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I LIKE Feeling This Way

I spent the last two and a half years of my "official" adolescence as a ward of the state of California and in a large group home or "open placement". It was an "open placement" because it wasn't a lock-down down facility. The front doors were unlocked and we had rooms instead of cells. It wasn't really a home so much as place to house messed up and throwaway girls who weren't really criminal enough to require full-time residence in juvenile hall.

Some girls were there due to drug and prostitution charges. Some were there behind assault and battery or arson charges. Others were simply guilty of bad attitudes, a lack of interest in any thing an authority figure had to say and running away from crappy homes, using alcohol or drugs to anesthetize intense internal pain and rage. I pretty much fell into the latter group, having been deemed a "pre-juvenile delinquent" by the social worker who placed me there. This meant only that I hadn't been caught doing something that would require my presence before a judge. It meant that I was headed straight for juvenile hall and a life of crime, if someone or something did not intervene.

And so it was that I came to find myself at the tender age of 16 in an old renovated convalescent home with 50 or so girls who were far more knowledgeable about all things criminal than I had ever thought to be. I was more rebellious than criminal, more interested in not feeling than making money by selling drugs.

Being put into placement probably wasn't the best place for me at the time but there was no other place for me. My father was a pedophile as everyone had learned several months earlier and my mother was ill-equipped to cope with not only the situation in which she found herself but also with a wayward, angry, stubborn and do-it-my-way teenage girl who refused to listen, conform or do anything other than look for ways to escape whatever uncomfortable circumstances she found herself in, one way or another.

And while the circumstances that brought me to the group home were heartbreaking at best; and much of what I experienced while there could be characterized as cathartic in some way, what I learned from being among those girls wasn't exactly therapeutic. What DID happen to me there was I felt my first glimpse and experience with what unconditional love and acceptance were from the woman who was charged with dealing with me. I was allowed to to be who I was on any given day. I received the therapy I so desperately needed. I learned my freedoms and privileges hinged mostly on my behavior and attitudes and I got the very first inkling that I had a problem with booze and anything that altered my mind.

What follows is the story of how I found myself at my very first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.

I was constantly going AWOL and coming back inebriated. The usual punishment for this was 50 demerits and 72 hours restriction. Restriction meant you couldn’t go on group activities or get phone calls or weekend passes. That kind of thing. Well, on the fourth time in a week, my caseworker finally reached the end of her patience and put me on restriction until further notice. She told me if I went AWOL one more time or had my friends come to my room window and hang out, she would not only move me to a inside room but also send me to Juvenile Hall. Shit, foiled again. At least I could see my friends at school.

The Wooden Spoon

"Why did you come back? Did you run out of money or drugs or were there just no more losers to trick with"? 

I said nothing and merely moved to the front of the hallway just outside the kitchen, that now served as my bedroom; because afterall if I really wanted to be a part of the family, I wouldn't keep running away. I opened the hall closet that held all my earthly possessions and slid out the plastic patio chaise lounge chair she had given me to sleep on.

"If you think you are going to come back here in the middle of the afternoon, after weeks of being god knows where, you've got another thing coming!" Still I said nothing as I unfolded the orange and white striped vinyl lounger that now served in the hallway as my bed. As I spread the sheet out on it, she stood there, watching me, red-faced, eyes bulging. She reached down and snatched the sheet off the lounger, balling it up and holding it close to her body as though it was a hard won prize. "I SAID you weren't going to come in here and sleep." I looked at her a long moment and watched the unsureness creep into her eyes. My silence was rattling her and shaking her already filmsy illusion of power over a situation she was powerless to control.

At 16 I'd already been running away from home for nearly 3 years, staying with friends and away from her as long as I could, until I had to return home for a while before it became unbearable again and I felt compelled to leave, to get away from this angry woman who hated me. Hated me because I never measured up, was never what she thought I ought to be, angry because I refused to let her inside after she was told what my father had done to me all those years.

Saying nothing, I sat down on the lounger, picked up a book and began to read because I couldn't fire up a joint and blow the smoke in her face. "Just what do you think you're doing?" she asked, incredulous. "Reading", I replied flatly. She stood there a minute more and left, moving into the kitchen. A second later she had returned and stood over me, as a sharp searing pain ripped through the right side of my jaw, accompanied by a resounding 'crack'. I scrambled up off the lounge chair, holding my jaw and she backed up a few feet, weilding in her hand the wooden spoon. She'd never attempted to hit me in the face with it before.

The Wooden Spoon. The great terrorizer of my childhood. The only thing I had ever been truly scared of as a child. It was old, about 12 inches long, made of solid, hard wood and had been owned by my great-grandmother. When you were whacked with it, no matter where, it hurt; worse than a belt or a paddle or my father's hand. She had started using it when she had begun hurting her hands hitting me with them or slamming them into furniture when I ducked, dodging her slaps.

"What the fuck did you do that for?", I demanded as I took a step out of the corner I was in and toward her. She backed up, into the doorjam and said "I'm not putting up with your lip. You think you can just stroll in here after disappearing for weeks and then get lippy? No way."

"You asked me what I was doing and I answered you. I wasn't being lippy."

She raised the the spoon again to hit me and I snatched it, breaking it in half over my knee. The pieces fell to the floor, rendered impotent, and forever useless. "Now. Hit me with it again", I spat at her.

 

"That was my grandmother's spoon", she said weakly, staring at the broken pieces lying on the floor.

"If you didn't want it broken, then you shouldn't have been using it to hit me," I retorted.

And then she did it. She reached out and backhanded me in the face. Hard.

I grabbed her by the neck of her housedress and pushed her hard up against the doorjam with all my strength and snarled, "If you ever lay another hand on me or hit me again , I swear to God I'll fucking kill you. I've had it. I've put up with your shit for years. Enough is enough. Leave me the fuck alone." I swear I'll remember those words for as long as I live because I've never said them to anyone else before or since.

The blood drained from her face; her face a conglomeration of confusion, fear, anger and she retreated to her locked bedroom, saying nothing more.

I sat back down on the lounger once more and picked up my book, which had fallen to the floor. I heard her on the phone in her bedroom. "I need the police to come and arrest my daughter. She's on drugs and she just assaulted me and threatened my life".

Knowing she would not bring me anything I may need in juvenile hall, I packed a brown grocery bag with toiletries and one change of clothes for when I was released. I didn't care. Anyplace was better than living here on a lounge chair in a hallway with a crazy woman who hated the sight of me. I sat and waited for the police to arrive.

I awoke 3 hours later to find I was indeed still quite free and she was still quite locked in her bedroom. So I packed another bag, and headed out to the nearest pay phone to call my best friend for a place to crash for awhile.