Conan's Sword
the reality of living with schizophrenia
Doug Draper had been my psychologist for something like a thousand years. We began talking just before the Ottoman Turks began their empire. I loved Doug, and I worked with him pretty honestly, but I can’t say I was cured.
“and, how do you feel about this, Boyd?”
“Gee, I feel pretty goddamn bad, Doug. I also feel outnumbered and outgunned.”
I don’t know if my sister knows this story. She was away on a church trip when it happened. I have no idea what they told her. We never discussed it. I should probably ask before I press “send,” but fortune favors the brave. Right? To say it was a family secret might be an understatement. It simply was never discussed, not even with me, and I was pretty sure I had a right to discuss it.
Before he lost his mind, my brother was my idol. I would quietly watch him try to copy the Frank Frazetta paintings of Conan the Barbarian. That was the before times. The sane times.
I was ok with the idea of people trying to kill me. As human beings go, I was probably more killable than most. Opinionated, moody, and impatient, it could have come any time, and I would have said I earned at least some of it. My mother had always been my protector. She jealously guarded me when people thought I was retarded. She even had a book called, “How To Educate the Retarded Child.” This would be the day that I lost my mother’s protection and became the outcast.
Jimmy started hearing voices when he started college. One of his classmates told Eddie Collins, the president of Millsaps, and Eddie called my dad, the chairman of the board. The idea seemed alien to me, and oddly cool. If I heard voices, what would they say? Trying to keep from pulling my brother out of college, his schedule was reduced to two classes a semester, then one.
One night, we got a call late. Jimmy and another boy from Millsaps tried to rob a gas station about a hundred yards from the Jewish Cemetery. Jimmy had an army surplus machete with him. Armed robbery. The police had just brought him home before. Not this time.
Jimmy’s defense was insanity. There was more than enough evidence and testimony for that. The other boy switched his defense to insanity too, which pissed me off. He wasn’t hearing voices; he was just buying drugs, which is how the whole caper started. The sentence agreement was time served in the Jackson city jail, which was about two months and a year’s institutional care beyond the six months he’d already been there.
If you live here, you’ve probably heard stories about how Big Jim Campbell influenced the verdict. You’re guess is as good as mine. We never discussed it. I can promise you, though, if he could have done it, he would have done it. I had just turned fifteen when my brother moved home again. Happy birthday. I’ve written about how my birthday was sometimes lost in the shuffle. This is one of those times. I don’t much care for birthdays.
Conan the Barbarian was my brother’s favorite character. As schizophrenia changed the shape of his mind, it also changed the shape of his art, but warriors from the Hyborian Age remained among his favorite subjects. They were part of his real life as an avocation, they were part of his harmless daydreaming fantasy life, and I would soon learn they were part of his illness.
Voices in your head tell you silly, nonsensical things, sometimes they tell you kind of cool things, and sometimes they tell you terrible things.
My brother and I never fought. We didn’t talk much, though. He was drugged pretty heavily. Sometimes he drooled. To be fair, I didn’t much like talking with anybody.
It was hard enough being sixteen. I had a girlfriend that I didn’t really think I loved, but she liked to have sex a lot. Like, a whole lot. Her father would spend weeks without getting out of bed. That ended horribly. My headmaster hated me, but to be fair, I hated him. My football coach wanted me to know Jesus, and I was getting acne on my back and thighs from the steroids.
We hadn’t fought. I came out of my room, and he was curled up in the corner of the hall, wearing worn-out underwear. He came at me with the machete held high.
My first instinct was to block the blow with my arm. Were there any sort of edge to the blade, my hand would be cut off, but it’d been dull since Hiroshima, so, although it left a considerable mark, it didn’t break the skin. My second instinct was to smash him into the walls, over and over again, until he quit moving. It wasn’t a conscious decision.
My brother lay bleeding and whimpering in the corner. My mother called the police. She was mad at me.
“You frightened him!”
“I was trying to get a goddamn coke!”
The unbreakable bond between my mother and me had been weakening for years. My bond with everybody had been weakening for years. The water was over the dam now. I was alone. She made her choice.
The police came for my brother. He was taken directly to St. Dominic’s. It was a setup. The Chief of Police graduated from high school with my dad. My dad was chairman of the board at St. Dominic’s. The paramedic tried to look at my arm. I told him to fuck himself.
“At your size, you could really hurt somebody.”
“Gee, I’ve only been hearing that since I was twelve!”
I asked my mother why the machete was even in the house. Wasn’t it evidence in a crime? I guess my father didn’t want any remnant of our family at the police station, but why wasn’t it thrown out?
“It was hidden, ok?”
“Obviously not very well. It’s a good thing none of the voices taught him how to sharpen it.”
“How dare you? He’s your brother!”
“Yeah, and this is my arm! Good thing it’s still here!”
I became an advocate for sending my brother to Whitfield or Meridian or Parchman, or anywhere, so that I could spend my last few years at home without being killed.
My mother had to make Sophie’s choice: my brother or me. She chose, not me. Even on the day she died, I knew that the schism between us still existed. It was the subject of many late-night arguments, sometimes shouting. As much as I loved her, I said the most horrible things you can imagine. I made her cry.
A mother has an unbreakable bond with her firstborn. Had the twins lived, I would have been fifth-born. I was expendable. That’s actually not even remotely true, but it felt like it. I loved my mother, and we worked really well together, but the trust was gone. My mother invested all her dreams into the first and last born. Second, third, fourth, and fifth were ultimately forgettable or died before drawing breath.
In college, I read The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. I didn’t take a class on Faulkner until after my father died. While he was alive, I was supposed to study economics and accounting.
Quentin Compson and Jason Compson had very different opinions about what to do with Benjy Compson. Candice Compson married a dim bulb lawyer and convinced him she was carrying his child. She wasn’t, not his at least.
I understood the position of both Jason and Quentin. Quentin made a pretty terrible decision that didn’t help anybody. Benjy ended up in Jackson anyway.
About six months before I left for college, my brother had found what appeared to be a broken piece of farm equipment. He called it “Odin’s Hammer.” Sword and Sandal warriors were still trying to break into his consciousness.
I suppose nearly losing my arm hadn’t made an impression because nobody took Odin’s hammer away until he started to smash furniture and windows with it. The police were called. Again. A few more weeks on the special floor of St. Dominic’s. Again. I got to move out in relative quiet, though.
About a year into college, there was a story in the paper. A schizophrenic boy, living at home with his mother, stabbed her with a steak knife sixty times, paralyzing her on one side. This was near Sheffield Drive. Walking distance away.
“You’ve got to do something. I don’t want you to die this way.”
“He’s my baby.”
She was right, of course. I wasn’t anybody’s baby. Even if he had cut my arm off, I still would have bounced him off the walls till he quit moving. I was a brute, and he was a wounded child, and that’s how it went, until the day she died.
The thing is, I am a brute. I’ve always been a brute. I cultivated it so people would leave me alone with my books. I cultivated it so I could stop bullies, but not be a hero. I have no use for medals or parades.
