A Long, Strange Trip
Drug abuse, schizophrenia, family and friends who meant well but did harm, and through it all, undeniable genius. For Roky Erickson, life as one of the most influential Texas rock and rollers of all time has been a long, strange trip and fortunately, it isn't over yet.
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Last year sumner decided enough was enough: Roky had a disease and he needed treatment. Sumner was angry that his 52-year-old brother, who was then living in a small federally subsidized apartment in South Austin, hadn’t been seen by a doctor in ten years. In January of this year, Sumner applied for guardianship. In May a psychiatrist who had visited Roky filed a report with a Travis County court saying that abscesses in Roky’s teeth were in danger of infecting his brain. Soon after, Roky was admitted to Shoal Creek Hospital, where he got two weeks of medical, dental, and psychological exams. Again he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, “a biological, genetic illness,” says his doctor, William Privitera, that was probably waiting to happen in 1969, “though perhaps it got sped up by drug use.” He was put on Zyprexa, one of a newer breed of anti-psychotics, by Privitera, who says it doesn’t have the side effects of the older medications like Haldol: “It helps him think more clearly, it reduces his auditory hallucinations, helps with his attention, and reduces his agitation.” Though Evelyn says Roky was anxious to leave the hospital, other family members saw immediate progress. “He shook my hand and asked about my kids,” says his brother Mike. “He’d never done that before.”
Evelyn visited Roky in the hospital every day. He asked her to cut his hair, which had grown into a massive dreadlock, and she did. She knew that the doctors were against her. “Theirs is an unhealthy, enmeshed relationship,” says Privitera. “It’s difficult to tell where she stops and he starts. We need to give Roky an opportunity to come into his own—to see what life without Mom can be.” At the June 11 guardianship hearing, Evelyn voiced her distrust of Roky’s medicine. “I would rather see the psychologists use methods more humane, more holistic, like yoga,” she said. The judge thought more drastic action was needed and made Sumner Roky’s guardian. Sumner felt he had to get Roky out of Austin, and nine days later they flew to Pittsburgh.
Once when he was a young boy, Sumner sat in the living room on Arthur Lane and listened to his big brother practice. Later he’d visit him in the insane asylum. Now he leaves him cheerful Post-it notes in his kitchen—“Dear Roky: Good Mornin’! I hope you had a good rest. Here’s your 8 am med.” He plans to raise $1 million through a new trust so that he can eventually buy his brother a home in Austin and support him for the rest of his life. “If a hundred thousand people each give ten dollars, there’s a million,” he says confidently. On the wall just around the corner from the kitchen is a drawing Roky made of Tubby the Tuba when he was a boy, years before Sumner was born. Sumner is convinced Roky had something to do with him hearing his calling. On the mantelpiece is a sculpture of a beautiful woman, done by the famous artist Charles Umlauf, an Erickson family friend. The woman is Evelyn.
“Roky looks good,” his rather taciturn father, Roger, says one evening. Roger, who designed Sumner’s ultramodern home, lives next door yet doesn’t see Roky much. Neither Roky nor Sumner seem particularly close to him. Indeed, Roky looks to Sumner for all things parental, asking him for permission like a child, sometimes testing his authority. Sumner, fifteen years younger, is patient and fair. Mostly Roky likes to watch the Cartoon Network and ride around in their dad’s big blue New Yorker with the radio tuned to his favorite Top 40 station (Roky hasn’t driven in years, terrified of getting stopped by the police). Roky is eating well, though he probably smokes a pack a day, dragging deeply on each one, exhaling, and almost immediately inhaling again. He doesn’t drink or do any kind of illicit drugs. He loves ice cream. He loves his new teeth and is no longer ashamed of his smile. (Evelyn says she had wanted to get Roky’s teeth fixed in 1994 with a root canal and caps, trying to save what teeth Roky had left, but the procedure was too expensive, so she never did it.) Sumner says that after years of not seeming to be interested in women, Roky is eyeballing them again. He likes going to talk to “this lady” who is helping him relax—Kay Miller, a new-age psychophysical therapist and Sumner’s “mentor” of twelve years who is seeing Roky thrice weekly. The only thing Roky doesn’t like is the tuba playing. “How about we go to your hotel and watch TV?” he said to me one afternoon when it was time for Sumner to practice.
On one of our drives, I asked Roky what he missed most about Austin and he said, “I miss my mother.” He hasn’t talked to her since a phone call on his birthday in July; Sumner says she tried to talk Roky out of taking his meds, so Sumner began blocking her calls. Sumner is just as determined as Evelyn was to have things his way, by his rules, and that means no contact with Mother. Without Evelyn, Roky’s past six months have been a paradigm shift as drastic as the one he was forced to undergo in 1969, when he went from living on LSD to living on Thorazine.
And though Sumner is kind to Roky, his way is not all sweetness and light. He is extremely bitter about Evelyn and vowed long ago never to return to her house—his childhood home—again. “Sumner is so wonderful,” says Roky’s ex-wife Dana, “but I hate it that he’s got this anger inside him.” Indeed, it borders on hatred, as strong as Roky’s love. It’s a sign of how upset Sumner is, how hard he’s pulling in his direction, that he doesn’t realize how irrational he sometimes sounds when he talks about Evelyn. “Every time he brings up his mother to me, he talks about what a horrible person she is,” says Monahan. “He wants everyone to know what a better job he is doing with Roky. He saved his brother’s life—why isn’t that enough?” Not everyone is happy with the way Sumner has gone about it. Dana worries that Sumner’s mentor, Miller, a woman in her seventies like Evelyn, will shift Roky’s dependency and become another Evelyn. Then there’s the money: attorneys hired by Evelyn finally reached a settlement with Charly (the company that bought the rights to Roky’s material from IA) that would have put more than $100,000 in Roky’s trust, but Sumner, the new guardian, has held up the deal for months so that he and his attorneys can scrutinize it further. And there are complaints that for too long Sumner has kept Roky away from his home, Austin, and his son, Jegar, who lives there (Spring lives in Houston and Cydne in Williamsport, Pennsylvania).
And, of course, Evelyn. At some point Roky will finally return to Evelyn’s world in Austin—“We’re taking it a day at a time,” said Sumner in October. “It could be two months, it could be eight”—and Sumner will go back to Pittsburgh and Sumner’s version of Roky will meet Evelyn’s. She is still angry and hurt over the way Sumner and the state took Roky away, and she filed a 75-page complaint with the Board of Medical Examiners about the whole affair. When I told her that Roky said he missed her, she said she missed him too. She was dismayed when I told her he was smoking a lot. “I had him down to ten cigarettes a day,” she says. “This worries me. The drugs cause you to overeat and oversmoke.” She’s concerned about Roky getting diabetes. She fills her days practicing the piano and doing yoga. Ever the iconoclast, she marched in an October anti-war demonstration and got her picture in the paper. She sings at church and at an open mike every once in a while with a little jazz band, doing a couple of old songs. On one such evening I was reminded again of Roky’s debt to her when I noticed how she cocked her head to the right as she sang “September Song,” just like she must have done fifty years ago when her son mimicked her every move. She didn’t shake it, though; that was Roky’s idea.
One night i asked Roky if he felt like playing the guitar. “Oh, no,” he said. But then he drawled, “I also play organ a lot.” My ears perked up; it was in the vicinity of such logic that the real Roky emerged. So you do play guitar some? “Yeah, just not in public.” Do you think you ever will? “I don’t really think so,” he said, laughing nervously. “I hope not.” Are you writing any songs? “Sometimes I write. I’ve got some ideas in my head right now.” For songs? “Uh-huh.” Are they going to be different? “I don’t know.” Then, after a pause, he asked, “Where are we?” He was changing the subject. But I had become one of those well-intentioned meddlers and I pushed him, saying I hoped he’d write and perform again. “Uh-huh,” he responded warily. Then I said how a lot of people would love to see him play again. Roky was silent. He was not going to be led somewhere he didn’t want to go. It was creepy how easy it was to take advantage of Roky’s childlike nature and humbling how firm he was in rejecting me. He was testing his limits, trying, it seemed, to come up with a version of himself he can live with.
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