McDermott - Gorilla and the bird: a memoir of madness and a mothers love

This is a true story, and I have done my best to ensure accuracy in its telling. As my memory is sometimes fallible, dialogue is approximate. In cases where the events described took place when I was too young to understand what was happening around me, I have relied on my mother, the Bird, to fill in the gaps. The names and identifying details of some individuals have been changed.

Granny hates the pigs to this day. If shes in a friendly mood, shell call them the fuzz, but never just the police or even cops. Most often, its the pigs. Zachariah, look out the window. Is that the pigs? Shell say that in the same voice she uses when she says Look, theres a cardinal in my bird feedernonchalant, lacking any malice. Its purely observational: Theres a bird. Theres the pigs. One night in 1978 the pigs beat her son Edward senseless on her front lawn while she watched.

My uncle was sitting in the cab of Pas truck, stoned out of his mind on PCP, when the cops showed up. First two cars, then three, then six. When they started pounding on the drivers side window, Pa told them they didnt need to do that. Let me talk to my son and Ill get him out of the truck. He was told to stay on the porch, sir. Then to stay on the fucking porch, sir. Soon he realized he should not have told the cops that Edward was strong, that he didnt know for sure what hed taken, and that his son wasnt in his right mind. They interpreted that as Please beat my sons ass because he is definitely going to try to beat yours.

Edward came out swinging once they got the door open, so high on dust that he didnt know he didnt have a chance. They beat him and kept beating him with their billy clubs while he flailed and resisted. Then they beat him after he quit flailing. Then they beat him after they cuffed him. Then they maced him. Then they kept beating him.

My mother, the Bird, knew why her parents house was lit up in blue and red before she got close enough to see the cop cars covering the front lawn. Edward. It couldnt be anything but Edward. Pa was on the porch, three cops forming a moat around him. He was howling, crying so loud she heard him before she got out of the car. Edward was in the backseat of one of the cruisers. The blood matted his hair down and caked his cheeks. His face was starting to swell, but hed look much worse in the morning. He was smiling.

Granny couldnt talk for several hours, and what she saw that day would haunt her forever. Edward, shackled and maced and bathed in police lights, getting bludgeoned by six men with wooden batons. Her husband screaming and cussing and crying and begging. Sirens ringing in her ears. Black baton hitting skull with the same pop as bat hitting baseball. The beating was brutal enough to have killed him, for sure. At what point could she be certain that it hadnt? Never. And if the beating hadnt finished him off, the PCP might still have had something to say.

The Sunday after Thanksgiving 1982, a few months before I was born, my schizophrenic uncle Eddie suffered his last overdose on angel dust. He was airlifted to Kansas City with a heart aneurysm. The procedure they used on him was new enough that his case was later chronicled in medical textbooks. The doctors gave him less than a 30 percent chance of making it through the surgery.

His body survived, but in many ways, that was the end of his life. After the airlift, Granny and Pa stayed with Edward in the Kansas City ICU until just before Christmas. Granny prayed the rosary; Pa drank whiskey.

This last overdose, combined with his already severe and untreated mental illness, erased any lingering hope that he might someday be able to live anything approximating a normal life. The schiz and the addictionproverbial chicken and egghad swallowed the man. He was twenty-six years old.

Granny and Pa didnt want him institutionalized, but he couldnt live on his own either. He could barely control his own body. Given his age, Granny and Pa couldnt just tell him he had to live at home. In an attempt to regain guardianship, they went to court. Things didnt go according to plan. The judge lifted their burden of care entirelythey were denied guardianship. Edward was ordered to enter a state mental institution in Topeka.

On the day the men from the mental hospital came to pick up Edward, my mom went into labor with me. His last day on the outside was my first.

I walked out of my apartment on the corner of St. Marks and Avenue A that afternoon and I knew we were rolling. I knew the people on the sidewalk were actors. They resembled the normal East Village lot, but they were archetypes: the skaters were all wearing DC Shoes and expensive skinny Levis; the construction workers boots were too worn, their accents too Brooklyn thick; and what kind of girl wears Louboutins in this neighborhood? Even the homeless people were a little too attractive, and when I looked closely, I could tell their face tattoos were actually professional makeup jobs.

It made sense. Id spent the whole summer doing stand-up and writing a TV pilot with The Producer, a new friend with major connections whom Id met at an open mic. Hed assured me that he had access to anyone we wanted to work with in Hollywood, and earlier in the week wed met with an MTV producer whod expressed interest. Now, a few days later, I found myself in a real-life audition. The Producers approach was genius: just let me do what I do, interact with the common folk, and get it all on film. It was up to me to make the show work. All the production assistants were doubling as extras, their foot traffic directing me from one scene to the next.

The herd steered me toward Tompkins Square Park at the end of my block. I couldnt believe how well theyd cast Generic Old Man on Park Bench. In comedy, its the little details and cameos that separate good from great, after all. I knew the old man should be my first mark, so I approached him immediately. I said hello. He looked nervous but returned the greeting. I grabbed his bike with the intention of taking it for a few laps. No! he shouted as he yanked it away. The old man had some chops. Figuring our scene was up, I sprinted east toward the dog park and hurdled the fence. Before popping back out at the end of the dog run, I dropped down on all fours to gallop with the pack.