My Lobotomy

by Fleming, Charles

  “I don’t think she gave a damn,” my dad said. “She just wanted him out of her life. That doesn’t mean you’re going to kill somebody. She made mistakes. She had strengths, too. But I never saw her as that type of person. No.”

  He sounded like he wanted to defend her—and to excuse himself for not knowing what she was up to.

  “It’s very difficult,” he said. “This person you loved, and they were cruel, well, you just don’t do that. Anybody who lives with someone who is cruel is stupid. And I didn’t think I was stupid. I was color-blind. I didn’t see.”

  Dave wasn’t satisfied with that. So he showed my dad the pictures of me in the operating room again, and demanded an answer.

  “Does it hurt you to see those ice picks in his eyes?”

  That question made my dad angry. “Do you want me in the hospital—sick, lame, or lazy?” he barked. “Because what you’re doing is asking me to dwell on something unpleasant and painful. And why should I? Looking at it will do what?”

  My father was innocent. He was blameless. And now he was the victim. Never mind what had happened to me, and how he had contributed to it. Now we were hurting him. We were asking him to look at something painful in his life.

  There was one other thing I needed to know. I asked him about my little brother Bruce. I told him about Lou telling Freeman that I had hurt him.

  “No,” he said. “That was a lie.”

  He remembered that it happened shortly after my mother died. We were living with my uncle Kenny. On this particular day, I wasn’t even there. He had taken me up to Oakland, to the Chapel of Memories cemetery, to see where my mother’s ashes were interred.

  Bruce and Brian stayed at Uncle Kenny’s, being watched over by Kenny’s wife, Twila, and her two sisters. At one point, my dad said, one of the kids jumped into the playpen with Bruce and got rough.

  “He started bouncing on the baby, and broke every rib in his body,” my dad said. “When we came home, he was like a little bag of bones. It shook the daylights out of me.”

  There it was, at last. I knew I had not hurt Bruce. But it was still a relief to hear it from my own father.

  Dave had one more question he needed me to ask my father.

  I didn’t want to. I asked anyway: “Here’s an easier question: Do you love me?”

  “Oh!” he said, then took his time answering. “This one is probably one of the greatest feelings a man has—when he sees his son for the first time. This is my flesh and blood, my contribution to mankind. And you were a cute little rascal, as far as I was concerned.”

  He couldn’t answer the question. He couldn’t say “I love you.” He couldn’t even say “Yes.”

  It was the last question I asked. My dad started complaining that he didn’t feel well. He reminded us that we had agreed to quit if he wasn’t feeling strong enough. Now he had some pain in his side and he wanted to go.

  As we all got up to leave, there was some joking. Dave asked if I could give my dad a hug. I said I could if he was able to stand up. My dad said, “Does anyone here have a shovel?” and laughed. Dave and Piya began to pack up the microphones and recording equipment.

  This was as close as I’d ever been to my father. I tried, one more time, to make a connection. The tape was still running. As we were getting ready to leave, I said, “I do want to thank you.”

  “I know it.”

  “I love you a lot. I—”

  “Well, I think you’re—”

  “I want to say—I love you very much for this.”

  “And I appreciate that,” he said. “I hope you’re reassured about how you ended up—not about the problems you went through, but my perception of how you are now.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  As we were leaving, he surprised me. He said, “I think we had a good talk.”

  I told him I wondered why I had been so afraid to ask him these questions.

  “You were probably afraid of my becoming irritated and easing away from you,” he said. “You do not know your father! He does not walk away.”

  When I drove him home, he didn’t seem angry. He didn’t seem displeased with me. He was quiet. I took him back to his apartment and said good-bye.

  That was April 2005. Dave and Piya went back to Brooklyn. There was nothing for me to do but wait.

  Life returned to normal for me and Barbara. I was driving buses for Durham. We were living in Aptos. Through that winter and into the spring we were just waiting. We didn’t know when the program would be broadcast. Spring? Summer? We didn’t know.

  Sometime in late winter I started recording the parts of the program that would stitch it together. I’d drive up with Barbara or sometimes my son Rodney, and we’d meet an engineer named Larry Blood at KUSP, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Cruz.

  It seemed to take forever. I have a good voice for radio, or people tell me I do, but I don’t have radio-perfect diction. It took me quite a few takes to get some of the lines right. We’d have to tape them over and over.

  For example, Dave and Piya had interviewed a woman named Angelene Forester, whose mother received the first transorbital lobotomy that Walter Freeman ever performed in his Washington, D.C., office. We had tape of Angelene talking with her mother.

  “He was just a great man,” her mother said.

  “As a child, you kind of see into people’s souls,” her daughter agreed. “And he was good, at least then.”

  It was a powerful piece of tape. The problem was the mother’s name. It was Sally Ellen Ionesco. Sally-Ellen-EYE-OH-NESS-CO.

  I don’t know about you, but for me that’s hard to say. The script called for me to say, “His patient was a housewife named Sally Ellen Ionesco.” I stumbled over it so many times that we rewrote the line. In the broadcast, I just referred to her as “Ellen Ionesco,” without the “Sally” part.

  In May 2005 Barb and I moved house. I had recently cashed in my 401(k) plan from driving buses. I had enough money to buy my own place. We found a spot in a mobile-home community designed for seniors. I was barely old enough. Barb wasn’t nearly old enough. But it was a good location, and it was affordable. For the first time in my life, I was living in my own home. That felt great.

  Waiting for the radio broadcast to take place wasn’t great. It seemed like it took forever. Finally, we were told it would air in November.

  In advance of that, I met a few reporters. I met a whole crew from People magazine. They came up to San Jose to meet with us. They bought me a wardrobe for the photo shoot. They said they wanted me to look nice for the pictures. I could have looked nice wearing things out of my own closet, but I wasn’t going to say no to some new clothes. We went down to the beach in Santa Cruz. They took pictures of me wearing tan slacks and a brown Pendleton-style shirt.

  Then it was time for the main event.

  Once again, I refused to fly. We arranged tickets for the train. Barbara couldn’t get off work. So I took my son Rodney. We had a nice ride across the country. Then, Barb’s schedule changed and she was able to join us. Rodney and I arrived in New York and got picked up by a Sound Portraits person at Penn Station right around the same time that someone else from Sound Portraits was picking up Barbara at JFK.

  The broadcast was scheduled for Wednesday, November 14,2005. The premiere was scheduled for the Monday before. It would be held at Bellevue, the famous New York mental hospital. The reception would be in the hospital library.

  I knew all about Bellevue. Any person my age did, from cartoons and TV shows of the fifties and sixties. That’s the place where they took the crazy people. And that’s where they took us that Monday night.

  It was almost empty when we arrived. I thought maybe no one was going to show up. Then people started coming in. I couldn’t believe how many of them came. There were two hundred people, plus a lot of press. There were people from CNN and the New York Times.

  It looked like a cocktail party. People were standing around, chatting. But it was kind of we
ird, because a lot of them were chatting about me. That was a new thing. People were looking at me. People were nodding at me, like they knew me.

  They sat me and Barbara and Rodney down right in the front row. Some of the other people from the broadcast were there, too, like Carol Noell, Freeman’s colleague Dr. Lichtenstein, and Freeman’s biographer, Jack El-Hai.

  I was nervous. I felt like I was baring my soul. Everything about me was going to be out there, for the whole world to see and hear. What would that be like? I had kept these things secret from most of the people I knew for almost my whole life. As far back as Agnews and Rancho Linda, I never told anyone about my lobotomy. Now I was doing a national radio broadcast that was called “My Lobotomy.”

  The program ran twenty-two minutes. It was very serious, very somber. It began with voices I didn’t know. And music. It was very sad music—a piano playing something soft and sad underneath these voices—that I found out later was written by Philip Glass. The voices were talking about Freeman, and his lobotomy.

  “We went into a room and there was a stretcher there…”

  “He came in with something of a flourish, and he had his valise…”

  “And the first person was brought in and strapped down, and given an electroshock.”

  “He had an instrument…”

  “It was an ice pick.”

  “And then he’d shove it up into the forward part of the brain…”

  “There was total silence among those of us who were watching. It was riveting.”

  There was total silence in the Bellevue Hospital library, too. You could feel the heaviness in the air. Then—the voice of Dr. Freeman, from an old, scratchy recording: “This is Walter Freeman, M.D., Ph.D. I am seventy-two years old now….”

  And then, not scratchy and old, but sounding like I was right there in the room, it was me.

  “This is Howard Dully. In 1960, when I was twelve, I was lobotomized by this man, Dr. Walter Freeman. Until this moment I haven’t shared this fact with anyone, except my wife and a few close friends. Now, I’m sharing it with you….”

  The audience heard me interview Frank Freeman. He remembered a drawer in the house where his father kept several ice picks. “A humble ice pick!” he says.

  He has an aw-shucks sort of personality. He says things like “Good heavens!” He says it was “a darn good experience” to finally meet one of his father’s patients.

  He doesn’t seem too concerned when I tell him I’d been lobotomized at the age of twelve. Then I ask him if he’s proud of his father.

  “Oh, yes,” Frank says. “He was terrific. He was really quite a remarkable pioneer lobotomist. I wish he could have gotten further.”

  Other interviews follow. There’s Angelene Forester and her mother, Sally Ellen Ionesco. Then comes Dr. Elliot S. Valenstein, author of Great and Desperate Cures, the history of brain surgery. He gives some historical context for the invention of the transorbital lobotomy, and tries to explain how such a brutal operation became so popular.

  Next is the interview with Carol Noell. You hear us being introduced, shaking hands. You hear Carol describing her mother, who’d been operated on when Carol was just a little girl.

  “Isn’t she pretty?” Carol says. “She was so smart….”

  During this part of the program, sitting in the dark in the Bellevue library, Carol took my hand, and held it tight for the rest of the show. She was obviously upset. She needed someone to lean on. Barb was a little bothered by this. But it didn’t mean anything. Carol just needed someone to hold on to right then.

  The conversation on the tape gets emotional. You can hear Carol’s voice breaking. It’s hard for her to talk about. She asks me why we’re stirring up these painful things that happened so long ago and can never be corrected.

  “How come it is that we’re at the age we are and we can’t seem to say, ‘Okay, that was then, this is now’?”

  “Because it’s not okay,” I tell her. “It’s not finished.”

  The sad piano music comes back up. Then it’s Dr. J. Lawrence Pool.

  “I am now ninety-seven years old,” he says. “I dedicated my life to brain surgery. I did not approve of Dr. Freeman’s ice-pick method—no. I tell you, it gave me a sense of horror.”

  Then the audience heard me going to the George Washington University archives. “My file has everything,” my voice on the tape says. “A photo of me with the ice picks in my eyes, medical bills. But all I care about are the notes. I want to understand why this was done to me.”

  First, I read out loud from Freeman’s notes: “‘Mrs. Dully came in to talk about her stepson who is now twelve years old.’” Then I speak: “It’s pretty much as I suspected. My real mother died of cancer when I was five. My dad remarried, and his new wife, my stepmother, hated me. I never understood why, but it was clear she’d do anything to get rid of me.”

  There were more sections of the notes, the buildup from Lou’s first meeting with Freeman to that terrible entry on December 3, 1960: “‘Mr. and Mrs. Dully have apparently decided to have Howard operated on. I suggested they not tell Howard anything about it.’”

  There was total silence in the Bellevue Hospital library. On the tape, there is only the sound of my voice, recorded as I sat reading Freeman’s notes, finding out for the first time what really happened to me, and why.

  “‘December 17, 1960: I performed transorbital lobotomy.’”

  “‘January 4, 1961: I told Howard what I’d done to him today and he took it without a quiver. He sits quietly, grinning most of the time and offering nothing.’”

  You can hear, on the tape, how hard this is for me. I say, “And I was supposed to fight all this? No way. How is a twelve-year-old kid supposed to stand up to something like this? It just wasn’t fair….”

  I didn’t know what Piya and Dave had done with that part of the tape they had on me from the archives. At the time, I’d broken down and cried. On the tape, I exhale heavily. Then the music comes back up. Now it is a lone violin, sorry and sad, joined by a string quartet.

  The sound of my voice returns: “When my stepmother saw the operation didn’t turn me into a vegetable, she got me out of the house. I was made a ward of the state. It took me years to get my life together. Through it all I’ve been haunted by questions. Did I do something to deserve this? Can I ever be normal? And, most of all: Why did my dad let this happen? In forty-four years, we’ve never discussed it once—not even after my stepmother died. It took me a year of working on this project before I even got up the courage to write him a letter.”

  The sound changes again. My voice changes again. You hear me say, “I’m here with my dad. I’ve waited for over forty years for this moment. Thank you for being here with me.”

  It’s almost impossible for me to say this on the tape. You can hear how difficult it is. My voice breaks several times. At the moment, it was incredibly emotional. Piya and Dave recorded it just as it happened. I was almost overcome with feeling. You can hear that on the tape.

  And you can hear how, for my dad, it’s not emotional at all. He says, “I’ll tell you anything that needs to be answered,” like he was taking a test at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

  I ask him, “How did you find Dr. Freeman?”

  “I didn’t,” he says quickly. “She did. She took you.”

  I push him a little. “My question would be, naturally, why would you let it happen to me, if that was the case?”

  He says he doesn’t dwell on the “negative.”

  I push harder still. You can hear on the tape how difficult it is for me. “But this was, this has really affected my whole life.”

  “Nobody is perfect,” he says back at me. “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!”

  You could almost hear the audience turn against him. There was a gasp or two. There was some mumbling. The energy in the room changed. It wa
s as if he had admitted everything. It was all out in the open now. This was the guy who had let me down.

  But the tape doesn’t attack him. What comes next is maybe the most powerful moment in the whole program.

  “Although he refuses to take any responsibility, just sitting here with my dad and getting to ask him questions about my lobotomy is the happiest moment of my life,” my narrator voice says.

  Then you hear my voice change, and it’s clear I’m talking with my dad again.

  “I want to thank you for doing this with me. I never thought this would ever happen.”

  “Well, you see?” my dad says, all chirpy and cheerful. “Miracles occur!”

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

  “Whatever made you think I didn’t know that?” he says. “You shaped up pretty good!”

  “…and I feel very happy about that.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear!”

  The piano music comes up again. Even now, it’s almost impossible for me to listen to that moment without crying. It’s heartbreaking. I’m opening up everything to him. I’m telling him I love him. I’m almost begging him to say he loves me, too. And he doesn’t.

  The narration continues. “After twenty-five hundred operations, Walter Freeman performed his final ice-pick lobotomy on a housewife named Helen Mortenson in February 1967. She died of a brain hemorrhage, and Freeman’s career was finally over….”

  The last interview is with Rebecca Welch, from the day she and her husband took us to meet her mother, Anita McGee. Rebecca begins to cry when she asks me, “Do you know how many people…can’t do what you’re doing, and you’re doing it for them?”

  The section ends with the sound of Rebecca and her mother singing “You Are My Sunshine.”

  Then my voice returns.

  After two years of searching, my journey is finally over. I’ll never know what I lost in those ten minutes with Dr. Freeman and his ice pick. By some miracle, it didn’t turn me into a zombie, or crush my spirit, or kill me.