This story is completely true and accurate, or at least as best as I can remember it almost 25 years later...
I'd always been a small kid, more brains than brawn. From junior high through early high school I was very insecure, awkward, out of place. But midway through high school I was introduced to drugs -- pot, acid, coke -- and suddenly I didn't feel so uncomfortable all of the time. I felt hip and cool and less like an outsider. But it turns out I have an addictive personality, and pretty soon I was high all the time. I was smart enough and had enough structure at home to coast through high school. But when I moved away to college, living in the dorms, with no restrictions on my behavior, I really lost it...getting high pretty much 24/7, going weeks without showing up to class. It is not surprising at all that the year ended with me back at my parents' house, having flunked out of school.
Of course, I hadn't learned my lesson yet and was still getting high all the time. Eventually my parents, in an act of tough love, kicked me out of the house.
The next couple of weeks were spent couch surfing with friends (or, more accurately, drug buddies), but eventually their goodwill was all used up and I was on my own. Having no money and not knowing what to do, I asked one of my drug buddies what he had done when he'd been homeless a few months prior. He said that the state had converted on of the old prison buildings into a homeless shelter at night, where they would give you a sandwich for dinner and a cot to sleep on. That sounded like a pretty shitty option, but being it was my only option, I walked the 6 miles there and arrived that night, too late for supper, but just in time for bed.
Even though I was 19, I was still very small. And despite having spent a few years in the drug culture, I was a relatively sheltered, naΓ―ve, innocent kid, with lots of book smarts but very little in the way of street smarts. I was a smart kid from a pretty nice middle-class family; I'd never had to fend for myself before. So being in this old prison building at lights out, laying in a tiny cot in a cold dark room surrounded by about 10 or 15 rough, dirty, homeless men, I was feeling extremely vulnerable and scared. I really felt like I was in prison, that I was the "fresh meat" at the mercy of these big, rough strangers.