Angelhead (15 page)

“As much as she cares for him and loves him, she's no longer able to care for him at home,” the prosecutor added.

APOCRYPHA

Our true stories, as we continually reshape them in the mind, are often the ones that we wish most to forget—a kind of apocrypha from our lives, the things that we keep secret and attempt to excise from the narrative of the self.

For a long time after Michael went to prison, I never spoke his name. When asked, I said I had only one brother, younger. I couldn't say the name “Michael” without feeling sick and anxious and embarrassed and sad. Acknowledging his existence was admitting his link to me and to all my weaknesses, failures, and humiliations. And it was, it is. Because no matter how I might define success, I am equally formed, if not more so, of human failure, mortal inadequacy, of loss as well as gain, and I am part of my brother just as he—whether he knows it or not, whether either of us want it or not—is part of me.

Michael has his own stories, and sometimes, I imagine, I am a character in one of those, a blurry ghost from his past, hovering on the periphery of his dreams. We all have to make sense. And Michael spends his time writing letters in the psychiatric wing of a maximum-security prison, where he is serving his thirty-year sentence, trying to make sense. He used to send them to my mother before she moved away from that house, before I convinced her that she had to move away from there, away from those memories and into a new life.

Michael's letters, in those first years after his incarceration, came on Hallmark cards; the cards had pictures of prairies and blue skies, of young couples holding hands and smiling; they had messages like “Every day is a new beginning” or “Life is what you make it.” The envelopes were stamped correctional facility in dark blue ink. Each card was covered in biblical verses—Revelation and Corinthians mostly, his favorites.

Inside, his writing was remarkably clear. He said he was sorry and asked for forgiveness, said that he loved our mother and he loved me and he loved my younger brother Ron. He said that he loved us all, always had and always would, and I believed him, because I don't think any of this happened for lack of love; I think, in fact, that the story of my brother, of my family, could be construed as a story of how wrong love might go, when mental illness—when spirits and angels and demons—invade your life.

Before my father died, he made us promise never to contact Michael again, no matter how we might feel in the future. It was the only way. He didn't succeed in murdering anyone the first time around, he said, and only a fool would give him a second chance. Feel sorry for him from afar. If he comes back into your life, he said, someone is going to die. There was no arguing with that, and we've all found a peace without Michael that we're not willing to give up.

Last year Michael came up for parole. I slept fitfully during the week before his hearing. I couldn't eat, I was petrified. It all seemed as if it were going to happen again. I called my mother every day that week, to see if she had heard anything, to see how she was doing, which was always better than I was, because she is, deep down, a stronger person. Finally, on a Saturday morning, she called to tell me that he had not been given parole, that the person from the parole board whom she had spoken with had said that he was “not doing well, not at all,” that he was violent and uncooperative, and that he would most likely have to serve the full length of his sentence.

My mother and I felt a sad sort of relief, yet being confronted with all this again rendered us both speechless. So we just stayed on the line, listening to each other breathe.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the Virginia Commission for the Arts for the Individual Artist Fellowship that kept me from sinking, the University of the South, Sewanee, for the Tennessee Williams Scholarship, and the University of Virginia for the Henry Hoyns Fellowship and the great library.

Thanks to the writers who helped me along the way: Michael Pearson, Janet Peery, Sheri Reynolds, Ben Marcus, Mark Richard, George Garrett, Deborah Eisenberg, and Doug Day.

Thanks to my wonderful agent Jenny Bent for all of her support and for putting this book into the hands of Doug Pepper, my editor at Crown, who performed wonders.

Thanks to the editors of
Creative Nonfiction
and
Salon,
where a portion of
Angelhead,
in slightly different form, first appeared.

And thanks especially to my wife and mother—the best people I know.

About the Author

Greg Bottoms was born in Hampton, Virginia, in 1970. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia. His stories and essays have appeared in
Alaska Quarterly Review, The Beacon Best of 1999, Creative Nonfiction, Nerve, Prism International, Salon,
and elsewhere. He and his wife live in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

Praise for
Angelhead

“A tour-de-force memoir . . . Bottoms writes like a poet, he writes as if he's on fire.”

Esquire
, a “Book of the Year” (2000)

“
Angelhead
is simply the best new book I've read in the past year and the finest true story I've encountered since Tobias Wolfe's
This Boy's Life
.”

The Virginian-Pilot

“
Angelhead
is a cleanly distilled story of a profound family anguish. On every one of its two hundred pages there are sentences like arrows. The whole work has the beauty of hard, painful truth, arrived at through intelligence, art, and compassion. This is one of the most moving books I've read in a long, long time.”

John Casey

“I am on the record as believing that any day is better when I am not asked to read another memoir. But Greg Bottoms's book caught my attention immediately and drew me in. I read it all in one sitting. I glanced up once or twice to look out the window and to clear my head, and then when I finished I looked at the window again, but it was dark outside. Which, considering what I'd just finished reading, seemed appropriate.

“I would feel foolish in saying that the book is powerful and well written. . . . That doesn't seem the point somehow.
Angelhead
is direct, inventive, clearly imagined, and packs a punch. It is a book people will talk about—perhaps productively.”

Ann Beattie

“
Angelhead
is a brilliant, albeit inconceivably sad book. The fact that Bottoms survived the ordeal is incredible. But the fact that he could write about it with such pathos and insight is nothing less than extraordinary.”

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Greg Bottoms has provided a biographical novel about his brother, Michael, a paranoid schizophrenic, that may be as close as most of us will ever get to knowing what it is to be truly mad.
Angelhead
is a story nearly as terrifying as the disease it describes.”

Psychology Today

“Few other families have had their stories told as crisply and powerfully as Greg Bottoms tells his.
Angelhead
makes us understand what it is like to live with someone you think you love but don't know what to do with. It's one of the saddest, scariest and most powerful memoirs I've read.”

The Detroit Free Press

“A harrowing yet highly readable description of living with a schizophrenic.”

Kirkus

“Readers like me who've watched a loved one be sucked under the paralyzing effects of mental illness, who've been accosted by the suddenness and the violence of the attack, and who, ultimately, have had to save their own lives at the expense of the loved one, will recognize themselves in the stinging portrait Bottoms paints. He captures the experience of witnessing a family member fragment, of wanting to grab hold of a brother, a mother, a loved one, and pull him or her back, make the person who used to be there reappear.”

LA Weekly

“Greg Bottoms's book is a valuable portrait of the extent to which mental illness damages, toughens, and inspires the lives of people who love the sufferer.”

SunSpot.net

“If
Angelhead
saves anyone, it's the reader, who is spared reading another book littered with well-worn cliches so common to this genre.”

New City

“A competently written book that tells the story it means to tell lucidly and without anger.”

Salon.com

Grateful acknowledgment is made to David Chernicky and
The Daily Press
for permission to reprint the following articles: “Suspect Called Sweet, Troubled . . .” by David Chernicky, Wednesday, April 15, 1992, page B3; “Years After Slaying, Man Surrenders” by Cheryl L. Reed, April 14, 1992, page A1; “Angry at Family, Man Sets Fire to Home . . .” by Matt Murray, February 24, 1993, page B1; “Poquoson Man Sentenced to 30 Years for Setting Fires . . .” by Mary Duan, November 24, 1993, page B3. Reprinted by permission.

ATRANDOM and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Copyright © 2000 by Greg Bottoms

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bottoms, Greg.

Angelhead: a memoir / Greg Bottoms.—1st ed. 1. Bottoms, Michael.

2. Schizophrenics—United States—Biography.

3. Bottoms, Greg.

4. Schizophrenics—Family relationships.

I. Title.

RC514.B593 B67 2000

616.8988280092—dc21

[B]

000-021353

Random House website address:
www.atrandom.com

eISBN: 978-0-676-80654-0

v3.0