Another excerpt from a work in progress (ignore spelling and grammar errors)

P

oplar Springs Hospital was divided into three main sections.  The adult acute unit, where the seriously fucked up people eighteen years and older went, the children’s acute unit, where kids with a varying degree of problems stayed for thirty days or less, and the residential unit, where teenagers stayed for longer than thirty days.

When I first started, Poplar Springs was desperate to make a name for itself, so it took anyone with insurance.  That meant the residential unit was often about eighty percent gang kids who knew the system well enough to get their stay moved from detention, where you were likely to get a serious ass invasion, to Poplar Spring where ass invasions were down almost thirty percent.  All a kid had to do was announce that they felt depressed and suicidal, and bam!  They were in Poplar Springs.  It wasn’t the greatest place to spend your summer vacation, but it sure as hell beat juvie hall.

The downside to this business model is that some seriously crazy teens are mixed in with some seriously violent teens.  Teenagers are annoying at the best of times, but homicidal teenagers who hear voices telling them to eat the people around them are a whole different level of annoying.  And I was a red haired skinny fuck who used big words, told jokes no one understood, and managed to eat lunch in a sarcastic manner.  Until I proved myself, I was a clown in stupid t-shirts.  I had seen enough prison movies to know that until I offed someone with a shiv made from molded butter, or ate my own pubic hair in the cafeteria,  I was anyone’s b*tch.

The way I actually earned my stripes took everyone by surprise, especially me.

I was working on the boy’s residential unit, minding my own business doing rounds (you carry a clipboard and put a mark next to a patient’s name when you have observed them present and account for.  Usually you only have to pretend to do this every thirty minutes, but some of the more difficult patients require you to pretend to do it every fifteen minutes).  I’d like to say my spidie-sense started tingling, or that I noticed a subtle change in my environment or the force, or something.  But I’m trying to be honest here.  I had no idea that four guys were following me, one behind, one in front, and one on each side.  I also didn’t notice that I was walking from the rec room to a hallway where no one had a direct line of sight. But suddenly I was all alone.  And then the little bastards jumped me.

I’d taken karate as a kid, judo in college, and a little aikido here and there.  But what made me particularly dangerous that evening was that they scared the shit out of me.  The biggest guy, about sixteen and bigger than I was, grabbed me from behind in a bear hug.  The smallest kid, maybe ten or eleven, grabbed one of my legs as the two remaining teens converged on me.  Someone said, “Get his key, f*ck him up!”  As I started to lose my balance I remembered what they had said in training.  Never let them get you down on the floor or they’ll seriously mess you up.  The week before I was hired they had a nice little riot that involved calling the police in to end it.  One of the mental health workers had been kicked in the face while he was down by a guy wearing steel-toed boots (why not let the patients carry swords and explosives while you’re at it?).  Spread his nose all over his face.  Not a pretty sight.

So there I was losing my balance with four crazy people on top of me.  And I have no memory of what happened next.  If I try really hard I get a blur of panic and flailing arms, and I think I might actually have done a forward roll at some point.  But all I have to go on is the end of the fight and what extremely unreliable witnesses told me (psychiatric patients and a nurse only half watching a video screen as I came partially into view).  It seems I elbowed the big guy in the temple as hard as I could, and he collapse like someone had suddenly pulled out his batteries.  The smallest kid I kicked across the room hard enough for him to crack the drywall on the other side of the hallway.  There was a punch to some kid’s neck and a kick that sent someone’s testicles into orbit, and it was done.  I was standing in a slight crouch, with teenagers writhing around on the floor around me, like some kung fu explosion.

I heard a “Code Green, boy’s residential unit!” announced over the intercom, and distantly realized that was where I was.  “Code Green” meant that any available staff needed to go to the specified unit for some head-busting.  I found out later that they called the code not only because I was attacked, but also because they were worried that the result might set off a larger riot.  It had happened before.  Crazy people and teenagers sometimes reacted to blood like sharks and movie critics.

They quickly separated me from the rest of the patients, partly to get my story of what happened, and partly to calm the situation down.  They knew I was full of adrenalin, and I guess they didn’t want me doing anything to make the situation more of a hassle.  The head Mental Health Work sat me down and looked me right in the eye.  He was an enormous black guy (See?  Always enormous) with a scar on the side of his head and the ability to silence a room just by entering it.  I had once seen him pick up a guy by the scruff of the neck and carry him to the “Time Out” room.  His hand went all the way around the guy’s neck.  I was worried I might get killed, or worse, fired.  But instead he high-fived me.

“Good job!  You really f*cked them up.  Especially Rabbit Testicles (I’m not going to use his real name due to various legal and moral restrictions.  But he was the guy I elbowed).  I know he deserved it.  He’s a real f*cknut whackjob.”

He really was, when you get right down to it.  Everyone knew I had kicked the shit out of some of the local badasses, even though Rabbit Testicles told everyone that he got that bruised head from playing football.  I kept his secret, but made sure to point out to him that he would lose some serious street cred if word got out that he got his butt handed to him by Opie the Clown.  He got the point. Sometimes, if you applied the right pressure, some of those little sh*t heads could be downright reasonable.