Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,107

he was stabilized on new meds and returned home to Mimi and Don. In the early spring of 1990, after several years of living largely quietly in his room, Donald heard that Peter, after a few failed tries at living on his own, might be coming back to live on Hidden Valley Road. Donald thought that Peter was going to lay claim to his room and decided to take action. He placed phone calls to the Army and Air Force, asking them to station him in Greenland. He announced that he would rather eat in his room than the kitchen; then he went to the market and bought raw octopus and brought it back to his room, leaving it to rot. That was when Mimi noticed that Donald had been missing appointments for his shots of Haldol Decanoate. When he refused to take his twice daily dose of Kemadrin, his parents sent him back to Pueblo.

“My family and I just broke up over financial problems,” Donald announced upon his arrival at the state hospital. “I don’t want to live in the same house with Peter.”

* * *

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JIM WAS LIVING on his own, getting by on Prolixin. To those who caught glimpses of him, he seemed to be suffering from depression—defanged by years of neuroleptic drugs, obese and frail. His heart was weak, his chest aching with each breath, and yet his paranoia and delusions never completely went away. While Jim was all but an outcast now, his mother still would see him. After everything, he was her son, and she never could shut the door all the way on any of them. The girls never asked about him, and she would try not to bring him up in conversation.

Of all the sick brothers, Joe was the one Margaret and Lindsay found the most poignant in his suffering. Living with Matt for a while, and then in his own federally funded Section 8 apartment, Joe knew that he saw things that weren’t there. He went on about Chinese history, and how he had lived in China in a previous life, even as he recognized how strange that was. Once, he pointed at the sky with excitement and told Lindsay that the clouds were pink, and there was a Chinese emperor speaking to him from his past life. “I’m having a hallucination,” he said, still half believing it. “Don’t you see it?”

Joe was well enough to live alone in an apartment in Colorado Springs, but not quite well enough to fend for himself. When his health benefits couldn’t cover his expenses, he piled up too much credit card debt for him ever to climb out of. He filed for bankruptcy with Michael’s help. Michael told him he couldn’t get another credit card, but Joe got one anyway. He said he had to have a credit card with the Broncos logo on it. Once lean and handsome, he put on a tremendous amount of weight, and his obesity made every little problem worse. His eyesight failed; he developed borderline diabetes. Then came some of the same problems Jim had: chest pain, delirium, stress, panic. But Joe still had his sense of humor, or some of it. He talked with Michael about Transcendental Meditation all the time, hatching plans to try to go to India. He was, in some small ways, still himself. “He had that ability to kind of separate somehow,” Lindsay said. “He was the one that would be like, ‘I just want this to stop.’?”

Joe never stopped wanting a connection to his family, sending religious-themed birthday cards and spending money he couldn’t spare on presents. Once, one of Michael’s grown daughters was complaining about needing money for books for college, and at Christmas an envelope showed up in her mailbox. Inside was five hundred dollars, with a note saying “for books.” Everyone agreed: No one other than Joe would have done such a thing.

* * *

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ACCORDING TO MATT, the former potter and second youngest of the four hockey brothers, his life took a wayward turn the day his mother decided to send him to a psychiatrist, after his teenage breakdown at the Garys’ house. “She took me to CU Medical Center in 1977,” he once said. “They put me on a psych ward, but that doesn’t make me mentally ill.”

Matt