Free Death Grip by Matt Samet Page B

that the last of the Mohicans?”), the cross-eyed glances, my own jitteriness in anticipation of the myriad predictable barbs.
    Not surprisingly, when I stopped attending Highland, both parents launched in with the “Why do you listen to that terrible, angry music?” spiel. I’m sure they, like anyone with a foundering child, needed a ready scapegoat, but it’s not as if a song or two had single-handedly derailed me. As far as I recall, none of the bands I listened to—not Black Flag, MDC, Corrosion of Conformity, the Exploited, the Sex Pistols, Operation Ivy, Poison Idea, Suicidal Tendencies, Killing Joke, Minor Threat, the Misfits, the Angry Samoans, or D.O.A.—had a song called “Get jumped four times, transfer to a scary high school, become agoraphobic, and drop out!” It doesn’t work that way, and what a crappy song that would be anyway: The title alone takes more time to say than most punk songs are long!
    That final day at Highland, I took myself to the school counselor’s office, feigned stomach pain, and called my father to come pick me up. Jeff accompanied me, trying to talk me back into the fray, but I was having none of it. “I would go away to a class and return and you were still there waiting,” he wrote me. “[It was like,] ‘Come on, kamikaze brother, we’ve got punk-rock shit to do out here!’ Why won’t you leave?” I must have waited three hours while my dad wrapped up things at work, my duffel bag at my feet, eyes glued to my boots, not even getting up to use the restroom. I didn’t care; I had to get away from Highland before somebody killed me. It was pure animal terror. Over the next two weeks I refused to leave my bedroom, making half-baked efforts to keep up with my studies remotely but soon giving up even on that. I drew the blinds, left my bed only to visit the kitchen and the bathroom, and slept as much as possible. I’m sure my folks thought I was on drugs—the change had, from the outside, been as sudden as if I’d gotten hooked on methamphetamine. But I wasn’t on any drugs, not even pot. As Jeff put it, “Before then, you always seemed so happy-go-lucky, if restless, so this kind of paralysis came on abruptly.”
    When anxiety and panic set in, it’s often that way.
    As the weeks passed and my options dwindled, my parents enrolled me in the Challenge Program, one of those outpatient programs for troubled teens, popular in the 1980s. Here I would remain for five months, two weeks of that as an inpatient, until fit to be released into the world again.

 
    CHAPTER 4
    Being locked away in a mental hospital: It’s not the same as driving past one on the highway or even popping in to visit your mother. When someone else holds the key, everything changes—you cannot leave until they say you can. So you do what they tell you to do, and you act like you like it.
    The Challenge Program was housed in a school/outbuilding behind Memorial Hospital, part of a gloomy complex at Central Avenue and I-25 that opened in 1926 as a tuberculosis sanitarium but had earlier served as a railroad hospital for employees of the Atchinson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. 1 Today the grounds are empty, enclosed in chain-link fence and on offer for $4.6 million, which buys you the school, a tiny power plant with a creepy smokestack, and the vacant horror-movie hospital with its rows of blank windows, gray gargoyles, and two-plus acres of sloped, wooded lot. Here Albuquerque drops toward downtown and the Valley along Central, the city’s main artery of funkness, sleaze, and skeeve. I entered Challenge as an outpatient, meaning I showed up at 8:00 A.M. and left at 5:00 P.M. Mornings were spent on lessons: English and literature with one teacher, math and science with another, with a half-hour break between.
    Because so much of the program centered on exercise, we all wore mandatory sweatpants, so there we