Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,77

to meet the mother of twelve whose sons were losing their minds. After his visit, he invited the Galvins to New Jersey for a complete work-up.

Everyone who was still at home packed up and traveled east to Princeton. Mary remembered someone checking her nails for white spots and being told she had a zinc deficiency, and her mother hanging on the pharmacologist’s every word, taking note of everything. Pfeiffer told everyone who came to the Brain Bio Center that what most people considered mental illness probably could be blamed on nutritional deficits. Even Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland, Pfeiffer said, would be alive today if they had adjusted their blood nutrients. A psychiatric hospital was just, as he once wrote, a “holding tank.” This must have been music to the ears of a mother who felt judged every moment, by doctors—and a husband—who suggested her boys would be better off in institutions.

Back home on Hidden Valley Road, Mimi made a ceramic mug by hand for each child. Each morning without fail, she filled the avocado-colored vessels with orange juice to help wash down Dr. Pfeiffer’s pills. On the way to school, Mary would get sick, her stomach on fire from the juice and vitamins. She started sticking the pills in her pocket on her way out the door, and chucking them into the woods as soon as she was out of sight.

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IN MARCH 1976—TWO months after Margaret left home—a Colorado state highway patrolman noticed a dark-haired man walking east down Route 24 in the precise middle of the road, toeing the double yellow line and talking to himself as cars veered past him on either side. When the officer asked Donald to step to the side of the road, he refused. When he tried to arrest him, Donald started pushing and shoving. It took several officers plus some local firemen to subdue him. In the Colorado Springs jail, the police learned that he had been off his medication for the last several months.

The police transferred him to Pueblo, where by now Donald was rather well known. The doctors learned that he’d just come back home to Hidden Valley Road in January after some time away. He’d gone to Oregon again to find Jean, only to be told this time that she had joined the Peace Corps. He stayed in Oregon for a while, working on a shrimp boat. When he returned, Don and Mimi agreed to take him in, but only if he went to Pikes Peak Mental Health Center in Colorado Springs regularly for his medication. (“They are also involved with several other male children in the family,” according to a report from Pueblo.) Donald agreed, but then refused, becoming what the Pueblo doctors referred to as a management problem. “He and family both agree that he should not be living at home,” the report reads, “because of his age and his poor influence on other children in the family.”

He denies that he was having hallucinations but would turn his head frequently and look to the side as if he were listening to a voice. He has many religious preoccupations and talks about symbols constantly going through his mind. One of them he described was that of an infant in which the radiance of God was shining down upon. At several points during the interview, he became very tense and expressed hostile feelings such as wanting to knock my block off….

After a few days, Donald still seemed confused and restless and aggressive—or, as the staff put it, “assaultive, destructive, belligerent, suicidal, hyperactive, over-talkative, [and] grandiose.” He was written up for “masturbating openly” and “exposing self,” and for wandering into the women’s dorms and, once, the women’s shower. The doctors at Pueblo calmed Donald with Prolixin, but he still reported faithfully about the symbols and signs flashing through his mind.

Still, he was deemed stable enough to be released back home in April.

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ON THE WEEKENDS, Jim’s son, Jimmy—Mary’s nephew, though he was just a few years younger than she was—and Mary formed a little two-member day camp. Jim would tell Don and Mimi that he was taking them to church, and instead they would do something fun—go ice-skating, or to the park. Now more