“Just stand up straight. Keep your feet together, keep your eyes straight ahead and keep your arms at your sides. Don’t move around at all and don’t make any noise.”
As he spoke, I followed his instructions. When he stopped talking, he eyed me quickly and saw I had done exactly what he told me. I wondered if he might throw me a doggie yummy for being so obedient, but he quickly squashed all hopes of that happening by barking out another order.
“That’s it! Now, stand there until they tell you to enter. Make sure you knock on the door before entering and don’t open the door until they tell you to enter the room.”
I was beginning to feel as if I had gone to some boot camp from hell. Had I enlisted in the military without knowing it? Was anyone friendly here? So far, there hadn’t been even a hint of any type of warmth or kindness. Were these hairless hippies from another dimension? Distant relatives of Marquis de Sade for whom the word “sadism” was coined? Only a few minutes had passed while I stood there, but each minute seemed like hours. My muscles were sore from sitting on the chair all afternoon and fatigue had begun to set in. Finally, an upbeat middle-aged woman appeared briefly as she stuck her head out the door and told me to knock on the door. I did as I was told and as soon as I knocked, several voices on the other side of the door hollered very loudly at me in unison. This almost made me laugh.
“Who is it?”
Momentarily, I was startled by the intensity of their voices, I wanted to reply, "Who the hell do you think it is? It's person you left sitting on that hardass chair for hours!" But I managed to respond in an appropriate manner.
“Karen Goggins”
“GET IN HERE!” they all bellowed in unison.
Wow! They all sounded so serious and pissed off. I briefly looked behind me before entering the room, but knew the only direction I could safely go was forward. Once inside the room, I saw there were six people who were seated in a semi-circle. I was told to stand in front of them while they conducted my interview. I felt like I was under a microscope as each one introduced themselves to me and immediately started firing questions at me. It appeared they had done this routine a time or two and I was the flavor of the day!
Some questions were what I expected, but others were things obviously thrown in to catch me off guard. “What kind of drugs did you do?” was easy to answer, but when “what I expected to get out of the program” and “why was I here” were asked, the answers were a little more complicated and not on the tip of my tongue. I hesitated many times before speaking. I had no clear-cut answers for some questions. How does one explain the dumbass ways of “Karenism?” Could I be truthful and just say this was the lesser of two evils so here I am? I wasn’t sure if they were ready for my version of the truth and I wasn’t sure I was ready to be brutally honest with a group of hostile people all staring at me waiting for my responses to their questions.
I did my best at first, but felt none of my answers were really the right ones or adequately answered the questions they fired my way. I had nothing to hide, so I did try to answer each question as honestly as I could, but I found myself becoming defensive and sarcastic as the interviewing committee became harsher and probed deeper into my misadventures and personal life. The process quickly turned from being casual into a full-scale interrogation that was aimed at making me feel ashamed and unworthy of being helped. The drama heightened to the grand finale in which I was told to ask them for help. Since my first attempt to do as I was told wasn't deemed as being sincere or adequate enough for their liking, I went through a series of attempts until I found myself frantically screaming for help. At that point, I was accepted into the program. Each of the six people present gave me a hug and welcomed me to Kinsman Hall. Wow! It was almost like home… abuse with feeling!
Before leaving the room, I was assigned a “big sister” to show me the ropes and to keep me in line while I went through my first month or so as a “candidate” for residency. During this time, I would go through the orientation phase of the program with other people who had entered Kinsman Hall around the same time I had. These people would be my peer group for the remainder of the program.
Kathy was one of the six who had just interviewed me. I guess she was the one who had drawn the short straw. She was an older resident and obviously a little older than most residents in the program. She appeared to be in her mid to late twenties and the first thing I noticed about her as she began to talk to me was the deep, soulful quality of her voice. Her dark brown, shoulder-length hair bounced as she became very animated as she spoke. I admired its healthy luster and hoped mine would eventually look that good. Her eyes almost twinkled as she spoke to me. Her casual demeanor made me immediately forgot she was one of the people screaming at me only a few short minutes ago.
Once outside the room in which I was interviewed, I noticed she had that natural type of good looks that didn’t need to be enhanced with make-up. She was lucky especially since wearing make-up wasn’t allowed at Kinsman Hall. Many things about Kinsman Hall made it difficult to appear feminine, so the females had to rely on what they had been born with to use as bait when seeking a male’s attention. Maybe I was lucky since I had never taken to wearing make up. I used to laugh and tell people that I didn't need to enhance my natural beauty. I wish that was how I really felt about myself, but in reality it was the polar opposite.
Like most of the other females, Kathy was shorter than I was and also, slightly fuller figured. I wondered if part of the process of getting clean, getting healthy and getting my act together would mean gaining weight. None of the females I had seen so far looked pudgy or overweight, but you never know about these things. Every female I saw just looked healthy and happy. I did a double take and looked at Kathy once again as we left the room. She looked happy, too. How could that be? How could all these people hollering at each other all day long and running around with shaved heads wearing weird things hanging from their necks look happy? I just didn’t get it. Perhaps that would be something Kathy could explain to me in her own unique no-nonsense way.
My first day finally came to a close when I was assigned a room with 5 other girls. After putting my freshly screened belongings away in the appropriate places, I finally was allowed to go to sleep. The unpacking process took no more than several minutes because I was given a clothing list before leaving Hallowell and was only allowed certain things and in certain quantities. No French bras? What’s a French bra? Who even wears a bra? They’re so uncomfortable and restricting! But before I left Stevens, I was given a couple bras to take with me “just in case.” I should have known that there was no “just in case” about anything in Kinsman Hall. All females wore bras at Kinsman Hall along with nothing low-cut or tight fitting unless you happened to be a female staff member. Female residents all seemed to have the same flannel shirt and bell-bottoms unisex look. The most distinguishing difference was that females didn’t have shaved heads.
Each new person I met for the next several days were virtual strangers to me, but most people immediately treated me as a member of their rather large Kinsman Hall family. Others silently checked me out and avoided any introduction. Those people were the ones that would remain on my “beware of” list. Did the friendly ones act that way because that’s how they were told to act or did they act that way because they remembered how it felt to be a new candidate? The answer to that question wasn’t something I really needed or wanted to know initially. I assumed I would figure it out eventually. For now, I was satisfied with the feeling their warmth and openness gave me. It helped ease the severity of my beginning steps along this journey. I didn’t feel quite as alone as I had. Without those friendly individuals, I doubt I could have begun my long journey into this new type of reality called Kinsman Hall, a place where there was only one way to do things… quickly and without question. Karen’s way of doing things no longer existed!