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| "Skrik" (Edvard Munch, 1893) |
In jail, they kept me in a cell by myself, isolated from other prisoners, and with a big sign on the door that read, "Juvenile / No Tobacco". Shortly after I got there, I started banging on my cell door and yelling at the guards to let me use a phone to call my mom. When a guard came and opened the cell door, I thought he was going to talk to me. Instead, he promptly smacked me (open-handed) so hard in the face that the blow literally knocked me on my ass. He then yelled, "You ain't in 'juvie' no more, punk! Stop banging on the door!" I was dumbfounded, but remained quiet from then on.
My father came to visit and asked me if I wanted him to bail me out or hire a lawyer - he couldn't afford both. Actually, he couldn't afford either, and ended up filing bankruptcy, so he never paid the lawyer he hired, John Ladenburg; a name I still strangely enough remember since I only met him once outside of a few very short court hearings. He was later elected District Attorney, so maybe that's why I remember him.
Ladenburg came to see me once at the jail. He asked me one question: "Did you do it?" I told him I did, and that I had confessed. He then put the papers he had with him back into an expensive-looking briefcase (which I also clearly remember, along with his expensive-looking suit), told me he'd be in touch, and left.
The next time I saw him was in court for a hearing to order a mental evaluation at "WSH" (Western State Mental Hospital).
A few days after the hearing, I was transported in the back of a van with one other prisoner to WSH. The other prisoner was going "home", as he put it, back to one of the "wards" for non-violent criminally insane. He seemed pretty "normal" to me, and after I bummed a cigarette from him, a "Kool" as I clearly remember, he even gave me the remaining nearly full pack to take with me, because he could easily get more once he got "back home", which he seemed very happy about.
In hindsight, I can understand easily why he might have been so happy to be going back to the hospital. WSH was a very pleasant place to live. Even Ward "W", the "Intake and Observation Ward", where I was taken for the court-ordered psych evaluation, was very "nice" by any standard of incarceration. It was on the top floor of a five story old red-brick building at the back of the sprawling hospital campus. It was one of the few "closed" wards at the hospital, which only meant that the single entrance door was kept locked and none of the patients were allowed to leave (unless discharged).
I was escorted inside and told to sit in a chair against a wall of the main entrance hall after the handcuffs were removed. I was left alone there until one of the nurses had time to come process me in.
As I sat there, taking in my surroundings, a young and fairly attractive female patient shuffled down the hall towards me from the main day-room area. She suddenly stopped directly in front of me and turned to face me, then asked me in a distinctly sing-song voice, "Can I have a cigarette?"
She had seen the pack of "Kool" I was holding, that the other prisoner/patient had just given me. I said, "Sure", and gave her one, lit it for her, and then, without another word, she shuffled off back towards the day-room. I soon learned the hospital parlance for the way she walked, by shuffling her feet, was called the "Thorazine shuffle". Like many of the patients on Ward "W", she was heavily sedated at all times. I also learned that she had killed her "boyfriend" by stabbing him more than fifty times with a steak knife. I consequently did not seek out her company or conversation the rest of the time I was there.
The person who "educated" me about her was another patient a few years older than myself. We were the youngest ones there. He had been admitted for evaluation by his parents for possible admission (permanently) to the hospital because of the constant hallucinations he "suffered". I don't remember his name, but I do remember that he always called me "Mr. V." from the first day we met. When I asked him why, he acted surprised. "Don't you know?" he said. Then he explained that I was plainly (to him) a "vampire". He said he could see my fangs and, at night, he watched me change into a bat and fly out of the window to go meet with other vampires. He also told me, in the same conversation, about a "magic wand" that was attached to his belly that made him do things, sometimes "bad" things. So, I didn't give much credence to the whole "vampire" thing. Years later, though, I came to realize that, somehow, he was able to "see" truths" visually that most people couldn't even comprehend mentally. I have long since had genuine respect for so-called "schizophrenics".
I spent most of the two weeks I spent there hanging out with him, playing chess in the day-room, or watching T.V. in the T.V.-room, or sometimes playing ping-pong in the game-room. The ward had its own small chow-hall where pretty darn good food was served off special hot-serving carts that came from the main kitchen. The overall atmosphere on the ward was airy and pleasant. It was co-ed (obviously), but most of the male patients ranged from completely catatonic to, well... We slept in dorms; one large main dorm for the males, and another smaller down for the females (except one woman, whose bed was in the day-room, so she couldn't kill herself).
One day, while my schizo-friend and I were in the game-room looking out the windows at the parks and trees and going-ons below (another favorite pastime), one of the "shufflers" came shuffling in, which caught both me and my friend's attention, because we were used to seeing this one just going in circles around the day-room. It was very odd to see him venture so far from his normal route, and he seemed to be on a mission as well.
And it turned out that he was on a mission. As he shuffled past the ping-pong-table, he picked up a paddle without even seeming to notice he had done so, and then he continued directly to a nearby window (three of the walls in the game-room were all windows, making it very sunny during the day) and nonchalantly broke one of the panes with the handle of the ping-pong-paddle, again barely seeming to even notice what he was doing and not even pausing or anything to contemplate what was happening.
He continued past the window, and then around the other side of the ping-pong-table, replacing the paddle on the table again as he passed, and then proceeded back out of the game-room. Out of curiosity, I decided to follow him - at a "safe distance, of course - to see what else "interesting" he might do. He made a shuffling bee-line to the nurse's station in the day-room, and I overheard him tell the nurse simply and with no inflection, "I broke a window in the game-room." I saw the nurse come out of the nurse's station and head towards the game-room, presumably to inspect the damage. But, I didn't want to risk getting involved, as a "witness" or otherwise, so I continued on my own to the T.V. room - which was in the opposite direction.
A little while later, when I ventured back through the day-room, I noticed the window-breaker doing his usual shuffle around in circles in the day-room, clearly in a deep stupor again. It seemed his "mission" (to get more Thorazine) was a success.
The only other patient I spoke to on occasion was an older (middle-aged) black man. We played chess sometimes in the day-room. He told me plainly that he was "scamming" the system to get out of prison. But, even then, I wondered if his "scam" was just part of his delusional thinking. He didn't seem very "rational" to me. One day in the T.V.-room, he pulled out his dick and asked me if I wanted to suck it. I didn't want to, but, just to be "nice", I pulled out my dick and offered it to him in kind. This made him instantly enraged. He said, "I ain't no fucking fag!", which only confused me. If he wasn't a fag, then why did he want me to suck his dick? I had lots to learn!
I remember waking up in the dorm sometime later that same night - with him on top of me, and on top of the blankets, dry-humping my butt. He wasn't hurting me, or making me uncomfortable, so I let him do his thing and then, after he finished, I just went back to sleep and thought nothing of it. I was more than used to that sort of behavior at this point in my life.
I met a couple of times with a doctor ("shrink") in one of the small offices there on the ward. I don't remember the conversations, though. But the "psych evaluation" was completed and I was returned to the juvenile isolation cell back at the old Pierce County Jail (I mention that this was the "old" jail, because the entire jail was in the city-county building, occupying only a few floors. They have long since built an entirely new jail in its own building next to the city-county building.). I even got "molested" while I was there, by a man in the cell next to mine, who liked reaching around to feel my ass through the bars at the back of the cell - yet, again, this was "normal" for me.
Ladenburg used the "psych evaluation" to convince a judge that I was "mature" enough to be evaluated for treatment at the "Sexual Psychopath Treatment Program" ("SP program"), also at WSH. So, I was returned to the hospital several weeks later for the SP program's "observation" for three months, to determine if I was "treatable". If Ward "W" was my intro to madness, then the SP program was the core curriculum, and then some!
[J.D. March 16, 2017]
