2. A Narrow Escape

It would be a stretch to describe my transformation from age 10 to age 13 as a loss of innocence, given what I’d already experienced in the first decade of life.

In 1968, I was still a young girl in love with animals, bicycling several miles on weekends to the stables where my 5th grade teacher Miss Flood kept her horses, to ride and help with grooming; two years later I was somebody else, a person wanting a place in the larger world outside of my family and grade school.

One year after that, at 13, I was a dope-smoking, shoplifting, cheap-apple-wine-drinking weekend runaway struggling to afford my pack-a-day cigarette habit. Was it puberty? The divorce and general family stress? The tumultuous 1970s?

In those days, in Suffolk County, NY, “incorrigible” children were easily scooped into the juvenile justice system (apparently since 1987, this is no longer an option). All you had to do was establish your youngster as a “PINS” (Persons In Need of Supervision), and whoosh, they were in the system. So at 13, at the end of 7th grade, the summer of 1971, I found myself in a kind of kiddie prison intake, complete with strip down, frisk, shower in front of guards, and surrender of all personal items. I put on the threadbare prison garb and was marched to my approximately 13 ft. by 10 ft. cell, where I was to reside (sometimes alone, sometimes with alternately creepy or cool roommates) for 4. 5 months; during this time, my custodial parent repeatedly refused, in multiple court hearings, to take me home. The point was to make me a ward of the court, and place me in an NY state institution for wayward girls until I reached my majority. But I didn’t know that right away.

As the youngest resident of the girls’ wing of Suffolk County Children’s Shelter, I found myself among girls ranging in age from 15 – 18 (at 18, girls were dealt with as adults) and with far more interesting problems. Armed robbery. Prostitution. Drugs. They extracted my pathetic story, laughed, and pressed me into service. Still a little slip of a girl, my body fit through the wall of square cubby holes separating the prison section from the personal effects room, where the girls had cigarettes and other paraphernalia stashed. I got my marching orders in the evening, during the quiet, card-playing time before bedtime, and had to strike like a snake to get the goods for them before morning–or suffer the consequences.

My parents sometimes came to visit me on weekends, my mother alone or my father with his fiancee. I hated it when they came, and I hated it when they didn’t. My father married his second wife that summer.

After the second or third court session, I realized that forces were at work to place me in an upstate NY school where I was meant to reside until I turned 18. At one point, the custodial parent and friend got a pass from the kiddie prison to drive me to one of these places. I remember that being a lovely day, and the school being set on a beautifully-landscaped lawn.

Shortly thereafter, one of the cool roommates, a Russian girl with a felony charge (robbery), and I plotted an escape. We worked out the daily routine, carefully noting the shift changes, and arranged for coinciding counseling sessions with a well-intentioned (but not very bright) social worker whose office faced the reception area by the front door. At the close of one of these sessions, we made a beeline through the reception area and out the front door, to the vast complex of low brick buildings and asphalt parking areas that was the Hauppauge County Center. This had been my only view of the external world for months, visible through the tiny, barred window of my cell, except for the occasional visit to the barbed wire fenced prison yard offering the same view. We ran past the county buildings, across a busy thoroughfare, through a pine forest, on and on into the Ronkonkoma suburban sprawl. At a strip mall plaza, we found a clothing store where we stole some civilian clothes, then hit a grocery store to steal some hot dogs for dinner.

I doubt the Suffolk County authorities put bloodhounds on our trail, but I do believe there was some interest in catching us, because they nabbed us about four days later, at a drug pad the Russian girl’s boyfriend knew about. That was where we stayed during our brief escape, the place where I witnessed a young pregnant woman vomit in a sink from morning sickness, then shoot heroin. By the time we were picked up, I was relieved to get back to the shelter.

Solitary confinement ensued, followed by more court hearings. At the final hearing, the well-intentioned social worker became an advocate for my release on the grounds that I’d already been incarcerated for too long, and that no spots were available for placement in any of the designated state institutions (though this wasn’t entirely true, as she knew). The custodial parent was forced to take me home. Two weeks later, anticipating the call, I answered the phone in my mother’s voice, saying, “No, thank you,” in response to the news of an opening at the school with the beautifully-landscaped lawn.

All of this took place before the diary incident.