Thirty Rooms To Hide In (25 page)
Read Thirty Rooms To Hide In Online
Authors: Luke Sullivan
Tags: #recovery, #alcoholism, #Rochester Minnesota, #50s, #‘60s, #the fifties, #the sixties, #rock&roll, #rock and roll, #Minnesota rock & roll, #Minnesota rock&roll, #garage bands, #45rpms, #AA, #Alcoholics Anonymous, #family history, #doctors, #religion, #addicted doctors, #drinking problem, #Hartford Institute, #family histories, #home movies, #recovery, #Memoir, #Minnesota history, #insanity, #Thirtyroomstohidein.com, #30roomstohidein.com, #Mayo Clinic, #Rochester MN
Dad and his first-born, Kip, circa 1948.
On my desk, dropped carelessly by the office mail-room boy, is a manila envelope that may contain some answers to my father’s death. Inside are his psychiatric records that I’d ordered months ago from the Institute of Living in Hartford; 50 single-spaced pages of his private conversations with psychiatrists; Rorschach interpretations, I.Q. tests, and other measurements of Western medicine that had been dutifully recorded and stored away in a file cabinet through four decades of Connecticut winters.
I open the envelope like it is an undisturbed crypt.
From the Hartford psychiatrist’s notes on my father, August 31, 1965
It is almost impossible for the patient to date the onset of his illness. The patient was brought up in a home in which there was no drinking permitted.
On completion of his [medical] residency, he was drinking only on occasion until one year after he became a staff member, when he was using alcohol to “get rid of my emotions.” The frequency at that time was less than once per month. As he recalls it, the drinking was always increased after a “spat with my wife.”
The intake of alcohol increased continually until the patient began seeing a psychiatrist about a year and a half ago. The patient was able to reduce the drinking, until Christmas of 1964 when his wife and family moved out of the house into another home.
* * *
We’ve rappelled down the side of Building C at the Hartford Institute of Living and are hanging outside the window of the room where Roger is in session with his psychiatrist.
We’re waiting for a “Code BS-10F” – SWAT lingo for Bullshit to the Tenth Fucking Degree. At 1300 hours, the conversation inside the room hands us a BS-10F on a silver platter.
“Well, I didn’t drink much, um, until Christmas of ’64 but
then
my wife and family moved out of the house, you see, and so
that’s
when I began to drink and ...”
“All agents, move in!”
The sounds of a breaking window. Of boots crunching over broken glass. Of the psychiatrist’s Waterman pen clicking shut. Through the voice-speakers on our haz-mat suits we warn the psychiatrist, “Sir, please step away from your notepad.”
The psychiatrist’s eyes say something to the effect of “Well, I never,” but he obeys.
“Sir, are you aware you just came in full contact with Bullshit to the Tenth Fucking Degree? This part right here.” My gloved finger taps a passage on his notepad:
The patient was able to reduce the drinking, until Christmas of 1964 when his wife and family moved out of the house…
“Do you have any idea how dangerous this kind of bullshit is?” I ask. “He’s makin’ it sound as if he began drinking after his wife and family left.” I gesture at Roger, who rolls his eyes (busted, goddammit) and I turn back to the shrink.
“He’s telling it backwards. The family left because of his drinking.”
I give the other guys the sign to “bag and tag” the notepad and in seconds it’s sealed in an airtight orange zipper case and on its way downtown for analysis.
* * *
Psychiatric notes, August 31, 1965
[After his wife and family moved out] his drinking increased to two or three Manhattans before supper, three or four scotches after supper, and a morning drink of gin and coffee. During this time, he would wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning feeling quite anxious. During the evening and sometimes at night he would have crying spells. This continued until April, 1965, when his wife and family moved back into the house. At this time, the patient said that as his drinking decreased, his wife “started throwing tantrums.”
During the period preceding admission, the patient became more and more unhappy with himself and found it necessary to “get plastered and call up my chief.” He would go to the home of his senior surgeon and talk about his difficulty with his wife at these times. During one of these visits, he indicated that his hands had begun to shake during surgery. He says he has not been assaultive but has struck his wife on two or three occasions in an effort “to get her to control herself.”
September 14, 1965
PERSONALITY BEFORE ILLNESS: The patient traced a history of being an only child who never felt close to his parents and indeed felt pushed by them into academic aspirations. … He recalls his mother saying, “Oh, you are so nervous” and going to church services and prayer meetings where it was difficult for him to “sit still.”
The patient smokes three packs of cigarettes a day at this time and describes strong anxiety feelings, which include “a feeling that I’d like to die and a trembling of my hands.” He has denied any suicidal tendencies but has stated that when he’s had too much to drink he’s talked about himself being better off if he were not alive…
INTERPRETATION OF TEST FINDINGS: Underlying the patient’s unreliable defensiveness is the absence of a concept of self. He is analogous to a building with elaborate decorative features but without a foundation…
While he is presently able to regain control when lapses in reality testing occur, the inner turmoil and the increasing external threat he experiences are at such a boiling point that the potential for a psychotic reaction appears very great.
* * *
I put the psychiatric records down.
“The potential for a psychotic reaction appears very great.”
It’s the sort of thing you like to hear about somebody you’re already mad at.
I remember hating my high school study-hall teacher and there were times when I would’ve given my letter jacket for a peek into his horrible little psychiatric folder.
With such a file in hand, I’d get up on my desk and read aloud to the whole class the smoking gun. “Excuse me, people? Everybody? Mr. Vellue’s psychiatrist says his ‘potential for a psychotic reaction is,’ and I
quote
, ‘very great’.” Having made a Citizen’s Diagnosis, I accept the applause of a grateful classroom and call the men in white uniforms to come cart the crazy bastard away.
Now, after forty years of wondering if my father was insane, here it is in black and white. Is this relief? Perhaps it’s what victims of crimes feel when they hear the bad guy’s been caught. There’s no closure really; I’m simply reminded of the crime.
I used to look at criminals in the newspaper and study their pictures. I thought perhaps if I could somehow learn the telltale wrinkle of brow or glint of knife edge in the eye I might glean what marked a man as a murderer.
(So, this is a murderer’s face.)
But it was always just a picture of a man. It feels the same way today. This phrase “psychotic reaction” brings me no closer to understanding my father. I look at his picture and see just a man.
* * *
Psychiatrists’ notes, continued
SUMMARY: In view of his difficulties in his role as a husband and father, as evidenced by his need to be indecisive and clinging at times, and obstructive and irritable at others, it is apparent that the patient’s diagnosis is most likely passive-aggressive personality, passive dependent type. Because of the use of alcohol as a primary defense against his inability to handle these stresses, he must be further classified as having the diagnosis of addiction, alcoholism. Additionally, one must consider the possibility of an organic brain syndrome considering the evidence of physical manifestations of the alcohol, as well as some apparent deterioration of judgment.
His frantic use of defenses seems to be a search for some kind of stability. His interpersonal contacts are affected by his own impaired sense of self, so that he cannot view people without projecting his own negative feelings about himself into the situation. While he appears to be maintaining a borderline adjustment at present, his precarious defenses and rapidly mounting inner tension suggest very strong potential for a psychotic mode of adjustment.
Psychiatrist’s notes, September 28, 1965
Dr. Sullivan has been utilizing his town pass and denies any drinking on the occasions he has been off the hospital grounds, but admits that this is primarily because he’s concerned that Institute employees might be observing him. He is still waiting to hear if his wife will be coming to visit him and is quite hopeful that she will come. However, he worries it will be “the same old story” in her ways of dealing with him.
