Moving Out

A New York Times article this morning says that people who have friends are healthier than those who don't.  Research.  Bad news for me, I think, notoriously a loner.  There must be more to it than that.  Surely genetics sends you in a direction and to fight that is bad for your health.  Or other's.  I've always been enamored of the single-handed sailor at sea, of the lone monk on a mountain top.  Of course, there is a difference between being lonely and alone.  

I don't know.  The article has me spooked.  

At school, people were growing up all around me.  I could see it.  Something happened to them.  And you could tell which direction they were headed.  Some maintained the stiffness of their parents.  Others were rebelling.  Some were college bound, others bound for the working docks.  Those kids just seemed to fade away while others emerged.  Consciousness.  I felt caught between, an observer of both worlds belonging to neither.  

It was a shock to me when I began to find out that the kids I grew up with--those who had not grown up around the margins of life, had not stood at a girl's window while she took her clothes off, had not gone to black night clubs at fifteen, had not been around drug dealers and demented murderers--were drinking and smoking and making love.  When had it happened?  It was sudden, I thought, overnight.  The prettiest girl in school had gotten pregnant and had gone to live with her aunt.  She was pregnant by a fellow who wanted to be a fireman, but the boy who loved her was the star of our basketball team, a fay boy, I thought, who wore black and white saddle shoes and madras shirts.  He was one of the few boys in school whose family had money.  He was a snotty little prick, but when she came back from her aunt's, he hung onto her like a baby monkey.  Even the Homecoming Queen had had a scare, and when it was over, she broke up with her longtime boyfriend.  It was too much.  It broke him and he never recovered.  I had gone to school with him since the first grade, and it was always assumed that he was a boy with a future, one of the bright ones who fit in well socially.  But suddenly, in a matter of months, just shy of graduating from high school, that had fallen apart.  You could see it as clearly as the gathering of storm clouds.  His life was unutterably altered.  

At home, what there was of it now, my mother had begun seeing someone, a merchant marine from Mississippi who spoke the most illiterate mumble imaginable.  It was impossible.  He was barely human, scum scraped from the bilge of one of those ships he worked on.  My mother actually brought him home and introduced him to me.  That night, I packed some clothes into my car and left.  I didn't know what to do about my dog, a Weimaraner I had had since I was twelve.  I would get settled and come back to get her, I said.  I would get a job and move in somewhere.  I would come back and get it all.  

That night, I drove over to Tommy's.  It was the middle of the week and there was no idea of staying in his trailer with him, his mother and step-father and brother and sister.  I just needed a place to park.  The back seat was big enough, and that is where I slept.  I would figure it out, I thought lying there in the humid night listening to the whine of mosquitoes.  I'd do something.