Cat’s Story: Straight, Inc. and Why I Despise Nancy Reagan

The day before yesterday, I posted the essay “Good Riddance, You Brutalizing Hag,” about my experiences with Nancy Reagan’s pet project, Straight Inc., and the damage that it did. In that article, I said that the things that happened to my girlfriend in the program were not my story to tell. She decided, for reasons of healing, to tell that story. Here it is, posted verbatim with her approval. The rest of this post is in Cathi’s own words. It is long, but important.
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One November day during my Senior year of High School at Osbourn Park in Manassas, VA I disappeared. It was during choir – a class I had to AUDITION for and one which I enjoyed. We were getting ready for the Christmas concert. I also during this time was trying out for the lead in Sganerelle with my Drama class. I was really enjoying going to school – despite the problems I was having sleeping at night which caused me to be sleepy in my Senior English class. I had my schedule just the way I wanted it with the classes I wanted to take – including being a teacher’s aide for my Freshman English teacher Mr. Shirley. I was taking Sociology – which was one of my true interests, drama, choir, Algebra II, Earth Science … and looking forward to graduating in the Spring. I had NO idea what was in my future when I got the hall pass to go to the office where my mother was waiting to take me out of school.

(Senior year photo of the author)

She had my 19 year old brother (and best friend) in the van, which was rather confusing. I could not understand what was going on and I was told that we were going to check him into a drug rehab. Little did I know that my mom’s plans included putting ME in as well. See, she had attended some sort of seminar in the weeks previous that PROMISED her that they would change her kids. If we were making choices that she didn’t like, if we were using alcohol or drugs, if we were defiant, if we were … well, basically anything other than EXACTLY what she wanted us to be then this organization would “fix” us for her. I don’t know if my brother ACTUALLY had an addiction to anything other than LARPs and King’s Hawaiian Bread, but I do know that he had smoked some dope, drank, and maybe snorted coke. I do know that all I had EVER done was smoke some dope and drink – and our PARENTS ***BOUGHT*** the wine. Butch was old enough to be “grandfathered in” to buy beer in Virginia since he hit 18 a few months before they changed the law. But I don’t think that he had ever done anything else. Had he possibly tripped on acid? I don’t honestly know. What I DID know is that I had no problems. I occasionally took a BENEDRYL (which *I* referred to as Bennies) to help me sleep. But in terms of illegal drugs, I had just passed around a joint or a bowl with the rest of our JOINT friends. So I never thought that my mother might be hoodwinked into thinking that I belonged in a drug treatment center. I figured that a REAL drug treatment center would know the difference. I didn’t know how WRONG I was. My main “sin” in my mother’s eyes was that I wanted to go to VCU for college – which is where my 21 year old boyfriend, Phil was studying Drama – instead of the all-girl Junior college in Missouri that SHE wanted me to attend (since it would take me far away from my boyfriend).

(UPI photo from the visit of Nancy Reagan and Princess Diana to the Springfield location of Straight, Inc.)

We walked into this nondescript building on Backlick Road in Springfield that actually was a converted warehouse. It had a nice lobby from what I could remember and there was this HUGE color photograph of Nancy Reagan and Princess Diana of Wales framed on the wall. My brother was herded into one small room with two teenaged boys and I was taken into another with two teenaged girls. I have no idea where Mom went. There was three blue plastic chairs in the room and a cheap desk. It all started fairly friendly enough with small talk and then they got into the real purpose: the interrogation. They asked me what drugs I had ever done. I told them pot and wine. I was told that I was not being truthful – that they KNEW I had done so much more than that or why else was I there? I *thought* I was there to discuss my BROTHER and I told them that. That’s when I was told that he would be admitted but that my parents were putting ME in as well. I was so confused, and they started the interrogation again. I was asked for DETAILED information about my sexual history – which included one guy … my then-boyfriend. I was asked if I had ever had an abortion and was told that I was lying when I said no, I was on birth control pills. I was asked if I had ever had anal sex (the answer was no). I was asked again about what drugs I had ever taken. I was asked about prescription drugs and OTC drugs. But no matter what I said, I was told I was lying. They even told me that my BROTHER had told them that I was using coke (not a fucking chance … I did my 11th grade research paper on the negative effects of cocaine on the body and how you could go into cardiac arrest on the first, tenth or thousand and tenth time you ingested it). I was told that he had said that I was having sex with the teenaged guys my mother “adopted” and who moved in with us – all friends of my brother and I. I’ll bet it would come as a real shock to Billy (Oron Wolf) and Steve and John that I was supposedly hopping from one bed to another once the lights went out. I knew that Butch would never say shit like that, but the two teens in the room with me talked rapidly and before I could get out a denial they had another accusation ready. One question really took the cake, though. They asked me how many times I had had sex with Butch. Wow. By this time I was fuming and I told them to get out of my way, I was LEAVING. Fat chance. I was forcibly held in my chair and told we could do this the easy way or the hard way, but that I WAS being admitted and that my mother had already left the building and gone home.

(Blue industrial chair, of the type used in the Straight Inc. offices. Kids might spend as long as 16 or 18 hours in such chairs per day.)

At that point I felt more than mere abandonment. I felt more than mere betrayal. I can’t even put into words the utter despair I felt. They then brought in an older teen who instructed me to strip. I was given a cavity search. With no gloves, and lots of comment on how I was SO SKINNY I must be doing either coke or heroin or BOTH. Now, ANY person who knew me when I was 16/17 would tell you that I was just thin. I was 1” short to go into modeling but had the classic model’s build naturally … I was all of a size 3 if not a size 0 and 5 foot 7 inches tall. I ate at least four meals a day (six on the weekends) and just had a fast metabolism. But that thin body with my small bones was proof positive that I was a junkie – despite no needle marks in my body (I must have been shooting up in between my toes). Once the strip/cavity search was done I was allowed to get dressed and some chick put her middle finger through my belt loop in the back of my jeans and then twisted it and put her fingers down the back of my jeans, holding onto the waist band. My months of torment and torture had begun.

I was walked out to the back of this HUGE room with girls on the left-hand side and boys on the right, all sitting in blue plastic chairs facing the front where this guy was sitting on a tall black and chrome bar stool. My brother had been brought out with me so there the two us stood – with strangers sticking their hands down our pants. Eventually, after maybe 5 minutes standing at the back of the room, the person sitting on the tall bar stool in the front of the room introduced us and we saw an EXPLOSION of kids waving their hands in the air so violently that it scared me. The chairs were moving all over the place as these weirdos just sat there and FLAILED. I had no idea what the fuck was going on, but I even more decided I wanted no part of this. I had been told that if I was “innocent” of being a drug addict they would know and I’d be back home within 2 weeks – and I believed them. So I determined there and then that I would just tell the truth and they would have no reason for keeping me there. I knew I would be going home. I was wrong. I was sat on the front row and just watched in bemusement at the insanity that was going on around me. Mostly it was a bunch of kids flailing around and getting up to either relate how fucked up they were or to yell at another kid telling them to “get real”. Then the guy at the front (I think it was Brady) called for a song and walked off while someone else walked up to the front of the group of kids. This went on for hours. If I had to go to the bathroom, I couldn’t just get up and go, I had to put my hand out straight in front of me and then someone would come and ask what I needed. I was told to hold it until dinner.

(Straight Inc. “drop-in center,” Cincinnati , OH, 1980s)

 

At the end of the day, I was beltlooped again and walked out to a vehicle that would be taking me to my first “host home”. It actually was not too far away from the warehouse. This happened at about 8:00 pm. Once we got to the house, I was informed that I could ONLY speak to my “oldcomers” or the house parents, I could not read anything – not even a cereal box or a pizza box, I had to perform a “Moral Inventory” every night, I was to take a shower with some girl standing on the other side of the shower curtain, I was given some ratty old underwear and pajamas and we were locked into a room at night until it was time to get up to go back to the building. I can remember the first night somewhat – they ordered pizza with anchovies on it and I was told that I could eat the pizza or I could go to bed hungry (dinner at the building was not terribly filling). I was given some other girl’s clothes the next day and brought back to the building at 6:00 in the morning so that the oldcomers could get to school and the parents could get to work. I was deposited into a VERY tiny room with a bunch of other girls and we all had our PBJ sandwiches and maybe a piece of fruit for lunch. I remember the room had one of those half-doors and we could see the guys coming in past our room to go to their own tiny room until it was time to form a newcomer chain to go into “group” in the huge warehouse room.

They apparently had told my parents that they would keep up with my medications – I was on a tri-cyclic antidepressant (Tofranil) at the time – so towards the end of the first night I was called up to a medication cart and given the medication. That didn’t last very long. They “decided” that I didn’t actually have major depression, I was “just” a druggie so the antidepressants had to go. They stopped them abruptly. I’m lucky I didn’t have a heart attack, since that is one of the dangers if you either take an overdose (as I found out much later) or if you stop the medication suddenly. You have to taper off the medication in order for it to be safe … and that was not something Straight, Inc. had time to do. It was one indication that the program had no medical or psychiatric oversight. When I asked why I was no longer getting medication, I was told I didn’t really “need” it and that it was a part of my “druggie past” as a “drug of choice”. What the Everloving FUCK?

Days “in the building” were the same with only minor variations. I have blocked out a great deal of what happened during the day to day scream-fest that being “in group” was. It always consisted of sitting in blue plastic chairs for most of the day, flailing your arms about violently. The goal was to either flail enough to get called upon to share something or bring up something on someone else. The ultimate goal while “motivating” was to flail so hard that your fingers hit together with a snapping sound. That’s how you KNEW you were really “motivating”. There would be different shifts of “staff members” leading the “raps” – and most of these staff members were no older than I was (17) and some were younger but all had one thing in common … they were former clients of Straight. They had received NO training, they had very little oversight in how they conducted the raps. Sometimes the kids called out other kids directly, but usually if you were going to get called out it was a sneak attack that started with “Where’s Cathi Jones?” from the staff member at the front. Or you would be standing up sharing something voluntarily when the staff member would spring the trap on you. So, whenever Staff would ask where you were specifically, it was a heart-pounding event. “Confronting” people involved a person standing there while person after person after person would flail about, get called on and then start screaming at the person being confronted.

(Production still from the Straight Inc. documentary Fix My Kid.)

In between raps we would sing … “The Rose”, “I’ve Got a Little Piece of Tin”, “American Pie” (with Whiskey and Rye changed to Water and Ice), “You Are My Sunshine”… a lot of songs and any reference to alcohol or drugs was removed from songs that referred to them. Some songs had been altered to fit Straight in their lyrics and some may have been thought up specifically for Straight. But the goal of the songs was twofold: keep the inmates occupied between raps so that nobody will HAVE a thought to get up and try to make a run for it and to fill up the time in between raps. While anyone was talking during rap, you had to either face them in your seat or face forward (if they were behind you) in an un-natural stiffness so that your back NEVER touched the back of the blue plastic chair you sat in. If you slouched even the tiniest bit, you got a fist shoved down your spine from the top of the chair back to the seat – knuckles poised to rasp down your spine.

We would take a break for lunch which was always a paper bag lunch that you had packed that morning. At that time you could ask to go to the bathroom – which was a fairly normal public restroom in that they had 2 stalls and sinks. The doors had been removed from the stalls, however, and the mirrors had also been removed. In order to use the bathroom on “First Phase Nothing” (and I’ll explain that “Nothing” along with other statuses in a bit) then you went to the bathroom with someone standing there watching you … always. Getting to the bathroom involved standing up, walking to the outer aisle of the row you were on, turning around and having someone stick their finger through your belt loop then walking behind you until you reached the stall where they would let go and watch or go back to get another person to take to the bathroom. Once you were done, the process would repeat in the reverse so that you could exit the stall, wash your hands and go back to your seat.

Now, I know that some people would ask “Why didn’t you just get up and make a run for it?” During regular meetings, there would be a group of people standing (all freaking day) arm’s length apart behind all of the chairs. It was called “The Wall” and was there to tackle anyone who tried to make a run for it. Keep in mind, this was a converted warehouse so they had linoleum over concrete as the floor. And tackling a runner was a full-contact event. Kids wound up with broken bones both from being tackled by a bunch of other kids or as a result of being the person tackling the person trying to escape. These kids on the wall were either kids who had advanced to “Second Phase” to be oldcomers and earned the right to go HOME at night (to be locked in their own bedrooms) and have newcomers to watch over or were First Phasers who had earned the dubious status of “Talk and Responsibilities”. Third Phasers were allowed to go to school or to work so they weren’t in the building unless they were too sick to go to school or work (and I’ve heard that the jobs were with businesses who contracted with Straight to get people to work for MUCH less than minimum wage).

Now, “Talk and Responsibilities” (or T & R) and the preceding status of “Talk” and the hideous “Nothing” were related to Friday and Monday nights and the “Open Meeting” (Friday) and “Closed Meeting” that parents came to. Friday nights and “Open Meeting”, the chairs the teens sat in were turned around and more chairs were brought in facing them. The other chairs were for family members. We would sit in our seats as the parents came in and took their seats and the microphones were brought in. If you earned “Nothing” (because you were resisting the brainwashing) then your parents would take the microphone as it was passed from person to person and stand up to tell you what a disappointment you were to them. When your parents stood up, YOU had to stand up as well. So you’re standing there and each parent relates how horrible you are. You are REQUIRED to speak into your own microphone after each parent belittled you and say the magic words of “I love you, Mom” or “I love you, Dad” before passing the microphone to the oldcomer who gave it to you and then sit back down once your parents were done speaking. If you earned “Talk” or “T & R”, your parents didn’t stand you up because you were going to be allowed to sit with them in a small group of your family, yourself and an oldcomer to relate an instance in your past when you used drugs or alcohol and how messed up that was and how you want to change. These interludes lasted about 5 to 10 minutes before you had to go back to “group” and sit back down while your parents went somewhere else in the building for Parents Rap. After the Open Meetings, each “side” (girls or boys) would scootch their chairs over into a wedge in one of the corners of the room and there would be an INTENSE “rap” whose purpose was to “confront” people who were “not getting real” and whose brainwashing was not “taking”. I had quite a few instances where I was confronted after Open Meeting … The usual form of this confrontation was someone literally getting within a few inches of you and SCREAMING at the top of their lungs into your face. You were not allowed to say anything back. You had to stand there and take person after person after person screaming at you. Open Meetings usually went on to at least midnight.

(Production still from the Straight Inc. documentary Fix My Kid.)

If the confrontations in the raps didn’t cause you to tell them what they wanted to hear then you would be up for consequences. Consequences could range quite a bit. The most severe consequences were 2 hours of sleep per night, 5 minute showers, 7 strokes with a hairbrush per day, no lotion or conditioner. Which ones you received and how many were up to the Staff and how much you were resisting the program. At one point, I was on ALL of them – at the same time. The 2 hours of sleep was done in “Shifts” and depending on how many oldcomers were in the house, you could be allowed as little as 15 minutes per attempt to sleep before you were sat up and watched to make sure you weren’t sleeping. I was informed that they program was required to allow the kids 2 hours of sleep per night as a minimum, but it DID NOT have to be 2 consecutive hours. So your amount of sleep was arbitrary. I never got more than 30 consecutive minutes during my consequences time to attempt to rest. Five minute showers were timed with a kitchen timer. Your shower would start once the water was running and you stepped in the shower. Once the five minutes was up, your water was shut off and you had to get out. If you still had soap or shampoo on your body, tough luck. You would get to live in the itchy soap scum until the following night when you could attempt another shower. Let’s just say that I can STILL perform a 5 minute shower if I need to. The trick is to get all wet, put shampoo in your hair and lather briefly then quickly wash your “stinky areas” before rinsing EVERYTHING off at once.

The other consequences should be pretty self-explanatory. Someone would literally count each stroke of the hairbrush or comb and remove it from your hand when the seven strokes were done. I have baby fine hair and psoriasis. After a month of “7 strokes” my hair had mats that had to be cut out (more on Straight haircuts later). I had weeping sores on my head from the psoriasis which oozed a sticky fluid which made the situation much worse. My skin was so dry it would crack and bleed. Needless to say, it was a painful experience and one designed specifically to break a person down physically, emotionally and mentally. In order to “get off consequences” you had to comply with the “sharing” part in group and tell them essentially what they wanted to hear. If you had to make shit up, you made shit up just to stop the pain. I don’t remember all the shit I made up just to satisfy the staff member who put me on consequences (since the staff member who inflicted the punishment was the only one who could remove it). I do remember that he was sick for a few days so he didn’t show up to the building and I was stuck. I also remember his name – it was Brady.

I don’t remember much about the dinners in the building. I can only remember two – tuna salad sandwiches and some vegetable soup with a side of an entire bagel with a hunk of cream cheese. That last one was actually filling and didn’t taste like ass. I can’t speak to the tuna salad – I *hate* cooked fish in every variety so I would eat whatever came on the side, try to mangle the sandwich so it looked like I had eaten something and drink my little cup of water. Let’s just say that dinners were not terribly memorable to me – except in the general sense of not being enough on a day to day basis.

 

So, the daily routine was: Get up, get dressed in whatever clothing you can find (more on clothing later), eat breakfast, make your bag lunch, go to the building, get put in Newcomer Hell, go into group, sit through raps where there was a LOT of verbal, psychological and emotional abuse (if it wasn’t directed at you it was directed at someone else), flail your arms over your head until your chair moves, move your chair back into a straight line, stand up and talk or get screamed at, eat lunch, have someone sticking their hands in the back of your pants, hold your bodily functions until lunch or dinner, sit with unnaturally erect posture at all times, and slowly lose your ever loving mind. Day in, day out. If you were really unlucky, you got to witness someone who was “acting out” get restrained. Picture, if you will, someone being grabbed by 6 people and CARRIED to an open area of linoleum over concrete flooring. Then, imagine that they are THROWN to the floor and you see people scrambling, wrestling, screaming. When the dust settles, you see someone with at least one person per limb, one at the head and one on their chest (if they’re LUCKY). Then they STAY on the floor for at least a couple of hours. Many kids wound up with broken limbs, broken ribs, cracked skulls, concussions from this treatment. And if you’re me … you can’t help but wonder when YOU are going to be thrown around like a rag doll. Is this what happens if the consequences they have you on don’t cause you to start lying your ass off? Is THAT the next step? Oh, and if someone gets a broken anything … good luck getting PERMISSION to have your injuries get looked at by a doctor. See, even getting an aspirin involves asking your oldcomer who asks the host parents who either make the oldcomer wait until morning or call a staff member (if the HOST PARENT deems it is a SERIOUS ENOUGH emergency) who would then have to call a SENIOR staff member and then MAYBE the “medical director” (who I suspect had no actual medical training). If your oldcomer is told to wait until morning, they must put in a REQUEST to a 5th phaser who would then put in a request to a staff member then to senior staff etc. Let’s just say that very few people received actual medical treatment. In fact, there was an epidemic of chicken pox that ran through the boys’ side while I was there and they simply put the poxed boys into a small room all day. I have no idea what they did in there, but I assumed they were at least allowed to lie down – which made me wish I could also come down with chicken pox. I never was restrained. My brother WAS. I cried … and was blasted FOR CRYING OVER HIS INJURIES, for crying over watching them savage my brother, for my helplessness and wanting to go over to him and check him out and hold him close. They broke his arm – I believe it was the left one, so at least he could write his MI every night.

 

(Undercover photo of “restraint” at a Straight Inc. facility.)

Now, you might imagine that once you got out of the building, life would at least quiet down. Nope. After you had showered and gotten into your PJ’s, and were locked into the bedroom (not kidding – it was LOCKED and had an alarm on it to boot so you better hope your host home doesn’t catch on fire in the night because you are NOT getting out alive) then the emotional abuse continued. I don’t know how many times the oldcomers had the other newcomers sing me the “Tastycake song” because “Everyone knows that a Tastycake is all sweet on the outside and nasty on the inside”. There were all kinds of verbal jabs that were taken at me, all in an effort to break my will and get me to STOP being honest and instead tell them some lie that they’d want to hear. Like expanding the drug list or saying that I had performed sexual favors to get drugs or expanding my sexual history. Oh, and let me tell you about sex according to Straight. It is a DRUG. You only ever use sex as a drug. Oral sex is NASTY. Anything other than missionary for procreative purposes is nasty and if you ENJOY IT? You’re a whore and dirty and beneath contempt. But they want all kinds of details about your sex life. They want to know with whom, what positions, how long it took, did you ever do drugs and have sex, did you ever have sex so you could do drugs … I tend to think looking back that staff got off on hearing teens recounting in group their sexual experiences, that and got off on feeling powerful that they were forcing kids to tell over 200 other kids every last detail. It was one big mind-rape all around, but especially when it came to the sexual details.

Now, nobody ever stayed in one host home long. I can count at least 6 I stayed at in just under 5 months in the program. You would get no advanced notice that you were being moved. You were just told at the end of the day that you would be going home with THIS person instead of THAT person. I was in Maryland, I was actually in Dale City (where my parents lived at the time), I was in Springfield in a variety of homes … and your clothes didn’t go with you the first night. They would show up on your SECOND night in a new host home – if you were lucky. A garbage bag with clothing in it would appear in the back of the room right before everyone lined up to leave and you were given the plastic bag that had your name on it. Now, that’s NOT saying you actually got your clothes. Frequently, if there was something NICE or something one of the oldcomers or a sibling coveted then it just mysteriously disappeared when clothing was moved from one home to another. I frequently wound up with clothing that was WAY too big and would have to try to figure out which jeans and shirts and bras and panties I could wear out of the jumble that was in a plastic bag. After about a week, many of my jeans at least found their way back to me since I was so skinny … nobody else could fit into it – except a younger sibling.

Each new host home had their OWN rules and routines. I was in one Korean host home during Christmas where I actually impressed the family because I could use chopsticks. But they also gave me all of a single wirebound notebook for the holiday where other newcomers received sweaters and other much nicer things to somewhat make up for the fact that they would not be seeing their own families at the holiday. Now, our parents were allowed to bring ONE unwrapped package into the building for us – which was then searched and wrapped on premises. My mother DID manage to get quite a bit of clothing into one box … I wound up losing most of it somehow during host home changes over the next 3 months. I think that they moved kids so often so that the host families and newcomers couldn’t start to become fond of each other. That would defeat the purpose of breaking the kids in every way possible.

 

(Saved from digits.newsvine.com)

And they DID break me. I “got with the program”. I confronted people. I lied my tits off. I accepted the brainwashing. I even admitted to some really strange crap. Like … one of the rules of the program is that you can’t talk about someone behind their back. If you were snitching on someone you have to do it in this weird “Such and such WAS SAID”, “reading WAS DONE”, “music WAS LISTENED TO” instead of actually naming WHO did it or even that a PERSON had done it instead of a chicken or a spider. Now, this got taken to weird extremes in Springfield in November ‘86 through March ‘87. If you had a THOUGHT about the building being too cold or the dinner being gross, you were “talking behind food’s back” or “talking behind the building’s back”. And yes, I self-reported that I “talked behind the back” of BOTH at one point or another. I was all set to go home the Friday after my 18th birthday. They had held Butch back by a week because the staff REALLY wanted the special occasion of a set of siblings “going home” TOGETHER. It would have made the staff so very fucking happy for both of us to stand up and scream “Mom, Dad, WE’RE COMING HOME”. Now, if this sounds vaguely like a TV movie from the 1980’s that you somewhat remember … it is. “Not My Kid” was entirely based on the Straight, Inc. program. The child locks on the doors of vehicles to prevent runners, the oldcomers bailing out to chase after someone “copping out” (the term for running away from the program), the entire Open Meeting structure … everything was cleaned up but the kernels are there. But their dreams were destined to be dashed.

See, on my 18th birthday as I was leaving the building there was someone waiting for me in the parking lot (I didn’t know until later that there were TWO people waiting). Phil had shown up to talk to me. All I knew was that I saw him and was hustled back into the building as he came close to me. I didn’t know that our friend Randi was with him or that they were threatened with a baseball bat, a knife and other weapons. I didn’t know why he was there. But it was just enough to cause me to crack their brainwashing a little bit. I spent the next day in one-on-one raps to try to regain control over me. To gauge how seeing him had affected me. To see if the brainwashing was “sticking”. It wasn’t. I asked that Friday (two days after they showed up) to withdraw myself. They panicked. They brought my parents in to the building for emergency meetings. They had them talk to me. They sat Butch and I in an intake room so HE could try to talk me into staying. They used every bit of emotional blackmail they had … and it failed. I was told I would be using drugs within 24 hours of leaving. That I would be prostituting myself to GET said drugs. That my parents would never talk to me again. That my brother would never talk to me again. That I would forever lose my family, that I would be dead to them. I didn’t care … I was getting out of there. So, they walked me to the edge of the property and told me to leave or they would call the police and have me arrested for trespass. So … I started walking. As I was walking, my parents drove past me in the family van and just kept driving. I know they saw me, I knew AT THE TIME that they saw me. They didn’t stop or even look at me as they drove past. So I knew I was on my own. I had no money, no clothing, nothing other than literally the clothes on my back. I was physically out of shape. I made it MAYBE a quarter mile to a church and hoped that I would be able to borrow some change for a payphone or ask to use their phone to call Phil’s mom. But the doors were locked so I just sat on a wall and cried. As I was crying and trying to figure out what the FUCK to do, a lady drove up, parked and walked up to me. It was the church secretary. She asked me if I was “from the building up the street” and I said yes. She let me into the building and took me back to the office as she told me that she had seen MANY kids come from that building. She handed me the phone receiver and told me to call whoever I needed to call to get help. Then she gave me a glass of water and waited with me until Phil’s mom drove up to get me. I was free. Technically HOMELESS with no clothing, no hygiene items – NOTHING … but I was free.

Nancy Reagan, Ronald Reagan, and George and Barbara Bush continued to support Straight, Inc. until it was shut down. They gave Mel Sembler, one of the founders of Straight, Inc. a diplomatic posting to Italy during the first Bush administration. The Semblers (Mel and Betty) continue to be HUGE Republican donors. They have never faced any charges relating to the torture, abuse and bodily injury suffered by over 50,000 children. They changed the name of Straight, Inc. to the Straight Foundation and then finally Drug Free America Foundation. Yes, DFAF **is** Straight, Inc. every penny that went to Mel and Betty from Straight went into DFAF and also into real estate development that is STILL funding the Republican Party. Mel and Betty will NEVER pay for the crimes they are GUILTY of. NEVER. And my parents were taken in by the FACT that they were told that Nancy Reagan supported Straight, Inc – that she had visited MULTIPLE Straight locations and she APPROVED OF THE PROGRAM. Nancy Reagan has gone to Hades – where she can ROT for all I care. She was a BITCH and I can NEVER forgive her, or the Bush family, for what all of us survivors went through. I have PTSD. I can not handle conflict. I either scream or I cower … I *am* healing – but slowly. I no longer scream at my 9 year old child and haven’t for over 2 years now. I finally feel strong enough to sit down and type up as much as I can remember and also give the general flavor of what life was like in the program. Since that Bitch Reagan died, a LOT of shit has come up for me. I feel RAGE. I feel shaky. I want to pulverize Mrs. Reagan and scatter her itsy bitsy pieces to the winds. And I can NOT WAIT to hear that Mel and Betty Sembler are both dead AND that George and Barbara Bush have bit the dust.None of them are/were “good people” in my book. None of them is deserving of resting in peace.