I was always going to run away from home. Not because of any physical abuse or neglect, but because I started out as a cherished only child, and my parents managed to produce four other contenders to the throne within just a few years. My brothers were noisy and crude and thoroughly overshadowed me in the arena of my parents’ attention. I learned early on that if I pretended to be a nice little boy, my mother’s mother would treat me as if I were special, but this was not enough, and by the time she moved to Florida, I was already in the habit of packing and repacking my miniature Washington Redskins satchel and drafting painstaking versions of the note I was going to leave behind when I left.

I don’t know where I got my romantic notion of Running Away, which was especially ironic considering I never imagined what life might be like if I left my own block. Perhaps that particular paradigm originated with the plucky youths in the books I read, some of them secretly aliens, who were always escaping harsh or humdrum situations and, after a series of adventures or misadventures, stumbling into an esteemed existence. The fires of this fantasy were stoked by my only friend, Deena, the trashy girl next door with whom I maintained an elaborate system of make-believe. Even in that friendship, I didn’t shine—I always played the Tonto to her Lone Ranger or the Priscilla to her Elvis—but I was impressed with the freedom she had even as a prepubescent, allowed to wander around the neighborhood at night or curse in front of her parents. Games played at her house, the architectural twin of ours except going to ruin in a weed-choked tract, always ran the risk of her mother wandering in naked and, it now occurs to me, as high as a kite. My own mother, who made chocolate-chip cookies from a Bisquick recipe and was able to keep track of which pasta shapes each of my brothers loved and/or refused to eat, viewed her slatternly counterpart with revulsion. One of my only vivid memories from that period involves the two of them shrieking at each other from their back doorways, over a chain-link fence.

My parents may not have believed in birth control, but they worked extra hard to make sure that their platoon of children had an idyllic suburban childhood in that hazy era just after Vietnam and Watergate. I vaguely recollect forming secret clubs, building forts, and even riding my bike down to play at the nearby creek, and our road trips to the beach or to Disney World were the stuff of legend, or possibly of cautionary tales, depending upon how large the car was and how prone my brothers and I were to attacking each other at any given time. My constant desire for escape reflected not in the least on my parents’ efforts but said a great deal about my own inability to be satisfied and the growing sense of alienation I was feeling from the world. These are themes that could have easily done me in early on, as I have seen happen to many others who became lost in addiction and hopelessness and wasted potential. I think what saved me was that I ultimately didn’t want to run away from the familiar as much as run toward some grand and special destiny. I was weary of being one of five, of being the Tonto, the Priscilla Presley, or the secret alien. I longed to disappear into a land where I was the hero, the rock star, or the king. My bag wasn't packed in preparation for a journey down the street so much as for a trip through a magic wardrobe or a transporter beam to an orbiting spaceship. Essentially, I was a damned fool, but this penchant for fantasy and escapism served me well later, when I started the torture chamber called junior high and life became almost unbearable.

Twenty years later, I have changed so much in every conceivable way that this story of my murky origin might as well refer to some nameless ghost. But through decades of turmoil and reinvention, the one constant in my life and the source of virtually all the support I ever received has been the people I stupidly tried to push away at the start.