Angelhead (8 page)

Do you have a history of mental illness in your family? they asked my parents.

My mother's family, no. My father's family tree, as I said at the beginning, was twisted and gnarled with alcoholism, depression, suicide.

He said not that he knew of.

We'll do what we can, said the doctors, but it will be hard, at times harder than you might imagine. However, knowing exactly what was wrong with him was a step in the right direction. Drug abuse made things worse, but this, his illness, was probably inevitable, perhaps encoded in his DNA at birth, though don't blame yourselves. The message: It's not your fault; there's not much you can do; the best thing is heavy tranquilizing medications, psychotropics. Try to get him someplace where they can deal with him safely. Here are some hotlines, the number of a good social worker, some prescriptions. Get yourself in a group, get help. You can't put him in a hospital, I'm afraid; that's a violation of his rights. Call me if it's an emergency. I don't work Saturdays.

The diagnosis helped, but it also made my parents angry, untrusting; they had been told by several psychologists and counselors over the years that Michael was depressed and needed to stop taking drugs. Both true, but only part of the story. They thought they had sent their troubled, violent, moody, drug-addicted son to Florida to get a job and straighten up. They had sent a sick kid—criminal or not—to slaughter. They never got over that.

DELINQUENTS

After the diagnosis came rituals as regular as clockwork, mixtures of old-time religion and television and slapstick: my brother putting a lawn chair in the middle of the yard, dancing around it, filthy and bloated, falling down, praying for God to take him away, strike him down, finish him off. Our neighbors stood on their porches wondering whether to call the cops or an ambulance; neighbors scratching their heads then, I imagined, relaying stories of my brother, their bizarre neighbor, over phone lines across neighborhoods, cities, counties, states, a continent.

Our family dog, a docile mutt named Molly, wouldn't go near Michael because of something he'd done to her, some kick across the yard because she housed demons, or maybe he thought he'd kill her one day to save her from the world, and she sensed the menace in the same way dogs sense fear.

Crosses appeared in odd places, formed from the stuff of suburban existence—place mats, welcome mats, rugs, gardening tools, sporting equipment; anything could be made into a crucifix, our barbecue a makeshift altar. Money disappeared. It all went to snack cakes and Fritos and bags of cheap pot, and to Robert Tilton, that shyster to the poor—bills crumpled and scribbled on,
God bless you, God bless us.
He'd get back a Gideon, a generic thank-you note, and a bookmark that Tilton's tears had supposedly dried on.

My parents couldn't take any more. They became much closer during this time, hunkered down, devising plans of dealing with Michael late at night. They were a team in crisis. They weren't so much a couple as two people pitted against an unconquerable foe, stuck with their family and their lives. Even if Michael was sick, they couldn't live like this. Even if there was lingering guilt over sending him to Florida, where he nearly died, where horrible things happened to him, this was unbearable. God and the devil, what Dr. Smith would call
the apotheosis of mental anguish,
were becoming less and less abstract—not just to Michael, but now to us.

My mother had moments when she believed he had become simply and purely evil, beyond all help. When she was around him her hands would shake involuntarily. Yet she never stopped loving him, or at least the memory of who he had been, long ago, as a boy, even when Michael would stand in the kitchen behind her, puffed up and slightly shaking, as if just barely containing his rage. She had dreams of him red-eyed and snarling. She wanted to find a way to help him, but how long could she live like this—sneaking around the house, locking doors, peeking around corners, listening for footsteps. This is a haunted house, she thought. We live in a haunted house.

I stayed in my college apartment in Norfolk, though I only sporadically attended classes. I had trouble seeing the point of college. My classes early on seemed ludicrous in their insistence on rote memorization, in their use of Scantron sheets where you simply chose the correctly memorized answer that coincided with A, B, C, or D.

My parents thought of college as more of an idea than something real, something tangible and day-to-day, because no one in my family had ever gone to a university. My father had been the second in his family to finish high school. My parents paid for my apartment, financially stretching themselves even thinner, just to keep me away from Michael, to afford me a “normal college experience.”

I had roommates at first—I'd always been adept at hiding my problems, offering a smile when appropriate, looking healthy and fine, always quick with a joke—but as my brother's condition declined, I withdrew from the world, needing to live alone, to sit around and read all the books I'd suddenly discovered and obsess about my family, my brother.

My method at college was to sign up for several courses, then figure out which ones would be the most enjoyable and require the least effort; I'd attend those courses and drop the rest, in an effort, I told myself, to work on my writing, to have time to think and read, because now I was going to be a writer, even if that meant poverty and obscurity. I needed to make sense of my world, needed to try to understand people below the surface, the artifice, of life.

At some point—I can't pinpoint exactly when—I realized that books made sense of the worst things, even if they seemed stunted and dark, offering nothing but a crippled epiphany. These were the ones I gravitated toward then: Poe, Dostoyevsky— “The Tell-tale Heart” and “White Nights” are, to me, schizophrenic classics—and the American pulp novelists of midcentury. I began reading all the time, endlessly, book after book, always looking to find the grand tragedy rendered with meaning—the more transgressive, the more violent, the better, because by the middle of the book I wanted to see how this mess would be fixed, how a life, even a sad, broken, imaginary life, could be
saved
. I started to believe—and I still believe—that I could somehow save myself with a story, and even though I couldn't save anyone else, I could try to understand them, attempt to grant them at least that, and perhaps it is in this, this attempt to understand, that a person is truly saved.

I'd skip weeks of classes but read all the books for a course and be led, by those books, on to other books. After reading a bent, rumpled copy of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
by Robert Pirsig, that quintessential and half-baked text of the hippie ethos, I decided grades didn't matter, organized education was a farce, and all true learning was heuristic (this is the effect a burgeoning intellectual life had on me: I began to view everything as suspect, if not outright false, which took me back to my punk childhood).

This new attitude—laziness disguised as rebelliousness—freed up a lot of time. My
sitting around and thinking
was now justified in big words and Eastern ideas filtered through the counterculture and pop psychology and philosophy.

Reading was what I loved, still love, true, but at the same time, looking back, I was afraid that if I didn't make my mind strong, I'd lose it, just like Michael had. I was afraid that wave of insanity, the currents of which I knew were already in my blood—I thought I could feel them like an itch at the base of my skull sometimes at night—would close over me if I didn't prepare myself, if I didn't constantly read and spend all my time building up my defenses against unreasonable thoughts, if I didn't engage all troubling ideas, cut them off at the pass, and bend them into tolerable, understandable things.

I found Calvino and Bruno Schulz and Beckett and Borges while sitting around, hanging out in libraries, skipping classes—all writers, in my mind, compelled to map the devolution and fissures of the mind in extraordinary ways. I went on, later, to get three rather impractical English degrees, my way of buying time to learn how to learn and to write, and still think of my education—or the part of my learning that actually matters—as something I figured out on my own, though I realize this is a romantic and mostly false notion, probably something I first came across in that Pirsig book.

Michael had drowned in thoughts and ideas, twisted notions of the metaphysical. More than anything, I did not want to be my brother. I did not want to suffer as part of my family; I wanted, foremost, somehow to be free of connection to these people, whom I desperately loved; barring that, I wanted to be
philosophical
about them and our lives. I am not exaggerating when I say books saved my life; or, put another way, books saved my mind and helped me to learn how to understand my life.

Michael told my parents, in one of his moments of psychotropic lucidity, that he had met two friends at the mall. He wanted to move out, to move in with them. He hated my parents now, he decided, wished them dead. Sorry, I love you, he said.

My mother often dropped Michael off at the mall like a teenager, the only way she could get him out of the house now that even Bill, the speed freak, the collector of porn and continuous enrollee in junior-college business courses, had abandoned him. Mall security guards had called my parents several times. They'd call to say that Michael stalked women, made lewd gestures to kids, told a woman he wanted to baptize her baby.

My mother took him back, again and again. That's where he wanted to be, smoking on a bench in the mall, staring at all those people with their secrets. And what else was there to do? She couldn't find anywhere else to put him.

Dealing with insanity became about improvisation and compromise, figuring out minor solutions while looking for a big solution. The hospitals she'd contacted about Michael were taking months to get back to her. Her job became putting out emotional fires around the house. Michael would get angry—she'd distract him with a promised trip to the mall. He'd start chanting and rocking—she'd ask if he wanted to go to McDonald's for a shake or a sundae; he'd look up and smile like a five-year-old. Bargaining became her way of dealing.

Frazzled, depressed, stressed beyond what is tolerable by Michael's presence at home, she told him he could move in with the “two friends.”

He was an adult. Wasn't he?

My mother and father were relieved and didn't think to meet the two men with whom Michael was moving in. They were two guys who had an extra room, nothing more. And what if my parents found out the two men were dangerous, mentally handicapped ex-cons or totally imaginary? Michael would have to keep living at home. And any questions would have brought on a violent tantrum, anyway. In many ways my brother was like a child you could never discipline.

They figured as long as he took his medication every day he could function. The one constant about my family was our ability to downplay all the negative possibilities, to pretend, to go from small trauma to small trauma, somehow hoping that tomorrow, or the day after, things would start to get better.

At about this time, my parents' request to put him on social security for a disability came through. He could pay the rent himself. They weren't kicking him out, not like before; he
wanted
to go, to get out into the world, to try to live a normal life. Even Dr. Smith agreed it could be a good thing for him.

He had met the men in the food court of the mall. They were white, college-aged, but they didn't go to college. They worked construction, commuted to Yorktown every day to work on a new naval weapons station as laborers. They hung out at the mall on Saturday afternoons, ate pizza at the Sbarro, caught a movie if anything good was playing; if not, they hit the game room, dropped quarters in machines, leaned and cursed at the blinking lights and noise of a race car game.

The two men had a history together. They were real people, which is sad, because I don't want real people like them to exist. But they do. Their story went something like this: They had met as boys in a juvenile institution where they had both been sent for burglary. They became friends because of a common interest in pool, women, movies, dope. They wore track suits and expensive basketball shoes; one had a pocket watch, the other long brown hair. They smoked cigarettes. That's all I really know about them.

They met Michael as he rocked back and forth on a bench in the food court, one of the several retarded or homeless people who spent afternoons at the mall. The real specifics of the meeting, what was said, the body language, the subtle gestures, the way people, even delinquents, interact nervously on first meetings are unimportant.

Michael was smoking a cigarette like a prisoner on death row, as if it were his last, always his last, inhaling with exaggerated need. The skin between his fingers was yellow. The voices chattered endlessly. He prayed once an hour, when the long hand hit the six on the clock near the theater. He wasn't sure God cared about him anymore. He had a brown circle on his front teeth the exact size of the end of a cigarette filter.

Maybe they made fun of him at first, but Michael didn't understand, didn't get it, his ability to decipher humor long gone, which made fucking with him even funnier to the two men.

They talked. Maybe they laughed. Certainly dope was mentioned. And they all stood up and walked away, as simple as that, two criminals on probation, with my brother in tow like a kidnapped kid. They lived near the mall.

At their place, they smoked good dope, indica, thaistick, sinsemilla. They used a glass bong with a skull sticker on it. They turned on Public Enemy, the bass beat, the sampled screech. They ate popcorn, watched Hitchcock's
The Birds
on TBS and the first half of
Under Siege
on video. They slow-motioned violence, chugged beers in some kind of drinking game Michael didn't quite get—having to do with the crunch of bones and punches thrown. Chug, they'd yell, and Michael would chug. He was like a pet, a toy. He laughed like a true moron.

On the day he moved in with the two men, my mother packed him bags of clothes, towels, sheets, as if for a child going to camp.

She dropped him off, told him to call home later, told him to have fun and be polite. My brother, bearded, overweight, nearly galloped up the stairs to his new apartment on the second floor of a complex that had a faux-Tudor feel to it and nice landscaping, too.

The first few nights went well. Or at least there were no phone calls home. Dope, movies, snacks. Laughter, music, pushing and clowning around, jumping up and down when the music and drugs called for it, banging on the floor when the downstairs neighbors banged on their ceiling, laughing because, fuck them, fuck those neighbors, man, motherfucking welfare-gettin' losers. Whatever the two guys thought was funny, Michael laughed at. He still heard voices, even warnings, but they were underneath this bubble of happiness and connection. It had been years since he'd had a friend, much less two.

But at the end of the first week he called my mother. He was alone in the apartment. He begged her to come get him, but not to bring my father. The guys he was living with were working, getting overtime on a Saturday at the weapons station. She asked if he had taken his medicine. He said yes.

Sensing a real problem, my mother agreed and drove the ten miles to get him. He had sounded urgent, but it was hard to tell what that meant with Michael. He reacted to dreams and imagined things as if they were real. Robert Tilton speaking in tongues on TV might send him into a funk as deep as if someone he loved had died. And the real stuff, the stuff that ought to upset a person, he often missed. She tried not to think about it. She couldn't bring up anything else to think about. An image of her son replaced the highway and strip malls. She wondered how life had become like this. She knew, of course, knew the facts, but she couldn't trace things back and make much sense. She had been beautiful, a popular girl in school, with friends and dreams. She fell in love with my father, who was maybe a little gruff, maybe he had a bad temper at times, but his heart, she knew, was good, and when he was in a good mood, he was funny and laughed a lot. She loved his smile, his face, those sad eyes. He was passionate, she thought, and for any anger he showed there was more than an equal and opposite reaction of love, more passion, a complete, even suffocating, devotion to the things he cared for most. There were babies, picnics, relatives, school pictures, sports . . . time slipped, sped ahead . . . but at some point, and she couldn't even remember when now because it was so long ago, Michael had changed, had gotten darker and stranger and unknowable, and everything had begun to crumble and rot. And then here she was, driving to get him.