While we were walking through an older woman said it had been peaceful and quiet till now and the littlest girl turned and said “Fuck you.” I was so surprised I looked for the ceiling to fall down on her head, but no one seems to pay any attention but me.
The little girl I told you about yesterday is in the room next to mine. She’s thirteen and she seems constantly on the verge of tears. When I asked her how long she’d been here, she said, “forever, simply forever.”
At dinner time she walked with me to the place where we eat and we sat together, not eating, at one of the long tables. The rest of the evening we were left to wander around the ward with nowhere to go and nothing to do. I desperately want to tell Mom and Dad what it’s like here but I won’t. It would only make them worry more.
One older woman in the ward is a lecherous alcoholic and she frightens me but I’m worried even more for Babbie. What’s to keep this dirty creature from making passes at us? She made some gestures when we passed her tonight and I asked Babbie if we couldn’t do something , about her. But Babbie just shrugged and said we could report her to the attendant but that it was better just to ignore her.
Then something really weird and terrifying happened. We were sitting in one of the “recreation” rooms watching the others watch us. It was like monkeys watching monkeys and when I asked Babbie if she wouldn’t rather talk in my room, she said we weren’t allowed to have sex in our rooms but we could manage it in the storeroom tomorrow. I didn’t know what to say! She thought I was trying to seduce her and I was so stunned I couldn’t say anything. Later I tried to explain but she just started talking about herself as if I wasn’t even there.
She said she’s thirteen and that she had been on drugs for two years. Her parents were divorced when she was ten and she was sent to live with her father who’s a contractor and who’s remarried. I guess things were all right for a while but she was jealous of her new mother’s children and felt like an outsider, a stranger. Then she began spending more and more time away from home, telling her stepmother that she was having trouble with school and had to go to the library, etc. The usual excuses, when actually she was going to school about only half the time. But she was still bringing home good grades so her parents didn’t seem too interested. Finally the school called because she was out so much. But she told her father that the school was so big and crowded, they didn’t know who was there and who wasn’t. I don’t know why her father believed that one, but I guess he did. It was probably too much trouble not to.
Anyway what really was going on was that Babbie had been introduced to drugs by some 32 year old man she met in a matinee movie. She didn’t tell me the details but I guess he introduced her to drugs and to the life in general. A few months later he floated away and she found that it was very easy to meet other men. In fact at twelve she was already a BP.[3] She told me all of this so quietly I felt like ripping my heart out. But even if I’d cried (which I didn’t), I don’t think she would have noticed, she was so out of it.
After she had been on drugs for about a year, her bright-eyed parents began to become suspicious. But even then they didn’t deal with her head-on. They just started asking a lot of questions and bugging her, so she robbed the next man she met at the movies and took a bus to L.A. A friend had told her that it was never any trouble for BP’s to get by and, according to Babbie, the friend was right. On her second day in L.A., she was wandering around and she met a “friend,” a beautifully dressed woman who took her to a big apartment on _______ Boulevard.
When she got there, there were some girls her age in the living room and pills all over the place in candy dishes. Within a half an hour, she was completely stoned.
Later, when she came back down, the woman said she could live there and go to school. She said she only had to work for her two hours a day—mostly in the afternoons. So the next day she registered in school as the woman’s niece and began living as a high class BP. The woman had four nieces staying with her while Babbie lived there. The chauffeur took them to school and picked them up and they never saw any of the money they made. Babbie said they just sat in the apartment like monkeys most of the time, never really talking and never going anywhere.
It sounded so unbelievable that I tried to ask her questions, but she kept right on talking and she was so sad and distant that I think she was really telling the truth. Besides after what I’ve been through, I think I’d believe anything. Isn’t that sad, to be in a spot where everything is so unbelievable you’d believe anything? I think it’s sad, dear friend, I really and truly and desperately do.
Anyway, after a few weeks Babbie ran away and hitchhiked to San Francisco. But in San Francisco, four guys beat her up and raped her. When she tried to panhandle some money to call home, no one would give her any. She said she would have crawled home and let them chain her in a closet but when I asked her why she hadn’t gone to the police or to a hospital, she just started yelling and spitting on the floor.
Later I guess she finally reached her parents, but by the time they got to San Francisco she had wandered off with some guy who had set up his own lab to make LSD. They both got mixed up in some communal shit and eventually she landed here, just like me.
Oh, Diary, I’m so grateful I have you because there is nothing, absolutely nothing to do in this animal cage and everyone is so crazy that I know I couldn’t exist without you.
There is a woman somewhere down the hall who moans and groans and makes unearthly noises. Even putting my sick, broken hands over my ears and the pillow over my head doesn’t keep out the horrible gurgling sounds. Will I ever again in my whole life be able to sleep without having to keep my tongue between my teeth to stop the chattering and without having terror flood in upon my mind when I think of this place? It can’t be real! I’m still on my bad trip. I must be. I think they are going to bring busloads of school children by tomorrow to feed us peanuts through the bars.
Dear Diary,
I truly must have lost my mind or at least control of it, for I have just tried to pray. I wanted to ask God to help me but I could utter only words, dark, useless words which fell on the floor beside me and rolled off into the corners and underneath the bed. I tried, I really tried to remember what I should say after, “Now I lay me down to sleep…” but they are only words, useless, artificial, heavy words which have no meaning and no powers. They are like the ravings of the idiotic spewing woman who is now part of my inmate family. Verbal rantings, useless, groping, unimportant, with no power and no glory. Sometimes I think death is the only way out of this room.
I was allowed the privilege of going to school today, and here school is a privilege. Nothing could be darker or bleaker or barer than just sitting with nothing to do and millions of endless hours in which to do it.
I must have cried in my sleep because this morning my pillow was soggy and wet, and I have been completely exhausted. The junior high kids have two teachers and we have two. They both seem kind and most of the kids seem pretty controlled. I guess that’s because they’re afraid of being sent again to no-mans-land, a world of wandering and being alone.
I guess people can adjust to anything, even to being locked up in an institution. Tonight when they locked the huge heavy door I didn’t even feel too terribly depressed or maybe I am just cried out.