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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In the short time Fred had been at Tarry Hall, he had not responded to the program at all. His behavior was starting to exasperate the staff. Compared with a number of other residents, Fred was quite bright; at times, when Talvin spoke to him about what he might get out of Tarry Hall, he seemed, after the usual hemming and hawing, to truly understand the point of it all. Fred would talk about wanting to live on his own and find a job, and when pushed he would admit that he had a long way to go before he was ready. “I need to do my hygiene,” he would say. “I gotta get some discipline.” He even had insight into his lack of motivation. “My mother spoiled me,” he would complain. “She never pushed me.” He liked to compare himself with Michael Jackson the singer. Joe Jackson, Michael’s father, had pushed his children to become singers, forcing them to practice every day even when they didn’t want to, Fred would say. As a result, the Jacksons had become “professionals.”
Yet, despite his insight, Fred Thomas simply would not lift a finger on his own behalf. His teeth went unbrushed and his hair uncombed. His room was disheveled. The bathroom he had been assigned to clean was so foul that the other residents wouldn’t use it. When asked about the bathroom, Fred would snap, “I ain’t no janitor, man,” and walk away.
When Liz made her request about the Fourth of July, it gave Talvin an idea. Maybe, he thought, Fred’s mother could provide the incentive he had been unable to. Talvin explained to Liz that he would like to use the visit home as a motivational tool, something Fred could earn by doing his hygiene and morning chores. Liz agreed. After he got off the phone, Talvin told Fred about the deal he had struck with Liz. Fred listened silently.
Later, however, after Talvin had left for the day, the Fourth of July was much on Fred's mind. “There’s gonna be a barbecue at my grandma’s house!” Fred said excitedly. “If I keep my hygiene up and participate more, they’ll let me home for the Fourth. That’s what Talvin said.” Just then, a Tarry Hall aide announced that she needed help planting flowers. Fred quickly volunteered, grabbed a shovel and, along with a handful of others, went outside to the garden. But once he got there, he put down the shovel, and while the others dug up dirt and planted flowers and chatted amiably, Fred just watched.
The Dirty Little Secret
One morning in early July I decided to see how the other half lived—the mentally ill people in Houston who do not have one of the 27 beds in Tarry Hall or access to the other facilities available to the lucky few. I went looking for Don Peterson.
I started at the Armstrong house where Peterson lived and talked my way inside for a quick glance around. I didn’t find Peterson, but what I did find left me reeling. Peterson’s tiny bedroom, which he shared with two other people, was particularly gruesome. A spoon on his bureau had been there for so long that whatever food it once held had turned moldy and black and so hard that it appeared glued to the surface. I saw a black woman walking around naked. I tried to talk to her, but two young white “attendants” shooed me away. The attendants would be fired a few weeks later when Armstrong found them “misusing one of the girls,” as he phrased it, though not sexually, he quickly added. Before I left, one of the tenants told me that Peterson usually hung out at the Star of Hope Mission during the day.
That’s where I found Peterson, sitting in a lower downtown parking lot across the street from the mission, a large, two-story building that can accommodate as many as five hundred homeless every night. Next to him was a white teenager, a runaway. Despite the heat, Peterson wore his usual four shirts, a vest, a jacket, and a pair of new tan cowboy boots. Sweat was dripping from the end of his moustache, and a dirty winter coat lay on the sidewalk next to him. He held a Burger King bag that contained a bottle of Thunderbird wine, which he had bought from someone at the mission for 13 cents.
Every day Peterson got up before dawn and took a bus downtown in order to be at the mission in time for breakfast, which began at 5 a.m. He usually stayed through the dinner hour. I thought at first that he came because the food was better, but he quickly disabused me. “Rev’s food’s about the same.” So why did he do it? “Dunno,” he said. “Guess it’s ‘cause this is where all my friends are.” He pointed in the direction of the runaway. I asked him what his friend’s name was. He didn’t know.
The real reason for Peterson’s routine was that the Star of Hope Mission came the closest to approximating life in an institution. He was used to the barter economy of the state hospital; that also existed among the transient population. He was used to standing in line for his food. He was even used to the danger. The runaway told me, somewhat nervously, that in the last week there had been four stabbings outside the mission. From reading the newspaper you can get the impression that mentally ill people commit an inordinate number of violent crimes. At a place like the Star of Hope Mission, you quickly see that the opposite is true: their sickness makes them easy targets.
By midmorning the sun was blazing down on the parking lot, and Peterson, dizzy from the heat and the wine, decided to walk across the street to the mission. He went into a small, fenced-in yard that was covered by a tin roof, which offered a small reprieve from the sun. I could immediately see its appeal too: it had the feel of a hospital dayroom, only much dirtier. Men who were wearing everything they owned sat and stared into space. Others slept on the asphalt, urine trickling down their legs. A hustler walked through the area selling cigarettes, 10 cents each or three for a quarter.
Peterson was in a talkative mood. He began jabbering and laughing and touching me in an eerie way. Out of the hospital less than a month, he was already regressing. I asked if he was still taking his medicine; yes, he said sharply. Then I pointed to his new boots and asked about them. “Rev bought ‘em for me,” he said proudly.
You didn’t have to spend much time in Houston mental health circles to hear the allegations about the Reverend Alvin Armstrong. They were rampant. There were allegations of sexual abuse at his house, of serious untreated illness, and more. From time to time, someone in the bureaucracy would poke around, but the investigations were always halfhearted at best. The system’s dirty little secret is that it needs Armstrong, desperately, to provide his wretched shelter. However many mentally ill people are wandering the streets of Houston, there would be hundreds more without the Alvin Armstrongs of the world. Mentally ill street people shame the society that lets them live as they do. In Armstrong’s house, tucked away in the ghetto, they are out of sight and out of mind.
Everyone in the system knew how bad his house was; everyone felt helpless to do anything. The existence of places like Armstrong’s was seen as a fact of life in the mental health business—one of the awful, unintended consequences of deinstitutionalization. A social worker who refers patients to Armstrong told me that she couldn’t bring herself to visit his house. “I don’t want to see it,” she said. “I don’t want to know where I’m sending them.” That Armstrong saw himself as a doer of good, not evil, only made things more pathetic. His case for himself contained a large measure of sad, undeniable truth. “I take care of the people no one else will touch,” he said. “Tell me what would be better,” he added when I asked him about the things I had heard, “that they live here, or outside in garbage cans?” He went on. “I don’t see you white people down here helping me.” His voice rose in indignation. “If I’m so terrible, why do people keep coming back to me?”
Certainly that was true for Peterson, who had been coming back ever since his father handed him over to Armstrong in 1979. When I asked Peterson how much he got each month from the federal government, he replied, “Dunno. Rev takes care of that. The Rev gives me whatever I need.” The modern mental health movement, with its emphasis on letting people out of institutions, does not admit that there are people who don’t know how to be anything but wards. Peterson was a ward. With the state unwilling to provide for him and his father unwilling, where else could he go but to the Rev’s?
Back at the Star of Hope Mission, it was time for lunch. Peterson dutifully got in line, his overcoat under his arm. Several hundred men were in front of him. When he finally got into the cafeteria, he picked up the day’s servings—bologna on white bread, Kool-Aid, and a prefab tart—and sat in a corner where he could eat by himself. After lunch, he went to the bathroom, where he found a dirty shirt and an even dirtier vest lying on the floor. He took off his jacket, his vest, and his four shirts, put them on the ground, and tried on the clothes he had just found. He looked at himself admiringly in the mirror; the clothes were too big, but he liked them anyway. He picked up his overcoat—leaving the rest of his clothes behind for the next person—and walked out of the mission. Then he headed up the street, to see what the rest of the day had to offer.
A Mother’s Love
Fred Thomas never got to go home on the Fourth of July. Even the chance to spend a day at home could not arouse him from his lethargy.
It was not that Fred hadn’t improved since arriving from Austin; in some ways he was vastly better. One of the premises of deinstitutionalization is that in a less stressful setting, the need for medication is reduced. That premise was clearly borne out at Tarry Hall. In Fred’s case, the doctor at the halfway house had taken him off all drugs for nearly a week in order to get a truer reading of his illness, and you couldn’t tell the difference. The doctor then cut his daily intake of Haldol by more than two thirds. On the new dosage Fred actually seemed better.
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