The last month was horrible, I've got to say. Billy was gobbling some stuff: this blood pressure medication that makes bipolar people manic, and he was gobbling some other shit that makes everybody manic. It was clear to me, just the day before, I was telling the New York offices [of the Ruane family trust] that Billy's going to ride this off a cliff. He's going to have to get locked up, and that's what we were doing. He wasn't going to like it at all. He wasn't going to enjoy the way things were going to have to be. He was going to have to have his medication administered on a daily basis. He hated being infantilized. I, myself, happen to love it -- I love being taken care of! But Billy couldn't stand it. I think it was because Billy really was an infant all the time. He could never have taken care of himself if he hadn't been wealthy.
He'd been in McLean Hospital at one point. But it had been a while since he'd been locked up, yes?
Because I never let him do anything to get himself locked up. That's where I came in. The last time he went to McLean's he was pink-papered because he was going to kill himself, just like he did recently. He'd found a doctor to give him a prescription for pharmaceutical-grade methamphetamine. And finally his father could not bear to see Billy kill himself. And he got him pink-papered: Section 8, harm to self, harm to others. The cops came and they sent him off to McLean. That's right about the time Billy asked me to help him.
One of the main things that he wanted me to do was find him a doctor who would prescribe the methamphetamine again. Desoxyn is what it's called. And so I went to hundreds of shrink appointments with Billy, making the case that he should be given methamphetamine. But what Billy didn't know was that had been my second appointment of the day. I'd been with the shrink earlier in the day already. One shrink appointment meant two. If it was a new shrink, I laid out Billy's story. Billy never said he was bipolar, because he didn't like the meds. He'd say it was ADHD or some nonsense. So that's why Billy was never locked up, because he never got anything to drive him crazy enough. My way to shepherd him through life was to make sure that he didn't get what he wanted, but that the quest was always there. And the hope – that's what got him through.
You have to strategize with people. And Billy had a lot of fun the last eight years, I know. It wasn't matter of, oh, he lived some kind of diminished existence. He did all kinds of wild shit. But I just didn't ever let him get what he wanted most of all -- which was that crazy mania. Not just regular bipolar mania, but methamphetamine-fueled mania.
We went to the hospital a week before he died, and he was so happy with the way his thought process was working. A lot of times, he couldn't even get a cohesive sentence out, and he was just like, "ROOAAAAAAAR!" Or sometimes it was really high pitched: [yelping noise]. It was so disturbing. But in the hospital he would calm down enough to say, "I'm so glad I have my brain back." And it was like, Billy, your body cannot handle this brain, it's too much for you.
