Excerpts from “Locked & Cranked” v2.0
If you haven’t yet read the explanation as to what on earth I’m doing with these (heavy on intro, laying the groundwork, without yet tipping a hand about which direction it’s headed or allowing a glimpse of Ivy’s diaries; these bits will be bridges, of sorts, between actual chapters), you might wanna go there & check it out, just so this makes sense! Otherwise…read on! And please feel free to leave feedback; I’m wide open to criticism and suggestion. But unless you’re in Group B, I’m not tellin’ you anything more than what you already see. Hee.
~~~~~~~~
Sure. Yeah. Let’s all of us sit and stare at Ivy. Nobody in this group knows her story yet. What’s she in for? Was she a junkie? Does she like little boys? Had she killed someone?
See, the best thing about these “rehab centres” in the private sector is that you get to meet a whole bunch of different characters. This isn’t like some State hospital, where your typical skid-rower usually ends up. No, this place… You could be in here for a lot of reasons. Maybe you’re just here to dry out because the kids keep playing that “Please, Daddy, Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas” song in October and you’ve finally gotten the hint. Or maybe you got lucky and some judge commuted your sentence, figuring two years in the klink was good enough…as long as you got yourself a Cinder-Block Suite here for the eight remaining years. You know, to address the little meth problem that led you to rob that bank in the first place.
Occasionally you’d even see a B- or a C-list celebrity here, and it was anyone’s guess why. Some of the ex-crackheads in the Wednesday afternoon “Face Your Demons” group always got a pool going. Speed, maybe? Or one of those infamous nervous breakdowns that are usually prefaced by a flurry of nonsensical blog entries on said celebrity’s website? One starts to wonder if it’s all an elaborate hoax so they’ll have a hideout while they recover from their ass lifts or implants or whatever the current trend is in plastic surgery.
Hell, I don’t know. I’ve been a little out of touch with celebrity trends while I’ve been here, as you might imagine.
It’s my second time at this particular group, but I haven’t yet spoken. I haven’t yet “told my truths” to these folks. A few of us haven’t, actually. We’ve been too busy meditating on what we’ve done wrong and making lists of who we need to ask for forgiveness and all that shit. Or maybe all of them have given up their truths, and I’m too new to know. Whatever. See, depending on what’s brought you to this facility, you could be having therapy with four or five different groups each week. Depending on how screwed up you are, you could have veritable therapy orgies with endless permutations of shrinks, “group facilitators”, and co-crazies. It’s like rehab’s a big game of musical chairs, but without the music.
Anyway, back to the present. I look around at this group of mostly unfamiliar co-crazies, each with a postcard-sized name tag stuck crookedly to their facility-issue blue shirts, just like mine. Lifting my eyes from my own messily written name tag and looking around at the circle of people in the room, I realize I don’t know anyone here, save for one. And that’s who’s being eyed by the others. Ivy. And since I already know her story, I lean back in my cheap plastic chair, ignoring the cracking sound it makes, and I yawn.
Fresh meat or not, this is going to be one long, dull hour.
~~~~~
Some of have roommates; some don’t. There are two kinds of rooms on our floor: one features solitary living space, presumably reserved for the nuttiest nuts who are prone to midnight outbursts of a nameless sort; the other is a much bigger room designed to house up to three crazies at a time. Sometimes the women who have to share, dorm-style, are fortunate enough to have only one roommate instead of two. The benefits are obvious. One fewer headcase, and loads of extra closet space.
My little joke about my particular housing situation is that I’m lucky; I live with Me, Myself and Ivy. But these people don’t seem to care much for levity, or jokes, or plays on words. They don’t care about wit. They’re not here to care. They’re all here for a million different reasons, yes, but their common denominator is what they’re not here to do: care.
~~~~~
Let’s tell this story E! True Hollywood style. You’ve got a “protagonist” named Ivy. You’ve got the loyal sidekick, Lily. You’ve got the man nobody could classify as the “good guy” or the “bad guy”, who’s got a name as slick as he is: Damon Rayne. You’ve got the guy who showed Ivy and Lil the face of darkness in the first place, who is somewhat ironically named Leumas. And then there’s Max, the man who’ll try just about anything to rescue Ivy the maiden fair from Damon, or herself, or the endless other bits of nastiness she encounters along the way.
Now you know the players.
Now you can put this story together piece by piece, as though you too were sitting in a room with us, our only respite from the tortures of daily therapy and “searching our inner selves” being The Story Of How Good Girl Ivy Got Here.
Now you can make your own decisions about whether or not one young woman’s descent from suburbia to hell is even remotely justifiable.
~~~~~
It’s obviously a story the entire group looks forward to. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Picture a dozen or so mentally defective people all gathering in the same stark room, dragging those cheap plastic elementary-school chairs into a circle, each metal leg screeching against the tile. If you weren’t already half-cocked coming into this room, you sure as hell would be on the way out. Either the décor would do it to you – fluorescent lights, puke-green cinderblock walls, orange chairs and a floor that might have been yellow about 35 years ago – or the stories you heard would.
~~~~~
It was down to a routine by now. Each little magic pill laid out, two by two, as if Noah’s Ark was a fucking pharmacy.
Four Xanax on the nightstand. Two for now, two for later – which usually meant no more than half an hour from now. Two Dilaudid. Same deal. Split them up to prolong the effects. At least a couple of Gravol to keep the morphine down – god knows there’d been enough nights spent facedown in the toilet because of this hobby. Toss in two or three sleeping pills, and the Cocktail For Coping was complete.
Yes, this is what it now took just to get through the night. The hope was that it’d all be slept off before work or school or anything else that might require “normal” behaviour the next day.
It didn’t always work out.
And besides, eventually, there was no work or school to worry about. Apparently you can only show up bloodshot and word-slurring so many times before you get the bum’s rush from most respectable places.
No matter.
This lifestyle was becoming a full-time job anyway.
~~~~~
When the toughest question of the day becomes, “Why are these morphine pills so fucking hard to grind into powder?”, a normal person would realize that the downward spiral had just sped up.
Our little Ivy had stopped being “normal” some ways back.
~~~~~
Everyone always noticed the same thing at the same time when the little kitchen timer “ding!”ed to signal the end of one of our sessions. It was only that “ding” that made the talking stop, and these days there was usually only one crazy doing the talking. These groups, lately, they’d become The Ivy Show. And when that timer went off, everyone always saw the Sleeve Tug that silence suddenly brought.
You know, that not-so-subtle effort to hide how many times you’ve wielded your Lady Bic wrong. The sheer number of times you couldn’t even get suicide right.
See, there are two main functions of talk therapy, and only one of them would be approved by most medical associations. The first is, of course, to air out your dirty laundry, get feedback from the shrink and/or your fellow group members, and hopefully have an epiphany somewhere along the way. Just by hearing your life’s issues spoken aloud, sometimes that can be enough to trigger a change. Enough for some people to come to new realizations and really turn it all around.
Whatever.
The second, and in my opinion the more important, use for this kind of “monkey on display” behaviour is that it gives everyone a chance to make the silence go away. Either you’re talking or someone else is, but whichever way it goes, there’s no chance to hear the voice inside your head. No time to meditate or mull over the enormously stupid things you’ve done. And because of that, when you’re talking or listening, you’re too involved and caught up in it all to do stupid, self-conscious things like the Sleeve Tug, which is a dead giveaway.
No pun intended.
So after the “ding” and the credits start to roll on The Ivy Show (“…until next time!…”), all everyone has to think about is Ivy. It’s a much more appealing option than thinking about oneself in this place. And so it’s not really a complete session these days until you hear someone in the group whispering to somebody or nobody or everybody.
“Look at Ivy. Like she thinks she can tell us her whole goddamn life story and still hide her botched cries for help.”
Bitching and bitching under their breath, even though they love every episode. It’s so much better than The Young And The Restless.
“She thinks she can sugar-coat everything,” the whispers say. “She thinks she can hide how crazy she really is.”
Sometimes, in that moment of silence after the credits have rolled, I can’t tell if those whispers are outside or inside.
~~~~~
Heather V. Swanson 
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