@onlyleslie504

Frontal Lobotomy

I wish I could remember his name. We were kids together- kind of.

I met him at one of the institutions I was sent to when I was a child. This one was in Texas. Victoria Texas. My mother had worked hard to get me Exceptional Children’s Act funding so that the Federal government could subsidize me and step up the quality of my incarceration a notch or two. I was supposed to be very smart.

This was a private institution and there was a lot of land around it and horses you couldn’t ride. Maybe somebody else could- I know the people who watched us did.
 
The building I lived in had a big area in front of it- like a quad and we would walk across it to go to meals. If you weren’t in trouble you could sit with the boys during meals and socialize. I don’t know where they stayed.
 

I guess it was a kind of boarding school for messed up kids- most of them with money and then there were people like me, who were wards of the State. I came from Louisiana.

This kid was a friend of mine and I really liked him. He was smart and he was really angry, like me. I was proud of him, because when things weren’t right- and they weren’t- he would get pissed off and say something. He would get in trouble, but he didn’t care. Neither did I.
 

I was always getting sent to solitary confinement, and having extra work, and being sent outside to pick up five hundred cigarette butts and sometimes they would give me piles of medication- thorazine, and valium, and god knows what else.

I hated being drugged, but took a Zen attitude to everything I was subjected to. I wasn’t going to give them the pleasure of knowing they’d gotten to me, so what ever it was, I would pretend there was nothing in the world I would rather do and oftentimes I would thank them for the punishments, which they found very baffling.

I want to say his name was Robert, but I’m not sure. I would go for long stretches where I didn’t get to go to meals and I was always exited when I was allowed. If he was free at the same time we would sit together and talk. I wrote poems about the shitty food:

Greasy food
Salty food
All the time
Every day
Over cooked
Over salted
Made me undernourished
I shoulda sued ‘em
But how could I prove
The diet I was placed upon
Affected my mind?

And we theorized about what kind of horrible crap they were putting in the pot because they knew we had to eat it. Huge piles of Macaroni and Cheese glumping into this mass of oily orange/ yellow- like an idea of something that could be good, but wasn’t.
My rebellious twelve year old spirit would make up poems like this and recite them until I’d pissed someone off and I’d get dragged away- Other’s would applaud. I had a reputation for being hard core and pretty wild.

Everyone else was much older than me. They were between the ages of fifteen and seventeen- considered ‘adolescents”. I was still technically a “Child” although no one could really figure out where to put me. I didn’t fit with children, but I wasn’t really old enough to be where I was. The courts had decided to place me in a facility for older kids thinking they would have a better shot of containing me. -

Robert and I felt that we were at war. Our jailors were the enemy, society was the enemy. Our parents were absolutely the enemy. More so for him than me- his parents actually paid full price to put him there. I couldn’t believe it. He had “Anger management issues”  and his wealthy parents sent him off to get it ‘Fixed”.

Oh, they fixed him all right. I hadn’t seen him for a while- I think I had broken out and then gotten caught and put into solitary confinement on my return, but I was free to go to lunch at last. Every body warned me that he’d been gone for a while and came back different.

He was all messed up.

They’d been giving him a series of shock treatments. He was happy to see me, but had a hard time putting his words together- I could see it in his eyes though- he was still there. It was so wrong that it made me crazy. I wanted to destroy the whole world. How could people do this to human beings? I lost it- it seemed like there was no one in the world to protect us from our families and the ‘professionals” they trusted.
 

“There was nothing wrong with him! Are you people insane?” I shouted -. I don’t remember what my punishment was, but I know they stepped up the Thorazine. I had gotten passed the affects of drugs by that time. It was all relative. Everything was crazy, everyone was crazy, and no one could be trusted.

After his series of shock treatments was over, he slowly got back to normal. I have to tell you, this was a smart, good-looking, 16 year old boy whose parents should have been really proud of him. It makes me cry, even now after all of the years that have passed to think about some of the things that have been done to children with no protection.

Eventually, he started mouthing off again- having “Episodes” where he displayed “uncontrollable anger” I was told, and he was taken away. I thought he’d been sent somewhere else. I had my own nightmares to deal with. We had a lesbian counselor who was molesting girls and several other unpleasant daily traumas to survive. I just thought my friend had gone away. Maybe he was free.


Then one day I was at lunch and I saw a horrible sight. My friend’s body was going through the line at lunch, with an attendant, but his face was all wrong. His spirit was gone. He was in pajamas with a new, red scar. They had given him a frontal Lobotomy. It was over. He was gone.

I didn’t say a word. I felt a cold, clear stillness in my heart. This was a casualty of war. A brave soldier who had fallen in defense of freedom. I wanted to stand for him out of respect, but I didn’t. I ate my food and went back to my dorm and quietly planned my next escape. When I broke out that next time I made sure I didn’t get caught.

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©Leslie Blackshear Smith