Baked

Baked

As I sat in the dingy grey office, the round, blond-haired man in his early forties who sat across the desk and introduced himself as “Glenn” began asking a series of strange questions about the past few weeks. “How have you been sleeping?” “Have these patterns of thought been occurring for very long?” “Are you on any drugs?” “Yes marijuana is a drug” “Are you SURE you haven’t been taking any OTHER drugs?” I can’t remember the specifics of the questions beyond that because I had figured out where I recognized Glenn from, and knowing who he really was I couldn’t wait to discuss the time he spent as the guitarist of Assück, the influential grindcore band formed in the late 1980’s in St. Petersburg, Florida. I recognized him from a grainy youtube footage of one of their early performances in 1991. “Glenn” disputed my claim, insisting that he’d never played in a band in his life. I suppose he had to do so because it is probably frowned upon to talk about your personal life in his profession, whatever that may be. Before I even had a chance to bring up their debut album Anticapital, I found myself hastily signing a handful of documents and questioning the intent of the two refrigerator-sized men that had entered the office and directed me to follow them.

We walked from the office down a short hallway to a dark room with concrete walls reminiscent of a prison cell, empty except for a drain on the floor and a sink mounted to the wall. The large man in grey scrubs asked me if I had anything in my pockets. I handed over my phone, wallet and chapstick and the other big man in black scrubs directed me to strip down to my underwear. Something was terribly wrong here. I hadn’t been arrested. I hadn’t broken any laws, but suddenly I’m being searched and treated like a prisoner? I couldn’t make sense of how I’d ended up in this place. Had the secret messages I’d been receiving online from a mysterious source all been a set up? Was I being taken as part of a crackdown on radicals? Were labor organizers being sent to a secret CIA brainwashing facility for re-education? Or something worse? My other suspicion, a much more terrifying suspicion that later on I’d be experiencing a painful, violent transformation intensified. I wished I had looked up the moon phase for that night. My demands to know what they intended to do with me were only met with orders to comply or be made to comply.

The two men in scrubs could sense that something was off. They could see in my eyes that I was on to them, and they approached, ready to subdue me when I attempted my escape. I noticed that the man in the grey had a pen in his shirt pocket. This was my chance. I mentally prepared myself to lunge, go for the pen and stab him with it somewhere that would make him and his partner think twice about any attempt to wrestle me to the floor. His neck was nice and meaty. I’d aim for that. I backed up as they advanced, a caged animal, terrified and confused, backed into a corner and ready to strike. Just as I was about to make my move, the door opened and Glenn stepped in, hands up, reassuring me that these men were not here to hurt me or lock me up, but instead just to make sure I didn’t have any weapons or drugs. Since I knew and trusted Glenn implicitly and there was no chance the ex-guitarist of an anarchist metal band could possibly be working for a covert, far-right prison complex, I was able to calm down enough to allow them to search. Once they were satisfied that I wasn’t hiding any weapons or drugs I was allowed to get dressed in the ripped grey skinny jeans and red Bad Religion t-shirt that featured a pair of kissing nuns and brown leather flip flops that I came in with. Why was I in flip flops? For 99% of my life it was Vans or nothing, but that was the least of my worries. My belt, phone, wallet and chapstick were confiscated.

The men in scrubs led me down the hall to an open room with faded white walls, a reception desk at one end with a few women dressed in scrubs answering phones and entering data in computers behind it and a hallway with several doors beyond it. At the other end stood a row of curved, modular plastic benches and a square cafeteria table with chairs. Around the table and benches, a group of people sat, most of them staring listlessly off into space while a few others milled around with eyes wide and their faces twisted in ways that suggested madness brought about by months of psychological torture techniques you might find employed in an offshore black site prison.

I took stock of the situation and concluded that it was indeed bad. I sat in the empty seat at the table. No one spoke. We all just sat around glancing warily at one another, them suspicious of the new guy and me, wondering who was “supposed” to be here and who might have been planted by the people behind the scenes as a means of covertly extracting information from unwary detainees. A tall, wiry young orderly stood on our side of the reception desk, keeping an eye on us. I stood up, walked over to him and asked “If I try to leave this place, you’re the one who’s supposed to stop me?” He turned to me, unphased, and replied “It’s not gonna go like you think it will” and turned his attention back to the man with stringy grey hair and an unsettling look, sitting at the table in a hospital gown, who had not broken eye contact since I entered the room.

After an hour or so of sitting and staring, night began to fall and my nervous energy and racing thoughts got the better of me. I began to read and obsessively reread the cryptic poster on the wall above the non-working pay phone next to the reception desk informing me of my “rights” in ambiguous language not-at-all meant to obfuscate any clear comprehension of what those “rights” were.

“If you request discharge your doctor will be notified and you will be discharged within 24 hours from a designated community facility and within three working days from a state hospital unless you withdraw your request or you meet the criteria for involuntary placement… you have the right to receive the least restrictive available appropriate treatment in this facility the criteria procedures and required staff training used by this facility for restraints seclusion isolation emergency treatment orders close levels of supervision or physical management are available for your review such interventions may never be used for punishment convenience of staff or to compensate for inadequate staff” Great. I’ll do that.

“I’m requesting discharge” I said, firmly informing the nurses at the desk of my intention to leave as soon as possible. “I don’t want to be here, and the sign says I’ll be discharged within 24 hours unless I withdraw my request, so I’d like to request that as soon as possible and get out of this place. You see, I just can’t be here. I’m supposed to be at the reunion for my old band.”

“It does not work like that. Please go and have a seat” the nurse countered in the robotic tone of a fast food worker who’s just heard “I’d like to speak to your manager” for the ninth time this month. I was bordering on a panic, pacing back and forth, trying to get a call to connect on the broken pay phone, reading and rereading my rights, demanding answers, thinking about all the bizarre cryptic messages I’d received on my phone in the days leading up to this, trying to piece together all the distorted bits of data swirling around my head like a tornado of information, to figure out what this organization really was, who these people worked for and where their loyalties lay. I could feel my body trembling and the thoughts kept racing and the staff, weary of my questioning, called for the two large men in scrubs to return. They walked up to me calmly, but with an air of violence, and directed me to back away from the nurse station and follow them down the hall. I complied. We stopped at a solid wood door, which they unlocked and opened, revealing a room the size of a small cell.

“Go inside and try to get some sleep.”

“I don’t feel like sleeping.”

The man in black strubs gestured to a mattress on top of a wooden box. On the sides of the box, leather straps and buckles. “Either you go in and get some sleep or we’ll have to use the restraints.” The thought of being strapped to a bed being too much to bare, I reluctantly sat down as the door was closed and locked from the outside. Above my head, a single beam of moonlight shone through a tiny, rectangular skylight. The moonlight, heavy door and wrist restraints had confirmed my worst fears. I eventually laid down and drifted off to sleep, knowing that at midnight I my insides would start to swell, my hands and feet would begin to contort until they became grotesque distortions of human limbs, I would writhe and scream with agony while my skin began to stretch and then tear and peel off, hair teeth and nails started to sprout and I became the deranged, murderous beast I was always cursed by and destined to become.

Either that, or I would wake up in the morning totally fine - other than the minor inconvenience of being fully in the grip of insanity, due to the unfortunate circumstance of having completely lost my mind.

In the morning I awoke to the sun beaming on my face through the skylight. I looked down at my normal hands, and then to my normal human feet. My nun t-shirt was still firmly in place and my jeans were still on, ripped but otherwise intact.

Fuck.