The Long, Lonesome Road
Fred Thomas is schizophrenic. Seven years ago he entered a state mental hospital. Ever since, his life has been a jumble of doctors and drugs, hospitals and halfway houses. But like so many others in Texas’ abysmal mental health system, he is not one bit better today.
(Page 6 of 9)
“They’re Trying To Railroad Me!”
On Friday, May 31, Fred’s sixty-third day at the hospital, Cathy Nottebart called Liz Thomas and put Fred on the phone. In recent days Fred had been rejecting all of Cathy’s overtures about Tarry Hall; with the clock ticking on his commitment, Fred was betting that his mother would break down and take him back. Cathy had made the phone call to convince Fred otherwise. It didn’t. Instead, Fred blew up at his mother. “Why are you doing this to me?” he spat into the phone. “I’ve got plenty of other places to go! I can go live at the Holiday Inn!” Afterward in the dayroom, Fred remained livid. “They’re like a locomotive, and they’ve tied me on the tracks,” he said. “They’re trying to railroad me.” Liz Thomas was also upset by the phone call. The next morning she bought a bus ticket for Austin.
By one o’clock Sunday, Liz was sitting in the Ward B visitors’ lobby, two of her sisters in tow, waiting to see Fred. It was a lovely afternoon, a perfect day for a picnic. For the past several years, Liz had been working behind the deli counter at a Kroger supermarket, and she bought two large ice chests filled with things from the deli: sandwiches, cookies, chips, and cold soda. Recently Kroger had cut back her hours, and money was tight. So although she also brought Fred some new clothes, they were mostly T-shirts and short pants, and not the expensive items she used to bring him.
When Fred strolled into the visitors’ lobby, Liz leapt out of her seat and gave her son a long, loving hug. “You’re looking good, baby,” she said after looking him up and down. It was true; in less than a week, the change Kerr had ordered in Fred’s medication had done wonders for him. Then Liz patted the bulge in Fred’s waistline. “You’ve been gaining some weight!” she added with a broad grin. Fred grinned back sheepishly.
Liz Thomas was a good eight inches shorter than her son, and notwithstanding his paunch, a good deal plumper. Fred had been born when she was 22, and she had never married his father, a jazz musician whom Fred had met only two or three times in his life. Liz was 45 now, but the weight was fairly recent; Judith Mitchell remembered her from Fred’s earlier stay at Tarry Hall as something of a man-killer. That was easy to picture. Liz has a very pretty face, and as she and Fred sat next to each other in the lobby, you saw at once where he got his delicate features.
After Fred hugged both his aunts, he and Liz immediately lapsed into a mother-and-son routine that was clearly second nature. Liz likes to keep the conversation flowing, and Fred doesn’t, so she would pepper him with questions and remarks while he grunted monosyllables in response. Most of her comments concerned his appearance, which in her opinion had been in steady decline since he entered the hospital. “Fred,” she said with a pained smile, “here’s a comb. Your hair is a mess!” Fred grumbled as he took the comb and made a few halfhearted stabs at his hair. Dissatisfied, Liz grabbed the comb back and began working it vigorously through his hair. “We gotta get you to Supercuts,” she said in dismay. Then she added, almost as if it were an afterthought, “You’re going to that halfway house, aren’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” replied Fred, staring gloomily at the ground.
“When you’re doing better you can come home.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Can you get this wet so I can comb your hair?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The Thomas family went outside. They sat at a picnic table on the lush, sprawling grounds behind Harris K, and Liz handed out sandwiches and soda. A huge live oak provided shade.
“Fred,” said Liz after everyone had eaten, “you’re not talking much for someone who has visitors from out of town. Tell us some of the Richard Pryor jokes you used to tell.”
“I don’t know no Richard Pryor jokes,” he answered sullenly. There was a lull in the conversation, and Fred broke it by asking his mother if she watched Charlie’s Angels. She sighed at the question and didn’t reply. Fred could read her mind. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“You’re not crazy!” Liz replied heatedly. “You got a lot of sense. Why are you saying you’re crazy?”
Again the conversation stopped. This time Liz broke the silence. “You need to get some glasses, baby,” she said. Although no one at the hospital had noticed, Fred was nearsighted. “I’ll have to ask Cathy about getting you glasses,” Liz continued. “You can ask her too, Fred. You’re a man now. Will you see Cathy tomorrow?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Are you gonna tell her you’re going to Tarry Hall?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Got a girlfriend?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Fred, though this was untrue. The idea of a girlfriend seemed to perk him up, however. He laughed happily as he described this figment of his imagination to his mother, and she laughed too, not knowing if he was telling the truth but not caring either. She was just happy to hear him talk. Then Liz realized something she hadn’t noticed before. “Fred,” she said in amazement, “you’re not asking us if we’re mad at you.”
Halfway Home
After Liz’s visit Fred accepted the inevitable. When the Tarry Hall screeners saw him a few weeks later, he no longer said he would not go there, and when Cathy told him that he had been accepted into the halfway house, he did not protest. If he still felt railroaded, his new attitude was that there was nothing he could do except lay across the tracks. And so, early in the morning of June 19—the eighty-fifth day of his commitment—while the other patients went to the cafeteria to eat breakfast, Fred remained in the dayroom, awaiting the hospital van that would take him to Houston. Waiting with him was Don Peterson, who had also improved dramatically after Kerr prescribed Tegretol.
They made an odd pair. Like so many patients released from Harris K, Peterson was returning, essentially, to the streets of Houston. Yet he seemed thrilled to be going back there. Wearing four layers of dirty clothes and a muddy red bandanna around his neck, Peterson was cackling and jabbering and rolling tobacco. “I’m going back to the Rev,” he kept saying. “The Rev’s gonna to take care of me.” “The Rev” was a man named Alvin Armstrong, who rented a series of run-down houses deep in a Houston ghetto to as many as fifteen mentally ill people. Peterson had lived in the Armstrong house on and off for six years.
By the standards of the system, it was Fred and not Peterson who should have been thrilled. After all, Fred had won a spot in the only publicly funded halfway house in the city. He was being given the rare chance to stop the revolving door. But while Peterson continued his excited talk, Fred sat morosely in front of the television. June 19 was, of course, Juneteenth, and that was a special day for Fred: his grandmother, whom he revered, always threw a big family barbecue at her home in Kashmere Gardens. The thought that he would be so close to the barbecue yet unable to attend made him miserable. “I wish you were happier about leaving,” the Ward B nurse remarked.
“I am,” Fred replied glumly. “I’m ecstatic.”
It rained most of Juneteenth. At Fred’s grandmother’s house, the rain forced the party into the small wooden house where Liz’s mother lives with her mentally ill daughter, Leola, and Leola’s two children. Late in the afternoon the rain finally gave way to sun and blue skies, and the house quickly emptied. Liz stayed inside, however, slicing brisket, piling on the coleslaw, and pressing seconds on anyone whose plate was less than completely full. She was the first of eight children, with the oldest child’s sense of responsibility; except for one three-month stretch, for instance, she had never been on welfare in her life. The family saw her more as a second mother than a sister. At affairs like this, Liz Thomas always seemed to be in the kitchen working.
As usual, Liz kept up a steady stream of small talk as she ladled out the food. But you could see that her heart wasn’t in it; she was preoccupied with thoughts of her son. It had taken a supreme act of will for Liz to stay away from Austin; now that Fred was at Tarry Hall, just a few miles away, it would be even harder. But she knew that she had to try to keep some distance.
Five years before, when Fred left Tarry Hall after only three months, Liz was blamed for his departure. She had visited her son frequently, picking up Fred’s laundry almost every day and keeping him supplied in cigarettes and money. Part of the point of a place like Tarry Hall is that the residents are supposed to learn to do their own laundry, and they are also supposed to earn their money and cigarettes by participating in the programs. Liz’s visits became a source of irritation to the staff, who felt that they stripped Fred of any motivation to do things for himself. They also believed that for deep psychological reasons of her own, Liz encouraged Fred’s dependency. When Fred left, the Tarry Hall staff was quick to write it off as a case of parental “sabotage.”
At first Liz deeply resented the accusation, but more recently she too had come to see Fred’s continued dependence on her as a problem. As she got older, Fred’s behavior and his needs were wearing her down. She was tired—tired in the way only the parent of a mentally ill person can be tired.
Still, as long as Fred was living close by, Liz would always be struggling between her motherly desire to see her child and her knowledge that the Tarry Hall staff wanted her to stay away. And on this Juneteenth, motherly desire was winning out. Late that afternoon she called Tarry Hall and asked, ever so timidly, if it would be okay for her to bring a plate of barbecue for Fred. There were tears in her eyes when the answer was yes.
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