A Deeper Blue (8 page)

Grace Jameson is a psychiatrist who has been on staff at the Titus Harris Clinic since the early 1950s. According to Dr. Jameson, “By the early 1940s, people all over Texas knew about Dr.

Harris and his associates, and the phrase ‘gone to Galveston’

began to mean that the individual had a psychiatric disorder
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and the only possible reason someone would come to Galveston would be to consult Dr. Harris or one of his partners.” 2

At the Titus Harris Clinic—one of the first facilities of its kind to serve children and adolescents—a team of doctors (primarily Doctors Ford, Martin, and Wight) evaluated Townes for a few weeks, overseeing the administration of a barrage of physical and psychological tests. According to his psychological report, Townes “attained a full scale I.Q. of 134 which places him in the very superior range of intelligence.”3

The psychological report, filed by Dr. Charles Gaston, goes on: The patient’s character structure is predominantly obsessive-compulsive. This is a pleasant, friendly, but quiet, reserved, somewhat shy and aloof individual.

His pleasantness and affable unobtrusiveness lend themselves to being quite charming and gracious in most social situations. Though he is quiet and reserved, he has a capacity for great intensity of feeling, and is also prone to mood swing [
sic
] and depression.

He is outwardly quite deferential and respectful to adults and other authority figures, though he feels quite hostile toward them inwardly.

This is a sensitive, artistic, and idealistic youth.

His value system emphasizes that he work hard, achieve, be courageous, take pride in himself, be an honorable and somewhat moralistic individual and stand on his own two feet.

While there is nothing too unusual in this assessment, the report goes on to describe what the doctor found to be the darker side of Townes’ personality: “This youth has a strong paranoid potential to his character structure, and this appears to be becoming more prominent at the present time. The sources for this appear two-fold. One, this youth feels quite inadequate in comparison with his successful father and feels he can never compete with him.… Two, there are indications of some feminine elements in his character structure and these feminine elements threaten his whole value system, sense of self, and adequacy as a male.”

The doctor believed that Townes’ feelings of inadequacy in relation to his father, along with a recognition of his “feminine”

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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
characteristics (most likely just his sensitivity and “artistic” nature), formed a conflict that was fomenting paranoia and the development of “grandiose perceptions of himself to bolster his feelings of personal worth.” The report continues: “While the overall pattern of this youth’s protocol is not floridly psychotic, he is moving in that direction, and his test protocols are reflective of a definite schizophrenic potential and possible current underlying psychotic ideation.”

The psychological report concluded with emphasis that Townes had an “obsessive-compulsive schizoid character with strong paranoid trends.” The official diagnosis was “Schizophrenic reaction, Schizo-affective type (Depression).”4 The treatment prescribed was cutting-edge at that time: a regimen of “shock therapies”—both insulin coma therapy and electroshock treatments—to be administered over the course of the next couple of months—nearly forty treatments between early April and early June 1964—during which time Townes was only to leave the confines of the hospital on occasional supervised weekend passes.

One of the original practitioners on staff at the clinic was Dr.

Martin Lee Towler, who was a pioneer in the use of electroen-cephalography and was a strong advocate of the so-called shock therapies, which even then were controversial, but which were considered the most effective treatments available. Insulin coma therapy, which had been introduced in the mid-1930s to treat schizophrenia, consists of injecting the patient with increasing amounts of insulin each morning in order to lower the blood sugar enough to bring about a coma. The procedure was performed in a special treatment room with specially trained nurses and attendants. “The comas were allowed to continue for about thirty minutes,” according to Dr. Jameson, “then [were] terminated by injecting fifty-percent glucose intravenously, followed by the administration of sugared orange juice and then breakfast. Acute episodes of schizophrenia did end quite satisfactorily with this treatment in most cases.” Electro Convulsive Therapy (also called electroshock), introduced shortly after insulin coma therapy, was used to treat depression and mania. When the two Sanitarium Blues

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therapies were combined, as Dr. Towler combined them, electroshocks were administered just before the patient was brought out of the insulin coma.

Years after his treatment, Townes became friends with a fellow Texan called Chito, who had been a patient of Dr. Towler’s at the clinic, with the same diagnosis as Townes, and they found that they had had the same experiences. Chito describes the experience as “horrifying,” but one that he and Townes came to feel they deserved as “punishment” for their misdeeds. As Chito remembers the treatment, “You go in there, and the doctors strap you down. They grease up these wires and they put them on your head in different places, and they also grease up some stuff that they put on your chest with wires. And then they shoot you with sodium pentathol and ask you to count backwards.

The next thing you know, you wake up in a room where other people are slowly waking up. And as you wake up, the orderlies take you back to your room. They used to ask me how I felt, and I said, ‘well, it made me really, really sick,’ which it really, really did. And [Townes] said it made him really, really sick too. And this is something he told me too, but it’s pretty much run of the mill for everybody: You can’t remember your name. And that’s the most important thing in the world to you.”5

According to Dr. Jameson, the electroshock treatment alone

“would probably have ended the episode that Mr. Van Zandt was treated for here. But, at that time, we all felt that, qualita-tively, if someone was psychotic, insulin coma therapy gave a better quality of remission.”

Van Zandt’s extreme behavior—a rash of serious drinking, sniffing glue to the point of unconsciousness, and taking off on spontaneous trips, removed from all responsibilities—was diagnosed as constituting a psychotic state. Townes’ mood swings were recognized as manifestations of manic-depressive illness.

And as extreme as these methods seem today, Dr. Jameson, for one, is quick to point out that the convulsive therapies seemed a godsend in those days, compared with the alternatives. “Before that, if somebody was manic-depressive they might spend
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
a great deal of their life in a hospital. In this context, the introduction of electroshock and insulin coma therapy seemed just revolutionary.… It’s really good at ending an episode of acute schizophrenia, and since we didn’t differentiate between that and the psychotic type, if you will, of manic-depressive psycho-sis, it would have been prescribed for that too.”

Even when shock treatment was successful, though, the success was qualified. “Shock treatment could end episodes, but it did nothing to prevent recurrences,” Dr. Jameson says. Anti-psychotic medications—primarily thorazine and related drugs—

had been introduced in the 1950s, and the first antidepressant medications were on the threshold of being brought into use in the early 1960s. Townes probably did have access to some of these new medicines at Galveston, according to Dr. Jameson.

“Obviously, the man wasn’t really schizophrenic, because he was able to do as much as he did,” Dr. Jameson says unequivo-cally. “Now we would call it ‘bipolar with psychotic features.’

Manic-depression—bipolar disorder—is basically a mood disorder, and it sometimes shows some psychotic features. If he was manic, and he probably was when he was psychotic, he couldn’t sleep, and just ordinary sleep deprivation can make a person psychotic.”

Manic-depressive illness is often complicated by the subject’s substance abuse, and Van Zandt clearly was abusing substances, primarily alcohol, prior to his diagnosis and treatment. In fact, it was recognized at the time and is even better understood today that a much greater percentage of individuals with bipolar disorder are diagnosed as alcoholics than in the general population, and Townes unquestionably was an alcoholic.6 It is important to note the relationship between the two distinct diseases. “The alcoholism could have started as his own misguided attempt to treat himself, because it would have made him feel better,” Dr.

Jameson says. “Often we see patients for alcoholism and drug abuse where the underlying cause is that they’re manic-depressive. And they have to be treated for that before they can be treated for the other.”

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Dr. Jameson is clear that Van Zandt’s treatment was, temporarily, fairly successful. “But where it was not successful,” she says, “is that he needed to be convinced to stay under a thera-pist’s care, even traveling around like musicians do; he could have arranged for it, if he knew enough about his own illness, if he knew he needed to see someone and get the appropriate lab work, or whatever. He could have done it, but he chose not to.

And the downside is that he treated the symptoms with drugs and alcohol, which was obviously a mistreatment.”

Van Zandt was hospitalized at Galveston from March 14 until June 19, 1964, a period that might have been extended from the original regimen because of some relapses on Townes’ part.

Townes was allowed to have visitors; his parents, Fran, and a friend or two came to see him—Fran later recalled that he had to be reintroduced to her each time she visited—and he was able to talk on the phone. “One of the stories [he told me] on the phone was he had just gotten in trouble that day, because they had caught him with a bottle of wine,” Bob Myrick remembers.

“One of his friends somehow smuggled a bottle of wine to him.

And he told the nurse it was a torpedo, that he was Captain Torpedo, and the bed was a submarine. I said, ‘Townes, that’s a weird story even for you.’”

Eventually Townes began to exhibit “less depression” and the doctors decided that “his thought content disturbance” was “in remission.” Townes was pronounced well enough to try to begin to make his way back into society, and he was discharged to his parents with no medications prescribed. But he was very likely changed forever.7

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Waitin’ for the Day

A
FTER HIS STAY AT GALVESTON, the Van Zandts took their son back home to Houston. They would not allow him to return to Colorado, but encouraged him to attend school locally, at the University of Houston. Fran had returned to Boulder to finish the year at the University of Colorado, but her and Townes’ strong desire to be together was the central tenet of their frequent, ongoing discussions of the future.1

And it seemed that the future was all that Townes was equipped to discuss. “He virtually had no memory of his childhood,” Fran says. She recalls that Townes’ mother, distraught by this unexpected after-effect of his treatment, would go through the family photo albums repeatedly with Townes, telling him stories to reinforce his memories and to help him rebuild them.

“When somebody would ask him a question, he would answer and then realize that the only reason he was saying that was because somebody had told him. It was like rote memory, not a picture memory,” Fran recalls. “I think it started coming back over time, but he never trusted that it was a real memory.” Hence, Townes and Fran did not discuss Galveston. “Townes had total
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honor for his parents,” Fran says. “So there was no resentment, no anger, only the constant sense of not knowing whether he really remembered.”

According to Dr. Grace Jameson at UTMB, the electroshock treatments would cause short-term memory loss; indeed, the point was to erase the traumatic memories surrounding the psychotic episode that initiated the treatment. But long-term memory loss, the wiping out of blocks of childhood memories, is not the result of such treatment. Dr. Jameson says, “There may be some other reason that he blocked out some of his childhood.”2

She speculates that his alcoholism could have caused this loss of long-term memory. Others have speculated that Townes pretended to have lost these long-term memories to inculcate guilt in his father and gain sympathy from his mother.

Although Townes was not prescribed any medication, he did go to some follow-up counseling sessions for a few months. By way of providing perspective, Fran adds, “I can remember meeting one of his counselors, months later, one of the young doctors, and he actually quit psychiatry because of Townes’ case. He said, ‘I didn’t think there was anything really wrong with him. I did not agree with the treatment.’”

To Fran, the changes in Townes after Galveston were fairly subtle, but clear. “Townes was needier, always needing reassur-ance. That was the biggest difference. His sense of humor was still intact, his quick wit, all of that was still there. But he seemed more calm; he wasn’t as intense, at least for a while.… He seemed more …”; she pauses to think, then says, “calmly resolute.”

Townes followed his parents’ advice and enrolled in the University of Houston’s pre-law program in January 1965, transferring thirty-two credits from Colorado.3 Fran had agreed to return to her home town and take her senior year at the University of Houston, with Townes. “He was a junior and I was starting my senior year,” Fran explains. “I picked up a year when he was in Galveston. He was only in Galveston for three months, but you know … it takes some time for recovery from that kind of treatment.” It was during this brief period that, for all intents
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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
and purposes, Townes seems to have decided—either with resolve or with resignation—to attempt to walk the straight path laid out for him by the people who loved him. A friend recalls Townes as he took up pre-law at Houston. “When he was first in law school he was pretty straight. He wore long-sleeved white starched shirts and pressed Levis and boots and a belt, and he really looked like an up-and-coming attorney.”4