Its not like there weren’t some fun times. Aggravation was fun. Headache was fun. Daytime tv was lots of fun. At least back then it was. Looking back, 5C was the best place I was ever put in. There were some good times there. Even though it was illegal to put a fourteen year old on an adult locked unit. You had to be sixteen in an emergency. And they had to have made a suicide attempt at least. I wasn’t and I hadn’t. It was still the best treatment I got.
  Headache was a game we sometimes played. At first we played it a lot. You got to push the pop-o-matic bubble to see where your man would go. You tried to get your cone shaped man to land on top of, and thereby capture, another players man. It was fun. (The pop-o-matic bubble was the best.) Especially when there really was nothing else to do.
  As the days went on I was introduced to another game. One I had never played before. Aggravation. I ended up liking it better. No pop-o-matic bubble. But marbles with this one. And dice. It was also simpler to play. And quieter. We could play it later into the night. If we could be quiet ourselves, that is. And so it became more popular. Towards the end of my stay we didn’t play Headache at all anymore.
  Of course the card games were the most popular. You only needed two people to play, one really. You could always play solitaire.  Hearts, spades, gin, rummy, speed. We played them all. And cards were the quietest of all. You only had to shuffle, a whisper really compared to the dice and marbles of Aggravation that could be heard into the hall. And the pop-o-matic? That could be heard all the way to the nurses station if it was quiet.
  Then there was daytime tv. And by that I mean talk shows. And they were nothing like what they are today. Sally Jessie, Jenny Jones, Maury, Donahue, Joan Rivers. If you didn’t live through talk shows in their original form you really missed something. Geraldo had a talk show. Remember that? I do. I didn’t watch it in the psych ward though. We watched Sally Jessie and Jenny Jones,  Joan Rivers and sometimes Donahue. What daytime tv was meant to be. Sometimes I’d watch cartoons with Jeff. Back when they still had cartoons after school. They had them in the mornings before school too. Imagine.
  And school? The tutor only came over from the drug rehab for an hour and a half twice a week. That was it. She mostly taught me nothing. Everything she brought I had already been through. I think she was just there for show. Because, as a hospital, they had to show they were providing for my education. But no one expected much, I’m sure.
  Cards and games and daytime tv were a nice distraction from why we were there and how we all got there. They allowed us to talk and gossip and get to know each other. Learn each others stories. What else was there to do. Sometimes I would draw and color them in. The designs, all line drawings I still do today. They filled the long days and empty nights when some of us had no visitors.  We would drink hot chocolate (or coffee or sanka for the others, I stuck to hot chocolate) and eat individual ice cream cups from the freezer while playing and talking and smoking cigarette and after cigarette. I must have been smoking a pack a day while I was in there. Not that much compared to others but still a considerable amount compared to what I had been smoking.