To this day I remain baffled by how our parents shielded Sally and me from the worst of Dad’s frantic episodes, including the midnight drive to Cincinnati and his sudden departures from our home. Had it not been for Mom’s superhuman efforts, we might have perished.
When Dad was climbing through a manic episode, his judgment was horrendous and his behavior outrageous. He needed to save Western philosophy and made late-night calls to unsuspecting colleagues around the country with his wild plans. At the same time, he might become convinced that others were stealing his ideas. When in a frenzy about such supposed theft, he disrupted OSU faculty meetings. The looks he got from strangers, or the alignment of dates on manuscripts he was reading, signaled cataclysmic events that could shape world history, leading him to rush home and type up incomprehensible notes. Despite the usual, careful organization of his lectures, he might skip from idea to idea like a flitting hummingbird.
It’s hard to imagine that he had the self-control to lie low in front of his children at those times, especially when the police came to get him to a hospital or his brother Bob appeared from California to intervene. Yet somehow, Mom—and he—kept the utter insanity hidden.
But if the truth be told, they didn’t do it completely on their own. I was a collaborator. I didn’t want to know what was happening. Whatever lay out there beneath the measured tone of our household, I never pressed to find out. During his year-long absence when I was in third grade, I gave up after my single, futile inquiry to Mom. If amnesia powder had been placed on our breakfast cereal, I sprinkled it there. If a memory pump was at work, I must have been the one dragging it from the garage and placing it atop my skull. To this day I fight the long-held belief that I must suppress anything troubling, which is part of my learned pattern, too often keeping me stuck even now. It’s one of the key battles of my lifetime.
* * *
“Steve, look here.” Mom handed me a blue book from the huge stack on the kitchen table as I paused from my algebra homework in seventh grade. Now an instructor at OSU, she was teaching freshman composition. The head of the English department, where she’d taken coursework for her new Master’s, convinced her to forgo secondary education and teach on campus. As an advanced instructor, each quarter she taught composition courses for international grad students as well as several sections of the required freshman English class.
Every few nights a batch of essays was strewn across the kitchen table, ready for grading. Back then there was only one admissions requirement for entering Ohio State, a high school diploma. First-year English was the make-or-break class. One of the topics for the current assignment—any issue to give some practice in writing—was the recent homecoming weekend. I peered down at the page. In a scrawl, the student had written his final lines: It rained and rained and rained. It was very muddey. I was so sad.
My eyes bulged. This was college English? I’d been practically raised on paragraph structure and spelling. If I didn’t attain near-perfection, my world came crashing down. I felt bad for that freshman. Mom did too, as hard as she tried to teach grammar and writing style. We were a privileged family, steeped in education, while many Ohio high school graduates had little preparation at all.
Our amusement—and horror—provided a touch of relief. It was similar with Dad when we watched the Three Stooges or Laurel and Hardy down in the family room. He loved those old films, his face convulsing with laughter. He was a boy once more in a Pasadena theater, the weight of the universe lifting. For a precious moment, the house’s unspoken tension evaporated.
Yet every so often the dam burst in a different way. Stuck outside in a thunderstorm after a swim at the town pool, chilled to the bone, I banged hard on the locked storm door, frustrated that no one could hear. I punched so hard that I slammed my fist right through the glass, avoiding a severed artery by sheer luck. Another time, when I thought Sally was teasing me too much, I slammed the door to my bedroom with such force that the full-length mirror—hinged to the back—crashed straight down to the floor, the sound of the five-foot-high rectangle of glass reverberating through the house. Somehow, it didn’t shatter.
What was it that lay a quarter-inch beneath the surface of my skin, ready to explode at a moment’s notice? My efforts to uphold the silence took their toll, leading to an occasional boiling point. Even more, I clearly carry a partial dose of Dad’s genes for bipolar illness. Although they yield a pale shadow of his own unchecked emotion during the worst of his episodes, I share similar tendencies of dysregulated affect. All too often, mental disorder is a family affair.
When I was in junior high school, Dad joined the choir at the large church he and Mom attended, a progressive Protestant congregation. The choir was ultra-high quality, sometimes accompanied by musicians from the Columbus Symphony. Every Thursday, after an early dinner, he attended rehearsals. During the week he practiced vocal scales and lyrics in his study, his voice penetrating the sliding wood door. On Sunday mornings, I saw him standing in his robe behind the pulpit of the large church sanctuary, his gaze alternating between the music in his hands and the heavens above. Where did he travel at those moments? Forward in time to the eternal life awaiting him if he kept his faith? Or back to his early religious training in Pasadena?
He told me how he combined his worlds. “I remain convinced that a supreme being created all that we see. Philosophers and scientists might attempt to comprehend a portion of the mystery.” My worries about eternal damnation were losing their grip but I still demanded perfection from myself. Suspended above a deep chasm, I clutched the narrow rope bridge, my arms and shoulders ready to give way from the strain.
At OSU Mom taught American novels, like The Great Gatsby, plus nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry. She showed Sally and me one of her favorite poems, Edward Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory.” The first and last verses stayed in my mind:
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim …
… So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
Mom said that she was trying to get her students to understand the poem’s main theme: the difference between the surface—what everyone saw as a perfect life—and the mysteries beneath, the despair no one knew. This poem, in fact, was the closest Sally and I got to any real truth about our family’s situation. Mom was committed to the sworn pact never to reveal Dad’s situation to us. It was only through discussion of literature that we received even a hint.
The famed Berkeley sociologist Erving Goffman coined the term courtesy stigma to signify society’s strong tendency to degrade anyone associated with a stigmatized individual or group. Sardonically, Goffman contended that if society rebukes and stigmatizes a certain class of people, it’s only common courtesy to denigrate those individuals affiliated with that group. Think of the relative of a leper—or someone, in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, who aided a slave in the South. Such people were total outcasts in the mainstream societies of their day. Currently, family members of those with serious mental disorder bear the huge brunt of courtesy stigma: How much closer can you get than being related to someone carrying that kind of taint?
Even more, throughout much of the twentieth century the professions of psychology and psychiatry directly blamed family members, especially parents, for causing mental illness in their offspring. Autism was linked to “refrigerator” parents who provided no emotional bonding; schizophrenia resulted from “schizophrenegenic mothers,” whose hostile and dependency-promoting styles drove their children to madness. Spouses, siblings, and offspring were part of the ongoing curse. Any consideration of biological vulnerability—including the clear findings that genetic risk is formidable for conditions like schizophrenia, bipolar illness, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and autism—was discounted.
Regarding courtesy stigma, families encounter considerable objective burden linked to their relative’s mental illness, including time taken off work and expenses for obtaining help, which all too often promote economic deprivation and major stress. Yet families also describe, quite vividly, what’s called subjective burden, linked to the shame and humiliation about the entire issue, including heroic efforts to keep things secret. As costly as objective burden can be, most families report that subjective burden—the discomfort and anxiety over admitting the very presence of family mental illness—takes a far larger toll.
As the wife of a man who periodically went mad back in the silent 1950s, Mom lived each day in the deep chasm of courtesy stigma. The psychiatric profession didn’t listen to her or value her insights in the least, and family support was completely off the radar of available mental health interventions. Rightfully, Mom felt that if anyone came to know the truth, our family would be shunned for carrying a “moral flaw,” the ultimate in unfitness. Any social standing we had would have evaporated.
Courtesy stigma isn’t just for relatives. Think of the entire mental health profession, including psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers—those individuals entrusted with the care of people with mental disorders—along with scientists who investigate causes and treatments. Bluntly, the unspoken view is that all such individuals spend their lives dealing with crazy people. In fact, people working in mental health fields encounter low status and even ridicule. Clinical psychologists are at the bottom of the totem pole of status among other psychologists; psychiatry is widely known to be an undesirable residency following medical school. Funding levels for mental health remain lower than those for physical disorders—that is, “real” illnesses. Stigma, self-stigma, and courtesy stigma fuel a crippling vicious cycle of defeat and despair, with shattering consequences for everyone touched by mental illness.
* * *
In a sudden burst, I grew several inches in seventh grade. First base was an increasingly good position in baseball, as I could reach off-target throws from the infielders. During the late spring we had a doubleheader on a bright Saturday morning. Sally was at a friend’s; Mom and Dad brought lawn chairs to watch. By noon, the heat was rising up in waves from the dusty infield. Even with my cap pulled tight around my head, I had to squint. Jogging in between innings, I stopped, blinked, and saw it in front of my eyes: A pinpoint of light, turning into a zigzag and then a lightning bolt blocking the right half of the sky. Fast-orbiting lights, bright as a thousand flashbulbs, pulsed outside my eyeballs. I reached up to cover my eyes.
“Steve, what’s the matter?” Mom said, rushing over.
“I can’t see anything,” I said back, fighting panic. “How can I make it stop?”
Dad told my coach I was sick and went for the car. Half of my vision was now covered by a yellow-gold blizzard. During the drive home the lights mysteriously faded, but the pain soon started on the other side of my head, deep in the temple, like the tip of a sword piercing my skull. If I moved a millimeter, the throbbing got worse.
Mystified and half paralyzed, I limped to bed. When Mom came in, her whisper sounded like a cannon shot. The trickles of light at the edges of my nightshade looked as bright as stadium lights. A few hours later, I rose up despite the crushing pain, feeling as though I’d swallowed a gallon of bilge. I barely made it to the bathroom. Retching over the toilet, I threw up explosively—juice, water, bile, who knows what. Panting, I sat on the floor tiles. Getting up to a wobbly standing position, I flushed the toilet, lightly brushed my teeth, and noted that the pain in my left temple had let up slightly. I slowly hoisted myself back into bed.
Sometime during the night I woke up from a deep sleep, parched. Walking gingerly to the bathroom, hardly believing I felt almost normal again, I dared drink only a few sips of water before going back to bed. The next thing I knew it was morning, the air radiant. Famished, I went downstairs, the poison inside me somehow purged. Food hadn’t tasted that good in months. It was as though I lived in two universes, one full of inexplicable pain and the other an exalted reprieve. Dad said I’d undoubtedly had my first migraine, just like he used to get as a teen. Just like Virgil Sr. and all the boys in the Hinshaw family. Just like Sally, about to begin hers. I was now linked to my relatives by pain.
* * *
After dinner, the whole family sometimes talked about Mom’s and Dad’s past lives. “How did you meet?” Sally and I asked them when we were pre-teens.
“On a blind date,” Mom answered. We didn’t yet know the term. Did you pretend to be blind? “It’s when two people who don’t know each other meet for the first time,” Mom replied patiently. “Friends of mine at OSU knew Dad, who was teaching in philosophy, and wanted the two of us to get together. We ended up falling in love.”
We peered at the wedding photo album, dated June 12, 1950. It was hard to believe that Mom looked so formal in her white gown. Dad seemed impossibly young in his tuxedo. Mom explained that they drove out West for their honeymoon, ending up in Pasadena. It was her first auto trip across the nation. Years later, in a private conversation when I was grown, she elaborated on meeting the five brothers and their families. “It was incredible,” she said. “As soon as they’d sat down for a meal, they talked over one another at the dining room table, vying for position, trying to one-up the rest. Virgil Sr. and Nettella glowed over their brood. Who knew the most about world events, politics, history, science? We wives could hardly get a word in edgewise.” Such a competitive male bastion—bonded by religion and academics—fueled Dad’s intellectual fires.
During the family discussion, Mom added: “We made another trip in 1952 when I was first pregnant with you, Steve, seeing all the California relatives again.”
“But there was a tragedy,” Dad continued. The first night of their drive up the coast to San Francisco, a message awaited them at the front desk of their hotel. Dad’s father had been in a car accident outside Bakersfield. Given his age of 76, he’d employed a driver. Yet a drunk driver had come across the road and hit the back of the car, killing my grandfather instantly. Sally and I were silent.
“We got in the car and drove through the mountains,” Dad continued. “I had to identify the body.” I pictured Dad at the coroner’s office, exhausted and grim. Familiar with irony by now, I couldn’t believe how my Prohibitionist grandfather had died.
That fall, following their honeymoon—and following the loss of his father—Dad escalated into mania, the first time Mom encountered an episode. He wasn’t hospitalized when I was born, Mom told me later, but it was a close call.
Sally and I asked what it was like when we were little. “You were so adorable,” Mom said. “All those bottles, boiling in the kitchen back on Wyandotte Road. But it was worth every minute.” Looking at photos, I saw one of me, a baby in the arms of my strong, shirtless Dad, squinting in the bright sunlight. Little did I know that Dad was floridly psychotic a few months later, as Mom’s pregnancy with Sally was coming to a close, requiring hospitalization out in California during a severe bout when she was born in February of 1954.
Mom gave birth to both Sally and me essentially alone.
“Here’s something you used to do when you were small,” Dad said. “You liked to pull my books off the shelves. Your favorite was my leather-bound dictionary, with embossed pages, a gift from my father. You would grab a page and just rip it out, a huge smile on your face. You loved the feel of those thin onionskin pages.”
I remembered that dictionary. When closed, the edges of its pages displayed a light gold tint between the covers. But had I really been that destructive as a toddler? Dad said he’d been tempted to punish me but realized that this was my way of exploring books. Because any punishment might thwart my desire to read, he took the book from my hands and placed it out of reach.
“Never,” he repeated, “did I wish to diminish your love of books.”
What if Dad had been manic or seriously depressed during such times? Would he have been outraged and screamed at me? Instead, while in his normal state—the “euthymic” period in between manias and depressions, as it’s formally called—he favored me with his patience and forbearance. What predicts when a person with bipolar disorder flies into mania or sinks into depression? Despite decades of research, it’s extremely hard to gauge. There’s a major genetic vulnerability to bipolar illness, but life stresses can trigger particular episodes. Patterns are specific to each individual. That Dad was in his right mind much of the time undoubtedly saved the family. But the stark contrast between his moods silently colored every interaction in our home.
* * *
Girls were on my mind like never before. Back in fourth grade, I stared at blond-haired Mary Ann, feeling strange sensations all through my body. Now in junior high school I felt that way just about every day. Would I ever feel connected with a girl and tell her about my feelings, if I could only figure them out myself? The mixture of longing and fear was overpowering.
On Saturday afternoons in the winter, I wandered through the shopping mall amid the freezing air, cars searching for spaces amidst piles of slush, the sky darkening by late afternoon. I was searching for a ring that I might give to some girl, if only I might get up the nerve. Inside a store, displays held jade-like rings that caught my eye. But when the saleslady asked if I wanted to see one, I looked away, my face scarlet. My longing stayed locked inside. What would I say to any girl about who I really was?
In fact, I was saying as little as possible to myself. Staying busy, striving for success in school and sports, and keeping my focus removed the temptation to actually feel. It was far better, I calculated, to keep things in.
When I was in eighth grade, one evening Dad and I sat down in the kitchen to watch The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Dad often had a bourbon and Coke or some other drink during pre-dinner hours. “It’s the common man’s religious experience,” he would say of his cocktail, though I’d never seen him drink more than two. What insights did the alcohol provide him?
Watching the news was a highlight of Dad’s day. He loved Cronkite. One of the lead stories that night was about a recent increase in gasoline prices throughout the country, a couple of cents per gallon. But Dad glared at the set like a cobra ready to pounce, a strange gleam in his eyes.
“It’s outrageous!” he snarled at the screen.
“What is?” I asked, hoping he’d bring it down a notch.
“Those prices are criminal,” he retorted. “Riots have broken out over far less than this. Class warfare won’t be far behind!” He was incensed, his moral outrage palpable. “History will prove me right,” he continued, holding a menacing edge in his voice.
Come on, I told him, but only in my mind: We aren’t heading toward a class war over an issue as trivial as this. For a moment, I felt older and more mature than my own dad. I was actually embarrassed by him. At least no friends of mine were over, I thought with relief. What would they make of a father so silly, immature, and overemotional?
Should I say something? But the edge in his look, as he stared down the television monitor, warned me to hold my tongue. I murmured something about how the price increase wasn’t all that much but he was utterly dismissive. His tone of assured superiority gripped me like an alien force.
During a rare glimpse, like this one, into my father’s early signs of mania, the biggest shock was the contrast with his usual demeanor and tone. I flashed on the scene at the Willard seven years before but quickly shut it out. During the next commercial, I made an excuse to leave. At school, I started bearing down even harder. Some days the pencil lead nearly snapped underneath my fingertips.
The fog of forgetting has blotted out my recall of how far he escalated after that scene. By that time, it’s conceivable that his doctors had increased the dosage of Mellaril—a newer cousin of Thorazine, an antipsychotic medication that can reduce delusional thinking and paranoia—and kept him home. Remember, I was a collaborator: I actively sought to block out key memories.
A year later, all of us were in the living room, reading magazines or various parts of the Sunday paper. The phone rang and Mom got up to answer in the kitchen. As she talked her voice rose and fell but I couldn’t make out any specific words. She hurried back in and told Dad, with a concerned look, that his brother Bob was on the line from California. Dad walked quickly into his study, closed the sliding door, and didn’t emerge for half an hour. Finally, he padded slowly back. With a slumped posture, he started to speak, then paused. Finally, he cleared his throat.
“Well, that was quite a long conversation with my dear brother Bob. There is troubling news. As you know, his work is as a psychiatrist, sitting all day and talking with patients. With this sedentary life, one of his legs began hurting. Gangrene soon set in.” Dad concluded by saying that Bob needed to have his leg amputated to save his life.
Mom’s eyes were wide, Sally’s too. Amputated? A vague suspicion descended over my shoulders. An amputation caused by too much sitting? As hyper-rational as Dad sounded about his talk with Uncle Bob, I couldn’t quite believe what I’d heard.
Or perhaps I could. I’d learned to accept what was placed in front of me. Questioning things, inviting in the unknown, seemed far too risky. A few weeks later Dad said that Bob had received his artificial leg, which seemed to be working fine. I was relieved. But that initial morning, I witnessed the erection of barricades, a wall against the truth. What else was hidden?
When I was still in junior high, Dad started talking with me about history. It was sure to be another lesson. “Do you ever think,” he asked me, “that full understanding of a person’s life history would reveal the underlying reasons for his behavior?” He continued. “Take Hitler. If we knew his full past, would we understand his actions?” Finishing his thought, he wondered specifically: “Is to know all to forgive all?”
I nodded halfheartedly, but my gut reaction was that this was way too soft. How could pure evil be forgiven if we simply knew the person’s past? But the bigger question was why Dad was so possessed by good and bad. His obsession with Hitler was complete. He recounted that a million people at once, completely captivated, would stand in the plazas of German cities, listening to Hitler’s speeches. Watching TV documentaries together, Dad and I stared at the Führer’s animated gestures as he harangued the throngs. A nation idolized him, but repression, purges, war, and unfathomable extermination were close behind. Dad couldn’t seem to get these images out of his mind. At that point in my life, I had no idea how far his obsession had taken him when he was 16.
On a frigid night before Christmas, Dad and I drove to deliver gifts to a family who’d done housework for us years earlier, an African American family on the other side of Columbus. Shivering, we rang their doorbell. After inviting us in to their overheated apartment, they seemed incredibly grateful that we’d come by. The interchange was warm and upbeat. But I felt sick with shame over how much I took for granted every day.
Driving home, as the heater blasted in the front seat while streetlights provided an amber tint to the ice-covered streets, Dad began speaking.
“Steve, we must discuss civil rights and the history of oppression in this country. Black people have been denied fundamental rights for far too long.” He brought up Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and separate drinking fountains and lunch counters in the South. As the bitter wind blew outside the frosted windows, I lamented how little I ever really thought about oppression. Yet if Dad was so attuned to these issues, why didn’t he seem to do much about them? Much of his life took place while sitting in his study, everything filtered through his mind. There was no mistaking his passion, but where was his action?
And where was mine? What was it that held me down and locked me in? Pure and simple, it was fear. But at that point, I didn’t know what I was afraid of.
* * *
I first heard the sound through our screen doors on a mid-August morning, three weeks before I was to start high school as a tenth grader. In a rhythmic chant, a hundred voices in the distance barked out hoarsely: “One-two-three-four; one-two-three-four.” At first puzzled, I quickly placed it: The football team had started their initial morning of two-a-day practices, counting off for calisthenics. I walked outside to gaze through a crack in the wooden fence bordering our back yard. Across the street the entire squad was arrayed on the fields, wearing white practice uniforms with gold helmets.
All morning I heard the distant smack of shoulder pad on shoulder pad, sharp whistle blasts ending a play, the rhythmic hand-clap of a coach. If I gazed from a bedroom window on the second floor, peering over the fence to an angled view of the field, I saw passes whizzing through the air, running backs breaking through the line and sprinting 20 extra yards before jogging back to the huddle and flipping the ball to an assistant. I marveled at the huge linemen perfecting their blocking techniques. Getting ready for my cross-country workout that afternoon, I witnessed a repeat performance as the sun began its slow westward slant. With each sharp whistle from the field the realization hit me like a blast furnace. I’d blown it, my opportunity lost. The despair clung to me like a shroud—I should have joined the football team.
It’s always been this way for me. After weeks or months of planning, something might topple the structure I’ve assembled. With a single setback, the balloon punctures. There’s no middle ground between moving forward and hopelessness.
I’d gone out for tackle football the year before, in my last year of junior high. In Ohio football was king. I’d become a decent baseball and basketball player and was pretty fast in middle distances for track, but I’d always wondered whether I could handle the contact of football.
I’d brought up the debate with Mom and Dad. Not realizing I was upstairs, they quietly argued from behind their closed bedroom door. “Football is too dangerous,” Mom said, with emphasis. “There can be major injuries.” Dad countered with his own quiet determination, trying to keep his voice low but not quite succeeding. “When I played there were just leather helmets. The equipment is superior now. I say we let him.”
Dad prevailed, and it was time to prove myself. At the first practice I put the shoulder pads, rib protector, and hip pads on my 135-pound frame, wondering how I’d be able to run in all that equipment. At twice-daily workouts in the sweltering humidity, I hit the blocking sled, firing out from my three-point stance, shoulder square into the huge pad, digging my legs in at the same instant, as grass and dirt flew out from my cleats. I tried to make tackles during defensive drills when a fast, strong kid tried to run right through me, the dust and heat overpowering. But after a rare good play, pride poured over me like a soothing bath. I made the team and played in every game. I’d passed the test.
Before I knew it the issue loomed again the following spring. The reminders poured in each day as I saw the mammoth new high school structure and endless playing fields a block behind our house. Our high school team was ranked among the elite in the state. I’d be lucky to make junior varsity as a tenth grader, and earning a spot on the varsity was no guarantee after that.
I started to think about joining the cross-country team, instead. I reasoned that cross-country might be a safer option, physically and mentally. Maybe I could get a varsity letter, even as a sophomore, during my initial year of high school.
By mid-summer I headed to the river with the cross-country team, lacing up my shoes after some stretches. The running course started under leafy trees and picnic benches on a small rise above the riverbank, the air hazy with humidity. Underneath us, the picnic grounds were bright green from spring and summer rains. The trail sloped down to the boat ramps, meeting a gravel road on the riverbank, the acrid smell of gasoline and tar filling the air. As it flattened the first auto bridge came into view. We passed underneath to the high-pitched hum and rhythmic bumps of cars on the grooved pavement far above. Suddenly, the full expanse of the river lay straight ahead, blue-gray and rippled, deep-green trees lining the opposite shore. The second bridge was a mile and a half beyond.
With my arms pumping, some of my breaths turned into gasps as I struggled to keep pace. Lazy clouds held in the oppressive heat, the grate of cicadas from nearby trees penetrating the dank air. At last we charged up a slope to some shade, turning around without pause to head back. Some of those guys could fly, showing all the lung power in the world. My runs were punctuated with the worry that I would deplete all the oxygen in my body. But while I was moving, doubts about my decision vanished.
All was lost, though, once I’d witnessed that initial football practice. In the back yard the next morning, as though drawn by magnetic force, I burst out crying as I watched the try-outs again. Back inside, I searched for something to read, anything to distract me, but my agitation was overpowering. Mom wondered why I was so upset but I choked on the words when I tried to explain. When Dad came home from campus for lunch, I leapt into his study and blurted it out. “Football practice began this week,” I said hoarsely. “Everyone knows the plays but me. I can’t wait until next year; I’d be so far behind I wouldn’t last a day. Don’t you see,” I stammered, “I’ve wrecked my only chance. How could I have done this?”
Dad directed his gaze into the distance. I buried my face in my hands, fighting the urge to gouge out my eyes.
“I know it seems late,” he finally responded. “But if you’re sure you want to try, I could do this: I could call the head coach later to day before the afternoon. He’s an honorable man, though tough, as you know. I can see what he says.”
I felt myself sink deeper, repeating that it was too late. Considering his words carefully, Dad looked out the window and repeated his plan, stating that I’d probably have to meet with the coach immediately to have any chance. I relented but couldn’t escape the self-hatred that had overtaken me.
Later that afternoon, Dad told me that he had spoken with Coach Mueller, who, if I were willing, would meet me that very evening. What did I have to lose? In the twilight Dad drove me to a street close to our old house on Wyandotte Road. He would pick me up in a half an hour, down the block. I managed to ring the doorbell and was ushered to a side porch. A moment later, the coach strode in, exuding his usual intensity. He looked me in the eye and briskly shook my hand. “Steve, tell me your thinking,” he inquired.
I gave it my best shot, telling him of my errant decision while certain his eyes could bore holes through my skin. Finally, he sat straight up. “I believe that I understand your thinking, Steve. You’ve missed some crucial sessions but there’s still time. If you bring a physical exam form in tomorrow and let the cross-country coach know, I’ll get equipment fitted for you and order you a playbook. You’ll have to learn our systems thoroughly.”
Had he just said yes? Stay of execution granted, I headed out in the dusk to find the car. Dad looked pleased as I nearly melted into the seat with relief. Saturday morning I was on the practice fields, part of the large, uniformed group. It took no time at all to get used to the intensity of two-a-day drills in the overpowering heat. I fought my way up and made the junior varsity squad. Our Saturday morning games were a pale afterthought to the excitement of the varsity contests under the lights the evening before, but I caught a few touchdown passes, rare for our Midwestern-style running team, and relished being part of a team. Without Dad, what would I have done?
* * *
The following summer, desert sands stretched endlessly, red-orange, tan, yellow, and pale brown. The peaks of Arizona’s Monument Valley were primordial, sheer rock emerging from the desert floor. We pulled over and Dad handed me the steering wheel for the first time, at age 15. Soaring over the highway, the car rocketed forward with the slightest touch of my foot on the gas. I sensed that my life might soar, too, if I could ever transcend my yoke of order and duty.
Finally reaching Southern California after our cross-country drive, we spent a day at Uncle Paul’s ravine-perched house near LA. With our cousins, Sally and I raced soap-box cars down the steep driveway. Before long a huge white Cadillac pulled up out front. Out climbed Uncle Bob, tall and confident. Pausing, he measured the slope with his eyes, slowly placed his artificial leg in front of his good leg, and walked magisterially down the path. He waved over at us, a jaunty smile on his lips, wearing his self-assurance like a crown. The amputation, it was clear, had not kept him down.
I felt like a stranger in the sun-washed, hip LA Basin. Yet Bob reached out, letting me know that it would take some time for me to get the hang of the pool cue in his den, while he hosted us there in his large, modern home overlooking the San Gabriel Valley. He helped me overcome the awkwardness I was feeling.
His four kids—additional cousins, roughly our age—seemed to look at Sally and me askance, which I attributed to our semi-hick status from the Midwest. What I didn’t know was that almost precisely seven years before, when Dad was gone for my entire third-grade year, Bob had flown to Columbus to take him to psychiatric facilities in Southern California and, during the final months, invited him to stay in a spare bedroom of their family home while finishing his recovery. What did their family know about Dad, and our family, that I didn’t?
A week later we were on the road back to Columbus. Mom wanted to see Lake Tahoe and its deep blue waters but Sally and I protested. My new girlfriend was waiting; I’d finally found someone I wanted to get close with. Even more, I needed to prepare to make the varsity football team as a junior. Sally, too, had commitments, including choir and cheerleading tryouts. After we begged, Mom and Dad relented and we stayed straight on the interstate to Salt Lake City and beyond.
Looking back, I feel ever guiltier over my selfishness. Mom desperately wanted to see that lake, to plumb its cobalt-blue depths. Something about deep waters drew her in, reminding her of long-ago train trips from Ohio to Cape Cod as a teenager, when she served as a camp counselor and taught sailing. She longed to escape land-locked Ohio and her duties there. Sally and I didn’t know of the pain and terror she’d endured, always in silence, as she continued to wonder whether Dad and the family would survive the next assault of his mind.
If I wanted to meet my goals I couldn’t let up. I’ve always had multiple plans, taking on many projects at a time. My plate is always full, the food spread thin to cover the china. A half-full plate might allow reflection back from the polished plate, a straight-on look that might be too revealing. With the plate filled, I can bypass any self-searching.
Early in my senior year, Sally and I pondered the future. She asked if I’d really leave home for college. I replied that if I got accepted, Harvard would be great.
“But won’t you be scared, being so far from home?”
“Maybe at first,” I countered, “but I’d like the challenge.”
“I don’t know if I could move that far away,” Sally continued. “It might be too scary. And for Mom, wouldn’t it be better if I were close by?” In her own way, Sally sensed the vortex lying beneath the family silence, completely identifying with Mom.
I didn’t know which was stronger: excitement over the prospect of departing Columbus or guilt that I’d be letting my sister down, maybe everyone else too. Sally might need to sacrifice huge parts of herself to stay close. Be brave—take the risk—move away! I wanted to shout in her ears. But how could I bring her to a place of confidence when I was as confused as I was about my own life?
Each season left its mark. Fall afternoons in the receding light, relentless football practices, victories each week under the stadium lights. In the winter, patchy snow lay on the ground. Basketball season was harder, my skills having peaked back in junior high. The blossoms finally burst forth in April, as track workouts burned my lungs. If I got to bed after 10:30 p.m., I fought panic that I wouldn’t get enough sleep.
On weekends, I saw my girlfriend, Barb—striking eyes, long brown hair—at her house, a long block down the tree-lined street joining our street at an angle just beyond the front yard. She was kind and funny, sometimes sarcastic, which I found unsettling but also a relief from the unrelenting seriousness that weighed me down most of the time. I usually felt uncomfortable around people who seemed casual: Didn’t they know how important it was to stay focused? But sarcasm had a bite, revealing a difference between appearance and the deeper reality underneath. Barb and I went to movies, hung out with friends, and gradually got more physical. Were we falling in love? I wasn’t sure, but the odds were good that we’d get married one day just like most of our classmates. I clung to the stability of knowing she was there.
Dad remained at home during my high school years, teaching graduate seminars and the huge intro to philosophy class, reading long into the evening, and pondering the futility of the Vietnam War as the sixties wound down, especially once Cronkite changed his own mind about the U.S. effort. Too many days he seemed blank and withdrawn, in a kind of retreat from the world. My activities locked up my time. I watched from a distance.
For many people with serious bipolar disorder, episodes increase in regularity and intensity across their adult years. In what’s called the “kindling” theory, it takes a large amount of stress during late adolescence—for example, experiencing maltreatment, confronting a major loss, or perhaps overusing drugs that prime the central nervous system for disaster—to spark the initial episode. But after that, the episodes emerge more spontaneously and regularly in the way that a raging fire escalates after it’s kindled. This was clearly Dad’s pattern. After his initial, age-16 bout, it took eight years for his hospitalization at Byberry. But between his mid-twenties and forties, things got far worse, with severe episodes every year or two. Inexplicably, though, he reached some equilibrium by middle age.
Still, he sometimes exuded an intensity I couldn’t place. Once the animated psychedelic film Yellow Submarine had been released, the Beatles’ title song played relentlessly on the radio. On a whim, I asked Dad to listen to the lyrics on our phonograph (“We all live in a yellow submarine…”). Intrigued, he cleared out the family room and positioned himself precisely between the two speakers for maximum stereophonic effect, playing the song over and over. Afterward, his eyes were ablaze. “The meaning is dark,” he said, a strange energy driving his words. “The yellow color of the submarine and the theme of the song betray a fundamental cowardice in the human condition.” He gazed over to the wall. “This song conveys the weakness of our species.” A profound insight? Or were Dad’s meanings filled with a logic I couldn’t see? As always, something lurked just out of reach.
During the fall of my senior year, I mailed in seven college applications. But my main concern was football. Somehow, I’d made the first team, and the new stadium was set to open right near our house. The whole team knew—how could we forget?—that the Golden Bears had won 20 consecutive games, state champions two straight years. Could we seniors do it? Between my courses and the never-ending practices, I hardly saw Dad.
The first Friday in September we took a three-hour bus ride for our opening game against a northern Ohio powerhouse. I pulled my “away” jersey, bright gold with a black 87, over my shoulder pads. But during warm-ups in the setting sun, I felt mucus, tons of mucus, in my stomach, and kept swallowing hard to keep it down. Something didn’t feel right in my head. I left the lines of calisthenics and threw up by the side of the field. It was just a gob of yellowish bile, as though I’d cleared poison, like a migraine but without any aura or headache.
Under the lights, in a fury of hard runs and defense, we squeaked by, 7-6. The block I made from my left-end position—elbows out, hands into my chest, slamming that big defensive tackle into the ground—sprang our fullback’s 40-yard run, our only touchdown. The next week we inaugurated our new stadium with a resounding win. Each subsequent week yielded a victory, some close, most lopsided. In the middle of the season, we were winning handily at home. I was in on offense and we were close to scoring. Our quarterback called a pass play, faking a handoff right. The defensive back took the bait; I cut left, wide open. But it was a bullet when a touch pass would have done; I lost it in the lights and it bounced off my chest. It didn’t matter: We kicked a field goal and won, 59-0.
But my world caved in. I quickly showered and skulked home, the shame burning my skin like acid. Dad had been at the stadium, though I wasn’t sure how he’d arrived. With a desperate look in his eyes, he walked toward me as I lay in my bed. “I’m proud of the way you and the team played,” he said. But all I could do was watch his valiant attempts from afar as I sank farther.
The season’s final week, at 9-0, we were one win from a third straight state championship. Light-headed from the flu and a fever, I forced myself into school and played every quarter, as I had all season. After another shutout victory, the celebration began in the locker room, coaches beaming, players whooping. Dehydrated and dizzy, I showered and walked home, falling asleep in a heap for 11 hours. I missed the party at the home of one of the star players, where beer and who knows what else was brought in. I’d never had a drink except for little-kid sips when I was tiny. I needed to stay pure, in control. I hated missing out but felt strangely relieved. What would I have done there?
* * *
By late April, as the lawns and trees turned a radiant green, letters appeared underneath the mail slot at home on our hallway’s slate floor. Each time I ripped open the envelope and saw “accepted” underneath the university insignia, a surge of pride washed over me. I’d known all along that if I got into Harvard—the oldest and highest-ranked school—I’d attend. Just after I accepted, the Kent State shootings took place in May of 1970, 100 miles north of Columbus. But I felt untouchable, a glass layer between me and such a fate. With a draft number of 38, I was next in line to Southeast Asia, but a college deferment had me heading to New England instead.
Which would be stronger: the surge to depart or the guilt I felt at leaving? I counted the days.