October 4th, 1964: The Music Room

Saturday, Oct. 06, 2001 - 10:21 p.m.

After dinner, the girls were allowed to spend time in "The Music Room" until "Lights Out."

In "The Music Room" was an old, upright piano, festooned with graffitti, most of it obscene, and an old record-player. I seem to remember it as a Victrola or a Gramophone, but it was probably a late 1940s vintage "record player."

Everyone got to take turns selecting music to play: after a brief and mostly uninspiring time listening to the girls who played their "axes" so solo performances of songs better performed by Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan, records began circulating in turn: The Beatles, Dionne Warwick, Barbara Streisand (a big favorite), the Supremes. Buffy Sainte Marie and Dave von Ronk were clearly ahead of the rest in terms of popularity, but the biggest favorite were a folk duo named Neil and Martin. One of their songs is played repeatedly, insistantly, with most of the girls singing along:

"In a whorehouse down by the water, in a whorehouse down by the water. You got that SWEEEEEEEET Jelly Rooooolllllllll in a whorehouse down by the water."

Throcky had never thought much of singalongs, but these girls made it seem cool, somehow.

Someone turned out the lights, and, as the music played, girls got up and danced, mostly whirling around by themselves. Most of them would take off their skirts at some point. With the lit cigarettes dancing about in the dark room, Miss Throckmorton gazed at the twirling and shifting points of light and wondered just where she was. How she got here seemed less important now than wondering who everyone was and how THEY got here, and why the "culture" seemed so different than back home. Some of these girls were beatniks. Maybe she did belong.

Skirts......another thing. You had to wear a dress or a skirt. On Sundays, one day a week, you could wear what the staff called "Chinos" or "Dungarees". NB: We weren't exactly in Montana. Where did they come up with these words?

Miss Throckmorton felt a little more at home: She liked the music. She lliked the swirling glow of the cigarettes. She liked the throbbing, thumping intensity.

After a couple of hours of vigourous dancing, the girls relaxed and Miss Throckmorton realized her purpose.

"Listen: You: the New One. So when we have someone new, it's a perfect time to split. When the night shift comes on, you need to start to scream. Scream a lot. Tell them you're flipping out. Then there's this aide named Pearl..."

(Query: Was it Pearl, Ruby, Beryl? All of the aides seemed to be named after precious or semi-precious stones.)

"So when Pearl comes on....ok...she looks like a whore. She hardly weighs anything. You need to knock her down, and she'll let go of her keys. Then they'll all come running to look at her and to make sure that you get in restaints, and then we can split. It's the golden opportunity."

They kept on rehearsing the plan. Miss Throckmorton would be a heroine. She would keep the staff at bay. Having knocked down Pearl, she would be "one of them." The girls could split, and she would be remembered in their orisons.

I never stopped to think about the wisdom of the plan. Nor did I think about what "restaints" might mean. I just thought that I had a place; I had a purpose; I could be of use.

And it worked. Pearl was suprisingly easy to knock down. The keys fell from her hands. I bellowed "You're a WHORE!" at here and started to scream "I"m FLIPPING OUT! FUCK YOU!" with great hysteria, heightened by the sight, from the corners of my eye, or four or five girls leaving the unit then....at night. All the staff members swooped in and carried me into one of the seclusion rooms. Pearl was not injured, fortunately.

And the girls who split?

Well, eventually they came back. It always worked out that way. Or ALMOST always. They would go into the city and wander around for a while and then realize that there was no place to go......no place safe, at least, and return to the Adolescent Pavilion.

And who split? What were their names? What became of them? How did they fare?

They returned, as I said. Returned to punishement, confinements, and other measures, some quite Draconian.

One of them is now a fairly well-known artist. One became a quite well-known singer. One is a movie-star/broadway star---a fading star, but her daughter is well known for her work in film and television. Her father is very famous.

But it would take me decades to learn that. Teenaged Girls interrupted. Many of them probably just had too much talent and too much impatience to handle high school. So they got slapped with thorazine and indefinite sentences at the Adolescent Pavilion.

On the night of October 4th, 1964, Miss Throckmorton lay on a bare canvas matress (sheets could be implements for suicide) in a seclusion room, looking at the tiles, and hoping that the girls who had split would be gone forever. She did not know when or how or if she ever would get beyond the door herself, but she felt a sense of power and popularity for, perhaps, the first time in her life. She had been the means, the vehicle, for unlossing keys from a staff member's hand. She had something. What it was she did not know, but she could FIGHT BACK.

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