Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family (14 page)

“Where are you from?” the judge asked.

“I’m from planet earth,” Michael said.

He spent another few days in jail before finally deciding to call home.

“What can you do for me?” Michael asked his father.

“I’ll send you a plane ticket,” Don said. Somehow, as Michael remembered it, his father vouching for him was enough to get him out.

SETBACKS LIKE THIS
didn’t hit Michael that hard. “I think I was taking everything in stride,” he’d remember later. Getting tossed in jail, sleeping in a park, or taking a bath in a river were all part of the same broader eye-opening adventure for him—a growing understanding that reality was not necessarily what he’d once thought, that what he’d been brought up to believe may not be all there is.

The reality of being home, however, had never agreed with Michael. The 1960s, by his estimation, had somehow blown right past Hidden Valley Road. While other young people were off finding themselves, he and his brothers still had to dress alike, at least at church, wearing coats and ties on Sunday. Like the military, everyone was presumed to be the same, and everyone was expected to obey. If a Galvin son ever chose to question Mimi—which Michael made a regular habit of—she rarely settled for anything less than what she had first demanded.

Mimi, not Don, was the authority figure Michael was born to undermine. “My father was in the Air Force, but my mother was the
brains
behind the Air Force,” Michael said. “He was gone,” working two jobs and studying for his PhD. “She was our disciplinarian. So if we had to do hospital corners and make a bed perfect, that was because of her, not him.” Mimi’s lectures to the boys were epic, her capacity to tune out any dissent practically endless. “You’re not going to get the point across to her,” Michael said; with Mimi, “it was always kind of a one-way street.”

As a teenager, Michael’s solution had been to not go home a lot. Hanging out with his friends, a joint in hand, he liked to think about Don being at Stanford in the late 1950s—around the same time as Ken Kesey, the countercultural icon who wrote
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
before leading a band of LSD-experimenting vagabonds across America. The idea of Colonel Don Galvin, the falcon man, dropping acid made them all laugh hysterically. At home, Michael became bolder, rejecting the Galvin family’s dress code, cutting the heels off of his Bass Weejuns so that they looked more like moccasins. When Michael started showing up stoned, his father would sit down with him and talk, but not much changed.

Things got so bad that in the fall of 1968, when Michael was fifteen, Don and Mimi sent him to Jacksonville, Florida, to live with his uncle and aunt for the school year—a chance for him to get his head straight, learn self-reliance, and be one fewer problem for parents who, though Michael did not know it, were in the thick of dealing with Donald’s issues. Michael took to Florida rather easily. His cousins, all a little younger than he was, found his Age of Aquarius affect fascinating. At his new high school, he had no trouble finding friends. He tried LSD for the first time on November 22, 1968; he remembered the date because it was the night Jimi Hendrix played Jacksonville. Michael went to the show with a new friend, Butch Trucks, who had just started a rock band with Duane Allman, and he spent much of the year hanging out at Butch’s place. The following year, 1969, Butch and Duane’s band became the Allman Brothers.

By then, Michael was back in Colorado, subject to the rules and regulations of the Galvin family for his last few years of high school. The only break in the monotony came in 1970, when Hidden Valley Road turned into a mental ward for Donald, lost and volatile after his divorce and hospitalization. Michael had no context for understanding Donald, and he was not terribly tolerant of Donald’s chosen passion, the authoritarian Catholic Church. Michael started to lose his temper with his brother, and his parents weren’t sure if the tension between them was Donald’s fault or because Michael and Donald were too much alike. To a certain extent, their experience with Donald, along with Jim’s delusional episodes, had shaken them awake. If two of their sons could lose their grip on reality, they were ready to believe that Michael might, too.

This was how the most formative moment thus far in Michael’s young life came to pass, in the fall of 1971—not long after his high school graduation and his return home from his road trip and visits in the local jails of Pennsylvania and Ohio—when Don and Mimi sent him to Denver General Hospital, where he was held in the hospital’s psychiatric ward on the top floor for observation.

Michael was prescribed Stelazine, an antipsychotic drug closely related to Thorazine. He wasn’t there long, a week or so, before he decided that he was in the wrong place. He wasn’t crazy—he was turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. He knew he did not belong there. So he left.

He slipped out of the hospital at his first opportunity, hitchhiked to a friend’s house, and called his parents. “You can’t make me go back there,” he said. “I’m not coming home, either.”

Don and Mimi were in a bind. Michael was eighteen, technically no longer theirs to control. They came back to him with a counterproposal: How would he feel about going to California to visit his brother Brian?

Michael smiled.

AFTER BRIAN HAD
left Colorado, his brothers still heard from him from time to time. Once, Richard got a letter in the mail with a joint inside, wrapped in red, white, and blue wrapping paper, along with a note that read, “Enjoy this from Jefferson Airplane.”

It wasn’t long, a few months, before his brothers learned that Brian had accomplished what he’d set out to do. He’d formed a new band with the name Bagshot Row, named for a street in the Shire near Bilbo Baggins’s home in
The Hobbit
. This was exactly the sort of adventure Michael yearned for now. Nothing could have been more appealing to him than a chance to hang out in the Bay Area with a bunch of hippies and musicians—with his brother, the handsome, dark-haired prodigy, leading the charge.

When Michael arrived, he learned that not everything about Brian’s new life was as advertised. Brian hadn’t quite made it to the Bay. He and his bandmates were renting a house in Sacramento, an hour’s drive from the coast. And Brian worked all day to pay the rent, leaving Michael on his own much of the time. What seemed like a perfect trip now was looking a little like a letdown. Bagshot Row was good, though—a rock-jazz-blues hybrid, featuring Brian as the band’s flute soloist. Once again, Brian was the standout musician. But unlike his high school group, this band made original music, and planned to make records. Michael roadied for them a little, heaving the band’s Hammond organ in and out of a van.

He wasn’t there very long, just a month, before he got into trouble. Bored and alone one day, Michael decided that he wanted to go find the Pacific Ocean. He knew it had to be miles away, given this was Sacramento, but he had the time and he knew which way west was, and he thought if he could follow one of the canals or rivers, he’d get there. He spent the better part of a day walking before giving up and starting back to Brian’s place. On the way, he cut through a trailer park and followed a dirt road. In the middle of the road, he noticed a garden hose connector. He picked it up, placed it on the step of the closest trailer, and knocked on the door. That got someone’s attention.

The police picked him up just a few blocks from Brian’s house. Michael heard one cop say the words “trespassing” and “attempted burglary.” He was astonished. He didn’t see how he’d done anything wrong. He figured he was being hassled for being a hippie. He got mad, and then he learned the police in Sacramento weren’t as forgiving as that judge in Jerusalem, Pennsylvania.

In jail, Michael learned that attempted burglary was a felony charge. He’d never been in trouble with the law like that. While awaiting his court date, Michael tried to make friends. The guy in a neighboring cell taught him how to make toast with the Wonder Bread that came with meals: take your toilet paper and wind it up and light it with the matches you get for cigarettes, create a little campfire, and place your bread over it. Michael mastered that, and then he got caught for it. He got placed in solitary—a dark room where he was all alone. Until he was actually in there, Michael had no idea a place like that actually existed.

He was alone in there for days before he was offered a chance to talk to a doctor. Michael agreed, and the doctor he met arranged to move him to the hospital part of the jail. Michael had a roommate and a TV now. That seemed like a move in the right direction. But next came another complete reversal of fortune: With no room available for him at Sacramento General Hospital, Michael was told that he was being transferred to Atascadero—California’s notorious maximum-security mental hospital, holding two thousand inmates.

For the second time in the space of a year, Michael had been sent to a mental hospital—this time a mental hospital in a prison setting—and he could not have been more certain that there was nothing wrong with his brain. It had taken this moment—locked away with men who had killed their wives or their bankers or their kids—to finally shake him awake. This was not a lark, it was real life, happening to him.

Michael was told that he was only in Atascadero for observation, but nobody would tell him how long that was supposed to last. The uncertainty was as bad as anything else.

His father came to visit, but this time he couldn’t do anything for him.

Brian came, too, but the best advice he could muster for his little brother was, “Life is about the journey, not the destination.”

It was five months before the court let Michael plead guilty in exchange for time served. There was no way to explain this; Michael could only move forward, shake it off. His time in Atascadero wasn’t without its diversions: Michael did meet one Yaqui Indian—a boxer who told a story about his brother fighting Sugar Ray Robinson—but the serendipity of that meeting was lost on him. He agreed with Brian: Life was about the journey. But some journeys, Michael decided, were better than others.

THERE WAS ONE
thing Michael was sure about: He was not like Donald. He was not crazy. He would spend the rest of his life proving everyone wrong about that if he had to—his parents included. The problem here, he believed, was a labeling error. Not everyone who saw the world differently had schizophrenia. If that were true, every hippie would be crazy.

To help Michael make that argument, he had the entire 1960s ethos on his side. It seemed to a lot of people at that time that anyone who stood up and said no to authority, or rejected the military-capitalist superstructure, risked being labeled insane by those in power. By the 1970s, the public conversation about mental illness was no longer just about Freud and Thorazine. It was about seeing the diagnosis of mental illness as an instrument of conformity and power—just another way of clamping down on independent thought and freedom.

This was a countercultural position, but its roots ran back to the anti-psychiatry movement—a wave of therapists and others who, more than a decade earlier, had rejected traditional assumptions about insanity almost completely out of hand. In the 1950s, Jean-Paul Sartre had argued that delusions were just a radical way of embracing the world of imagination over “
the existing mediocrity.” In 1959, the iconoclastic Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing, influenced heavily by Sartre and other existentialists, made the case in
The Divided Self
that
schizophrenia was an act of self-preservation by a wounded soul. Laing famously decried the “
lobotomies and tranquilizers that place the bars of Bedlam and the locked doors
inside
the patient.” He believed patients retreat inside their own mind as
a way of playing possum, to preserve their autonomy; better to turn oneself into a stone, he once said, than to be turned into a stone by someone else. In 1961, the
sociologist Erving Goffman published his book
Asylums,
in which he explored life in mental institutions and came away believing that the institution informed the illness of patients, not the other way around. That same year, the Finnish psychiatrist Martti Olavi Siirala wrote that people with
schizophrenia were almost like prophets with special insight into our society’s neuroses—our collective unconscious’s shared mental illness. And again, that same year, the godfather of anti-psychiatry, Thomas Szasz, published his most famous book,
The Myth of Mental Illness,
in which he declared that
insanity was a concept wielded by the powerful against the disenfranchised—a step in the ghettoization and dehumanization of a whole segment of society that thinks differently.

A year later, in 1962, anti-psychiatry crossed over into the mainstream with a juggernaut of a novel that treated the brutality of a state-run mental hospital as a metaphor for social control and authoritarian oppression.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
was the story of Randle Patrick “Mac” McMurphy, a low-level criminal and free-spirited renegade who fights
a war of wits inside of an insane asylum, only to be crushed by the malevolent forces of authority. Even before it became a movie,
Cuckoo’s Nest
became one of the foundation myths for the counterculture, as romantic, in its way, and as powerful as
Easy Rider
and
Bonnie and Clyde
—a perfect way to explain the way the world was working right now and expose everything that had flattened out the culture of the previous generation.

Going back even further, of course, that idea of whatever society deems to be mental illness sharing the same wellspring as the creative, artistic impulse has been with us for centuries: the artist as iconoclast and truth-teller, the only sane one in an insane world. Even Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, in the years before her death in 1957, came to believe in a “
secondary element” in the loneliness of some psychotics that makes them “more keen, sensitive, and fearless as observers.” She wrote about the composers, artists, and writers with mental illness, suggesting their talents sprang from the difficulty they had with direct, conventional communication. Like a court jester, Fromm-Reichmann wrote, people with schizophrenia often tell uncomfortable truths that the rest of us would rather not hear. She was referencing the Cervantes novel
The Man of Glass,
about a village idiot who’s treated tenderly by the people around him, as long as they can laugh off the painful truths he spouts as crazy delusions. But when the man recovers, the community prevents him from getting back on his feet, lest they suddenly have to take seriously everything he says.