by Ron Powers
Kevin and Peter moved into their Roxbury apartment and commenced their summer nights waiting tables at the club. By day, they worked toward their true summer goal: to re-form Booby and book a gig at the Middle East, the iconic music-and-restaurant complex on Central Square in Cambridge. A landmark with its bright gold canopies, several dining areas, and four performance stages, the Middle East had showcased and often introduced legendary bands in rock, jazz, punk, ska, and hardcore: Aerosmith, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and hundreds more. Kevin and Peter wanted to make it there before they began college. They put out flyers for a drummer, wrote new songs, and rehearsed daily. They found a skinsman who suited their standards. By August they had auditioned at the Middle East and secured a September booking.
Early the following month, they moved into their separate college residences. Kevin was assigned a third-floor room with another guitarist in a Berklee student residence, a fine old graystone on Massachusetts Avenue, an easy walk to the academy. To Honoree and me, it was a wonderful building, an artifact of the Proper Bostonian Era. In fact, all of it seemed too good to be true, and it was. By then, out of our sight, Kevin’s dreams and his life had begun to fall apart.
A midsummer email was our first warning. “Hey guys,” Kevin began in a typical salutation, and then dropped into a tone of uncharacteristic dejection:
I’m writing partly to purely just vent about some things and partly to seek some advice from you as I value both of your wisdom equally and very strongly. I’ve been feeling real stressed lately here, more so than I have before. I’m not at any point of giving up or complete dispair. But as you could imagine, for me, I feel like I need something else right now that I’m not getting here.
What Kevin was not getting, he went on, was support from Peter. He felt that his friend was pulling away; losing interest in the friendship and in Booby as he immersed himself in preparing for the demands of the conservatory.
One of the harshest lessons an adolescent must learn is among the most common: things change. The childhood world falls away, and with it the childhood verities. Change often means loss, and loss can wound the adolescent heart. Among the most painful and bewildering of these losses are best-friendships and romances. The spurned generally heal over time. But not everyone heals.
Physiologically speaking, these early (metaphorical) blows to the heart often coincide with the actual and necessary severing of cortical synapses described earlier in this book: the “neurological housecleaning” of obsolescent gray matter formed early in life so that new connections can form to meet the challenges of adulthood. This pruning-away stage usually happens from age sixteen through the early twenties. It is the same period of life when the genes for schizophrenia, if they are present, come alive to help fill the vacuum.
Peter, of course, could not have known any of this, and likely had no idea of his bandmate’s perceptions. Two years earlier, Kevin might not even have noticed his friend’s actions, nor been upset by them. Honoree and I were likewise oblivious. We did not think to connect Kevin’s distress to his January crisis, though I now believe that these were both symptoms of what was to come. We simply knew that our buoyant son had fallen into an untypical state of depression. We hoped it would pass.
Shortly before their Middle East performance, Kevin wrote, “I’m rehearsing with the band tonight and Pete and Jeff [the drummer] and I have already run the set, so it should go well. We’re very excited about the show and we’ll certainly tell you all about it.”
The show did go well, apparently. But Kevin’s message afterward was one of devastation. He expressed it in another long, almost despairing email. Peter, in his perception at least, had quickly left the stage at the end and joined a crowd of friends with hardly a word to Kevin or the drummer: “What hurt me the most,” he wrote, “was that he turned his back on me after a triumph of a show.” He mentioned a state of feelings that we did not recognize at the time as a four-alarm warning for those with a schizophrenia gene complex: “The last thing I want to do is move into my first Berklee year with the stress that is eating me alive.”
He strove—I could almost feel him doing it—to recapture some of his characteristic optimism: “I like it here [at Berklee]. I like the kids, I like the environment, I don’t feel like someone ‘different’ because I like rock, classical and jazz and bluegrass at the same time. This is my kind of place.” He followed with an attempt at philosophical detachment: “Maybe Peter has found his place too. But OUR place is no longer a thing in my mind, our common ground is not there and I can’t see it forming again.” And then the close, and a sentiment that he almost never failed to include in his messages to us, yet, in this instance, might have signaled some deep foreboding about his future:
You guys are everything to me and thank you for all your love,
Sincerely,
Kevin
As Kevin pushed on into his first semester at Berklee, Dean was navigating a new campus as well. In autumn 2002 he began classes at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. He’d transferred up there from Fort Lewis College at Durango, pursuing a girlfriend who had made the same change. He had not come back east during this transition, electing to sign up as a summer volunteer with the Colorado Trail Crew that was clearing logs and boulders for a road through the vast Front Range.
He’d lived in the mountains on a spartan diet, played his guitar around evening campfires, and slept in a tent. The wilderness had called to Dean since boyhood, when he’d hiked and camped and skied in the tamer mountains around Middlebury. Now, the heavy lifting in the cool mountain air hardened his athletic body, and the company of his taciturn fellow volunteers made real a romantic escapist dream, the origins of which were known only to Dean. Dean and the girl broke up in the fall of 2002. How serious—or seriously wounded—were the feelings on each side was unknown to us, as was her name. But before long, Dean was sending us CDs of ballads he had written and recorded. The earliest ones were filled with raw emotion and harsh chords, but even these showed moments of tenderness: he built an entire song, in fact, around the image of a blue backpack. It seems that he was working through an ache of loss that paralleled Kevin’s—an ache made worse by the same stealthy transformation of his mind.
Once again, we had no means for grasping this.
As the weeks went on and he sent us more of his songs, the pain in his lyrics softened beneath an overlay of clever irony and wordplay, and, from there, into poetry that was alternately playful, joyous, and nakedly tender.
He continued to excel as a student. “Your English scores are phenomenal!” I’d written him shortly before Kevin’s crisis. He let us know that although he remained haunted by the accident with Amy and its aftermath, and suffered from anxiety, his burst of songwriting had paid off: he had booked a gig at Jon’s Blue Note, a small but popular coffee shop and a stop on the Colorado independent folk circuit: “I’m gonna make fliers today.”
We emailed back and forth a lot—about the national scene, Dean’s music, his writing, many topics. Emails provided the unexpected benefit of letting us purge the inexplicable tension that hovered over our times together. They somehow allowed Dean to drop the monosyllabic retorts he used in our personal conversations and open up his full expressive range—funny, ironic, informed, companionable, and refreshingly profane when the situation seemed to demand it, as in this reply to some tale of political perfidy I had sent to him:
that is some scary shit, pardon my arab, ill check it out i told this girl whos sitting next to me, and she kind of looked back and seemed to think if she just smiled long enough i would go away, my point is nobody cares, nobody, really cool, alright take care, im going to read
And:
well, my fuckin teachers a dickhead, and i put up with him every day cause of his attendance policy is so strict, you know, im going there i pay to go to school, i have to listen to his bull shit and today he says “dean powers, where are you? why are you looking so mean?” everyone turns to look at me, and i
joked “i just got done with mean class im practicing my homework.” silence in the class, as if we were having a moment of silence for the deceased, my humors pretty poor i guess but then i felt mean, and i wasn’t before, and he went on teaching the class without responding to me either, and as if he were truely upset with me, im pissed, and im trying to let it go, ive got a lot of shit in my head, i understand hes very insecure, he wants everyone to be onboard with him in his jocularity, and i don’t have to laugh i don’t have to pretend im enjoying the class and worry the teacher is going to whip me into shape for not doing so, ya know?
I admit to laughing, possibly even out loud, at that “i just got done with mean class” line.
I was oblivious then to certain other products of his imagination; a line from a song, say, that may or may not have amounted to a warning sign:
These are such good songs, Dean. Some of your lyrics are amazing. And clever as hell. I love the one about the man inside your head and you have to disagree with what he said. That’s as good as anything Dylan wrote.
Perhaps I should have wondered: What man inside his head?
Once in a while, I did wonder. After we’d both watched a televised football game, separated by two thousand miles, he emailed:
i think that game was fixed, and probably by the government
Somehow, that remark struck me as more than a joke.
His psychic struggles resurfaced, and with them his own yearning for anesthetization via drugs and alcohol.
As for Kevin, notes of anxiety persisted as his semester went on, intruding into his attempts to be upbeat. “Wow, it can be intense here.” “It’s like you were saying in your email, all the tiny little things in everyday life get magnified and come to a much broader meaning than ever before.” “It’s almost nerve racking…”
Was he all right? We had no real evidence to assume that he wasn’t all right. He must be all right. Every adolescent had a rough patch or two. Kevin was Kevin. He would be all right.
At four o’clock one October morning, the ringing telephone roused us from our sleep and into the realization that Kevin was not all right. Nothing would ever be all right with Kevin again.
Honoree got to the phone first and heard Kevin’s breathless voice announce that he had been selected by a senior member of Berklee’s administration, a man who himself was a renowned musician, to accompany him on a concert tour of Russia.
Honoree listened for a minute and then handed me the receiver without a word. Kevin repeated the information to me. He sounded out of breath, as well he might after learning of such an honor; but there was something else in his voice as well, a quaver, and he was talking very fast. I tried to pin him down on specifics, starting with why he was calling at this hour. He said something, in his rushed voice, about having just come from an all-night planning session. I pressed for more: When are you leaving? For how long? How did this selection process work? But I quickly realized that I was talking into a dead line. Kevin had hung up.
Honoree made coffee and we sat in the living room in our robes trying to make sense of it. Such is the power of persuasion, or the need to believe, or something, that we tried to fit his announcement into some plausible context. He was pretty damn good, after all. Had he made it through an all-night winnowing process of deserving students? But why all night? And why did he hang up? But then why would he have called to tell us this in the first place if it weren’t true? There lay the rub, and neither of us could summon the will to articulate it right away. We stared at the coffee cooling in our cups until I at last spoke up, framing my suspicions in words that I have never managed to recall without wincing.
“Unless,” I said, “he wigged out.”
I guess I put it that way to distance myself from the ghastly chance that it was true. But then Honoree’s and my eyes met, and we both knew that it was true.
Honoree picked up our landline receiver and dialed Kevin’s mobile phone. No answer, just his message. Should we call his roommate? We told each other that we didn’t want to wake him. It was too early, by hours, to contact anyone at the school. And so we resigned ourselves to waiting. At some point I believe we returned to bed. But we didn’t sleep. We stared at the ceiling and wondered where our son was, and why, and at what point it would be necessary to call the police.
It was Kevin himself who reestablished contact, at midmorning. He had just boarded a westbound Greyhound bus, he told Honoree. He was headed to Los Angeles, where he expected to find work as a rock star.
Honoree didn’t engage him on this. The tour to Russia was revealed as the vapor it was, but this new destination, if not the immediate dream behind it, was unnervingly real. Already, our instincts were sharpening, growing strategic. She ended the conversation; we found a map and determined that the bus’s first stop would be Albany. We probably could get there in time to intercept him and find help. Albany was about three hours from Middlebury, and three to four hours from Boston, depending on traffic and the route. We dressed and headed right out, our mobile phones, thankfully, in tow.
At the Albany terminal we waited an hour and then exited our van as the Greyhound from Boston pulled in. Its door opened and its passengers filed out. Kevin was not among them. For some reason I had anticipated this. My wife and I returned to the van and sat there trying to think of what to do next. Honoree’s mobile phone rang. It wasn’t our son, but a New York state policeman. He had found her number on Kevin’s phone. He told her that he had picked up Kevin and taken him to a hospital in Syracuse. I started the van and we set out on the two-hour drive west.
There we learned that Kevin had been removed from the bus at a service stop near Albany. He’d awakened, disoriented, from a sleep, and stormed up the aisle toward the driver, demanding to know where he was being taken. He’d grown belligerent—for the first and only time in his life—and a good Samaritan passenger, a powerful man, had hurried up the aisle behind him and gently enveloped Kevin in his arms. The driver ejected him from the bus at the service stop, and the state police had taken over from there.
A hospital doctor in Syracuse led us to an emergency room where we found our son sound asleep on his side, his back to us. He had been sedated. The attending doctor was not certain what had happened. He said that it might have been a drug overdose. And then he said it might have been an onset of bipolar affliction. This shocked us, as we had heard the term “bipolar” infrequently in our lives, and we instinctively believed it was a disease that happened to other people. We were typical in our clueless denial.
Then the doctor said something that unsettled us even more. He said that bipolarity was a better diagnosis “than the alternative.” He did not name “the alternative.” Yet, uninitiated as we were, we thought that perhaps we knew.
We spent nearly that entire afternoon not in consultation with the hospital staff, but in phone calls to and from our insurance provider. The conversations were silly, and maddening. We were told, for instance, that the provider would not offer us coverage unless Kevin were transported to Middlebury by ambulance, a distance of 230 miles and a driving time of four hours. The problem was, there were no available ambulances. We asked why we could not drive our son, given that we were going that way ourselves. The provider provided an answer of some kind. Versions of this exchange went on for perhaps three hours, until someone came to what passed for their senses and said that it was okay for us to take Kevin home. He was given another sedative, and he slept until we reached our house in Middlebury after dark, filled with apprehension over what our son’s mood might be on the following morning.
He was thankfully subdued as we made an emergency appointment with a psychiatrist in Middlebury, who prescribed more tranquilizing meds and, after a few more visits, confirmed his condition as bipolarity. Perhaps this was correct at the time. The manic phase of this disease certainly features symptoms that describe our younger son’s behavior: impulsiveness, irrational euphoria and grandiose hope, the loss of judgment, high energy, sleeplessness. B
ut as I have written earlier in this book, these symptoms are almost identical to those of schizophrenia, though they involve different, yet sometimes overlapping, out-of-balance brain networks. It is possible that Kev’s affliction deepened over time and crossed diagnostic boundaries. It is also possible that the similarities of symptoms may have disguised the fact that the latter, more destructive disease was already at work.
The point in writing this is not to place blame on the psychiatric physicians who examined our son in these early stages. I believe that all of them were working in good faith to isolate the precise synaptic failures from a spectrum of dauntingly similar possibilities. If anything, I write this to stress how utterly unprepared we were for grasping the overwhelming obligations that lay before us; how eager—how understandably humanly eager—to accept and cling to the least dreadful of the possibilities. We did not know what my later studies of chronic mental illness have made crystal clear: that the most useful weapon in the meager arsenal is early intervention. Early and persistent. No cures exist for mental illness, but the quicker and more accurately the early symptoms are noticed and treated, the better the prospects for minimizing the effects.
The larger point in writing this, then, is to arm other families with a sense of urgency that perhaps came to us too late: When symptoms occur in a loved one, assume the worst until a professional convinces you otherwise. Act quickly, and keep acting. If necessary, act to the limit of your means. Tough advice. Tough world.
At Middlebury, a brief hospital stay; doctor’s appointments; rest. Kevin acknowledged his relapse into marijuana dependency to us. We talked about recovery strategies with him, as did his doctor. Kevin was emphatic that he intended to get over his addiction and return to Berklee. But as it turned out, the handsome old residence building on Massachusetts Avenue was among the worst possible places for Kevin to live. The air in its three stories, the air that Kevin breathed, was tinted blue each evening with marijuana smoke. We did not learn until later that Kevin had stopped going to his academic classes almost immediately and stayed in his room except to attend his music workshops. When we did learn these things, we felt no impulse to blame the Berklee School of Music. This was life in American colleges. Most students made it through. The few who carried schizophrenia genes tended to be not so lucky. We didn’t know anything yet about “the few who carried schizophrenia genes,” even though a teachable moment lay directly in front of us.
