They couldn’t keep me in Juvenile Hall. I hadn’t committed any crime—I wasn’t even one of the guys they caught in bed at Rancho Linda. I hadn’t been accused of anything. Besides, I was barely even a juvenile anymore. It was April 1966. I was seventeen and a half years old. I was practically grown up.

I was tall enough and big enough—six feet four inches and probably about 180 pounds. I had done enough sports at Rancho Linda that I was physically fit—no Jack LaLanne, but I was in good shape. In the pictures that I have from that time, I see a clean-cut guy who wears his hair short and his sport coat tight and has a little bit of an attitude. In most of the pictures from this period, I’ve got a smirk. Not quite a smile. Not quite a frown. Just a sort of look that says, “I know what a joke this all is.”

It seemed like a joke. It was like my dream of being in the army had come true. Now I had done my time in the service, and I was furloughed out. I was being returned to civilian life, and would walk the streets again with the rest of the citizens.

But I couldn’t go home. Despite Freeman’s reports about my continued progress, and the fact that I’d gotten through a few years at Rancho Linda without killing anybody, I was not welcome at the house on Edgewood. Lou still wouldn’t have me.

So, after a short stay at juvie, I was placed in a halfway house with a collection of other misfit guys who, like me, didn’t have anyplace else to go. The house was a two-story stucco with a glassed-in front porch and a kind of Oriental wood trim. The corners of the roof turned up like a pagoda. The address was 619 North First Street in San Jose.

The place was run by a crabby old lady. She fixed our meals and made sure the rules were followed. But there weren’t many rules. You had to be out by a certain time in the morning, and you had to be back by a certain time at night. Your rent was paid by the government, directly to the old lady. You got a little allowance out of that, so you could buy cigarettes and coffee. (I smoked Marlboro reds in those days.) Other than that, it didn’t matter what you did with yourself as long as you stayed out of trouble.

I did, for a while. Someone from the Welfare Department or the Probation Department or Social Services arranged a little job for me with Goodwill Industries. They called it a job, but it was a joke. I was paid ten cents an hour to sort through boxes of clothes. Ten cents an hour! Even for a guy with no work experience, that was insulting. The minimum wage was something like $1.25 or $1.35. How did they get away with paying someone ten cents an hour? In my case, they didn’t—not for long. I stopped going to work.

There was an International House of Pancakes right down the block. I’d go down there and hang out and drink coffee and talk to the people I’d meet. I fell in with some bad characters. I met a group of guys who belonged to this motorcycle gang called the Gypsy Jokers. They had names like Shorty and Butcher. They were like the Hells Angels, but maybe not as dangerous, and they let me hang out with them. Since I didn’t have a bike and wasn’t going to ride with them, they didn’t have to jump me in or do any of that hairy initiation stuff. They just let me hang out. They all drank at this beer bar called The Spartan Hub. In the afternoons and evenings, when I wasn’t busy goofing off at the IHOP, I’d go down there and drink beer with them. I thought I was pretty cool—not even eighteen yet, and here I was drinking beer with the Gypsy Jokers.

Back at the halfway house I made friends with a guy named Ed Woodson. He was a skinny little guy who wore a beard and mustache over what I think was a cleft palate. He had a slight speech impediment, and a weird habit of saying “But one thing” whenever he had something to say. He said it like he was sharing a secret, or like he was afraid you were going to get mad at him, but it was meaningless. You’d ask him if he wanted to go downtown. He’d lean over and say, “Yeah, but one thing: I have to go see my probation officer….”

I never knew what his background was or how he wound up in the halfway house, but we got to be buddies and started having some fun together. Sometimes the fun backfired, which seemed to happen a lot with me.

Usually it started out sort of innocent. There was a guy at the halfway house who had a motorcycle. He thought he was so cool, with his little motorcycle. We were jealous, so we decided to teach him a lesson.

I got two paper milk containers, one empty and one full. I drained the gas out of his tank into the empty one, and then I filled the gas tank with milk from the full one. I hid the two milk containers in the rubbish pit. We sat back to see what would happen to the guy’s bike.

That wasn’t very dramatic. The bike just wouldn’t start. The guy looked in the gas tank and saw this milky stuff and could not figure out what the heck had happened. It was pretty funny.

It wasn’t so funny the next time the gardener went out to the rubbish pit. He took the rubbish and put it in the incinerator, and started a fire. The gas ignited, and the milk container exploded. The whole backyard went up in flames, and the house almost burned down.

I didn’t get caught for that one.

Ed Woodson was a bit wilder than me. He had more experience. He knew people. For example, he knew two guys who had escaped from the county jail. I don’t know how they got out. I don’t know how Ed knew them. But when they escaped, they came straight to the halfway house. Ed hid them in the basement and snuck food down to them for a few days. When the heat was off, they left. I thought that was wild. Guys escaping from jail! Hiding out in our basement! It was like James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. This was the big time.

I didn’t get caught for that one, either. Ed didn’t get caught. I don’t know whether the two guys went back to jail or what. At the time, I didn’t even realize it was serious.

And that was part of the problem. I didn’t understand what was serious and what wasn’t. I knew the difference between right and wrong. But I didn’t really understand the significance of doing right and wrong. I had no idea how to behave. I was on the street, and I had all this freedom, but I had no idea what to do with it.

For example…

Ever since Rancho Linda, I had been thinking about Annette. She had been my special girl. I kept with me a picture of the two of us dancing. She had written on the back of it, “For Howard, from Annette. I hope one day to be your wife.”

I heard she was staying with some friends, or some family member, in Glendale, a San Fernando Valley suburb of Los Angeles. Ed Woodson had family in Los Angeles somewhere. We decided we’d hitchhike down there together. I’d surprise Annette and he’d surprise his family.

We set out like it was going to be a little overnight visit. We didn’t have much money. We didn’t have any gear—nothing to eat, nothing to sleep on, nothing to wash with, nothing but the clothes on our backs.

It took us a long time to get to Los Angeles. A trucker picked us up and left us out in the sticks. We stood on the side of the highway all night trying to get a lift. It took three days just to get down to Ventura.

We split up there. Ed went on to Los Angeles. I went into the San Fernando Valley. I don’t remember where my last ride dropped me off, but I walked the rest of the way. The area was mostly orange groves in those days, and dirt roads. I walked for an entire day, down these dusty dirt roads, eating oranges the whole time, until I got to Glendale.

I hadn’t written to Annette to tell her I was coming. Now I knocked on the door. Some guy came out and said she wasn’t home. He said she might be back later. I said thank you and I left.

I was crushed. I had left San Jose with very little money. Now I didn’t have a dime. I had hardly eaten, except for those oranges, in a couple of days. I hadn’t bathed or changed clothes since leaving the halfway house. I was filthy. I was scared, too.

So I got mad. How dare Annette not be at home! What a nerve! Didn’t she know I had practically walked across the state of California to see her? Didn’t she love me anymore?

I suppose I could have waited for her. I could have asked her family to let me come in and wait for her. But I didn’t. I don’t remember whether I even thought about those things. Probably I wasn’t thinking too clearly. I was tired and hungry and upset. I probably wasn’t thinking at all. So I went back out to the highway and started hitchhiking.

I don’t remember how long it took, but I found myself in King City, California, up in the Central Valley. And there, hitching on the side of the road, I bumped into Ed. He had been hitching awhile, and he wasn’t getting any rides, so he was going to buy a bus ticket home. When he saw me, though, he changed his mind. We used his money to buy some food, and then we hitchhiked back to San Jose.

I never saw Annette again. I didn’t write. I have no idea what happened to her. I don’t know whether she ever knew that the dirty, crazy nut who came to her door that day was me.

For some reason I didn’t get into trouble for being away from the halfway house for those few days. The crabby old lady let me and Ed in, and we went back to our old routine. It wasn’t much of a routine. It wasn’t much of a life.

I was nearly eighteen. I was old enough to be doing all kinds of things. But I didn’t really know how to do anything. I didn’t have a high school diploma. I had never applied for a job. I didn’t have a checking account or a savings account. I had no idea how to handle money. I had never washed my own clothes. I didn’t know how to cook for myself—even though I had helped out in the kitchen at Rancho Linda sometimes. I had never bought food for myself in a grocery store. I had never bought myself a pair of pants or a shirt or a pair of shoes. I had never gotten myself a haircut. I had no idea how to do anything.

But now, out on the street, I was expected to take care of myself and stay out of trouble. I wasn’t very good at taking care of myself. My size usually kept bad guys away from me. I looked like I was going to be a problem. But if someone did come after me, I really didn’t know what to do about it.

Living on First Street, I was attacked one night. I was on the street in front of the halfway house and this guy sprang up out of nowhere and pulled a knife on me. He grabbed me by the hair—I had really long hair at the time—and said he was going to chop all my hair off.

I didn’t know what to do, but I was scared, so I started screaming. That was the right thing to do. He ran away without cutting my hair off, and he didn’t come back.

The real trouble I got into was of my own making.

One day me and Ed were sitting at the halfway house when the mail came. There was a bank statement in there, delivered to the wrong address, with a bunch of canceled checks from the IRS. I guess they were refund checks. They were in large amounts, like $1,000 and $1,500. They were canceled, but the bank mark showing the cancelations was so light that you could rub it out with an eraser without damaging the paper. So I hatched a plan.

I’d take the check to a bank and open a checking account. I’d say I wanted to deposit the $1,000, and have $200 in cash. Then I’d get a pack of temporary checks until my own personal checks could be printed. I’d leave the bank with money in my pocket and a handful of temporary checks.

I didn’t know if it would work. The IRS checks were no good, because they’d already been cashed, but the bank might not know that for a couple of days. By then, I’d pull the same thing with another check at another bank.

Meanwhile I started visiting pawnshops. I’d look around until I decided I wanted to buy something like an electric guitar. Actually, I did want to buy it. It was a nice guitar. But that wasn’t the idea. The guitar cost, say, three hundred dollars. I paid for it with a bad check. Then I took the guitar across town to another pawnshop. I hocked it for maybe a hundred bucks. That was the idea.

It was the perfect crime. Suddenly I was rich. I had a hundred bucks in cash, plus what I’d gotten from the bank. This was more money than I’d ever had in my life. I didn’t even know what to do with all the money. I’d hail a cab and ride around for half the night, just to spend a few bucks.

It was a great scam. Since it worked once, I figured it would work again. I did the same scam several times, buying things at one pawnshop with a bad check, then taking them to another pawnshop and hocking them there. I raised some good money that way.

The problem was this: I was a bad criminal. I had criminal instincts, but not a criminal mind. When you write a blank check at a place like a pawnshop, the pawnshop owner asks you for your name and address and phone number. Since it was a fake account and I didn’t have any money, I didn’t think it mattered what name and address I gave him. So I wrote down my right name, and I wrote down the address and phone number of the halfway house.

The phone calls started coming in. The checks were no good. The banks were onto me. The pawnshop guys knew where I was. It was only a matter of time before someone came to get me.

A real criminal would have run away. I didn’t. I just waited.

The call came from a Lieutenant Lance Hunt. He explained to me that I was in some trouble, and that the trouble would be worse if I tried to run from it. He said that he was coming over to get me, and that I’d better be there.

I waited.

Despite my little bits of trouble in the past, this was my first serious contact with the law. Before, I had just been a screw-up. Now I was a criminal. I had committed a felony. Passing bad checks was a serious crime. I guess I knew that, but I didn’t really calculate what kind of trouble I’d be in if they caught me.

Well, they caught me. And I found out pretty quickly what kind of trouble I was in. They told me guys went to prison for this kind of thing, even guys who were only seventeen and a half years old. Guys went to prison for one to fourteen years.

I was fingerprinted. They took my mug shot. They took away my belt and my shoelaces. They stuck me in a cell.

At some point while I was in Agnews or at Rancho Linda, my dad had gotten interested in law enforcement. He had become a reserve deputy sheriff. Over the years he had worked at the jail, helped the sheriff ’s department with transportation, done court security as a bailiff, and helped train other reserve officers. He had never been an actual policeman, but he knew lots of cops.

He must have known someone in the San Jose Police Department, because they contacted my dad and talked to him about my situation. They offered him some sort of deal.

My dad came to tell me the details. The cops had agreed to let me off the hook. No prison time. No jail time. All I had to do was let them stick me back in Agnews for a while. If I could convince the people at Agnews that I was a little bit crazy, I could stay there instead of going to jail. He made it real clear to me that if I didn’t convince them I was crazy, I was going to jail. Or, worse than jail, I would go to prison.

I didn’t know what prison was like. But I had been to Juvenile Hall, and county jail, and I could imagine. I didn’t want to go there. Oh, boy, did I not want to go there. So I made the deal. I agreed to go back to Agnews and act crazy.

Someone got the word to Freeman.

“Howard has been readmitted to Agnews in the last few days,” the doctor wrote on September 23, 1966.

The Rancho School has closed down when it was discovered that the patients were enjoying too much sexual freedom, and Howard was at some halfway house where he adjusted pretty well until he got hold of a batch of checks and made out a number of them to his friends and others until the law caught up with him. Both his mother and father were very much concerned over the possibility of his coming back into the home, saying that his influence would be definitely disrupting. They arranged for his commitment.

The following day, Freeman came for a visit.

I saw Howard at Agnews today on the admission ward where he was sent from jail after a bad check. He says he has not been home at all, but has been living in San Jose in a house with other discharged patients. He was employed for several weeks at Good Will sorting cards at 10 cents an hour, which he said was not enough to buy his cigarettes, so he got disgusted and quit. Then he found out that people were getting 60 cents an hour, so he was disgruntled. “I like it better in here than out there.” Howard has filled out quite a bit and is, I think, at least as tall as his father. He talks fairly freely, and in the few minutes I had with him did not express any unusual ideas.

I was saving my unusual ideas for the Agnews staff. My dad had told me that I had to convince them I was a little nutty in order to stay there, and out of jail. So I tried to look a little nutty.

At the beginning I was on the observation ward. But I was on a tighter rein this time. The doctors needed to come up with a report. The court people and the probation people had to make a recommendation. So they were watching me closely. They had to gather all the data on me.

I gave it my best shot. I tried to show them I was crazy. It was just a matter of acting weird at the right times. Anyone can do that. You don’t have to be crazy to act crazy. You just have to know what crazy people act like. And I had plenty of experience watching crazy people.

Crazy people hit themselves. They talk to themselves. So, I did that. I don’t know how convincing I was, especially with the talking-to-myself part. I thought it was stupid, and I thought I looked stupid doing it. But if they were looking for something to write about, I was going to give it to them. I was going to make them say, “Okay, this guy’s a nut.”

I talked to myself about normal things, just like I was telling a friend a story. But I also invented things. Like, I invented a guitar and amplifier that didn’t exist. One of the techs would come to talk to me. I’d see him coming and I’d start talking to myself. Then he’d start to sit in a chair and I’d say, “Hey! Watch out. That’s my guitar and amp there!”

That seemed to make them pick up their notebooks pretty fast.

My crazy act worked. I made the doctors think that I needed to be there. After three weeks or so, they made their recommendation, and I was allowed to stay. I was allowed to not go to prison.

I guess I figured that once they knew about the lobotomy, the doctors and technicians would give me a break. The funny thing is, it never occurred to me that if I convinced them I was crazy, I would have trouble convincing them later on that I was not crazy. It didn’t occur to me that it would be hard to get out of Agnews. I wasn’t worried at all about showing the doctors I was normal.

I should have been. Here I was, back at Agnews, a couple of months shy of my eighteenth birthday. It would be more than two years before I was on the street again.

         

This time around, I was more mature, less fearful. The first time in had been like One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Now it was more like McHale’s Navy.

I had grounds privileges now. There were trees and lawns and benches. As long as you didn’t get into trouble, as long as you didn’t try to hurt anybody or try to hurt yourself, you could wander around on your own. It was kind of like when I was a kid, when I would go walking along the railroad tracks or take my bike up into the hills.

There was even a bus you could take from the Westside campus, where I was, to the Eastside campus. That’s where they kept the really crazy people. The bus ride was probably more than a mile, and it felt like being in another world. You could ride that bus and walk around the Eastside and feel like you were in a different city.

I spent a lot of time wandering around at Agnews on my own. Maybe I’d never have gotten into trouble if I’d been alone all the time, but…

But you met guys at mealtime. You met guys in the day rooms. Most of them were people you didn’t want to know. But I made a couple of friends. I met a guy named Steve Alper.

Steve had been sent to Agnews for some behavior problems. He was skinny and about a foot shorter than me, and he was willing to go along with my schemes, which was very cool. Like always, I needed a partner. I needed a front man. Just like with the great train-station robbery, I always wanted someone around who, if things went wrong, would get caught and then not snitch me off. At Agnews, the second time I was there, that was Steve.

We began to hatch some scams.

The people at Agnews distributed tobacco and rolling papers to anyone who wanted them. But most guys hated the roll-your-owns. They’d pay a lot for real cigarettes. If they didn’t have canteen privileges and no one was visiting them and bringing them stuff, they had no way to get real cigarettes. Steve and I had canteen privileges, but we didn’t have any real money.

So we cooked up a scam where we could get some money and some real cigarettes in the bargain.

First we’d go to the canteen and buy a pack of cigarettes. We’d open it carefully and take all the cigarettes out. We’d refill the pack with twenty roll-your-owns, and reseal the pack so it looked brand-new. Then we’d sell that pack, as new, to another patient.

If the guy who bought the cigarettes was crazy enough, he didn’t notice. If he was just sort of crazy, he might think, Hey, these cigarettes are a mess. If he was normal, he might realize something was wrong. So he’d probably take the cigarettes to the canteen and say, “Hey! These are roll-your-owns!” Usually the guy in the canteen would just give him another pack—of real cigarettes.

Sometimes we did that ourselves instead of selling them. It worked so well that after a while we’d just sort of stuff the pack with paper and tobacco. We’d tell the guy at the canteen that there might have been a mistake at the factory.

I thought it was hilarious. It was like these people didn’t think we were intelligent enough, or shrewd enough, to figure out any scams. We were in the nuthouse. How smart could we be? So they didn’t have any defenses against these little schemes.

There were alcoholics on the ward, and some of them had ways to slip off and buy booze and sneak it back. Some guys drank. Some guys sold liquor. But because it was the 1960s, a lot of people were interested in drugs, too. Some guys sold drugs. Some guys just handed them out. I was given some acid one time. I had what you’d call a bad trip. Later on I took some “orange sunshine” someone gave me, and that was okay.

Since people were interested in drugs, there were ways to make money off them. A friend and I figured out how we could sell marijuana to some of the younger girls at Agnews. Only it wasn’t marijuana. Where would guys like us get marijuana? It was just grass cuttings from the lawn. We’d get some of that and dry it out and roll it up in cigarette paper and sell it. We charged one dollar a joint. These girls would come back and tell us what a great trip they had. They wanted more. So me and Steve would string them along. We’d say, “Well, we can get more, but it’s going to take a couple of days. And it’s going to cost you.” Then we’d dry some more grass.

Far more than drugs or alcohol, I was interested in sex. Just like at Rancho Linda, there was plenty of sex at Agnews.

The dormitories were segregated into boys and girls, men and women. The mealtimes were segregated, too. But the classrooms were coed, and so were the grounds. So you could meet girls. You’d see them in class and talk to them afterward. Or you’d see them in the canteen, or sitting on a bench, and you could strike up a conversation.

Getting them alone was a little harder. But it wasn’t impossible. Once I was interested in a girl and I knew she was interested in me, I’d go down to the canteen. There was a pay phone there. I’d call the front office and say, “So-and-so has a visitor.” Then I’d hang up before they could ask who the visitor was, and I’d head out into the hallway to intercept the girl before she got to the front office. She did have a visitor—me!

To be alone, you’d go for a walk on the grounds. You could take that bus over to the Eastside. Over there the patients were so much crazier that you could do almost anything and no one paid attention.

After a while I figured out which bathrooms were never used. There were some that no one ever went into. That’s where I’d take my girls. Usually, because there wasn’t much time and there wasn’t anyplace to lie down, we wouldn’t have actual intercourse. We’d just fool around.

Sometimes I had the real thing, though, like I did with a woman named Ellen. She was older than me, probably in her early thirties, and she was just as into sex as I was. We’d get on the Agnews bus together and go over to the Eastside, where no one knew us by sight. We’d wander around the buildings until we found a place that seemed deserted. We’d have sex in the stairwells. We needed privacy, of course, but we also needed time, because she wore really complicated undergarments—a girdle, and a brassiere that fastened with a million metal hooks—and it took forever to get them off.

I was interested in anyone who was interested in me. This wasn’t like with Annette. I would go with anyone who was available and willing. I went with girls my age, and girls who were older. One time I went with this one lady—I don’t even want to think about how old she was. Pretty old, though. I’m embarrassed to even remember that.

Daily life at Agnews wasn’t difficult. They fed you all right, even if there were rumors about what went into the food. (We heard they put saltpeter in the meals so no one would have any sex drive. They must not have put enough in there for me.) At night you’d watch TV and drink coffee. You got up at five. You went to bed at nine. In between, you played cards a lot. Sometimes no one was around to play with you. I played a lot of solitaire. I played a lot of war—with myself.

After a while, they trusted me enough to give me a job. Part of the deal at Agnews was if you wanted grounds privileges you had to work a job. At first, I cut hair. I guess I wasn’t very good at it. By the time I got through with them, everyone had the same haircut. So I didn’t last too long at that. Later on, I worked in the bakery, on the hog farm, in the laundry, and in the storerooms. Most of it was boring, stupid work. You didn’t really learn anything. You didn’t learn enough to get a job on the outside. It was just your way of paying for your keep. If you didn’t like it, you could stay confined to your room, which would have been terrible.

There was a lot of hanging out, a lot of time spent just hanging around doing nothing, shooting the breeze. With some of the guys this was okay, and with some of them it wasn’t. There was one guy who teased me a lot about sex. He would say I had never had sex with a girl. I’d say that wasn’t true, that he was wrong about that. So he’d start asking me questions about it—did I do this, or did I do that? That made me pretty uneasy, so I stayed away from him. I stayed away from anyone who talked about sex. Some guys just gave me the creeps.

But Steve and I got to be friends, and partners. We sold that marijuana together. We did some embezzling, too.

We somehow managed to steal some paperwork from the accounting office, which was the place that banked and disbursed patients’ money. I filled out the paperwork. Steve got access to the official stamp. Then he took the paperwork down to the accounting office. When he came back, with his head down and his hands behind him, I thought he’d gotten busted. Then he smiled and showed me his hands. Three hundred dollars!

Another time I cooked up a scheme to sneak out of Agnews. I forged some paperwork requesting that I be allowed to visit my grandmother—Daisy, my mother’s mother—in Oakland. I made it look like she had called and made the request. I took the papers in to have them approved. My grandmother didn’t actually know anything about it, but I wanted to get out for a few days and have a field trip away from San Jose. I filled out the same kind of paperwork for Steve. We were let out of our wards, and walked to the bus pickup. The Greyhound bus came once a day to the clock tower building. We rode it up to Oakland.

When I was a kid, visiting my grandmother Daisy was a big deal. She still lived in the huge family home on Newton Avenue. It was dark and stately, and felt like money. Sometimes on family visits my uncle Hugh and uncle Gordon were there, and I liked seeing them. But after my father married Lou, we saw my mother’s side of the family less and less. My father said bad things about Gordon, and he always felt like Daisy had looked down on him as not good enough for my mother. Maybe seeing them reminded him how much he missed my mother, too. As the years passed, Brian and I were hardly ever taken to see our grandmother anymore.

So when I snuck out of Agnews my grandmother was happy to see me. She had kept up her letter-writing campaign, trying to find out what they were doing to me, and not getting answers that satisfied her. She was relieved to know I was all right. But she seemed surprised that I was able to get to Oakland on my own when I was supposed to be locked up.

Steve and I did that enough times that it turned into an inside joke. When he and I and two other guys formed a little rock band, we called it “Granny’s Place.” I was the guitar player, Steve played keyboards, another guy played drums, and another guy played bass. We worked up a few songs, like “Louie, Louie,” “Wipeout,” “Walk, Don’t Run,” and “House of the Rising Sun.” We were good enough that we got to play one of the Agnews dances. They had a real band come in, but when the band took a break we got onstage and did our songs. That was our only gig.

If I’d wanted to, I could have filled out that paperwork and left Agnews for good. But I always came back. Why not? I had nowhere else to go.

Mostly I stayed out of trouble with the staff there, but I did get written up for little things—cutting class, or taking off from work. I never got caught for selling grass, or for going with girls. I never got caught for the embezzling or anything else serious.

But I was a suspect one time in a serious crime that I had nothing to do with. Someone had hot-wired a truck, driven it over to the administration building, broken into the room where they kept the patients’ money, stolen the safe where all the money was kept, got the safe onto the truck, and taken it out onto a field. They busted into the safe and made off with a bunch of money.

The administrators thought I was behind this. They brought me in and questioned me. I thought it was a great caper, but—me? How could I do any of that stuff? I didn’t know anything about hot-wiring cars, or breaking locks, or cracking safes. And how would I do all of that stuff while I was in my bed, on a locked ward, and still sleeping when they came to talk to me about it? It didn’t make sense. Maybe they didn’t have any other suspects.

Throughout all this, I had one really good reason not to get in trouble. There was a doctor at Agnews who believed in using electroshock therapy as punishment. Everyone knew about it. I think the technicians wanted us to know about it. They wanted us to know what was in store for us if we got out of line.

Steve was one of the people who got out of line. He was friendly with me, but with other people he could be real belligerent. He was a fighter. One day they took Steve out and kept him for a while. A week later, I heard he was out—but they’d moved him to a new ward. They had given him the electroshock.

When I saw him again, he wasn’t right. I don’t think he was ever right after that. The treatment was supposed to “calm” patients down. In Steve’s case, the calm was only temporary. Years later, Steve would be sent to jail for shooting a wino in the eye with a BB gun after the wino had passed him a bottle of wine that someone had urinated in.

I was afraid of electroshock. I was scared of the medications, too. I had no experience with that, and I was afraid they’d start giving me something that would make me crazy—like the other guys I saw on medication. I didn’t know that the doctors had decided not to give me electroshock because I’d had the lobotomy. So my fear of it was very real.

My dad still came to visit me almost every other weekend. He was trying to make up for what happened, I think. He was trying to make it all right.

Other than my dad, my other grandmother, Grandma Boo, was my only visitor at Agnews. She would come once in a while. For some reason she would always come really early in the morning and sleep in her car until visiting hours.

I never saw Lou. I never saw my brothers. When my dad visited, he didn’t seem to want to talk about them. He didn’t want to talk about me going home. I had given up any ideas about that. I knew they didn’t want me there. I knew I couldn’t get out of Agnews. I had stopped fantasizing about it, too.

The guy who held the key to me getting out of Agnews was Dr. Shon.

Shon was this balding, bookworm-looking psychiatrist with black-rimmed glasses. He was a nice guy. He dealt with me like it was all a big joke. He’d call me “Mr. Dully,” like I was an adult, but it was kind of like he was making fun of me. He’d say, “Well, Mr. Dully, how are you enjoying life here at Agnews?” like he was the owner of a hotel and was asking me whether I was having a good time.

I saw him once a month. He’d ask me questions. Hours and hours of questions. He’d show me inkblots and ask me what I thought of them, or what I saw in them. He never said what he thought about my answers. He’d just nod and ask another question.

After a while, he told me he knew I didn’t belong at Agnews. But he also told me I couldn’t leave.

I would say, “How can you say that? How can you tell me I don’t belong here but I have to stay here anyway?”

He’d smile and say, “That’s just the way it is.”

         

The time dragged slowly. It was frustrating to be at Agnews. I didn’t know what I could do to make them understand I wasn’t crazy, except what I was already doing. And I didn’t know how to get out except by showing them I wasn’t crazy. But that wasn’t working. If Dr. Shon knew I didn’t belong there, but told me I couldn’t leave, how would I ever get out?

I didn’t think of running away, or escaping, because I couldn’t imagine where I would go. I didn’t think of suicide, either. I was never self-destructive that way. I might have been tired of living, like the song says, but I was also scared of dying. I did not want to die, as lonely or scared or sad as I ever got. I never thought about killing myself.

But it was hard, watching the clock, getting through the days.

Sometime in the middle of 1968—I have no papers on this period of my life, and I wasn’t keeping any kind of prison diary at Agnews—Dr. Shon made me an offer. He told me that if I could stay out of trouble for three weeks, he’d arrange to have me released. This meant no trouble. I had to go three weeks without screwing up in any way. I couldn’t get written up for anything.

That sounded easy. For some guys, it would have been. For me, it was hard. I almost made it, several times. But then I’d get written up for some little infraction or other, ditching a class or not coming down for a meal or something like that.

After a while, Shon decided to let me go anyway. He said, “You’re leaving.” He didn’t say why. He didn’t say where. He just said, “We’re arranging for your release.”

I didn’t think I was going home. I didn’t think I’d ever go home. I didn’t think they could send me back to Juvenile Hall. I was too old. I didn’t think they were sending me to prison for the checks, because they told me that was all taken care of.

So I wasn’t all that surprised when they said they were sending me back to a halfway house.

I was excited. I had been locked up at Agnews for more than two years. I couldn’t wait to get out. I was free again.

At least for a little while.