On the Run to San Diego
Chapter 1
When I was small, I used to have bad dreams about my dad. I had this one bad dream over and over. It was about me drowning. In the dream, I would be in the water trying to swim, and there would be this whirlpool, like a huge version of what you see in the toilet when you flush it, or like in the bathtub or sink when the water goes down. It starts to swirl around as it goes down. But in my dreams, the whirlpool would be so huge I felt tiny, like a small insect getting flushed down a toilet. In the dreams, I was always swimming in some deep water at first – some kind of lake or something. My dad would be in a fishing boat near me. Then the water would begin to swirl around me, sucking me down toward the center or the whirlpool. I would always scream for help.
“Dad, please help me! I’m drowning!”
But my dad was always too busy messing with his fishing gear, and he would never even look over at me. I would whirl around, finally getting sucked down into the whirlpool. Then all of a sudden, as my head was going under, I would wake up with my heart beating so hard it hurt my chest.
Part of the dream is based on real life. My dad really does like to fish. All my life, he would go out fishing at night and stay out until the next day, almost every weekend. When we were little, he took me and my younger brother, Danny, a couple of times, but he didn’t really want to. Our mom made him take us. She said he needed to spend more time with his boys, that we didn’t even know him. That’s pretty much true. All he ever does is work all day from before sunrise until ten or eleven at night. Then on the weekends, he fishes.
When we went fishing with him those few times, it was really boring with nothing to do. Danny and I didn’t catch anything for about two hours. Then we got sleepy and fell asleep. When we woke up late at night, we were cold and sore from sleeping on the wet sand. My dad would still be fishing and drinking some beer and smoking cigarettes.
The reason I’m thinking lately about my old dream about drowning is because I had that dream again just a few days ago. Only this time, Danny was in the dream, too. He was in a boat with our dad, and he was trying to help me by telling me to swim faster to the boat.
“Come on, swim, Carl, swim faster,” Danny screamed. But the strong whirlpool still kept pulling me away from the boat and down into the vortex. My hands and feet swam as fast as they could move toward the boat but the water was too strong, pulling me deeper as the ship moved farther away.
“Stop the ship, Dad, please,” I heard Danny’s voice. But the boat kept getting farther away. Finally, I woke up with my heart hurting, just like it would always happen when I was young.
It’s strange that Danny would be in the dream this time because he’s been dead for nearly two years now. I don’t even miss him that bad anymore, not as bad as I used to. He was killed in a car accident. And then the police said it was my mom’s fault because Danny didn’t have on his seat belt. She had told him to keep it on. I know because I was there and saw the whole thing. But Danny would hardly ever listen when people told him to do something. It wasn’t that he was disobedient or defiant. It was only because he was always thinking about something else in his head and didn’t ever hear half of the things people said to him. Danny was really smart and creative, so he was always thinking instead of paying attention.
When we crashed, Danny went out the window and another car ran over him. I saw him after that when he was all mashed up on the street and already dead. My mom and I both saw him dead. I used to have some scary dreams about that, too. I’ve learned not to let my mind think about what we saw that day when I’m awake, but when I’m asleep, I guess my mind thinks about pretty much whatever it wants to think about.
My mom got into a lot of trouble with the law because of Danny not having his seat belt on. They acted like he was some little kid who needed help putting his seat belt on and my mom failed to strap him in. But he was ten when he died – old enough to keep his own seat belt fastened – and I was eleven. We were only fourteen months apart in our age. Even though my mom had told Danny to wear his belt, the judge still said it was her fault and she had to get on probation for a year because of that.
Another bad thing that happened from the accident is that I had to quit living with my mom. After Danny died, my dad said he was going to get a divorce from my mom, and he got a good lawyer so that, when they went to court for the divorce, my dad was able to show that Mom wasn’t a good enough parent to keep me with her. I don’t know why my dad acted like he wanted to keep me so much. He’s never home anyway.
My dad works as an engineer for road construction. If you ever drive some place where there’s a big road construction, my dad might be the one telling all the workers what to do. All my life, we’ve been moving around to be close to where my dad is working. Like he would have a big construction job near some little town in Alabama. My mom and Danny and I would all have to move there. Danny and I would start in a new school where we didn’t know anyone. Then pretty soon – maybe eight months or a year later – my dad would get finished with the construction job in Alabama, and we would have to move all over again, maybe to Colorado this time or New Jersey – wherever the work was. And we would have to start all over in a new school where we didn’t know anybody and kids would pick on us because we were new. We hardly ever had any good friends. That’s one of the reasons why Danny and I were really good buddies even though he was more than a year younger than me. We would always hang out and play together. I didn’t mind him being younger at all.
Now it’s just me and my dad, which really means just me since he’s never there. We’ve been living in Memphis, Tennessee, where my dad’s running a big job that’s supposed to take over two years to finish. That’s going to be longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere, if we really do stay that long. But my dad is kind of famous for finishing jobs faster than anyone says he can. That’s because he’s always working, and he makes his construction crew work extra hard. He says he saves his company lots of money by finishing faster, and that’s why they pay him so much.
Dad makes so much money that we live in a really big house in a fancy neighborhood, and I get to go to a private school now – Saint Paul’s Academy. It’s okay at that school I guess. At least nobody there tries to beat me up or steal my stuff. It’s run by an Episcopalian church, and all the kids who go there are kind of rich. This one kid’s dad is the Mayor of Memphis. He’s one of the only black kids in the school even though he doesn’t talk like a black kid. Most of the kids there are white even though Memphis is mostly a black city. There are only about five other black kids there, and they kind of hang out together, but the mayor’s son hangs out with all the richest white kids instead. I heard him say once that most black people are poor because they don’t have enough initiative to work hard and improve themselves. I always wondered why someone would talk like that about his own race. I think maybe he doesn’t know what he’s talking about because my dad says a lot of the guys who work for him are black, and they work harder than anyone.
Most of the students at St Paul’s Academy have gone there since they were in preschool, so they have some pretty tight friendships. There are a lot of little groups of good friends – little cliques – who won’t let anyone else into their groups. They’re kind of like gangs except these groups are for preppy types and there’s no fighting or tattooing required. I don’t really fit in to any of the groups. There are three of us eighth graders who are new at the school this year, so we hang out together even though we really don’t have much in common.
One of my two new friends at school is Lisa Boudreaux. Lisa’s a little bit chubby, but she’s been losing weight, and she’s really nice. She play’s the oboe really well. (An oboe is this long skinny instrument with a reed at one end and you blow into it.) In fact, Lisa’s so good that she’s already in the Memphis Symphony Orchestra as an eighth grader, and Memphis is a huge city with more than a million people in it. Lisa claims she doesn’t even like playing the oboe – that her mom has always had to force her to practice. She let me try to play it once, but all I could get out of it was a couple of little squawks.
I’ve been noticing lately that Lisa seems to be starting to like me as more than just a friend (if you know what I mean). But I didn’t really feel that way about her. She would sometimes try to mash herself up against me like she was wanting to hug or cuddle or something.
Besides me and Lisa, the other one who hangs out with us is Ben Adler. Everyone calls him Benny. Benny’s family is Jewish. They just have him in the Episcopal school because the quality of education there is so good. One of the reasons I like Benny is that he reminds me of my brother, Danny, before he was killed. It’s not just because their names sound the same. It’s because Benny always has his mind elsewhere, a million miles away, thinking about some story he’s read or some story he’s writing. Just like Danny, he’s very creative. As a matter of fact, Benny is helping me write this story about running away to San Diego. He’s not telling me what to write but he’s just reading through it and giving me advice about how to reword it.
After school gets out every day, I would almost always take the bus straight over to Benny’s house for a while instead of going home. I do that so often that, when I went straight home after school last Thursday, my babysitter, Mrs. Koonce, seemed shocked to see me.
“What are you doing here?” She asked me.
“I live here, remember?” I told her.
Mrs. Koonce is like sixty-something. She’s okay I guess. At least she lets me do pretty much whatever I want to do as long as she knows about it first and it doesn’t get her in trouble with my dad. You may be wondering why an eighth grader even needs a baby-sitter. Well, I’ve always wondered the same thing. Mrs. Koonce refers to herself as my “care-giver,” but I think that may be over-stating her role. I’ve never believed she really cared all that much. She mostly just lies around in the recliner, watching television and talking to her friends and family members on the telephone. Whenever I come through the living room, she holds the phone up closer to her mouth and starts talking more quietly into it, watching me with a look that says, “Get lost.”
Whenever I try to ask her something like “What am I microwaving for my dinner tonight,” she looks really put out. She raises her painted-on fake eyebrows up real high with a warning look and holds her index finger straight up in the air in my general direction indicating that I should shut up and wait for an hour or however long it takes her to finally get off her phone call. I once saw her hold her finger and her eyebrows up nonstop for over five minutes while someone on the other line just kept talking, “Blah, blah, blah.” I finally just went and made myself a bowl of cereal.
The whole situation with trying to run away happened just this weekend. Let me explain how it all started. Yesterday (Friday), a bunch of us students from St Paul’s were going on a field trip to Graceland, the former mansion of Elvis Presley. Every Friday, all the students who were completely caught up on their school work got to go on a field trip to one local attraction or another. Not everyone gets to go on the field trip, only the students who are called SPOTS. As far as I know, Spot’s a dog’s name. But that’s what the schoolmaster calls the group who get to go on the field trip. (BTW, schoolmaster is the word that fancy private schools use for their principal). SPOTS stands for St Paul’s On-Target Students, and you have to be caught up and passing in every one of your classes to stay in that group and go on the field trips. And the school is very difficult, so not many students get to go, but Benny, Lisa and I always got to go since we always do our school work.
The place we went, Graceland, was really cool and interesting. Usually we would go to some horrible, boring place like the ballet or, worst of all, the opera. Once we had to go see a matinee performance by the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, and Lisa was up there playing her oboe. I didn’t have my glasses on, and she was so far away I could hardly see her. If she wasn’t chubby, I would never even have known which one she was. I kept falling asleep and having to jerk my head up straight again. Later, when I was telling Lisa about sleeping through her concert, she said I’m not very “cultured.” Occasionally we just went out to some fancy restaurant for our SPOTS outing, but usually it was some place that was supposedly educational.
Yesterday, when we were all at Graceland, Lisa seemed to want to always be leaning up against me and clutching hold of me while we were seeing the sights. When one of the tape-recorded messages was playing in one of the rooms, all about how Elvis and Priscilla Presley first met and how romantic and lovey-dovey it was, Lisa actually got me in a big hug and didn’t want to turn loose. I patted her on the shoulders for a while until she finally let go. Some of the other students were making rude comments.
“Ooooh,” squealed several sixth graders in unison.
“Get a room,” this one big-haired high school girl said.
That’s when I finally began to realize for sure that Lisa might be seeing me as more than just a buddy. I could tell that she got her feelings hurt because I wasn’t hugging her back and stuff. All of that got me to thinking how some girls (and guys) are just unlucky in love. My mom has always been that way. She hooks up with guys like my dad who don’t really want to be with her, or guys like the one she’s with now, who likes to use her as a punching bag. I’ve seen her with bruises more than once when I’ve been visiting during the summer and on holidays. I had been thinking about that “unlucky in love” idea all day before my mom called me that night.