“Yup, it looks like we got a group of Satanists here,” the cop said, as she shined her Mag light on our altars and bookshelves.

Maybe it was from the drugs, but the cop that got in my face looked like a giant.

“Are you high?” he said as he pierced my blasted eyes with his ego-bashing flashlight.

Silly me, I figured he and his piggy friends were figments of my imagination-my deepest fears personified-since I was higher than hell on psychotropics.

“You’re not real.” I laughed.

After that, all I remember is flailing and screaming as the biggest male cop carried me over his shoulder down the stairs and into the cop car. I blacked out until we arrived at the hospital. I was in a room, naked, with a female nurse that was violently putting on latex gloves as she gritted her teeth with a maniacal grin. Blood began to rush down the wall behind her, reminding me of the Shining. I got the impression that she was going to strip search me. I don’t know for sure if she ever did. I was utterly mortified. I blacked out again and woke up restrained to a hospital bed in ER with a catheter up my piss-hole. My partner in crime, Mike, was restrained to the bed next to me. At some point we agreed to openly curse the hospital and burn it down with black magick.

“Ya Zati Shaitan! IA Baphomet! IO Pan! With the powers of Satan, we will burn this hospital down! Hail Satan! ShT! Set! Cthulu Fatagan!”

At first, they wouldn’t let me call my mother, yet they let Mike call his. Apparently he was losing his mind, sobbing about how grotesque demons were tearing apart his tripped-out psyche. He told her he saw angels rescuing him. Fuck, nothing like that happened to me. When they finally let me call my mom, I was just begging her to get me the hell out of ER. The catheter was really starting to hurt-I mean, I was perfectly capable of walking to the bathroom. I’m sure that screaming obscenities and invocations to Satan had everything to do with why they wouldn’t release us. They eventually told us if they hadn’t found us when they did and pumped our stomachs, we would have DIED.

Mike was discharged long before me because he was eighteen and I was seventeen. Since I hadn’t been emancipated and my mother couldn’t afford to travel to Pittsburgh from South Florida, they locked me up in a psych ward at the St. Francis Hospital. The only remotely comforting thing about the place was the great view I had of the cemetery from my room. That and the wardrobe in my room that I used to sleep in. I was totally miserable there. I felt hopeless. I feared I wouldn’t get discharged until I was legally an adult.