Author’s note: Aware of the shortcomings of memory ...



Author’s note: Aware of the shortcomings of my memory, especially my earliest memories, I have supported this material with my own research. Anything between quotation marks comes from an interview, my own notes or a written document. No names have been changed.

Roommates Again

The last time I see Pat conscious is at our sister Michelle’s house in Kansas City.

As I drift in the darkness I am aware of my brother’s presence – he’s all I can think about in fact. It’s his snore, for one thing. Sometimes he sounds like a cartoon character, his deep melodious breathing an animated and almost comical sound of deep slumber. Other times, he is a jalopy, sputtering, broken down, backfiring, with a short silence between breaths, then the gasping, wheezing, sleepy, snorting, sketchy series starts again.

After nearly forty years, we are sharing a bedroom again. Pat is lying on one bed, me another. It’s the night of the first leg of Pat’s trip, the first time he has traveled to visit a family member in about a decade or more.

The little excursion has been exhausting so far. Pat has been toying with Michelle’s no-smoking-in-the-house rule. He has the habit of putting a cigarette in his mouth while sitting in the living room watching TV. You think he is going to light up. He fumbles with his matches, when he can find them. Then Michelle admonishes him, telling him again and again he can’t smoke in the house. Anna, her teenage daughter, is allergic to the smoke, she says. He complains. It’s point, counterpoint. He can’t win, but there’s a danger lurking. You don’t know if he will try it. Then what would Michelle do? Will she shriek? Will she call the police? He gives in and moves out to the back patio where he sits or paces and smokes.

Pat is the oldest of us nine kids. He is fifty-two now -- we just celebrated his birthday. He looks every bit his age: a man tattered by living on streets, in mental institutions and dim pay-by-the-week motel rooms. He no longer is the handsome guy with the shiny dark hair, the gentle big brother with the playful smile and the quick mind. He has no teeth. The teeth that haven’t rotted away had been kicked or punched out when he was jumped in prison or mental institutions. His beard is unkempt and whiskers droop, covering his lips and mouth, like overgrown vegetation in front of a dark cave. His nose is bent to one side, a result of an accident he had running from taunting motorists who had made fun of him while he was walking on the street. His hands are burned from cigarettes and stained yellow from nicotine. He has gained weight over the years, adding surprising girth to his otherwise small frame. His eyes, still piercing, a bold hazel, are more anxious than last year when I drove up to Albuquerque, New Mexico, with my mother to visit him.

He hasn’t been able to settle down since he arrived. He paces. Pat always paces. With everyone talking around the kitchen table or sitting in the living room, Pat is restless. He gets up and wanders around. I am conscious of where he is, as if a neighbor’s child is visiting a house that is not childproof.

The day before, Pat had flown in from Albuquerque. I flew up from Texas. Pat’s case manager had encouraged the visit, saying Pat wanted to travel and it would do him good. Weeks earlier, when I had spoken with Michelle on the phone about Pat’s adventure, I had been optimistic. Pat’s life seemed to be improving. He had his own apartment now, even a telephone, and he seemed to be taking his medications regularly, according to reports we’ve heard. Our plan was to stay a few days with Michelle, and then I would accompany him on the next part of the journey – to fly to my home in Austin where he would stay with me and visit our mother and two of our other sisters before we sent him back. By having me along as unofficial chaperone, Pat would be able to visit some family members he hadn’t seen in many years. We had been in the habit of visiting him, he didn’t visit us. It was understood that we wanted to avoid the kinds of drama we had experienced many times years ago, disturbances and scenes involving the police and hospitals. It is sometimes quite a hassle having a brother like Pat.

Almost immediately after my arrival my optimism had faded as I sensed how hyper Pat was and, just as much, Michelle’s weariness. Was it the tension in her voice or an intolerant look in her eyes? Instinctively, I noticed the fear, as if some impending tragedy would spoil everything. Without speaking, I knew we had to be on guard. I understood that Pat needed a tight rein. I needed to help manage the situation, and I felt responsible for keeping Pat out of trouble. Is he wanting another pack of cigarettes? What about his medicine? Is it time to take another pill?

Before he had fallen asleep, Pat and I had briefly talked in the dark, with the lights off, like we were kids. Then I heard his snore.

In the morning, I wake before dawn and Pat is gone. I look for him in the backyard. I go out the front door and look up and down the street. No Pat. What now? Nobody else is awake. I decide to wait until others rise to call out a search party. No need to bother them yet. I go back inside and upstairs to the guest bedroom and lay down. I fall back to sleep. Soon, I hear sounds downstairs -- Michelle and Pat in the kitchen. He came back. Thank goodness.

Where’d he go? I ask, knowing the suburb offered no street life, just middle-class homes and a strip of shops. He had wandered, unable to sleep, looking for something to do, he says. He had gotten lost. He had to go to the bathroom. All the businesses were closed. So he took a crap in some bushes in somebody’s front yard.

During the day Pat wants to go places, too. He gets bored easily and likes to be entertained. We go to a matinee at a mall movie theater. We take a walk around the neighborhood. I recall that we visit a scenic overlook and gaze down on the Missouri River at the site Lewis and Clark traveled west on their historic trip some 200 years earlier.

As we drive around, Pat notices a Church’s Fried Chicken restaurant and mentions how our mother invented the fast food chain’s chicken recipe; the company ripped her off. Other times during the weekend Pat mentions that family ancestors helped Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison with inventions but they never received the credit nor the ensuing riches they deserved.

My brother-in-law, Tom, and I usually play golf when I visit. Not this time, at least not on a real golf course. Unspoken, we knew it wouldn’t be fair to leave Pat with Michelle and Anna. I’m disappointed but keep Pat company while he smokes on the patio and sits on a lawn chair. Tom and I pitch plastic golf balls around the backyard. We devise a golf “hole” that requires hitting a ball at a pot near a fence. It is a tricky shot over Pat as he slumps in a chair, in the line of fire. One of my shots accidentally hits Pat. He bolts upright. We laugh. We decide it is more fun to try to land the ball on Pat’s lap. He is a good sport about it, smokes with one hand, and throws the ball back with the other.

One evening we order pizza for dinner. As we all sit around the table munching, Tom jokes that his grandfather invented pizza. We all burst into laughter. I look at Pat and nearly choke; he has joined in, a sly smile from the corner of his mouth.

After dinner, I challenge Pat to a game of ping-pong in the basement. Pat’s reactions are slow. I mostly take it easy on him, lob the ball. But occasionally I can’t resist a slam and I hit the ball as hard as I can.

It’s near dark. He is antsy. He wants to go out just as everyone else is settling in. It’s boring just sitting around the house, he says. I’m tense myself and, with everyone so touchy, I volunteer to walk with him up the street to a bar and grill. It would get him out of the house, and Michelle needs a break from hawkish duty and issuing a stream of admonishments to try control Pat.

It is dark by the time we enter the establishment, a mile or two away. There is a small crowd inside. What will the waitress think about this unkempt, wild-eyed man? Would he pull a stunt or embarrass me? I’m somewhat used to this, act normal, step up and play conciliator, smile, and tell the waitress we are only here for some drinks. Pat orders a Coke. Pat always drinks Cokes, but there’s never enough to slake his thirst. I order a cup of decaffeinated coffee.

A few well-dressed women and men sit on stools in the dark paneled bar. There is quite a bit of laughter. I watch a muted ballgame on a TV. He slurps and looks around the room. Pat gulps, wants a refill and can’t wait for our waitress to come back to check on us. I start to cringe when he lunges and stands to block the path of a passing waitress.

“Miss, Miss,” can I have a refill, Pat asks, nearly causing her to topple a tray of food. Not our waitress. We have to pay for refill, she says, shifting and looking past him for help.

I want to leave, after my coffee, but Pat wants to stay or go somewhere else. He threatens to stay out without me. I can’t tell him what to do, he says sharply. I am not the boss of him. If I don’t stay out with him, there is a good chance we would have a mess to solve later. He might run off, get arrested, and be hospitalized again. Michelle would never forgive me if he was institutionalized in her town, making Pat her problem. He argues his way out of leaving and I’m stuck so we stay. I can’t remember what we talk about, but Pat is ever opinionated, and I sometimes challenge his statements, which seem impractical. I change the subject. I am bored and feel worn out. I’m getting tired, I say. Aren’t you? You didn’t much sleep the night before. It’s getting late. I convince him it is time to go. His drink is empty again, and he can’t smoke in the restaurant. Finally, we gives in and we head back. I sense he is still keyed up, so I encourage some wandering, and we walk the lighted residential streets. With the tall trees and two-story homes with dormer windows, this could have been the neighborhood where we grew up. We look in the windows of a few storefronts, a hardware store, a bagel shop. I am relieved that all the shops are closed.

Pat slows to an irritating crawl, hanging back. If I keep a steady pace he will follow, I think. He falls further behind, walking even more slowly, trying to light a cigarette. He stops to sit on a curb. It is cat and mouse now. I am about a half block ahead of him and, looking back over my shoulder, I stop when he stops. I am not about to let him get too far behind. I take a wrong turn somewhere and we end up walking the streets for about forty minutes. Finally, I spot a familiar intersection. An older couple passes walking a dog, and so I stop and pet, looking and waiting for Pat to catch up. What a pretty doggie. We finally return to Michelle’s. The others are asleep. Pat wants to watch TV. I stay up with him awhile, page through one of the books that fill my sister’s bookcases, unwilling to take the chance to leave him alone. He might disappear again. Sometime around midnight, I convince Pat to turn off the TV and come up to bed. We have to fly out early in the morning, I remind him. I brush my teeth and change into pajama bottoms. Working off his shirt with grunts, Pat drops into bed with his pants on.

After some fidgeting, and listening for Pat’s snore, I fall asleep.

Early the next morning, Pat is gone -- again. I go outside looking for him. I scan neighbors’ yards. I enter the Catholic Church a couple blocks away. It is Sunday, but the early mass won’t be for more than an hour. No Pat inside. I light a candle. God, please help Pat. Grant him Your highest and best good.

Our flight departs soon. Michelle calls the police department to see if they picked him up. No Pat. We agree that if Pat doesn’t show up, I should get on my flight without him. What else can I do? Later, at the airport, I feel relief as I take my bag from Tom’s car. At least now I won’t have to manage Pat during his visit to my home, no more images of coming home from work to find my house burned down from an unattended cigarette. If Pat acted out, became delusional and ran away, would we spend days searching for him? What if we were forced to check him into a mental hospital? The worst-case scenarios couldn’t happen now -- at least on my watch – but I feel anxious about leaving the problem with Michelle. It was going to be her mess to solve. The return flight is uneventful. I nap.

A few days later, Michelle tells me over the phone that they finally found Pat. In the middle of the night he made his way across the state border to Kansas and he wandered a couple days before he was picked up by the police on suspicion of vagrancy. They agreed to let him go and drop the charges if he flew home. She immediately had his airline ticket changed, called his case manager, and sent him back to Albuquerque.

It takes a couple days of calling and leaving messages before I reach Pat on the phone. I tell him he had hurt his chances of visiting the family anytime soon. We have to trust him to obey house rules and to not run off. I am sorry, he says. We can’t spend our time searching for you all the time, I continue. Mom is eighty years old, and most of our brothers and sisters have kids at home. I’m not sure when we would be able to arrange another trip. I know, he says. He says he is sorry again. His voice, often difficult to understand over the phone, fades off in a mumble. I don’t want to hear him anymore, not in this way. I am ashamed, cornering Pat into making amends for inconveniencing us. I change the subject. I have to go, I have to go, Pat says suddenly, urgently. The phone goes dead. He hangs up without saying goodbye.

Later, I think to myself that he hung up so abruptly because he had to go to bathroom. He has been suffering from incontinence.

The King of Them All

Pat and Jon were the oldest. Good cop, bad cop. Wise king and the prince of darkness. One the power of attraction, one aversion.

Inevitably, there was a dispute, some test or a battle of wits. There was a game and someone was accused of cheating. They argued over whose turn to retrieve the baseball from the bushes. Or, Jon picked on Madeline. He had her on the carpet, her arms pinned to her sides as he tortured her. He licked her face, and she tried to push him off, shaking her head back and forth, red-faced, hair flinging. Jon’s laughter was maniacal, his tongue dangled. Sometimes he dripped thick salvia from his mouth. Just before the slime touched her face he sucked it back up into his mouth.

There was a wrestling match. Pat would win, of course. We danced around the house and burst into our made-up song of victory: “Who’s the ki-iiing of them all. Everybody knows it’s Pat, Pat, Pat!” Over and over we would sing, doing a bunny hop dance, marching in circles, our legs and arms pumping, cheerful, through the living room, the hallway, the kitchen. A regular conga line. The world was a riotous circus, and sometimes it was all right.

“Who’s the ki-iiing of them all. Everybody knows it’s Pat, Pat, Pat.”

“Who’s the ki-iiing of them all. Everybody knows it’s Pat. Pat. Pat.”

Somebody is Making a Racket

All I know is somebody is making a racket, and they are trying to climb into our house. As spooky black as it is outside, it seems impossibly bright inside at this hour. The lights burn.

This is one of my earliest memories. I am three or four years old.

I sit on the stairs. I am blinking in half sleep, looking down upon the scene, an almost mythical vision, this bird’s-eye view. I don’t remember words, but there are loud noises and there is movement in the hallway and in rooms below. Suddenly I realize that my dad has broken into the house, and he is causing a ruckus. Everybody in the house is up by now. Even my little sisters, Barbara and baby Denise, couldn’t sleep through this.

Years later, I learn my father, separated from my mother, climbed the arbor outside, crawled on the roof and stumbled into the house through a window. During a certain period of our lives, these were semi-regular incidents. The way I remember, they played out the same: Dad, drunk, gets in the house in search of my mother. Chaos ensues. It’s loud. We try to protect her. We hide her, usually in a closet or under a bed. Sometimes dad was violent. One time he threw my mother against a wall and she crumpled to the floor. One time we picked up kitchen implements, pots and pans and banged them violently, driving my father from the house, so Pat once told me. Madeline remembers standing on a step and swinging a skillet at him.

The drama on this night plays out when Jon picks up the phone at the top of the stairs and calls the police.

I watch, still on my perch, as dark-blue uniformed policemen enter the house. The police car’s colored lights bounce off the walls. A police officer cuffs my father’s hands behind his back. I see him with his head bent, balding, with horn-rimmed glasses, finally subdued as they lead him off. I follow down the stairs and gather with others at the front entryway. The front porch light is on. The cop car disappears down the street and into the dark. There is a buzz. The lights still burn. I am wide awake now.

Go to sleep, go back to sleep, someone says. Everything will be all right.

I didn’t know until years later that my dad called the house the next day. I never thought my own son would call the police on me, dad told Jon on the phone. Damn right, and I’d do it again, Jon remembered thinking.

Games

To play Surfin’ USA you tried to walk across the backs and butts of your older brothers and sisters as they lay face down and lined up on the living-room floor. Barefoot, you held out your arms to balance yourself, as if on a surfboard. The bodies wiggled back and forth, trying to send us younger ones to the floor. Fall off and you end up in shark-infested waters.

We had a tetherball pole, a badminton set, a ping-pong table, a croquet set. We played Spud, Green Monsters and kick ball. We played Ghost in the Graveyard, Flying Statues, Shark!, AUT-to-mo-bile, and Pile on Mom. We played Wiffle ball and Nerf basketball. We had Frisbee and Hula Hoop. Neighbors had a trampoline, an aboveground pool and a basketball hoop. Across the street, lawn darts. We played tennis. We biked. We had our own version of the 1972 Olympics after Bob received a stopwatch as a gift. We played tackle football, five errors and golf with plastic balls. In winter, we went sled-riding and ice-skating. I played ice hockey in the living room with a foam ball and an old wooden cane that I found in some bushes. We played baseball in the house with fuzzy dice and a plastic baseball bat. We rolled up socks to use as basketballs and a lampshade as a hoop. We played tic-tac-toe and hangman. We played Go Fish, Old Maid, War, Spit and Crazy Eights. We played chess, checkers, Uno, Parcheesi, Twister, Monopoly, Scrabble, Mouse Trap, The Game of Life and Sorry.

It was during a game of pickle that Pat showed me how to better catch a baseball. I was a vacuum cleaner for anything on the ground or around my belt. But I tried to basket catch everything, even balls up near my head or shoulders. High balls would skip out of my glove, or I’d get my hand smashed trying to keep the ball in my mitt. You have a decision to make when the ball is coming toward you, Pat explained. Is it above your belt or below? If it’s above your waist, you need to turn your glove the other way. You try it. I’ll throw you some high balls. Turn your glove the other way as it’s coming. That’s right. That’s it. Now catch it in the pocket. That’s it! Now you got it.

In the car, we played the house game. As we passed houses, everyone in the family received a house for their very own. With all eyes peering out the windows on one side of the car, we counted down as all nine of us got our own house. Even dad got a house, though he wasn’t in the car and didn’t live with us anymore. He lived in a men’s dormitory on Victory Parkway near downtown. We always counted in the same order, oldest to youngest: “Mommy’s house, dad’s house, Pat’s house, Jon’s house, Michelle’s house, Madeline’s house, Nancy’s house, Bob’s house, Chip’s house, Barbara’s house, Denise’s house.” Then we’d start over, counting down again and again -- especially on long weekend drives when mom had one of her bouts of wanderlust. It was a game of chance. Sometimes, you got a freshly painted five-bedroom, three-bath Colonial surrounded with flowing gardens and a swimming pool in the back. Other times you got an old sharecroppers’ shack. I liked the attention when I landed the fanciest place. But I always felt it right and appropriate if Pat landed a mansion.

One year, I received a transistor radio as a birthday present. I listened to baseball games. The same radio station where dad worked also broadcast Cincinnati Reds baseball games. Sometimes, just prior to the pregame show, I heard dad deliver the news and then pitch the broadcast to the game announcers. Lights off, everyone asleep, I stayed up late when the Reds played games on the West Coast. With the radio under my pillow, the sounds of the game, a stream of play-by-play, etched a groove into my brain.

During the day, I played my own version of baseball. I threw a tennis ball against the front steps. Standing on the sidewalk, glove in hand, I looked in for the sign from an imaginary catcher. There was a strike zone only I could see. If I hit the target just right between the second two steps, it was strike and the ball caromed back to me with a satisfying sound -- tennis ball on concrete steps -- “THA-thunk.” If I hit the edge of a step, the ball sailed back, sometimes over my head. Other times the ball kicked backwards on the porch, thwacking the storm door. Foul ball.

The game was on the line. It was the bottom of the ninth. The play-by-play announcer told the story. Reds down five to three, two men on, two out. Boisseau at the plate. Swing and a miss. Now it’s three balls, two strikes. Runners will be going on this one. … The wind up and the pitch. Long fly ball, deeeeeep to centerfield, back, back, back -- it’s goooone. A game-winning homer!

Until dark, I was the lone star, and I had control of the drama. My older brothers were somewhere else, doing their own thing, and they had their own ideas of how to play or they were not interested in playing ball. This game was mine. I invented it. I was in control. I decided when it started and how it ended.

Rigid Little Bull

I was a crazy kid, a very odd one. Take my eating habits. I’m told that I stopped eating like a normal person when I was about two years old. Mom and dad and my brothers and sisters all went on a vacation to a lake cabin in Michigan. I stayed behind with Grandma Mobie – my dad’s mom. When they came back I didn’t eat. I don’t know what happened. Did I punish them for leaving me behind? I know only that I wouldn’t eat most food. My mind was a closed fist. I had a list of about a dozen items that I would consume. I ate meats. Well-done. I ate potatoes, mashed. No gravy. Or fried. Not baked. I ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Creamy peanut butter, not crunchy. No strawberry or raspberry jelly; only grape. For breakfast, I ate cereal. Dry. No milk. I drank a cup of milk separately. I ate waffles and pancakes and French toast. That was about it. No eggs -- runny yellow goop on a plate? Not even scrambled. No spaghetti, a pile of worms. No liver. No onions. No pickles. No tomatoes. Nothing at all mixed together. No sauces. No soups. I sat at the table until everyone else finished, or they got tired of waiting and wandered off. I could outlast anybody. I would gag if you tried to force anything down my throat, as Jon tried once, and then I’d go all silent and pierce you with my pathetic tough look. My favorite hiding place was between the coils of the radiator in the dining room. Years later Mom said they never could figure out where the strange odors came from in that house. We moved when I was six or seven years old.

I wasn’t the only finicky eater. Nancy: no juices, no soups; Madeline: no cooked fruits or pies. One year, when Pat was really young, he only ate peaches and asparagus, Mom told me. But Pat seemed an indiscriminate eater to me. He would try anything. He even ate his apple cores and seeds, and I’d imagined that an apple tree would grow inside him. Michelle drew a picture with branches coming out of his ears.

Pat and Linda Stick Take Me on a Date

One evening, Pat took me with him on a date with his girlfriend, Linda Stick. This must have been before or just after Pat was away for a summer in Washington, D.C., where he served as an intern in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Linda was pretty, with her long, shiny straight hair. She lived in a neighborhood on a steep hill. Pat drove our green Volkswagen bus. Once when he visited Linda he crashed the bus because he forgot to put on the parking brake. He ran after it down the street, the bus careening backwards and hitting another car.

When we pulled up to drop her off, Pat got out, walked Linda to the door and went inside. I stayed out in the bus. Other kids were playing on the street or sitting on front stoops. Girls, probably about my age, a head taller, came up to the bus when they noticed someone inside. They looked in the window. I dropped to the floor in the back and hid, my arms covering my head. I imagined they couldn’t see me. There’s a boy in there. Let me see. Yes, there is. He’s cute. Hello, hello. Hey! Knock, knock, knock. I didn’t budge, frozen.

On the way home Pat asked why didn’t I come out. I could always count on Pat to question me, not in a critical way but, I suppose, in a curious way and somehow I knew he cared and paid attention to me. I wasn’t used to being focused on, and didn’t know how to say I felt embarrassed and that I was scared and that I just imagined that I could make them go away by ignoring the faces and sounds at the window.

I don’t know, I mumbled, and I shrugged and turned my face toward the rushing air from the open car window.

Undated Letter to Jon from Pat

(sometime after 1982)

“This is going to be a strange letter. It’s really the recollections of my life….

Remember Dad in his tie teaching you the curve ball. And remember the boobie traps we set for the girls who wanted to go up to our room. I had many acquaintances a few friends those years. I came home I was lord of the castle I went out I was the little one. … It was a hard couple of years for me I didn’t have any friends because I was afraid of girls. …

Sophomore year in college was the best time. I had friends all over, always something to do. I met my good friend Rick Driscoll.

Summers I mostly hung out with Linda and worked at the zoo. I worked at Washington D.C. which was interesting except for one bad thing. I was at a bus stop in Washington D.C. and an articulate middle aged man struck up a conversation. He kept on saying that he admired my intellect. He asked me if I like to come over his house. It turned out to be a trap. He gave me a blowjob I was so drunk I could not see. After the blowjob I had a hard time getting rid of the guy but I did. I felt like shit. …

Anyway I dropped out of college and took a trip to Montreal. … Michelle (Rick’s friend), Rick and I went up to Montreal in my car – remember that Impala convertible? Anyway, Jon, here’s where it gets strange. I was in the backseat of the car and reading the Bible, on the radio was ‘it’s going to a bright, bright sunshiny day’ and while reading the 17th chapter of John I got born again. There isn’t any doubt, I was really one with God and going to heaven. When we got to Montreal I smoked more weed – I kind of thought at the time that marijuana got one closer to God. I started to hear voices. …”

John, Chapter 17

After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed: “Father, the time has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. … My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. … I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. …”

17:1 [explanatory note] This entire chapter is Jesus’ prayer. From it we learn that the world is a tremendous battleground where the forces under Satan’s power and those under God’s authority are at war. Satan and his forces are motivated by bitter hatred for Christ and his forces. Jesus prayed for his disciples, including those of us who follow him today. He prayed that God would keep his chosen believers safe from Satan’s power, setting them apart and making them pure and holy, uniting them through his truth.

-- Passage and explanatory note from The Holy Bible, New International Version, Life Application Study Bible, copyright 1978, revised 1983, The Zondervan Corporation and Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

Pat a Zombie

After Pat’s trip to Montreal, he temporarily dropped out of college and then during spring break 1973 he took another trip, this time to Arizona to meet up with a friend who was attending college there. He was going with his two male friends, one a black guy with a big afro, and a girl, is how Mom remembers it.

Next thing she knows she gets a call from someone – one of the guys Pat is traveling with, nobody remembers his name -- who says that she needed to come and get Pat because he had flipped out. They were on the top of a mountain. And he was seeing and hearing things. They took him to the emergency room at a hospital. The story is he experimented with LSD and freaked. He heard voices.

Mom called her friend, Louise, who had recently moved there, the same woman who put Pat up when he was an intern in Washington. She had picked him up and had him over at her house in Phoenix until Mom could fly in. Mom caught a plane the next morning, borrowing money for the flight, an outrageously expensive cost we couldn’t afford, especially in those days before the deregulation of the airline industry. Pat was staring straight ahead in a fog. He just held on to her jacket when they were at the airport and followed behind her, like a little kid.

As they were seated in their airplane seats for the flight home, the pilot came back into the cabin and asked her: “Is he going to be all right? Can you handle him?” Mom remembers. She straightened herself in her seat. She said yes she could. “But I didn’t know,” she told me years later.

Dad met them at the airport in northern Kentucky, and they drove their separate cars on the way back to the house. Pat made a fuss and insisted that they stop and he switch vehicles on the ride back. He didn’t want to take sides between his mother and father. This was about the time Mom and dad finalized the divorce, and my dad remarried.

After he came home Pat often just sat there and stared straight ahead, unanimated. His eyes were unfocused and scary. He was like a zombie. I don’t think I had ever heard of “schizophrenia” before. But that is what they told us he had. It wasn’t split personalities, like some people believed, but I didn’t understand it at all -- how could I? It seemed some demons possessed my big brother. He wasn’t the same person.

One night he lay on his bed and he heard me crying in the next room, he told me years later. What happened to Pat? What’s wrong with Pat? he heard me cry. No one could explain. What it must have been like for him, trapped inside a mind and a world that was strange and sometimes scary -- scarier than ever before. There was nothing he could say.

During the late afternoon and into the night, Pat stared in the mirror in the bathroom, hour after hour. He read the Bible and recited long boring incomprehensible passages. Later, he tried to slit his wrists. We piled on top of him and wrestled him down and pinned his arms and took away the razor.

Soon Pat was hospitalized and confined in a mental ward, one of an endless series of institutions. We visited him. I remember signing in, being buzzed through locked doors, and the foul smells. We played ping-pong and watched TV. He smoked cigarettes. He usually talked to everyone, the uniformed workers, other patients with whom he traded cigarettes – they were mostly derelicts, as far as I could tell -- custodians. His hands shook from all the medications. He paced, and the ashes from his cigarettes fell on and in everything. I wandered the fluorescent-lit hallways, a little nervous and closed-down like a boy turtle, for my own self protection -- but also curious about the place with all the crazies. An old gray-haired lady in a housecoat walked toward me. There were shouts from hospital workers. She turned and scooted up the hallway, chuckling. She left a turd on the linoleum floor.

I developed a default prayer. During one part of the Catholic mass, the priest always asks for prayers of personal intention. Every day at our Catholic school we also said prayers. After we stood for the “Pledge of Allegiance,” Sister Margaret, the principal, led us in prayer over the intercom, the “Our Father” or “Hail Mary.” Then she asked for a moment of silence for our own personal prayers. I squeezed my eyes shut and bowed toward the floor. Sometimes I was teary-eyed. Dear God, please help Pat.

A Family Fear

Most people I know – people you know too, I’m certain -- have medical concerns that stretch generations, chronic illnesses, ones they dutifully itemize when filling out medical history forms or when discussing the illnesses of ancestors -- diabetes, heart disease, cancer. For my brothers and sisters, the fears are of mental illness and -- to a lesser extent – alcoholism. These are shadows that have hung over at least two generations. The fears center on the males (though women are not exempt; several of my sisters have battled with severe depression, for example.) Men in my family, it goes, show intelligence and promise, but they are often sidetracked, prone to mania, severe mental illness, and a tendency to abuse alcohol. They sabotage themselves, suffer family problems, and failure. On occasion, this has been kitchen-table conversation among my sisters and their husbands. What is wrong with the men in our family?

Of course, one obvious explanation is there weren’t any healthy male role models. In addition to having a crazy, boozing dad, we didn’t have any grandfathers or even any uncles (or aunts, for that matter) to look up to. Around our house, it was pretty much just us nine kids -- and Mom, of course. That’s because both Mother and father were only children.

A quick synopsis of the family’s history: Both parents grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, during the Great Depression. Mother’s father died when she was eleven years old when he drove his car into a freight train late one night in May 1937. He was returning from an American Legion function. No one knows, but he likely may have been drunk. Father’s father, a long-time bachelor, married late in life, and died -- most likely -- from illnesses brought on from chronic alcoholism when dad was fourteen.

Of course, I understand it’s all a farce, an overly simplistic answer – this lack of having proper male role models. Too easy. Millions of people don’t have role models and they end up outstanding, successful people, citizens who have never been to a mental hospital or a jail. Is it fate? Is it just the (bad) luck of the draw? Is it simply our heredity? Our chromosomes must contain a ticking time bomb that can spring loose given the right conditions. But that sounds like anybody on the planet. Like another family’s history of heart attacks, or tumors running amok. Yeah. Maybe we’re no different. And there is no satisfactory explanation, just that when our internal spring goes it’s the mind that snaps -- schizophrenia, manic depression, and the voice that tells you solutions are in a bottle.

Continuing the little family history: After more than a decade of marriage and building a successful career, dad suffered from manic depression. He and Mom separated. On multiple occasions, courts ordered him committed to mental hospitals. Eventually, they divorced and dad remarried and divorced twice more. While he resurrected his news broadcasting career for awhile, he died in March 1996, aged sixty-nine, alone, virtually penniless, an alcoholic who never found recovery.

In contrast, Mother is roundly admired by people who know anything about the family. She raised us nine children practically single-handedly. She is a survivor. She is the strong one who held everything together.

That is not to say that I’ve always been grateful for her sacrifices. While I got it -- that she was tireless and provided for us -- by the time I was a teenager she was worn out and moody. To get her way and to motivate us, she raged, often late in the night. Can’t say I blame her -- I was a particularly self-centered, bullheaded, and crafty adolescent, and most of my siblings weren’t angels, either. At least one of my sisters believes that our mother has never loved her. I don’t accept that. Yes, she has never been comfortable touching us, hugging us, and opening up. Mom never said she loved me, either.

To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have minded ending up like dad back then. I was kind of proud of him. He was a local celebrity. I thought his life as a semi-bachelor was appealing in a way, going to bars after work, having adventures, swapping stories. He had a lot of freedom. When I was fifteen, I started drinking beers with friends at night, hanging out at the golf course where we caddied or cruising streets during the mid-‘70s auto mania. The mix worked well at the time (as far as I could tell): Twelve packs, keg parties, school dances, Bob Seeger blaring on the radio, and fifty-cents-a-gallon gasoline. Alcohol was my fuel, elixir that made me funnier, smarter, and fearless. Not exactly a revelation, that. But I came to understand – at least up to a point -- why dad’s was a drinking life, why he couldn’t live without it. And, I wanted to follow in his footsteps. I went to college to study journalism.

I understood, even while wearing my beer spectacles, that dad’s life was pretty much constant chaos. Sure. But I was accustomed to chaos. Pat’s madness followed the family through my grade-school and high-school years. After being stabilized on some meds, Pat periodically held a job, tried to return to college, and lived on his own. But then he’d stop taking his medication, and fail to see the psychiatrist. He would hear voices again, become delusional, and send all his money to missionaries. He’d end up in a jail, a hospital, and then back home. The cycle would start all over again.

In the winter of 1979, Mom suddenly moved to Texas for a job as art director at a greeting card company. She was not only was fed up with us, she was fed up with Pat. Escaping to the Sunbelt seemed a good move. Ohio was the Rust Belt, and people still employed feared layoffs, rising high inflation and the takeover of Japanese imports. Texas – no state taxes, no unions – seemed a safer place. Mom admits that part of the reason for the move was to get away from Pat. I can see a love, a tough love. She worried Pat would never find his own way if she was there to bail him out all the time. She didn’t understand schizophrenia, but then neither did anyone else.

The family household dwindled to four when Mom packed for a ranch-style house in a north Dallas suburb. Bob -- my next oldest brother and closest to me in age – went along with the youngest siblings, Barbara and Denise. Most of my other brothers and sisters and I stayed behind in Ohio, already in various stages of being on our own; Jon had served his four years in the Navy by this time and had moved to San Francisco.

In Texas, Bob – having skipped college -- learned to play the drums in a garage band, smoked pot, and worked in a metal-working shop. One night, he was partying with a friend on the shores of a manmade lake in suburban Dallas, one of his hangouts. He was about twenty – same as when Pat had his first psychotic episode. Bob took LSD. He says now he was an admittedly reckless and stupid twenty-year-old. He saw mind-blowing visions, awe-struck. A tree on the edge of the lake changed into blocks, and then disintegrated, and then rose up again into blocks, and into a tree, over and over and over. When he came to, he swore off. Bob never tried LSD again. He worried he’d end up like Pat.

Nobody really knows if LSD was the trigger that sent Pat over the edge. Professionals don’t know what caused his mental illness. There is a lot of guilt going around. For a time, parents and the family were blamed, either subtly or not so subtly. My mother felt the sting of criticism from doctors and whispers among neighbors. There must be something wrong with that family; the father is out of his mind, a drunk, and now this. But these days, my siblings and Mom think that the most likely culprit may have been all the pressure that Pat put on himself. He was all ways a worrier, Mom says. When he was only four or five years old, he became obsessed whether he should get married first or join the armed forces. As the oldest, and with dad absent, he badly wanted to live up to expectations, assume the throne, king of our castle.

All the same, I never tried LSD. I didn’t want to take a chance to end up like Pat, either.

Belief Stuff and Word Salad in ABQ

Two times I return to Albuquerque after Pat died in the fall of 2005. On the first trip, I feel a heaviness as the jet descends and I notice ABQ spread out below the wing.

I’m returning to interview some case managers, other people who knew him, and to review Pat’s mental health records. I’m not sure why I’m doing this, exactly. Maybe it is because I’m hoping to understand him more, in a way I never could while he was alive. Did Pat’s life, miserable as it was for the last thirty-three years, amount to anything, anything at all? Isn’t there some good that can come from it, some lesson, some healing? I’m hoping to find something, to understand something. What, exactly? All I can say is by telling the story maybe I can dislodge the guilt I feel from my inability to support him more while he was alive. Will that redeem my self-centeredness? Isn’t having a goal like this self centered in itself? Yes, probably so.

It is a brilliant, sunny, clear autumn day, and my melancholia begins to fade as I rent a car and drive the familiar route to Central Avenue, old Route 66, which cuts through the center of town. This is the street where Pat lived for most of his last twenty years, a beehive that runs east of downtown, past the University of New Mexico and a hodgepodge of retail stores, run-down motels and diners, and stretches past a gentrifying neighborhood called Nob Hill. In the distance you can see the gleaming, snow-covered peaks of the Sandia Mountains. This was Pat’s world.

I check into the same little motel that I stayed when I and other family members visited him in the hospital in October 2005 as he was dying -- Hiway House, motel and apartments. It’s not far from but an upgrade from the places Pat usually lived, not pricey, though, $49 a night. The best thing is the location, just a dozen or so blocks from Mesa House, the residential home for mentally ill clients where Pat received services. Mesa House is operated by Transitional Living Services, or TLS, a local nonprofit organization that serves people with severe mental illnesses. Mesa House was Pat’s home, as much as any place was; it is where he at times lived, where he received his meds everyday, where his case managers held meetings with him, and where he ate meals.

On Sunday morning, I wander the neighborhood. I want to know more about some of the people Pat hung with and the place he lived. The iron gate to the courtyard of Mesa House is locked and there is no door bell. It’s quiet. A man walks along the sidewalk carrying a plastic grocery bag. He approaches the gate but before he enters I introduce myself, tell him I’m Pat’s little brother, and say I’d like to ask a few questions. He is antsy and seems in a hurry, but I squeeze in some questions, trying to win him over, use some reporter tricks. I want to hear whether he has any stories to share about Pat. His name is Reed, he says, and he has been a resident for eleven years. Sure, he says, he remembers Pat.

“What brings you here? How come you’ve been here for eleven years?”

“I don’t know. It’s been so long. I’ve been other places just like this,” Reed says, clutching his sack. He is a light-skinned African-American with a graying and light brown short-cropped afro. He’s about ten or more years older than me – probably about the same age Pat would be if he was still alive. He is pleasant and friendly enough, with clear eyes. I ask him what he has been diagnosed with.

“So can I see you later another time?” Reed says, surprising me by wanting to abruptly end the conversation.

“What?” I ask, trying to keep him engaged.

“Can I see you later, another time?” he repeats.

“Well, I’m going to leave today,” I say.

“Another weekend you could come?”

“I could – but I live in Austin, Texas. So it’s kind of difficult to get up here,” I say, trying to keep him. Austin catches his interest.

“Oh so, listen, my friend drives up, my friend Jam, and Fran, drives up Austin,” Reed says. I don’t understand what he is saying.

“Who does?”

“Jam. She moved in Deming. She moves back in Deming. And Austin, too, she goes to Austin, too, back to Deming, New Mexico.”

I am puzzled but I continue talking, take a stab with another question.

“Who is Deming?”

“No, Jam. Jam. Jam is a friend of Fran, one I used to go work with. You heard of San Francisco, Wyoming? Of Wyoming, San Francisco, that streets, of those houses, those story houses.”

He has totally lost me, though I think he may be talking about streets in Albuquerque. I know that one of the city’s major thoroughfares is Wyoming.

“You ever been over there?” he asks.

I’m not sure where over there is. “Another halfway house?” I ask, guessing.

“No, they are homes, apartments, houses,” Reed responds.

Oh. Clear as a chunk of asphalt. He’s lost me again. I try another volley, to bring the conversation back to my subject.

“What do you remember of Pat? He lived here for awhile and then he lived in these motels for awhile,” I say, motioning up Central Avenue.

“Yeah, he’d talk about belief stuff,” Reed says.

“Talk about what?”

“Belief stuff.”

“Belief stuff?”

“Belief stuff,” Reed says.

I’m not sure what he means. “Like, uh, Jesus … and the Bible?”

“Yeah,” Reed says. “Yeah.”

“Did you agree with him? Did you remember anything?”

“I don’t know. I interest in that, but not all ways, less than half the time,” Reed says.

“Was he a nice guy?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know much about him.”

“Was he a friend of yours?”

“Yes,” Reed says, no hint of irony.

“He was a friend of yours but you don’t know much about him, huh?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Reed says.

I’m puzzled, naturally, but then I remember I’m talking to a man who has some type of severe mental illness. Logic may not enter this conversation. I try a new line.

“What did you guys do? Do you remember what you guys did?”

“He said ‘come to the lobby, certain time,’ and they’d come certain time… he had an apartment over there. He’d ask for cigarettes.”

“Do you ever remember him living here?” I know that Pat once lived at Mesa House, years ago but I’m unsure how long ago. TLS kicked Pat out for not obeying the house rules, but kept him as an off-site client. Maybe Reed remembers that.

“I don’t know remember. All I know he lived in an apartment.”

“Was he easy to get along with?”

“Yeah, I got along with him at times. Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t get along with him.”

“Do you remember when you didn’t get along with him? What was going on?”

“I wish could. I know, but I don’t know how to ‘splain it, though,” Reed says. He gives a little laugh.

“Did you ever have fun with him?”

“Some fun with him, we talked together in the clubhouse.”

“Where’s the clubhouse?” I ask.

“Right over there, by that window there,” Reed motions beyond the iron fence, points toward a room off the courtyard, the one with the open door. I hear a soft noise coming from a Sunday morning TV program. “You can’t come here unless you are a staff or a client.”

“Do you remember what you guys talked about?”

“No,” Reed says. Then he tells about a time he did. “I was watching ‘Friday the 13th’ and he didn’t want to see it. And we were busting each other about it.”

“That movie?” I ask, making sure I understand. He’s talking about the horror flick?

“Yeah.”

“It was scary wasn’t it?” I ask, trying to milk him.

“Yeah,” Reed says. He laughs. “He said it makes him feel, something he said about what he didn’t want to see it.”

“Was he scared of it?”

“No, kinda, I don’t know, I guess,” Reed says. And then he shifts and says: “I didn’t know you were his brother.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Oh.”

“Little brother.”

“Oh.”

Cars and a city bus pass as we continue talking, Reed holding his white plastic bag.

“Did he ever talk about his family?” I ask.

“Yes, I think so, but I don’t know how to ‘splain it. I would tell you, but don’t know how to ‘splain it.”

“It’s hard to explain, isn’t it?” I suggest, encouragingly.

“Yeah.”

“What about your family. Where are they? Did you grow up here?”

“My mother’s on Catherine street, she lived on Catherine Street,” Reed says.

“Here in town?”

“She was a pull-yun.”

I don’t know what he means. “Who was?” I ask gently.

“Jane Augustus. She was a pull-un, a pull-yun. Does pull-yun stories for a living.”

“Poems!?” I ask, relieved that I think I figured out the word he is trying to pronounce.

“Yeah,” Reeds says, not missing a beat. “She was a waitress too.”

“Is that your mom?”

“Yeah. Yes,” Reed says.

“Is she still alive?”

“No.”

“Do you have anybody else, any other family?”

“My Brothers.”

“Where are they?”

“One’s in San Francisco and another’s in Minneapolis.”

“Do you get to see them much?”

“Yeah, before I did. I’d seen the brother Charles. In Washington. He’s used to be in Chicago.”

“Where’s he now?”

“In Washington, D.C.”

“So you have three brothers?”

“Yeah.”

Just like me – or I did -- before Pat died, I think to myself. “How do you like Albuquerque?”

“Not much, I like it, but I don’t like it all ways,” he says. “I like to go back to Haywood, the place I don’t like.”

“Haywood?”

“Haywood, California,” Reed says.

“But you grew up here, right?” I venture, confused again.

“No, grew up in Haywood, California.”

We’ve been talking for about five minutes. It seems longer. The morning traffic is still light. No one else is visible, no one on the street or inside the courtyard.

“Do you have a job or how do you… ” I begin another line. I mention that Pat had a job for awhile, working at a Goodwill Industries’ retail center, sorting merchandise, I believe. But I add that he lived mostly on his monthly Social Security disability income.

“Who?”

“My brother Pat,” I say. Has he forgotten we’re talking about Pat?

“Oh,” Reed says.

“I’m hoping to get a job,” Reed says. He mentions something that sounds like “prescription though” but I don’t make it out. His interest seems to fade. I show him a photograph of the Eiffel Tower that I just picked up at an art space around the corner. To gain additional credibility, I show him a business card I’m carrying from Pat’s former therapist who used to work at TLS. Reed says he likes the therapist, whose name is Michael Bishoff.

“How do you like living here for eleven years?” I ask, trying to continue the conversation.

“Not all ways. I don’t have a place. Yeah, I went to the grocery store and bought this,” Reed says, switching subjects. He shows me the contents of his sack: a box of crackers and several cans of peaches.

“That’s a good jacket you have on,” Reed says, looking over my black fleece.

“My ex-wife gave that to me,” I say.

“Oh.”

“Ever been married?”

“No. I don’t want to get married,” Reed says.

“Did you ever hear of Pat talk about hearing voices?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of voices did he have?”

“I don’t know, I can’t ‘splain it. I wish I could ‘splain it. Just what I can tell you.”

“Did he ever talk about having a wife himself?”

“Yeah. I got to leave now because the staff don’t want that,” Reed says.

Reed turns and uses a key to open the iron gate. He agrees to let me enter to talk to the on-duty care worker. I walk into the courtyard and Reed points me to the kitchen, where a worker is preparing lunch.

“I’ll talk to you another time,” Reed says. I thank him and say goodbye. He disappears into his room and closes the door.

In the kitchen, the worker, Mark, is cutting vegetables for lunch. He didn’t know Pat. He has worked at Mesa House only a few months. He says he can’t officially give me any information about the organization or clients because of confidentiality rules. He says I need to get in touch with people in the office on Monday when they open. I’ll be gone then, flying back tonight, I say, but I plan to return on another trip, or call later after I return home. On my way out, I take note of a flier on a door advertising a Schizophrenics Anonymous meeting.

Later, after I return home, I mention the encounter with Reed when I speak on the phone with Ray Davies, who served as TLS’s clinical director from 1992 to 1999. Reed “talks in a world salad,” Davies explains, not unusual for clients with severe mental illness. “The words come out convoluted and they don’t always mean what they seem.”

After I depart Mesa House, I continue to explore the neighborhood. Next door is a hookah supply store. Just up the street is one of the old motels where Pat lived, De Anza Motor Lodge. This is where he lived when I visited him during Christmas 2002. It’s shuttered now. Up and down Central Avenue, many of the old motels -- once havens for vacationers traveling Route 66 -- are boarded up. I’m told that the city shut them down, citing the operators for various violations; many of the motels were well-known draws for crack dealers and users. A chain link fence surrounds the De Anza property, littered, weedy. Signs warn against trespassing. Several doors to rooms are missing, and it is dark inside with trash and construction debris strewn about. On the other side of the fence, red rose bushes are in full bloom. It’s mid-November. A gray and white cat pokes out from under a cover of the pool, looks at me, and then disappears.

Nearby is Pussycat Video, and next to that the Leather Shoppe where signs advertise fantasy leather, sexy lingerie, and leather accessories. Down a side street I notice an adobe building -- Albuquerque Social Club. It’s a gay bar. A few doors up is a tattoo parlor named “Pain is Living in the Moment Tattoos.” I ponder the name of this establishment. Pain is living in the present moment? Lately, I’ve more thought pain is living with regret, feeling guilty about our failures in the past, or being fearful about the future, about suffering, about our own and our loved ones’ inevitable demise. Isn’t the present the only place where happiness is possible? But then again, why is it that we so often desperately crave to escape the present moment? My mind is still considering this as I walk along old Route 66. A pickup truck passes and someone yells at me from an open window: “Hey!”

A Crazy Zoo Trip

It is spring 1982. I’m twenty years old -- the same age as Pat when he had his first episode. Just as he did nine years earlier, I dropped out of college after two years at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.

I am employed as a canvasser, piling in a van with eight or ten others and going door-to-door in late afternoons and evenings to solicit contributions for a public interest group. I’m not very good at it. I seldom make my nightly quota of eighty dollars. But I need a job, and it’s only temporary. My plan is to transfer to the University of Texas at Austin in the fall, provided I can qualify for student financial aid.

I’m broke, not a penny saved. I can’t afford a telephone. Because I don’t have money to replace a water pump, I take to carrying jugs of water in the back of my Toyota. I fill the radiator every couple miles before all the water pours out. Inevitably the car dies and I leave it on the side of the road. My little efficiency comes furnished with a fold-out sofa, a chewed-up table, and an assortment of roaches. I don’t own a watch or a clock. To tell the time, I bolt out of my apartment, run three blocks to a corner and check the clock at a bank. When I run out of cigarettes, I take to gazing the sidewalk for butts that have some mileage left.

I desperately want to attract a woman, but I haven’t a clue how. I take to carrying a harmonica and a journal, make home-made tape recordings, and try my best to imitate the look of Jim Morrison of the Doors. I suck in my cheeks, posing. If I drink enough I feel a wild freedom, and I do cartwheels in the street. When I look back on this period the embarrassment I once felt is gone. It’s like I was unformed, another person, a desperate craver, a lost kid.

Sitting on the floor of a van is where I find Lisa, my first wife. She is a far better money raiser, maybe it’s her sweet smile or because she believes the schlock we’re selling as we try to keep people from slamming front doors long enough to hear our spiel to ask for personal checks or cash to fund formal protests against rising utility bills at public hearings in Columbus. Amazingly, some of them sign a petition and fork over money. They get a subscription to a little newsletter that comes six times a year. Canvassers get half of the money we raise. I spent most of mine on cigarettes and beers.

Sometimes, I go drinking with dad, meeting up with him at a bar after he gets off work. He introduces me around, shows off his extensive vocabulary, many words I don’t know, tells jokes. Early in the evening, he is surrounded by other men, still dressed in ties and suit coats, having cocktails at downtown taverns. Later in the night, we go to increasingly seedier joints, sometimes cross the river to the aging topless bars with the big neon signs in Newport, Kentucky.

Mostly, I go out drinking with other canvassers after work or with old friends from high school who still live in town. I tend to blackout, and usually I can’t remember much of anything when I come to. One early morning, a couple police cars pull me over for driving 100 mph on a freeway. They haul me in to the police station. I’m not jailed. They let me go after charging me with driving while intoxicated. All the officers know who my dad is, the newscaster. A date is set for me to appear in court later in the summer but by then I bolt for Texas and never show up.

I often visit Pat, who is a guest of a psychiatric hospital only a few blocks away. One day after spending an afternoon with him my mind is abuzz with all of his ideas and energy.

“I felt I was in a cloudy whirlpool as I talked to my brother Pat today,” I wrote at the time on a yellow legal pad. “He spoke so fast about so many things, all of which I wanted to know, only a few of which I could understand. I got a headache. I couldn’t talk. Maybe it was because it was a lazy Sunday afternoon and I felt vertigo because of a hangover. Then again, maybe it is because my brother is so much smarter than I that we’re on different wavelengths, as is the case when ‘average’ people are confronted with genius.”

I thought of him as I ran my fingers along the bars of a cast-iron fence on the way back to my apartment, my head still spinning.

Sometime in May, Pat was released from the psychiatric hospital, and he temporarily moved in with me. One night, he warned me to be on guard. Watch that I don’t succumb to the family curse, he said.

“Pat and I are pretty much alike,” I scribbled in my pad. “That’s why he told me to be careful for the next couple years. You see, Pat had problems when he was my age. Like me, he got paranoid while smoking marijuana, but then he began doing acid which, he says, was five thousand times worse. I know I couldn’t handle that. I can barely handle a bad case of paranoia while smoking marijuana; no way I could handle acid.”

On May 14, Pat and I go to the Cincinnati Zoo, one of our favorite places. Not to be outdone by the exotic pets capturing all the attention, Pat competes for the spotlight by talking to animals. He reminds me of our dad, who often commanded audiences at circuses and zoos by provoking the usually sleepy, caged lions. He exercised his deep broadcaster’s vocal chords by roaring, getting the lions all riled up, starting a call and response with the jungle kings, often to the delight of passersby.

This time Pat is the ringleader. “Eight thousand kids walking around with name tags on, pointing, laughing, crying, singing,” I scribbled in a journal entry. “Pat got excited. He talked to the kids, tried to teach them things. It got a little weird when he started to talk to the animals – he talks in some strange tongue, maybe part Hebrew, and jumps around trying to stir up the animals.

“He talked to the gorillas in this manner: ‘Hugga, bugga, dunga, loogee, boogee!’

“Then he said, in English, ‘Hey Carina! (the gorilla’s name) Do something! I’m going to steal your wife!’ There was a big crowd hanging around and they all looked at Pat as if he was serious. Not until he laughed were they able to relax. They didn’t think it was a joke. They thought Pat was crazy.”

Within a few months I move out of my apartment, leaving the place to Pat, and I relocate to a spare mattress in Lisa’s apartment in northern Kentucky, on the other side of the Ohio, just across the Suspension Bridge. Lisa, two years older, also is a college dropout. In a matter of months, these things happen: one evening she invites me to share a bubble bath, we load all our possessions (mostly hers) in a ’71 Ford Maverick (hers, too) and move to Texas together, she becomes pregnant, I drop out of college (again), we get married, and she gives birth to our only child, Katharine Michelle.

That summer, as I was off to Texas, Pat returned to the zoo. He was arrested for trying to kidnap a two-year-old boy visiting with his parents from Kalamazoo, Michigan. A judge later found Pat not guilty by reason of insanity. He ordered him to Longview State Mental Hspital to serve the remainder of his sentence.

Years later, long after he escaped and ended up in Albuquerque, Pat wrote in a letter that the boy he picked up was one of his own children – over the years he claimed he had five, sometimes seven kids – with his wife, Vicky. Once in awhile, talking to him on the phone late at night, listening to stories about Vicky and his kids, he almost had me convinced they were real.

No Pat Answers

While at Longview, Pat kept a journal. Throughout his life, Pat wrote poetry and stories. Almost all of the writings are gone -- like nearly all possessions he ever had, all lost, stolen or given away. (This made it frustrating when sending him a gift, or buying him things he needed, like yet another pair of glasses or dentures. Why bother? They’d only disappear.) Other than a few letters, the only pieces of Pat’s writing that remains is a half-filled, plaid, cloth-covered journal, pages he left behind when he took off for the West. Madeline saved it. Pat’s entries consist of prayers, poems, philosophy, and diary accounts. He wrote about boredom, self-pity, love, loneliness, going back to college, being drugged up on anti-psychotic medications, and what it was like being locked in a crazy compound with a collection of nuts, people who can offer him little intelligent conversation or anything else of interest.

He wrote about sometimes feeling hopeless and powerless. And yet he also wrote about plans for the future. He wrote about ways to improve his life when he is released. Ever the philosopher, Pat jotted down possibilities for good things that could come from the experience. Some of the entries are dated, but most are undated; some of writings are in ballpoint ink, others in pencil. (I have lightly edited the following entries for grammatical or usage.)

A week from now

I go to court

To see if I’m

Sill the crazy sort.

When the future has died

Ain’t much to do

But kneel down and pray

Upon a pew.

So much power

Within the judge’s gavel

So powerless I feel

Over today and tomorrow.

“Hank came to visit me today,” Pat wrote on February 20, 1983, in a fairly steady, legible hand. (I don’t ever recall a friend of his named Hank, but I have no reason to doubt that he had one.) The date is nearly ten years exactly since Pat was first diagnosed with schizophrenia (more specifically, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type.) “He puzzles me, always so full of optimism. Well, I’m at Longview; the future still looks dismal. I hope I can go back to school in teaching but that’s at least a year from now. There’s an air of depression settled on me. I don’t feel like doing much. Ten years, ten wasted years.”

Dear Lord

If there is a way to recapture

The essence of communion

With you, I want it.

If there is a path that leads back to you

Put me on it.

Page twelve:

Locked up

Turn of the key

Tell me what’s to become of me

And when these barred doors

I escape

Will there be a lucky break?

The sea of loneliness

Comes in toward the shore

But it breaks the big strong rocks

Into little grains of sand.

Page thirteen:

I met a beggar on the road

All I wanted to do was get ahead

He said why don’t you sit a spell?

I said no I must be moving on

His eyes seemed to take it all in

And reflect back the universe

He didn’t care for money

Or all the usual traps.

You see a life without God is useless

Without love we’re just dust

That beggar seemed to have it all

Without owning a single thing.

Hospital Life

This place is a wasteland

Barren and dry

No food for my soul

No water I cry

These people are rags

Discarded and used

Totally ignored,

soil and abused

So hard to find solace

Need some release

How to feel dignity?

How to feel peace?

Each day is the same day

Boredom without end

No one to relate to

No one to call friend

Solution

If I can learn to conquer myself

Swallow my unhappiness, get rid of my pride

Then I can be happy here

And if I can be happy in this place

Full of tears

Then I can be happy anywhere.

No Pat Answers

There are no easy answers

To this problem that I feel

No pat answers will do or

Get me through.

I don’t know what I need

Just an uneasiness inside

Don’t know what is called for

Or how to be free.

Need a song to inspire me

Need to feel love

Need to know there’s a good friend

Who cares from above.

On September 29, 1983, Pat beseeches God, asks for mercy, and promises to devote his life to Him. “All pleasures will I no longer seek, except the pleasing of you,” he writes. Two days later my daughter is born. I choose Pat as her godfather. Pat is unable to attend the Baptismal ceremony a few months later. I knew he couldn’t be there. But I insisted on giving him the honor, hoping that this little family responsibility might help him, somehow, maybe give him a spark, provide him a sign that he is loved, that we wanted him in our lives. Years later, I regret the decision. I think of my daughter and how she was granted a godfather she couldn’t count on. She was mostly scared of him the few times she met him or talked to him on the phone.

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