Angelhead (9 page)

It was a perfect spring day. The Virginia sky, in the spring when the humidity is low, is vibrant and crayon-blue, and now it filled up her windshield. She listened to the oldies station, the Ronettes, the Beach Boys, nostalgic for her youth, being in her twenties, feeling love the way you do when you're young.

Michael was an emotional mess, she thought, untrustworthy. Probably nothing had happened and he just missed the comforts of home, where she bought any food he wanted, gave him his medication on time, drove him to the mall, to the doctor, let him watch religious television all day as he rocked and smoked, sometimes calling her a cunt, a bitch, as she brought him cheese and crackers, bowls of soup. It was like she had to keep a lid on a boiling pot.

Pulling into the parking lot, she saw him sitting on the curb with his head between his knees. She couldn't believe how heavy he'd become, how the antipsychotics and antidepressants and sleeping pills, those endless bottles of expensive pills that still barely contained him, had made it even worse.

She almost started crying. My mother has an astounding ability to ignore the harshest realities, to hover above even death and depression and mayhem and float through the day, somehow, smiling. I deplore and admire this ability by turns. But today, looking at him touched something raw in her mind. All the stuff inside her started coming to the surface. He looked like a bum, a wino, and he was still just a boy in her eyes. Despite everything, she still loved him so much, which simply didn't make sense to her—not after her life, not after our lives; but isn't love, like God, inexplicable, a bond that transcends reason and sense? She still imagined, despite everything she'd heard, that he might snap out of his disease one day with the right medications, some new treatment.

Michael stood, got in the car. He didn't have any of his things. My mother, who saved everything and often reminded us what something we lost had cost her, didn't even ask about them. Something about the look on his face, the glazed-over eyes, warned her against it.

In the car, he told her everything. He told it to her clearly, miraculous for him, as if he were trying to hurt her, to blame her for what had happened.

Things had started fine. Michael thought that he had made two friends. He imagined, for a moment, that he was someone you could like. Even the thought of connection brought a lump to his throat. People feared Michael. People actually left the mall because of him. He was now the filthy beggar that bugs you at 7-Eleven, the guy with a will work for food sign sitting by the on-ramp that you make sure not to make eye contact with, a criminal.

They weren't his friends
was how he began, my mother told me.

They—the three of them—had been watching a movie, a comedy. They were laughing. One put his hand on Michael's leg. Either one, doesn't matter. They were criminals. I'm not even giving them names. Michael heard the chattering, heard voices, but the medication turned them into whispers, indecipherable, distant things. The new, stronger medications smudged everything. And they also made him slower, uncoordinated.

He—one of them—kissed Michael's neck, licked his face. They were still laughing, really drunk. It was funny—those idiots, those fucking assholes on the tube, man, they were funny, right. Hand on a leg. Lights dim. Just laughing at those crass-ass motherfuckers cracking us the fuck up on the tube, right. Ain't trying nothing funny. No bullshit.

My brother sat blank-faced, tensed up, thought of Florida, of how painful it was to get fucked, because fucking, he knew, was a violent act, an act of power or acquiescence, fantasy or nightmare, depending on which side of it you were on.

For these two guys, my brother was someone who didn't matter, who would never matter, a guy the world would be better off without, so who would care if he was held down and fucked, fucked in his face and in his ass. Because he wasn't human, he was a plaything, a grotesque fuck-doll for criminals, just like some of those geeks in juvie, the punks that the kingpins made grab their ankles and talk like a girl.

They'd been fucking boys in juvie, these two, had been fucked as boys in juvie. Boy, girl, didn't matter, just a hole, just something to shove your dick in, might as well be an animal, this fat ridiculous thing.

He let them do it. My brother didn't fight. Voices chattered. Maybe he left his body. I want to imagine that he left his body, a lot like S did the day he was murdered eight years earlier, and watched the whole thing with complete detachment, without a trace of pain or humiliation, with the beatific gaze of a saint or a department-store mannequin.

He didn't resist. He didn't resist when, in that blue blinking light from the TV, or God, whichever, they wrapped a bicycle chain around his neck. He didn't resist when they put their genitals in his face. He didn't resist when they tore his clothes and got him lying naked, rolls of flesh hanging off bone, his schizophrenic stink filling the house. He didn't resist any of it.

They did what they wanted, did everything, made him bleed, and maybe he thought of what hell might be like, just like this, living in a world where you did not matter, where nothing made sense and no one could be trusted, where every nightmare was physical, where you became a negative of what you once were and there was no help, anywhere, to be had.

The next day, after hearing the story, my father wanted to call the cops. But what could you charge against what amounted to, at least in a legal sense, consensual sex? My mother and Michael sat at the kitchen table as they had so many times before, silent. Michael seemed to be over it already, on to thinking of other things. My father locked himself in a room and broke things. When I heard the full extent of this story, years later, I locked myself in a room and broke things.

ASSISTANCE

After being raped by his two roommates, Michael locked himself in his room and prayed. He would act as if it never happened, then as if it was the only thing that had ever happened. He told my mother to die, that he was sorry; he came downstairs and said he forgot what he was going to say and then stared at the floor, looking for it, a word crawling, an idea with a thousand legs.

His delusions intensified, delusions of how evil the world was, of God as senseless, deranged, torturous, full of love, full of hate. God is all of these in the Bible, which, by now, Michael had ingested, made a part of himself, so his moods, I believe, were partially contingent on the tone of the verses he had most recently reread. Ezekiel was contemplative. Job was broken and defeated. Paul was bristly and relentless. Mark was softer, hopeful and dreamy, but not without rage. Revelation brought on stark-raving fits.

There is madness throughout the Bible: the aforementioned Ezekiel has constant auditory and visual hallucinations; Nebuchadnezzar “ate grass as oxen for seven years”; miracles, resurrection, plagues, punishments; and of course there's John of Patmos' famous line: “He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit sayeth . . .”Voices, visions. Nothing was real and everything was real.

Michael realized one day, while staring at his backwards self in the bathroom mirror, after a few hours spent with Revelation, that it wasn't God tricking him, but
them,
setting traps at every turn. He had his suspicions, had mentioned them to me that day in front of Robert Tilton, but now he knew. He withdrew for a few days, not answering knocks at the door, afraid to leave his room, filling the upstairs with a suffocating stink, then vanishing into a neurovegetative state, eyes sunk in his skull, fingers dangling, yellow and smoke-smelling, a corpse in a folding chair.

Then he woke as if from a dream into a fit of extreme paranoia, throwing open his door. What did you put in my food? Who hid my Bible? God damn mother fucking cock sucking fucking whore mother fucker.

Yellow teeth. Matted beard. Shouting with his head thrown back.

Let's just leave him alone, my mother would say. Just don't say anything.

It was 1991. Michael was twenty-four years old. He began to threaten my mother regularly—jokingly at first, but then for real. He became obsessed with fire, with hell and burning alive. He would look at her and quote scripture—usually from Revelation: “And upon her forehead was a name written, mystery, babylon the great, the mother of harlots and abomination of the earth . . . If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.”

My mother, years later when I was badgering her with questions about Michael, told me that he used to hold a lighter up to her face while she drove him to the mall, saying that he would burn her if she didn't give him money, asking her if she knew what God did to stingy cunts.

He'd turn up heavy metal on the radio as they drove and say, I
dare
you to fucking touch that dial! Yet the next day, the next car ride, he might stare somberly and quietly out the window. He might tell her how much he loved her. You never knew.

His mood swings came and went like total eclipses. He would melt into sadness, mumble of suicide, of heaven. Then he would jump to violence, or at least the threat of violence.
Fuck off. Back off. Go to hell, cunt, cock, whore, asshole.
Confusion ate cankerous holes in his existence. He couldn't live at home anymore, said my mother, because now the threats didn't just seem real, they
were
real. This time she meant it, this really was the last straw in the ongoing line of last straws.

But you can't “put someone away” unless they've hurt another person or themselves. And even then the incident must be proven by law. Since “deinstitutionalization” took place in 1965 and psychiatric wards were cleared of all but the most severe cases, the number of lawyers in America has risen from about a quarter-million to well over a million. This means lawyers spawn at a rate of about four times the normal population, making them something, in reproductive terms, along the lines of unspayed cats. Innumerable lawsuits have been brought against states for housing the mentally ill. Many truly ill people have been sent out to be homeless, or to commit crimes out of desperation. A mother run through with a marine sword, a woman pushed in front of a subway train, two White House security guards gunned down, and so on—all possibly prevented with better mental health care.

It is a terrible thing, obviously, that mental patients have been mistreated, and it is something that has needed immediate addressing, but, like everything in America, the reaction has been absurdly, well, reactionary, making it in this day and age difficult for many families to help their own.

My brother went briefly into institutions a couple of times as both an outpatient and an inpatient between 1988 and early 1991. He once stayed the legal thirty days at a state institution west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He went in, was heavily sedated, occasionally counseled, and thirty days later, according to Virginia Commonwealth law, he walked out, worse, and angrier, feeling
accused
of something and viewing his stay as simply punitive, his days filled with a regimen of minor punishments for breaking the rules and rewards for good behavior. This makes a schizoid personality further paranoid about the unfair state of the world, the fact that people are “out to get him.”

My parents, however, would have thirty days of peace. They still had all their friends, but now spent most of their time at home, worrying, trying to figure out what to do with my brother. Kicking him out, or sending him away with money—any amount—wouldn't work anymore. He wouldn't
leave
. They were hostages to his illness, hostages in their own home.

My father, frightened of Michael now, would warn him often.

Do that again, he'd say about some strange behavior, some mean act, and you've got to leave, just pack your bags and get out.

Michael replied, on several occasions, that he'd murder us all if that happened.

My mother and father made endless phone calls, looking for anywhere that would take him, help him, keep him, feed him. They needed a referral, said the disembodied voices in the phone, needed to try other things first. They needed to bring Michael in for a pre-screening. They needed to call the police. My parents couldn't do it anymore. They couldn't afford it. They were going crazy themselves.

I sat in my filthy apartment, scraping up change to buy old paperbacks and quarts of cheap beer—usually malt liquor because it was stronger. I was skipping all of my classes, sure this was it, that I'd drop out. I ate rarely, ate nothing. I wanted not to care. We all wanted not to care for just a week, a day, an hour.

It wasn't quick, finding a place for him. It took time.

To make matters worse, Michael sensed the conspiracy, sensed that they were trying to get rid of him. He was right after all. No one loved him, no one cared about him.

On a sunny winter day—windy, cool but not cold—Michael was sitting outside in a lawn chair under the large open garage doorway, smoking, looking out onto the driveway, his hair down over his face.

My brother Ron and my father were washing the cars, talking, laughing. My father had told a dirty joke. Ron, fifteen, was shaking his head, saying how bad my father's jokes were.

My father sprayed Ron. Ron hit my father in the chest with a soapy sponge. They dodged water, screamed, giggled like children, ducking down behind the cars.

Michael picked up an aluminum softball bat that sat in a barrel, one of the replacements after the burning-cross ordeal, and held it in his lap. The voices were howling again. This new medication—there was always a new medication, a higher dosage—wasn't working. He could hear teeth chattering in his head that weren't his own. Something about the laughing stopped him from rocking silently and smoking.

They were laughing at him. That was it. There was real clarity—truth—in this thought. They were laughing at all that was wrong with him, laughing because they thought he belonged in a hospital, because they thought he was a faggot who liked getting fucked. They thought he was funny. They were spraying each other and throwing water and laughing and saying that Michael was an asshole, an idiot, a pansy, that he should die, that he should go back and live with those guys from the mall.

Ron did in fact hate Michael, as he told me on a number of occasions over the phone while I sat in my apartment trying to figure out what to say. He was young, and never knew what life was like without the insanity of Michael. My parents, particularly my father, who doted on Ron, went to great lengths to keep him away from Michael, to keep him active in sports (in which he was something of a prodigy) and school and always off with friends. Yet Ron once told me that he would like to kill Michael, finish everything, that even if he went to jail it'd be worth it, to get rid of that stupid bastard, and he was crying as he said this, a gentle kid, crying and wishing he had it in him to save everybody a lot of grief by killing his brother. I sat with the receiver to my ear, still only half-believing it had come to this.

Sometimes Ron made fun of Michael to his face. Ron had a temper, like my father and Michael, and, at moments, couldn't control it. When Michael pissed him off he'd let out a stream of insults, calling him a fat retard, a moron, a loser, a shit-smelling lard-ass.

Michael did, by appearances, seem almost stereotypically “retarded,” mainly because paranoid schizophrenics care nothing for their appearance and lose all social sense of style; he wore pants a little too tight, shirts off the rack from Kmart, and sneakers years out of fashion; he also had his odd nervous habits of rocking and breathing in a long, loud, drawn-out way every few minutes. But I don't think his illness affected his intelligence at all; rather it bent otherwise normal, intelligent thoughts. Maybe he didn't get Ron's jokes, but insults he definitely understood.

Another symptom of schizophrenia—any book will tell you this—is the Oedipus complex: coveting your mother (in extreme cases, sexually); viewing your father as perhaps the source of all your demons, the head conspirator. This was true of Michael, particularly as he worsened with the years, as medication after medication after treatment failed to assuage his anxiety, sadness, anger. (Later I would read a marked-out, barely legible passage in Michael's Bible—1 Corinthians 5:1—in which Saint Paul wrote: “It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father's wife.”)

He didn't say anything the day of the car washing, Ron told me. There was no warning. He was sitting silently, as always, rocking, smoking, his lips moving whispered prayers or curses, and then he was up, chasing them through the yard with a fat-ended aluminum softball bat, huffing and running with a cigarette still in his mouth, swinging the bat through the air.

Our yard had a fence—six feet high, wooden, that my father had recently built to keep the neighbors from seeing Michael, from “knowing our business.”

They were trapped in the backyard as Michael came at my father, swinging the bat wildly, cutting hard through the air, wanting to cave in his head. They were running around the yard, a sad suburban domestic scene you might have read about if it had turned out differently. Ron was a big kid, muscular, broad-faced and lean and heavy-shouldered like the rest of us, a national champion in freestyle wrestling, a thousand-yard rushing halfback. Which I believe was all that kept Michael from killing my father that day.

As Michael went at my father—
trying to kill him,
Ron told me—Ron tackled him from behind, tied up his legs and arms in a wrestling move, and began, by forcing Michael's head down and shoulders up in a full nelson, to try to suffocate him. Michael screamed, finally dropping the cigarette from his lips.

My father grabbed Ron by the shoulders and pulled him off Michael. My father was red with anger, brushing down his hair, telling Michael to get out of here.

Michael had gone from being lithe, muscular, and strong to being heavy and thoroughly out of shape. He'd almost died of starvation in Florida, returning skin and bones, then had regained all the weight quickly with his compulsive eating. He was weak now, without muscle or coordination, lethargic, unable even to throw a karate kick, his mental illness and the corrosive drug treatments eating away at him physically. Ron told me that he could have killed Michael. He felt in him the power to do so.

Michael went silently back into the garage to sit down and smoke. Episode over, forgotten. A minor scene in some sad lives. My father was sweating. He thought of calling the cops; then, looking at Michael lighting a cigarette, realized how embarrassing that would be, your own son coming at you with a softball bat. He didn't have the energy to explain anymore.

My mother, shortly after this incident, which augured what was to come, finally found a place to put Michael, a place where insurance would cover most of the cost.

It was an “adult community” in Williamsburg, an hour from our home, an apartment complex set back among rolling green hills and old trees, gates surrounding it. All of the tenants were mentally impaired in some way. Counselors were on duty twenty-four hours a day, and the patients were given the help psychologists deemed suitable—medication, counseling, work-study in some specific combination. It was a country club with a high gate.

Michael got to eat, sleep, sit out by a pool, smoke, read the Bible, and watch TV. All he had to do for these privileges was show up to counseling meetings, do one chore a week—dishes in the large disinfectant-smelling cafeteria, say, or weeding one of the mulch-covered gardens.

But he couldn't handle it. The voices, the paranoia, made it impossible somehow. The medications he was on at the time—Haldol, some sedatives to help him sleep, without which he would never have shut his eyes—just weren't enough. Nothing was enough. The weekly reports on him by counselors consistently said he was “difficult” and “uncooperative” and occasionally “aggressive in his behaviors.”