I WASN’T GOING to make the same mistake I made the year before. Tim needed help to succeed on his own. And by now, I had a pretty good idea about what that help should be. First, Tim needed to rely more on mental health professionals to help him meet his day-to-day needs and less on his homeless friends. Second, these professionals needed to facilitate a formal collaboration of housing, legal services, law enforcement, and community-services providers in arranging for and carrying out services for Tim. In other words, Tim needed integrated services, led by a mental health professional. And third, we as parents had to play our role, supporting Tim as needed and working productively with all of these people on his behalf.
On the day Tim moved into his Section 8 apartment, I thought we might be on track. ATCMHMR was back in the picture on the clinical side as a result of Tim’s probation and finally seemed ready to help organize and coordinate Tim’s care. Tim’s homeless friends were a few miles away. We had a new housing provider that understood his basic needs, and Tim’s probation officer seemed willing to advocate for services that could prevent his return to jail. And Pam and I were close by, able to work to connect him with a neighborhood bank, drug store, and supermarket and other resources to facilitate his independent living.
Then I received an unexpected out-of-state job offer, and Pam and I were making plans to move from Austin to Florida by the summer. I was reluctant to leave Tim behind, but he wanted to stay in Austin. We had six months to arrange Tim’s supports. I thought that would be plenty of time.
We started by making a list of the things Tim would need to live on his own when Pam and I moved away. He had an apartment and food shopping and preparation skills, and he knew how to take the bus to get around town. He needed a telephone he wouldn’t lose, so we installed a landline in his apartment. He also needed a new ID card, which we got for him.
The rest of the things he needed were going to be a little more challenging. Two in particular were a high priority. Tim had to be able to manage his money and his mail so that he could pay his bills and respond to important correspondence on time. He also had to be able to work with ATCMHMR to manage his mental illness and his medications. He needed a caseworker he could count on at ATCMHMR and someone to run interference for him with the criminal justice system, including his probation officer.
To improve Tim’s money-management skills, I arranged to have a fifty-dollar check drawn from his account and sent to him by mail each week. I told him that he could use the fifty dollars any way he wanted. I wanted to help him begin to manage money—something he also wanted to do—and to have an incentive to check his mail regularly. Then I brought him with me to the bank branch office where Pam and I did our regular banking. I introduced him to the branch manager and tellers. I explained that Tim would be coming in each week to cash a check drawn on his own account. They agreed to cash the check for him even if he forgot his ID card.
With money management checked off our list, we paid a visit to a Walgreens pharmacy near his apartment. We made sure that the pharmacy had his Medicaid number and address on file so that Tim would be able to fill prescriptions there without needing to bring either money or identification.
I was feeling upbeat about our progress, but there was one thing that did not happen right away. ATCMHMR did not assign a new caseworker to Tim, and so no one from ATCMHMR accompanied us on our visits and started getting to know Tim. And when I asked if ATCMHMR could find Tim a representative payee, there was no one available for this, either.
No problem, I thought; we’ll make do. But one Sunday in mid-February, Tim came for dinner showing signs of active psychosis. Fearful and anxious, he couldn’t tell me if a caseworker had checked in on him. He hadn’t gone to the pharmacy to fill any of his prescriptions. He hadn’t slept for a couple of days but refused to take any of the trazodone we had in the house. He was irritable and he didn’t want any food. “Just coffee,” he said, because he wanted to stay awake. When Pam and I said no to the coffee, he cut short his visit.
The next day proved to me both how elusive the idea of collaborative services driven by mental health professionals would be for Tim and how inadequate my plan for his independence was. Nothing went according to plan.
Tim’s probation officer called me as I was getting ready for work. I had not heard from her since just after Tim’s release from jail, and she told me that Tim had missed two scheduled appointments. She did not have Tim’s address or phone number, and her office was issuing a warrant for his arrest. I gave her Tim’s contact information and told her that I did not think he was actively avoiding her. He was just holed up in his apartment and not feeling well and had not been assigned a new ATCMHMR caseworker yet. She seemed to understand as we strategized about how she might encourage him to ask for more treatment services from ATCMHMR.
I told her I was concerned about the arrest warrant because I didn’t want him back in jail. I asked if it could be withdrawn if I brought Tim to see her right away. She said that it could not because her supervisor said that it had been ninety days since they had had contact with Tim. I reminded her that Tim hadn’t been released from jail until the first week of January, so it could not have been more than forty days. She told me that the wheels of the system were turning and there was nothing more she could do but that she did want to see Tim right away anyway.
I skipped work and went to get Tim. It was a challenge getting him out of bed; he complained that he was too tired to leave his apartment. I told him about the arrest warrant and said that if he did not go to see his probation officer with me, the police might come for him instead.
He reluctantly agreed to come with me. We left his apartment around ten-thirty and arrived at the probation office a few minutes later. His probation officer spent about forty-five minutes with us. Tim was barely able to keep his eyes open. He was unwashed and incoherent in his responses to her questions. She judged that he was in need of treatment. She asked about the level of support that ATCMHMR was providing, and when I described it as inconsistent she immediately put in a call to the agency.
She demanded a more intensive level of treatment, either through ANEW or ACT. She told Tim that she was making it a condition of his probation that he take his medications and asked him if he was willing to go immediately to the ATCMHMR emergency services center for an evaluation. Tim said yes and agreed to take any medications they gave him. She asked him if he was drinking or using drugs; he said no to drinking but yes to marijuana. She asked him if he was using marijuana because it made him feel better, and he said yes. She said she appreciated his honesty and just let it go.
Before we left, she called ATCMHMR emergency services directly and demanded that a nurse see Tim as soon as we arrived. When she hung up she reported that she got “attitude” from the person on the other end of the line but that we should still go right to the emergency services program. She made a follow-up appointment for the end of the week to meet with Tim in his apartment and promised that she would follow up with ATCMHMR before then.
When we arrived at the ATCMHMR emergency services center, I let the receptionist know that we had been sent directly from the probation office for an evaluation and medication. She asked us to take a seat. Despite the call from the probation officer, we waited nearly an hour before seeing a counselor. Tim’s agitation increased, and he occasionally muttered to himself. He also whined repeatedly that he wanted to go back to his apartment to sleep. He twice tried to leave the center, forcing me to follow him out the door and coax him back.
We finally saw a mental health counselor. Tim answered his questions in a monotone. Then the counselor turned to me and said that we shouldn’t be there because Tim didn’t need emergency services; he just needed a medication order. He handed it to me and told us to go to an ATCMHMR clinic a mile or so away that would fill the order. Just to be sure, he called the facility before we left to tell the staff that he was sending us there and why.
As we were being ushered out, I told him I was concerned about Tim, who appeared to me to need more than just medication. He was becoming more and more agitated and was still muttering incoherently. The counselor asked Tim if he was hallucinating, and Tim said yes. The counselor hesitated for a moment and then repeated that he did not think Tim needed immediate treatment. We should just go to the clinic to get the medication order filled.
I was worried that we might have to wait again at the clinic. If the only service we were going to get there was filling a prescription, couldn’t he just call it into Walgreens so we could pick it up there on the way back to Tim’s apartment? He said no, that the order had to be filled at the clinic.
Over Tim’s objection, I drove directly to the clinic. When we got there Tim was asked to take a number. We waited. Finally, we were called into an office where a young woman said that she would register Tim in the system and issue him a card so that he could receive medication dispensed from the clinic. But when she looked up Tim’s name in the computer, she said he was already on Medicaid. The clinic only dispensed medications to uninsured clients. Tim needed to take a prescription to a regular pharmacy, such as Walgreens, to get his medication.
I took a breath. I told her that I had already asked the emergency services center counselor to call in a prescription to Walgreens but he had refused. And now all we had was a medication order the clinic was refusing to fill, not a prescription that we could take to a regular pharmacy.
She asked us to wait a minute while she went to get a supervisor. He came back holding the order in his hand. He brusquely informed us that there were no refills permitted on the order. I had no idea what he was talking about. “We’re not trying to get a refill,” I explained, “just the medication order filled or a prescription we can bring to Walgreens.” All the while, Tim was sitting next to me moaning, begging to be taken back to his apartment so that he could get some sleep.
Finally, the supervisor agreed to call in the prescription to Walgreens. I thanked him, thinking that our hours-long ordeal finally might be ending. He glanced over at Tim, who was moaning, and said that we should leave because he was very busy and it might take him some time to call in the prescription.
I thought we might get a quicker result if we stayed put. I told the supervisor that we would just wait in the clinic until he could call it in. He told me to give him an hour and went back to his office and closed the door.
At that point I didn’t want to deal with Tim, who kept begging me to leave so he could go home to bed. And no one at the clinic wanted to deal with me. So I used the time to call the CEO of ATCMHMR, who was a member of the board of the nonprofit for which I was executive director. I left him a brief voice mail explaining the situation. A short time later, the supervisor returned from his office and told me he had called in the prescription to Walgreens. He said it should be ready for us when we arrived there. He gave me a copy for my records and sent us on our way. I checked my watch. It was three-fifteen. It had taken us nearly four hours to get a prescription called into a pharmacy. I wondered how Tim was supposed to manage any of this when he was on his own.
But our day wasn’t close to being over. When we arrived at Walgreen’s a few minutes later, Tim told me he wanted to wait in the car; he had been asked to leave the store a week earlier and told not to come back. I took a deep breath and asked why. He wouldn’t say but insisted that he hadn’t done anything wrong. I figured that the day was already a loss but that this was something we had to straighten out, so I made him come in with me. I asked to speak to the manager, who confirmed that she had asked Tim to leave because he had been “hanging out” in the store a few days earlier. Tim hadn’t said or done anything to arouse suspicion; his presence just made the cashier nervous.
I was too tired to be diplomatic. I asked whether it was Tim’s height, race, or apparent mental illness that made the cashier nervous. The manager hesitated for a minute and then replied that while Tim was welcome as a customer at any time, “homeless people milling about” (she had just assumed, on the basis of his appearance, that Tim was homeless when she told him to leave) made other customers nervous. I told her that Tim wasn’t homeless. He lived in an apartment in the neighborhood, and we had made arrangements for him to shop at this Walgreens. She finally relented, saying that he was welcome to shop there at any time.
The truth was that she hadn’t treated Tim any differently from the way he was often treated in Austin. Tall, black, and usually unkempt, Tim was a target for discrimination, and it bothered me. Once I took him into a mall department store to shop for clothes. We went to the men’s section, but to different clothing racks. He found a shirt he liked right away, but I was still looking. I noticed a salesperson watching Tim as he took the shirt from the rack and walked closer to me to wait. After a few minutes, she approached Tim and told him he needed to put the shirt back. Tim just smiled and shrugged as he started to comply; he never enjoyed confrontation. But I didn’t mind defending my son and chimed in that Tim had as much a right to purchase a shirt in her store as anyone did.
Tim was embarrassed. He said, “Dad, don’t make a big deal, it happens to me sometimes.” It finally dawned on the salesperson that Tim and I were father and son and were shopping in the store together. She apologized for the “misunderstanding,” offering a lame explanation that she was just trying to make sure we paid for Tim’s shirt in the “correct department.” “Of course you were,” I said.
I was thinking about this as I handed the Walgreens manager my business card and told her to call me if she ever had any real problem with Tim. Then I told Tim privately not to hang out there anymore.
Finally, I thought, we were ready to pick up Tim’s prescription. We went to the counter, but the prescription wasn’t ready. The supervisor at the clinic had implied to me that he had spoken to someone at Walgreens when he called in the prescription, but all he had done was leave a voice mail, to which the pharmacist had not yet listened. So we waited some more.
While we were waiting, I received a call from Tim’s probation officer, who told me that she had scheduled two more meetings for Tim. One was an interview with the ANEW program for the following Monday. She made it clear that she expected me to take the day off from work to be there with Tim. She had also set up an appointment for Tim for the following Thursday afternoon at her office. She wanted me to be there, too. In return, she said, her supervisor “might be willing” to pull the arrest warrant. I thanked her for her efforts and began to think about how I could revise my work schedule to accommodate these appointments.
When the call ended, the pharmacist called me back to the counter. She said that the prescription could not be filled because Texas Medicaid required “prior authorization” from a physician from the clinic. We did not have one and so would have to go back to the clinic to get it. Tim looked as if he were about ready to fall over. I took another deep breath and offered to pay for the prescription in cash if she would fill it. The pharmacist agreed, and twenty minutes later we finally walked out of the pharmacy with the medication it had taken us all day to get.
Drained of all energy, I brought Tim back to his apartment in silence. I took out one of his pills and filled a glass with water. As I held out the pill to him, he said that he did not want to take it. “It makes me sleepy,” he said, before heading to bed.
Tim’s intake interview for the ANEW program the following Monday was very long, and I sat through it all. He talked freely about himself, including where he was born, where he had lived, where he’d gone to school, what he’d accomplished so far in his life, and what his interests were. He also gave as much information about his medical history as he could. Toward the end of the session, the interviewer inadvertently went down an unintentionally existential path.
“The next question may seem silly,” he said, “but I have to ask it anyway. Do you know who you are?”
After a long, reflective pause, Tim sighed. “No, not really.”
“You don’t know who you are?” the interviewer asked again, a little surprised by Tim’s answer.
Tim thought a few seconds more. “No, I don’t really think I know who I am yet.”
The nature of the miscommunication dawned on everyone present. “I meant,” the interviewer corrected himself, “do you know your name?”
“Yes, it’s Tim Gionfriddo—but I don’t really know who I am.”
The interviewer moved on. “Okay. Do you know how old you are?”
“Nineteen,” Tim answered correctly.
“Very good,” said the interviewer. “And do you know what year it is?”
“I don’t know. Nineteen-eighty-five or eighty-six. I think eighty-five.”
I tried to help. “Not your birth year, Tim. He means what year is it now?”
“Oh,” he said. “I don’t know.”
The interviewer made a note. “Do you know what day it is?”
“Uh, Monday?” Tim guessed, playing a one-in-seven chance that he would be right. He was.
“Do you know what month it is?”
“March.”
“March?”
“No, wait, the month before March.”
“And what month is that?”
“Uh, I don’t really know my months.”
“Do you know what time of day it is?”
“About three o’clock, right?”
It felt like three o’clock to me, too. “What time is it?” Tim then asked.
“Eleven A.M.,” the interviewer replied.
I couldn’t help it; the melody just started to run through my brain. “Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?”
After that tedious day, I got a call back from the CEO of ATCMHMR. A caring and thoughtful man, he was as gracious as always, referring to our day’s runaround as “unconscionable.” He then asked what I wanted for Tim besides more intensive services. Nothing, I told him—just some actual service. The next morning, a caseworker left me a voice mail. He wondered if he should ask the Austin Police Department mental health officers to assess Tim. If that was the caseworker’s idea of service, I wondered if Tim might need a different caseworker.
Tim mostly rested at his apartment over the next few days, recovering from his latest bout of psychosis. I paid him frequent visits to be sure that he took his medication and got some sleep. I cleaned his apartment with him before his probation officer visited so that it was as presentable (and free of illegal substances) as possible. The meeting went well, and the next day he made a successful trip to the bank by himself to cash his check. He came over for dinner a few days after that, rested and medicated. We had our meeting with his probation officer, who praised Tim for his progress. She did not, however, pull his arrest warrant.
The ANEW program did not accept Tim after his lengthy interview and evaluation. The counselor did not think that Tim would be able to show up for weekly appointments at the ATCMHMR clinic on his own, as was expected of all ANEW clients. If he did not, he would be discharged from ANEW. A discharge would result in a parole violation, and Tim could be returned to jail. He advised that Tim apply again for the ACT program, which provided more daily supervision.
But we ran into a snag. To qualify for ACT, Tim had to have had at least two stays in Austin State Hospital within the previous six months, or three within a year. He had been at the hospital four months earlier, but that was the only time during the last six months. Neither Tim nor anyone at ATCMHMR knew whether he had been admitted once or twice the previous spring when he was evicted from his efficiency apartment.
The ACT team suggested that to resolve the matter, Tim check himself into the hospital for a day. In recent weeks he had been hearing voices, feeling paranoid, and wondering how he could protect himself from people trying to harm him, and they guessed that the hospital would probably admit him if he said so. But Tim refused to do this.
As he was stuck between ACT and ANEW, Tim received no services from ATCMHMR, though both the agency and his probation officer were pushing him to accept some. Pam and I were traveling between Austin and Florida and could not keep a twenty-four-hour watch on him by ourselves. Tim’s apartment manager discovered four additional people living in his apartment, and in late March Tim was cited for two lease violations—one for the unauthorized occupants and another for an unclean apartment.
After that, Tim agreed to admit himself to Austin State Hospital. He thought this would get his probation officer and ATCMHMR off his back, but his plan backfired when he signed himself out again four days later against the hospital’s advice and mine. Instead of referring him to ACT, his probation officer responded by having him arrested immediately using the still-outstanding warrant, thinking that Del Valle jail would just send him directly back to the hospital for treatment. But her plan also backfired when the psychiatrist who evaluated Tim discounted his entire medical history. He decided that Tim did not have a mental illness and bounced him right back to Del Valle.
Tim was sitting in jail again, awaiting another court date. With time on his hands, he began to think seriously about moving back to Connecticut. He talked with Linda to see if she would help. She told me that she thought she would have time to put some services together for Tim.
Tim was released from Del Valle a few days later, but soon we were dealing with more immediate concerns. First, his illness worsened, but he denied that it was happening. Next, he was involuntarily admitted to the hospital—his third admission in a little over a month. Finally, while he was hospitalized he received a second notice of a lease violation from his landlord, this time for having too many “unauthorized persons” in the apartment, “urinating in the hallway,” and “throwing up just outside of the entrance way.” Tim had not been in his apartment when these things happened.
I contacted the apartment manager and explained that Tim was in the hospital. She said that she sympathized, but she would not withdraw the notice. In her view, Tim was not receiving the support she had expected from ATCMHMR. Also, she knew Pam and I were moving, and she did not want to have to deal with Tim’s issues directly when he was released from the hospital. Instead, she said that she would evict him if things did not improve immediately.
I visited with Tim in the hospital. He told me what he had told Linda—that he would move to Connecticut “for a while” after he was released. I was relieved and contacted Linda. Unfortunately, the window in which she would have been able to arrange for services on her own in Connecticut had closed, and she told me that she needed me to figure out his health care and insurance. She was also concerned enough about Tim’s failure to take his medication that she wanted to see if he could be put on an injectable medication first (which at the time only required dosing every three months). The problem was that Tim’s psychiatrists had been unwilling to use an injectable unless he agreed not to self-medicate, too.
Also, there were some new logistical issues to resolve. Linda was vacationing on Memorial Day weekend, so she did not think it would be possible for Tim to come to Connecticut until June 1 at the earliest. But Pam and I would be in Florida by then. She suggested that I fly up to Connecticut with Tim from Austin and then go back to Florida.
I couldn’t really blame her for wanting help. I knew from experience that assisting Tim was nearly a full-time job. But Pam and I were also busy. I had already squeezed in two trips to Connecticut that spring, one for Lizzie’s confirmation and another to meet with Ben’s teachers. When we were in Florida, I was working full-time at my new job while Pam searched for a place to live. And when we were in Austin, Pam and I were packing up the house and wrapping up our work obligations at the same time that we were running interference for Tim. I just didn’t have the time, resources, or energy to do everything Linda asked as well. But our situation was by no means unusual—family caregivers of people with serious mental illness are often simply burned out by the effort.
When Tim was discharged from the hospital he temporarily put his plan to move to Connecticut on hold. Austin was looking better to him. He had a new girlfriend and a tenuous hold on his apartment. What he lacked was money. So while Pam and I were in Florida, he and some friends broke into our house. They helped themselves to hundreds of dollars’ worth of computer equipment, a bike, jewelry, and other items and pawned them all. When we discovered what had happened, we were livid. We told Tim that he could not come by our house anymore when we weren’t there and that if he did he would find himself back in jail.
He then decided he would move to Connecticut. Linda relented on some of her conditions, and Pam and I arranged for Tim to leave for Connecticut by bus during our last full weekend in Austin. But Tim was torn about leaving his girlfriend behind. Linda briefly entertained the idea of letting them both come north.
On the heels of the break-in at our house, I discouraged her in an e-mail. “These days,” I wrote, “neither Tim nor his friends are to be trusted or taken at face value. You can take on whatever you want in inviting them into your home, life, and the life of your family, but be careful, and keep your eyes open. Also, Tim is legally an adult, and not your financial or legal responsibility in any way. To whatever extent you involve yourself in his affairs, others (in my experience) will attempt to make you partially responsible, and you may at times be tempted to do so yourself. It would be a mistake for you to let either happen.” This was advice from experience—if I had learned anything since Tim had become an adult, it was that to get anything done for him, I always had to be right by his side. And that just wore me out.
On moving day, Pam and I brought Tim to the Greyhound station in Austin before we set out on our drive to Florida. All of his possessions fit into three bags. We sat at the bus station waiting for the bus, and I gave him some cash, his ID, and his birth certificate. I had paid the rent on his Austin apartment through the end of June, so the apartment was still his. We had locked it up together, and we agreed that he would wait until after he got to Connecticut to give his landlord notice that he was vacating. We talked a little about his two-day itinerary and reviewed the towns in which he would be stopping.
He left Austin at one-thirty in the afternoon. He transferred to another bus in Houston, leaving there at six-ten P.M. He was supposed to travel from there through Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Mobile, Montgomery, Atlanta, Charlotte, Richmond, Baltimore, and New York on his journey to Connecticut. He never made it out of Texas.
Pam and I were in Mississippi when Linda called to say that Tim had gotten off the bus during a stop in East Texas and the bus had left without him. His money, ID, Social Security card, birth certificate, and other possessions were still on the bus. For reasons that were unclear to Pam and me, Tim decided that he should return to Austin instead of taking the next bus and catching up with his possessions. He was already on his way back there. We had not anticipated this contingency. He had no cash, no ID, no parents, and no means of support in Austin. He did, however, have a girlfriend and an apartment waiting for him.
Linda flew to Austin the next weekend to try to convince Tim to return to Connecticut with her, but by then he was settled back into his apartment. He refused to leave, and Linda returned to Connecticut without him.
It was too bad that she had not been more persuasive. Two weeks later, Tim was arrested for misdemeanor assault with injury after getting into a fight with his girlfriend. He was assigned to another defense attorney, who had never represented him before. He received an eviction notice for domestic violence while he was in jail. He stayed in jail for a week and was released after someone posted bail for him. Tim agreed to a family-violence evaluation and was ordered to stay two hundred yards away from his girlfriend. Pam and I flew back to Austin at the end of June and tried, unsuccessfully, to convince him to go back to Connecticut.
I didn’t hear from Tim for several weeks after that—the first extended period during which Pam and I were unsure of where he was. There would be many more in the future, and I would have to learn to live with this uncertainty. But I was very anxious until he turned up again. When he did, I learned that he had been arrested again just a week after we had last seen him and had been sent back to Del Valle jail. Because we had no landline in Florida and Tim was not permitted to call cell phones from jail, he could not contact us. But he did call Linda, who contacted me near the end of July to tell me that Tim was going to be released soon.
Tim’s SSI benefits had been suspended while he was in jail, and when I got a copy of the notice I let Linda know so that she could get a message to Tim. He would need to bring his release papers in person to the Social Security Administration office in downtown Austin to apply for reinstatement. He would also need to remember that when his benefits were reinstated they would be lower at first because of the two-month delay in the housing portion of the payment. In the meantime, I had paid all of Tim’s outstanding bills from the apartment and had previously sent Linda $400 to help with his move to Connecticut. The funds in his account were low, but between these and the $400, I figured that we might be able to put together a security deposit if Tim could find another place to live. He would need one soon if he wanted health care. Because his Medicaid benefits in Texas were linked to his SSI, he would lose them if we transferred his legal address to Florida or Connecticut.
Tim was now charting his own path in Austin, but he still had to make a decision. Should he stay in Austin, where he had friends and something of a support system, but no job or housing, and constant reminders that he was just one step removed from jail? Or would it be better for him to return to Connecticut, where he had family, housing, and assistance but no friends or other support system?
Because he was not thinking about coming to Florida, I withdrew as Tim’s representative payee in late August, transferring the responsibility to Linda. My control of his money had always been a source of friction between Tim and me, and I was happy that we would no longer have to fight about it. I encouraged Linda not to remain as Tim’s payee for long. I thought that she would have a better relationship with him if she could get someone else, preferably a service provider, to do it. Why invite more tension into a relationship that had plenty of tension in it already?
Almost as soon as he was released, Tim was arrested again and found his way back to jail. He waited there until November for a hearing. From Connecticut, Linda tried to bring Tim’s new public defender up to speed on Tim’s history and situation. In addition, she asked that the lawyer help Tim get the copy of his release papers to the Social Security office when he was released so that his SSI benefits could be restored. She also asked the lawyer to help Tim obtain a new photo ID and a referral back to the social services delivery system. His lawyer had no interest in doing any of these things; his job was simply to represent Tim in court.
When Tim was released from Del Valle after a hearing on November 3, he returned once again to the streets without any supports. I talked with Linda about getting Tim back to Connecticut as soon as possible, but again events with Tim moved more quickly than we could. He located his girlfriend, with whom he reconciled, but he got only as far as the Drag. A couple of days later, he was cited for criminal trespass. For the third time in his life—just as he had at the wilderness program and when he was evicted from his apartment—he sat down on the spot, would not say a word, and refused to move. The police brought him directly to Austin State Hospital.
During his first days there, he carried a quotation with him that read “He who knows, speaks not; he who speaks, knows not,” and showed it to any staff members who questioned him. They contacted Linda, but he would not talk to her either. He did, however, agree to respond to yes-no questions she asked by scratching the phone receiver once for “yes” and tapping it for “no.”
Fortunately, Pam was in Austin visiting Verena, and they went to see Tim at the hospital. Tim had started talking again by the time they arrived, and the three of them had a pleasant visit, during which Tim was calm and contemplative. He told them that he was trying to practice Buddhism and that his refusal to speak was part of an effort he was making to surround himself with peace and tranquility. This is when, on his own, he began studying Buddhism and Eastern philosophy and religion in earnest.
This more tranquil Tim was deemed to be stable and discharged from the hospital a few days later. He went back to the Drag, staying with his girlfriend or other friends in the evenings. He also began to use some services voluntarily, but not from ATCMHMR. During the day he hung out at a youth drop-in center, where he got food, health care, and supervised companionship with his peers. But he soon had another run-in with the police, which resulted in his being transported by ambulance to a different hospital, where he was treated for cuts and bruises and released. Pam and I saw him that weekend when we returned to Austin for Verena’s December graduation from college. We arranged to meet him for lunch at a local sub shop near the Drag. I was surprised by the extent of his facial injuries. He had a black eye, a bruise on his cheekbone, and a variety of small scrapes and scratches.
“What happened to you?” I asked. “The police did it,” he answered. His story was that they had accosted him for loitering on the Drag, and when he tried to run away he was tackled from behind. The officers ground his face into the sidewalk. We had no way of verifying his story, but we did confirm that he had gone to the hospital and that he had not been arrested. This was the last straw for Tim. The year had been a far too difficult and challenging one for him. He now believed that the Austin police were out to get him, and he decided that it wasn’t safe for him there anymore. We bought him a bus ticket before we left, and he was back in Connecticut in time for Christmas.
