was getting more grizzled in middle age, heavier like Jim and Joe and Donald, but also hairier, with a bushy beard, and gruffer, with the imposing bearing of a Hells Angel. Matt’s best friends were Vietnam vets and homeless guys who, like him, subsisted on Social Security payments and Section 8 housing vouchers. Matt’s doctors learned that he sold his medications on the street more often than he took them.
He was in and out of Pueblo until 1986, when the doctors switched him over to clozapine. After practically his first dose, Matt noticed a difference. He started attending all his mental health appointments without fail. He told his family that he felt like he’d awoken from a nightmare. He no longer thought he was Paul McCartney. An atypical neuroleptic that worked slightly differently from typical neuroleptics like Thorazine, clozapine also had proven helpful to Donald and Joe, but had seemingly little effect on Peter. “When it works,” said Albert Singleton, the medical director at Pueblo, “the difference between clozapine and other drugs is like the difference between Bayer aspirin and Oxycontin.”
As long as he had a car to drive, Matt filled his day running errands for his friends. He felt useful this way, and he was. He volunteered at a food kitchen for homeless veterans for years; many of the people he served were his friends. The VA sent him a letter of thanks once for his service. “His little bit of responsibility to other people keeps him going,” his brother Michael once observed. “I think that’s true for all of us.”
Even on a better drug, Matt could still descend into long jags of self-pity, airing grievances against everyone in the family and the government. At his monthly sessions at Pikes Peak Mental Health Center in Colorado Springs, he did his best to convince the doctors that he did not need the medication anymore. Every month, he was disappointed. But unlike Peter, who would just stop taking his medicine, Matt’s chief reaction was to complain—convinced the entire world was conspiring against him, and that his family had forsaken him. Only when he was at his angriest would his grip on reality loosen a little again. That was when he would became convinced that his medical treatment was not only not necessary, but that it was the cause of any number of world events.
“The more they drug me, the more people will end up dead,” Matt once said. “If you ever watch the news lately, like, four hundred eighty people died in four different plane wrecks. Eight thousand people died in an earthquake in the Himalayas; a hundred fifty men in Nigeria got shot down; twenty-two people killed in a church; twenty-two killed in a plane wreck. Quit drugging me, or these things will keep happening.”
* * *
—
“I AM THE prophet you have heard so much about!”
In November 1985, Peter Galvin—twenty-five and rail-thin, his hockey bulk a thing of the past—was noticed praying in the middle of a street in downtown Colorado Springs. A few days later, the police ran across him, this time upset and hostile. When they told him he most likely was heading to the state hospital, Peter lost his temper, threatening to fight anyone who tried to take him. When one cop approached him, Peter said he’d rip out his carotid artery. Then he attacked.
This would be Peter’s eighth admission to Pueblo. He arrived angry, and at mealtime he refused to eat. During observation, Peter’s contradictions became well known to the staff. “It is interesting to watch him function,” one psychiatrist wrote. “He says that he will take his medication, but, when confronted that he has recently refused, he says, ‘You’re right, I have,’ as though this inconsistency means nothing to him.”
The doctors at Pueblo decided to send Peter to court to face the assault charge as soon as he stabilized. Until then, he was placed in CARES House, the supervised residence that years earlier had given him the boot. Peter tried to escape, climbing out of the same window four times in four days and coming home to Hidden Valley Road. Mimi drove him back each time, only to see him walking back through her door the next day.
After years of questioning his diagnosis, his doctors had finally