I ran away from RMA right after I moved up to New Horizons... got put on a pit restriction because I was "stagnant" or something... something in me snapped, I guess. I just walked out of Mirkwood and kept walking. Long story short, I walked to Sandpoint, caught a ride with a couple of Mexican truckers to Seattle, and then caught another ride south back to central CA. Smoked a bunch of weed, listened to all the music I'd been missing, got a job as a busboy in a Mexican restaurant. Saved up enough money for a Greyhound ticket, and took a bus to Birmingham AL, to hook up with this girl named Bre that I'd been close to back at RMA. She had left when she turned 18. So after being in AL for a month or so, Bre and I were sitting in a park talking about our mutual friend back at the school named Ben Foulke... and I suddenly said "why don't we go back for him?" So we got a thousand bucks from her mom and headed back to Bonners Ferry. I snuck back on to the campus at around 2 in the morning with a walkie talkie and a tire iron, and woke Ben up... it was so funny- it was dark, and he thought I was his bunkie, Justin Morganthaler, fucking with him. I said "Ben, wake the fuck up" and he said, real loud "fuck off, Morganfailure" and I shone the flashlight on my face for a split second to show him who I was. He freaked the fuck out. Turned out he'd been on full time for over 40 days, because the fuckers wouldn't believe that he hadn't known I was going to split. I didn't tell him. Hell, I didn't even know I was going to split. So anyway, got him out to the car, but not before I went up to the house and got my violin out of the music room. Some old guy whose name escapes me that used to watch the place at night saw us, and I brandished my tire iron and told him we were leaving and not to call anyone. I was scared as shit. He said there probably wasn't anything he could do to stop us, and told us we had 10 minutes. We drove, man. I think we made it to Spokane in 45 minutes or so. So anyway, we made it down to Kingman AZ, where Ben's mom lived, over the next week or so.. Ben stupidly insisted on calling his mom and dad to argue with them almost every time we stopped the fucking car, and told his dad where we were and where we were going. So when we got to Kingman, I got arrested. Ben was 17, Bre was 18, and I had just turned 16... so they put me in juvie for a couple of weeks, until this bounty hunter my parents had hired came and got me and took me to SUWS. After that, I went home to my parents house for about 3 months. Then I left and went back to Alabama to be with Bre. And so on. SUWS was fun by comparison to RMA, by the way. I remember thinking that the lack of food was a lot easier to cope with than all the shit RMA heaped on you every waking moment of every fucking day the whole time you were there. The Randy Eide stories are true- I partied with him a few years later in Walnut Creek CA, I think it was. I sold dope with a guy named Matt Rush later in life, that went to that school, (that wasn't there when I was there, but I met afterwards.. .) but that's another collection of fucked-up stories for another time.
Going to RMA, I think, is kind of like being a soldier in a war. You have all this fucked up shit that happened in a really short time.... but you never talk about it with anyone who wasn't there. It isn't really explicable to anyone who didn't survive it. I met this kid about 4 years ago who said that they had started giving all the kids psych meds, and a lot of the old rules had gone out the window. Pussies. No drugs, right? My ass. So anyway, I could ramble for days, but I won't, 'cause it was the better part of 20 years ago, and it doesn't matter anymore. Those so called "counselors" were sick fucks, for the most part- but I've met a whole lot of sick fucks since then, and I'm kind of hard to impress at this point.
Oh yeah- I'm not afraid to speak my name. I'm John Bodine (Bonyhard) and I was in peer group 37. That was the number that Paul Newman had on his jumpsuit in Cool Hand Luke, by the way. Not that you give a fuck.
So take a deep breath, and get over it.
