Momentous
Discovery
I'm goin' through changes
— changes
in my mind.
Chuck Girard, "Changes"
At the Orange County Medical Center Michael was put on hold for seventy-two hours, during which he was supposed to be kept under observation. It was evening when he arrived, and he was placed in a tank with a number of other patients behind a locked door. Not wishing to fall asleep in such bizarre surroundings, he began exercising with push-ups and jumping jacks until two orderlies in white coats arrived with large red pills.
"Don't!" pleaded Michael. "I'll do anything. Just don't sedate me."
"O.K., then quit the jumping and exercising."
Soon they returned with some juice, which was also medicated. He refused it. They then shifted him to a room that contained a bed with straps on it. Again Michael pleaded: "Please, whatever you do, don't strap me down. I'll be quiet. I won't do anything."
There was no sleep for him that night.
The next day the other patients talked to him so strangely that Michael was convinced the mental ward was filled with demons and evil spirits. He was escorted
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to an evaluating psychiatrist and then to a full board of psychiatrists and was asked questions. He repeated his tale of joining the Beatles and being shot in the head. The consensus was that Michael should be admitted for his own good, and he was given a paper to sign. He wept again, because after four years of taking drugs he knew he was at the end of his rope.
He signed.
The conclusion of the evaluation board was that Michael should be diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic. He spent a week at the medical center, undergoing tests and hypnosis, after which he was released to outpatient status. For the next ten months he was assigned to a Newport Beach psychologist and paid weekly visits. The hypnotic probing of childhood experiences proved helpful; it explained behavioral trends and fear reactions that had often puzzled him. Memories long buried were recalled to the threshold of consciousness. The "shot in the head" was traced to a possible desire for self-destruction.
Michael balked at the prescribed treatment at a major point: he refused all medication after one dosage, claiming the medicine made him crazier than drugs ever had. And with drugs he was finished forever; the hoped-for "good trip" that would take him "into the light" had turned into a bummer that threw him. Acid flashes did continue to recur and caused him to fade in and out of reality. Sometimes when he was shaving his image would seem to disappear off the mirror. Migraine headaches were a daily occurrence. Many, many times he would relive the horror of feeling the side of his head blown off.
With his family gone and the Irvine house sold by the Riddets, Michael went back to the house in Huntington Beach, which he shared with his brother Kent and several of his friends. He obtained another job selling cars but it
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did not last long — his attitude was a little too crazy for the owner. So instead of earning a thousand dollars a week, he began collecting unemployment compensation and living on food stamps. He hocked his guitar. At night he would drive around the back streets of Orange County cities, drinking six-packs of beer and trying to convince himself that his head wasn't blown off. The next morning's hangover, painful as it was, somehow felt reassuring: he was still alive.
When the ten months of treatment were up, the psychologist informed Michael that he had progressed sufficiently to be assigned to group therapy. His speech was less halting and his body, finally rid of unhealthy chemicals, gave some promise of recovering from the abuse to which it had been subjected. Michael reported regularly to the sessions where he engaged in dialogue with other patients, some of whom were struggling with problems of identity or insecurity, while others were attempting to rescue their marriages. Each week during this period Michael managed to scrape up twenty-five dollars for the psychologist's fee. After seven months he decided he should discontinue all treatment.
Michael's thoughts after seventeen months of therapy were, "O.K., I had a bad trip. The acid has left me mentally crippled for life, but I've got to accept the facts and live with them even if it means pain and agony."
During his hospital stay the doctors had asked Michael, "Do you have a plan for the future?" and he had replied, "I would like to be a songwriter." Even though his world had collapsed, he still enjoyed music. Perhaps he could work up sound tracks that would set the mood for different events. He might even break into the motion picture industry. The more he thought about music, the more he liked the idea. Sandra had taught him to enjoy beauty in
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nature; now he wanted to follow that path. He would become an aesthete, a lover of poetry and music.
Kent had enrolled in Orange Coast Junior College, a recently established small college sandwiched between I-405 and the Pacific Ocean. Kent was becoming involved in a radical movement known as the Students for a Democratic Society. Michael had no interest in such activity, but he visited the campus with his brother and decided he might try to learn something about music. He applied and was accepted as a student, and for the next four-and-a-half months he made his only contact with higher education. The five courses he selected were psychology, philosophy, music, speech, and cinema. He managed to maintain a B average, only to drop out after completing the spring semester. But before he closed the door on his formal education and left the campus, Michael made a momentous discovery.
He met some Christians.
It didn't make sense to him. He would see these people in his classes, carrying their Bibles and talking about the Lord. Bibles on campus? He had never run into such people. Because he was still somewhat paranoid, he became suspicious of them. Perhaps they were Communists using reverse psychology to make a mockery of religion. Perhaps their Bibles were hollow and they were dealing in drugs. It never occurred to Michael that a young person would carry a Bible to college. It seemed so foreign! And their looks troubled him, for they had long hair and looked like hippies; but he had to admit they were happy people and full of love. In all his involvement in the drug culture at the rock concerts and elsewhere, he had never seen the peace and happiness that these men and women seemed to have. And when he talked to them about it, they credited it all to Jesus Christ.
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One young man particularly impressed him. He said his name was Henry Cutrona, and he looked like Paul McCartney. He was thin, with dark hair and brown eyes, and he was just bubbled over with the Lord. He was light-spirited, jovial, an excellent guitar player, and a good singer. Just a free spirit! Henry wrote his own songs and would sing them sitting on the planters outside the school cafeteria. He was very uninhibited in his witness for Jesus, and Michael was intrigued by him.
For the first time Michael was hearing songs about Jesus written in the contemporary rock style of Buffalo Springfield, Moody Blues, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash — groups that had become part of his life. The effect was magnetic. He began attending concerts of singing groups that visited the campus, including Love Song and Andrae Crouch and the Disciples. Singer Chuck Girard's testimony particularly impressed him. Michael was not a Christian; he had a long way to go; he was neither reading his Bible nor attending church. But he had a new love, and music became its expression. He would compose simple tunes, put words to them, and play them on the guitar or the piano in his music class.
One day shortly after the tragic Kent State campus confrontation of 1970, a political rally was held at Orange Coast Junior College to protest President Nixon's policies and American participation in the Vietnam War. Various off-campus speakers were introduced from neighboring state universities. As sentiment began to build, hundreds of students and faculty gathered in the free-speech area. A small group ran to the flagpole, intending to lower the flag. Seeing the majority of students standing dumbfounded, Michael became excited and sought out the dean of students.
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"Hey," he said, "everyone else under the sun is speaking. Can I say something?" Permission granted, he climbed on stage, took the microphone, and faced the audience.
"Do you know what you people look like?" he asked.
"No what do we look like?" they shouted back.
"You look like a bunch a sheep without a shepherd!"
The crowd was startled. Most of them (and that included Michael) did not know he was quoting Scripture. "These people know what they're doing here. You don't. You're following them!" He named some of the leaders of the antiwar movement present. The crowd began to murmur.
In a flash it occurred to Michael that if he could inject the name of Jesus Christ in the situation, the atmosphere would be changed and the rally somehow defused. "Since so many others have spoken today," he shouted, "the next thing I expect to hear is that Jesus Christ is walking down Harbor Boulevard, and He's going to come up here and talk!"
What the students of Orange Coast Junior College thought of this strange speech may never be known, but the crowd's mood did seem to alter and some students began drifting away. The threat to the flag faded. Afterward some of the long-haired Christian students came to Michael and asked him, "Are you a Christian?"
"Of course! I'm an American." At that point in time, being a Christian and an American seemed to him equivalent if not identical.
"Are you born again?"
The confusion that drugs had created in Michael's mind kept him from understanding the implication of the question, and his dabblings in Eastern religious philosophy only added to his bewilderment. "Do you mean reincarnated?" he asked. "Not really."
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"Oh. That's all we wanted to know." The long-haired ones left with their Bibles; but from that day Michael was marked, and he found himself making new friends. He liked them. He decided not to be embarrassed to be seen in their company (a major step) even though Jesus seemed to be all they talked about. He would listen to their music and hear what they had to say.
One of the things they said was, "Would you like to go to Calvary Chapel?"
