CHAPTER 44 -HOS COME LEAVING

I tried to leave Johnny nine times in the nine months I was with him, a kind of gestation period for enough self-esteem to walk away. How does a wild child learn self-esteem? Life would show me how.

Elizabeth Gilbert said it best: “Never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.”

An itch I didn't even know I had kept drawing me back to him. It had nothing to do with intelligence, this Johhny addiction. I was smart enough to know he was trouble, but the feeling of belonging somewhere, to someone, was my drug. 

I liked stealing for him. I liked being the 'shill' in card games designed to take tourists' money or robbing a hotel room after I checked out and someone else checked in. We were a team against the world.

I guess losing my brother and father had unforeseen psychological impacts. Johnny was Dad, teaching me how to behave within the rules of 'The Life.' He was my brother, helping cultivate the rebel in me. I brought all the loyalty I had for Bryan to Johnny.

The other thing was I had nowhere to go. My mom had signed the Hyde School commitment not to let your kids back home if they left Hyde. I would have to stay out on the streets until I was 20, or so I thought, so I'd never have to return there.

Johnny and I became homeless one morning. Then, telling me nothing, we boarded the train for Yonkers at Grand Central. He had found us a place to live, he said, 'calling in favors.'

"I always take care of my woman," he bragged.

I watched as the city disappeared and foliage began to appear, like that of my childhood in Massachusetts. I pushed down a yearning feeling I had for nature. As kids, the edible stuff fascinated us. Four-leaf clovers delighted us. Light was more than photons, it was a good mood.