Rescue Me

Jeff, still taller than his younger brother, c. 1958, Fort Ticonderoga, New York

When I was in the second grade, I ran away from home. I told a classmate at school of my plan, and at the end of the day, when the school bus from P.S. 18 dropped us off a mile east along Hillside Avenue, in front of the Bell Park Manor Terrace garden apartments, I avoided the large center court of apartments where my family lived and followed an alternative route from the usual. I instead wended my way through many other courts, sadly but determinedly following a course in the winter snow up a gently inclining Queens Village residential hill away from home.

I was the youngest of the three children, “the baby,” of a loving but boisterous and volatile, emotionally troubled family. I was painfully sensitive and shy, a dreamy child who played by himself with his toy soldiers and building blocks, read his books and watched his movies from his stomach on the floor, and I shrank before the wild free jazz that was…