Go Ask Alice

by Beatrice Sparks

  Then they took me down a smelly, ugly, dingy, paint-peeling old hallway and through a locked door, which was locked again behind me. My heart was pounding so hard that I thought at any second it would explode and spray the whole hall. I could hear it pounding in my ears and I could hardly get one foot in front of the other.

  We walked down an endlessly dark hallway and I got a look at some of the people here and now I know I don’t belong here. I can’t get over what it feels like to be in a world of crazy people, a whole world of them. On the inside and on the outside. I don’t belong here, but I’m here. That’s crazy isn’t it? So you see, dear friend, my only friend, there’s nowhere to go because the whole world is crazy.

  July 24

  The night was interminable. Anything in the world could happen in here and no one would ever know.

  July 25

  This morning they woke me up at 6:30 for a breakfast I couldn’t eat and bleary eyed and still shivering, I was led down the long dark hall to the big metal door with the barred window in the middle. Keys were clanked into the big lock and we were on the other side. Then the keys were clanked again. The day attendants talked a lot but I really couldn’t hear them. My ears are clogged up, probably from fear. Then they took me to the Youth Center which was just two buildings away, passed two slobbering men with another attendant who were raking up leaves.

  At the Youth Center there were fifty, sixty, maybe even seventy kids, milling around preparing to go to their classes or whatever they were going to do. All of them seemed pretty normal except one big girl who looked to be about my age but who was eight or ten inches taller and at least fifty pounds heavier. She was stretched out stupidly under the pinball machine in the dayroom, and there was also a teen age boy who kept bouncing his head and muttering idiotically.

  A bell rang and all of the kids went off except the two dummies. I was left in the dayroom with them. Finally a large lady (the school nurse) came in and said that if I wanted the privilege of going to school I would have to go see Doctor Miller and sign a commitment that I was ready to live according to all the Center rules and regulations.

  I said I was ready but Doctor Miller was not in so I spent the rest of the morning in the day room watching the two dum-dums, one sleeping and one bouncing. I wondered what insane impression I made upon them, with my healing face and my lawn mower type haircut.

  All through the endless morning bells rang and people came and went. There was a stack of magazines on a little round table in the hall but I couldn’t read them. My mind was racing a thousand miles a minute and going nowhere.

  At eleven thirty Marj, the nurse, showed me the dining room. Kids were milling around in all directions, and certainly none of them looked crazy enough to be locked up but obviously they all were. The meal consisted of macaroni and cheese with a little bologna cut up in it and canned string beans, and some kind of soggy looking pudding. Trying to eat was a big waste of time. I couldn’t get anything down past the lump in my throat.

  A lot of the kids were laughing and teasing each other and it was pretty obvious that they even call their teachers and therapists and social workers by their first names. I guess everyone but the doctors. None of them seem as frightened as am I. Were they frightened when they first came here? Are they still frightened but putting up a good front? I don’t understand how can they exist here. Truthfully, the Youth Center isn’t as bad as the ward. It seems almost like a small school, but the hospital itself is unbearable. The smelly halls, the bleak people, the locked barred doors. It’s a dreadful nightmare, it’s a bad trip, it’s a bummer, it’s everything terrible that I can imagine.

  Dr. Miller finally came back in the afternoon and I got to talk to him. He told me that the hospital couldn’t help me, and the staff couldn’t help me and the teachers couldn’t help me, and the program which had proved very successful couldn’t help me, unless I wanted help! He also told me that before I could overcome my problem I had to admit I had a problem, but how can I do that when I really haven’t? I know now that I could resist drugs if I were drowning in them. But how will I ever convince anyone other than Mom and Dad and Tim, and Joel, I hope, that I didn’t really take anything knowingly this last time? It sounds incredible that the first time I took drugs and the last time which landed me in an insane asylum were both given to me without my knowledge. Oh nobody would believe anyone could be that dumb. I can hardly believe it myself even when I know it’s true.

  Anyway how can I admit anything when I am so scared I can’t even talk? I just sat nodding my head in Dr. Miller’s office so I wouldn’t have to open my mouth. Nothing would have come out anyway.

  At two thirty the kids were out of school, and some of them went to play ball and part of them stayed here for group therapy.

  Some of what the first doctor and the parole officer told me is coming back. The kids are in two groups. Group One kids are trying to obey all the rules and get released. They get all the privileges offered. Group Two is kind of grounded. They aren’t obeying the rules, and are losing their tempers or cursing or stealing or having sex or something and so they are restricted in everything. I hope there’s no pot here. I know I could resist it, but I don’t think I could stand any more problems without really going crazy. I guess the doctors know what they’re doing but I’m so lonely and so lost and so frightened. I think I really am losing my mind.

  At four thirty it was time for us to come back to our wards and be locked in again like animals in the zoo. There are six other girls besides myself and five boys who are in my ward, and thank God for that for I couldn’t have gone back by myself. However I noticed that they all cringed a little (as I do) when the doors clanked shut behind us.

  While we were walking through an older woman said it had been peaceful and quiet till now and the littlest girl turned and said “Fuck you.” I was so surprised I looked for the ceiling to fall down on her head, but no one seems to pay any attention but me.

  July 26

  The little girl I told you about yesterday is in the room next to mine. She’s thirteen and she seems constantly on the verge of tears. When I asked her how long she’d been here, she said, “forever, simply forever.”

  At dinner time she walked with me to the place where we eat and we sat together, not eating, at one of the long tables. The rest of the evening we were left to wander around the ward with nowhere to go and nothing to do. I desperately want to tell Mom and Dad what it’s like here but I won’t. It would only make them worry more.

  One older woman in the ward is a lecherous alcoholic and she frightens me but I’m worried even more for Babbie. What’s to keep this dirty creature from making passes at us? She made some gestures when we passed her tonight and I asked Babbie if we couldn’t do something about her. But Babbie just shrugged and said we could report her to the attendant but that it was better just to ignore her.

  Then something really weird and terrifying happened. We were sitting in one of the “recreation” rooms watching the others watch us. It was like monkeys watching monkeys and when I asked Babbie if she wouldn’t rather talk in my room, she said we weren’t allowed to have sex in our rooms but we could manage it in the storeroom tomorrow. I didn’t know what to say! She thought I was trying to seduce her and I was so stunned I couldn’t say anything. Later I tried to explain but she just started talking about herself as if I wasn’t even there.

  She said she’s thirteen and that she had been on drugs for two years. Her parents were divorced when she was ten and she was sent to live with her father who’s a contractor and who’s remarried. I guess things were all right for a while but she was jealous of her new mother’s children and felt like an outsider, a stranger. Then she began spending more and more time away from home, telling her stepmother that she was having trouble with school and had to go to the library, etc. The usual excuses, when actually she was going to school about only half the time. But she was still bringing home good grades so her parents didn’t seem too interested. Finall
y the school called because she was out so much, But she told her father that the school was so big and crowded, they didn’t know who was there and who wasn’t. I don’t know why her father believed that one, but I guess he did. It was probably too much trouble not to.

  Anyway what really was going on was that Babbie had been introduced to drugs by some 32 year old man she met in a matinee movie. She didn’t tell me the details but I guess he introduced her to drugs and to the life in general. A few months later he floated away and she found that it was very easy to meet other men. In fact at twelve she was already a BP.2 She told me all of this so quietly I felt like ripping my heart out. But even if I’d cried (which I didn’t), I don’t think she would have noticed, she was so out of it.

  After she had been on drugs for a about a year, her bright-eyed parents began to become suspicious. But even then they didn’t deal with her head-on. They just started asking a lot of questions and bugging her, so she robbed the next man she met at the movies and took a bus to L.A. A friend had told her that it was never any trouble for BP’s to get by and, according to Babbie, the friend was right. On her second day in L.A., she was wandering around and she met a “friend,” a beautifully dressed woman who took her to a big apartment on _____ Boulevard. When she got there, there were some girls her age in the living room and pills all over the place in candy dishes. Within a half an hour, she was completely stoned.

  Later, when she came back down, the woman said she could live there and go to school. She said she only had to work for her two hours a day — mostly in the afternoons. So the next day she registered in school as the woman’s niece and began living as a high class BP. The woman had four nieces staying with her while Babbie lived there. The chauffeur took them to school and picked them up and they never saw any of the money they made. Babbie said they just sat in the apartment like monkeys most of the time, never really talking and never going anywhere.

  It sounded so unbelievable that I tried to ask her questions, but she kept right on talking and she was so sad and distant that I think she was really telling the truth. Besides after what I’ve been through, I think I’d believe anything. Isn’t that sad, to be in a spot where everything is so unbelievable you’d believe anything? I think it’s sad, dear friend, I really and truly and desperately do.

  Anyway, after a few weeks Babbie ran away and hitchhiked to San Francisco. But in San Francisco, four guys beat her up and raped her. When she tried to panhandle some money to call home, no one would give her any. She said she would have crawled home and let them chain her in a closet but when I asked her why she hadn’t gone to the police or to a hospital, she just started yelling and spitting on the floor.

  Later I guess she finally reached her parents, but by the time they got to San Francisco she had wandered off with some guy who had set up his own lab to make LSD. They both got mixed up in some communal shit and eventually she landed here, just like me.

  Oh, Diary, I’m so grateful I have you because there is nothing, absolutely nothing to do in this animal cage and everyone is so crazy that I know I couldn’t exist without you.

  There is a woman somewhere down the hall who moans and groans and makes unearthly noises. Even putting my sick, broken hands over my ears and the pillow over my head doesn’t keep out the horrible gurgling sounds. Will I ever again in my whole life be able to sleep without having to keep my tongue between my teeth to stop the chattering and without having terror flood in upon my mind when I think of this place? It can’t be real! I’m still on my bad trip. I must be. I think they are going to bring bus-loads of school children by tomorrow to feed us peanuts through the bars.

  July 27

  Dear Diary,

  I truly must have lost my mind or at least control of it, for I have just tried to pray. I wanted to ask God to help me but I could utter only words, dark, useless words which fell on the floor beside me and rolled off into the corners and underneath the bed. I tried, I really tried to remember what I should say after, “Now I lay me down to sleep . . . ,” but they are only words, useless, artificial, heavy words which have no meaning and no powers. They are like the ravings of the idiotic spewing woman who is now part of my inmate family. Verbal rantings, useless, groping, unimportant, with no power and no glory. Sometimes I think death is the only way out of this room.

  July 29

  I was allowed the privilege of going to school today, and here school is a privilege. Nothing could be darker or bleaker or barer than just sitting with nothing to do and millions of endless hours in which to do it.

  I must have cried in my sleep because this morning my pillow was soggy and wet, and I have been completely exhausted. The junior high kids have two teachers and we have two. They both seem kind and most of the kids seem pretty controlled. I guess that’s because they’re afraid of being sent again to no-mans-land, a world of wandering and being alone.

  I guess people can adjust to anything, even to being locked up in an institution. Tonight when they locked the huge heavy door I didn’t even feel too terribly depressed or maybe I am just cried out.

  Babbie and I sat and talked for a while and I put up her hair, but all the joy and spontaneity has gone out of life. I am beginning to drag and merely exist as she does.

  The other girls on the ward talk and joke and watch TV and sneak into the bathrooms to smoke, but Babbie and I are just trying to keep ourselves together.

  Everybody smokes here and the halls are filled with fumes and gray circling smoke, there isn’t even anywhere for it to go. It seems as trapped and confused as the patients.

  The attendants all wear heavy clanking keys pinned to their aprons. The constant sound of them jangling together is a continual depressing reminder.

  July 30

  Tonight Babbie went down to the dayroom to watch TV and I am jealous. Will I wind up a hard butch angry at some child who has given her affection to an old woman with a package of cigarettes to share with her?

  This can’t be! It can’t be happening to me!

  July 31

  After school today we had group therapy in the Youth Center dayroom. It was very interesting listening to the kids. I was dying to ask how all the kids had felt when they first came here, but I didn’t dare open my mouth. Rosie was upset because she felt the kids were ignoring her and they all told her why she wasn’t easy to be with: because she tried to monopolize people and was always clinging to them and hanging onto them. At first she was angry and swore, but I think before it was over she understood herself a little better, at least she should have.

  Then they discussed how others were “feeding their own problems” which was interesting. Perhaps the time I am spending here will actually make me a more capable person.

  After therapy, Carter, who is the present president of the group (they vote a new one each six weeks), sat and talked with me. He told me to feel free to bring my thoughts and angers and fears out in the open to be examined. He told me that clumped inside they all seemed magnified and distorted out of true proportion. And he also said that when he first came here he had been scared so badly that for three days he literally lost his voice. He physically couldn’t talk! He was sent here basically because no one could deal with him. He had been in juvenile halls and reform schools and foster homes so many times he couldn’t count them, but the thought of being in a mental hospital really blew his mind.

  He told me we could get out of Group Two once we made some progress and proved we were under control. He’d been in Group One a couple of times, but always got sent back because of his temper. He also said that in two weeks the Group One kids were going on a bus trip to a cave in the mountains and on a tour through the cave. Oh, I want to go on that trip. I’ve got to get out of here! I’ve simply got to.

  August 1

  Today Mom and Dad came to visit me. They still believe me and Dad has been to see Jan and feels that he will soon be able to get her at least to take back the statement that I was trying to sell her drugs.

  I am
so grateful for group therapy. Maybe now I’ll get something out of this place instead of being broken by it.

  August 2

  I had a session with Doctor Miller and I think he believes me too! He seems delighted that I want to go into social work and feels there is a great need for people who understand what’s going on out there. He suggested that I ask some of the kids here about their backgrounds which maybe would give me more insight into people but he warned me not to be shocked at some of the things I should find out. I guess he thinks there are still things in this world that might amaze me. It’s a good thing he doesn’t know all of my background, at least I think he doesn’t? ? ?

  At first I felt I would be too shy to ask kids outright to tell me about themselves. But he said if I told the kids why I wanted to know he was sure they would want to help me. I’m still not sure I want to go prying into other people’s lives. I’m not at all sure I’d want to tell them about mine. I guess I would though-except maybe the very worst parts.

  I watched TV for a little while tonight, but there are only six kids on this ward and thirty older ladies, and since we have to vote on which programs we can see, naturally they win. I think I’d rather read or write anyway. I’m trying to get Babbie to read and maybe she will get a book from the Youth Center library tomorrow if I push her. It certainly will help take her mind off things, if she can concentrate. Her social worker is trying to get her into a foster home, but with her background it seems to be difficult, and apparently her parents don’t want her anymore. Isn’t that sad!