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My First Time in LA

the debut of an ongoing series of posts by people recollecting their initial take on our little town
hi my name is raymi and the first time i went to your city i went cuhrazy and i was thrown in a mental hospital at the UCLA Medical Center or some shit and they had to put me in four-point restraints and inject my left hip with something that knocked me out cos i was 100% hypo-manic, you know like the equivalent of doing a bunch of meth except i wasn't on meth at all. they were worried i would give myself a heart attack, i had to blow into this little box breathalizer styles and continuously blow to see what my heartrate was anyway before the injection fully kicked in i managed to get one of the restraints unbuckled, i started on the second one but soon passed out. i woke up and was all WTF!?
i remember this one dude showed up in a yellow rain slicker and he was preaching about julia roberts ruining his life and she was stalking him and I BELIEVED IT!
they took me out of the restraint room and put me with these other fucked up chicks, i think it was lunch time, they brought me some food and this one fat black chick was walking around screaming about how she don't need no jail socks. they give you these little blue ankle socks with grips on the bottom so you don't slip and i was thinking i wanted to keep mine but by the time i was released three days later they were totally dirty. i figured that chick must have been to jail before cos she knew what jail socks were.
i felt a little bit scared and alone like, dude, i'm in a los angeles psych ward, good going moron.
the day before i was in a jail cell, i'll tell you that story later maybe this could be like a regular feature, a weekly crazy raymi installment, ha. anyway this black chick sets me off and i get to thinking hey man i have rights here, i'm canadian who the fuck put me here?

in my mania i figured out a loophole in the system perhaps - i was 20 years old, in my country i am an adult but in america i was a minor maybe? so without parental consent i dunno, i screamed and babbled a bunch of shit and they took me into the ward where the crazies were - co-ed - and this huge lady gave me some towels and showed me my bed and then my boyfriend showed up with some smokes and clothes and i gotta commend him with keeping it together, we still barely knew each other at the time and what a fucking way to kick off a relationship. thing is, my doctor in canada told my mom it was inevitable that i would go bonkers and obvs but i was intent on going to LA come what may so they were like, "whatevs, let her go to the US bla bla she'll be back."
the doctors finally diagnosed me as bi-polar and gave me these horse tranquilizer sized pills, awesome.
there were two 15-minute outside breaks daily and that's when we could smoke and you could have like 2 smokes during that time - they wouldn't let u smoke more than that. because i was pretty much the only patient who had a regular visitor the other patients would always try and hit up my boyfriend for outside food, total fucking scammers, con-artists.
one korean guy fully escaped somehow and the palce was on lockdown while they searched the place for him, but he never turned up. i gave my phone number to a bunch of guys cos like at the time we were like BFF crazy styles. people always do that in psyche wards, i hear, and then they get stalkers on the outside. great.
there was one chick who told me she was posessed and her entire family believed it too, they took over one of the visitting rooms and brought in a priest and like i dunno, made her unposessed somehow. even me being fully fucking looney i wasn't crazy enough to believe that shit i was like peace, lights out lady.
it was around easter when this happened so we did some arts n crafts and i made two dope-ass rabbit baskets well i think they were pre-made cos crazy people are not capable of glueing things - i decorated them and was a total supplies-hog and got super competitive and was like LOOK HOW FUCKING AWESOME THIS IS! CAN A CRAZY PERSON DO THIS!?
the day i was released i had to speak to a bunch of doctors and some of the nurses privately so they could determine exactly how unstable i was and i remember standing in front of all of them and i was fully like rainman-savant all mathematical/delusional and in hindsight i figure they bought none of it, i was still released but it was under the condition that i get the fuck back to canada and a week later i did and spent two weeks in psych ward up here in the suburbs. i rule.
Raymi rules at raymitheminx.blogspot.com
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