MosesWrites

Running Away

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It began with butter.

One afternoon in early November of 1997, I wanted to make cookies. I forget why, but I knew I wanted to bake something after we ate dinner, and so I asked my mother if we had butter, or if I needed to go to the store. She said we did.

When the time came, I couldn’t find the butter. I had an enormous mess of emotions, since we had moved in with her new husband earlier in the year. I felt lost and angry and hopeless and I had no sense of control as a teenager hoping to make my way in the world.

My mother had married Peter Lawson Kennedy, born in New York City, raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a graduate of Allen Stevenson (plus member of the Knickerbocker Grays), Hotchkiss, Harvard, and Columbia Law School. Peter never had a child of his own. Peter offered a new world of wealth and wonder yet also one of rage and resentment.

But back to butter: I complained to my mother, angry that I now had to go out, and since it was late, to drive a fair distance to a market that would still be open. She, trying to make amends, volunteered to go on her own. You should go, I probably said, since you made a mistake. Peter didn’t take kindly to this, and as with most all family arguments, something trivial manifested a chasm of ill-will and unprocessed scorn. I’m sure shouting ensued, even if, as the youngest of three children, I have always been conflict-averse and as a young person felt profoundly unsettled by my older siblings’ bickering with each other and our parents. Ultimately, I gave up, I couldn’t care, I made no cookies, I simply went to my room and shut the door.

Yet I resolved I would leave. I couldn’t live like this: I had been stricken with anxiety, awakening in the middle of the night with panic attacks, sweating, my chest constricted and unable to breath. I had been sneaking alcohol in unhealthy ways. I had been embittered by Peter’s control of our lives, even if he afforded my mother and I with opportunities unlike anything I could have dreamed of previously: fancy trips, fancy meals, fancy cars, fancy friends, fancy everything. I had been lured into learning how to SCUBA dive, because Peter wanted a companion, someone he could bring along and show off to his buddies, and also because I believe he genuinely wanted a friend, a son, someone who might love him. I didn’t want to dive, but I did, too. Same with sailing on his boat, or taking trips to the rifle range, or cooking risotto or learning that Leica cameras exist and how to take an excellent photograph.

But that night in early November, I decided I would leave. I must have been plotting earlier, even subconsciously, because I knew that once I turned eighteen, I would be entitled to the monthly Social Security survivors benefits owed after my father’s death. Before eighteen, they went to my mother; once an adult, they would be mine, until I graduated from high school. So, with something like eight or nine hundred dollars a month, I decided I could figure out some way to live that wasn’t at Peter’s home, albeit a beautiful three-story, architect-designed red brick edifice from the 1920s, at the end of Bluff Avenue in Edgewood, with a terraced lawn and manicured grounds that stretched down to Narraganset Bay.

Because I had been living in Cranston and still going to high school in Lincoln, skirting the letter of the law and claiming as my residence the home my mother still owned, and where I had lived since my birth but which had been overtaken by my brother, every morning I had to commute about twenty or thirty minutes, onto route 95, then route 146, and finally to school, often having picked up a Dunkin Donuts coffee along the way. I always left early to avoid traffic and to avoid explaining why I was coming from such a distance.

The next morning, per usual, before Peter and my mother had gotten up, I drove off, but instead of getting on the highway, I just went to a local breakfast spot and waited until I knew they would have gone for the day. Then I returned, packed up my computer and clothes and as much of what I thought I needed, whatever I could stuff in my car, and after that I headed to school. While a little late, I had made wonderful connections with the ladies in the front office, and I had let them know in advance, so I had no problems with my tardiness. Again, now 18, no need to check with my mother, and also they knew enough of my personal circumstances to know better than to pry or disclose.

That afternoon, I topped up my car with gas and went to the grocery store to buy a pile of things: I had a credit card linked to my mother’s account, but I knew that given my intentions, access to it wouldn’t last long. Still, I didn’t have much of a plan from there. Perhaps to find a cheap motel?  Could I find an apartment to rent?

I was naïve about anyone leasing to an eighteen-year-old, still in high school, as well as the fact that you probably needed first and last month’s rent, a security deposit, and more than a modest monthly Social Security check before anyone would let you move in—and for how long? I had no idea, despite my determination.

I ended up at the house of a dear friend, in part because I knew and trusted her parents, and also because I knew that her father had some rental properties: perhaps I could live in one of them.

As I unloaded my plight on my friend’s mother, I can’t imagine what she had to process in her adult mind. Yet I made one thing clear: I wouldn’t be going home. Sure, my mother might be worried if I didn’t show up, but that wasn’t my problem. In fact, I relished her dread and guilt and worry. Finally, I agreed, a call could be made to say that I was safe, but not to disclose where I was, and only to say that there should be no expectation that I would return at any point.

With a generosity that I still find hard to fathom to this day, not least because of the risk it entailed, my friend’s parents agreed that I could live in a small in-law apartment in their basement, at least until I got things sorted. So, I had a place to stay, warm and dry and safe, and I realized then and forever never to take such a thing for granted.

I can’t say I had an instantly healthier life—I ate mostly fast food, and I had a stash of rice crispy treats and Mt Dew, but I stopped drinking any alcohol, and I could finally, more or less, sleep through the night without hyperventilating awake in the darkest hours of aloneness. I only had what I had been able to stuff in my car, but I didn’t need all that much to survive.

Life continued, but certain moments cut me like I had never been cut before. Peter changed the answering machine, he changed the locks, he reprogrammed the garage door. I no longer had a home. Unsurprisingly, the credit card stopped working, too.

Life continued, and I needed to apply to college and to complete high school. I had thrown myself into extracurricular activities because they offered an escape from all the terrible things I didn’t want to confront. As class treasurer, as yearbook editor, as production manager for the annual variety show, I used every minute of my time to do things that allowed me to find refuge with people who valued my contributions and who treated me with kindness. Few if any had a sense of the full scope of what I endured, but they knew enough to cut me some slack when I needed it, like the janitor who let me have any key I needed to open any door around the school, and the teachers who never told anyone that I had those keys.

I had few close friends, but I had friendly connections with all my classmates, whether the jocks or the cool kids or the kids in the band, the kids who applied ED to the Ivy League and those who skipped school more often than they attended. I gave of myself without asking for much in return, which led to the greatest, oddest, kindest, and most painful honor of my life. Though not a football player, in fact never having played on any sports team at all, and never having had a girlfriend, I was voted homecoming king, just days after I had left home and started living in my friend’s basement.

Shock and shame, I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t care about these kinds of things, if I knew they mattered deeply to others. But I also knew for sure that I didn’t want to be in the spotlight, literally or figuratively, my broken, shattered self revealed for all to see. I remember a dazed sense of sadness and, finally, a friend saying I needed to smile and to hold hands with the homecoming queen, herself a truly sweet and wonderful young women who I had known since elementary school, and to put the crown on my head and to have our photo taken. I only have the faintest flashes of memories from that evening, as if a flash-bang grenade had gone off and entirely disoriented my perception of reality.

Life continued, and at some point, I emailed my sister, who at that time had embarked on a post-college trip in South and South-East Asia. She had already had her own falling out with my mother and Peter, even if we somehow attended her graduation from Berkeley earlier that year. My running away led her to swoop into mother mode, and to lay plans for a return to Rhode Island after she arrived back in the US: we would ultimately rent an apartment together in Providence at the start of 1998.

Yet before that, I still needed to apply to college. I had little idea of what I should do, but I had a couple college of guidebooks, and I knew where my friends wanted to go. Bowdoin, in Brunswick, Maine, which we had driven by countless times enroute to our home in Boothbay Harbor, embodied for me what a college ought to look like, though I had never even stepped foot on its campus, no less taken a tour. Beyond that, I went through the filing cabinets in the guidance office and picked out some brochures that looked nice. Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, caught my attention, too, because of an excellent write-up in some top colleges book, plus it was far away, had a focus on academics (I knew at the very least I didn’t want big sports or fraternities or the like) and, most importantly, I knew it was the only college in that book to which, based on my rather uneven academic record, I had any hope of being admitted.

Somehow, I would need to explain my ups and downs, to provide some assurance that, while I had many a C and hadn’t been able to sustain advanced math and science courses, I still had potential. I had strong testing though it could have been stronger: I had been hungover the morning I took the SAT for the one any only time, and I had forgotten my calculator: I knew enough not to write about that in the section soliciting additional information. I didn’t want to make any excuses; I felt a sort of defiant pride in the choices I had made to care for my family, to contribute to my school, and in many cases to have prioritized immediate personal needs over what I had seen as senseless busywork. If I liked a subject, or more so, a teacher, I would try my best. But if I didn’t, I would do the bare minimum needed to pass. I could be obnoxious and antagonistic. I had zero sense of strategy, that AP Biology probably mattered more than a journalism elective (in the eyes of an admission committee), even if I found the latter much more satisfying. I had no savvy when it came to expressing my leadership abilities or any of the adult skills I had learned in spades. I had little effective guidance as to what a college might want to see from a student.

On the floor of my friend’s basement, I arranged all the various forms one needed, all still paper back then, copies of the Common Application and recommendation requests and various supplements. Some I wrote by hand, and some, the ones I really cared about, I typed on a typewriter. I addressed envelopes and licked stamps. But I didn’t have enough money to apply to all those colleges, and I couldn’t get a fee waiver because clearly my family had the money to pay.

That problem became the first truce with my mother. She agreed, she would write checks for the application fees. I sent a list, threw in some wild cards to make my true intentions less apparent, and I might have even planned to use my own money for one or two I didn’t want her or Peter to know about. Yet part of the compromise meant seeing each other in person, if only briefly. We met on neutral ground, in a McDonald’s parking lot on the East Side of Providence.

I should have known better: that initial truce became further tragedy.

Of course, and I realize all the more so in retrospect, she was heartbroken that I had left, if at that time I viewed it as a matter of mostly superficial shame, something that she needed to hide from her friends: who can openly admit that their child has run away?

Peter had been her knight in shining armor, not simply ensuring financial security for the rest of her life but also giving her access to the sort of life she had dreamed of, with the nicest clothes and a house cleaner who came three times a week and memberships in the poshest clubs. My father had provided us with a very privileged life, but nothing like this, and my mother had lost her mother, and her husband, and her father in short order. She needed not to think, not to worry, not to have any independent identity beyond mindlessly morphing into the newest Mrs Kennedy. Though at that time, as an eighteen-year-old, I only saw detestable striving and dishonest deference. I despised her happiness because I knew it couldn’t have been happiness, at least what I imagined happiness ought to be. If she wished to pretend so fully and so falsely, I felt I could only despise all the more how she sacrificed any sense of integrity that a mother ought to model for her child.

I gave the cruelest of ultimatums: you have a choice, I said, Peter or your children. She said Peter. I went back to my car. I drove away. I stopped. I balled with tears and shook with heartbreak.

Life continued, and at the start of 1998 I settled into my new commute from Fox Point to Lincoln. I loved being within walking distance of the Brown University campus and in particular, the Brown Bookstore. I quickly figured out which bars wouldn’t ask for ID, and I occasionally became cool by inviting a few friends from my small town to enjoy the fun of the “big” city. I ate falafel and sushi and Indian food that, while less ten miles from my childhood home, felt like a new world of sophistication.

Most importantly, I found constancy in the routines of everyday life, of grocery shopping and utility bills. I felt prepared: all those lessons from my grandfather, having sat with him while he balanced his checkbook, having mastered the intricacies of maximizing a coupon’s value, having learned how to fix things and to sand and to paint, having managed all that I managed in my mother’s life before she married Peter. I felt like I had regained a measure of control in my own life, and I began to understand what I actually needed and wanted as a mostly independent person.

As I remember it, I applied ED to Reed and got deferred. But I had started to find greater fulfilment in my academic work. Something clicked while writing a paper about The Great Gatsby. I didn’t need to summarize the plot or follow strictly a five-paragraph structure with a thesis statement and topic sentences. I could analyze. I could narrate an argument, created with quotations, that brought the book alive. I could make Gatsby my own.

I redoubled and deepened my fascination with history. In tenth grade, I had written my first proper research paper on Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, using skills honed on an essay in ninth grade government class (on the Supreme Court case Plessy v Ferguson, which I had learned about the year before, and which, as I remember, is the only and only thing from school I ever discussed with my father). But I hadn’t really done real research before.

Since my early childhood, I had been captivated by the opening lines of the Decleration of Independence. I would even stand on a chair in our basement and read it aloud, trying to articulate those words in a way that intoned their profound meaning. Like John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy, Paine’s own rhetorical genius captivated me.

Around that time, too, I also had the good fortune of having come to know a professor at Brown, Ken Hart, who also went to the First Unitarian Church, the same church where my father had been President, and where he was memorialized. Ken gave me my first glimpse of actual academic inquiry, brining me into the stacks of Brown’s Rockefeller Library and encouraging me to pull any and every possibly useful book from the shelves. I read microfilm for the first time, and I became familiar with how to search in old-fashioned card catalogues.

In my senior year, for my AP European History course, I ended up writing a paper on Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, because during one of my visits to the Brown Bookstore I had found Ben Kiernan’s then recently published monograph. I justified it to my teacher as an extension of European colonialism. I remember my shock that something so horrible had happened in the world, and had happened relatively recently, yet I had never heard about it before. I only knew a little about the Vietnam War, but nothing of the auto-genocidal campaigns that arose in its westerly neighbor, enabled in no small part by United States bombing. I searched for news articles.

I tried to make sense of that moral calamity, of evil in the world.

I remember, too, just as the World Wide Web was becoming a thing, finding Kiernan’s biography on the Yale History Department website, and sending him an email expressing my appreciation for his book. He gave a very kind reply; I don’t imagine that at that time many high school students wrote emails to historians of modern Southeast Asian history. His encouragement meant the world to me.

I ran away into history, too. Yet I also found a greater depth of humanity.

I also, finally, received a large envelope with confetti and an acceptance letter from Reed. I believe my sister advocated on my behalf, and I also know now that at that time, the bar of entry for a male student who didn’t need any financial aid wasn’t too high. So, I got lucky, and I felt relief that I could run away even further, all the way to the west coast. The greater the distance from the anguish of my adolescence the better, even if I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

For my graduation, I reached yet another truce with my mother. She and Peter could attend, but that was it. I knew I couldn’t avoid the reality of their appearing at a public event, but I could set clear boundaries: the ceremony only, and I think I might have allowed a photo. Keeping up appearances. But no warm embrace, no chatting with friends, no dinner afterward. My mother shed tears, though clearly not tears of joy.

Life continued, and that summer I stumbled into a job with the Lincoln School District, helping to repair computers, since by late 1990s standards I had a modicum of technical skill. I got paid something like $6.50 an hour to clean lint from the rollers in pre-optical mice, to dislodge crayons from disk drives, to reformat hard drives that had been corrupted. I got to come and go as I liked, to take long lunch breaks, and to read books while files copied at an absurdly slow pace. I got to pirate software and hone my obsession with fonts and formatting. I had, on the whole, an amazing summer.

The last and final truce came when I finally headed off to college. For whatever reason, my mother wanted to drop me off at the airport, and I would leave my Nissan in the Bluff Avenue driveway while I studied in Oregon. So, I drove over, early in the morning, and I reloaded my bags into Peter’s car.

The brief fifteen- or twenty-minute ride to the airport passed in silence. I unloaded my luggage by myself; neither Peter nor my mother got out of the car. They simply dropped me at the curb. I said goodbye, and I didn’t look back. Yet I have since realized that no matter how far I may run away, the need to look back will remain inescapable.