Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,58

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