He said that when my case was taken before the juvenile judge, Jan and Marcie both testified that I had been trying for weeks to sell them LSD and marijuana and that around school I was a known user and pusher.
Circumstances really were quite against me. I have a drug record and Daddy said that when Mrs. Larsen’s neighbor heard me screaming, she and the gardener came over to see what was happening and thinking I had gone insane they locked me in a small closet, ran to check the baby who had apparently also been awakened by my screams, and called the police. By the time they got there I had injured myself severely and was trying to scratch the rough plaster off the walls to get out and had beaten my head against the door until I had a brain concussion and a fractured skull.
Now they are going to send me to the Boobie Hatch which is probably where I belong. Daddy says I probably won’t be there long and he will immediately start proceedings to have me released and put into the hands of a good psychiatrist.
Dad and Mom keep calling the place where I’m going a youth center, but they aren’t fooling anybody. They aren’t even fooling themselves. They are sending me to an insane asylum! And I don’t understand how can that be. How is it possible? Other people have bad trips and they don’t get sent to an insane asylum. They tell me my worms aren’t real and yet they’re sending me to a place that’s worse than all the coffins and the worms put together. I don’t understand why this is happening to me. I think I
have fallen off the face of the earth and that I will never stop falling. Oh, please, please don’t let them take me. Don’t let them put me away with insane people. I’m afraid of them. Please let me go home to my own room and go to sleep. Please God.
My parole officer came and got me and took me to the State Mental Hospital where I was registered and catalogued and questioned and everything but fingerprinted. Then I was taken to the psychiatrist’s office and he talked to me for a little while. But I didn’t have anything to say because I couldn’t even think. All that kept running through my brain was I’m scared, I’m scared, I’m scared.
Then they took me down a smelly, ugly, dingy, paint-peeling old hallway and through a locked door, which was locked again behind me. My heart was pounding so hard that I thought at any second it would explode and spray the whole hall. I could hear it pounding in my ears and I could hardly get one foot in front of the other.
We walked down an endlessly dark hallway and I got a look at some of the people here and now I know I don’t belong here. I can’t get over what it feels like to be in a world of crazy people, a whole world of them. On the inside and on the outside. I don’t belong here, but I’m here. That’s crazy isn’t it? So you see, dear friend, my only friend, there’s nowhere to go because the whole world is crazy.
The night was interminable. Anything in the world could happen in here and no one would ever know.
This morning they woke me up at 6:30 for a breakfast I couldn’t eat and bleary eyed and still shivering, I was led down the long dark hall to the big metal door with the barred window in the middle. Keys were clanked into the big lock and we were on the other side. Then the keys were clanked again. The day attendants talked a lot but I really couldn’t hear them. My ears are clogged up, probably from fear. Then they took me to the Youth Center which was just two buildings away, passed two slobbering men with another attendant who were raking up leaves.
At the Youth Center there were fifty, sixty, maybe even seventy kids, milling around preparing to go to their classes or whatever they were going to do. All of them seemed pretty normal except one big girl who looked to be about my age but who was eight or ten inches taller and at least fifty pounds heavier. She was stretched out stupidly under the pinball machine in the dayroom, and there was also a teen age boy who kept bouncing his head and muttering idiotically.
A bell rang and all of the kids went off except the two dummies. I was left in the dayroom with them. Finally a large lady (the school nurse) came in and said that if I wanted the privilege of going to school I would have to go see Doctor Miller and sign a commitment that I was ready to live according to all the Center rules and regulations.
I said I was ready but Doctor Miller was not in so I spent the rest of the morning in the day room watching the two dum-dums, one sleeping and one bouncing. I wondered what insane impression I made upon them, with my healing face and my lawn mower type haircut.
All through the endless morning bells rang and people came and went. There was a stack of magazines on a little round table in the hall but I couldn’t read them. My mind was racing a thousand miles a minute and going nowhere.
At eleven thirty Marj, the nurse, showed me the dining room. Kids were milling around in all directions, and certainly none of them looked crazy enough to be locked up but obviously they all were. The meal consisted of macaroni and cheese with a little bologna cut up in it and canned string beans, and some kind of soggy looking pudding. Trying to eat was a big waste of time. I couldn’t get anything down past the lump in my throat.
A lot of the kids were laughing and teasing each other and it was pretty obvious that they even call their teachers and therapists and social workers by their first names. I guess everyone but the doctors. None of them seem as frightened as am I. Were they frightened when they first came here? Are they still frightened but putting up a good front? I don’t understand how can they exist here. Truthfully, the Youth Center isn’t as bad as the ward. It seems almost like a small school, but the hospital itself is unbearable. The smelly halls, the bleak people, the locked barred doors. It’s a dreadful nightmare, it’s a bad trip, it’s a bummer, it’s everything terrible that I can imagine.
Dr. Miller finally came back in the afternoon and I got to talk to him. He told me that the hospital couldn’t help me, and the staff couldn’t help me and the teachers couldn’t help me, and the program which had proved very successful couldn’t help me, unless I wanted help! He also told me that before I could overcome my problem I had to admit I had a problem, but how can I do that when I really haven’t? I know now that I could resist drugs if I were drowning in them. But how will I ever convince anyone other than Mom and Dad and Tim, and Joel, I hope, that I didn’t really take anything knowingly this last time? It sounds incredible that the first time I took drugs and the last time which landed me in an insane asylum were both given to me without my knowledge. Oh nobody would believe anyone could be that dumb. I can hardly believe it myself even when I know it’s true.
Anyway how can I admit anything when I am so scared I can’t even talk? I just sat nodding my head in Dr. Miller’s office so I wouldn’t have to open my mouth. Nothing would have come out anyway.
At two thirty the kids were out of school, and some of them went to play ball and part of them stayed here for group therapy.
Some of what the first doctor and the parole officer told me is coming back. The kids are in two groups. Group One kids are trying to obey all the rules and get released. They get all the privileges offered. Group Two is kind of grounded. They aren’t obeying the rules, and are losing their tempers or cursing or stealing or having sex or something and so they are restricted in everything. I hope there’s no pot here. I know I could resist it, but I don’t think I could stand any more problems without really going crazy. I guess the doctors know what they’re doing but I’m so lonely and so lost and so frightened. I think I really am losing my mind.
At four thirty it was time for us to come back to our wards and be locked in again like animals in the zoo. There are six other girls besides myself and five boys who are in my ward, and thank God for that for I couldn’t have gone back by myself. However I noticed that they all cringed a little (as I do) when the doors clanked shut behind us.