One Side of Schizophrenia

By Daniel McGill

There are a number of reasons I wrote this book—for one thing, it is a story that should have been written a long, long time ago. Schizophrenia and the way I acquired it is very strange. Because this is all written within this book, I won’t write about it here. My main purpose in writing this book is to warn people not to make the same mistakes I made.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685264895

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One Side of Schizophrenia

Daniel McGill

ISBN 978-1-68526-488-8 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68526-489-5 (Digital)

Copyright © 2022 Daniel McGill

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

Table of Contents

1

2 Army Days

3 Getting Out

4 Enter Schizophrenia

5 Telepathy Starts

6 Learning to Cope with It

7 Thinking Back

8 Finally an Escape

9 Theresa

10 Searching for a Reason

11 Last Explanation

1

To start this book, I was born Daniel Owen McGill, September 17, 1960, five days after my mother turned thirty. I was born the second of six children: Peter, myself, Edward, Michael, Janice, and finally, Jacqueline. We are originally from Beachmont, which is a neighborhood in Revere, Massachusetts. This is the start of a pretty strange story that I will lead into. All of us are of Irish American descent. My father was from Dorchester, and my mother was from Charlestown, the urban part of Boston. We all attended the same private school ran by nuns, St Rose in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

A lot of my early years at this time are pretty vague. I remember my brother Edward, for instance, got hit by a car twice. I remember the first time, I was so young that I hardly realized he was my brother. The second time I was in the house.

I remember one episode about myself and my brother Ed. He was trying to throw a rock to the house across the yard, and it landed on my head. I was gushing blood, and I remember saying to one kid, Am I bleeding? He retorted, Yes, there is blood rushing down your head. So I started running through the backyards crying, yelling. Something was strange about the backyards in Beachmont. They were all connected; there were no barriers. This was on Bellingham Avenue in Beachmont. Well, anyway, by the time I got to my parents’ house, I was so soaked in blood. I remember feeling the blood in my shoes. That is how small I was. As if by some miracle, and it was a miracle, my mother put some kind of a rag on my head, and it stopped almost immediately.

There were about twelve kids in my parents’ house knocking on the door saying, What happened? I remember the clothes that I had on were completely soaked with blood. My mother told me much later that she had never seen so much blood in her life.

Well, we lived in Beachmont (Revere, Massachusetts) for a number of years. My father was a salesman for Sears and Roebuck on Route 1 in Saugus. He sold furniture and televisions, which is how he supported us. Incidentally, my mother’s maiden name was Meagher, old Irish. My mother at this time acted perfectly, but my mother was a very sick woman as I will get into.

Well, being kids, myself and my brother Edward, one time, and I believe this was before school, wanted to walk around and reconnoiter. Well, what happened was we were walking around all of Beachmont and we ended up in someone’s house, which we thought was our aunt Virginia. We were eating lollipops, swinging on the swing in the front porch. Well, nobody ever came back to the house, and this went on for a few hours. I believe it was on Winthrop Beach. Myself and my brother were on the wall, and all of a sudden, my father and my older brother Peter pulled up. I saw my father breathe a sigh of relief. He scolded us, of course.

Well, my father was twenty-one when he married my mother, who was twenty-seven. My father’s main ambition in life was to turn us all into athletes and scholars. I remember every Christmas there would be hockey sticks, baseball gloves, footballs, and basketballs, and out on the street, we would play with the other kids. Every weekend, I remember playing baseball, football, you name it. My older brother Peter developed very young. He was on the heavy side. Whereas I and Ed were as thin as rails. Michael, at the time, was really just an infant.

My father was kind of a superstitious man. For example, my brother Edward, he is named after Fast Eddie Felson, a character that he saw in the movie The Hustler. Paul Newman played Fast Eddie Felson, and Jackie Gleason played Minnesota Fats. My sister Jacqueline is from the song by Neil Diamond called Cracklin’ Rosie. He thought he was singing Jacqueline Rosie.

In these days, I was so young I hardly realized things about my brothers and sisters. For example, my brother Edward, when he got hit by the car, I was out on the street and the guy who hit my brother asked, Where does he live? I said, Right there. Which was across the street. A lot of my childhood was not very bad. From my earliest recollections, myself and my brothers were constantly playing wiffle ball, all kinds of sports, at this particular age. It was really just myself and my older brother Peter. Eddie and Mike were just children. Well, at this particular time, my older brother Peter was picked on because he was fat, and of course, myself was skinny.

I remember when my father got a few weeks off, we would go up to The Elms, a beautiful place that had great food, a swimming pool, square dances, cookouts, everything. And when we did not go there, we went to a place called New Found Lake in New Hampshire, the same state New Hampshire. They had up there shuffleboards and cookouts, and down the street, there was the beach.

Well, a lot of these days were treasurable. But a lot of these days were bad. For example, my mother never cooked for us. I remember not going without eating for three or four days at a time.

My father was employed at Sears and Roebuck up in Saugus, Massachusetts, as a salesman. He sold furniture and televisions, and he was pretty good. He tried to provide for us at this young age that we were, but my mother was the opposite side of the coin. She never cooked. For one thing, she never made sure that we were bathed. I remember one time I was so hungry I went downstairs and looked in the refrigerator, and the only thing that was in there was a can of mustard and on top was a loaf of bread. I must have eaten about ten mustard sandwiches.

Well, of course, some were good and a lot were bad. But this is before we moved to Charlestown. This book is about schizophrenia, and I will lead into that.

Of course, I had my share of fights, like any other kid. It was Ryan’s Playground that we played most of our sports every weekend, and we were busy going to St Rose Elementary School dodging nuns. At least my father saw to it that we got an education, and my mother had us join the Charlestown Boys Club, myself at the age of six and also my older brother Peter. According to the people of that town, to be a townie, which we all spent most of our lives, you had to have been born there. But years later when we finally moved there, a lot of the kids in that town considered us townies.

I believe I was eight or nine when we moved there. I got into some fights the same as other kids. For some reason, my father knew that my brother Eddie would be a runner. Every weekend when we moved to Charlestown, my father would take us down to what people in Charlestown called the Neck. We must have played every sport down there except hockey. My father would time Eddie as he ran around the whole field, and my father did not stop at this. Jacqueline became a runner too when she got into high school.

Well, when we moved to Charlestown, my mother changed a lot and not for the better. My mother was a very sick woman. Her brother Walter was in the Battle of the Bulge, and her other brother Jim, as we called him, was in North Africa.

I will admit this now about my uncle Walter. Well, Walter robbed and killed a Boston cab driver, and there were extenuating circumstances, and he spent nine years in a facility for the criminally insane in Massachusetts called Bridgewater Correctional Institute.

Getting back to Charlestown, it is a pretty historic town. For example, the Bunker Hill Monument is there. As a matter of fact, we lived right down the street from it. And down there in the harbor was Old Ironsides, the ship that was used in the war of 1812. Being a kid in Charlestown going to the boys club, there were ping-pong and pool swimming. It would only cost two cents to go swimming, and they would give you a towel and you would swim naked. It did not bother anyone. There would be a lot of expressions that originated in that town, like the one that was written on the bathroom wall, Here I sit brokenhearted, tried to shit but only farted, and another joke that went around, What’s Jed’s last name on the Beverly Hillbillies? Then they would grab your balls and say,