Booty Juice: A Story of an Inpatient Teen
This is home, for now.
I was 17, pretty fuckin’ sad, and had good insurance. So they put me away for a month.
The place was Rockford; I heard about it on the news recently. Someone killed themselves on their lawn after having just been released. I guess his insurance was up.
Not everyone was there because they were sad. Some were 15-year-olds who were addicted to Percocet. Some were bi-polar. Some were sociopaths. We exchanged diagnoses like candy on a playground, except the sociopaths usually lied about theirs.
There was group therapy every night. When the therapists tried to teach me how to be happy, it didn’t work. They’d give me a laundry list of coping mechanisms — things like exercise, reading good books and any other utterly commonplace hobby you could think of — but the word “cope” always got under my skin.
I didn’t want to just cope. If I wanted to merely cope with life’s tragedies, I wouldn’t have wound up in Rockford in the first place. I wanted to experience things wholly, not just deal with them. And I only learned to do so when the therapists acted like real people — like when Mr. Joey stayed up all night talking to me when he was supposed to be making sure I wasn’t staying up all night talking. Or when Mr. Evan caught me singing Sam Cooke and joined in with an “it’s been too hard living, but I’m afraid to die, ’cause I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky.”
Before Rockford, I hated being home. Even in a place where I had to eat plain Cheerios for breakfast every day, I still didn’t want to come home — not because of my family or anything, it wasn’t their fault. I was just trying to disappear into nothing so no one would notice if I left.
I did wish I had my family’s dog to comfort me, though.
I assume Rockford was meant to be a safe place, considering they cut out all of the underwire from our bras and pulled the laces from our shoes, all before we even had the chance to conjure up corporal punishment on ourselves or others. You should have seen their faces when they found out I kept a mechanical pencil in my room for two whole weeks. I’m still not sure if it was the sharp lead that they thought was dangerous, or the poetry I wrote with it.
