Bay Camp Juvenile Detention

Gettin Weird Chapter 3.

Bay Camp Juvenile Detention Facility in Bayview Washington. Yep. Joey and I gave them five-and-a-half months out of a nine-month sentence; we got three and a half months off for ‘good behavior’ even though, swear to god, I never behaved ‘good’ once. Well, except for my cutting back on swearing—if you swore at Bay Camp you got demerits and lost privileges—not a good thing in a place where there weren’t all that many privileges to start with.

The classes at Bay Camp were actually very good for me; I’d never had a drop of booze in my whole boring life before I went there. Incarceration can be a wonderful thing.

I learned to love getting’ drunk at Bay Camp, not in the Alcohol and Drug Awareness classes of course, but in an odd way, on account of them. Like I said, before I got sent there, I’d never drank alcohol at all. The classes were meant to teach us that drinking was bad; that we shouldn’t do it and that if we did our lives would be miserable and we’d be failures and stuff. In the first five minutes of the very first class I raised my hand and the instructor, a big, thick-necked jock ‘counselor’ named Mr. Anderson called on me.

I said, “I don’t do drugs or alcohol.”

Some of the other guys in the class snickered but Mr. Anderson gave them a killer stare that shut them up right away, which I thought was pretty cool.

“That’s good Joey” he said to me.

 “Actually, he’s Joey,” I answered pointing at my brother seated next to me, “I’m Alan.”

Mr. Anderson said, “Oh, sorry, anyway, that’s good Alan.”

I asked, “If I don’t drink or do drugs, why do I need this class?”

He looked at me with the same expression he had given the guys who’d laughed a few moments before, “Everybody at Bay Camp takes this class Alan; it’s a prevention program, to make sure you never drink or take drugs.”

Before I knew I was gonna say it, I asked, “Never? What about when you’re 21 and it’s legal?”

Anderson said, “Well, okay maybe not ‘never’, but not when you’re under 21.”

And suddenly the nasty little authority-hating, part of myself blurted out, “So when you’re 20 years and 364 days old, you’re too young to drink. But the next day, even two seconds after 11:59 pm and 59 seconds of your 20^th year, when you turn 21 you are old enough?”

“That’s the law,” Anderson said.

That shut me up. The whole reason we were at Bay Camp was because Joey and I, following my brilliant plan, had broken the law, quite a few of them actually. Whether a law makes any sense or not, even whether it’s fair, doesn’t matter, if you get on the wrong side of it, you end up at a place like Bay Camp.

So, the Alcohol and Drug Classes weren’t that bad, really, except for being held so early in the morning and the fact that they never showed anything about why anybody would drink. They gave us lots of information about why you shouldn’t—all kinds of pictures of messed up livers, and lectures about brain damage and ‘long term health consequences’ which was pretty irrelevant to me—‘long term health consequences’? Come on man, at 17 who the hell cares about ‘long term’ anything? Not many guys I know worry too much about multi-vitamins or sunscreen.

And the truth is that later on that very first day of that very first class I had my first ever drink of booze—Southern Comfort mixed with Sprite that some of the guys in the class had smuggled in and stashed in our cabin.

“You never drank before?” a kid named Alphonso asked me, just before ‘lights out’ that night.

“Nope” I answered.

“You from some kind of crazy-assed religious family or something?”

Joey stood-up, pissed-off, “There’s nothing wrong with our family!”

Alphonso was cool, though, “That’s aw’ight; I never said there was. I just don’t get how a kid could never have drank by the time he’s . . .what are you . . .” he looked at me more closely, “16?”

“Seventeen,” I answered.

“It’s cool,” Alphonso said. 

Joey, still glaring said, “It’s against the rules to drink.”

Alphonso smiled again and a couple of other guys gathered around us, maybe drawn by Joey’s hostility, and hoping to see a fight.

Alphonso looked at me. He knew that going after Joey meant dealing with me too. Joey may be an idiot, okay he is an idiot, but as my little brother he’s, my idiot.

Alphonso looked at Joey, “Its cool little bro—you don’t wanna drink, you wanna obey all the rules that’s on you. I tell you something, though,” he looked back at me, “time gonna go a lot faster for you in here if you help it go faster.”

I said, “Oh yeah?”

“For sure,” Alphonso answered.

He offered me the bottle.

I flashed for a few seconds on ugly livers and damaged brains and long-term health consequences and then I laughed “What the hell!”

Alphonso and the other guys laughed too, everyone but Joey.

I grabbed the bottle, lifted it to my lips and took my first taste of alcohol—a big gulp.

Thus the weirdness began . . . Barking at the moon and escaping reality—no need for vampire or werewolf genes if you have Mr. Jack Daniels or Senor Jose Cuervo.

I think that my time at Bay Camp did go a lot faster than Joey’s did. Getting drunk most nights with the other guys was a lot more fun than studying all the schoolwork they kept giving us every day. Joey obeyed every rule, all the time. Not every rule, I guess since he never turned us in for drinking. But he never tried it himself and he always kept his distance. Joey decided to get everything he could out of doing his time and then get out and start over again. As his older brother, I’d gotten him into trouble in the first place, so I did everything I could to protect and help him in Bay Camp. After all, we were in friggin’ jail! A kid’s jail yeah, but it was still jail: fences all around us, miles and miles of woods in every direction and tons of rules and regulations. We had no freedom except that which we could steal late at night when the ‘counselors’ (more like prison guards) were all in their own cabins drinking. I’m not exaggerating. More than once Anderson, our instructor, came to our 8 a.m. Alcohol and Drug Awareness class, sweating and stinking of booze and obviously hung-over. Truthfully, most of us in the room were hung-over. At Bay Camp I saw first-hand how thin the line between the guards and us ‘bad guys’ was. Sometimes there was no line at all. Whatever we were supposed to be learning there, what I learned was just another example of how much phony bull there is in the world.

From my very first taste of alcohol, I liked it. I didn’t love the taste, although I didn’t mind it—but drinking hard stuff and getting’ drunk was amazing. That buzz you get when it first starts to take hold of you, everything in the world seeming funny, the hot feeling in your gut that covers you like a warm blanket.

Of course, none of the drug alcohol classes mentioned those fun parts of drinking. None of the lectures ever said, “Lots of times people drink alcohol to escape some crazy situation they’re in, like being abandoned by their dad or being in friggin’ jail! People get drunk to escape their lives when they can’t escape in any other way.”

Almost any night we drank, something happened, something fun or funny or at least interesting. And thanks to the loose security at Bay Camp, we drank most every night; guys were always able to sneak in plenty of booze. Even the bad moments, like guys fighting never lasted very long because by the time anybody started to scuffle, we were all so wasted that we could barely stand up.