Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 14    I’ll never forget the act of kindness put forward by one of my classmates
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My junior year found me embroiled in a full-fledged police investigation. I was tipped off by a cop-wannabe.

I don’t know what they would’ve uncovered if anything. I felt guilty about some things and I was malicious and mean at times, but never intentionally hurt anyone … well that’s not really true is it? I set a car afire. I stole a science project even though I returned it. I tried to pock a teacher in the head with a snowball. I threw eggs at people and damaged property.

Still, at the time, I viewed myself as a normal kid and carried on routinely; each morning delivering newspapers, catching the milkman for a 25¢ quart of chocolate milk (when I didn’t steal one out of somebody’s milk box), going home and eating two eggs, and then hiking across the fields to school, where I saw a red fox one day. He jumped impossibly through the square opening in a wire fence. I didn’t believe my eyes, but saw the tuft of hair left behind, so it really happened. Nature is truly magic.

The cop wannabe rousted me from bowling with my brother one afternoon. He pulled me away saying he wanted to talk to me ‘without any of my boys around.’ What the fuck was that … he thinks I’m a gang leader?

I’m sure he was given the nod by the police, and a short time later he used some neighborhood kids to set-up a break-in ‘plot’ at the boat-shop. He followed me around in his car when I was on my bike. He pulled me into his car one day and said we could settle ‘the whole thing’ out of court. All I had to do is tell him about my crimes … so I confessed to shoplifting a couple pens when I was 11, and started thinking real hard but couldn’t remember anything else. Then he said these exact words, ‘It’s getting hot for you downtown,’ and then he gave me a choice: come clean or ‘sweat it out.’

I said I would sweat-it-out, and that seemed pretty serious at 17, but unknown to him, in my back pocket, we were moving to New Jersey, and I would finish high school there. And that’s what happened, we moved away two months later and I was gone for a year before coming back to attend college.

Before we left, something happened and I’ll never forget the act of kindness put forward by one of my classmates. This fellow later became a respected columnist and wrote for several newspapers. After hearing we were moving, he offered to let me live with his family so I could graduate with my class. To this day I remain speechless; both for the remarkable offer and for how little kinship I felt for ‘graduating class.’

This guy might have been trying to keep me in town so the police could close their case against me.

It’s hard to know the difference one ‘yes’ or ‘no’ might play in the fate of one’s life.

What would happen if I stayed with my classmate’s family? What if I were removed from the tornado of my home dysfunction, and placed among civilized people? Would I have become a doctor, or worse yet a lawyer, and found what was lacking inside me? On the other hand, by stepping back from his offer, maybe I selected the right course and became what I was supposed to become.
 
One thing is for certain, I couldn’t leave my mother alone, and she needed her family around her, and we needed her.

Today I wonder if this empathic relationship with her was the reason I couldn’t make things happen for myself? Was it a dysfunctional cycle that stopped me from having or realizing dreams? I don’t think it’s the full answer, but it’s a part, and I never cried at her funeral, and she never got to see my house. It’s just the way things happened.

Chapter 15) New Jersey-creased-pants
Chapter 16-17) My last year of high school ... my family disintegrates
Index of chapters