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This is the story of my first night in a particular psych ward. Once again, this is a failed escape attempt, but it did set the tone for my time on the sixth floor of the Civic Hospital.

The cops brought me in around two o'clock in the afternoon. I'll spare you the details of how I came to be there for the sake of privacy, but I was pretty happy to socialize with the people in this particular loony bin, as I'd been hitching around the east side of the country for the previous couple months and hadn't been in a big group for a while.

The main character in this story isn't me, it's my roommate-to-be, who we'll call Chunky. Chunky was brought up in a cult, he told me, and they had decided he was bipolar. We were getting on fine, trying to touch our toes with our butts against the wall, as instructed by a pretty native girl who had realized the Catholic Church was a cult a bit too loudly while in attendance at the aforementioned church. Having failed at this, I started to dance around and shadow box, being fairly stimulated. Chunky, too, began to shadow box.

Unfortunately, Chunky became very excited by this jumping around and punching the air, and in his excitement, he grabbed Terry, a deaf white guy who had been put in the psych ward for shoplifting from the hospital's gift shop. Chunky threw Terry against the wall pretty hard. The staff started rounding each other up, as they'd always use at least four people to subdue a resident in case of a Code White. Chunky knew he was gonna get a needle in the butt, and wasn't gonna have it. He ran into one of the bathrooms and locked the door.

Now, obviously the bathrooms in a psych ward can be opened from the outside pretty easily, but they still need a key to keep us pervy inmates from barging in on each other. The key was eventually found and the door was opened to find Chunky had climbed onto the sink and ripped the flourescent lighting fixture out of the ceiling, and had proceeded to climb into the ceiling. His plan, he later told me, was to make for the stairwell through the ceiling, jump out, and escape the hospital. Unfortunately, the concrete walls of that particular hospital extend through the visible ceiling, past all the electrical, and up to the concrete floor above. Chunky was stuck above the bathroom.

Chunky was tenacious. Just because he couldn't escape from the ceiling of the bathroom didn't mean he was going to come down and accept a high dose of some sedative. He ignored the coaxing of the staff and stayed up there until some fire department guys arrived with a ladder, climbed up, and hauled his ass down.

The unfortunate ending to this story is that he did, in the end, get stabbed in the ass with a needle that put him to sleep for a day or so. I ended up being roommates with Terry.

Now, one last story and we're gonna put this fire out and go to sleep.