But I want to be ready. I’ve seen both my parents drown in the sickness. I’ve seen my brother sink down. I’ve denied my own madness and I’ve loved it almost to death. All my life I’ve heard my family blame each other, some devil, some church, genetics and shrinks. We’re ashamed and afraid of our minds. I want to believe my wife and not worry. I want to get strong and show my kids how. I want my family fearless and proud.
My parents met in 1954 at the Peniel Bible Conference, a small church camp in upstate New York. This camp shaped my parents’ courtship, their marriage and the rest of their lives – all of our lives, really. It’s the closest my brother, sister and I ever got to a hometown. Peniel sat at the base of Mount Cobble, best described as an oversized hill with a good view. The camp took its old-time religion straight from the tent revivals of the Great Depression and it looked it. Unaffiliated with any specific denomination, any real source of funds, the camp was built from the basics: sweat, rough lumber, God and the Devil.
The dining hall was sheathed in wooden slats pulled from World War II ammunition crates. It was a long, utilitarian building with a massive stone fireplace set at one end and it smelled of wood smoke and porridge. The pine woods were full of cabins built from damp, greenish pine and dotted by red and white lichen. Each section, the boys’ and the girls’, had two outhouses. Our assembly field was the packed earth between the dining hall and the chapel, and it doubled as the playing field. Peniel had an underused baseball diamond in a place we called the Dustbowl. The Channel, our swimming hole, was a cleared stretch of marsh full of soft mud and sharp grasses. There were redwing blackbirds and painted turtles, too, and there was no swimming on Sundays. The chapel was a simple pine building with a great bronze bell on its porch. This bell woke us, sent us to calisthenics, meetings (Bible study), meals, more meetings (prayer) and bed. Peniel washed my whole family in the blood of the Lamb – regularly – and that’s something each of us carries in various ways. It’s hard to forget.
My mother was born in 1925, the youngest of three children. Her father was a banker and the family lost almost everything in the Crash of 1929. He lost the rest five years later when his wife died. My grandfather continued; he kept his suits pressed and found work, but his sorrow went bitter and poisoned him. He began attending the fire-and-brimstone crusades and was saved by the infamous Billy Sunday, the preacher who rallied for Prohibition. ‘There isn’t a man who votes for the saloon who doesn’t deserve to have his boy die a drunkard,’ Sunday thundered. ‘He deserves to have his girl live out her life with a drunken husband.’ This made good, stern sense to my grandfather. He renounced the Devil and set about raising his children, my mother, Betty Lee, her sister, Rose, and her brother, Frank, in a dark world full of sinners. My grandfather ruled his house absolutely, with righteousness and a hard hand, and my mother, the youngest, served him from breakfast to bedtime. He remarried but his new wife resented the children. Their stepmother berated them all for years and then she just left.
My mom was the youngest and seemed to suffer in her childhood the most. She was nine when her mother died. At sixteen, her brother, Frank, took charge of the family’s happiness. He staged my mother’s dearest memories with magic, vaudeville acts and art. He called her ‘Midget’ and she was his magician’s assistant. He scoured the city for costumes and wigs and had his younger sisters up on his backyard stage every day after school. Rose dressed my mother; she turned her baby sister into princesses and cowgirls and fairies. The three of them pretended together; they acted out other people’s stories, happy ones. Frank and Rose are the heroes of her happiest memories. Mom is the one who still carries her father’s heartbreak. She was his favourite, and all of her love is stitched down by worry.
My dad was born in Hollywood, where his father fixed scripts for Twentieth Century Fox and drank. When he smashed my grandmother’s Rolls-Royce she initiated divorce proceedings immediately. As soon as the court allowed she moved my six-year-old father to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she burned every letter, photograph and press clipping concerned with the man. If my grandmother could have extracted her ex-husband’s DNA from her son, she would have done so immediately. She never spoke of Hunter Lovelace again, not even with my father. She told him Japanese submarines were the reason they left California. An attack, she said, was imminent.
My father grew up a virtual orphan on the high New Mexican desert. By the time he turned nine he discovered books could rescue him and let him leave his autocratic mother far behind. The further the better, and for my father that meant spaceships. Back then, before the Bomb, science still conjured a utopian future. The classic science fiction of the era took this on faith, built its castles in the air and sometimes destroyed them. My father never quite outgrew these stories. He let go of the hardware, sure, but he never let go of the vision, his hope for a shining city on a hill.
Gus Armstrong, my father’s only school friend, dragged him out of the books and into the desert. They caught lizards and hunted, jumping ducks from irrigation ditches along the Rio Grande. They found a case of dynamite down in an old mine-shaft and they spent weeks blowing boulders from cliffs. They spied on a Hopi snake dance and afterwards caught two of the rattlesnakes and brought them back to town. The rattlers’ fangs had been ripped out for the dance. My grandmother tolerated them until new fangs appeared.
In the summer of 1948, just before my father went east, Gus Armstrong decided to round off my father’s preparatory education with a trip to a brothel he knew in Juarez. Driving south, the boys entertained themselves with a twenty-two-calibre pistol, shooting road signs and groundhogs from the car window. A groundhog ducked; my father pulled back the pistol and slipped the gun’s hammer. Bang. Silence ensued and then Gus asked calmly, ‘Richard. Did you just shoot a hole in my Buick?’
‘No, Gus,’ my father answered, just as slow and deliberate. ‘I did not. I shot a hole in my leg.’ Gus pulled over, fashioned a sort of tourniquet, and they turned back home.
‘I guess that trip just wasn’t God’s will,’ my father remarked to me years later. The doctors left the slug in my father, just above his right knee, and when I was a boy I’d ask to see the bullet all the time. The bullet is still lodged right there in his muscle, like a piece of God’s will, coppery green and buried in flesh. Shortly after the aborted trip to Juarez, my father limped into Yale on crutches, a gun-shot atheist.
In 1943 Frank encouraged my mother to enroll at the Pratt Institute in New York City. He had become a successful photographer and supported his worried kid sister with money and love. My mother hoped to illustrate children’s books and she worked extremely hard, repaying Frank with her happy watercolours: the girls all in pigtails, their brothers with slingshots, calico aprons for Mom, and for Dad a pipe and the paper. But her normal undergraduate concerns began building and mutating. She stopped worrying about grades but feared for her soul. She worked harder and harder to stay with her painting, to keep her paranoia contained.
She finally broke at the end of her final year, just prior to project deadlines and exams. She had been studying and painting for days. She was jacked up on coffee and had stopped sleeping, just pushing herself. And then late one night she looked up from her paintings, the blue skies and children, and she saw a wicked figure, a demon hunched in the corner of her room, watching. She snapped and heard voices; the creature just stayed in the corner, waiting. Her close friend and roommate, Margaret, sought help. By the next day she was labelled schizophrenic and put away. Her diagnosis didn’t change for forty years.
It was 1949 and psychiatrists diagnosed almost all delusional illness as schizophrenia – ‘shattered mind’. Nervous breakdowns were one thing, but with hallucinations it was pretty damn hopeless. They didn’t have antipsychotic drugs. They didn’t have Thorazine, Stelazine, Trilafon, Zyprexa and the rest. All they had was electroshock. They’d been using it for eight or nine years when my mother got sick. The treatment wasn’t yet perfected, but it was a fairly simple procedure. Electrodes are placed on either side of the patient’s head. An electric stimulus is applied,