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.
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Around six o’clock, with the party winding down, Liz Thomas made her first trip to Tarry Hall in five years. Along with the barbecue, she brought a carton of cigarettes and $5. When she arrived, she pulled one pack out of the carton and handed the rest to a Tarry Hall aide; she remembered the routine from the last time. Then she found her son, and after much hugging and kissing and fussing with his hair, they retired to a small room where they could talk in relative privacy. She handed him the cigarettes and the plate of barbecue, which he promptly began to devour.
“What did you do today?” she asked.
“Went for a walk.”
“What are you going to do tomorrow?”
Fred stared at his now-empty plate, but did not reply. “You’re not being very nice, Fred,” Liz said. “Talk to me.” She was pleading. “Are you glad to be back in Houston?” Fred nodded yes, but he still said nothing. “I’m glad you decided to come to Tarry Hall.”
At that, Fred looked up at his mother. There were daggers in his eyes. “Mommie Dearest,” he said in a tone dripping with sarcasm. But instantly the tone softened. “Mommie Dearest. Did you like that movie? Better than The Exorcist. I think I’ll be content living here.” He smiled at her. “I used to have two Richard Pryor albums.”
She smiled back. “You’re looking good, baby. They got any pretty women in here?”
“You’re pretty, Mama,” replied Fred. “Nobody’s prettier than you.”
The Trials of Tarry Hall
“Hygiene and room check are now beginning.”
It was 9:15 a.m. the next day, and the voice booming over the intercom belonged to Dennis Milam, a bearded, sandaled social worker who is third in command at Tarry Hall. By this time, the residents (as Tarry Hall calls its clientele) had been awake for nearly three hours, and theoretically they should have finished their hygiene and room chores. Instead, most were in the same position as Fred. They hadn’t even started.
Tarry Hall is a deceptively large house built in the shape of a square doughnut. Its central feature is an outdoor courtyard surrounded by four wide corridors. In the front of the building is a pool room, and in the back, a den. Because it has a TV and a stereo, the den serves much the same function as the dayroom in Austin; it is where the residents can usually be found when they have nothing else to do. It was where Talvin Paul—a 25-year-old graduate of Grambling who was Fred’s caseworker—now found his new charge.
“Have you taken a shower yet, Fred?” asked Talvin.
“Too early for that, man.” Fred stared straight ahead while Talvin spoke. “One of the expectations around here is that everybody takes a shower,” Talvin said. Still, Fred didn’t move. It was 9:25. Over the intercom Dennis said, “Fred Thomas, you are needed in your room.” Fred crushed his cigarette butt into the floor—ignoring Talvin’s admonition to put it in an ashtray—and shuffled off to his room.
The purpose of the hygiene and room chores is to instill a sense of responsibility in the residents, and those who accomplish their daily tasks are rewarded with access to their money and cigarettes and with the accumulation of free time—time they can spend away from the halfway house. Fred and his new roommate, another recent arrival from Austin, listened impassively as Dennis explained what was expected of them each morning: besides making their beds and putting their clothes away, they were supposed to sweep, mop, and dust their rooms. In addition, each would soon be given a household chore (Fred was eventually assigned a bathroom to keep clean). “Do you understand?” asked Dennis. Fred nodded and began picking up his sheets. But as soon as Dennis left, Fred dropped the sheets, wandered back into the den, and turned on the stereo. It was 9:35.
Fifteen minutes later, Dennis found him. “In the morning,” he said, “we don’t have the stereo or TV on.” He flicked the music off. “Your roommate is sweeping the room right now, so why don’t you get the mop?” Annoyed by that, Fred nonetheless got a mop and dragged it behind him toward his bedroom. When he got there he gave the floor a few halfhearted passes. But as soon as the coast was clear, Fred started to walk back to the den. Talvin spotted him. “Fred,” he shouted, “you need to be in your room!”
That was more than Fred could bear. He stalked past Talvin into the den and again turned on the stereo. When Talvin caught up with him, Fred glared. “Why are you trying to punish me, man?” he asked. It was 10:15.
Today hygiene and room check took nearly two hours. Up until a few months ago, it had taken a half-hour. Back then, the staff had encouraged residents to look for work, and the residents themselves had run a meeting every Friday to decided how much free time each person had earned. Now the staff was spending its time encouraging residents to comb their hair, and the Friday meeting was run by staff members, who had already decided how much time each resident had earned. Things were different because the residents were different; the mentally ill people whom Tarry Hall once treated had been much less sick than the ones it treated now.
The era had only recently ended, yet it was already viewed nostalgically by the Tarry Hall staff. It had been more fun to work with higher functioning residents: they were more motivated to succeed and easier to reach, and the psychic rewards for the staff were much more immediate. Tarry Hall had enjoyed a great deal of independence in the old days. Stripped of that independence, Tarry Hall was bitter.
For most of its eight-year existence, the halfway house had successfully resisted efforts to make it a port of entry for released state hospital patients. Never mind that Tarry Hall was the only county-funded halfway house in the city and that there were mentally ill people in the streets of Houston who needed the kind of help Tarry Hall could offer. For years Tarry Hall administrators refused to admit that those two facts were connected.
Early in 1985, however, in its never-ending effort to reduce hospital populations, MHMR began dangling money in front of local mental health agencies as an inducement to treat more mentally ill people. Each agency would receive $35.50 per patient per day that the census was reduced in Austin. Gradually, the Harris County mental health authorities began making changes aimed at keeping more people out of the hospital. For instance, they assigned caseworkers to monitor the progress of recently released state hospital patients. They also began scrambling for more placement possibilities; inevitably, they saw Tarry Hall as a luxury they could no longer afford. In late March 1985 Tarry Hall had begun accepting its first handful of residents from Austin.
The change from without imposed on Tarry Hall also brought changes from within. Tarry Hall used to have a library; now the library was being converted to a point store. The former clientele had attended current-events classes; the new clientele took walks in the neighborhood. In general, sights were lowered. Among the staff members, who had agreed to the changes only because they had no other choice, morale was very weak.
The question that remained unanswered was whether the new Tarry Hall was equipped to help its new residents. For years the staff had done a good job with the people it chose to work with. Now, though the residents were different, the staff was the same. Could the staff teach residents to comb their hair and take a shower as well as they had once taught current events? Could Tarry Hall motivate the truly unmotivated? As Fred had shown, it would be no easy trick.
Parental Sabotage
On his third day at Tarry Hall, just after lunch, Fred Thomas walked home. It took him all afternoon. He got into the house by crawling through an unlocked window; when Liz got home from work she thought at first she had been robbed. But then she poked her head in Fred’s old room and saw her son there, sleeping off a bottle of wine.
In her heart of hearts, Liz knew she should probably drive him right back. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Instead she made him dinner, and afterward they talked, mostly about how Fred didn’t want to go back. At about ten-thirty, Liz handed him all the money she could spare—$2—and drove him to Tarry Hall.
At the halfway house Fred’s departure did not create much of a stir. It was only after Liz brought him back that several mental alarm bells went off among the staff—and the source of the concern was not Fred but his mother. “The minute she walked in the door, she had that look on her face I remembered from last time,” Judith Mitchell said later. “And the first thing she wanted to know was whether Fred had enough cigarettes.” To Judith, that was the first sign of parental sabotage. “I think I’m going to have a talk to her,” she added. But she never did.
A week later Liz screwed up her courage and called Talvin to ask if Fred could come home for a Fourth of July barbecue. She knew that such a request left her open to accusations of sabotage, but she couldn’t help herself; she was a mother who wanted to do something nice for her son. She also half-expected Talvin to say no to her request, but to her surprise that was not the case.
My Library
