Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,34

actions, grow up.

And she thought about how perfect their life was otherwise. And how fragile her husband’s happiness had always seemed to her. And how sometimes it seemed as if the slightest move in any direction could bring the whole place toppling down.

DON

MIMI

DONALD

JIM

JOHN

BRIAN

MICHAEL

RICHARD

JOE

MARK

MATT

PETER

MARGARET

MARY

CHAPTER 7

On September 11, 1964, Donald Galvin, at the start of his sophomore year at Colorado State in Fort Collins, paid his first visit to the campus health center. He had come in to be treated for a minor injury to his left thumb, a bite mark from a cat. He offered no explanation for what had happened—no reason why the cat would have felt so provoked that he’d bite and not just scratch.

The next spring, Donald returned to the health center. This time, his problem was more personal, yet every bit as peculiar. He said that he’d learned that his roommate had caught syphilis, and that he was afraid that he might catch it from him by accident. Donald, who had told his parents that he wanted to study medicine one day, had to be disabused of the notion that he could get the disease in a way other than sexual intercourse.

A few weeks later, in April 1965, Donald visited the health center for a third time. He said he was at home, his family’s place on Hidden Valley Road, when one of his brothers, he did not say which one, got the jump on him, attacking him from behind. Diagnosed with back strain, he spent the night in the infirmary.

Then came the fire.

One night in the fall of 1965, Donald staggered through the health center doors with burns on his body. His sweater had caught fire, he said, during a pep rally. After a little back-and-forth, it came out that Donald had jumped straight into a bonfire. Maybe he did it to get attention, or to impress a friend, or as a cry for help. He could not say.

* * *

THE STAFF PULLED Donald out of his classes and sent him for a psychiatric evaluation. Major Reed Larsen, a clinical psychologist for the Air Force Academy Hospital, saw Donald four times over the next two months. This was the first time that a mental health professional examined Donald, and the first time that Donald’s parents were forced to face the possibility that all was not right with their oldest son. But whatever fears Don and Mimi had about Donald subsided when Major Larsen came back with his report. “Our findings showed no evidence of a serious thinking disorder, nor of symptoms secondary to a psychotic process,” he wrote on January 5, 1966.

Don and Mimi were reassured, even if the endorsement was hardly full-throated. To begin with, the major noted that one of Donald’s sessions took place with the assistance of sodium amytal, one variety of truth serum. Amytal interviews in psychotherapeutic settings weren’t entirely unheard of, but they were usually saved for patients who are having difficulty communicating—and, perhaps, exhibiting the signs of the catatonic variety of schizophrenia. Even so, the major recommended that Donald be allowed back to school, provided he continued to receive psychiatric help. “We did discover a number of emotional conflicts which, I feel, are disturbing enough to Mr. Galvin to account for his erratic behavior while at school,” he wrote. Such treatment could be paid for, he said, by the military’s new Medicare program for dependents.

What was bothering Donald so much that he ran into a raging fire? Before anyone could find an answer, he propelled himself back into campus life at the start of 1966, determined to make up for lost time. Donald desperately wanted to connect with people now, especially females, even as he seemed rather naive about how to find a girlfriend. The distance from others that he’d been feeling seemed even more pronounced. But he was still athletic and

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