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I bought a one-way ticket from the sickly-looking woman who minded the counter at the bus station, and made my way to the back of the bus so no one I knew would see me. This put me in the smoking section, and between the smoke and the bumpy ride I developed a throbbing headache by the time the bus had passed through the Lincoln Tunnel and had snaked up the ramp to the top level of the Port Authority bus terminal.
I had brought along some things to read on the bus. There was a book called Love and Sex in Plain Language, which my mother had given my brother and he had given me along with a warning never to have sex with a girl with large breasts, due to the risk of suffocation. At the time, I believed that there were two ways of making babies. The good way was by love. This explanation was given me by the TV set. I believe the specific show was Family Affair, but the scenario was repeated on all family sit-coms whenever the kids got curious. I understood this to mean that if I were in love with a girl, and she with me, she would automatically become pregnant. The bad, or dirty, way was sex. I didn’t know many of the particulars about sex yet, but I was sure that Love and Sex in Plain Language would tell me all I needed to know.
At the newsstand next to the bus station I bought the latest issue of Mad magazine. I was not being careful with my money—I also bought a buttered onion roll and a large 7-Up when I could easily have brought something from home.
I had no idea what I’d do once I got to New York City; all I knew was that I wanted to run away from home. I was the only child in a house full of grown-ups, all of whom, in fact, had run away at one time or another. Without a word in advance, my father had driven to Florida with my uncle Max for more than a week when Max and aunt Sophie were getting divorced. I never knew what they did there, but it must have been bad because my mother would only mention it in front of company, and then my father would stiffen up as if he’d spilled hot coffee in his lap.
The same year, my sister took off with her friend Shelley. My parents gave her picture to the police—it was really an old picture of the three of us at day camp with me and my brother sliced off—and a few weeks later she and Shelley were picked up hitchhiking in northern California. When she was brought home, she gave me a plastic cocktail stirrer from United Airlines that had a little airplane on top.
While she was gone, Nathan, my brother, was seen by one of my mother’s friends going into the bus station in the middle of the day. The friend called my mother at work, and she got to the station just in time to get him off the bus. When my mother left, some kids at school said it was with a black man. I was told nothing. She was gone, and then she was back.
It was the same with all of them. They went away, and then they came back. There were no fights, no discussions. No one but me wanted to know why anyone else went away, and I was never in a position to ask. I seemed as if the reasons were plain as day, but I couldn’t see them.
I had no plans. When I alighted at the Port Authority, I saw a pinball machine called SNAFU, which had a big green jalopy on the scoreboard, like a machine I had played in the canteen at day camp. I put a quarter in and played for half an hour, the case with my belongings lodged between my feet. The rubber was fresh, and responded to the slightest push, not like the old machine at camp that tilted before you could put any english on the ball. When the game ended, I sat on a bench and finished the television parody, which was of the show All in the Family. They made fun of Archie Bunker’s contrariness by having him support gum disease simply because everyone else was opposed to it.
It wasn’t until I looked outside and saw how dark it was that I thought about where I would sleep. I knew I hadn’t enough money for a hotel room. I should have asked my sister where she slept when she was hitchhiking cross-country, but even if it had occurred to me to do so, we never talked much about anything and it would have been hard to bring up the subject. There were halfway houses and shelters that were advertised on TV late at night, but they were all named after saints and ladies of things so I didn’t think I’d be let in. All this sudden planning made me wonder where I would go to school the next day. I hadn’t considered that running away would have any effect on my daily routine; I’d had no clear picture in my mind what the life of a runaway was like. This was in the days before all those after-school specials on TV.
My mother’s two sisters lived with their families in the Bronx on opposite ends of a huge co-op apartment complex. I had classified them as the”cool” cousins and the “straight” cousins. In camp I used to say the word ”cool” with two syllables—”coo-ell,” and that was how I pronounced it in my mind when I thought about the Mosses. They were coo-ell. My brother told me they screwed all the time and that they smoked grass. Nathan smoked all the time, and I wanted to, too, but he said I couldn’t until I was a man. He told me I would be a man when I had hair all over my balls. At night, I would examine my boyish, hairless cock, wishing the tiny bumps would sprout hairs. I let my head hair grow long so I would look cool when I was ready to smoke grass. I was pudgy and the long hair made me look like a girl. Once when I was walking in town by a construction site, the workers whistled at me and made gestures I didn’t understand. Nathan never had any problems; he looked like Neil Young.
The Steinbergs were not cool. Uncle Asher was a lawyer and aunt Deborah was a housewife. Even their kids weren’t cool. One was studying to be a rabbi and the other went to a military high school. We always stayed with the Mosses when we visited, and we’d walk over to the Steinbergs’ for a formal dinner. We’d have to wear yarmulkehs and say the prayers over the wine and bread, then we’d go back to the Mosses’ and have fun.
I saw that it was almost eight-thirty and decided to go to the Mosses’. I figured they wouldn’t call my parents if I showed up at their door late at night without warning. I took the escalator down to the subway and asked someone how to get to the Bronx. He said he was going there, and I could come with him. His name sounded like Habib, and he said he was from Lebanon. He had a strange accent but spoke perfect English. He bought me a token and sat me down next to him on the train. Habib kept asking me if I was hungry, and I kept saying “no.” He made me uncomfortable, but if I didn’t stay with him I would have been lost. When we came out of the subway, he led me into a delicatessen and ordered some things from the man behind the counter. “Are you sure I can’t get you something?” he asked me.
“I have to get to my cousins’,” I said. “They’re waiting for me.”
“It’s a long walk from here,” he said. ‘I’m going to eat something and then I’ll take you. You should have something, too.” Except for his accent, he sounded just like an announcer on TV.
I looked into the glass case and selected macaroni salad. I was pretty hungry, but I was beginning to get anxious about getting to the Mosses’. Also, Habib kept placing his hand on my shoulder. Because my father never made fatherly gestures, I wasn’t used to them and Habib’s hand made me squirm. I’d let it sit there for a moment, then I’d move from under it, pretending to look at something on a shelf. Finally the man handed Habib a paper bag, and we left. We went half a block, then Habib led me into a building.
“We’re home,” he said.
His apartment had very high ceilings and white walls on which were hung bright paintings and framed prints from exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art. It looked just like urban apartments I had seen on TV shows, but it had a strong and unfamiliar spicy smell to it. There were two other men there, dark-skinned like Habib but not as old. I decided they were his brothers. One sat at the kitchen table reading the New York Post. The other was sleeping on a couch. He was wearing an orange bathrobe which had fallen open. His legs and balls were covered with thick, black hair and his cock was very long and almost rigid. Nobody seemed embarrassed by this, so I tried not to notice, but my eyes were continually drawn back to it.
I ate some of the macaroni salad, and then Habib asked if I felt like a bath. I complained that I was already late, but he said that the bath would make me feel better. The water was already running in the tub, filling the bathroom with steam. He put his hand on my shoulder again, then began to pull my tee-shirt over my head. This is when I realized he was trying to have sex with me. I pulled my shirt down and said, “No, I’m a boy. A boy!”
“Please take a bath,” he implored. “I won’t watch. You may lock the door.”
The man at the table looked over his paper at us, smiling as if at a lovers’ quarrel. “It’s a nice bathtub,” he said.
“I don’t want to take a bath.” I didn’t want to cry, but my voice cracked and my eyes were full of water. “I want to go to my cousins’. I want to go.”
I put on my denim jacket and picked up my bag. Habib touched me on the cheek. “O.K.,” he said. “I’ll take you to your cousins’.” He put his coat on and we went down the stairs. He put his arm around me and led me back toward the subway station. I asked if we didn’t want to go the other way. He said, “It’s too far to walk. I’ll take you to the train, but let us kiss good-bye here.”
“But I’m not a girl.” I thought he didn’t understand, or that maybe in Lebanon men kissed, like in France. I knew I could have run away and got safely to the subway, but I stayed and raised my cheek for him to kiss me. Habib put his hand on my chin and turned my mouth to his mouth. Then he did something that Nathan had told me to do if I ever kissed a girl. I pulled away from him and ran all the way to the subway station. He did not follow. I stopped on the stairs and spit and wiped my mouth with my sleeve.
When my breath returned, I asked the man in the booth which train I should take for the co-op. I still didn’t know how to get to the co-op from the station, but I was afraid to ask the men who sat behind opened newspapers in the car I had entered. I went through to the next car and saw a woman sitting alone. Under her blue windbreaker she wore a nurse’s uniform. she was looking up at the line of advertisements. I asked her if she knew how to get to the co-op. She continued to stare at the ads, most of which were in Spanish. I asked again, and she looked at me. Deciding I was all right, and maybe guessing I was a runaway, she helped me. She got off at the station with me and put me on a bus that stopped where I was going, instructing the driver where to let me off as if she were my mother. I wanted to kiss her, but I was already on the bus. I waved surreptitiously, so no one else on the bus could see me, and she smiled. I kept thinking afterwards that I should have kissed her, if only just to make her deception seem the more real.
The bus let me off at the shopping plaza in the co-op. The stores were all closed, but the lobby was open. I knew where I was now. I knew which building housed the Mosses and which the Steinbergs. It was eleven o’clock. There was an arcade game there that I’d played with my cousin Alex Moss, where you sit in a bucket seat and steer a plastic car in front of a screen while the road rolls by behind. There is a stick shift and a gas pedal, and the object is to make the road go by as quickly as possible. When you go too fast you have to shift into a higher gear or you blow the engine, ending the game. I wanted to play awhile before I went to the Mosses’, to make it be too late for them to call and wake my parents.
I didn’t have any quarters. There was a policeman walking around and a group of older kids sitting on a bench talking and laughing. I asked the policeman for change, but he didn’t have. He didn’t seem a bit curious that a twelve-year-old kid would be hanging around the plaza alone with a piece of luggage at eleven o’clock at night, but maybe he was just a security guard. He just went on with his rounds.
I didn’t want to ask the group of kids for money because I was afraid of them, so I waited around on another bench for it to be late enough for the Mosses. I read around in Love and Sex in Plain Language, coming across words like “fellatio” and “vagina,” which I read as “vah-gun-nuh” and did not connect to the “puh-jy-nuh” my brother had told me about. I examined the strange words and a drawing of the female sex organs that looked like weird handlebars, then took off for the Mosses’.
As I came around the corner of a building, someone slung an arm across my chest and held a knife at my back. He said it was a knife, but uncle Asher said later that it was probably just the guy’s thumbnail. He said not to talk. Keeping the one hand behind my back, he lowered the other and emptied my pockets. He fisted a wad of crumpled one-dollar bills and asked if there was any more. I shook my head. He said not to move for five minutes of he’d kill me. I counted sixty Mississippis five times, though I had heard him run away as soon as he finished talking.
I began to cry out loud. I turned and walked past two buildings, entering the third through a door with a sign over it that read: Fallout Shelter. I ran to the stairs and up the five flights, then out into the morbid echoey hallway. I jumped when the door slammed shut behind me. I raced to a door and rapped the knocker until uncle asher opened the door in his pajamas, his wiry, greying beard mashed against his face on one side.
Uncle Asher called my parents from his study while aunt Deborah made me a bowl of beef bouillon. When she went away, I listened at the door and heard him lecturing my mother in steady, forceful tones, pronouncing her name, Esther, like a slap. Then he said something like, “Whether the pitcher hits the stone or the stone hits the pitcher, it’s bad for the pitcher.” I have no idea what he meant by this. After saying it, he was silent for a long time.
My mother and brother came to get me. My father couldn’t come because he had a sales meeting in Syracuse the next morning. No one ever asked why I ran away, even though I had a speech ready. I would tell them I ran away to keep my mother and father together, because they were fighting all the time. This, I believe, I got from Peter on The Brady Bunch. Of course, my parents’ happiness had had nothing to do with my running away, but then neither did anything else I could think of. It was simply my turn.
Within three years, my parents were divorced, and my sister and Nathan were both living on their own. My father left the area, so my mother is looking after me until I go away to college. She sold the house and moved us into a cramped condominium. There is only one bedroom, and it remains vacant most nights while my mother prepares for the life that will be her own when I leave. I have what the condo people call the TV room: an open, windowless alcove. We are not mother and son here, not friends, not strangers.
Go back to my home page and never stray again.
When I was twelve years and a few weeks old, I packed some clothing into one of my father’s sample cases, pocketed the money I had collected for the week on my paper route, no more than thirty dollars, to be sure, and ran away. No one was home when I left. My father, I knew, was making his rounds in one of the towns through which the bus would pass on its way to New York City. My mother was behind the receptionist’s window at the professional building. My sister and brother were senior and junior in high school and they came home when they pleased. I missed Hebrew school to catch the four o’clock bus.
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© 1989 David Cohen
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