The five years between the ages of eight and thirteen were odd. This span of time was also the time my mother was married to the only step-father I ever had. Once a year, we would drive up to Maine from Tennessee in the summer and pick up my two older stepbrothers. It took three days each way, but the ride was really fun because we had this old RV. My mom and stepfather would be up front while us kids played and horsed around in the back.

On these trips, we would stop at various locations and spend the night. This always stretched the trip out into a two week span. We would visit places like Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, Natural Bridge in Virginia and my favorite was Lily Bay in Maine. We would stop for a night or two and since it was the 80s, my brothers and I were free to run the forests, rivers, caves with no parental supervision. Epic adventures. It's amazing what a little safety training can do for a kid's independence.

My stepfather was retired from the Army. He had served in the Korean War and after that went in to some other gig in the Army. He never fully explained it to us or my mother. Sometimes he would get a little drunk and get a little loose with his lips. This is when a small snippet of a story would creep out occasionally. As a kid, I could care less, but now that I am an adult, I understand why my mother always got quiet for a little while afterwards. He was not a violent or loud man in any way. Stern and orderly, but I have no memories of him being an asshole.

So, now that a little back story is covered, I can proceed to the point of the title of this thread. About eight years ago, I was talking about these trips with my little brother (there were five of us total. Three of us from mom and two from my step-dad) and he brought up a huge 1/4 mile long water slide near Silver Dollar City in Missouri. This slide was epic, especially for a 10 year old kid. You sat in an inner tube with a handle and zipped down a small mountain/large hill and splashed into a big pool at the end. Then we went to Silver Dollar City and we also road horses that day. Man, talk about fun???!

The only thing that f*cks the whole story up is that I have zero memories of this trip. I asked my mom and my other brother about it. Yeah, they all remember the slide. Mom even recalled tricks pulled by various kids and how my baby brother nearly lost his shorts in the splash at the end. She could tell me what everyone did that day...but me. No one can remember anything I did specifically, yet they all claim I was there. Now here's the interesting part:

I have a memory of that time period. It only came to me after we had the discussion about the slide and the whole trip. I remember being in a large cedar chest. It was empty and spacious like the kind of chest people might keep at the end of their bed to store extra blankets, pillows or ten year old boys. It's only a quick memory. I remember the smell of cedar. I remember wondering why I was in a chest. I remember seeing a small margin of light between the lid and the latch. I remember the smell of rubbing alcohol.

So, in the next installment...I talk more about my stepfather's post-war career

As I get older, I am starting to wonder about what a freak show my stepfather may have been. Here's a little story he told that I believe, ultimately, may be pertinent to my memories of a cedar box...somehow (I'm not quite sure just yet HOW....piecing that together):

My stepfather had a buddy that lived in town named Sam. They had served in Korea together and would get together at each other's place a few times a month to shoot the shit. One weekend afternoon, they had been working in our vegetable garden and were having a few beers afterward at our picnic table in the back yard. My mom and Sam's wife were sitting there as well while all the kids were running around. By this time, I was 12 and becoming interested in my stepfather's rare war story. I mean, we played war all the time, but this guy had actually done it, right? A little hero worship or maybe living vicariously. Kids have no concept of death or the horrible things that happen in war, so in my mind it was all like GI Joe, but rad as hell and with real guns.

So, at some segue in the conversation, Sam says, "Hey, Ira, tell 'em 'bout Nevada." My step dad makes a whistling noise and says, "What for? You were there" - or something to that effect. Sam points out that he doesn't have a story because he just stood around that day while my step dad got to have "some fun". The story goes like this:

They were stationed at an Army base in Kentucky in 1970. Whatever group they were with didn't wear their uniforms the day they went to Nevada. So, he says that their commanding officer called them all into a briefing, then in civilian clothing, they boarded a transport aircraft and flew to Nevada. Once there, they loaded into a convoy of vehicles and were driven out to a small compound of buildings in the desert. While en route they were given their directives and shown a lay out of the buildings.

My stepfather was positioned at a back door of one building. His orders were, and I quote him "to kill anyone that comes out that door". Sam then pipes in and says that they were not told anything about what they were doing other than their individual directives. Also, they were not privy to the individual directives of their comrades in the other vehicles in the convoy. So, my step dad mentions they were at the site for maybe 30 minutes and during that time he "dropped four". Afterwards, they got back into the vehicles, went back to the airfield and flew back to Kentucky. Sam says with all frivolity to my mom (who is looking at my stepfather with a "WTF did I marry?" look creeping into her face), "Oh, yeah, we were always goin' places with no goddamned idea what we were goin' for."

I say this because I need to cover some back story before I get into the meat of my, now, 20 year piecing together of this weird man and why ultimately, I think he was a spook of some kind.

More later.

Henceforth, I will refer to my stepfather as SF.

My SF had a way of showing up out of no where. For a period of time, I apparently started sleep walking. I have no recollection of these episodes, but I would always find myself in random places upon waking up. Sometimes in the back yard, front yard, in the tool shed, but most of the time, I would be in the middle of our 2-acre garden. I always had dreams about bats at that time.

There were times I remember my SF walking me back inside the house. Now, I know this is one of those things where the explanation is simple: he heard me rustling about and maybe thought, "Shit, that limp-wristed stepson of mine is walking around again. I better go fetch him before he starts drawing on the walls..."

Plausible. Most of the things that have made rethink a lot of this stuff from my childhood has come out of talking about events with my siblings or mother. I was talking about sleep-walking to my brother and how it is something I haven't done since childhood. I brought it up because one of my brother's sons has a tendency to wander about at night. He informed me that it isn't sleepwalking and that my nephew is wide awake and being a sneaky three year old. My brother then says, "Miles (my nephew) is just like me, man. I never went to sleep when I was supposed to. I would play under the covers until really late. I would listen for mom walking around and pretend to be asleep."

While we were talking about my episodes of Nocturnal Restless Mobility Syndrome, I said to my brother how annoying it must have been for our SF to have to get up and wrangle me back to bed. My brother says, "Yeah, he would come into the room sometimes and then you would get up. I used to get pissed because I thought they were letting you get up after midnight and go play outside."

WHAT?

I just look at him and ask for some clarification. He said he remembers my SF coming to our room and opening the door and me leaving the room. Then a few times he would see me go outside and walk towards the garden. So, after I told him that THAT was when I was supposedly sleepwalking, he sort of stared at me and said, "Man, I don't even want to freakin' know...Ira was an odd guy. He always weirded me out."

The picture is becoming a little more convoluted. I have to actually get some work done today, so more later.

Now, what I have to ask myself is why would my SF lead me out of my room at night to stand in the middle if a large garden alone? I am going to presume I was alone based on my brother's testimony of seeing him let me out and not following me. The other question is why didn't I ever wake up when he came into the room? There was a cue at work here that I was not consciously aware of obviously.

Sometimes, my brothers and I get the feeling he was running a domestic psy-op within our house. He played head games with us. He spooked us. But, these occurrences were small and fleeting. When they happened, they whizzed right past us and only later have we questioned particular events. When we were camping in various parts of the country, all of us boys would head off into the woods seeking places to act out D&D or Elf Quest or something else equally dork. At least once on every trip, my step dad would hold me back and when the other kids ran off, he would give me things to do on my own little adventure. At the time, I thought it was awesome...and still do, but now I realize how weird some shit could be. For example:

My SF would say, "I want you measure the sun with your hand like this..." He would show me how to divide the sky between the sun and the horizon with the width of my hand and continue, " Now, count how many hand spaces you see. Ok, three. Now, I want you to walk West until there are only two widths in the sky. Turn South and go another width. Then turn North-East and be back by dark." All of us boys carried hunting knives in the woods, so I always had that. Sometimes he would tell me to leave my coat behind. Basically, I had my knife and the clothes on my back when he sent me off on these treks. Other times he would give me an objective like bring back a particular leaf or some other plant. Once he asked for lava rock.

All and all, I can't say what he was doing was bad in these instances. The best way for a child to learn skills is hands-on experience. When it was hot out, he would tell me to find water. As proof that I had found it, he said that I had to bring back a root or later lead him back to the water source. I forgot to add, if I f*cked up and failed...no dinner and sometimes I had to sleep in the open. No blanket, tent or coat.

Once I was lost. I got completely turned around and it was well after dark. I tried to get my bearings by using the sky, but the sky was cloudy that night. I was fighting panic, but I kept remembering my SF telling me that panic will get me killed. Panic makes you foul up and make a situation worse. He also told me that if I were to ever become lost, to get off the low ground and bed down. If not to sleep, then to calm myself and get acquainted with the turf. So, I did just that. I made a simple lean-to under a low tree and sat down. I wanted a fire, but everything was damp and at the time my fire-making skills weren't what they are today. I decided to hang out until I could think back on where I had come from and maybe where I had gotten turned around when I heard something relatively close to my position.

Now, when you are a kid alone and lost, everything is a Kodiak bear at night in the woods. In Maine. Even though they don't live there...but there were bears. We found their droppings occasionally. So, in my mind, I was sure it would be afraid of my knife...also, my knife was all I had. I waited to hear it again and when nothing happened, in stead of assuming it was gone, I assumed it was about to pounce.

At that point, everything my SF ever told me about panicking was f*cking pointless drivel for I panicked like no one has ever panicked before. I shot off at a sprint in some unknown direction. There was hardly any light and I wisely was holding my knife in front of me like a retard. Running with scissors? Shit no. I was running full-tilt, legs pumping through an unknown patch of wilderness with an 8" blade straight out in front of me at belly-level. chuckle

Dumb ass...

OH f*ck! It was behind me. I could hear it crashing through the underbrush like someone had pitched that big ass stone sphere from The Temple Of Doom straight at me. It was destroying every small bush it encountered not to mentioned untold numbers of marmot nests...

Then off to my right, I saw a HUGE dark shape speed straight at me. I could hear it breathing hard like a horse and when it was close enough, it slapped the knife out of my hand with enough force to spin me half-way around. Before I could fall in a sobbing mess the 17-foot tall bear grabbed me. One paw around my torso and the other clamped firmly around the back of my neck. It spun me around quickly as to cause my feet to leave the ground.

It opened it's mouth and came towards my face...

And said, "Boy you made four bad, BAD f*cking mistakes tonight. NEVER RUN WITH A GODDAMNED KNIFE IN YOUR HANDS!" The bear had been tracking me since I left camp. I think the bear always followed me because he went on to tell me how I had never made this many "f*ck ups" before. Needless to say, I slept next to fire embers that night. I also had to sit at camp for half the next day.

-TO BE CONTINUED-

Another anecdote. I will talk about the ultimate demise of my SF in a moment, but first let's jump ahead some years.

My mother eventually left my SF. A caveat about their coupling. It is obvious now that my SF targeted my mother from before their courtship began. We were a desperately poor family. We lived in a trailer park and my father had taken off leaving my 23 year old mother with three children. She had me, her first, at 16. She was a pretty, loyal blond that had managed to hold onto her figure after carrying three big-headed boys. Unfortunately, my mother (God love her) is not the brightest tool in the shed. Part of it could have been age, but a lot of it was being uneducated and dirt poor. My SF hired her as his house keeper and then seemed to "groom" her. Did I mention he was 30 years older? Yeah, he was 30 years older.

Now, skip ahead to 1993. My stepfather becomes a drunk. He lives with his two buys in an apartment complex in Mississippi. It's at that time that he becomes with ufology. He is convinced, and tells anyone that will listen, that UFOs are demons masking themselves as futuristic machines. He rants about how he sold his soul for knowledge. He says he knows he is going to Hell and the UFO/Demons are everywhere. He starts making flyers and putting them on telephone polls, public announcement boards at cafes and calling the governor.

He talks about how he has been visited by demons and "aliens" since he was a child. He talks about promising his future children to the demons when he was a young man. He says they saved him in Korea. He says they helped his career.

Six months into this behavior, he is accused of inappropriately touching a little black girl. He was never charged. There was only a prelim hearing with a judge (reportedly) and during this meeting, the judge tells him he has to leave the state within 30 days. He moves to Arkansas and rents a house. Four days after he moved, he was in a K-Mart in Jonesboro, Arkansas, sitting in the little diner area while his kids bought fishing rods.
According to my step brother, he was walking toward my SF and noticed him speaking with a well dressed man. As he got closer, he could see the two of them talking arguing. The man got up, tapped his finger on the on the table and left the store. My SF stood up, put a hand on the table and collapsed. He died on the floor of a K-Mart.

Now that I have written everything I think is important about my SF, I feel it is time for me to throw out my thoughts on this as a way to wrap this whole thing up with a nice bow. Maybe not so nice a bow. I have to remind myself that I am not telling a story to entertain anyone, but writing out events as I remember them and trying to piece together a puzzle with some pieces missing.

So, after everything I have said, I still have no idea why I was ever in a cedar box. Why would I have a memory like that? Is the box a construct of my own mind? A block of some kind placed there by myself of someone else? If I were so inclined, I would think this has something to do with abduction or abuse, yet I have no memories of these things. One thing that makes me feel that I may have been singled out is because, I am different from the rest of my siblings. I have certain attributes that they do not possess. Such a thing doesn't make me better than them, on the contrary, it has made my life more difficult. What it did do was make me more capable of experiencing other "realities"...maybe, a better way of saying it is that I understand other ways of being. Of living.

I am convinced of two things: either my SF was a f*cked up man with a twisted psyche or he was into some bad juju. Somehow, I am the product of that. So much of that man I have retained. I remember everything he ever taught me and for some reason, I feel it is going to be useful to me some day. I personally feel whatever was being done is incomplete because my mother left him. As she got older, it became apparent to her that something was very off. She used to watch over me in the years after their divorce.

My mother acts like she is afraid of me sometimes, yet I have never once lashed out at her verbally or otherwise (I mean, who does that to their mother). Yet, she cringes from me when I temper goes up where she will bark my other brothers down under similar circumstances. My own wife has told me that there is something off with me. She says I scare her at bight sometimes. When I have asked her what I do, she can't explain really. She just says at night when we are in bed she gets spooked by me.

I don't know what my SF was up to, but it was never allowed to come to fruition. Since the time of the divorce, I lost contact with my stepbrothers. Those two lived with him full-time afterwards and in the following years, both have died as well. One committed suicide and the other disappeared in the Ozarks, presumed dead now for 8 years.

Let's jump backwards a few years to my twelfth year. This is the year where things started to change for me. 1988 was when my mother started pulling away from my SF. To her credit, none of us kids were aware of this development. This was also the beginning of my acquaintance with a fella named Porl. He has been in my life now for twenty four years in various capacities.

It was October 11, 1988, which was a Tuesday. It was late in the evening around 10pm and I was sitting in the recliner in the front room of our house. I remember this recliner because I virtually lived in it during summer night. I would sit and listen to my Walkman, endlessly flipping cassette tapes. The chair was a shade of blue that only furniture designers in the 80s could love. I swear there were little sparkles sewn into the fabric. Really f*cking heinous decor.

So, the furniture in the front room was arranged in an "L" formation. A couch made the upward stem of the letter. My little brother was sitting at the far end of the couch away from me looking at some comics while I doodled on a legal pad. I hadn't discovered sketch pads yet, so I would get a 11" x 14" yellow legal pad whenever we went to the Five and Dime to draw. At that point in my life, I drew Batman a lot.

For most of that year, starting shortly after my birthday in January, I had started hearing voices. "WHAT??? I KNEW IT!!", you are saying. Well, hold on there, Tonto. For awhile, I said the same thing to myself, albeit quietly and only in my head. It was a terrifying prospect. I had heard that crazy people hear voices in their head and was it possible that I was already full on window-licking bat shit-bonkers at 12? I was running the risk of never getting the chance to make out with a girl, drive a car, buy my own stuff and all the things 12 year-old boys dream will one day be theirs.

At first it sounded like three people talking in the next room. Their voices were muffled and I could not make out any clear words. Eventually, I was able to make out bits and pieces of what they were saying, but never enough to actually follow the conversation. Imagine that same muffled conversation, but every so often, someone opens a door and you can hear actual words. One day, I was able to hear them like they were in the same room. I can't remember what they were talking about, but in unison they stopped talking and I could sense them noticing me for what seemed like the first time. Which is strange, right? Shouldn't it be the other way around? They are the ones in my head after all. One would assume incorporeal voices might realize they are contained within the confines of a skull.

Once the voices stopped and "looked" at me, I was able to identify them as far as gender. Or what I perceived their genders to be at least. Two males and a female were present. Over time their presence became strong enough that it sounded like they were next to me. At school I could hear them. It made concentrating on assignments difficult. I knew they were adults partly because the things they talked about were over my head.

As my brother and I sat in the front room of the house, he reading and me drawing, the voices stopped their chatter and started saying my name. They also said other names, but mine would pop into a rotation every 9 or 10 names. Imagine hearing three people whispering, "Robert, Samuel, John, Michael, Elise, Francis, Juan, Lau, KEITH..." in a repeating cycle. When they got to my name, it was punctuated, almost with a little too much force. The cycle began to speed up and I started to silently freak out and sweat. "Oh, God please help...Oh, no, no, no..." was what I remember thinking the whole time as the they chanted this litany of names.

As the list reached a crescendo, my brother looks up and says, "Who's outside?" I don't hear him at first, well, I hear him speak, but I could care less what he was saying. I am dealing with some psychosis hear, bro...gimme a minute, huh? I look at him and say, "What?"

"Who's outside? Someone is here asking for you? Mom's gonna be mad. We can't have friends over this late. It's a school night.", he explains.

"What?" I repeat

"SOMEONE IS CALLING YOUR NAME. I am telling mom that your friends have snuck out."

I suppose he thinks I am a massive dumbass at this point. That is when I realize that he hears it too. That was the moment I felt that maybe it wasn't me. I mean, do most people share their on-set schizophrenic auditory hallucinations? I haven't read of that in any literature.

I remember looking at him and feeling some relief. The voices stopped talking in unison and began whispering to each other. They also started "pushing" on me with a force that is very hard to describe. It felt like an asthma attack along my spine (that is if you could draw breath from your spinal column). The pressure was building and I knew that my defenses were finished. I was keenly aware now that I was being attacked in some way, but it was welcome. With a horror and joy I have never experienced since that night, I gave up and the world took on shades of brown and deeper colors I can't describe. The world now looked like it was viewed through a dirty light gel.

I felt power explode from my chest, eyes, feet, belly, mouth, ears, penis, hands...points of contact with something not seen. I remember sending my pencils and pad flying to the floor as I shot out of my chair and ran out the front door, down the steps of our little porch and into the front yard. I fell on my back and screamed. I think I may have bent in some way. All I know is that I wasn't in control. I had let it go. I was smiling. I know that. Whether it was on my face, I will never know, but I was smiling inside. In the deepest part of me, I was smiling wider than the Cheshire Cat. The smile was a "V".

I don't remember leaving the yard.

The next concrete memory is of my best friend, Steve, sitting next to me in a hospital waiting room. He has been crying and looks really worried. Pretty heavy shit for two 12 year old boys. The seats were cold and white bucket-style deals all attached to a bar in a row along a hospital sea-foam wall. His mother was sitting on the other side of me and my mother was some feet away speaking to a lady with a clipboard and wearing scrubs.

I looked around and didn't see any other sick people. The only people in the waiting room were the four of us. Uh...ummmm...hmmmm

After a few minutes, the nurse walks over to Anne, Steve's mom, and asks her relationship to me. She says that she is my godmother and the nurse asks if she wanted to be a second contact. Anne agrees and looks at the lady like she should have known that she, indeed, was the second contact. Mom walks up and hugs me and tells me it will be okay. Steve hugs me and starts crying. Anne tells me that she will come see me when she can and that she loves me. The three of them are walked towards a door by a black man wearing the same hospital scrubs. My head is clearing up more now, but I am still buzzing inside like my spine had become battery cables. I am not sure what is happening, but I have a clear impression that it sucks.

The white female and the black male nurses approach me and with the lightest of movements ask me to come with them. The man introduces himself as Anthony and the woman is Deborah. Anthony informs me that he is my psych-tech and that Deborah is the charge nurse on duty.

Wait...what?

I was lead to a hospital room that looked more like a hotel room. On the door were the number 1614. I had been admitted to what my grandmother refers to as "The Nervous Hospital".

I sat in my room. A room with a desk, two chairs, and a bed. The desk, chairs and bed frame were all made from an off white plastic with rounded corners. When I got settled and the realization that I was in a place for the mentally ill, Anthony broke my concentration with the ground rules.

"I need you to change out of your clothes and put on this gown and slippers. I have two gowns for you here, one for the back and one for the front. When you are dressed, call my name. I will be standing in the hallway with the door open. Put all your clothes in this bag."

"Why?"

"You will be in isolation for 72 hours and a mandatory suicide watch. The reason I need your clothing is because you could fashion them into instruments to hurt yourself. I will be back shortly after you change with a menu for your meals. You will mark off what you want for your three meals and we will bring them to you. Twice a day, your psychiatrist will visit you and once every hour, a nurse will stop by. After the 72 hour adjustment period ends, you will be introduced to the patient community and begin regular counseling sessions."

Ah, f*ck....really? I think to myself. I had already decided that I could not talk about what happened earlier in the front room. I was scared shitless. How long was I going to be here??? I had watched "One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest" and I was praying there would be a big ass Indian with a hobby of ripping faucets out of the floor to save me.

Minutes become hours. Hours become the movements of the sun in the sky. Those begin to blur into a procession of shadows. The voices keep talking.

Female: I love you. You are the most beautiful thing I have ever known.
Male 1: You don't understand right now, but you will one day. All you have to do is let us help you.
Male 2: f*ck him. I don't want to do this shit anymore. It's meat.

These are the rolls they play. Loving matron and the good cop/bad cop.

At some point I have to be taken out of the room because I haven't eaten in two days. I won't respond to the staff. I won't get out of the chair. The doctor on day shift ordered me down into ICU for IV fluids. I have no memory of this. I remember my mother standing near me crying. I remember hearing the doctor saying to her that I was in shock. My mother is frantic because she wants to know what is wrong and why is her son listless and cold.

Eventually, I make it back to room 1614. I spend a total of a week in confinement instead of three days. I have a Anthony stationed a door over monitoring me via the intercom system in my room. Anthony eventually got me to start talking. Sometimes in person, sometimes over the speaker. He would play a guitar and sing songs to me. He never asked me what was wrong (because, if he had, I wouldn't have known either. For all intent and purposes, a lot of the experience felt good).

Eight days after my admission, I met Dr. V (name withheld). Dr. V was in his late 50s when I met him. The first time we met was after my first lunch shared with the other kids in my ward. I was taken to his office a floor below the one I was housed on by Anthony. I walked in and he looked at me.

I looked at him.

He was Jewish. Balding with blue eyes and a black beard. The hair he had was curly except on top where there was just a wisp of his mane's former glory. The remaining hair looked like a short-cut, salt and pepper Bozo wig. He removed his glasses and said "What's wrong with you, son?"

"Shit if I know..." I clamped my hand over my mouth because I had never cursed in front of an adult before. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean..."

"You can say whatever you want, okay? If you want to use profanity, and if it helps, I will allow it."

"f*ck..."

"Was that for a reason or were you testing the waters? Don't "f*ck" around in our sessions, Mr. Rash. Got it?"

"Yes, sir."

"I will see you tomorrow and every day for the next two weeks at least for a few minutes. You have 30 minutes a day to spend in my office. If there is anything you want to discuss that you are not comfortable discussing in one of the group sessions, this is where you do it. Deal?"

"Yeah."

"It's nice to meet you, Mr. Rash. You can call me Roger"

"You, too. Everybody calls me Keith"

"I will see you tomorrow, Keith."

Life in the hospital was hard to adapt to, but I eventually found a routine. Mainly because my routine was planned out for me. At 7:30am every morning, a soft chime would sound over the intercom system. It would gradually build in frequency until it annoyed a patient enough to get out of bed and walk across the room to shut it off. I had until 8:00am to be showered and dressed.

Once dressed, a nurse would call over the intercom and ask me if I was ready and I would confirm. Then the locks on the door leading into the hall would electronically unlock. When I heard the click of the lock, I was to open my door, step in to the hall and stand there. As I looked to either side of me down the hallway, there were other patients doing the same thing. At even intervals there were staff members facing us and eventually we would receive a group command to turn to our left and form a single line.

This line wrapped around the patient floor, ending at the nurses station. Every patient got their turn with the charge nurse. She was a portly grey hair with Mrs. Claus' rosie cheeks. Her voice was sweet (she sounded like the granny that owned Sylvester the Cat) as she asked how was your night. Then she handed you two paper cups. One with water and another with a grab-bag of brightly colored pills. After watching you swallow both, she kindly ask for you to open your mouth to insure you actually took them.

This was when I started to formulate my escape.

The pills were sedatives. I am sure they we specified for each patient, but I was never sure. Anyway, I did my best to not take them. I didn't trust the fact that I was amongst strangers and being sedated. My SF's vigilant, paranoid training made this a difficult thing to accept. After the first week, I managed to stop taking them by holding them down my throat.

After putting the pills in my mouth, I would quickly shift them into my cheek so when I drank the water, they would not be washed down. In the second after swallowing the water, I would push the pills to the back of my tongue and press the meds against the back of my throat. The key here was to get out of line and into the kitchen line where breakfast was served before my gag reflexes kicked in and made me swallow or the pills started to dissolve. I would say my success rate was in the high 80s/low 90s. When I didn't have time to get to a napkin and discretely cough the sedatives up, I basically went about my day fuming that I was zombified. I suppose it would have been easier to give up and let the medication wash over me on days when I failed, but I was afraid I would get lazy and give in if I didn't remain vigilant and angry about it.

So, once the meds were given, swallowed and checked, we were all corralled into the kitchen. If you have ever been to prison, it looks eerily familiar. Linoleum floors, fluorescent lighting, brick walls painted the f*cked up sea foam green you always see in hospitals. Anyway, patients line up on a wall with a metal self that runs the length of said wall which terminates at a small window that opens up into the actual cooking area.

I grabbed a green, plastic tray and butt-fuckingly slow, inch my way in line to the window. Once at the window, a gloved hand shoots forward to execute three maneuvers involving an ice cream scoop and tongs with lightening, machine-like efficiency:

ICE CREAM SCOOP! POW! - Powdered egg-stuff
TONGS! BAM! - Greasy meat (bacon, ham, sausage and I swear, sometimes SPAM...probably TREET because these hospital ninjas are cheap)
ICE CREAM SCOOP - THE SEQUEL! - Potato product

Everyday was filled with group meetings. Meetings for kids on drugs. Meetings for kids with addict parents. Meetings about gender roles (???). One on one counseling. Rec time was especially annoying because were restricted to G rated movies. The board games sucked.

I was fully aware that i was not crazy. It had become apparent to me that some of the patients were probably going to leave in worse shape than when they came due to being strung out on whatever mind-numbing shit they were forcing on us every day. This was 1988 and the psychiatric community was still operating under left over guises of the 1950s...I swear. I wanted out. I was sure what had happened to me was a personal moment that overwhelmed me and not a sign of any deep psychological issues. The problem was the locked door between me and freedom...

Every day around noon, we all lined back up, received some more pills and then ushered into the food cave. Again with the plastic tray queue to the Window of Flung Meals. Except this time, it was a sack lunch usually containing a sandwich, baggy of cut vegetables and fruit. During lunch, the Gloved Hand had no serving utensils. Instead, he threw it through the window underhanded. We always knew quickly when an apple was in the bag because the first kid in line always got beaned with a hard ass apple right in the stomach. It became a game to dodge the sack lunch and catch it without it smacking you in the torso. One kid got in trouble for catching it and in one swift movement, threw it right back at the Gloved One.

During the time we were eating, the delivery people from the laundry service were in and out of the main door. The door was located maybe 15 - 20 feet from the restroom outside the cafeteria. My plan was to use the cover of urination and speed to make it through that door...

Did I mention the sandwiches were nasty? Well, they were. Warm bologna or weird slightly grey ham. Also, they only put ONE slice of ham one them. Slightly dry white bread and a notebook page thick piece of warm, proto-ham (NEW PUNK BAND NAME!). So, I stopped eating them. I would unwrap it and take a bite so the nutritionist could see me "eating". I started saving them...

Gross...right?

So, when I could get away with it, I would wrap it up and tuck it into the band of my pants. There was an in-house black market on the Youth Floor. There were two fat kids that always felt underfed. One of them was named Derek. Derek was a 17 year old suicide risk. Derek's mom brought him cigarettes every week stashed in her purse.

At night after the last intercom check was made to our rooms, the dealing began. There was a 9-foot, double door wardrobe in all of our rooms located next to the sink in our bathrooms. If you climbed on top, then shimmied up the wardrobe, you could lift up the ceiling panels. Above was an empty crawl space big enough to sit in. We were on the top floor of the building, so the support struts were also the weight bearing structures to our walls. But, they were wide open on top. We literally could sit in the ceiling space and talk, smoke cigarettes and goof around...

QUIETLY

We were pretty much only able to hear the person next to us, so if anyone wanted to tell you something, it was a game of telephone. Since the beams were only wide enough for one person, navigating away from your room was treacherous. This was also a time when the boys and girls could mingle. Other than community-wide group sessions, the genders were kept separate (imagine a bunch of f*cked up kids with their own beds unsupervised?). There were some hook-ups up there (not by me, I was still scared of girls then, but I did get to see my first boob in that ceiling...much fapping commenced later. It's amazing how seeing A SINGLE breast for about 10 seconds can sustain a 12 year old for months...), but not many.

Anyway, the point of this is the ceiling crawl space was part of my escape plan. More importantly, it was where I could get my supplies. See, Derek, the fat kid with the Winstons, would trade smokes for food. So, I saved my sandwiches and the few cookies I could get during our late night snack and trade him a sandwich for a smoke or five cookies for a smoke. I know, steep prices for some 12 year old that was still 5 years from his first cigarette, but you know, supply and demand. Capitalism at it's finest.

So, what would the young and nubile Mr. Rash want with cigarettes? Nothing. But Patty O'Neal liked them. Patty O'Neal was a girl that was so abused, she took to drinking rubbing alcohol to get drunk before her dad came home from being on the road all week. Well, Patty, sadly, liked to dress sexy for the boys at night and somehow she had a pair of stocking stashed somewhere in her room.

I wanted the stockings. They were crucial to my plan. So, over two weeks, I bartered a WHOLE pack of Winston Filter Kings and then offered Patty a deal. Her stockings for the pack of smokes (which were wrapped up in a plastic bag). After she stared at me and wondered what I wanted with them, she reluctantly gave in after I explained that her legs were pretty without the stockings. I made her blush...awwww...and I flirted with her. I kind of felt bad for playing to her psych issues, but I really needed to leave that place. The shrinks were filling mom's head full of garbage and I was losing an up-hill battle.

So, when I got back to my room after my big score, I was grossed out by the stocking...I don't know why. They didn't stink (I didn't check it out in detail), but to this day, stockings kind of gross me out. I washed them twice in my sink with a bar of soap and hung them on the door knob on the back of the bathroom door. Now, with Phase One complete, I spent the next week obtaining the next thing I needed.