out. Why did I have to deal with it here? I couldn’t stand the way they walked down the hall like they owned the place, how they chased after you if you didn’t have a hall pass, how they hollered at you if they saw you running away down the hall.
I remember one day in Mrs. Sullivan’s class we learned how slaves who had secretly learned how to read and write would forge passes to visit friends or lovers on other nearby plantations. Some would write passes to the north, all the way to freedom. If white folks saw them on the road with a pass, they assumed nothing because it was impossible for a creature that was only three-fifths human to read or write. When I asked why we had to have passes like slaves, Mrs. Sullivan retorted with a very good answer. She understood my concern, but explained that we still had freedom outside of the structured workplace. Adults have rules too, she said. Slaves didn’t have any freedom at all, until after the Civil War. She explained how there was no comparison, but it didn’t make me feel any better at the time. Late passes, bathroom passes, and nurse passes all seemed like an attack on my adolescent freedom. I just wanted to run free.
My biggest problem was not getting into fights, cursing out teachers, goofing around, or any of the standard suspensions, though I had experimented with all of them. My trouble was getting caught escaping or coming back from escapes. I just didn’t want to be there. Popular kids in their turtle necks, jocks in their jerseys, metal heads dressed in black dirty jeans and band t-shirts like it was still the 80s, pretty boy guidos in their Z-Cavaricci pants with gold chains around their necks— I hated it all. I had tried to be all of them, but the turtlenecks choked me, the jerseys bored me, the black clothes depressed me, and I didn’t have enough money for the guido costumes. None of us knew who we were. Five hundred living breathing souls with the same identity crisis.
The concrete walls of the school halls were lined with brown metal lockers. It was stuffy like a prison and I felt like I had a perpetual fever. Like the bathroom I accidentally locked myself in when I was four. All I wanted was out. I had screamed for an hour until the fire department came and broke open the lock. I didn’t want to be confined ever again. I needed to move around, breathe fresh air, and get away from those florescent lights. So I cut out when I felt the urge. There was nothing like the feeling of the metal bar on the steel door moving in and then the light that hit your face as you exited the dark building.
Sometimes friends came with me. Sometimes we ran through yards and hopped fences to get away. Most of the time, we just avoided being spotted by the security van in the first place. It was a game. For some kids it was good practice. They would spend the rest of their lives on the run. Steven and Gene came with me a lot, but because of their silent dislike for one another it was one or the other. One time Paul and I left only to be rounded up with a few others by security guards and thrown in the back of a paddy wagon to be brought back to school. He never came with me again after that, but I couldn’t control myself. I needed out.
Most of the time I cut out on my own. I needed the space. It wasn’t about the fun and games, going to a girl’s house, drinking or drugs; those all just happened to be there waiting. For me, it was the quiet and alone time I didn’t get in school or at home. Out on the streets, I could finally breathe. I could walk and walk and walk. I could cool my fever.
I’d walk the streets whistling and humming songs, studying my surroundings in the dreary neighborhoods, and I envisioned a time when I would never see these streets again. Maybe I’d be a rock star or an actor far away in California and all these New York streets would be a distant memory. Everything was surreal like a dream. The jagged cracks in the sidewalks. The sharp grass of the front lawns. The white and yellow homes that all looked like one another, except for the occasional red or blue one. The neighborhoods just rolled on and on and never seemed to end. The streets were all the same. Even when I wasn’t stoned and before I had even tried pot, something was strange. It was hard for me to grasp.
Many days I would just walk and smoke cigarettes. I’d go to the deli café and sit at a round table by myself with a Boston crème donut and a Yoo-hoo. I’d look around and the other tables were filled with other lonely folks, all older and many probably retired. Some looked like they were on a lunch break or like maybe they were ditching work. I felt like I should’ve been in work, like I was older than I really was. I guess I always rushed things and looked ahead. It was my coping mechanism to get away from where I was in the present.
My walks to nowhere usually resulted in detention or suspension. One year I spent over forty days in the ISS room, and many other weeks of after school detention and out of school suspension. The suspensions always began with a typical declaration from Mr. Bundy:
“You’re being a dirt bag and you’re insubordinate. I’m going to have to suspend you.”
Mr. Bundy was a tall man with a giant girth. Wide eyeglasses engulfed his face and seemed connected to his bushy mustache like a Mr. Potato Head attachment. His thick dark hair was parted to the side like a politician. His chubby cheeks reminded me of a pig. His monotone voice droned on and on— and many days his morning announcement would start our day— I pledge allegiance to the flag… echoed like torture.
I slumped in my chair as he dialed the phone.
“Yes, Mrs. Tortis, this is Jack’s high school principal, Mr. Bundy. Your son has been suspended for insubordination. He will serve three days in the in-school suspension room. If you would like to talk about the issue feel free to call me at the school office number. Thank you.”
The good old answering machine had saved me again, at least from immediate embarrassment.
“Finish up your day and report to the suspension room tomorrow morning. Don’t be late or absent because you’ll get an additional day. You’re dismissed.”
As always I went right home and earned myself an extra day in suspension. But since no one was home, I erased the message from the answering machine and the problem would stay my problem.
$$$
I reported back to the suspension room and sat down facing the windows. Mr. Kelly arrived and took attendance. The bell rang and he began going around distributing the assignments for the day. When he got to me he smiled and shook his head.
“You really liked that assignment, eh?”
“Yes, I guess I have a lot to say.”
“Have you ever thought about being a writer?”
“No, not really.”
“You have real potential. You could consider journalism, but you might want to try and stay out of here if you want to go to college.”
Journalism? College? These were foreign and I didn’t know what to make of these suggestions. I blew them off as ridiculous.
“Yes, I’d like to stay out of here.”
“All right. I read this last night and you’re really taking me somewhere, but I think you’re going to need to take me back to the start.”
And so I started at the beginning.
4
MY MOTHER was seventeen and graduated high school five months pregnant. My father was nineteen and had dropped out at sixteen to build racecars. He still lived at home with his younger brother and sisters. Their father had taken off just after the last daughter reached her second birthday. My father wouldn’t even make it to my second birthday. When I was one and a half, he packed all his belongings into a hefty bag and drove off into the night. A wife crying at the back of his head, a baby crying in the background, a rental house with no one to pay the rent or bills—
