A Soft Place to Land by Susan Rebecca White

Author:Susan Rebecca White [White, Susan Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781416558699
Amazon: B004E3XCXQ
Publisher: Touchstone Books
Published: 2010-04-05T23:00:00+00:00

Part Three

Chapter Ten

From Straight,

a Memoir, by Julia Rose Smith

CHAPTER ONE

The first thing you need to know about the Center is this: no one there looked like Winona Ryder or Angelina Jolie. Netted from the suburbs and rural outposts of Virginia, we were the dregs of American teens—a pasty, pimply assortment of losers—all swept into a series of low buildings with particleboard ceilings and oversized combination locks on all of the doors. This was not finishing school for bad girls. We did not inhabit a pseudo-campus with soft hills and architecturally significant buildings made of stone and mellowed brick. Nor did our daddies come and visit on the weekends, bringing us gifts of roast chicken and perfumed soaps.

No, we were on our own during our tenure at the Center, no visitors allowed, no contact with the outside world at all until we were deemed recovered, turned eighteen, or our parents’ money ran out. Whichever came first. No health insurance covered the Center. They were unaccredited. (Even Harvard, the brochure claimed, was unaccredited in its nascent years.)

I would like to believe that “Bobs Squared”—as founders Bob Mack and Bob Spurgeon jokingly called themselves—began the program with good intentions: to help out troubled kids, to channel teen anger into something other than drug use, to provide an alternative for when home life was no longer working. The Bobs were just so jolly, with their penchant for nicknames, their guayabera shirts. Surely they did not intend for the Center to become a sort of ground zero for sadomasochism cloaked in evangelical language. But if my theory is correct, if the Center was founded on good intentions, how did it become such an unholy place, disastrous to so many?

I only have to reflect back on my time there to know the answer, a trickle-down theory, if you will: The fundamentalist Christian viewpoint is one that embraces a strictly hierarchical universe, where those at the top have all the power. At the Center, the counselors were on top, and therefore were granted the power to do with us as they saw fit. And power corrupts, which in the case of the Center led to cruelty. And you better believe cruelty is contagious, especially when everyone—from the “Bobs” all the way down to the “Addicts”—is encouraged to participate in it. And most crucially, there was no one from the outside looking in. There was no one the Center had to answer to but God. And they were pretty sure they had him all figured out.

Everything that took place at the Center was shielded from the public eye. We could write as many letters as we wanted, just “to get things off our chests,” but no postman ever delivered them. We telephoned our parents once a week—whether we wanted to or not—but never without a “Buddy” sitting beside us, making sure we did not go off the script we were given to read from during the call. Yes, there were actual scripts, similar to the ones telemarketers read. I have a script sitting before me.

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