Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family (19 page)

Margaret remembered the wooden door to the garage broken into pieces, and the ghostly silence once the fighting finally stopped—only after the ambulance came to take Matt away.

IN
1976
, MATT
enrolled at Loretto Heights, a local private college in Denver, not far from the Garys’, to study fine arts. Don and Mimi’s ninth son—one of the hockey boys, four years older than Margaret—was a potter, and a good one. Even Mimi said so. He also received encouragement from Nancy Gary, who had served on the Loretto Heights board. The Garys told Matt he was welcome to drop by sometime.

One day, Matt brought a vase he had made to the Garys’ house, to show them what he could do. Margaret heard a commotion downstairs, and up came Matt, completely naked. He had taken off all of his clothes, then taken the vase and smashed it. With some of the others, there at least had been some warning signs. But Matt’s breakdown was a stunner. It was as if whatever had been slowly overtaking her brothers was picking up speed now.

This was Margaret’s old world crashing in on her new one—a reminder she did not belong there, and that nowhere was safe. It was only a matter of time, she felt, before her Kent School friends learned the truth about her family—about her.

“
There is a loud telepathic signal here,” the skinny man said, calling out with an easy smile to the swath of tie-dye all around him. “If you just be quiet for a while, you can feel it.”

Stephen Gaskin was a
six-foot-four
ex-Marine with a blond goatee, a receding hairline, and a long, untamed tangle of hair flowing down his shoulders. With his time in the military years behind him, he had moved up in the world, becoming a certain kind of prophet. Gaskin had first drawn a following in San Francisco in the late 1960s with a lecture series called “
Monday Night Class,” in which he regularly filled a two-thousand-capacity ballroom with discourses about acid trips, supernatural activity, and the right way to pursue peaceful social transformation. In 1970, he decided to take Monday Night Class on the road, and he and some four hundred followers traveled the country in a convoy of sixty buses that won them a raft of nationwide media attention. The sign on the convoy said it all:
OUT TO SAVE THE WORLD
. After wandering across the continent and back again, Gaskin’s new community—a nomadic tribe of mellow revolutionaries—
paid nearly $120,000 for 1,700 acres of land in the woods of Summertown, Tennessee, settling there in the spring of 1971. Within a few years, the Farm, as Gaskin named it, became
the nation’s largest commune.

Michael Galvin first arrived at the entrance of the Farm in 1974, partly as a hippie in search of a new way of living, and partly because he was out of options. The tragedy of Brian and Noni had brought low everyone in the family, but it was Michael who had gone with Don to see the body, and Michael who stood there as a police officer explained in cold, clinical terms what had happened to his brother—and to that poor girl. He still believed that, in an alternate reality, he might have helped his brother—how, if he had gone straight to Sacramento and not detoured in L.A., he might have made it there in time to do something. What, exactly, he couldn’t say.

Mimi and Don must have sensed how difficult this was for Michael. They decided to send him east to New York to stay with an uncle, Don’s brother George, who worked as a conductor with the Long Island Rail Road. Michael’s parents thought that he might find Michael a job as a brakeman. When Michael failed the engineering test, he went to see his maternal grandmother—Mimi’s mother, Billy, then living in New Jersey—who came up with another idea.

AT THE HEIGHT
of its popularity, the Farm attracted
a population of about 1,500 people. Michael might have been the only one who pulled up to the front gate in a Buick driven by his grandmother. Before being let inside, Michael was informed of the rules. No overt anger. No lying. No private money. No eating animal products. No smoking tobacco. No alcohol. No man-made psychedelics like LSD. No sex without commitment (
Stephen Gaskin was licensed by the state of Tennessee to perform marriages, and did so frequently,
preferring to marry two couples to one another in what he called a “four-marriage”). Michael said yes to it all.

Despite Gaskin’s
wholehearted endorsement of tantric sex and the
bountiful supply of homegrown hallucinogenic mushrooms, Michael learned that the Farm was not a place where anything goes. Behavior was always policed, often by Gaskin himself, who would
complain that all he had time for all day was settling everyone else’s conflicts. And for a bunch of anti-authoritarians, the Farm’s inhabitants had one leader whose rule was never called into question.
Gaskin controlled what drugs people took, who slept with whom, and how money worked in the community (whose members relinquished cash, cars, property, even inheritances to the cause). Gaskin became known for meting out banishments called “
thirty dayers,” during which the Farmies were supposed to get their heads right. “
A smart horse runs at the shadow of the whip,” he once said. He required some people to take a vow of chastity, even as he had three wives of his own that he shared with two other men—his own “
six-marriage.” One of those wives, Ina May Gaskin, would revolutionize natural childbirth in America with a book published in 1975,
Spiritual Midwifery.
Four or more babies were born at the Farm every month, keeping Ina May and her trainee midwives busy. “Farmies,” she would say, were “
a special kind of hippie: they worked.”

Michael found that he didn’t mind the work. In a weird way, he kind of craved it. Gaskin had always insisted that the Farm was not a cult but a collective—a demonstration project for a different way of living. His lectures touched on the teachings of the
Tibetan yogi Milarepa, whose own master cast him into the depths of despair in order to mold his character. The key wasn’t to tune out like a stereotypical hippie, but to notice what was happening around you—to hear the signal. “If you get too used to it and don’t pay attention to it, it’s like living by a waterfall,” Gaskin said. “
People who live by waterfalls don’t hear them.”

Gaskin’s Sunday morning talks, mass meditation sessions attended by the entire Farm community, were more meaningful to Michael than any Catholic mass he’d ever attended. Michael received validation and confirmation of things he had only suspected—that science only describes the physical world, not matters of the heart. He loved how Gaskin always said “keep closure”: If you leave someone hanging, be sure you go back to them and make sure everything is understood between you both. On Hidden Valley Road, there had never been closure, just sibling rivalries layered on top of one another. Even his father’s attempts to get everybody to live in harmony never worked. Instead of clearing the air, they’d watch a football game. Could it be there was another way to live?

The most intense moments for Michael took place in a tent called
the Rock Tumbler. Set off away from the community, the Tumbler was where men whom Gaskin considered too oppositional were sent to dissect one another’s troubles—
We need to talk. What are you doing? Why are you doing that?
—until, so the theory went, their rough edges were smoothed out. Gaskin doled out “
constructive feedback” for Farm members who were “on a trip”—too uptight or angry, or not empathetic, or too lazy. “
You are the only variable in the situation you have control over,” he would say. “If you’re not grooving all the time, find out why you’re not grooving and fix it.”

Michael had never experienced anything like this before. Everything in his own family had been so top-down, so dictatorial, with a pecking order that invited the older siblings to victimize the younger ones. Here there was a leader, sure, but the community acted on consensus to hold everyone accountable, and to dig and dig until the subconscious issues at the root of the problem became known to everyone.

This was a Watergate-style inquiry: The denial and suppression and cover-up of a problem were as bad as the problem itself.

Michael ended up loving the Tumbler. Everything about the Farm felt wholesome to him—progressive, well-intentioned people being good to one another. But while he was there, his contempt for his own family only intensified, sometimes even overpowering everything positive he was feeling in the moment. He hadn’t gotten over how his parents once wanted him committed. He knew he wasn’t insane; what system, what family, would send him to the hospital that way? Don and Mimi were so repressive, he was convinced that they were part of the problem.

At the end of eight months, Michael and his Tumbler-mates had become isolated—so much so that Gaskin commanded them to disband their tent and come back to live closer to the heart of things. Michael went under the tent to grab a bag he’d left there, and when he opened the bag at his new quarters he saw thousands of tiny bug eggs, spilling out of the opening.

Michael took that as a sign that his time at the Farm might be winding down. He went to Gaskin and said he needed to get away. There happened to be a bus leaving for Albuquerque, so he took it, taking a new set of tools for living with him.

HE WAS NOT
ready to go home just yet. An old friend was heading to Hawaii. Michael tagged along, finding a $130 air fare from L.A. He stayed for about a year, finding short-term work hanging drywall, living off of food stamps, being out on his own completely, without his family or his surrogate Farm family.

He moved a little bit further through his grief. And he was about to move on to the Philippines with a new friend when his mother, on the phone, told him that she missed him and that she wanted to send him a plane ticket.

Here was the chance to put the Farm’s lessons into action for the family he’d left behind. Michael came home to Colorado Springs and enrolled in a community college to learn mechanical drafting. But he had returned to even more conflict than he would have anticipated. Donald was there, and Michael found himself infuriated by him—why wasn’t he making choices that were helpful to him? Was he too far gone to be saved? Things were even worse now than before he left. Peter was sick, too. Their father had his stroke. Everything seemed more out of control than he’d remembered it. And no one was taking any of his advice. He wanted them all to eat brown rice and meditate, and they wouldn’t have any part of it.

Michael came away dejected. What would it take for his brothers to do what he’d managed to do? When would they learn to get out of their own way? When would they notice the waterfall crashing around them?

Mary never stopped campaigning to visit Margaret. Her parents let her spend weekends in Denver every few months, when the Garys hadn’t jetted to one of their other homes. When summer came, the Garys also paid for Mary to spend two weeks at Geneva Glen, a sleepaway camp that ran its campers through a number of elaborate imaginary scenarios—the Knights of the Round Table, Native American traditions. For the first time in her life, Mary, away from her family and away from Jim, had permission to let down her guard, remove her mask a bit, and forget about what was going on at home. At the end of her first session in the summer of 1976, Mary called home, begging to stay. The Garys paid for her to stay the full eight weeks. She went back every summer until college.

For a couple of weeks at the end of every summer, the Garys opened up their Montana place to a platoon of kids, including friends and cousins. Mary was there for that. She and Suzy Gary were mischievous kindred spirits, sneaking sips of Sam’s Coors Lights. It still confused Mary that Margaret got to live in this world all the time while she had to beg and plead for the chance to visit. But as Mary got older and mixed with the Garys a little more, she and Sam started to have longer conversations about her future. Whenever Mary said she wanted to do something for the greater good, Sam’s response was always the same: “If you want to do something like that, go make some money and give it away.”

Both Mary and Margaret loved the Montana trips. But while for Margaret, Montana was another place where she never truly felt at home, for Mary it was a taste of what life could be like if she didn’t have to be at home at all.

MATT CONTROLLED THE
stoplights in Colorado Springs for a long while. Then he announced that he was Paul McCartney.

After his breakdown at the Garys’ house, Matt had dropped out of his ceramics program at Loretto Heights in 1977 and was back home now with Donald and Peter. Mary—twelve years old and the only sane child living at home—no longer had Matt as a protector. Now he was part of the problem, a hazard. One day, Peter was being a pest to Mary, and Mary had asked Matt for help. Her parents were not there; neither was Donald. The two brothers faced off in the living room, the same way Donald and Jim used to. Once the punches flew, the pretext for the fight didn’t matter. Both Matt and Peter lost control, each of them accessing something primal, something Mary hadn’t seen before. She was sure they were going to kill each other.

There was only one established move in these situations, a move that Mary knew well by now. She rushed to Don and Mimi’s bedroom, flipped the lock behind her, and called the police. That was when Matt turned on her; the last thing he wanted was the police at their door. She sat there, trembling, the phone in her hand, as Matt, once the brother she admired most, tried to break the door down.

The police arrived before Matt could get to her. They took Matt away to the hospital. For Mary, this was the first time she’d felt responsible for hospitalizing one of her brothers. She was surprised, after so many years feeling rage toward them, to feel guilty about that.

She was also surprised that she had actually not wanted them to hurt one another—that after building up so much resentment toward them, she still cared.

Matt’s first admission to Pueblo was on December 7, 1978. Five days later, Peter joined him there, for his third visit to Pueblo that year. Donald also was cycling in and out of Pueblo that year—three Galvin brothers on separate wards of the same hospital, for what would not be the last time.

From then on, when Mary was alone with Matt and Peter, she locked herself in her parents’ room until someone else came home.

PETER WAS THE
closest brother in age to Mary, just four years older. At home now, Peter was a wall of
no
—he refused all help and defied all advice. He never thought he needed medical care. It followed that he did not believe he needed his shot of Prolixin every three weeks.

By 1978, the year Peter turned eighteen, the staff at Pikes Peak knew the whole family well, especially Mimi, who had become a fierce advocate for each of the sons. Between outpatient visits, Peter would stay at Hidden Valley Road only as long as he could stand it, or until he became too much for his parents to handle and they sent him away. Then he would camp out under a bridge for days at a time, or hitchhike to Vail and hang out along the main strip.

Peter was in and out of hospitals a half dozen times that year. A supportive residence called CARES House in Colorado Springs took him in briefly, but when Peter left without permission, the staff said he was not welcome back. On July 2, an argument with his parents over taking his Prolixin ended with Peter smashing four picture windows. Peter later explained that he “really did not want to get into a hassle, but it just happened.” Once again, his parents threw him out of the house; this time, he was old enough to be sent to the state mental hospital at Pueblo.

Over three stays at Pueblo, the staff got to see both sides of Peter. He could be charming—“a pleasant, alert, oriented and well-groomed young man who behaved appropriately in the interview situation.” But once the conversation turned toward his family, “his overall style was markedly grandiose and paranoid” and later “belligerent” and “very hostile.” Peter announced that he had an interview for a job at the Eisenhower Tunnel; then he said he had decided to start work as a ski instructor in a few weeks; then he mentioned that he’d recently done some work as a stunt skier for the TV show
Charlie’s Angels
. At times, the staff at Pueblo needed to put him in restraints; then, once the restraints were removed, he would decide to leave the hospital. Once he made it as far as Ordway, a tiny town of a thousand people fifty miles east of Pueblo, where he jumped on one car and tried to leap onto a moving truck and was almost run over. Another time, he said he was a Secret Service agent, working for the Queen of England. “Presently, Peter is so loose and psychotic,” one report read, “that interviewing him is fruitless and nonproductive.”

For perhaps the first time, the doctors, struck by “his irritability, his demandingness, his mild hyperactivity, [and] his manipulativeness,” suspected that Peter’s problem was likely not schizophrenia at all but bipolar disorder. If that were the case, that revised diagnosis would cause an entirely new set of problems: Peter was too unreliable to be trusted to regularly take lithium, the drug most prescribed at the time for that condition. Lithium is one of the few psychiatric medications that is dangerous in mild overdose; Peter would not only have to follow the drug regimen, he would have to agree to have his blood level monitored, and that didn’t seem likely. As long as he stayed on Prolixin, he seemed more or less all right. So they decided to stick with schizophrenia as a diagnosis, concluding that “the distinction does probably not have any practical importance at this time.”

For the next several years, Peter would be prescribed drugs to treat schizophrenia, when it was quite possible he was suffering from another illness altogether.

WHEN DONALD WASN’T
at home or getting outpatient treatment at Pikes Peak Mental Health Center in Colorado Springs, he was still walking upward of two hundred miles a week. Jobs would come and go, but walking remained his great constant, along with religious visions and preaching. Only now and then would his wanderings get him into trouble. He was brought back to Pueblo in September 1978, after a squabble with a clerk at a sporting goods store. During that nearly three-month stay, he announced plans to leave the country at Christmas and give up his citizenship.

He returned to Pueblo a year later after having an argument with a nurse at Pikes Peak. That was when he started talking about various stars in the sky showing him where to find particular elements in the ground that were involved with what he called “rock knife chemistry.” He believed that he had to find those elements, smash them with a hammer, and eat the dust.

Donald was discharged on January 7, 1980, only to be readmitted in March—his sixth visit to the state hospital in Pueblo in ten years—after Don and Mimi lost patience with him and told him to get his own apartment. On the ward, Donald shouted about Jesus, and his Thorazine prescription was increased several times with little effect. He was discharged in June, once he was stabilized with an antipsychotic drug called Loxitane.

But he returned yet again in November. He stopped taking the medication and had been staying awake for eighteen hours a day, walking around naked in the house, screaming at the top of his lungs. Jean was back in his thoughts. He referred to her as his wife. He also was talking about guns and knives.

Mimi and Don, according to the hospital report, were afraid of their oldest son. “They want Donald to get the strong message that they love him,” the report reads, “but they cannot accept him until he has been stabilized on the medication.”

JOHN, THE MUSIC TEACHER
, was in Idaho. Richard, once the schemer of the family, was trying to start a business in Denver. The two hockey brothers who had not become sick, Mark and Joe, also were hours away in Denver—there but not there, able to avoid the worst of it. Mark, once the family’s prodigious chess master, was hurt deeply by what had happened to his hockey teammates, Matt and Peter. Joe, driving a fuel truck at the airport, was living quietly, even as he seemed to be exhibiting some of the warning signs of psychosis—a disconnection from everyday life, problems understanding basic social cues.

And then there was Jim.

The most important rule of the house was clear enough: The last thing Mary should ever do was talk about any of this. But she saw what was happening to her family. She was angry about that, even as some small part of her was preparing to be next. As she got older, Mary stopped hiding her frustration. She was almost thirteen—not a little girl anymore, and not to be trifled with. She banged on her walls at night now with abandon, without apology, trying to get Donald to be quiet.

She noticed other changes, too. During the day, she sensed a growing distance between her mother and father. It was as if Mimi had become her husband’s caretaker now, nothing more. Once, her mother even left for a few weeks, staying with her sister, Betty, back east, leaving Mary alone with her father and brothers. Another desertion, another abandonment.

Mimi must have noticed that Mary felt this way—recognized the anger inside her, maybe even identified with it—and started taking her on shopping trips downtown, just the two of them, and to tea parties with her friends. Without explicitly saying so, Mimi was working to ingratiate herself with Mary—to let her know she loved her, too. Despite herself, Mary found herself enjoying this time with her mother, away from the others. While she thought all she wanted was to get away, what she really wanted, perhaps, was this sense of closeness—an uncomplicated love, free of mystery, free of danger.