Mimi, not Don, was the authority figure Michael was born to undermine. “My father was in the Air Force, but my mother was the brains behind the Air Force,” Michael said. “He was gone,” working two jobs and studying for his PhD. “She was our disciplinarian. So if we had to do hospital corners and make a bed perfect, that was because of her, not him.” Mimi’s lectures to the boys were epic, her capacity to tune out any dissent practically endless. “You’re not going to get the point across to her,” Michael said; with Mimi, “it was always kind of a one-way street.”
As a teenager, Michael’s solution had been to not go home a lot. Hanging out with his friends, a joint in hand, he liked to think about Don being at Stanford in the late 1950s—around the same time as Ken Kesey, the countercultural icon who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest before leading a band of LSD-experimenting vagabonds across America. The idea of Colonel Don Galvin, the falcon man, dropping acid made them all laugh hysterically. At home, Michael became bolder, rejecting the Galvin family’s dress code, cutting the heels off of his Bass Weejuns so that they looked more like moccasins. When Michael started showing up stoned, his father would sit down with him and talk, but not much changed.
Things got so bad that in the fall of 1968, when Michael was fifteen, Don and Mimi sent him to Jacksonville, Florida, to live with his uncle and aunt for the school year—a chance for him to get his head straight, learn self-reliance, and be one fewer problem for parents who, though Michael did not know it, were in the thick of dealing with Donald’s issues. Michael took to Florida rather easily. His cousins, all a little younger than he was, found his Age of Aquarius affect fascinating. At his new high school, he had no trouble finding friends. He tried LSD for the first time on November 22, 1968; he remembered the date because it was the night Jimi Hendrix played Jacksonville. Michael went to the show with a new friend, Butch Trucks, who had just started a rock band with Duane Allman, and he spent much of the year hanging out at Butch’s place. The following year, 1969, Butch and Duane’s band became the Allman Brothers.
By then, Michael was back in Colorado, subject to the rules and regulations of the Galvin family for his last few years of high school. The only break in the monotony came in 1970, when Hidden Valley Road turned into a mental ward for Donald, lost and volatile after his divorce and hospitalization. Michael had no context for understanding Donald, and he was not terribly tolerant of Donald’s chosen passion, the authoritarian Catholic Church. Michael started to lose his temper with his brother, and his parents weren’t sure if the tension between them was Donald’s fault or because Michael and Donald were too much alike. To a certain extent, their experience with Donald, along with Jim’s delusional episodes, had shaken them awake. If two of their sons could lose their grip on reality, they were ready to believe that Michael might, too.
This was how the most formative moment thus far in Michael’s young life came to pass, in the fall of 1971—not long after his high school graduation and his return home from his road trip and visits in the local jails of Pennsylvania and Ohio—when Don and Mimi sent him to Denver General Hospital, where he was held in the hospital’s psychiatric ward on the top floor for observation.
Michael was prescribed Stelazine, an antipsychotic drug closely related to Thorazine. He wasn’t there long, a week or so, before he decided that he was in the wrong place. He wasn’t crazy—he was turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. He knew he did not belong there. So he left.
He slipped out of the hospital at his first opportunity, hitchhiked to a friend’s house, and called his parents. “You can’t make me go back there,” he said. “I’m not coming home, either.”
Don and Mimi were in a bind. Michael was eighteen, technically no longer theirs to control. They came back to him with a counterproposal: How would he feel about going to California to visit his brother Brian?
Michael smiled.
* * *
—
AFTER BRIAN HAD left Colorado, his brothers still heard from him from time to time. Once, Richard got a letter in the mail with a joint inside, wrapped in red, white, and blue wrapping paper, along with a note that read, “Enjoy this from Jefferson Airplane.”
It wasn’t long, a few months, before his brothers learned that Brian had accomplished what he’d set out to do. He’d formed a new band with the name Bagshot Row, named for a street in the Shire near Bilbo Baggins’s home in The Hobbit. This was exactly the sort of adventure Michael yearned for now. Nothing could have been more appealing to him than a chance to hang out in the Bay Area with a bunch of hippies and musicians—with his brother, the handsome, dark-haired prodigy, leading the charge.
When Michael arrived, he learned that not everything about Brian’s new life was as advertised. Brian hadn’t quite made it to the Bay. He and his bandmates were renting a house in Sacramento, an hour’s drive from the coast. And Brian worked all day to pay the rent, leaving Michael on his own much of the time. What seemed like a perfect trip now was looking a little like a letdown. Bagshot Row was good, though—a rock-jazz-blues hybrid, featuring Brian as the band’s flute soloist. Once again, Brian was the standout musician. But unlike his high school group, this band made original music, and planned to make records. Michael roadied for them a little, heaving the band’s Hammond organ in and out of a van.
He wasn’t there very long, just a month, before he got into trouble. Bored and alone one day, Michael decided that he wanted to go find the Pacific Ocean. He knew it had to be miles away, given this was Sacramento, but he had the time and he knew which way west was, and he thought if he could follow one of the canals or rivers, he’d get there. He spent the better part of a day walking before giving up and starting back to Brian’s place. On the way, he cut through a trailer park and followed a dirt road. In the middle of the road, he noticed a garden hose connector. He picked it up, placed it on the step of the closest trailer, and knocked on the door. That got someone’s attention.
The police picked him up just a few blocks from Brian’s house. Michael heard one cop say the words “trespassing” and “attempted burglary.” He was astonished. He didn’t see how he’d done anything wrong. He figured he was being hassled for being a hippie. He got mad, and then he learned the police in Sacramento weren’t as forgiving as that judge in Jerusalem, Pennsylvania.
In jail, Michael learned that attempted burglary was a felony charge. He’d never been in trouble with the law like that. While awaiting his court date, Michael tried to make friends. The guy in a neighboring cell taught him how to make toast with the Wonder Bread that came with meals: take your toilet paper and wind it up and light it with the matches you get for cigarettes, create a little campfire, and place your bread over it. Michael mastered that, and then he got caught for it. He got placed in solitary—a dark room where he was all alone. Until he was actually in there, Michael had no idea a place like that actually existed.