney Lloyd Dully.
I don’t remember my family being around much then. My father didn’t visit when Rodney was born. But I did have a visit from my stepbrother George. He was down from Washington, visiting with my dad, and he wanted to get together.
I was nervous about seeing him. It had been years since we’d met, and we hadn’t spent any real time together since before my lobotomy. I was afraid I’d say the wrong thing, or we’d start talking about the past and I’d say something to make him mad.
He was really nervous about the meeting, too—but for different reasons. He was afraid of me. Lou had convinced him that I was dangerous, that he and his family wouldn’t be safe having me around. Lou had said I was “predatory and scary,” he said, “a paranoid schizophrenic and unpredictable.” George told me Lou had started using those exact words right after I had my operation, and had continued using them for years afterward.
I learned later that Lou had told Brian the same things, and also made him think I was dangerous and not to be trusted.
Brian had finished high school and gone on to college, at UC Davis. But he was still living at home, until something happened with Lou and my dad. Things between them were very distant. They didn’t seem to want to be married to each other anymore. They argued frequently.
One day Lou took Brian aside. She was worried about Rod, she said. She was afraid he was becoming violent. She was afraid he would try to hurt her, or hurt Brian. So she gave him some advice: If your father gets violent with you, she said, “You should get a hammer and sneak up behind him and hit him hard right on the back of the head. That will kill him.”
Despite Lou’s warnings the meeting with George went fine. We had coffee. We talked. I was surprised by what he talked about. He wanted to talk about the old days, and about what happened to me. He felt guilty about it. He told me he knew I had been mistreated when we were boys. He felt like my lobotomy and my years at Agnews and Rancho Linda were somehow his fault.
I said, “George! You were twelve years old! What could you do?”
He said something about how he should have stood up for me.
I said, “How? Were you supposed to get in trouble just because I was getting in trouble? It wouldn’t have made any difference.”
He didn’t look convinced. He still looked scared, and like he felt guilty. It would be more than twenty years before I saw him again.
Now that I was a dad, I had to start becoming responsible. Chris and I moved with the boys into our own place, and I got a job working for a company that managed mobile-home parks. I did maintenance on swimming pools and hot tubs. I did some gardening. I was in charge of reading the gas meters.
I liked the work, but I liked the stuff that happened after work better. There was a woman who cut hair in one of the mobile-home parks. I went in one night after hours and asked her to cut my hair. She did, and some things happened. Nice things. And those nice things continued to happen.
Christine knew something was going on. She knew I was seeing someone. But she couldn’t figure out who. So she started tailing me when I left the house.
One night she saw me and the hairdresser leaving the mobile-home park, and followed us. But somehow she followed the wrong car. She ended up going into this bar where she thought she’d find us. When we weren’t there, she went back outside to the car she’d been following and slashed the tires—of some other person’s car.
I was already out of town. The hairdresser had a friend in Visalia. We had decided to go down there and visit.
By the time I got back to San Jose, Christine was mad. I called her at home, from some bar, and said I was on my way. She said she didn’t want me coming home. She was upset. She wanted to talk first. So when she told me to meet her in this shopping center parking lot, I agreed.
I was standing beside my car when she showed up. It was dark. It was late. There was no one around. She drove into the parking lot and over to where I was standing—fast. I realized almost too late that she was going to run me down. I dove and rolled out of the way just in time.
She was jealous like that. Another time she was going through my wallet and found a picture of a naked girl I was trying to set up with a friend of mine. Chris didn’t want an explanation. She came at me with a steak knife.
We always patched things up. But Chris’s jealousy meant I had to stay away from the woman in the picture, and I had to quit the mobile-home-management job.
I needed another job. So I got one, helping out in a print shop. I got good enough at printing that when the boss decided to sell the business, I borrowed four thousand dollars from my dad and set up shop.
For a while, things were good. I was living the high life. I hung out in a bar called The Golden Horn. I’d go in there with a pocket full of money. I’d start drinking Black Russians, and ordering drinks for all the girls. I’d wind up dancing, and end up going home with girls I hardly even knew. I’d go through $500 just like that.
So
I lost the printing business. I couldn’t cover our overhead. I tried. I had even stopped paying the rent on our house as a way of keeping the business going. When we got evicted from that house, we moved into the print shop. I thought that would be a good way to cut down expenses. Imagine, two adults and two little boys living in a print shop in the middle of downtown San Jose. This was my idea of how to save money. It didn’t work. I lost the shop.
With no money, and no place to live, Chris and I had to move in with Nancy, another sister. But Nancy didn’t like my drinking. She wouldn’t let me sleep in the house. So I spent most nights sleeping in this old GMC truck my dad had given me.
It wasn’t just the business I was messing up. It was my marriage, too. I was chasing a woman who lived in South San Jose. She wasn’t that interested in me, but she was very interested in cocaine. I’d go visit her and bring some coke along. She’d do the coke. I’d drink. She’d do some more coke. I’d drink some more, and wait for her to decide to have sex with me. I figured that sooner or later she would get high enough to let me sleep with her, but she never did.
I always had a lot to drink before I went home. One night, I had too much. By the time I left her house, I was drunk and sleepy. So I decided to take a little nap.
Unfortunately I was still driving at the time. I went to sleep and the truck kept going. It plowed into the side of a parked van.
The impact woke me up. I knew I would be taken to jail if they caught me. I had no money to pay for the van I’d just smashed into. So I drove home.
My Lobotomy Page 20