For a couple of weeks at the end of every summer, the Garys opened up their Montana place to a platoon of kids, including friends and cousins. Mary was there for that. She and Suzy Gary were mischievous kindred spirits, sneaking sips of Sam’s Coors Lights. It still confused Mary that Margaret got to live in this world all the time while she had to beg and plead for the chance to visit. But as Mary got older and mixed with the Garys a little more, she and Sam started to have longer conversations about her future. Whenever Mary said she wanted to do something for the greater good, Sam’s response was always the same: “If you want to do something like that, go make some money and give it away.”
Both Mary and Margaret loved the Montana trips. But while for Margaret, Montana was another place where she never truly felt at home, for Mary it was a taste of what life could be like if she didn’t have to be at home at all.
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MATT CONTROLLED THE stoplights in Colorado Springs for a long while. Then he announced that he was Paul McCartney.
After his breakdown at the Garys’ house, Matt had dropped out of his ceramics program at Loretto Heights in 1977 and was back home now with Donald and Peter. Mary—twelve years old and the only sane child living at home—no longer had Matt as a protector. Now he was part of the problem, a hazard. One day, Peter was being a pest to Mary, and Mary had asked Matt for help. Her parents were not there; neither was Donald. The two brothers faced off in the living room, the same way Donald and Jim used to. Once the punches flew, the pretext for the fight didn’t matter. Both Matt and Peter lost control, each of them accessing something primal, something Mary hadn’t seen before. She was sure they were going to kill each other.
There was only one established move in these situations, a move that Mary knew well by now. She rushed to Don and Mimi’s bedroom, flipped the lock behind her, and called the police. That was when Matt turned on her; the last thing he wanted was the police at their door. She sat there, trembling, the phone in her hand, as Matt, once the brother she admired most, tried to break the door down.
The police arrived before Matt could get to her. They took Matt away to the hospital. For Mary, this was the first time she’d felt responsible for hospitalizing one of her brothers. She was surprised, after so many years feeling rage toward them, to feel guilty about that.
She was also surprised that she had actually not wanted them to hurt one another—that after building up so much resentment toward them, she still cared.
Matt’s first admission to Pueblo was on December 7, 1978. Five days later, Peter joined him there, for his third visit to Pueblo that year. Donald also was cycling in and out of Pueblo that year—three Galvin brothers on separate wards of the same hospital, for what would not be the last time.
From then on, when Mary was alone with Matt and Peter, she locked herself in her parents’ room until someone else came home.
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PETER WAS THE closest brother in age to Mary, just four years older. At home now, Peter was a wall of no—he refused all help and defied all advice. He never thought he needed medical care. It followed that he did not believe he needed his shot of Prolixin every three weeks.
By 1978, the year Peter turned eighteen, the staff at Pikes Peak knew the whole family well, especially Mimi, who had become a fierce advocate for each of the sons. Between outpatient visits, Peter would stay at Hidden Valley Road only as long as he could stand it, or until he became too much for his parents to handle and they sent him away. Then he would camp out under a bridge for days at a time, or hitchhike to Vail and hang out along the main strip.
Peter was in and out of hospitals a half dozen times that year. A supportive residence called CARES House in Colorado Springs took him in briefly, but when Peter left without permission, the staff said he was not welcome back. On July 2, an argument with his parents over taking his Prolixin ended with Peter smashing four picture windows. Peter later explained that he “really did not want to get into a hassle, but it just happened.” Once again, his parents threw him out of the house; this time, he was old enough to be sent to the state mental hospital at Pueblo.
Over three stays at Pueblo, the staff got to see both sides of Peter. He could be charming—“a pleasant, alert, oriented and well-groomed young man who behaved appropriately in the interview situation.” But once the conversation turned toward his family, “his overall style was markedly grandiose and paranoid” and later “belligerent” and “very hostile.” Peter announced that he had an interview for a job at the Eisenhower Tunnel; then he said he had decided to start work as a ski instructor in a few weeks; then he mentioned that he’d recently done some work as a stunt skier for the TV show Charlie’s Angels. At times, the staff at Pueblo needed to put him in restraints; then, once the restraints were removed, he would decide to leave the hospital. Once he made it as far as Ordway, a tiny town of a thousand people fifty miles east of Pueblo, where he jumped on one car and tried to leap onto a moving truck and was almost run over. Another time, he said he was a Secret Service agent, working for the Queen of England. “Presently, Peter is so loose and psychotic,” one report read, “that interviewing him is fruitless and nonproductive.”
For perhaps the first time, the doctors, struck by “his irritability, his demandingness, his mild hyperactivity, [and] his manipulativeness,” suspected that Peter’s problem was likely not schizophrenia at all but bipolar disorder. If that were the case, that revised diagnosis would cause an entirely new set of problems: Peter was too unreliable to be trusted to regularly take lithium, the drug most prescribed at the time for that condition. Lithium is one of the few psychiatric medications that is dangerous in mild overdose; Peter would not only have to follow the drug regimen, he would have to agree to have his blood level monitored, and that didn’t seem likely. As long as he stayed on Prolixin, he seemed more or less all right. So they decided to stick with schizophrenia as a diagnosis, concluding that “the distinction does probably not have any practical importance at this time.”
For the next several years, Peter would be prescribed drugs to treat schizophrenia, when it was quite possible he was suffering from another illness altogether.
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WHEN DONALD WASN’T at home or getting outpatient treatment at Pikes Peak Mental Health Center in Colorado Springs, he was still walking upward of two hundred miles a week. Jobs would come and go, but walking remained his great constant, along with religious visions and preaching. Only now and then would his wanderings get him into trouble. He was brought back to Pueblo in September 1978, after a squabble with a clerk at a sporting goods store. During that nearly three-month stay, he announced plans to leave the country at Christmas and give up his citizenship.
He returned to Pueblo a year later after having an argument with a nurse at Pikes Peak. That was when he started talking about various stars in the sky showing him where to find particular elements in the ground that were involved with what he called “rock knife chemistry.” He believed that he had to find those elements, smash them with a hammer, and eat the dust.