My Lobotomy

by Fleming, Charles

  He laughed when he said that. I didn’t tell him that Freeman had actually practiced on cantaloupes, which have more of the soft consistency of the human brain, and not grapefruit.

  Dave had kept quiet so far, but I could see he was getting impatient. These weren’t the answers he wanted. So he handed me a couple of photographs and told me to ask my dad to look at them.

  “Have you ever seen a picture of the operation?” I asked him. “Would you mind if I showed you one?”

  I gave him the picture of me on the table halfway through the operation, with the leucotome sticking out of my head.

  He looked at it for the longest time. Then he said, “The thing I’m intrigued by is how you look so calm. Maybe they gave you some medication.”

  “Electroshock treatments,” I said.

  “Oh!”

  He kept looking at the picture. It seemed to have no effect on him at all. He said nothing.

  Dave got even more impatient. He leaned forward and said, “How does it make you feel?”

  “It’s just a picture,” he said.

  Just a picture! It was his own son, but it made no impression. He started talking about where he was that day. He wandered off the topic.

  Dave tried to bring him back. He said, “Can I ask you a couple of questions? Was Lou trying to convince you to do this? How did she convince you to do this?”

  “I got manipulated,” my dad answered. “I was sold a bill of goods. She sold me, and Freeman sold me, and I didn’t like it.”

  Maybe so, but he sure didn’t seem concerned about it now. None of this seemed to disturb him in any way.

  So I asked him, “Is there anything in this that you regret at all?”

  “See, that’s negative,” he said quickly. “And I don’t dwell on negative ideas. And what am I talking about?”

  “The positive.”

  “I always try to be positive.”

  I pushed a little further. On the tape, I sound like I’m begging him to listen to me, and to respond. “But this was, this has really affected my whole life.”

  “Nobody is perfect,” he said. “Could I do it over again? Would I have? Oh, hindsight’s beautiful. Fifty years later, can I say this was a mistake? So was World War One a mistake!”

  Was that as far as he was willing to go—that a mistake was made? Forty years of my life had been lost, and the best he could do was agree that a mistake had been made? It hurt me to hear him say that. When I asked the question a different way, I started to get choked up.

  “But I’ve had a lot of pain, during my life, because of the operation,” I said. Then I started to cry. “I felt like a freak, a monster, a lot of the time, because of things I’ve seen and heard.”

  He seemed not to believe that. He wanted to know why people would make fun of me having a lobotomy, unless I told them I had a lobotomy. “How would they know?” he said.

  I said that sometimes I’d just hear people making jokes—like the one about wanting to have “a bottle in front of me instead of a frontal lobotomy.”

  “Oh!” he said. “What you’re saying is, it’s like being a homosexual in a place that is totally nonhomosexual. And all you hear is antihomosexual jokes.”

  “Separated,” I explained. “Different. For a long time I felt I was the only one. That I am the only one. This is what I’ve had to live with.”

  My dad got all positive on me again. “The one thing you have to do—it’s up here that everything is,” he said, pointing to his head. “And there isn’t two of us alike on earth. We are all individuals.”

  I tried one more thing. I asked him, “Why do you think it’s been so hard for us to talk about this?”

  “You never asked about it,” he said. “It was an unpleasant part of my life. I don’t particularly want to delve into it. It’s like, ‘Let’s go out and play in the horse manure.’ But you were always able to talk to me. And you never did. I tried.”

  So his silence all these years was my fault. But he was willing to take a tiny bit of the blame.

  “Maybe that’s where I failed, in not letting you know I was able to be talked to,” he said. “I was doing the same thing you were doing—waiting for me to put my hand out, as I was waiting for you to put your hand out.”

  His answers hurt me deeply, but I tried not to get defensive. I had asked him to come and he had come. I had asked him questions and he had answered. I didn’t think I had any right to be angry with him for not giving me the answers I wanted.

  “I want to thank you for doing this with me,” I told him while the tape was still rolling. “I never thought this would ever happen.”

  “Well, you see? Miracles occur!” he said.

  I had one more thing that I needed to say. I needed to say it out loud. I needed him to hear me say it.

  “Actually,” I stammered, “what I wanted to do was tell you that I love you.”

  This was a huge moment for me. I had never said that to my father, not once, my whole life. I was afraid to. I was afraid that if I said it to him he wouldn’t say it to me.

  Is this every kid’s worst fear—that his mother and father don’t love him? It was mine. Didn’t my mother love me? She died and left me. Didn’t my father love me? He let them cut my head open and hurt me. That’s what I felt inside.

  But I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was old enough to understand that it didn’t matter if he loved me, or said he loved me. It only mattered that I loved him, and that I said so.

  I waited to hear him say he loved me, too. But he couldn’t. He said, “Whatever made you think I didn’t know that?” Then he added, “You shaped up pretty good!”

  It wasn’t “I love you, too,” but it was enough. He was doing the best he could. I thanked him again for agreeing to talk with us on tape. We put the recording equipment away.

  The following day, my dad and I met again, this time with a photographer Dave and Piya had hired to shoot some pictures of us. His name was Harvey Wang. He had been shooting pictures for all the interviews we did. Now he wanted to photograph me and my dad. He asked us if we could hug, so he could get a shot of that.

  My dad refused. He said he didn’t want to hug me. “I want to do that when I want to do that—not when it’s some made-up thing for the camera.”

  So Harvey shot us standing next to each other, sort of smiling, sort of like old friends. You’d never know we were father and son, or that we’d been through any sort of ordeal.

  We did many interviews over the next two months. We visited with Dr. Robert Lichtenstein, who had been Freeman’s assistant on the day of my lobotomy. We also interviewed Freeman’s sons—three of them, in three separate interviews.

  Walter Freeman Jr. was the toughest. He’s a neurobiologist at the University of California at Berkeley. He’s a scientist. And he was very protective of his father. He was a difficult interview.

  To tell you the truth, the interview creeped me out. He seemed like, from the way he was defending his father’s work, he might have actually continued it, if he’d been given the opportunity. It worried me. This guy is part of the faculty at a medical school. He’s responsible for shaping young minds. Does he tell them that lobotomy is a good thing?

  Next we met Paul Freeman, in San Francisco. He invited us to his home. He had a friend with him, a French woman he identified as his roommate. He sat still for the interview, but I don’t think we really learned anything new from him.

  Then we met Frank Freeman, in San Carlos. He also welcomed us into his home. This was the first interview I did on my own, where I asked all the questions. I was nervous about it. I had a lot of anxiety. I guess it came down to this: Would people think I was a freak? Would they treat me like I was a freak? After all, when you hear that someone has had knitting needles stuck in their head and egg-beaten around for ten minutes, you might assume that they’re going to be some drooling Frankenstein monster. I was afraid I might be treated that way.

  Besides, I was in awe of Frank. As we were getting set
up and ready to begin the interview, I could see his home was filled with books. When he spoke, I could hear he was very knowledgeable. He talked like a doctor, like he had complete knowledge of the operation and everything that went with it.

  But he chuckled when he talked, in ways that were sort of creepy. He called the leucotome “the humble ice pick,” and laughed. He said that if he had a couple of leucotomes he could probably do a lobotomy right there in his house.

  I was impressed by his apparent medical knowledge, but I was upset by the interview. I got a bad headache. I found that I got a bad headache after almost every single interview we did. I’m not a guy who usually gets headaches. But when I’m under a lot of stress, especially emotional stress, my head starts hurting me.

  When we were finished, Dave asked Frank if he would mind going into the other room and putting his work clothes on. I thought this was weird. What work clothes? Why would Dave ask him to do that?

  He came back a few minutes later wearing his uniform. He was a security guard! I thought he was a doctor, or a professor, or something connected to the medical field. But he worked as a security guard. That blew me away. Frank and Dave got a good laugh over it. I felt kind of foolish.

  Dave and Piya went back to Brooklyn, to the Sound Portraits studios, and began assembling the tapes. I went back to driving school buses.

  I didn’t see my dad. I don’t think I even talked to him. I was worried that I had pushed him too far, that I’d made him uncomfortable, that he was mad at me for making him sit for the interview. But it was done. I couldn’t take it back. The radio broadcast was going forward.

  I was still worried that he would ask me to stop it. I could imagine him telling me that it was a mistake, that I was going to hurt the family, that I was being dishonorable to the memory of my stepmother. I could imagine him telling me I had no right to do it.

  That wouldn’t have stopped the broadcast, but it would have been difficult for me. I had never had a real confrontation with my father after the lobotomy. There was never a single time after when I stood up to him, or told him to leave me alone, or anything like that. I never went up against him, face to face.

  Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe every boy needs to stand up to his dad one day and become his own man. But I never did that. So I was always afraid of him. Afraid of his anger. Afraid of his displeasure in me. I would like to call it respect—because that makes it sound honorable and manly—but it was really just fear. I wanted his approval. I spent most of my life trying to make him approve of me—and failing.

  Did the operation do that? Did it make me less able to stand up for myself? Maybe there are people who, if the lobotomy had happened to them, would have been all over their fathers. “Why did you do this? How could you do this?” I could never ask those questions.

  So I wasn’t too happy to learn that Dave and Piya wanted me to interview my dad again. We didn’t have enough. We didn’t have him saying the things we needed him to say.

  I let them contact him. I let them be the ones to ask for the second interview. Dave made the request. It was very casual. He said we just needed to clarify a few things, get a few details straight.

  To my surprise, he agreed. But he had a stipulation. He said he hadn’t been feeling too good. If he started to have pain during the interview, he’d have to stop.

  The second interview took place the same way as the first one. Dave booked a room in the same hotel. I picked up my dad and drove him over.

  Dave and Piya said hello, and got him comfortable in the room. Or tried to get him comfortable. He didn’t seem well. He looked frail. His color wasn’t good.

  He’s tall, like me—over six feet three inches—but he’s thin. He’s always been thin. Now he seemed even thinner and kind of weak.

  But he wanted us to know he wasn’t going to be bossed around. He had finally read the documents we sent him, Freeman’s notes from his meetings with Lou, and he wasn’t too happy about what he had read.

  “It’s inaccurate,” he said. “There are things that are left out. Some of what’s left out is critical.”

  Dave explained that the microphones weren’t set up yet. My dad didn’t care.

  “I’d rather talk about things before we get into it,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going to be covered. I’m very proud of some of the things I’ve done in my life!”

  Dave told him we could talk about a few things before the tape got going. He said my dad ought to be proud of his son. “Howard has been interviewing all these people,” he said. “Doctors, patients, psychiatrists…He’s the worldwide expert on this thing now.”

  My dad wasn’t going to listen to anyone tell him to be proud of his son. And he wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to knock me down to size, either.

  “I’ve always been proud of my son, even when he was not exactly the sweetest kid in the world,” my father said. “Howard puts his pants on one leg at a time like everybody else, but he’s a fine boy.”

  When the mikes were ready, Dave told me we could get started. My dad said, “Okay. Fire away.”

  Just like before, his answers were evasive. He had a sort of impatient, sarcastic manner, like he was lecturing a group of not very bright students.

  He insisted that Lou had never told him half the things she told Freeman. He said he didn’t think there was anything really wrong with my behavior or with me. “I did not see the things she was describing,” he said. “I never did see them. I saw a normal boy that was not getting the affection he got before.”

  In fact, the problem, as he saw it, was that I had been given too much affection as a child. My real mother had spoiled me. She gave me all her attention, leaving none for her husband or her other son. Then, when he married Lou, I got a stepmother who had no affection for me at all. She was involved in a bitter ongoing dispute with her ex-husband. She was afraid of losing her children. If she had to sacrifice me to save them, so be it.

  So, in his mind, the blame fell on my mother for loving me too much, on Lou for not loving me enough and for not telling him the truth about what was going on in the home, and on me for being defiant. He was blameless.

  I tried something different. I asked him whether the operation had changed me. He didn’t think it had. I asked him whether I might have ended up differently if I hadn’t had the operation. He thought I would have ended up about the same. I asked him whether he regretted anything he had done with me, or if there was anything he now wished that he had done differently.

  He said he didn’t like to think about things like that. “If I were to sit and glower and dig over Lou and the things she did wrong, at the expense of the things she did right, it wouldn’t improve me,” he said. “It would damage my perception of what I should become.”

  He explained that because of his mother’s background in Christian Science, he didn’t like thinking negative thoughts. He said my unhealthy obsession with my past wasn’t going to help me with my present, or my future.

  “It’s over,” he said. “I’ve got to live today, and you have to live today. What I’m trying to hope for is that you see the kind of person you are, not the person that other people perceive you to be, but what you always have been and what you always will be.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, but he liked that answer a lot. He said to Dave and Piya, “That’s good! Put a star by that one!”

  He answered some more questions, criticizing Freeman and the notes he took. He particularly objected to Lou’s statements that he was violent, that he lost his temper and was “vicious” with me.

  “I was reasonably fair with you,” he said. “I won’t say it was perfect. I wasn’t perfect. Never will be. But I think the only thing I ever used on you was a shingle, wasn’t it?”

  I reminded him about the boards, about me having to choose the boards that he spanked me with. If the board broke, and he felt you needed some more whacks, he’d use his hand—which didn’t break, unfortunately, and hurt like hell.


  He didn’t remember that, either. “I don’t recall ever leaving you with a bruise on you or anything,” he said. “Or where you couldn’t sit down.”

  Dave was getting frustrated. He began asking questions himself. He asked my father again why he let Freeman go forward with the operation.

  My dad said it was because Lou insisted. He didn’t know what other choice he had. “The only option I would have had is to take Howard and Brian and move, and divorce her.”

  Dave asked why Lou hated me so much.

  “I have no idea,” he said. “You’d have to ask her—and she’s dead.”

  I asked whether it was because I was so big. Was Lou afraid of me?

  “I’m not a psychologist,” he said. “I won’t even try to play the game of what-did-it-mean.”

  We were getting nowhere. Dave passed me a note, and told me to show my dad the pictures of my operation again. We had to get a better reaction. So I pulled out the pictures and asked him, “Can I show you some pictures of the operation? Did I show you this picture already?”

  “I never saw this picture before,” he said. “God, you were a nice-looking boy! But your mouth is wide open—a Dully charactistic.”

  Urged on by Dave, I asked him, “Have you felt ashamed of me, ever?”

  The silence that followed was incredible. He seemed to think about it forever. Then he said, “It’s extremely difficult to answer. Because I don’t carry those things around with me that way. I’m frustrated, you see. If I was ashamed of you, I’d be ashamed of me, because you’re half me.”

  That wasn’t exactly the no I was looking for. Dave urged me to go to the next question. Reading from my notes, I said, “I have a question that I’m not sure how to ask. Do you think that I’m owed an apology?”

  “No,” my dad said right away. “Because it serves absolutely no purpose. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by holding a grudge. If you wish to be issued an apology, well, it would be the equivalent of saying, ‘Lou, say you’re sorry you did it.’ And I can hear her say, ‘Yeah—when hell freezes over!’”

  Dave stepped in again. He tried to get some kind of response. He asked what Lou thought would happen after the operation. He asked whether Lou was really trying to have me killed.