The first time I went to Juvenile Hall in San Diego, I must have been 16 or 17. I think it was after I had been to San Francisco. In those days. San Diego had a curfew of 10m for anyone under 18. Every night, if you were watching television in San Diego at 10pm, there would be a public service announcement and the announcer would say “It is ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”
One night, I had been to a beach party after going to The Palace and I had been given something new called STP that was supposed to be like L.S.D. except that it was supposed to last for three days rather than just 8-10 hours. I can’t imagine as a senior why I would have had ANY inclination to want to take something like that but I guess I was just young and adventurous. Regardless, whatever it actually was that I took, it didn’t last three days.
It must have been right around 10pm and a group of us had stopped to get a bite to eat at a Denny’s. As we were walking out of the restaurant, a police car pulled up into the parking lot. We were obviously a group of young hippie types and so the police had to check everybody’s id. Of course, my ID would have shown me to be under 18 and out past curfew. I was arrested and handcuffed and put in the back of the police car. I remember telling myself to quit smiling as we drove to juvenile hall. I was really coming on to the STP by that time and I’m sure I had a silly grin on my face but I couldn’t seem to stop grinning!! I was handcuffed in the back of a police car tripping my brains out.
When we got to juvenile hall, they processed me and put me in a “seclusion” room. This was a locked room with a small window through which they could check on me. The next morning, I was taken out of the cell by one of the officers, who must have thought I was very high or very stupid, and he tried to make me believe he was giving me a lie detector test while he asked a few questions. I gave non-committal answers and didn’t say anything of significance and my mom came pretty early and picked me up. Of course she was furious and told me that if I EVER got locked up in juvenile hall again, she would not come and get me again!!
So a while later, again before I had turned 18, I was hitchhiking on a freeway onramp. It was legal to hitchhike in San Diego but you had to be careful where you did it. Someone had let me off in the middle of an interchange between two freeways, in a spot that knew wasn’t legal and there was no way to exit other than going onto one freeway or the other. A police car came along and picked me up and I was taken to juvenile hall again and put in seclusion again!
Even though my mom had threatened not to pick me up if there was a second juvenile hall detention, she relented and did finally show up and sprung me.