A MYTH AND A SECRET
The myth: “Your brother was a genius.” I can still hear my mom’s voice. I guess they’d had his IQ tested somewhere along the line, and from then on he was a genius. Then inevitably and invariably came, “But he didn’t have the sense to come in out of the rain.”
Larry learned how to hyperventilate in grade school. It’s not hard. You squat, take a bunch of deep breaths, stand up quickly, then hold your breath really hard and you pass out. So Larry would get himself sent to the nurse’s office and sometimes they’d send him home, which was exactly the point.
Pure genius.
As the years passed, he went on to bigger and better things.
One evening I’m in the den watching TV and Larry wanders in. Still living at home at 23, he’s wearing a dark grey corduroy sports coat and a weird grin.
“I want to show you something,” he says.
“What?” I ask, not particularly interested, 17-year-old attitude.
He pulls open his coat to reveal three tall test tube vials nestled within the inside breast pocket. They’re filled with a clear blue liquid and have aluminum foil wrapped around the tops as lids.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Owsley’s own…lysergic acid diethylamide,” he enunciates, obviously enjoying the way it trips off his tongue. Then with a smirky twinkle in his eye, he fairly dances into the kitchen and places the vials on a shelf in the refrigerator with a note wrapped around them that says, “Larry’s — Hands Off! This Means You!!”
The phone rings in the middle of the night. There’s a lot of whispering, but no one will tell me what’s going on so I go back to sleep. The next day I overhear that Larry had been arrested for bathing nude with his girlfriend in a fountain on Wilshire Boulevard while under the influence of LSD.
Genius.
The Affidavit of Intemperance filed on May 23, 1966, states that Larry, “who is so far addicted to the intemperate use of Habit Forming Drugs as to have lost the power of self-control . . . that there is reasonable ground for believing . . . that said person, if committed to a State Hospital, will be permanently benefited by treatment therein. And that by reason thereof said person is a fit subject for commitment to a State Hospital for the care and treatment of the mentally ill and ought to be confined therein.”
A few days later Mom and Dad make the 50-mile drive to visit him at Camarillo State Hospital. The setting is pastoral, and they sit outdoors on manicured grounds surrounded by lush farm fields. They talk cautiously. Larry assures them that he’s okay. He’s barefoot, and Daddy leaves him his shoes. Daddy cries on the drive home, then goes directly upstairs and pours himself a drink.
My mom is rummaging in Larry's closet, then suddenly runs into her bedroom and closes the door. I’m curious so I follow quietly. I can hear the murmur of her talking to my dad. I sneak right up to the door, listen.
“What is it?” my dad asks.
“It’s a hypodermic needle and a bent spoon. It looks like it’s been burned,” my mom answers.
“Why are you showing it to me?” he asks. His voice is flat; it doesn’t sound like he really wants to know.
“I found it in Larry’s jacket pocket,” she says. “I think it’s for taking heroin.”
A long, long silence. I hear the door of the refrigerator bar open and close, then the thunk of a bottle.
“I just know it’s that damned Lou,” my mom says, “he’s a bad influence.” Silence, and then, “Well, at least now he’s safe.”
I scoot away before she opens the door.
My brother the genius.
The booklet entitled “Questions and Answers — Information for Patients admitted to Camarillo State Hospital” looks like an old travel brochure. It features a rubber-stamp-like seal depicting a stylized landscape with mountains in the background, trees in the foreground, and a tall bell tower rising amidst a group of low-slung buildings. On the first page, a greeting — of sorts: “Undoubtedly you will want to know more about Camarillo State Hospital now that you are entering here. This booklet is designed to help answer some of your questions.”
Taking a page from Dante, it might well have read, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
Camarillo State Hospital has been redeveloped as the California State University, Channel Islands. Some of the buildings stand testament to its curb appeal with its graceful Mission Revival Style architecture, but its outward appearance is deceptive. Its dark reputation is possibly more accurate and certainly well documented. Before its doors closed in 1996, more than 1,000 patients died there of both natural and suspicious causes. Today, in a wooded park on the campus, a marker honors them:
“In honor and memory of those who lived and died on the grounds of the former Camarillo State Hospital and of those buried anonymously throughout California. Let no person ever again be wrongly removed from the community by reason of disability.”
Much of the hellish movie “The Snake Pit” with Olivia De Havilland was filmed there; of course that was make-believe. But first person accounts say incoming patients were routinely strapped into restraints, quaintly called “camisoles,” and given a tranquilizer cocktail called “Number 1,” a mixture of Thorazine or Serentil, Stelazine and Hyosine, then given electroshock treatment.
Reports of mistreatment and outright abuse of patients led one district attorney to investigate the circumstances surrounding deaths due to overdoses, strangulation and gross negligence by hospital staff.
Larry was committed to Camarillo on May 23rd. On May 30th, he was dead.
How did Larry die? The short answer: “The patient died due to massive aspiration with aspiration pneumonitis and pulmonary edema.” How this came about is unknown, the circumstances highly suspicious. An inquiry was never made; grief trumped curiosity. And besides, what did it matter? After all those middle-of-the-night phone calls while we were growing up, to bail Larry out of one jam or another, my mom had been holding her breath, as she put it, “waiting for the other shoe to drop.” And now it had. Truth be told, there was a certain relief.
Secrets can be deadly. I grew up to the sound of hushed whispering; entering a room and the conversation stopping; muffled discussions behind closed doors; my brother telling my parents, “I didn't ask to be born.” I didn’t know it then, but what I know now is that Larry, my big brother, had been forced to keep a secret his entire short life, a secret I wouldn't be told for another 20 years. He knew that Daddy was not our — his and my — biological father. He knew that we’d had a different father for the first six years of his life, the first six months of mine, a father neither of us ever saw or heard from again. And this man we called Daddy was actually the father of his best friend, a friend he also never saw or heard from again. I imagine him thinking that just as our mother had stolen her best friend's husband, he’d stolen his best friend’s father — it wouldn't have taken a genius to come to that conclusion. But that's just my take on it.
R.I.P., my brother.