The Psychopath Inside (4 page)

My mother told me that one day she watched me work on the boat from the kitchen window and grew concerned. It was the first time I'd ever exhibited any antisocial behavior. “I was torn whether to tell your father, and to contact a psychiatrist we knew,” she said. By the time I started school in September and was forced into my routine, I went back to normal. My mother never told my father, and I never experienced another period of depression like that again. When I returned to school I became so active socially and athletically that anytime it would creep up, I'd have something to do. There wasn't any time to get depressed.

As I moved into my freshman year of high school, my piety was rewarded by my diocese naming me Catholic Boy of the Year at the yearly New York State conference of Catholic youth. For this honor, I got to spend some time with Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the Archbishop of New York Cardinal Spellman, and other officials of the Church and State. I met some other people about my age who had received the same honor. During the retreat associated with the statewide conference with these students and priests, I realized for the first time that my fellow Catholic youth activists were interested in action items of the Church, real
practical matters, while I was just interested in a purely metaphysical world, a world of insanity.

My four years of high school were filled with nonstop activities. Every year I was on the football team, the wrestling team, and the track and field team. In the summer I swam competitively, and in the winter I skied competitively each year in slalom and giant slalom. Although I enjoyed victory as much as anyone else, I never got mad at opponents. The same could not be said of me in all competitive situations, however; when I played parlor games I proved to be perfectly obnoxious. I hated to lose, and after a while I ostracized any potential poker or Scrabble opponent in my circle of friends.

Despite my poor parlor sportsmanship, I was generally a nice guy. I was a musician in the band every year, acted in school productions, served as president of the drama club, and was involved in the student government. I enjoyed a rich social life and was considered one of the cool, good-looking, athletic, smart types in a school of more than a thousand students. I had three very close friends and about thirty people I considered good friends, and I was on friendly terms with all my classmates and was accepted into the jocks, thespians, arts, and geek groups. I sincerely felt at ease with all of them and found their interests and activities compelling. I had an exhausting sense of humor and an openness and optimism that made people want to spend time with me. I was a bright kid, but not particularly focused, and to my parents' dismay earned the distinction of “Class Clown” for my high school graduating class.

Recently I asked an old friend, Pat Quinn, whom I have known since the seventh grade and who later became a clinical psychologist, what she remembers of my personality and character while we were in high school. She e-mailed, “You were tough on the football field, but empathetic and caring off the field. You were a bright competitive student who seldom missed an opportunity to be a prankster. You also had a more conservative, rigid side when it came to politics and religion. As teenagers, it was not unusual to push the limits, particularly in the norms of the mid-sixties. But you were not a rule breaker and when it came to societal norms, you were clearly a black and white thinker. You could often be heard debating a popular subject, but you had little patience for those who were not of your intellectual ability. You were a well-rounded adolescent who would never be considered to lack insight, empathy, or compassion for others.”

At the same time, in the background of my mind, I knew there was a dark bogeyman lurking, drawing me into lonely and weird places.

One series of brief, disorienting experiences in my junior year helped to change my attitude about my obvious bouts of OCD and bizarre religiosity. My father had me do drug deliveries for the pharmacy, and this involved hospitals, individual physicians, patients, factories, and a variety of quirky shut-in customers. But that summer he had me take drug shipments to a home for the elderly filled with psychiatric patients. When I walked down those halls I witnessed behaviors that astonished me: elderly women stripping
and urging me to jump into bed with them, people with echolalia who would repeat the same phrases over and over for hours on end, and others with schizophrenia, terminal dementia, and unspeakable behaviorial problems. After seeing that scene several times, I realized that any emotional problems I might have were a mere inconvenience compared to the burden these poor souls had to endure. Those visits, and ones to the girls' criminal home, set me straight on what real problems were about. Seeing all the bizarre and terribly unhappy people there appropriately turned off any woe-is-me sensibilities. I began to appreciate the life my parents had blessed us with.

•   •   •

I was so busy, and my external life was so positive, I thrived throughout those years. I graduated and immediately found a college where I could continue to play football and ski against top collegiate alpine skiers in the Northeast and Canada. I entered Saint Michael's College in Vermont at seventeen. My obsessions had abated as high school progressed, but during my college freshman year I started being afflicted by other odd disorders. One day, while talking to a classmate in the cafeteria, my hands began to shake uncontrollably for no apparent reason. I was diagnosed with benign familial tremor, a genetic disorder, and still experience those shakes from time to time.

That same month, I drove back to New York to visit Diane, whom I'd been dating since high school. While driving with her that weekend I felt an unpleasant tingling in my feet that then spread up my legs to my torso. By the time this vibratory pressure
wave shot into my neck, I thought the top of my head would blow off. My heart started pounding so fast that Diane freaked out because she could see my pulse in my throat and my chest was heaving violently. We pulled over and she took the wheel, picked up her mother, and drove me to the hospital. By the time I got there my blood pressure was 240 over 165, and my pulse was 142 beats per minute, a combined cardiovascular event of dangerous magnitude. The doctors pumped me with an IV solution of Valium. Within fifteen minutes my blood pressure and heart rate began to normalize.

That event would be the first of approximately 850 panic attacks I would experience over the ensuing years, mostly occurring in my twenties and early thirties, until I learned to manage them whenever I felt one coming on. But during the first five hundred panic attacks, I was certain that I was going to die within a minute or two. I would get these anytime, day or night, and it didn't matter if I was alone or in a crowd. It would just happen. It did not matter that I knew full well I would not die, having experienced these attacks before. The limbic system convinced the rest of my brain that I was about to kick the bucket. So although my OCD and episodes of dread had abated, my brain now charmed me with shaky hands and panic attacks. Nice.

One positive spin on developing panic attacks is that I was so freaked out by the potential for a stroke or heart attack that I never took hard or hallucinogenic drugs throughout college and beyond. I stuck with alcohol, and an occasional joint in certain social situations, but I do believe that, given my well-established addictions
to nicotine and alcohol, the fear of losing my mind and dying of a stroke permanently kept me otherwise drug-free.

A year after the onset of the panic attacks, I was called to answer the draft for the Vietnam War. When I arranged for my physical, I was asked what conditions I had. The draft board could not have cared less about my OCD or panic attacks. But they were open to the problems my allergic asthma might present in a theater of war. So I was given an allergy scratch test on my forearm. Within ten minutes of the scratch application, I developed tunnel vision, with a dark blinding wash coming over my eyes. The next thing I knew, I was on the physician's table getting an IV. I had gone into complete anaphylactic shock from the allergens. I never received a call to the draft, and this was clearly another case where one of my inconvenient maladies probably saved my life. In fact, every one of the weird cognitive, emotional, psychiatric, and physical challenges I've been blessed with had a net positive influence on my life and my attitude toward it. Darwin would be amused.

My college years from 1965 through 1969 were probably as normal and intense and wasteful as most kids experienced in the late 1960s. I was interested in biology, skiing, and playing football. Many of my closest friends were musicians and nonscience majors, and that naturally went hand in hand with a certain level of Eastern mysticism, hallucinogens, and veritable bales of marijuana. Even snorting camphorated opiate rectal ointment was not off-limits to this confederacy, and our four-day weekend fight song, “Any Port in a Storm for a Buzz,” guided those heydays of
mesmerizing silliness. Just recently a former college classmate of mine, Henry (some names have been changed), reminded me of an episode that he was apparently sober enough to recall, in which I booted a guy out of a convertible and whisked away his date.

Even after college, I partied hard. In 1977, while I was a postdoctoral fellow at UC San Diego, I attended a major collegiate football game with a physician friend of mine. After the game, we headed to fraternity row, where a bunch of drunk college students in several houses thought it would be fun to move all their furniture outside. I encouraged them to pour alcohol on the furniture and light it on fire. In nearly all matters, I was both reckless and charming. When the police arrived, they didn't seem too concerned. I offered a fireman a joint, and in return he let me play with the hose, so I started spraying people. Minutes later my friend and I ran down the street to attend a large party at another fraternity house. I went up to the third floor and looked down at the band on the patio, then saw an emergency fire hose and asked the guy next to me to hand it over. I stuck it out the window and told him to turn it on. I wiped out the band, full blast. Drums were flying everywhere. A bunch of huge guys, probably football players, came up, furious, and dragged me downstairs. On my way I saw the water from the hose seeping through the ceiling of the second floor. I was put in handcuffs, and then made the cops laugh enough while convincing them that we had never really harmed anyone physically that they released me. On the run from an angry crowd, my friend and I ended up getting booted out of another frat house, then run out of an inner-city dive, and pulled over
twice on the way home for suspected DUI. In all these cases I gave the police a story they enjoyed, and the two of us made it home at six a.m., just in time for him to do a twenty-four-hour ER stint and for me to start an experiment in the lab at eight a.m.

I was well out of puberty but still acting like an adolescent. And hey, a few house break-ins and, yeah, car thefts for fun really didn't mean that much back then. Boys will be boys. Most of my baby boomer friends and I feel sorry for the present Gen Y-ers who are banned from school and society for pranks we pulled on a daily basis. My early ability to make teachers and police laugh meant I never got in any real trouble. But the
Animal House
shenanigans were clearly getting less and less controlled by the end of my adolescent years—clearly not the kind of high mark one reaches for when one has his heart and mind set on a career in the top echelon of the medical sciences. I was blowing it, but I was also having a great time.

Teenagers do dumb things, especially when they're around other teenagers and copious amounts of alcohol and drugs. I won't pretend that the antics just described betray some demon within me, waiting for any opportunity to wreak havoc on the lives of everyone I knew. But considering how calm and good-natured I was as a child, the carefree and borderline destructive attitude I adopted in college was somewhat remarkable.

At the same time I was getting myself into trouble at school, I was also adopting a laissez-faire attitude toward society at large. In the protected environs of a small Catholic school in Vermont, many of us were kept blissfully uncaring about social and political
events elsewhere. We paid some homage to the imperatives of those faraway social conflicts by swearing our opposition to the Vietnam War and offering a cursory nod to the grab bag of social ills and inequities many of us were poorly equipped to understand and too distracted with partying and schoolwork to do anything about. I had been a much more sensitive humanist in high school and for the first two years of college, but those sensibilities faded as I reached twenty.

My loss of social awareness and empathy wasn't due to the environment of the college itself. Saint Michael's was founded on liberal French Enlightenment principles, which extended far beyond the classroom. The priests on the faculty were both educators and social activists and often disappeared overnight to take up the banner for whatever cause was most pressing—civil rights, Vietnam, and so on. Instead there seemed to be a crack opening and widening in my psyche, a vaguely defined door in my sensibilities that became obvious during my junior year. My behavior suggested that the change in my thinking and behavior was real, and perhaps permanent. And through that crack, on the other side of the door, was a grand hypomanic party that has never let up to this day.

My sophomore year, I enrolled in a philosophy class taught by a priest who saw something in me, something he didn't like, an emerging change of character. He wouldn't start class until I showed up and sat down, and he went so far as to hold up class one day until one of my classmates ran back to the dorm and got me out of my bed. Classmates had told him about my supposed ESP.
I never believed in it, but I would tell people what they were thinking or make predictions, probably just because I picked up on subtle physical clues, and it freaked them out. One time when I was younger, I was in my friend's backyard and pretended to be someone sitting in heaven. I named a friend of his father's and said I was driving my Jaguar XKE along Route 9E toward Lake Placid when I came around a curve and hit a tree in the road and died. Several days later that happened. My friend's father heard my prediction and said I couldn't hang out with his son anymore. People tell me I have a gift, but I say if you talk a lot you're bound to be right sometimes. In college, a few friends also said I developed a way of looking through people. Some felt scared, although they knew I wouldn't attack them. Still, it bothered them. I never tried to be a tough guy, but I was doing something that people were picking up on. The priest started calling me “evil” during class. I laughed it all off, especially since I had still not done anything I considered immoral or unethical. In my mind, my personality and character were very much intact. People said something in me was changing, something they said was rather unholy. I thought all their observations were a bunch of hooey.