Clinics To Jail: Robby Talbot’s Hard Road

Robby Talbot was a poet. A teddy bear. An underground iconoclast with a penchant for psychedelics. Someone who struggled with mental health and substance abuse. Whose family tried and tried to help him navigate a circular network of court appearances and social service programs.

Talbot’s life ended abruptly in the shower of the Whalley Avenue jail. The people who knew and loved him have a hunch that the system, that society, let him down.

“A sometimes caustic angel with hot girl energy,” one friend said about Talbot, whose legal name was Carl Robert.

“He was just brilliant, fascinating,” said another.

“He just had a very different perspective on living than anyone else,” said a third.

Talbot died last Thursday following an altercation with Whalley Avenue jail staff. He was 30 years old.

Since Talbot’s death at the state-run detention center, friends, family, local artists, and counterculture acquaintances have flooded Facebook with eulogies for ​“Robby.” Or, as some friends knew him, the ​“prince of New Haven.”

His friends remember him as a stalwart of New Haven’s noise music and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) underground arts scene whose gentle amiability shone forth despite longstanding mental health issues and frequent encounters with the criminal justice system.

His family remembers him as someone who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder even before he became a teenager, who was let down time and again by a mental health care system that offered too few beds and too short periods of care for too much money.

Despite the good intentions of city and state diversionary programs targeted at people who commit low-level offenses related to their addictions, the system ultimately relied too much on the prison system to take care of someone struggling with both mental health problems and substance abuse.

They’ve all posted pictures of Talbot: heavy, bearded, wearing a flannel shirt and a tan jacket and a shaggy smile and a coterie of friends.

As of Tuesday afternoon, his family had raised over $5,000 on GoFundMe to help found the Carl Robert Talbot Memorial Fund for Mental Health Advocacy. (Click here to donate.)

“Everybody knew he should be in a mental hospital and not a jail,” Talbot’s mom, Colleen Lord, told the Independent in an interview Tuesday. ​“Our main dissatisfaction with the mental health industry is how they’re just housed in the jails right now.”

“It has to change,” his sister Erin Gael Talbot said. ​“Stop housing the mentally ill in jails.”

Andrius Banevicius, spokesperson for the state Department of Correction (DOC), said the state is still investigating what happened last Thursday between 6:45 a.m., when Whalley jail staff restrained Talbot for refusing to leave the shower area, and 9:40 a.m., when Talbot was pronounced dead at Yale-New Haven Hospital.

As the investigation continues, those who love and were touched by him were quick to recall just how outsized of an impact Talbot had on a New Haven music and arts scene that took place not in clubs or concert halls, but in artist communes, house shows, factory buildings, and garage spaces tucked behind fast food joints.

His family, meanwhile, recalled just how much they tried to help him get adequate mental health and substance abuse disorder care. And just how difficult, near impossible, those efforts proved to be.

“He Was Always Different”

Talbot was born in New Milford on May 5, 1988. At 8 or 9 years old, Lord remembered, he was diagnosed with biploar disorder with schizophrenic features.

“He was always different,” she said. ​“Different in great ways.” He would exasperate his teachers, doctors, counselors, family and friends by being so clear and lucid at some points, and so difficult at others.

Lord said as a pre-teen Talbot attended a number of therapeutic day schools in southwestern Connecticut, including the Danbury Hospital School and the Wheeler Clinic. His first hospitalization, due to a manic episode related to his mental health disorder, came at just 13 years old at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan.

“People were always perplexed with him,” she said. Sometimes he was so high functioning. Sometimes he could barely function at all.

Talbot’s early encounters with the mental health care system would prove indicative of the rest of his young life, Lord said. Almost every hospital and mental health care provider he went to discharged him for needing ​“a higher level of care.”

This shuttling from hospital to home, hospital to home only got worse as he began to self-medicate with illegal substances and gained a lot of weight, she said. He developed sleep apnea.

Doctors tended to focus on his substance abuse disorders, she said, but seemed unable to offer a dual diagnosis that also took into consideration his related, longstanding mental health problems.

He started getting arrested for nonviolent misdemeanors like breach of peace and criminal trespass.

Then judges would order him to attend Involuntary Outpatient Commitment (IOC) programs as a means of getting his criminal record cleared. Even with the assistance of his family, he often missed appointments, or got in line for crowded programs just a minute too late in the morning, or was denied access because he was on methadone, Lord said.

She said he would then end up back in court, where judges would chastise him for not following through with the diversionary programs.

Lord described ​“a horrible merry-go-round” between mental health providers, hospital emergency rooms, courts, and occasionally the Whalley Avenue jail.

“It’s been ridiculous and maddening,” she said.

His family checked him into an inpatient program at Connecticut Valley Hospital.

“They said he needed a higher level of care,” Lord said. The same happened when his family checked Talbot into a similar program at Bridges in Milford.

A few years ago, she said, hospitals stopped taking him into inpatient programs altogether. That coincided with Talbot aging out of his mother’s health insurance and going onto a state insurance plan, Lord said.

She said Talbot had been to the emergency room at Yale-New Haven Hospital 40 times in the past two years.

“One week he went to the ER nine times,” she said, ​“and they never kept him.”

The hospital would occasionally call the police on him if he didn’t leave the premises quickly enough.

In April 2018, Lord said, she borrowed $30,000 from Talbot’s grandparents and paid for her son to go to a three-month inpatient program in Pennsylvania. After a month, the program transferred him to another hospital in New Jersey. After another month, the New Jersey program transferred him back home, she said.

Then came more arrests over the next six months: for second-degree breach of peace, sixth-degree larceny, first-degree criminal trespass, violation of conditional discharge, according to the state’s judicial website.

On March 19, he was arrested for second-degree breach of peace and sent to Whalley Avenue jail for pre-trial detention. According to the state’s website, he was scheduled to be arraigned on March 29.

“We all said, ​‘At least he’ll be safe,’” Erin recalled about when the family got the news that Talbot was in the jail’s custody.

Tragically, that would not be the case. On March 21, his family learned that Talbot had died during an altercation with jail staff. Lord said the state has informed her that she should know more about what happened to her son in the next six to eight weeks.

“He didn’t belong there, and everyone knew he didn’t,” Lord said.

With money raised for the new Carl Robert Talbot Memorial Fund for Mental Health Advocacy, she said, she hopes to share her family’s experience and interact with Connecticut judges, police officers, hospitals, and mental health providers about the current disconnect between court-ordered diversionary programs and the actual availability and accessibility of mental health services.

“Hilarious And Exciting And Everybody Loved Him”

Talbot’s life was not defined simply by mental health, addiction, and brief bouts in jail. 

The Independent interviewed a half dozen local artists who lived with or spent hours and years hanging with Talbot, particularly during the mid-2000s through the early 2010s.

They all recalled a young man whose vivid poetry, ramshackle lifestyle, and pervasive kindness made him a fixture of, as one friend called it, ​“the New Haven noise/weirdo scene.”

“He was super off-kilter, but you could see total flashes of brilliance,” said Jules Bakes, who forged a friendship with Talbot in the early 2010 through their frequent visits to the Edgewood artist commune, the Captain’s House. ​“His primary characteristic was just how sensitive he was. That made him a great poet.”

He reminded her of the outsider musician Daniel Johnston, she said, not just in his persistent struggles with mental health, but in his unflagging commitment to living life honestly, artfully, and inclusively on the margins of society.

Adam LoPiano first met Talbot at Bridgeport warehouse concerts around 2004. In the late 2000s, he lived with Talbot for several years at the West River artist commune, Fort Sunshine.

He remembered Talbot as a gentle, idiosyncratic, sometimes revered presence whom friends would follow step-for-step to try to catch discarded remnants of his abstract poetry.

“He was just brilliant,” LoPiano said. ​“He was hilarious and exciting and everybody loved him. He was a huge teddy bear. He was difficult to be around, but he was just brilliant, fascinating.”

LoPiano recalled Talbot’s high-pitched voice, his often disheveled appearance, his struggles to hold down stable employment.

“He was a present person,” he said. ​“He understood right from wrong. He was just on a different wavelength.”

Local musician Adam Matlock got to know Talbot in the late 2000s and early 2010s as a fixture at the former noise, punk, DIY music venue Popeye’s Garage on Whalley Avenue.

Matlock even composed a song cycle based on four of Talbot’s poems, though he never got the chance to perform them live.

“He was very good at peeling things back and making it so you had to talk about them,” Matlock said about Talbot. ​“This was true of mental health, of sexuality. He really thought about a lot of the intersecting angles that the punk scene was trying to hold itself accountable to.”

On Monday, Matlock shared on Facebook one of Talbot’s poems that he had included in that song cycle from a decade ago.

“As you can see,” Matlock wrote, ​“it was not difficult to find the music in this writing.

july 31 08
a legendary dead end
with fences that bend
the sharp grip of the crow
grabbed clipped and let go
picked up and then dropped
on top of a rock
like shellfish gone shattered
with cracked wheat on top
the birthday in the barnyard
with the roof on fire
hens click and then duck
the bombs bursting in air

“He was so smart and original,” Talbot’s sister Erin said. ​“He got me into everything I like.”

He was a ​“New Haven celebrity,” she continued. Always making people laugh. Always dancing with no inhibition. Always using his innate sense of wordplay to confound and inspire and delight.

(More of Talbot’s poetry is included at the bottom of this article.)

“He Found Reality Very, Very Painful,”

Bakes, LoPiano, Matlock, and fellow Popeye’s regular Big George Waters all said they lost touch with Talbot over the past few years, particularly as his substance abuse seemed to spiral and he started hanging out with rougher and rougher crowds.

“He found reality very, very painful,” Bakes said. ​“Something about being sober was completely unbearable to him.”

She said that friends from the underground arts scene slowly drifted from contact with Talbot because of the rough crowd he was spending more and more time with. She recalled some public arguments between Talbot and friends and family on Facebook over Talbot’s drug use.

“He was a real, real friendly guy,” Waters said. ​“But at the same time you could tell there was a lot going on up there.”

Everyone the Independent spoke to said that Talbot was never hostile, never violent, even during his occasional ​“mental breaks,” as LoPiano put it.

“He was a large person, but he was doughy,” LoPiano said. ​“He was never violent. Not even close.”

He recalled Talbot occasionally checking in to in-patient mental health treatment centers, then being released with little more than a reminder to take his medication. Even in emergency situations, he said, Talbot often had to wait to find an open bed for treatment.

As he cycled in and out of prison for a variety of misdemeanors and parole violations, Bakes said, Talbot’s mental health only worsened.

“Why was he just thrown into prison over and over?” she asked. ​“Every time this happened, you could watch this chip away at him. This was not helping him.”

Talbot’s Poetry

Below are four poems written by Talbot and included in a song cycle composed by local musician Adam Matlock.

march 16 09
fwa ch fwa ch the desert
like a pine cone blowin’ in the night
the cactus whispers to the antelope
the antelope dampened by fright
like an owl hootin’ in the wind
spinning buffalo bones in bridgeport
where the porridge is grim
if you don’t feed these fat kids
they bound to grow slim
get cathy her calcium
but only from skim
dipped in dressing, celery on the side
bread milk dripping into the toilet
and body of christ
who left the fire hydrant 
in control of gas prices
while all the water leaked out of your engine

july 31 08
a legendary dead end
with fences that bend
the sharp grip of the crow
grabbed clipped and let go
picked up and then dropped
on top of a rock
like shellfish gone shattered
with cracked wheat on top
the birthday in the barnyard
with the roof on fire
hens click and then duck
the bombs bursting in air

jan 9 08
one day i was cracking my knuckles
and all of my fingers fell off
there was the church
and there was the steeple
bleeding all over the place
open the doors and see all the people
pinkys and thumbs divided by race

dec 22 07
she who spreads curse with graceful foundation
empties her purse into the fountain after graduation
leaves lolly pops in the center of your head
so you get crosseyed gazing inward at the white and the red