Bio - 8 in My Bio

In late August, Dotty, a couple of people from DSS, and I all piled into a van together. Dotty told me we were going to get carpet for my so-called new rooms in the new house we were supposed to move into. Being the naïve, gullible little idiot I sometimes was back then, I believed her, even though we were on the road for nearly an hour. Why couldn’t I have put two and two together and realized that we not only shouldn’t have had to travel that far for carpet, but also, why would a couple of strangers accompany us on the endeavor? Maybe I just didn’t want to accept that I was being bullshitted. No one wants to believe they’re about to be tricked into being placed in the worst place yet—and for two whole years! It was absolutely horrible. If I thought Brattleboro was bad, I hadn’t seen anything yet! Valleyhead, a residential school for girls run like a reformatory, was truly hell on earth. Nestled in the heart of the Berkshire Mountains in Lenox, Massachusetts, Valleyhead was anything but fun.

Valleyhead was situated on a series of hills with forests around them. At the very top of the twelve-acre property lived the owners, an older couple. Their sons and daughter worked there. Off to one side of their house was a small field where games like soccer and baseball were played. Down below in a large clearing was the main house, a huge mansion that used to be an inn. There were sixteen rooms upstairs, most of which had two sets of bunk beds and housed four girls.

Fortunately, I got along with my roommates, and although one girl could get a little scary at times, I never had any major problems with the other students—nothing more than you would expect from sixty teenage girls all living in the same house.

The top floor of the main house was where the special education and accounting classes were held. The Carriage House, about three hundred feet from the main house, was where the rest of the standard subjects were taught. It was a small, one-story building with only about six rooms.

Between the Carriage House and the main house was a smaller, newer two-story building. The troublemakers were downstairs, the slow kids were on the upper right side, and those doing exceptionally well were on the upper left side. I would eventually earn a spot (and a little more privacy and independence) on the upper left side once I realized that the only way to survive the place was to basically kiss ass.

Down another steep hill, just below the main house, was a pool.

At Valleyhead, you lived on a point system. There were four different levels, and the most you could get for an allowance was the amount of your level. Most people were on level two. In the end, I’d be one of the very few to make it up to level four. You weren’t allowed money from family or friends, and after you returned from a visit with your family—if you had one to go to—you were only allowed to return with one measly dollar. Even back in 1982, a buck or two wasn’t much!

“I’m not going to support your smoking habits,” the owner said one day.

“But why couldn’t our families be allowed to?” I asked.

“Because that wouldn’t be fair,” she’d say.

But life isn’t fair, and nothing’s the same for everyone in the real world. As far as I was concerned, not allowing our families to give us whatever money they wanted was just another means of power and control.

I often wished I didn’t smoke, but I did at the time, and I wasn’t nearly ready to quit. The most you could get back then with a couple of bucks was four packs of smokes for the week if you could find a buy-one-get-one-free deal.

It seemed that all I had to enjoy at Valleyhead were my stereo and guitar. I even composed a song with another student there that turned out beautifully. I still remember it to this day and have a copy of the lyrics.

I ended up closest to Denise, whom I often roomed with, along with Ethel and a Black girl named Stacy.

We were a strange bunch in the eyes of Donna, the school’s worst nightmare in the staff department (especially if she disliked you) and the only one we called by her first name.

At Valleyhead, it was lights out at 11:00 PM, and no one was to get out of bed unless it was to go to the bathroom. One night, we were pretty restless and unable to sleep, so all of us, except for Ethel, decided to do our own thing. Stacy was pacing around, mumbling about who knows what; Denise was fishing for something in the closet; and I was about to sit down on the floor and listen to music. Only, in the dark, I misjudged where my stereo was and ended up in the middle of the room.

The door suddenly flung open, and the lights came on.

We froze.

Donna glanced from Stacy to me and then to Denise. “What are you doing in the closet?!” she screamed at Denise. Then she looked at me. “And what are you doing in the middle of the floor?!” Finally, she looked at Stacy. “Come on, you bunch of weirdos! Downstairs! Now!!!”

We scurried out of the room.

“Somebody’s feet stink like shit!” Donna added on the way down.

Once downstairs, Donna had us all sit in separate rooms for a while. I guess she thought that sitting there and staring at the walls would make us bored enough to sleep.

“Weirdos!” we heard her tell another staff member. “One in the closet, one pacing the room, one in the middle of the floor…”

With the exception of that night, I had no problems sleeping at Valleyhead. That was easy to do when you were a walking pharmacy.

When I first arrived at Valleyhead, I had no problems with Donna. She seemed to like me well enough and often complimented my singing and guitar playing, even if I don’t remember myself being very good back in those young and untrained days. Jumping out of a second-story window would change all that. But even before that, not even cutting myself during a visit home changed much. This happened during the winter, so I was wearing long sleeves at the time and was able to keep it hidden. Or so I thought.

Once I returned to Valleyhead by bus after the visit, I called to assure my mother I’d made it back in one piece. Without thinking, I raised my arm at some point and ran it through my long hair. My sleeve slipped up and another student saw the cuts and asked if I had done it upstairs.

“No, I did it at home,” I told her.

“Did what at home?” Mom asked.

Although I told her it was nothing, she called back, dialing the office number instead of the student pay phone, and asked that I be checked. I don’t remember what sort of action or punishment occurred because of it, but I’m sure it wasn’t pleasant.