The Last Stop

Where would you end up?

You'd either be in jail, in a hospital or dead, okay?

It's time to take your life seriously.

Get your feelings off.

You worthless piece of shit!

You're nobody to me!

I'll fucking slay you, you foreign motherfucker!

You piece of shit!

I'll tear your fucking limb off and beat you fucking with it!

Piece of shit asshole, I'll fucking kill you!

I don't give a fuck who you are, you're nobody!

You're stuck here for good, and I'll makes sure of that!

Fuck you!

My parents tell me, they're like,

"Well, next week we're going to look at boarding schools

and just packing up stuff for a week or whatever,

and we're just going to go look at two or three different schools."

So I was like, "Okay, cool."

Called my friends, I was like, "Oh, I'm going to be gone for a week.

I'll see you in like a week, da da da da."

Packed a bag, took all my music with me

because I ain't go anywhere without my music.

Left everything else behind, and I'm like,

"Well, I thought we were going to Massachusetts."

And my parents were like, "The plane is going to Maine."

I did not want to go up to Maine.

I'd already heard a little bit about it ahead of time,

and I knew it was going to be very strict, though I didn't know just how strict.

It used to be that we had bad kids who were locked away in reform schools,

and sick kids who were locked away in mental hospitals,

but in the past decade we've been seeking an alternative.

Instead of simply punishing unacceptable behavior,

we've been looking for ways to change that behavior.

This facility called Elan claims to be able to do that.

Why was I sent there?

That's heavy, man.

Why was I in Elan?

From a very young age

things went very badly for me.

I was pretty angry and confused about a lot of things,

and I was just constantly trying to distract myself.

So yeah, I was... whatever drugs I can get a hold of.

If that was what it was, or just not going to school.

Freshman year I'm trying to think, I put roaches in a girl's purse as a prank.

Pre-lunch, so she'd open them and whatever.

The school charged me with assault for that.

Well, I was always in trouble with the law

when I was eight or nine years old.

If you had something that I wanted I'd break in your house

when you weren't there and take it.

I got jumped by a couple juniors.

I beat the fuck out of one kid who started it,

and they charged me with assault and battery for that.

And then just a whole litany of bullshit like that pretty much.

It was all the same like instigating a fight or being involved in this.

Me, I could get laid,

smoke a lot of bud, enjoy myself,

have good music like the Gifts of the Grateful Dead.

I know for me it was pretty much about getting as fucked up as you could,

dancing as hard as you could for as long as you could and listening to music.

Or I could go home be in bed at 10 o'clock, get up at 6:00, go to school.

You know.

It was a no-brainer,

it was just when you start at 12 they get kind of a little pissy about it.

I started using drugs when I was 13.

If you consider marijuana a drug, I was 13.

I snorted coke when I was 14 at some house party I was at.

Prior to me going to Elan,

I was mostly smoking pot and eating acid, drinking occasionally.

Drinking was getting really dangerous and out of control.

About a month before I went to Elan,

I ran away off a home pass from a psych hospital

and stole a bunch of beer out of the back of a restaurant,

and they found me on a friend's driveway.

I...

While on lithium and Prozac I drank all this beer

and just basically passed out on their lawn. They thought I was dead.

When I found out about Peter's heroin use, I was very scared for him.

My mother came in my room, and my friend and I were shooting up.

I ratted him out because I was that scared.

I was going to buy Bud for my girlfriend,

and I was getting me Adderall for tests and shit.

I got pinched with that, it was like a quarter of weed and a couple of pills.

And I was on probation at the time,

so my mother called my probation officer,

and I woke up the next morning

and he was standing at the foot of my bed with a urine cup.

Possession, intent to distribute in a school zone.

Fucking horrible, at 15 caught like a class whatever and whenever,

possession intent to distribute charge. That's what ruined me.

It started when I was a kid at about eight when my dad died,

and I got slightly out of control with mom,

and couldn't handle me and all that I guess.

And I ended up in one home.

When they started sending me to group homes

and foster homes and things like that

is where I learned how to misbehave, and I learned about drugs.

Because I didn't know any of that stuff living with my mother and my stepfather.

I didn't run the streets, I didn't get in trouble, I wasn't truant,

any of that. It took me getting into the system to learn how to do those things.

Back then they really didn't have too many rules

about what you could and couldn't do to kids, so I was rather abusive.

I was in the Connecticut Junior Republic, it was a boy's home.

I was little, I was from Bridgeport, I didn't know them, they didn't want to know me.

They wanted to rape me, they wanted to beat the shit out of me.

And I escaped from there.

Then I got into some trouble with the law and I was sent to Long Lane.

So a lot of bruises are showing up on me. What do you think?

They didn't do anything. So you take matters in your own hand.

You just get them all, get them all at once.

I barricaded the room, I let them all go, and that was the end of that.

I was institutionalized from when I was 13 until I was 18.

There was a three-week break that I did come home,

but that's when I took that overdose of alcohol and Prozac.

After I had been in the hospital for an overdose

I tried to kill myself in the hospital.

I had broken a light bulb and actually cut my wrists, and then I had also run away.

I'd been hospitalized several times

and pretty much ran away from every place my parents put me in.

The Dead were always on tour, so there was always somewhere else to go.

The more I escaped from another place then I went to a worse place and a worse place.

Until I finally found myself in places

that were more brutal than I wanted to deal with, put it that way.

Adolescents are very shrewd.

If you go into a hospital and you don't want to stay there,

all you have to do is make an aggressive gesture at a nurse and you're kicked out.

All you have to do is light your bed on fire and you're kicked out.

So consequently, kids learn how to get out of treatment.

They were trying to find a school that would keep me

no matter how many times I ran away.

Finally in August when I was 12 they shipped me up to Elan

because Elan said that they kept runaways.

At Elan the first thing they learn is you're not going to get out of here.

If you burn the place down we'll sleep in a tent together.

No matter how many times you run away, we will go and get you.

Why? Because we have a commitment to you and to ourselves.

What I did was wrong, they did CAT scans on me and all that.

And so...

They're saying I know I went before a judge.

Instead of me going to Leahy in Worcester,

which is like the juvenile facility they have out here,

they offered up a plea for me to go to Elan instead.

I was 12. They said you're going away until you turn 18.

They were explaining that it would be

more intense than juvie pretty much.

I got on a plane, I went to Elan.

The court officers

took me to an airport where Dr. Davidson came down on the plane.

I had never had a driver's license,

so I had never paid attention to where we were going,

and all of a sudden I was in the middle of the woods in Maine.

I was like I'm in the fucking boondocks. This is nuts.

Some of the kids have mentioned that they or their peers were snatched.

What does that mean?

Yeah, I remember that night.

Well, it's usually in the morning you see.

When four residents

and generally big people or taller and heavier,

will show up at someone's house

and go into a new resident's bedroom and say,

"Hi Johnny, we're from Elan and we'd like you to come with us."

And they talk very nicely,

but they're big and they're strong and they're insistent and there are four of them.

And so it happens.

I was sleeping in my bed, and probably at about 4:00 AM

two guys came into my room, woke me up.

One of the guys said, "We're taking you to your new school."

My mom was telling me this was for the best.

I tried to run, they grabbed me,

and they threw me in a van and drove me up to Poland Springs, Maine.

So I get off the plane, and there's two kids,

just gigantic huge kids,

maybe a year older or maybe two years older than me, and two adults.

They're like, "We're taking you to the school."

They didn't really tell me too much about where I was going.

So all of a sudden we're going up this dusty dirt road.

I just remember thinking, "God, this place is out in the middle of nowhere."

And there's these scattered house I feel like I'm going to summer camp.

And after you're in Long Lane for six months anything looks better.

And a couple staff came with really pretty pictures of the lake and the property,

and it looked really nice.

And they were talking about the horseback riding

and canoeing and hiking and house trips.

I thought that I was going from complete lockup

to summer camp paradise.

I'm like, "Where's the swimming pool, the horses and the tennis courts?"

So now when I arrived in August of '73,

V-J Day as a matter of fact, I saw this white Victorian house sitting up on the hill.

And my parents brought me in,

and I was taken right in to the director's office, Joe Ricci.

We don't bullshit kids.

We don't tell kids that this is some kind of utopia,

that everything is going to work out for you.

And so they bring me into this trailer, and we were being told about the program.

Looked my mother straight dead in the eye and said, "This is the last stop on the bus."

Not one time did anybody say, even hinted at what I was about to go through.

If you don't send your son here he's going to be dead, you can count on it.

You have six minutes to say goodbye to your parents,

and if you say anything disrespectful to them I'm going to put you in a corner.

And I just looked at my dad and I just was shaking my head, I started crying.