Don’t really know what to tell you ,

They used 24 or so different types of drugs on me as juvenile a ward of the state, some of them you would recognize, some of them I have no fucking idea what they were. One of them made me piss the bed. One of them distorted my depth perception so much that a car’s brake lights 200 feet in front of us registered as an “imminent collision” and I’d be screaming in the front seat.

Another one gave me like, what I will jokingly refer to as “superpowers,” I found a flaw in a particular type of folger-adams lock for the “food tray” , whereby if you kicked it about 3-4 inches above the tray, directly in the center, the lock would disengage and the food tray would pop open.

I gave everyone else instructions on how to exploit this, and all hell broke loose because you could not leave or enter the unit without passing our group. One of them was a little disturbed than us and he’d kick the tray open and fling cups of piss at staff members he didn’t like.

There was kid from Janesville I encountered in 3 different facilities and I hated his fucking guts. Chris Powell, I think his name was. He would get on the phone and tell his mom every persons name in juvenile detention, first and last name, so the bitch could go gossip to all her friends about who the bad kids were. As her own fucking kid was in there, good grief.

Chris ends up in the next room to me and he started taunting me about fat my mom was. I say “super powers” because I started kicking the cinderblock wall that separated us open like the fucking koolaid man. Ohhh yeaaah! I proceeded to kick through both sides of our wall, and as the hole got bigger and bigger, I threw every piece of broken cinderblock at his fucking head and had damn near made a hole big enough to crawl through and beat his ass, save for a piece of electrical conduit in the way, acting sort of like a “bar on the window” preventing me from crawling through and getting him. But not from breaking bigger and bigger and bigger pieces of the wall off and pelting him with them while he shrieked to be saved.

All hell broke loose from there once the other guys realized the walls could be kicked and broken down. Maintenance showed up and welded a few metal patch pieces over it, and they had to close down and relocate the entire unit to one where the walls were constructed of solid concrete.

I got another fun story about the same kid, Chris, he shows up at a third facility I’m in, and this was the one where “some bitch named Candace” — I have to tell you this story, it’s funny,okay — Candace with her 3 inch long purple fingernails and her giant hoop earrings , sits down next to me at the table and asks me “so, why does your file say to never let you look at or see any of our keys?”

I said “because I can remember them and then fabricate them or alter my key to match them.”

Candace said “nuh uh, boy you ain’t that smart.”

I shrugged. Idgaf what you think, bitch.

So Candace , sigh, must have never seen the movie “Gremlins” and learned the perils of not following the care and feeding instructions when she was a child.

She pulls out her key ring and straight up, held the master key to the entire unit, up to my face, and said “so you’re telling me, if I show you this key, you’ll memorize it and make one?”

I already knew, from comparing my room key to the other guys keys, that the first three pins were identical on all the keys. The master key, therefore, would have been on elevations/depth of the last four pins.

It didn’t even take me 5 seconds to snort and say “the fucking master key is 9 9 9 5?” I lost my shit laughing. “It’s fucking 9995? THATS YOUR MASTER KEY? HAHAHAAHJHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA”

She pulled the key back and asked “wh wh what, do you mean?”

Because you can take ANY key and file it down to 999 with nail clippers or a piece of tile grout, LOL. Who the FUCK would make the master key “9995” instead of like, “0001” (?) because you “can’t build a key up as easily as you cut it down.”(*) it took me a half hour with the nail clipper and grout to make my favorite new toy.

(*) “I can,” and “I did, ” when they attempted to rekey the entire unit and do exactly that, but that particular trick is reserved for future use at a later time, sorry.

Now I could go into the supply closet and the contraband closet where all the drugs and all the other fun shit went, I’d help myself to the mariijuana , roll it up in some bible paper, and shove two pencil leads in the outlet , take some toilet tissue twisted up on a third pencil lead that I’d touch up against the other two leads to light my joint , and pretty much any weed you got caught with was my weed now.

Sargent locks of that era were divided into two categories, (R)ight and (L)eft , representing whether the warded part of the key was on the right or the left side of the blank. The warding configuration was such that , keys for lock types RA, RB, and RC would not fit into each other cylinders. But then “RD” fit into all three types of locks and was a sub-master of RA/RB/RC. , this pattern continued on where RE/RF/RG were not compatible keys, but then “RH” was a submaster capable of entering all three of those. 

Moving along, RI/RJ/RK , same story, RL was a submaster and I don’t know how many of these groups there were or at what letter they ended, but then there an altogether different key blank, I don’t know the alphabetical letter for these keys, but IF memory serves me correct 30 years later, the generic names for the left and right keys that fit into ALL OF THEM are SC-6 and SC-31, one of those being for left warded keys and the other being for the right warded key.

I think the SC6 is the right hand warded key, and the SC-31 is the left hand warded key. Basically if you took concrete and shaved all the wards down, your “RJ” master for Blackhawk was now a defacto homemade SC-31 key for the entire institution, I could open the fences and walk right out the juvenile prison.

How does Rob know this? He was bored, he was 9 years old and saw Sally Struthers on TV selling diplomas , and picked up a phone and told some nice lady “I want to be a locksmith” and they just .. mailed me books and equipment and a invoice I never paid. They called the house one day and asked me a few questions about when I was going to pay .. I’d done all their little courses and passed the tests but never got the certificate because they wanted their money (of course.) But this one lady asked if I minded her asking how old I was. “10.” 

PCDI never called again. I didn’t get my certificate either, booooo. 

I guess I must be a leftist, I was way ahead of my time!!!!!! I wanted a diploma and I didn’t want to pay for it!!!!!! LOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL anyway.

The first experiment was with John , the ministerial servant I was fucking , who showed me the key to the kingdom hall, like “okay , you can practice. make this key.” So did. And it worked. St Aemelian’s, I already wrote about running away from that place all the time , but on some of those trips I would get Corbin or Schlage keys and fashion master keys to the units there as well. I was 12 I think. I had one teacher who was really angry, and two other teachers who just busted out laughing uncontrollably and could not even try to pretend it wasnt funny. 

So this particular “gremlin” came with instructions: “Hide your keys , do not ever let him see the unit key.”

Anyway, I “outed myself” one day, and it was all because of Chris Powell. 

Who, once again, was in the fucking room next to me. In a different place.

(Wasn’t that uncommon, my baby daddy was my roommate a few times in a few different places, wink, ohhhh Ricky you’re so pretty you don’t understand-)

Chris being Chris, would stay safe inside his room taunting people, like he did about my mother. And he’d yell “NIGGER! NIGGER NIGGER! NIGGER! NIGGER!” at you, know, the 98% black population of the unit as theyd all gather around his door and say “if you ever open that door boy-” 

He had a little song, a little rap, I’m not going to lie , it was catchy, it was like any Beyonce anthem, years ahead of his time, just repeating the same word over and over and over and and over and over. He could have been a song writer for Beyonce, but I don’t think she’d have approved of this particular jam, because , I could type out the lyrics for you, but every single word of his song was “nigger.”

Alright, he had the dudes circling his door and he scared to even go piss.

Chris jumps up on his desk and whispers through the crack in our wall “hey your mom’s still fucking fat!” and then he went back to do his door and starting calling four young men a … I already said it, you know EXACTLY what he was saying. This time all four of them were trying to breach his door.

What the hell’s the matter with you guys, I took two of those doors down in 2 or 3 kicks single handedly … remember , superpowers right ?

Oh but today Chris Powell was getting his. I smiled and grabbed my key out of its special location — wrapped in a plastic garbage bag and pushed to the bottom of a metal cannister of “blue magic” and went out into the hallway and finally revealed my secret. I stuck the key in the lock and opened the door for those four men.

I went back down and laid on my bed and listened to him scream and cry and wail and get his ass beaten black and blue by four young men who were as tired of his mouth as I was. I’m not gonna lie. I smiled. I enjoyed every horrified, terrified shriek. The staff were , to put it mildly, shocked . They saw exactly what I procured, and exactly what I did, but they’d been watching this go on long enough that they just ignored it and they let him beat the kid’s ass.

They came to room about two hours later to toss it and throw me in solitary confinement for a few months. They never found the key, or wondered why a white boy needed a can of “Blue Magic.” Those motherfuckers tossed my room almost every day and they only ever caught me with it one time when I’d just used it to procure some weed, and still had the key in my pocket.

Did a little more time in solitary over that ………………………………..

It’s not the solitary confinement part that gets to me.

It’s just that … it’s really fucking boring alone in your head without weed.

They dragged me in front of Judge Lussow and said I deserved more time locked up in this “secure facility” because I kept making keys to the goddamn place.

I asked Judge Lussow , “what’s the point of a more secure facility, when I can make keys to it anyway? obviously I can march out the fence or straight through the sallyport or the front gate, and I choose NOT TO, so -“

He told me “that wasn’t the point” and , my extended vacation was “so ordered.”