Daylight pours through the kitchen window of the small apartment. This room resembles an overexposed photograph compared to the adjacent living room, where Andy sits in the dark chain-smoking Marlboros and chuckling at Judge Wapner of The People’s Court.
Like AIDS, the disease has no cure; unlike AIDS, its cause is still a mystery. The belief that environmental factors cause the disease has now yielded to the widely held professional opinion that it’s caused by biological factors–although external forces, like family stress, may trigger the illness. Unlike AIDS, schizophrenia doesn’t attack specific high-risk groups–except youth itself. According to Dr. Torrey, three-quarters of all newly diagnosed schizophrenics are from 16 to 25 years old.
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Andy grew up in an upper-middle-class neighborhood. He was a good student and an outstanding athlete. In high school, he and his brother both were reportedly watched by pro-baseball scouts. He was friendly and likable, his talent for sports earned him respect from the guys, and his Celtic good looks made him popular with the girls. He seemed destined for the good life.
Andy went instead that June to live with high school chums in Honolulu, in a tough section of Waikiki known as “the jungle.” He lasted a month. “I could see a difference in him when he returned from Hawaii,” his mother says. “It was like he was in outer space or something. He wasn’t really concentrating.” Andy had been home less than two weeks when his parents “really noticed odd behavior.”
Andy grew up with a generation that condoned, if it did not encourage, drug use. In the early 70s many high school students chose pot and psychedelics over Old Style and Bud. Andy’s friends “chugged gusto,” but they also identified with hippies and the drug scene. “I dropped acid and mescaline exactly 13 times and never had a bad trip,” he says. The last time he tripped was on a quarter hit of “window pane” in Waikiki.
“One day I told my psychiatrist how good it felt to be alive. I had suddenly crossed some sort of threshold. I could look at somebody and see their soul. I got the feeling that I was the only one alive, and everybody else was an image sent from God. I couldn’t figure it out. My whole orientation was off, the way I was born to see things had changed. I was enlightened, and I was thinking about things I’d never dreamed of before. I felt an indescribable love for people, and I felt I could communicate better than I’d ever done before.” The spiritual revelations lasted nearly a year, but gradually “things got out of tune” and “the feeling went away.”
But although medication kept the schizophrenia at bay, Andy had trouble mustering the courage to face strangers. He was afraid of exposing his sometimes bizarre behavior. And his occasional facial tics, vacant stares, and inappropriate eruptions of nervous laughter did make customers uneasy. He finally quit the job, on the brink of another breakdown. He remained unemployed for two years, living at home, sitting around the house during the day and, when the doctor took him off medication for a year, going out almost every night to drink beer at a tavern.
