Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family (33 page)

On the blazing July day before his mother’s funeral, Peter’s room at Riverwalk—a nursing home, a few blocks away from the state mental hospital in Pueblo—had a cheap boom box blaring classic rock and a big-screen TV going full blast, both of which Peter largely ignored.

“It’s
wonderful,
” Peter said, looking around, Lindsay standing next to him. “I got the Bible and everything.”

He showed off a photo album, filled with group shots of the Galvins. He pointed at faces and picked out names.

“Don, Jim, John, Brian, Robert, Richard, Joseph, that’s me, Peter, Mary’s in the chair,” he said, jabbing at the photo with a shaky index finger. “They’re
wonderful
. That’s my dad. He was a lieutenant colonel in U.S. Air Force. He flew the falcons at the Air Force football games. The Thunderbirds were at halftime….Don, Jim, John, Brian, Robert, Richard, Joseph, Mark, Matt, and that’s me, Peter. Margaret, Mary”—he smiled—“that’s my little girl, Mary. She’s
wonderful
.”

“You know, Peter, could you bring that with you?” Lindsay said.

“Yeah, yeah. I think I should, I think I should and
cooperate,
with the Bible. I love you!”

“Jeff is going to come pick you up tomorrow morning,” Lindsay said. “We’re just going to go have lunch today.”

“Can I go with you for lunch?”

Lindsay laughed. “Sure!” This, of course, had been the plan all along.

Peter was beyond thin now—bony, his pants cinched in order to fit him. He had emerged from his room to meet his sister smiling, wearing a hockey jersey, a plaid flannel bathrobe, a ratty ski jacket, a baseball cap, heavy work boots, and winter gloves. His voice was low and gravelly, his mustache scraggly. But he still had his same puckishness, dampened only a little by exhaustion from shock therapy. Lindsay’s visit happened to land on a Tuesday, and Peter had just returned from his weekly ECT at the hospital.

When Peter wasn’t on a tirade, claiming his doctors were working for Satan, those same doctors found him as charming as always, even sweet. “He’s the only patient I’ve ever gone that far out of my way where I would take him for walks,” said one of his doctors, Matt Goodwin, who treated him for years when Peter lived full-time at Pueblo, and who still often administered his ECT sessions. “I would take him out for lunch.” On the wards, Peter would serenade patients and doctors with his recorder, playing “Yesterday,” “Let It Be,” and “The Long and Winding Road.” Every Christmas, he’d take out the photo of his family on the staircase at the Air Force Academy, showing everyone who was who, and talk endlessly about flying falcons with his father.

In 2015, Goodwin had petitioned the court controlling Peter’s care to compel El Paso County, where the city of Pueblo is located, to make a space in one of its local assisted living facilities available to Peter. As long as he had ECT on a regular basis, Goodwin argued, Peter had no need to live inside the state mental hospital. A month later, on December 17, Peter moved to Riverwalk, which primarily serves people with Alzheimer’s and dementia. Peter was by far the youngest resident there. His diagnosis: bipolar 1 and psychosis. His prescriptions: the mood stabilizer Depakote; Zyprexa, an antipsychotic; and Latuda, an antidepressant often prescribed to bipolar patients.

At Riverwalk, Peter liked to keep to a schedule. His smoke breaks had to happen at a certain time. If they didn’t, he’d get agitated. “It’s something for him to do out of the monotony of the day,” a supervisor at Riverwalk said. “It gives him an activity.” He was never violent or aggressive, though he could sometimes be loud and persistent (“You said you were going to get my cigarettes!”). He often played his recorder at a long-term care facility across the street, where the patients applauded him and asked for more. He’d play there every day if they let him.

For their lunch outing, Lindsay coaxed Peter into losing the bathrobe. It was the middle of summer. The treatment had depleted Peter. He hadn’t eaten since the night before. But he was excited to leave with Lindsay. “I think I’m gonna get a big thirty-eight-ounce Coke,” he said. “I want to get a cup of coffee. I like coffee….I shampooed all my hair and got everything all cleaned up and put socks on and new shoes and new underwear….Hey, can’t we stop and get a pack of cigarettes? I want to stop and get a pack of cigarettes with a five-dollar bill.”

What does he think about ECT?

Peter’s expression darkened. “They knocked me out. They knocked me out cold with oxygen.”

How does he feel afterward?

“I just cooperate fully and do everything that they say.”

On the way out, Peter stopped in the lobby, pulled out his recorder, and performed a Christmastime favorite—“Angels We Have Heard on High”—before walking stiffly out the door.

“I want to go get a burger!” he said in the backseat of Lindsay’s SUV. He flashed cash from his wallet. “I got all the money. Twenty-five dollars, right here.”

“That’s all right, I’ve got it,” Lindsay said.

“Okay, I’ll cooperate fully.”

“So it’s going to be a big crowd tomorrow, Peter,” Lindsay said.

“Yeah, it will be.”

“Do you have something nice you can wear?”

“Yep.”

“All of Mimi’s grandkids and great-grandkids will be there.”

“I’m going to go smoke! I wish I could have gotten cigarettes.”

“After lunch we can go get some cigarettes.”

They pulled up at a pub in downtown Pueblo, where Peter ordered a large Coke and a burger with fries and ketchup, tearing through the fries first. Some Riverwalk employees noticed him from across the room and walked over to say hello, smiling and asking how Peter was feeling today.

“So who were they?” Lindsay asked, once they returned to their table.

“I don’t know,” Peter said.

“Were they from the hospital?”

Peter did not answer.

“Are you feeling okay?”

“No. I’m sick of everything that I went through. I want to get a pack of cigarettes and
cooperate
. I’ll go buy it myself and cooperate with you in full to do everything you want me to. Just don’t smoke ’em. I’ll smoke ’em myself….I can’t eat this ketchup with cheese. I think I have an upset stomach. The ketchup makes me feel funny….I’m cooperating
full
. I want to cooperate—do anything for you that I can.”

AFTER LUNCH, LINDSAY
pulled up to a store and let Peter out to get cigarettes by himself, giving her a moment to speak openly about his condition. “Dr. Freedman explained it to me,” Lindsay said. “Years and years of overmedicating. That’s why they do these ECTs, because the medications really don’t work for him.” This was a version of the same problem all her sick brothers had. The less consistently you take the medication, the worse off you were—the more psychotic breaks you have, the more far gone you become. It was a painful catch-22 to witness a loved one experience: Not taking the drugs makes them more sick, and then taking them, in some cases, makes them sicker. A different kind of sick, she agreed, but sick nevertheless.

“He said eventually the medications will have no more impact,” Lindsay said. “And it’s really the ECTs that have caused the majority of the memory loss. This is more disorganized thinking. Not able to answer questions. And the mantra—
I cooperate
fully
—is constant.”

That saying, so specific, must have some meaning to Peter. All those years of parents and doctors telling him he was not cooperating, Lindsay said—maybe they’ve made a mark on him.

Peter hopped back in the car, smiling. “God, that’s fast in there. I’ve got a whole pack. Can I light one up in here?”

“No!” Lindsay said cheerfully.

“Okay,” Peter said, then muttered: “I’ll cooperate fully.” A moment later, he brightened again. “I have a whole pack of Marlboros. You people are
wonderful
.”

Lindsay’s next stop that day, Matt’s home at the Citadel Apartments in Colorado Springs, was a small, no-frills place paid for with a Section 8 housing voucher. Never one to focus on his personal hygiene, Matt nevertheless maintained his home like the tidiest of hoarders, his towering piles of stuff always neat and organized. “I bet he’s got a fortune in collectible vinyl,” said Lindsay as she pulled into the parking lot.

Matt’s most prized collection was his stack of Clint Eastwood movies—DVDs and VHS tapes. Most of the time, when Matt was on the phone with his family,
A Fistful of Dollars
or
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
could be heard blasting in the background. “I told him that Clint Eastwood is Republican,” Lindsay said, smiling. “That was very disappointing to him.” But he still watched all the movies.

Visits and phone calls with Matt were never predictable. Sometimes he’d rage about being labeled mentally ill, about his mother putting him on medication, about the millions of dollars he said the government owed him for building all of the roads and bridges in the state of Colorado, about how the mental health profession had killed his father and two of his brothers, Jim and Joe. “They might as well kill me!” he’d moan—he had nothing left to live for. But today, the day before his mother’s funeral, Matt was in a decent mood—not delusional, just glum, and, as usual, a little caustic. He’d been watching
Hang ’Em High
when Lindsay showed up. In jeans and a leather biker vest, he was a little imposing, tall and stout with unruly long hair, a scraggly beard, and the same deep-set eyes as his brother Donald. Lindsay’s kids, whenever they saw him, always remarked on how much he looked like Hagrid. Even his voice was a low, mumbly growl.

“Well, my shoulder couldn’t get any worse than what it is,” Matt said, sinking into the backseat of the SUV.

“You’ve got a doctor’s appointment, though!” Lindsay said, triumphantly. Seeing doctors had never appealed to Matt. For years, Lindsay had been trying to get him to get his teeth fixed, but he thought the dentist would implant something in his head.

“I’ve got an appointment over at Park View on the tenth of August,” he said, and then he started running through other old business, concerned about tying up loose ends from his accident with the truck—the one Lindsay had been helping him with just before Mimi’s death. Matt actually had been in the middle of a good deed when the crash happened. He was helping his friend Brody, a Vietnam vet who is a paraplegic, get to Denver to get a new bag for his catheter. They were on their way back during rush hour on a Friday night when Matt saw a car stopped in the center lane and slammed his brakes. He missed that car, but then the two cars behind him smashed into him, one after the other.

“They sent me a letter from the impound lot, saying it cost eight hundred and fifty dollars?”

“I know,” said Lindsay. She had spent hours on the phone with the police and the courts and the insurance company, sending copies of the power of attorney document that Matt had signed to show that she could handle everything on his behalf. “If they call you or anything, or write another letter, give it to me.”

“I just want to sort that out.”

“We will. It’s gonna take a long time, though, Matt. The courts, they haven’t even assigned a permanent case number to it yet.”

Lindsay tried to bring up tomorrow’s funeral, just as she had with Peter. Matt also didn’t pick up on that. Instead, over a sandwich at a nearby sub shop, he ran through a litany of his many injuries and wounds. “I had six separate teeth surgeries. And I had a blot clot removed from my brain in 1979, I was twelve and a half.”

“I was at that hockey game,” Lindsay said.

“It was at the Air Force Academy,” he said. “It was the league championship. We beat Mitchell. They had twenty-two players, two goalies, and a coach. We had eleven guys. You know what you say about hockey? Go puck yourself.”

Lindsay smiled. She was used to Matt’s jokes. Most were dirtier.

“Our team went to state,” he said. “But I couldn’t play because I broke my face. This guy picked me up under my butt and threw me into the boards.”

“I remember!” Lindsay said. “I sat next to you in the backseat of the car and your eyeball was hanging out of your face.”

He showed Lindsay a scar on the side of his face.

“I got a hundred and fifty-seven stitches,” Matt said, launching into his usual exaggerated version of the story. “I flatlined and they used the shockers. You know that
ER
show, with the shockers? They hit me ten times, and I flatlined for seven and a half minutes, and they said do it one more time. The eleventh time they hit me, they got a pulse, and I woke up two and a half weeks later.”

He reminisced a little about his college days at Loretto Heights—girls in the dorms, Frisbee in the hallways, all the hockey players he knew there. He remembered dropping out after a year and working at the bowling alley and having a newspaper route and living with his brother Joe for a while.

“When Joe died, me and Mark and Mike went out there and divided his stuff between the three of us,” he said somberly. “I got his TV.”