This post is about the children’s home I spent part of my youth at. Rossie talking about claustrophobia spurred me to go back through this in my life and write it out. I have talked about some of the general things that happened there in past posts, such as the assault I endured.

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I collapsed completely when I was fifteen into a deep psychosis. I was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic but that diagnosis was changed to manic-depressive before my emancipation. Two subsequent psychiatrists have confirmed that diagnosis, and I have found Depakote effective in dealing with the depression and mania. Mania means to me not sleeping much, and staying compulsively busy. It’s a roller coaster to live with.

I don’t know that anyone living through my shit would have reacted any different. I had a horrible life back then. I had no steady home, in trouble with the police all the time, had gotten initiated into a gang and had no idea (at thirteen) what that meant. It was the least consentual thing I can ever imagine.

I had been sexual all of my life, and couldn’t remember not being sexual. I hurt people emotionally very deeply. It scared me that I didn’t have feelings about anything – right, wrong, happy, sad. Nothing towards the end before the State took me.

I made tragic mistakes and felt the enormous weight of that in guilt. Honest to God I couldn’t have understood any of it to know to do anything different. Child molestation ran in my family, and my father was violently abusive.

And I couldn’t stop anything going on in my life. I couldn’t have left the gang if I wanted to. I was a lot younger than the rest and they kept me to do shit my age let me get away with. It was not consentual. They beat the fuck out of me all the time. They tattooed me. No matter what I did, I always ended up back in my ‘hood after a while. The beatings were a hazing sort of thing.

One they did over and over was we had a room built into the slope of a roof – long, narrow, low ceiling. I slept there a lot. No bedding, no pillow, sleep on a wood floor in an empty room. The guy who lived at the house is the one I mentioned had the cat, Roo, that he beat. He beat the fuck out of his mother all the time. She was scared to death those years. She knew we were all big into heroin. She’d find needles and beg Ted not to mess with it, until she was crying for him that she’d lose him and he’d get mad and he’d throw her around and beat her.

There were two wire bed frames that everyone – a dozen guys – would sit on, banging dope and plotting crime. I was thirteen when this shit started. People would get to talking shit and dominance was always the concept of the day. Be the alpha dog. It comes out in me today. Someone would end up getting on me, punking me out and I’d fight back hard. The rule was anyone who carried my tat and lost fighting when we were like that got beat. I usually lost.

I was a little kid around grown men: 17-19 y.o.’s. Anything was fair: shooting, stabbing, choking. I was a little kid who was in-a-cent. Maybe some of you understand that. I’m not scared of someone with a knife or a gun because of those days. The beating was usually being on the floor and getting kicked between the two sides. At some point the person would be bloody and not moving and the game was up.

Nothing I ever got from that gang was as bad as the beatings from my father. He tried to kill me. I never fought back. He used cruel things to beat me with.

There was no way for me to stay away because of being strung out from dope. I can’t explain it really but if that stuff is you, you can’t leave it alone. It made all the hurt in my life go away. I sucked dick for it, let men have anal sex with me, robbed and stole anything I could for it.

I went and talked to one of the older men in my life from back then a while ago. He put up a few times. We were never sexual, and he told me it was because of the dope I was on.

Two years of that life – and the hopelessness of changing it – and I utterly broke. I quit believing the world was real. I remember my psychosis well. I quit thinking, quit having thoughts about what was going on around me. I had no single emotion, ever, during it.

When I was in seventh grade a guidance counselor who realized I had a broken arm had me in her office and talked to me. I denied it. They didn’t look for that shit back then like now. She started keeping an eye on me and mentioning I could always talk to her privately, confidentially, if I wanted. She started realizing what was going on and I always denied it. I couldn’t even talk about the shit from my father until the last few years.

I wrote up everything I had done and went and found that guidance counselor shortly after my fifteenth birthday. That started a chain of events that resulted in me becoming a state ward. The police questioned me a number of times. Eventually the prosecutor declined to file charges in juveile court due to all of the circumstances and had an order filed that I be detained until majority age as a family court case.

There were two possibilities for me, a large group home that looks like a prison, or the state psychiatric prison (Larue). So I was committed to Larue for two and a half years. It had a child ward and an adolescent ward, and was about fifty percent minors. It held kids who failed out of the foster system or were not permitted in it, and didn’t make it at the group home. We all wanted to go there.

Before the commitment the State held me in another short-term locked facility (Community). My case worker hated me passionately and told me so many times. Everyone hated me. I was fourteen years old though, and I was a child myself at that age – completely emotionally immature because of my life. I don’t know that foreign intelligence agencies are so creative in crafting mind fucks. The place was run by Dr. Pierce, and he was the definition of an evil sociopath. He enjoyed torturing adolescent boys and girls.

There were probably twenty of us there on my unit. We were all doped heavy. Our families were kept away, if any of us had any. Mine visited once. Two guards carried me to the chair, and I couldn’t speak because of the thorazine. They had no idea what happened in that place.

All of the people there were evil. When they first brought me in they dressed me out – no underwear and a gown. We had no privacy, toilets and showers in the open. They manhandled me to a high-back hardwood chair against a wall. After a few hours I started not being able to handle it. I complained. Finally I punched the wall, and my fist went all the way through the sheetrock and was shocked to see someone sitting in a closet. I got my turn later on – days and weeks sitting in a 3 x 4 foot closet with the door closed.

They restrained me to a bed for two days until I agreed to go back to the chair. They hit me with thorazine for the first time and then I started taking it in pill form when they would push meds on us. No options there – if you refused they strapped you down and shot it into you.

Thorazine is one of the strongest drugs I have ever used. There are only two drugs I have not tried (crack cocaine and MDMA, or Ecstasy). It compares in strength only to PCP. It is heavier than a speed ball (heroin and cocaine injected together). The first few days I couldn’t lift my arms up. I ended up staying on a high dose of it for two and a half years and became successful at fighting its effects.

The program with the chair was “quiet time”. You’d see the look on a friends face when they came and told him that he was on quiet time and gave him his objective. The mind fuck was that you could never tell what they wanted, it never made any sense.

On quiet time you went to your chair straight from your bed at six a.m. You’d be exhausted from lack of sleep. At some point before seven they’d come get you for a bathroom visit, make you take your robe off and anyone interested watched. I couldn’t look at people.

You’d get a breakfast tray delivered by one of the other kids who were off restriction. It was a dangerous job – we were all close because of what we were going through and if the person carrying trays got caught communicating in any way (even blinks of an eye for support), that person got put on quiet time.

Fifteen minutes and you got to carry your tray up one at a time. We were always being accused of stealing silverware, and it was never rational – they gave you one spoon, you gave it back, you didn’t have anywhere you could hide it anyway. Back then the Papeon stuff never crossed my mind (hiding something in your rectum). It was the mind fuck. This repeated for lunch and dinner.

Every two hours they took you to the bathroom for five minutes and made you disrobe.

You were not allowed to communicate in any fashion on quiet time. If you fucked that up you went back up to the top (level three) and after a day restrained to a bed they locked you in a ten by ten foot room with tile floor, nothing in it, no windows. Eventually you would work back to a chair, three days or so. To say resistance was futile is an understatement.

The highlight of the day was once in the morning and once in the evening the staff would talk to you about your objective. They might get you up and sit you down in the rocker, in a closed room, and then tell you they didn’t think you were working and to go sit back down. Or you might get fifteen to thirty minutes to talk, depending on their mood and which staff it was. One of my objectives was “why do you hate your parents?” You could never answer the question. It was a mind game, but for ten minutes usually, twice a day, it was contact with another human being. And any time you could get lucky: they’d say okay, you’re off quiet time. Put your chair back in your room. You hoped beyond hope for that.

To get there (off restriction) you had to work down from a chair on a wall (level two quiet time) to a chair in a closet (level one quiet time). Every single kid there cried the first time they experienced the closet. I did. Before you could see people peripherally – in level three you could see feet walking by under the door – and hear people talking. And then nothing.

When you were on a chair on the wall you could sneak looks at the clock and know the time. The last mind fuck of the day was they would send you to bed between ten and eleven o’clock, but never the same time night to night. You’d be desperate to go lay down. On level one you never had any idea what time it was except at meals.

An average quiet time lasted seven days. Mine were all two weeks. I saw another kid make twenty-eight days.

Off of quiet time there were different privileges you could enjoy for short periods of time – TV, music room, snack room. They had the Beatle’s White Album. It was one of the first prints, and had the serial number embossed on the inside of the album. I still remember it. I listened to Dear Martha over and over, and Rocky Racoon. Number Nine, Number nine, Number nine,

They had Pink Floyd The Wall on vinyl.

There was nothing you could do to escape what they did to us.

They strapped me to a bed, four-pointed with leather restraint belts, and pulled my gown up. They laid my penis in a pair of large silver scissors and threatened to cut it off, playing with my genitals and squeezing the scissors. They made my penis bleed from it. The assault was not sexually motivated on their part, it was hate-based for my pedophilia. I was so weak – after a day in restraint belts you can’t sit up on your own. I couldn’t even move or answer their questions.

I have carried a restraint belt key on my keychain most of my life as a reminder. It is very distinct looking, long, thin, and smooth with no serrations.

There was a guy named JP, and one day we were both in the music room and we stood catatonic in front of the window as our only protest. We all practiced on the chair not moving any muscle. I could sit for an hour motionless. Sleeping on a chair took you back to the top of the levels and we’d be scared to blink when they would sit and stare at us.

They ordered us to sit down, and hit the code on the wall plate for this. This is what it was: a recorded voice speaking over the intercom, saying: “Code 8 Two Northeast”. That was the code. When you heard code eight, someone was going into belts and we were all scared to death of that. It might not be a friend (Code 8 two southeast was for a different unit).

All of the staff would flood into the unit and do the restraining. It sucked. There was some kind of fucked up psychology theory about that shit back then as a tough-love kind of treatment program.

And then stayed in belts after that code, and whatever they wanted to do to you in a closed level three room. By the time they let you up you couldn’t walk for hours.

So JP and I pulled all of our hair out, to show them. I didn’t grimace and I know he didn’t. I love you, JP. I wish you were in my life now. And you too A**** – you were twelve years old trying to survive that place. You had more courage than you’ll ever know.

This program still operates in my city. Years ago, when I cared and felt anger about it, I went back a number of times and got removed from the premises. I tried to get an alternative newsweekly here to do an article about it. I don’t know if it has changed how it operates by now – as of ten years ago I talked to someone who had recently been there and it hadn’t.

And then four months after Community, they took me to Larue. They let my parents take me home for dinner and then to Larue. My parents tricked me into going to Larue – I thought I was out, and the horror was done. We were going to go shopping for shoes and clothes.

We had a meeting with the case manager who knew everything about that place. I had put my switchblade into my pocket at home and still had it in my jean pocket when we got there. I ended up running and escaping briefly.

Larue is a big chunk of my life and I want to spend time writing about it, and the people, to do it justice. I want to sit in the parking lot and live back through it. I will take pictures and include them. It is boarded now in a run-down industrial part of the city. I lived there two years, my fifteenth and sixteenth years, behind barbed wire. It was the first stability I had ever had in my life.

Remo