A few weeks ago I published Thumb Out, Volume One of The Spaces Between — the story of the summer I was twenty-one, when I dropped out of college, stuck out my thumb on the side of Route 22, and headed for California with a backpack and a 1943 Harmony Cremona archtop guitar. The book covers seventy-two days on the road in 1973. It also reaches back into earlier years, because that’s how memory works — the road keeps unlocking doors you didn’t know were there.

Three objects from that journey ended up shaping the book.

A guitar I bought for eighty-five dollars at Manny’s on 42nd Street. A tambourine that came down off the stage from Pigpen’s hands at a Grateful Dead concert. And three translucent stones — white, pink, and yellow — that I found in a dream on a bluff above the California coast and wrote down in my journal the next morning.

I lost the first two. The third never existed in the first place.

This week I gathered the stand-ins I had collected over the last 6 months for all three of them, set them up on a table in my house, and took the photograph above. This is a post about why.

The guitar in the photograph is not the guitar.

The original was that 1943 Harmony Cremona archtop. It went four thousand miles with me. Through Pennsylvania rain, Colorado mountains, redwood fog, the desert. Jerry Garcia held it once at the Grateful Dead’s office in San Rafael, sat on an amp, played a few bluesy bars, and called it a cannon. These old ones, they’ve got songs already inside them. The wood remembers everything. He pointed out the Brazilian rosewood fingerboard and the wooden trapeze tailpiece — wartime build, metal scarce, needed for bullets.

Not long after Jerry held it, it was stolen out of my campsite in Santa Elena Canyon while I slept. I woke up to a depression in the dust where it had lain all night, and footprints — not mine — leading to the road.

That guitar carried Jerry’s hands. It carried Pigpen’s tambourine in the same backpack. It carried every campfire and every silence and every song I tried to learn in the dark. And then it was just gone, the way things go when you live on the road.

The guitar in the photograph is a 1940 Harmony Cremona, the exact same model, purchased last fall on reverb.com, since fully restored by a professional luthier. Same headstock. Same F-holes. Same Brazilian rosewood fingerboard. But this one is pre-war, so it has the original metal tailpiece — not the wooden one they switched to in ‘43, when metal went to bullets. Not the original. A stand-in.

The tambourine is also a stand-in.

The original came from Pigpen’s hands at Irvine Auditorium on October 16, 1970 — Bob Weir’s birthday, my freshman year at Penn. Acid on my tongue, ten thousand organ pipes overhead, the Dead playing electric communion. Ron McKernan handed it down off the stage. I carried it home that night to a yellow room I’d painted on cocaine, and the tambourine sat there on the floor catching light while everything else in my life rearranged itself.

I lost it somewhere in the years that followed. I don’t even remember where. That’s the worst kind of losing — not a dramatic theft, just slow attrition, the way objects slip out of your life when you’re moving too fast to notice.

The tambourine in the photograph is black plastic with brass jingles. It doesn’t have Pigpen’s fingerprints on it. But when I set it on the table next to the guitar, something in me recognizes it anyway.

The crystals never existed.

I dreamed them on a bluff above Bixby Creek in October 1973, three months into the road. In the dream I was barefoot in warm African mud, walking through golden grasses toward a village where everyone had grown up together. I came upon three translucent stones, each the size of a peach pit. One is white, one is pink, and one is yellow. I gathered them, cleaned them in a stream, and put them in my pocket.

I wrote the dream down in my journal the next morning. White for clarity. Pink for the heart. Yellow for what I could not yet name. The three stones traveled with me for fifty-three years inside that journal, never as objects, only as words on a page.

The crystals in the photograph are the first time they have ever existed in the physical world. Citrine, rose quartz, clear quartz. They are stand-ins for objects that were never lost because they were never real to begin with — and yet they were the most real of the three, because the dream survived when the guitar and the tambourine did not.

Here is the part I didn’t expect.

I wrote most of Thumb Out before I went looking for any of these objects. The book was already done. The guitar was on the page, the tambourine was on the page, the three stones were on the page. The writing didn’t need them.

But the writing pulled them into the world anyway.

I went and found a 1940 Harmony Cremona and had it restored. I bought a black tambourine. I bought three crystals — citrine, rose quartz, clear quartz — and arranged them on the table where I write. Not because I needed them to remember. Because the act of writing for two years had made them necessary in a different way. They had become real on the page, and the page wanted them in the room.

That is something I didn’t know about memoir until I was deep inside one. The book doesn’t just record what happened. It calls things back. Sometimes it calls back the original — Jerry’s exact words from a 1973 afternoon in San Rafael, surfacing unbidden after fifty-three years. And sometimes it calls back something close enough to stand in for what was lost, because the loss itself has become part of the story.

On May 23 I’ll be signing books at Bear Pond Books in Stowe. The guitar will be there. The tambourine. The three crystals. Talismans, all of them — not the originals, but truer than nothing, and the only kind of evidence a memoirist gets to bring.

The wood remembers everything, Jerry said. Even when the wood is different wood.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

For Charlie and Anni

That moment -

you both walking toward me

coming up Oregon Road

backlit in the dying light

holding hands

You’ve both been in my heart

since mama brought you home

You still are

Epigram

(Author readings are embedded at the top of each chapter)

Every young man tells himself a story about who he’s going to become.

My dreams were blocked.

Every resource denied.

All that was left was the side of an American highway.

Thumb out.

Scared shitless.

But I felt a growing confidence that if I just put one foot in front of the other and walked out that door, I would make it.

I had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

ACT ONE: BEFORE THUMB OUT

Purple Barrels

Fish Out Of Water

The Band That Never Played Out

Detonation

ACT TWO: SURFING THE INTERSTATES

Thumb Out

Turn On Your Lovelight

The Kindness of Strangers

The Price of Paradise

The Frequency of Freedom

Solitary Push

Chicken Coop Days

Sasha Among the Giants

Target Practice

Let the Guitar Decide

ZIP!

Love Through Stone

The Ocean Don’t Lie

Out in the West Texas Town of El Paso

The Descending Dark

Phantom Ships

ACT THREE: AFTER THUMB OUT

Caught In The Light

Together Brothers

The Grind

The Rug

Hitting The Big Time

The Factory Floor

An Entrepreneur Is Born

Before Thea

“Raw, unflinching 1970s hitchhiking memoir blending family trauma, Vietnam-era tension, Grateful Dead mysticism, and vivid road encounters. Strong voice, evocative prose, no filler—reads like Kerouac raised on acid and Allman Brothers.”

A few months ago I made a decision that surprised me. Surfing the Interstates — the 1973 hitchhiking memoir I’d been carrying for fifty years and finally published in 2025 — wasn’t a standalone book after all. It was the middle of one.

What was missing was the boy before the road, and the man who came back. Both of them needed their own pages. So I wrote Boomerang — the four years before Surfing the Interstates and the seven years after.

But it didn’t feel right to have them as two separate books. I decided Boomerang was the bread and Surfing the Interstates was the meat. So I made a sandwich.

The result is Thumb Out, Volume One of The Spaces Between Memoir Series.

Two voices share the book. The opening and closing acts are told in the reflective voice of a seventy-four-year-old man looking back — sentences that breathe and circle and take their time. The middle act — the road itself — is written in a cinematic present tense: short, fragmented, verb-forward, the way the road actually felt when I was twenty-one and broke and scared.

Below are three short excerpts, one from each act. Together they show what Thumb Out is and how it moves.

FROM ACT ONE — BEFORE THUMB OUT

Chapter 1: Purple Barrels

I wasn’t ready. Everyone knew it except the one person whose opinion mattered.

I was thirteen when my father pulled me out of Whitby Montessori School and sent me to the Phillips Exeter Academy. A year early, to save a year of tuition — the kind of calculation that made perfect sense on paper and no sense at all inside the life of a boy who’d just begun to find his footing. Paul Czaja, who’d taught me to sit with a photograph and let words come from the silence, thought it was a mistake. My other teachers agreed. The boy needed another year. I had friends now, or the beginnings of them — girls in Greenwich I couldn’t see outside of school because they lived thirty minutes away and I didn’t have a car, but still. The architecture of a social life, just starting to take shape.

My father didn’t care. Exeter was Exeter. The name carried weight. The boy would adjust. He had gone from Choate to Harvard.

I didn’t, not really. I survived.

This is the voice of the older narrator — full sentences, internal weather, the long view. This is how Act One opens, and how Act Three returns at the end.

FROM ACT TWO — SURFING THE INTERSTATES

Chapter 5: Thumb Out

Tossing and turning, I finally awake. Twenty-one and broke. Already past noon, the mid-July sun in its full glory. I’ve been crashing in Ledge Acres’ servant’s quarters in the back of our sprawling 1865 farmhouse. Jimmy Matsudo’s old room. One foot already out the door.

Getting up. Survey the clutter. 1943 Harmony Cremona, I’ve nicknamed “Mona,” safe in her battered hard case. Brand new Kelty backpack loaded — tent, sleeping bag, mess kit, few days’ food. Sony cassette deck with carefully recorded mix tapes: Dead, Allmans, Airplane, CSN. Colombian weed and Bambus tucked away. Water bottle full. Everything I own.

Wander the empty house. My father — moved to the city. The younger kids — scattered to camps and day school. The two older sisters — somewhere. My mother — has taken Nana to the Senior Center.

Passing the living room doorway. Stop.

The July heat can’t erase the ghost of that first Christmas at Ledge Acres.

The voice shifts. Verb-forward, fragmentary, present tense. This is the engine of the road sections — sixteen chapters of it, from leaving Ledge Acres to a five-day fast in a Texas canyon. The whole middle of the book runs at this rhythm.

FROM ACT THREE — AFTER THUMB OUT

Chapter 21: Caught In The Light

The two of us stood in the middle of the road, looking south.

And coming toward us from the direction of 684, over the crest of the next hill — golden hair first. Blonde and straight and fine, backlit by late afternoon sun. Turner light — low, slanting, the kind that dissolves edges and makes the world look like a memory even while you’re standing in it. Then their heads. Their shoulders. Small bodies in navy and white, Rippowam uniforms, collared shirts. Books in one hand each.

And their free hands holding each other.

Charlie. Twelve. Anni. Ten. Walking home from school.

They were the babies. Youngest two of six, and the only ones truly native to Ledge Acres — born at Northern Westchester Hospital, rooted in this place from their first breath. A solid decade of one address, one school to walk home from. They had lifelong friends. I’d moved eight times by their age and lost touch with all of mine.

The reflective voice returns. The boy who left has come home to a sold house and an arthritic dog, and his two youngest siblings are walking up the road. This is where Act Three begins, and where the book turns its attention to what was left behind.

That’s the architecture. Two voices, three acts, one volume. The boy on the porch at thirteen, the man with his thumb out at twenty-one, the man who came back at twenty-two and had to figure out what to do with what he’d seen.

If any of that pulled you in, Thumb Out is available in paperback, hardcover, Kindle as well as an e-book for non kindle readers. The whole story runs about 110,000 words, twenty-eight chapters, the long arc from Exeter to the canyon and back to Pound Ridge.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

Volume Two — Sahara Dust: 1980’s Windsurfing Antigua Memoir — is in progress with chapters dropping here as they are written. Be sure to subscribe and receive them in your email.

“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ signed paperback

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I should clarify something about the timeline. The MCA job, the Village life, the band — these weren’t sequential chapters. They overlapped. I was working days on Park Avenue in that twelve-by-twelve screening room and living nights in Greenwich Village, commuting between two worlds that had nothing to say to each other. The corporate fourth floor and the gutted townhouse. The white leather couch and the mattress on the floor. My life had split into parallel tracks, and I was failing to thrive on either one.

I couldn’t take living with Grandmère anymore. A few months of her fossilized propriety and pointed silences about my future was enough. My father, in one of his rare acts of practical kindness, arranged for me to move into 158 West 11th Street — a micro townhouse in the heart of Greenwich Village that was being renovated. Or more accurately, had been gutted and was waiting for renovation that hadn’t begun. No kitchen. A bathroom that worked, mostly. Running water. Two floors, one room per floor. Alexander Hamilton had apparently once lived there, which gave the place a historical grandeur that its current condition did nothing to support.

Free rent while they waited for permits. I moved in with two suitcases and my guitar.

* * *

The Village was a different planet from Park Avenue. Even in 1971, years after the folk scene had peaked and Dylan had gone electric and the Summer of Love had curdled into Altamont and Manson, the streets still hummed with something. Head shops and record stores, revolutionary bookstores and coffee houses, people who looked like me — long hair, no plan, vaguely artistic intentions — drifting through Washington Square Park with instruments and ideas and nowhere particular to be.

That’s where I met them. I’d been sitting on a bench in the park, working through chord progressions on my guitar — tentatively, the way I always played, never quite committing to the notes, never quite believing I had the right to make them.

Stan Rice sat down beside me. Black, maybe twenty-five, from Harlem, with the easy confidence of someone who’d grown up making music in rooms where you had to be good or get off the stage. He had a practice pad and his hands moved across it with a casual precision that made my guitar work feel even more hesitant by comparison.

Chuck Cruz showed up a week later — heavyset guy from Queens with thick glasses and greasy black hair who played rhythm guitar like he was trying to settle a personal score with the instrument. We started jamming together in the park, then more regularly once I had a space to practice in.

We needed a name. Chuck wanted Black Hand. I didn’t like it — the mafia connotation felt wrong. Stan came up with the Rock Bottom Blues Band. “Because that’s where the best blues comes from,” he said. “Rock bottom.” We all loved blues rock — Cream, Hendrix, the Allman Brothers — so it stuck.

We never played a single gig. Not one. We practiced, we jammed, we had fun, and that was the extent of it. Looking back, I understand why. I didn’t want to perform. I wanted to hide inside the music, play lead guitar where I could float on top of everything without singing, without exposing myself, without risking the judgment that came with being seen. The band was a structure I could disappear into, same as the screening room at MCA was a box I could sit in. Different boxes, same impulse.

When the townhouse arrangement ended, I moved to a similar deal on Hudson Street — an empty warehouse space, temporary, waiting for renovation. Big enough to practice in, with those tall industrial windows that flooded the room with light. That’s where we spent most of our time as a band, Stan behind his kit, Chuck thrashing away at rhythm, me on my SG, all of us playing to an audience of zero and not minding.

Stan became a real friend — the only one from that period who did. He came out to visit me at Ledge Acres later, which meant something. A Black drummer from Harlem making the trip to suburban Westchester to see a white kid from privilege — that took a generosity of spirit that I didn’t fully appreciate at the time.

He also took me to see Parliament Funkadelic at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. I was the only white person in the building. Every eye in the place registered my presence. Stan navigated it, letting people know I was cool, and once the music started it didn’t matter anyway — George Clinton and his crew of costumed funk masters generated a force that erased everything except rhythm. The bass line hit like a physical event, and suddenly everyone was moving, everyone was together, and the color of my skin was the least interesting thing in the room.

That night at the Apollo was one of the few genuinely transcendent experiences of my time in New York. I was dancing — really dancing, not the careful shuffle of someone afraid to be noticed — and for a few hours, the noise and dirt and loneliness of the city fell away and there was only the music and the communion of bodies in motion.

It didn’t last. Nothing in New York lasted.

* * *

During this period I also worked part-time as a security guard at the Village East Theatre — the old Fillmore East, reopened under new management. For several months I worked the stage-right aisle, helping people find their seats, dealing with unruly patrons, and occasionally talking someone down from a bad trip. The irony of that last part wasn’t lost on me, even then — a kid who’d nearly lost his own mind on acid at Penn, now guiding strangers back from the edge the way Pete had guided me.

The acts that came through were extraordinary. Chuck Berry. Miles Davis. Aerosmith, before anyone knew who they were. Crazy Horse without Neil Young — just the band, raw and loud. The New York Dolls. Fairport Convention. I stood six feet from these people night after night, close enough to see the sweat and the concentration, and I was a security guard. Not a musician, not a filmmaker, not anything I’d wanted to be. Just a kid in a venue-branded t-shirt making sure nobody fell out of their seat.

After one show, I hung out with Crazy Horse backstage. They were friendly, loose, clearly wanting to extend the evening. “You know where we can score some weed?” they asked. I didn’t, which felt like the most pathetic admission possible — I was living in Greenwich Village in 1972 and couldn’t find marijuana for Crazy Horse. But that was the truth of my situation. I was adjacent to everything and part of nothing.

* * *

Somewhere in this period, I met Karin. I was riding the train between White Plains and the city — I traveled back and forth to Ledge Acres occasionally, unable to fully commit to either world — and she was there with her camera. She was a photographer from Scarsdale, from serious money. But Karin wore her privilege the way I wished I could wear mine — lightly, more interested in art than status, having chosen a camera over whatever path her family might have preferred.

We started seeing each other. It wasn’t serious in the way that word usually means — we liked each other, we slept together, she photographed the band in the Hudson Street warehouse, and we enjoyed each other’s company without pretending it was heading somewhere permanent. She had a good eye. The shots she took of Stan and Chuck and me in that raw industrial space, light pouring through those big windows, caught something I couldn’t see in myself at the time — an intensity, a hunger that the Quaaludes and casual drifting hadn’t quite extinguished.

Years later, one of Karin’s photographs ended up on the cover of my novella, “Surfing The Interstates.” She’d captured me in a denim jacket, curly hair wild, a slight smile that could mean anything. I didn’t know when she took that picture that it was documenting someone on the verge of disappearing — that within months I’d be standing on an interstate with my thumb out, everything I owned on my back. But she saw something. Photographers do.

* * *

My uncle Richard lived in the West Village with his wife and two sons. I idolized him. He was my father’s brother but seemed to exist in a different register — warmer, more human, less concerned with the rigid performance of authority that defined my father’s every interaction. When he asked me to housesit while they went away for a weekend, I was glad to help.

One night I had a few friends over. Weed and beers, nothing dramatic. The next morning, I couldn’t find the apartment keys. I tore the place apart looking — cushions off the couch, drawers emptied, every pocket checked twice. Nothing. I had to leave for work at MCA, and with no key, I left the apartment unlocked.

They came home early.

Richard’s wife never forgave me.

It was such a small thing — lost keys, an unlocked door, a minor violation of trust that in a different family might have been laughed off by the following weekend. But in my family, small things became permanent things. The keys joined the $250 — another entry in the ledger of Andre’s unreliability, another story told in rooms where I wasn’t present.

In 1972, Richard was just my cool uncle whose wife had stopped talking to me over a set of lost keys.

* * *

The Village apartment came next — the one that ended everything. After Hudson Street, I moved to a place with roommates, somewhere near Richard’s apartment. Bedrooms, a shared living space, the kind of arrangement that sounds reasonable on paper.

It wasn’t reasonable. It was a revolving door. People coming through at all hours — friends of roommates, strangers, the kind of drifters who materialized in Village apartments like dust gathering in corners. The parties started casually and got darker. Quaaludes appeared. You’d take one, wake up the next day with no memory of the intervening hours, sometimes next to someone you didn’t recognize.

I got involved in the casual sex that floated through that scene — disconnected encounters that left me feeling emptier than before. This wasn’t the free love the counterculture had promised. This was anesthesia. People numbing themselves in proximity to each other and calling it connection.

There was a guy named Sean who embodied the worst of it — a full-blown alcoholic, chaotic, eventually arrested and jailed. The kind the scene attracted and the kind who made the scene what it was becoming — less a community of artists and seekers and more a collection of damaged people keeping each other company.

One day I came home from work and my guitar was gone. My cherry-burst Gibson SG — the instrument I’d been playing with Stan and Chuck, the thing that connected me to music, to whatever fragile sense of identity I’d been building in that warehouse with the good light. Someone at one of those parties had taken it. No way to know who. Too many strangers had passed through those rooms.

The theft felt larger than the loss of an instrument. Without the guitar, the band dissolved. Chuck disappeared back into Queens. Stan returned to Harlem. Even Karin drifted away, her interest waning as my spiral accelerated.

All in all, my life in New York was deeply unhappy. I hated the noise, the dirt, the energy, the cost of everything. I’d met too many random people and not enough real ones. The city that was supposed to offer freedom and possibility had delivered a succession of temporary rooms, a band that never performed, a guitar that got stolen, and a scene that was eating itself alive.

I was done. Completely done. I packed what little I had and went home to Ledge Acres.

* * *

Looking back, what strikes me most about the Village period isn’t the darkness — though that was real enough — but the pattern it established. I’d arrived in New York believing that geography was the answer. If I could just get to the right place, the right scene, the right people, everything would click into place. Instead, I discovered what I’d discover again and again over the next fifty years: you can’t outrun yourself. The restlessness, the inability to commit, the preference for preparation over presence — I carried all of it from Park Avenue to the Village to Hudson Street to that apartment with its revolving door. Different rooms, same occupant.

The city hadn’t failed me. I hadn’t failed the city. We’d simply confirmed what should have been obvious from the start: I wasn’t looking for a place to be. I was looking for a reason to leave.

→ Next Chapter: Detonation

← Previous: Fish Out Of Water

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My grandmother’s apartment at 785 Park Avenue was a museum where all the exhibits watched you back. Every square foot filled with antiques, every conversation an interrogation disguised as concern.

“What exactly does a projectionist do?” she asked over breakfast, her tone suggesting she already disapproved.

Grandmère was my father’s mother — Jacqueline, the woman who’d once told me my father had “put his heart in the deep freeze.” She would know. She’d watched her own children scatter and self-destruct. Living with her meant inhabiting a fossilized worldview where popes and kings set the standard for human behavior and a grandson without a degree or a plan was a specimen to be studied with polite alarm.

I couldn’t have lasted more than a few months. But during those months, I found the job that would define the next year of my life — a classified ad in the New York Times, placed by Career Blazers: “Projectionist wanted. MCA Universal. Experience preferred but not required.”

* * *

The address was 445 Park Avenue. Seventeen blocks south of my grandmother’s apartment, same side of the street. I think that’s why they hired me — a kid from Park Avenue applying for a job on Park Avenue. It suggested a certain pedigree, even if the kid in question was wearing jeans and a white dress shirt with no tie and had a white man’s afro exploding from his head.

The job paid three dollars an hour, a hundred and twenty-five a week. It got me into the IATSE union, which at the time seemed like a formality but would turn out to be a golden ticket years later when I needed to get into Hollywood. I had no way of knowing that. I had no way of knowing anything about where my life was going. I was nineteen years old, sitting on a white leather couch in a twelve-by-twelve screening room on the fourth floor of an office building, waiting for executives who never came.

The room was a strange little capsule. White leather couch, built-in wooden side tables with matching dimmable lamps, and what looked like a bookcase — but behind the cabinet doors was a bar and a rear-view sixteen-millimeter projection system. You’d open a door, a screen would swing out on a hinge, and inside sat a projector aimed at a series of mirrors that bounced the image onto the screen so it appeared correct. There was a telephone that never rang.

The whole setup existed so syndication sales executives could show off their television products — Ironside, Marcus Welby, the shows that were about as far from the films I wanted to make as you could get. But these executives did ninety-nine percent of their selling on the road, traveling to TV stations across the country. The screening room was a prop, and I was the prop’s custodian.

I sat on that couch and waited for a year.

Three vice presidents took an interest in me, each in his own way. Louis F., whose office was closest to my door, tried to steer me toward sales. “You’ve got the pedigree for it,” he said — a word my father would have used. Pedigree. As if I were a horse to be assessed for breeding potential.

Next door, Hal C., vice president of advertising, decided I should be a copywriter. “You speak well, you write well. You could write copy — words about shows that make people want to buy them.” I told him that was about as far from what I wanted to do as I could imagine.

Third door down was a guy named Selznick, some spawn of David O. Selznick, probably one of the most legendary Hollywood producers of all time. He wasn’t around much. But one day he was there with his girlfriend, and they called me into the office and closed the door.

“How would you like to be in a film?”

My heart jumped. Really?

“We’re shooting this weekend. Westchester mansion. You’d ride up on a Harley-Davidson. Go inside. Have sex with two beautiful women.”

I was twenty years old, incredibly inexperienced, bashful to the point of paralysis when it came to sex. They kept working on me. I kept saying no. The last thing I wanted to do. But I remember the particular cruelty of the offer — dangling the word “film” in front of someone who’d wanted nothing else since he was thirteen, then revealing it was pornography. Three executives, three pitches, and not one of them had anything to do with who I actually was or what I actually wanted.

* * *

One night I woke up on the fold-out bed with my crotch on fire. Itching like I’d rolled in fiberglass. I crept to the bathroom, flipped on the light, and there they were — tiny white things moving through my pubic hair. Crabs. I’d been celibate for months. Hadn’t so much as held a girl’s hand since Penn. But here they were, at one in the morning, in my grandmother’s Park Avenue bathroom, scurrying around like they owned the place.

I rode the elevator down in a cold sweat, found an all-night pharmacy on Lexington, and explained my situation to a pharmacist who’d clearly heard worse. He handed me a bottle of Pyrinate 2000 without comment. Back in the apartment, I sat on the edge of the bathtub at two a.m., applying lice shampoo to my pubic hair while Grandmère slept down the hall dreaming of popes and kings. I never figured out where they came from. My best guess, even now, is the men’s room at MCA.

* * *

Mr. F.’s secretary sat right outside my door. She was vivacious, slightly plump, strawberry blonde with freckles — a really wonderful woman who commuted in every day from Queens on the F train. One morning she came in crying.

She’s trying to clean her jacket. A little hip-length fur, the kind a secretary saves for months to buy. She’s scrubbing at it with paper towels, mascara streaking her face.

“What happened?”

“On the train... it was so crowded.” She struggles with the words. “Some creep... he... on my coat. I didn’t realize until I got here and took it off.”

The violation hangs between us. She’d felt something happening in that sardine-can subway car but hadn’t understood until she found the evidence. Semen on the back of her fur jacket.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. Useless words.

“It’s this city,” she whispers. “Sometimes I hate this city.”

I thought of Westchester, of family dinners where the live-in maid served courses in silence, of Sunday Mass where my father’s donations ensured front-row seating. My life had been hermetically sealed against the world this woman navigated every day. Three dollars an hour, same as me, but she earned hers by crossing through a city that could assault you on your morning commute and leave you scrubbing the evidence off your nicest coat.

* * *

The one person on that floor who existed in the same universe as me was Abby. Puerto Rican, worked in the mail room on the back side of the elevators along a windowless corridor. My age, my frequency. One day he appeared and asked the question that would define our friendship.

“You smoke?”

“Cigarettes?”

His grin told me everything.

We’d meet in the stairwell between floors, suspended in concrete limbo, share a joint, talk about music and the lives we imagined for ourselves, then go back to work blitzed. Nobody seemed to care or notice. That was the extent of it — occasional co-conspirators in corporate purgatory. But Abby had something I lacked: the instinct to act on impulse rather than just dream about it.

* * *

During this period I enrolled in a poetry writing course at the New School for Social Research. Grandmère had given me two hundred and fifty dollars as a gift — my money now, to use as I saw fit. My father had a standing offer: if I went to school and earned a B or better, he’d reimburse the tuition. So I paid for the course, did the work, got the grade, and collected his reimbursement. As far as I was concerned, the deal was clean. A gift is a gift. What I chose to spend it on was my business.

Then my father had dinner with his mother. He was bragging about the arrangement — how his son was finally showing initiative, how he’d kept his word and reimbursed me. Grandmère told him she’d given me the money.

From that moment, my father believed his son had conned him — taken a gift from Grandmère, spent it on tuition, then collected reimbursement for an expense that had cost me nothing. The fact that the gift was mine, that I could have spent it on anything, that I’d chosen to invest it in education and honored every condition he’d set — none of that mattered. The story became fixed in the family record. Another data point in the emerging portrait of Andre as someone who couldn’t be trusted with money. Truth is no match for a story that confirms what people already want to believe.

* * *

Steve Ferry came back into my life on a lunch break. He’d dropped out of Penn after freshman year, moved to California, was back east visiting someone. He called the office and suggested we grab something to eat.

We left the building, headed north on Park Avenue toward 56th Street.

A crowd gathering on the south side of 56th. Something pulling people toward an apartment building with a canopy that extends ten, twenty yards from the entrance. We push through.

A woman on the pavement. Beautiful. Blonde hair fanned out. She’s wearing what looks like a slip. She’s come through the canopy from high above — the canvas slowed her just enough to leave her face intact. Arms and legs at odd angles. No blood that I can see. She’s very pale.

I stand there. Steve stands there. Neither of us speaks.

Then we went to lunch. Steve told me about California — Santa Rosa, wine country, a converted chicken coop on an old prune ranch. Fifty dollars a month. Beautiful country, real people, no pretensions. He’d read Kerouac, we’d both read Kerouac, and here he was living it.

“You should come out,” he said. “The offer stands.”

I told him I’d think about it. But the image of that woman on the pavement stayed with me longer than Steve’s pitch. She’d chosen to leave a building the fastest way possible, and the city had gathered around her body with the same hungry curiosity it brought to everything — spectacle as entertainment, tragedy as a thing to see on your lunch break.

* * *

The VisitUSA passes were Abby’s idea. Everything good that happened at MCA was Abby’s idea.

“I got a hold of these two air passes,” he told me in the stairwell one afternoon. “VisitUSA. The bearer travels anywhere in the country for twenty-one days, free. Participating airlines only — smaller carriers, so you can’t just jet from New York to San Francisco. You take a bunch of legs. But it’s free.”

“What’s the catch?”

“You’re Almali Medeiros. I’m Nair Fares.” He grinned. “Two Brazilian guys who had to go home early. My cousin works at the airline.”

“They don’t check ID?”

“They don’t check. Long as you have the ticket, you get on the plane.”

“What about work?”

“Call in sick.”

In 1972, this was possible. Airport security was a man at a desk who glanced at your ticket and waved you through. No metal detectors, no body scanners, no photo ID requirements. You could fly across the country under someone else’s name and nobody blinked.

We met at LaGuardia the next morning, called in sick, and boarded the first of what would be four flights chasing the sun west. LaGuardia to St. Louis. St. Louis to Denver. Denver to Las Vegas. Vegas to San Francisco.

On the leg into Sin City, Abby befriended a guy who took us to his air-conditioned house in the desert — sixty-eight degrees while it was over a hundred outside. We smoked his weed, listened to his stereo, and made our flight to San Francisco.

True to form, Abby had chatted up a woman on the plane — attractive, older than us, traveling alone. By the time we landed, we had a place to stay. Her apartment in North Beach, wine, weed, music. Abby and the woman disappeared into her bedroom. I slept on the couch.

The next day, I wanted to visit my friend Gary who was going to Stanford. We rented motorcycles — Abby’s idea — and rode down to Palo Alto. Gary sold us a quarter pound of excellent weed, we caught up on life since Penn, and on the ride back Abby and I were going about five miles an hour on a quiet secondary road, talking to each other across our handlebars, when the handlebars locked and we both went down.

It was a slow-speed tangle, nothing serious — a couple of bruises and some road rash on my pride. But the image stays: two guys from Park Avenue and the Bronx, flying around California on stolen airline passes under Brazilian aliases, wiping out on rented motorcycles with a quarter pound of weed in their bags. If my father could have seen us.

We spent another night at the woman’s apartment — Abby enjoyed her company again, I enjoyed the couch again — and the next morning started the return trip. San Francisco to Vegas, Vegas to Denver, Denver to St. Louis.

In St. Louis, we checked in for the final leg to LaGuardia. Sat down. Waited for boarding.

The PA system crackled.

“Would Almali Medeiros and Nair Fares please report to the ticket counter?”

We looked at each other.

At the counter, an airline agent stood beside a man in a dark suit. Federal Sky Marshal. He interviewed us one at a time in a small room. Asked for ID. We couldn’t prove we were who was on the ticket, obviously, because we weren’t.

He searched my bag. I was sweating through my shirt because I had two ounces of Gary’s finest California weed in my suitcase. But it was a cursory search — weapons, not drugs. He didn’t feel it, didn’t find it, didn’t mention it.

“What you’ve done is fraud,” he said. “But I’m going to let you off with a warning. Now get out of here.”

And there we were. Two guys with suitcases and two ounces of weed, stranded in St. Louis with no money and no ride home.

So we hitchhiked.

Two guys in a Mustang with a killer sound system picked us up first, heading east, just cruising. They passed a bottle of Southern Comfort around. We hit some weed, had some laughs, and they let us out somewhere on I-70 as night was falling. Then nothing. Nobody stopping for two long-haired kids — Abby’s magnificent afro, my white-boy version, both of us tall and lean and looking like exactly what we were.

Hours passed. It was getting depressing, then worrying. And then, improbably, a brand-new motorhome pulling an identical copy behind it eased to a stop a hundred yards ahead. We ran to catch up.

“Where you headed?”

“New York.”

“That’s where I’m delivering these. Hop in.”

The motorhome was luxurious — kitchen, bathroom, beds sealed in plastic for the dealership. “Don’t unwrap anything,” the driver said. “Just lay on top if you’re tired.”

We were tired. We crashed on plastic-wrapped mattresses and slept like the dead while America scrolled past in the darkness. Woke up the next morning to the Manhattan skyline.

Monday morning, we were both back at our desks.

“How are you feeling?”

“Much better, thanks. Must have been a twenty-four-hour thing.”

That trip cracked something open. Not just the adventure of it — though flying across the country under false names and hitchhiking home from St. Louis with a bag full of weed was certainly an adventure. What it showed me was that the road was real. Not just a Kerouac fantasy, not just Steve Ferry’s postcard promises, but an actual thing you could do. You could leave. You could move through the country and meet strangers who’d let you sleep in their refrigerated houses or their brand-new motorhomes, and most of them would be decent, and you’d survive.

Abby knew this instinctively. I had to learn it. The VisitUSA passes were my first lesson.

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I wasn’t ready. Everyone knew it except the one person whose opinion mattered.

I was thirteen when my father pulled me out of Whitby Montessori School and sent me to the Phillips Exeter Academy. A year early, to save a year of tuition — the kind of calculation that made perfect sense on paper and no sense at all inside the life of a boy who’d just begun to find his footing. Paul Czaja, who’d taught me to sit with a photograph and let words come from the silence, thought it was a mistake. My other teachers agreed. The boy needed another year. I had friends now, or the beginnings of them — girls in Greenwich I couldn’t see outside of school because they lived thirty minutes away and I didn’t have a car, but still. The architecture of a social life, just starting to take shape.

My father didn’t care. Exeter was Exeter. The name carried weight. The boy would adjust. He had gone from Choate to Harvard.

I didn’t, not really. I survived. Learned to perform well enough on tests, made a few friends, discovered marijuana and Bergman films and the liberating possibilities of a Bolex H16 camera with a three-lens turret. Senior year I made a forty-five-minute film called “BWATUL” — prep school slang for going into the woods to get high — about a kid mesmerized by drugs and rock music, frustrated by the impossibility of integrating into institutional life. Shot it in dark black-and-white, Gothic, clearly the work of someone who’d been watching “Persona” too many times. It won the school’s arts prize. My father never watched it.

* * *

That same year, my father drove me to West Point for an interview. I sat in the passenger seat of the Oldsmobile Delta 88, watching the Hudson Valley scroll past, saying nothing. West Point was his fantasy — the son as officer, serving with honor, embodying the martial tradition he romanticized from the safety of his study where he listened to German marching music and moved toy soldiers across maps. I had about as much interest in a military career as I had in dental surgery, but he hadn’t asked. He rarely asked.

The interview was a formality. I answered questions with the bare minimum of enthusiasm required to avoid outright rudeness, and we drove home in silence. Another box checked on someone else’s list.

What I wanted — the only thing I wanted — was film school. USC, UCLA, NYU. Places where people made movies, not war. I’d been making films since Paul Czaja put that Bolex in my hands, had felt something click into place behind the viewfinder that I’d never felt anywhere else. Cinema was the one language that made sense to me.

My father said no. Flatly. Absolutely. If I wanted tuition money, I would study philosophy. A real education. Something that built the mind, prepared a man for serious work. Film was a hobby, not a career. Not for a Saint Phalle.

* * *

That summer, Woodstock happened an hour from Ledge Acres. I begged to go. The argument went on for days — not a discussion, never a discussion, but an escalating series of appeals met with escalating refusals until my father issued a flat decree. No. End of conversation. Half a million people gathered on a farm in Bethel to witness the defining cultural moment of their generation, and I listened to it on the radio in my bedroom, close enough to have ridden my bicycle.

The irony would take fifty years to become visible. My father was right about philosophy — just wrong about the route and the timeline. I’d get my philosophical education, but it would take the open road, not a lecture hall. The curriculum would be strangers’ cars and campfire conversations and a hundred hits of acid flushed down a dormitory toilet. But none of that was knowable yet. In 1969, all I knew was that the door I most wanted to walk through had been locked by the one person who held the key.

* * *

So I went to Penn. Not because I wanted to, but because Ivy League was the minimum my father would accept, and I was still, at eighteen, a boy who needed his father’s approval even as I was learning to hate needing it.

Steve Ferry showed up in my life the way most important people do — without announcement, sideways, through some ordinary door. We were both freshmen in the fall of 1969, assigned to rooms in the same corridor of the Quad. Steve was from Glenrock, New Jersey. His father ran an advertising agency on Madison Avenue. “Sells America to itself,” Steve said once, with a bitterness that suggested dinner-table arguments that had ended badly.

We recognized something in each other immediately — not friendship exactly, but a shared frequency. Both smart enough to be there, both suspicious of why we were. Both carrying fathers who’d mapped futures for us that felt like someone else’s life.

Steve had a collection of film canisters that he labeled with names from the old anti-marijuana propaganda film “Reefer Madness” — MURDER, INSANITY, DEATH. He thought this was hilarious. He kept his best weed in INSANITY. He played guitar, argued about Clapton versus Hendrix, and had a cynicism about institutional life that I found both thrilling and slightly frightening. Steve had already decided that the system was broken. I was still trying to figure out whether the system existed at all.

The acid came early. First semester. I’d bought a hundred hits of purple Owsley from a connection — tiny barrels, supposedly the purest LSD on the market. The trip went sideways almost immediately. Whether the barrel-making machine had been faulty or I simply wasn’t prepared for what pure psychedelics could do to a mind that had spent eighteen years under my father’s rigid control, the dose hit like a freight train. Ego dissolution. Terror. The boundaries of self liquefying into something vast and incomprehensible.

Pete, from down the hall, talked me through it. He was one of those people who radiated calm the way some people radiate anxiety — a natural steadiness that you didn’t fully appreciate until you needed it. Hours in a garden somewhere on campus, the world fractured into kaleidoscopic geometry, Pete’s hand on my shoulder, Pete’s voice cutting through the chaos: “You don’t need to hold on. Let go. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

I let go. And what I found on the other side was, for a few luminous hours, the most profound experience of my life. The universe as a single breathing organism. A glimpse behind the curtain of ordinary consciousness that left me shaking and transformed and desperate to explain it to someone who might understand.

Looking back now, I understand that Pete may have saved my life that night. Not dramatically — no ambulance, no stomach pump — but in the quieter way of keeping a mind from tipping past the point of return.

The next morning, my father was at the door.

Knocking. Not a polite knock. The knock of a man who has taken the train from New York at dawn because someone has called him about his son.

The door opens. My father in a dark suit. Tie knotted. Face tight.

“Dad!” A surge of joy — irrational, leftover from the trip, the residue of cosmic love still coursing through me. “You’re here! I have so much to tell you —”

“Where are they?”

“Where are what?”

“The drugs, Andre. The hundred doses.”

And still, still riding the afterglow, still lit up with the conviction that what I’d seen was real and important and worth sharing: “Dad, if you tried it, just once, you’d understand —”

He takes me by the arm. Down the hall to the bathroom. Forces me to tip the vial over the toilet. One hundred purple barrels swirl and disappear.

One flush. One hundred dollars. One conversation that never happens.

He checks his watch. “I have to get back to New York.”

And leaves. No discussion. No curiosity. No attempt to understand what I had experienced or why it mattered. Just disposal and departure. His only visit while I was at Penn.

* * *

It would be easy to make this a story about a cruel father and a sensitive son. It’s not that simple. The man who flushed those hits was carrying his own damage — a childhood shaped by a father who’d been taking amphetamine cocktails from Dr. Feelgood while preaching self-discipline to his children, a family marked by suicides and the kind of secrets that would eventually surface publicly. He’d learned early that feeling too much was dangerous. He’d put his heart, as his own mother once said, in the deep freeze.

So when his son stood before him radiating psychedelic wonder, talking about cosmic unity and dissolved boundaries, what he saw wasn’t revelation. He saw the family curse surfacing in another generation. He saw chaos threatening the order he’d spent his whole life constructing. He did the only thing he knew how to do: eliminate the problem and leave.

I didn’t see any of this at nineteen.

But there’s another layer, one that took even longer to surface. What would I have done with a hundred hits of the most powerful LSD available? I’d already nearly lost my mind on what may have been a double or triple dose from a faulty barrel. I was nineteen, reckless, convinced of my own invincibility the way only nineteen-year-olds can be. I might have taken more. I might have ended up like Pete’s roommate, who took STP at a festival in Florida and ended up in a mental hospital for months. I might have sold them and been arrested, a federal drug charge that would have followed me forever.

My mind reels now, fifty years later, to think of how close I came to disaster — and to recognize that my father, in his clumsy and brusque way, may have saved me from it. Pete and my father. Two acts of rescue, neither one understood at the time.

* * *

On December 1, 1969, we gathered around the television to watch the first draft lottery since World War II. Representative Alexander Pirnie reached into a glass container and drew capsules, each one containing a birthday. Each birthday a fate.

Steve’s came first. July 9th. Number one.

The room went silent. Number one. Not figuratively bad — literally the worst possible outcome. First birthday drawn, first to be called, certain deployment. Vietnam.

I watched my friend’s face drain of color and understood, in a way I hadn’t before, that this was not abstract. This was not politics or philosophy or protest signs. This was my friend’s body being requisitioned by the government to go kill people or be killed in a jungle on the other side of the world.

Steve stood up and walked out. I found him later with a bottle of bourbon, already working on a plan. There was a psychiatrist on campus, a Dr. Frei, who was sympathetic. Steve would build a case for psychological unfitness. He would make himself officially crazy, because the alternative was officially dead.

Steve got his 4-F. But something shifted in him after that — a hardness that wouldn’t leave.

My lottery came seven months later, in July 1970 — the second lottery, for birthdates in 1952. I drew number 200.

Two hundred sounded high. It wasn’t high enough to be safe, not then, not when nobody knew where the cutoff would fall. For weeks, maybe months, I lived in a particular kind of limbo that no one who hasn’t experienced it can fully understand. Every time I tried to imagine myself in Vietnam — the heat, the rifles, the possibility of killing or dying — my mind simply refused the picture. It was like trying to visualize my own death. The image wouldn’t form.

I was 100 percent certain of one thing: I would not go. Not as an officer, which my father had pushed — “You might as well go as a lieutenant rather than some buck private in the mud” — and not as anything else. Canada. A psychiatric deferment like Steve’s. Whatever it took. The war was wrong, and dying in it, or killing in it, was not something I was willing to do for a country that couldn’t explain why it was asking.

When the final numbers came — they drafted through 160, stopping forty short of my birthday — the relief arrived not as joy but as a slow unclenching. A fist that had been closed for months gradually opening. I was safe. Steve was safe, through different means. But the experience left a mark on both of us, a shared understanding that the institutions we’d been raised to trust — government, university, family — would feed you into a machine without hesitation if the machine required it.

The last year at Penn felt like watching a building condemned.

The war kept escalating. Protests grew larger and angrier. Professors cancelled classes. Some joined the demonstrations. Others retreated into their subjects with a kind of desperate irrelevance — me sitting in a seminar on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason while outside the windows, students marched and chanted and occasionally bled.

* * *

One night, a commotion echoed through the labyrinthine hallways of the Quad dorms. I came out of my room and followed the noise, walking two hundred yards through the connected corridors toward whatever was generating that particular frequency of excited male voices. When I found the source — a line of at least six guys outside a door, some adjusting their clothes, some bouncing on their heels — I asked the nearest one what was going on.

“There’s a girl in there taking all comers,” the guy said, grinning. “No questions asked.”

I turned around and walked the two hundred yards back to my room. I did nothing. Said nothing. Filed no report, told no authority.

* * *

There was a girl named Holly who lived in one of the high-rise dorms they’d thrown up on the edge of campus — the ones we called the skyscrapers, all glass and concrete optimism. We were friendly in that borderline way that never quite became anything. She had a good laugh and an easy way about her, and then one semester she was just gone. No goodbye, no explanation. People disappeared like that then. You didn’t chase it down.

Years later, when the Ira Einhorn story broke — the counterculture guru, the trunk, the body — I learned the victim’s name was Holly. For a long moment I went cold. Then I pieced it together. Wrong Holly. Wrong timeline. The Holly he killed had come to Penn after my time there.

But the cold feeling didn’t entirely go away. Because the truth was, it could have been. Einhorn had been floating around that campus like a planet with its own gravitational field, pulling people into his orbit — especially young women who were drawn to the counterculture and its promises. I’d seen him. Everyone had. He was hard to miss — big, bearded, magnetic, absolutely certain of his own importance. The kind of man that era had no antibodies against.

My Holly disappeared the ordinary way. I never knew why and never asked. That was the thing about that time and that place — the not asking had become a kind of culture. The girl in the Quad hallway. Holly in the skyscraper. You looked away and kept moving.

I stopped caring about grades. The classes my father had arranged — philosophy, French literature — felt like obligations from a world that no longer existed. The one course I’d chosen for myself, a film class, was the only thing that still engaged me. But even that seemed small against the scale of what was happening outside.

In the spring of 1971, the campus shut down. Anti-war protests had reached a pitch that made normal academic operations impossible. Finals were cancelled. Everyone passed. The administration essentially threw up its hands and sent us home.

I don’t remember how I left. I was living off campus by then, in an apartment I can picture but whose exit I cannot. I must have packed a bag — a few clothes, maybe the guitar — and gotten on a train. My stuff stayed behind. Books, records, the accumulated debris of two years. I wouldn’t come back for months. When I did, it was just to collect what was left, the way you’d clear out a room after someone had died.

Not in anger, exactly, and not in triumph. More the way you leave a party that stopped being fun hours ago — quietly, without saying goodbye, already thinking about what comes next.

What came next was the question. I was twenty years old, had no degree, no plan, no money of my own, and a father whose vision for my future — Harvard, graduate school, politics or the Church — had been so thoroughly rejected that the two of us could barely sustain a phone conversation.

I went home to Ledge Acres. But home, I was beginning to understand, was a word that had started to mean less and less. The house was the same. The people in it were coming apart.

→ Next Chapter: Fish Out Of Water

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I came home to Ledge Acres with nothing to show for my time in New York except an IATSE union card and the knowledge that the city wasn’t going to save me. No guitar, no band, no relationship, no plan. Just the same bedroom in the same farmhouse, the same father’s shadow over everything, the same question I’d been unable to answer since Exeter: what was I supposed to do with my life?

The first answer was the most absurd. An elderly woman in Bedford needed a driver, and somehow I landed the job. The arrangement came with an unexpected perk — she let me take her Lincoln Continental home each night, because there was no other way for me to get to work. For a brief period I was piloting a luxury car I didn’t own through the back roads of Westchester, a twenty-year-old with no degree and no prospects driving a vehicle that cost more than most people’s houses.

The end came fast. I needed to retrieve the last of my belongings from Penn, and the Lincoln offered the only solution. The drive to Philadelphia was smooth. The return was a nightmare — construction on the George Washington Bridge had created a massive bottleneck, miles of dead traffic, and I was due to pick her up the next morning. Without thinking through the consequences, I pulled onto the shoulder and drove past the entire backup like a maniac, cars honking, my hands white on the wheel. I made it back, but I was late the next morning. The job lasted maybe two more days.

That was the pattern. Not malice, not laziness — just a fundamental inability to fit inside structures that other people navigated without thinking. The Bedford job was a metaphor I was too young to recognize: borrowing someone else’s vehicle to go retrieve the remnants of a life that hadn’t worked out, then destroying the arrangement through recklessness on the way back.

* * *

After Bedford, I got a job at MicroAcoustics, a speaker company in Elmsford. My mother had to drive me there every morning because I didn’t have a car — the Lincoln having been returned to its rightful owner along with my employment. They put me at the end of a production line as a final quality inspector. Each newly assembled bookshelf speaker would come to me, I’d put on a headset, run tones through it, check that everything was reproducing correctly, then stamp it and send it down the line.

It was deadening work. The kind of job that exists to remind you that you have no marketable skills and no leverage. I didn’t last long there either. It was too much for my mother, the daily drive, and it was just another dead-end with no connection to anything I cared about.

* * *

What saved me — temporarily, in the way things kept temporarily saving me — was Paul Czaja.

Paul had been my teacher at Whitby, back when I was a boy and the world still made a kind of sense. He was the one who’d taught me to sit with a photograph and let whatever needed to come, come. No judgment, no grades, no competition — just an image and the silence to receive it. He’d hand us photographs, carefully chosen, and say: “Pick one that speaks to you. Look at it. Really look. Then write whatever comes.”

That exercise had opened something in me that nothing since — not Exeter, not Penn, not New York — had managed to close entirely. The habit of looking, of letting images generate words, of trusting the space between seeing and saying. Paul had given me that, and now, years later, he offered me something else: a job.

He’d become headmaster at Whitby. He needed a teaching assistant for the creative writing program. The irony wasn’t lost on me — returning to the school I’d been pulled from too early, stepping into the role of the teacher who’d shaped me. But irony was a luxury I couldn’t afford. I needed work, and Paul was offering it.

The first day, facing a classroom of ten-year-olds, I felt like a fraud. But then I pulled out the photographs — Paul’s old collection, the same carefully curated images — and said the words he’d said to me: “Pick one that speaks to you.”

A freckled boy held up a photograph of an empty rowboat on a misty lake. “I don’t know what to write.”

“What do you see?”

“A boat.”

“What else?”

He studied the image. “Maybe... someone just left? Or maybe they’re about to come back?”

“Write about that. Write about the person who isn’t there.”

Teaching became an anchor. Not a calling — I wasn’t built for institutions, even gentle ones like Whitby — but a structure that asked something real of me every day. The children didn’t care about my family name or my dropped-out education or my failure to hold a job in New York. They cared about whether I could help them find words for what they saw, and it turned out I could.

* * *

Through the Whitby teachers I found music again. Roger played harmonica like he was channeling Chicago blues. Bruce, a maintenance guy who’d been hired to paint and plaster, turned out to have session experience in California. We started jamming after hours in the music room — called ourselves Bedrock, played blues rock with the urgency of people who knew how easily music could slip away. It wasn’t the Rock Bottom Blues Band. It was better, because it was simpler. No scene, no parties, no revolving door of strangers. Just a few people making noise together because it felt good.

But the ground was shifting under all of it.

* * *

Papers appeared on the dining room table. Legal documents with words like “dissolution” and “property division.” My parents moved through the house like ghosts occupying the same space but different dimensions. The silences at dinner were no longer the ordinary silences of a family that had run out of things to say. These were the silences of people preparing to become strangers.

I don’t know exactly when I saw it. Somewhere in the limbo between finishing at Whitby and whatever came next. I may still have been teaching. The memory is precise in its content but vague in its timing, the way traumatic things often are — the event seared in, the calendar around it blurred.

Walking past the laundry room. The door half open.

My father has my mother by one arm. His other hand comes across her face. A backhand. Not a punch — a backhand, the way you’d strike someone you considered beneath you. The sound of it — skin on skin, sharp and flat — is what I remember most. That, and her expression. Not surprise. Something worse than surprise. Recognition.

I keep walking. I don’t intervene. I don’t shout. I don’t do anything at all.

What do you do with a moment like that? I’ve had fifty years to think about it and I still don’t have an answer. I was twenty-one and I was afraid of my father — afraid in the body, in the place where childhood teaches you what’s safe and what isn’t. The man who’d slapped me for not learning to read a clock, who’d run from his card table to strike me so hard I fell against the banister and cut my head, who’d made me pitch until my elbow screamed and forced me to West Point and flushed my acid and refused my dreams — that man had trained me, through years of precise physical and psychological intimidation, to do exactly what I did. Keep walking.

* * *

My mother filed for divorce. The house went on the market. Ledge Acres — twenty-five acres, the 1865 farmhouse, the weeping willow, the stone wall, the swimming pool, the apple orchard, thirteen years of whatever we’d been as a family — all of it reduced to a real estate listing.

Everything detonated at once. Three of us had dropped out of college. My middle sister came home from spring break pregnant announcing that she was not going to college. The divorce was swift. My father moved to the city, then remarried outside the faith, sought an annulment that erased twenty years and six children in the eyes of the Church. My mother, overwhelmed, chain-smoking her Kents, tried to hold together what remained. My middle brother was at boarding school. My two youngest siblings were still young enough to need stability and old enough to know it wasn’t coming.

And Nana. Tiny, fierce Nana, who’d crossed the Atlantic with nothing, who’d raised three children alone after her husband died on Boxing Day, who’d moved in with us at Ledge Acres and given us warmth when the house had none to spare. She was in her seventies now, on medication after the seizures, going to the senior center a couple of times a week. She was never quite the same after the grand mal I’d witnessed in the living room — her body seizing, frothing, my mother shoving a wooden spoon between her teeth while I stood there at twelve or thirteen, learning for the first time that the people you love most can be taken from you without warning.

In the summer of 1973, Nana was still alive, still making her little jokes, still singing her songs about men with pancakes tied to their bums. The last time I would ever see her was approaching, and I didn’t know that either.

* * *

I had already decided to go. Steve Ferry’s letters from Santa Rosa kept arriving — the chicken coop, the redwoods, the Russian River. California, the mythical west. Kerouac’s road, still open, still calling. The VisitUSA adventure with Abby had proved that the road was real, that strangers would help you, that you could move through the country and survive.

But the decision wasn’t really about California. It was about what was happening to the house, to the family, to the ground under my feet. You can’t watch your father hit your mother and keep living under his roof. You can’t watch a family dissolve and pretend the walls are still standing. The house was being sold. The marriage was over. My siblings were scattering. There was nothing left to stay for — or more honestly, staying had become unbearable and leaving had become the only act available to me.

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