Pender later, after closing, when the crew and the band were unwinding with a few drinks, swapping songs and shooting the bull. And with a few slugs of Jim Beam under his belt, Pender discovered, it was almost possible, if not to actually forget the stuff he was trying not to remember, then to pretend to forget, at least for a little while longer.
2
Although I’d figured out the game the first night, it wasn’t until the next morning that Dr. O explained to us what the stakes were. If you played it right, you got to go home (graduate, they called it) and finish your treatment in the bosom of your familial unit. If you played it wrong, you went from there into a residential program. And in case that sounds like bull sessions and pajama pizza parties to you, you should know that in rehab language,
residential
generally means “locked.”
On the second day’s hike, when we were finally allowed to talkto each other (the counselors sandwiched us in on the trail, two ahead and two behind), I learned that my revelations the night before had earned me some respect from my so-called peers. Brent was practically creaming. “Your own pad, your own gun, all da dope you cou’ smoke, no muhfuggin’ school. Muhfuh, dat musta been sweeeet!”
“Save your breath, wiggah,” I told him, having just caught a glimpse of the next rise in the trail. “You’re gonna need it.”
It wasn’t all work, though. After an especially hairy canyon descent, we broke for lunch at a secret swimming hole Gary claimed to have discovered—Lake Gary, he called it. Everybody changed into bathing suits, even the counselors, and we swam and splashed and frolicked around, happy as a bunch of otters for a couple hours.
The campfire group therapy that night was mostly about Dusty. Her deal was rough sex with older guys, we learned. It had started with her stepfather abusing her, of course, but by the time she was fifteen she had worked her way through a neighbor, two teachers, a minister, and the shrink who was supposed to be helping her with her problem in the first place.
Dr. O kept trying to get her to cop to having low self-esteem. He said that was why she liked it rough, and let the men use her. She made what I thought were a couple of very good arguments, such as that everything he was saying was based on the assumption that sex was bad. And even if that were true, she added, she was using the men as much as they were using her.
But after a while it appeared to me that she was starting to give in to him, to go along with all his bullshit. Dr. O would make some lame observation, and she would give him this wet-lipped, deer-eyed look, and say something like “You know, I never thought of it that way before.”
I was probably the only one who noticed what was going on. “You planning to let Dr. O screw you?” I asked her that night. We’d set up our tents with the back walls touching so we could talk to each other through them.
“If I have to in order to graduate,” she said. “I just can’t face being locked up again.”
They broke us up the third day. The girls hiked with Kara and Diane, the boys with Gary and Dr. O, and we had separate campfires that night. If anything, there was even more bullshit involved in the
boys only
therapy sessions, with everybody trying to outdo each other in acting tough.
Day four we marched in silence again, and instead of a campfire we had individual sessions, one of us at a time versus all four counselors.
Versus
is my word, of course, but it definitely describes my session. They started off by asking me to tell them in my own words why I was here, but without blaming anybody else. I said in that case it wouldn’t be my own words, would it? Things went downhill from there.
The fifth day was the hardest climb of all, up a steep mountain trail in the broiling sun. By the time we set up camp in a boulder-strewn meadow with a view of forever, even my blisters had blisters. My feet hurt so bad I finally
2
Although I’d figured out the game the first night, it wasn’t until the next morning that Dr. O explained to us what the stakes were. If you played it right, you got to go home (graduate, they called it) and finish your treatment in the bosom of your familial unit. If you played it wrong, you went from there into a residential program. And in case that sounds like bull sessions and pajama pizza parties to you, you should know that in rehab language,
residential
generally means “locked.”
On the second day’s hike, when we were finally allowed to talkto each other (the counselors sandwiched us in on the trail, two ahead and two behind), I learned that my revelations the night before had earned me some respect from my so-called peers. Brent was practically creaming. “Your own pad, your own gun, all da dope you cou’ smoke, no muhfuggin’ school. Muhfuh, dat musta been sweeeet!”
“Save your breath, wiggah,” I told him, having just caught a glimpse of the next rise in the trail. “You’re gonna need it.”
It wasn’t all work, though. After an especially hairy canyon descent, we broke for lunch at a secret swimming hole Gary claimed to have discovered—Lake Gary, he called it. Everybody changed into bathing suits, even the counselors, and we swam and splashed and frolicked around, happy as a bunch of otters for a couple hours.
The campfire group therapy that night was mostly about Dusty. Her deal was rough sex with older guys, we learned. It had started with her stepfather abusing her, of course, but by the time she was fifteen she had worked her way through a neighbor, two teachers, a minister, and the shrink who was supposed to be helping her with her problem in the first place.
Dr. O kept trying to get her to cop to having low self-esteem. He said that was why she liked it rough, and let the men use her. She made what I thought were a couple of very good arguments, such as that everything he was saying was based on the assumption that sex was bad. And even if that were true, she added, she was using the men as much as they were using her.
But after a while it appeared to me that she was starting to give in to him, to go along with all his bullshit. Dr. O would make some lame observation, and she would give him this wet-lipped, deer-eyed look, and say something like “You know, I never thought of it that way before.”
I was probably the only one who noticed what was going on. “You planning to let Dr. O screw you?” I asked her that night. We’d set up our tents with the back walls touching so we could talk to each other through them.
“If I have to in order to graduate,” she said. “I just can’t face being locked up again.”
They broke us up the third day. The girls hiked with Kara and Diane, the boys with Gary and Dr. O, and we had separate campfires that night. If anything, there was even more bullshit involved in the
boys only
therapy sessions, with everybody trying to outdo each other in acting tough.
Day four we marched in silence again, and instead of a campfire we had individual sessions, one of us at a time versus all four counselors.
Versus
is my word, of course, but it definitely describes my session. They started off by asking me to tell them in my own words why I was here, but without blaming anybody else. I said in that case it wouldn’t be my own words, would it? Things went downhill from there.
The fifth day was the hardest climb of all, up a steep mountain trail in the broiling sun. By the time we set up camp in a boulder-strewn meadow with a view of forever, even my blisters had blisters. My feet hurt so bad I finally
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