Free Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir by Ron Perlman

for him.
    My brother hit a brick wall during the summer before my senior year. He was working in the Catskills at one of the better hotels upthere. He’d come down to the city or go really anywhere a band hired him to play at a club or a big gig. That’s how musicians made a living, and many still do. Then I see there’s this sudden major drama going down in the background at my house. No one wanted to tell me exactly what happened, but I knew it had to be something bad. I finally found out my brother had what was being called a “behavioral incident.” It was serious enough to have him picked up immediately from the Concord Hotel and brought home to figure out what the fuck was wrong with him. My father went up there to pick him up and brings him home.
    Once back at our place—I remember like a scene out of a movie—my brother is standing in the kitchen, looking really weird and rambling. He’s just saying whatever, free associating, making no sense. My mother is in the far corner with her hands to her mouth in disbelief. My dad’s trying to reason with him. He grabs my brother by the shoulders and makes my brother look at his face. But my brother has a kind of angry, hostile tone to his rambling. He pulls away from my father’s hold and nearly squares off, with his clinched fists at his side. My brother’s tone escalates to confrontational. This was freaking my father out because he thought Les was being disrespectful. My father raised his hand to slap his face, but he held it there aloft. Dad then turned, deeply exhaled, and sat down in a kitchen chair, his hands laid out flat on the table, though I could see them slightly trembling. My father stared out the window as my brother rambled on. Although we had no idea what was wrong, as it was not easy to diagnose back then, what actually happened was that my brother started to have what are now known as manic depressive episodes. This was the very first one.
    No one could understand how he got it. There was no mental illness in the family line, as my father would say. He couldn’t understand what was wrong or how to fix my brother. Years later my brother told me he had taken some acid while up in the Catskills. One of the other musicians and Les dropped some home-brewed LSD, and both had nightmarish trips that lasted for twelve or more hours. Once you’re tripping, you can’t untrip at will. So if you’re having a bad trip, you arefucked. I’m not certain this is the thing that truly kicked off my brother’s manic depression. He had been a candidate for it, with or without the acid trip, but whatever happened on that acid trip triggered some sort of a chemical imbalance in him that he never recovered from.
    The next day my mother convinced my father to have my brother hospitalized. I don’t know whether they even had a term for manic depression in the late sixties, but they anesthetized him with Thorazine, which is a horse tranquilizer. They prescribed huge amounts of the drug to calm him into a state until he was zombietized. After two days of being in the hospital he looked like Jack Nicholson at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest . He had no fuckin’ life in his eyes. It was a very sad thing to watch.
    They then put him on lithium as well and told my folks he needed therapy. He was released after about two months of lockdown. When he came home he was tranquil, to say the least, because he was so sedated. Yet he lost his edge, his creativity, the thing that made him the genius musician he was. To this day I think of Les as a pure talent and myself as the charlatan. I really think I got by on a very thin set of skills, whereas with Les, he was really touched by some major muses. The heartbreaking part was that he had these demons that overwhelmed his phenomenal talents, such that we never got a chance to see the genius shine through. That’s the real tragedy.
    It’s a double-edged sword, this artistic genius, as is the disease he had. He knew he