THIS IS YOUR FATHER'S LIFE

By James Willwerth

Nathaniel Lachenmeyer's childhood memories of his father Charles are bitterly divided. The earliest and fondest ones are of his dad's gentle counsel during nightly walks with the dog. But as Nathaniel grew older, Charles, a promising sociology professor, became ill with paranoid schizophrenia. The boy was terrified by his father's delusions that CIA agents and Nathaniel's mother had "enslaved" his mind. Charles left home in 1981 when his son was 12.

Nathaniel was working as a comic-book writer in Manhattan in 1995 when police in Burlington, Vermont, found his father's body in a flophouse. "I didn't know he was in Vermont--and sometimes homeless," Lachenmeyer, 27, admits. Propelled by curiosity and remorse, Lachenmeyer, who had no experience in filmmaking, hired a camera crew and set out to reconstruct his father's final years.

Checking return addresses on old letters, Lachenmeyer traveled first to Grantham, New Hampshire, where Charles rented a room in 1983 with the aid of pension and disability money. In Grantham and other cities, Lachenmeyer learned that his father lived alone, churning out pamphlets about government thought control. Before becoming ill, he had published two sociology books. Now he added titles like Technological Slavery to his curriculum vitae. "My father never recognized that he was mentally ill," Lachenmeyer says. "He spent the lion's share of each day looking for teaching work."

Charles was sent to psychiatric hospitals several times in the '80s, first in 1984 after breaking the nose of an elderly Grantham woman he considered a "government agent." But after each hospitalization he refused help and drifted away, spiraling downward. Retracing his father's footsteps, Lachenmeyer discovered that doctors and caseworkers had tried hard to help. "I was startled at how deeply involved they were with my father," he says. The elderly woman Charles had attacked turned out to be a retired psychiatric nurse who agreed to drive more than an hour to meet Lachenmeyer's film crew.

Charles occasionally wrote letters to his son and sent books by Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. "The letters seemed strange and alienating," recalls Lachenmeyer, then a student at the University of Chicago. "Now I've learned what a remarkable exercise in self-control they were." Because during this period his father's illness was clearly getting worse. When Lachenmeyer incautiously asked about his schizophrenia in a 1989 letter, Charles responded by calling him "an arrogant little s___ who needs to have his behind warmed."

Overwhelmed, the college student cut off contact. "I can't live in your world," he wrote, "and you can't live in mine." On one filmmaking trip, he summoned up his courage and asked a caseworker how the cutoff had affected Charles. "He felt it was the end for my father," Lachenmeyer admits sadly. "They knew I was the most important person in his life."

Lachenmeyer found that nearly everyone in the shops and restaurants on Church Street in Burlington remembered the proud bearded man in greasy, lice-ridden clothes who sat erect on park benches and somehow survived the coldest winter in local history. Police called him "Chuck" and said he arrived in 1992. He was comfortably dressed at first. But his disability checks stopped coming because of bureaucratic fumbling, and he became tattered and filthy.

Charles used an ATM foyer as a refuge. Local laws limited stays at the homeless shelter, so he went there only on the coldest nights. A waitress at a sandwich shop let him drink coffee during freezing evenings even when he soiled himself and insulted her customers. Townspeople marveled at his resilience.

Finally, sympathetic cops organized a panhandling arrest so "Chuck" could be hospitalized. At his commitment hearing, Charles declared himself the U.S. President and sentenced everyone to death. But medicated in the state hospital, Charles returned to his professorial style, helping a nursing aide rewrite a graduate paper that would get an A. Discharged and again collecting disability, he rented a tiny room above a restaurant in Burlington--and died there six weeks later of heart disease.

Lachenmeyer's mother, psychologist Juliana Lachenmeyer, has thus far refused to be interviewed on camera, though she supports her son's efforts and understands that making the film offers him a unique chance to come to terms with his father's tragedy. "My life started with this film," he explains. "Nothing else seems important."