THEN

         I decided my new name would be Moon.

When I fled my home, I also fled the name I was called for the first thirteen years of my life and had no intention of choosing a new one. My old name was a label attached to a person I no longer wanted to be, a person stuck in a life I no longer could bear, a person who had been labeled all sorts of things by the people around me.

Loser, faggot, pussy, weirdo. My name was just another label I grew to detest, and I didn’t feel the need for a new one. A nameless existence would be easier, I thought. One less label.

Renata changed my mind.

Having a name makes it easier to engage with other people, she said. Iwould like to be able to call you something when we have our sessions. And you can choose whatever new name you want.

Engaging with other people never had made my list of favorites, but I wanted to make Renata happy by doing something she suggested.

         The moon and I had a lot in common: Bullied by meteors and space junk, the moon carried scars and bruises, and people said stupid and mean things about the moon—that it was made of cheese and cows could jump over it, and it turned people into werewolves. But the moon wasn’t affected by its tormentors: it just kept cycling through its phases, reflecting the sun’s light and shining it back down on us.

Without the sun’s light the moon would be invisible, but that didn’t make me think less of the moon. In fact, I envied it: The moon had something that shone light on it, allowing it to be seen. There was no light shining on me, a moon without a sun, invisible, drifting in darkness.

I would sit in the backyard and stare at the moon for hours, even when it was just a sliver, even on frigid winter nights. If I stared at the moon long enough my mind would go quiet and I would stop thinking all those things I usually was thinking. It’s a good thing to stop thinking every now and then. Thinking is a highly overrated human function. It causes lots of problems.

I was horrified when I learned that NASA planned to send astronauts to the moon and infect it with members of our species.

What do you want? For the goddamned commies to get there first? my father said when I declared my opposition to NASA’s plans. They’ll get all the minerals and stuff and before long we’ll all be speaking Russian, he said. Is that what you want?

Well, no, I didn’t want communists walking around on the moon and I didn’t want to learn Russian. I just wanted everybody to leave the moon alone.

         My name wasn’t the only thing I wanted to shed when I left home. My life to that point was like a cassette tape filled with grating music. I wanted to erase that tape, that life, and make a new recording. It would be my recording, my life’s music. I envied amnesiacs. They don’t have to work at erasing their tapes and forgetting their miserable lives.

         Mind you, I wanted to erase the first thirteen years of my life, not do away with my biological organism, the way Jimmy Hollingsworth did when he atomized his head with his stepfather’s twelve-gauge shotgun. The principal called a school assembly and announced that Jimmy had died in a terrible accident, as if you could accidentally stick a shotgun barrel in your mouth and then accidently pull the trigger with your big toe.

Kids aren’t stupid; we all knew what really happened.

Like me, Jimmy Hollingsworth was a small boy. He was buck-toothed, jittery, had a high-pitched giggly laugh, and chewed his nails so the tips of his fingers looked raw. Jimmy never talked to anyone at school except me, probably because I also didn’t have any friends. I would rather draw or read books about outer space and the oceans, or sit by the creek watching the water gurgle by, than play sports or make-believe war.

Jimmy wanted to be my friend. He would sit with me in the cafeteria every day and always invited me to come over to his house after school. The two of us, sitting alone, were an irresistible target for the other boys, who would walk by and say, Hi, girls! and then spit in our food.

We both were bullied for sport by the bigger boys, but I had an ignitable temper and after a point would fight back—and got the bloody noses to prove it. Jimmy cowered at being bullied and would slink down the hallways from class to class.

I would have preferred if Jimmy had sat elsewhere. We didn’t have much in common and Jimmy wasn’t very bright. But we both liked superhero comic books, and he always asked to see the pictures I drew.

I spent many hours drawing, usually during class. I would draw real and imagined celestial objects, rocket ships, deep sea creatures and space aliens, and I invented comic book characters. Jimmy especially liked Racoon Man and his sidekick Tadpole Boy. I didn’t write stories about them, I just drew them doing various things like punching bad guys, most of whom resembled my father or Uncle Arnie.

I could turn anybody into a cartoon by distorting their features. Most people were pretty funny looking to begin with, and even more so if you distorted their features. It made scary people less scary if I turned them into cartoons, so I drew cartoons of my father and my older brother Jake and the bullies at school and Uncle Arnie and the old woman who lived next door and glared at me even when I was in my own yard.

When I was little, Jake told me she was a witch and he threatened to sell me to her so she could cook me for dinner. I believed him because she did look the part. He told me that she had nabbed and eaten the McCuthers kids, which is why they had disappeared from our neighborhood. Jake described in detail how she had cooked each of them. The McCuthers in fact had moved to Texas, but I didn’t learn this until years later.

         When my father heard that Jimmy had shot himself, he shook his head and mumbled, What a loser.

My mother said, Hush, Larry. What an awful thing to say. Think what his poor mother’s going through. She took another sip from the glass of vodka that over the past several years had become virtually glued to her hand.

Well, she shouldn’t have raised a loser, my father retorted with a self-congratulatory snort, the way he did after making what he thought was a clever or witty observation.

Jake made the sound of a shotgun blast—kapow!—and then he and my father snickered. Jake said, I heard Hollingsworth was a fucking faggot.

In that case, no great loss, one less faggot in the world, my father said. Mom refilled her glass with shaky hands. I went into the backyard with my dog Sirius and sat under the sycamore tree waiting for the evening glow to fade out and the night sky to appear.

Jimmy was the only kid at school who talked to me and wanted to be my friend, so I felt a eulogy was in order. I looked up at the infinite universe and said, See ya later, Jimmy. But I didn’t really believe anyone would ever see him again.

I’m sorry, Jimmy, I added, and a few tears coursed down my face. Sirius licked my hand and rested his head on my lap. He always understood what I was feeling even before I did.

         Sirius was a mutt, a dog stew with maybe a dash of wolf thrown in for flavor. He was small enough to share my bed but not so small that he couldn’t bare his teeth and stare down bigger dogs. This made Sirius more of a hero to me than a pet. I would’ve given anything to have his intimidating growl.

I talked to him more than I talked to any human being and I’m pretty sure he understood every word I said. He was a damn smart dog and my only true friend. No one else in the house had paid Sirius much attention so he became my dog. This doomed his relationship with Jake, who hated Sirius as much as he hated me.

My father didn’t like small creatures of any type and grumbled about how much it cost to feed Sirius, as if a can of dog food and some table scraps were going to bankrupt us. I never heard my father complain about the cost of feeding me, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if he did. Sirius would growl and bark whenever my father hit me.

My mother had once loved Sirius. When he was a puppy, she would help me bathe him in the metal tub in the backyard; we’d laugh when he splashed soapy water all over us. But when I was eight years old my mother abruptly changed into a different person and no longer seemed to care about much of anything so long as there was booze in the cabinet and a pack of cigarettes on the counter.

She still looked like my mother on the outside but there was a different person inside. I didn’t know what had happened or where my old mother had gone, but I missed her terribly. By the time I turned thirteen, I knew she never was coming back and I never would find my sun as long as I lived in that house, in that family, in that life.

When my dad murdered Sirius, he killed all the love that was left in my life.

So, on a drizzly spring day in 1968, I fled. I sat by the window of the Greyhound bus as it pulled out of town, holding my rucksack tightly in my arms, but in my imagination, I was on a spaceship tearing free of Earth’s gravity to begin a voyage in search of a sun.

         When kids run away from home, people try to find them and send them back. It apparently never occurs to them that kids run away for a reason, and because running away is difficult and scary that reason must be a damn good one.

I don’t know, maybe some kids who run away do want to go back home after making a point like scaring their parents or crying out for help or whatever. But I wasn’t trying to make a point or cry for help. And if no one knew my old name or where I was from, they couldn’t send me back.

When I got to California I revealed nothing about my origins, to the immense frustration of the police officer at the hospital who grilled me as if I were a suspected serial killer instead of a thirteen-year-old escaping from hell.

He promised that he wouldn’t force me to go home if I gave him my parents’ telephone number. I just want to call them and let them know that you’re okay, he said.

Well, I may have been young and inexperienced with the ways of the world, but I wasn’t an idiot, so I just shook my head.

He then started threatening me with juvenile prison and reform school and other horrors. I stared at the tile floor and thought how the policeman looked a lot like Curly from the Three Stooges, and how could anyone take Curly seriously? I tried hard not to laugh.

When the policeman finally gave up and dumped me at the youth shelter in Venice, I figured they too would try and send me back home. But then I met Renata, and she seemed to easily understand why I had discarded my old name and why creating a new life was a very different thing from simply fleeing an old life.

And that’s why I came to love her.

I didn’t encounter the policeman or arrive at the shelter right away. I spent several weeks living on the streets of Los Angeles, after sitting on buses for three days and spending four hours in the St. Louis bus depot waiting for a connection, during which time my bladder nearly exploded before I gathered the courage to enter the men’s restroom, which was inhabited by seedy characters and smelled like raw sewage mixed with cigarette smoke. I never pissed so fast in my life.

I decided to go to California because it was far away from my home and on television shows it seemed like people always were happy there and the days permanently sunny. It seemed like a good place to find a sun, and it had an ocean, too. But sometimes I think that there were other things luring me there, and to Venice in particular, things I could not have known at the time. Things that may not even be knowable.

I didn’t know what to do when I got to California. I had planned only the running away part—which I did quite well, thank you very much—and hadn’t thought about what would happen when I emerged from that Greyhound spaceship.

I’m going to go to California and start my life over, I said to myself, as if there would be a huge banner at the bus station in Los Angeles saying, Welcome to California! Free Food and Housing for All Runaways!

The more unbearable my life had become, the more desperate became my urge to flee. If I really had thought about being all alone in a huge city, I might have scared myself out of running away. So, in order for me to carry out the first step, my mind prevented me from thinking about the consequences. Which shows that you can’t really trust your mind because you never know what it’s up to. The mind is a sneaky little bastard.

Even had I thought about it, I never would have been prepared for the streets of Los Angeles: lots of cars, lots of people who were not white, lots of hippies, lots of bums, and lots of aimless teenagers, especially along Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards. I don’t remember how I found my way to that part of town; it was like a magnet for the adrift and bereft.

No one bothered me much, not even the other teenagers, which was a great relief after middle school. But middle school is a holding pen for pubescent kids not ready to be unleashed into the real world. The kids on Hollywood and Sunset already were in the real world; they didn’t need to mess with me.

I still would get nervous if I saw a group of boys together—predatory teens travel in packs—and I often would duck inside a store before they saw me.

Most of the bums were so drunk or so insane that they posed no danger, although I did get into a tussle with a scruffy man of indeterminate age who tried to pull my rucksack off my back. He was stumbling drunkenly but was strong, and I had to keep twisting in spirals to free myself. Passersby kept passing by.

The hippies were harmless. They often would ask me for money—can you share some bread, little cat?—but I had no bread to share, and they weren’t persistent. I did share their fear of the police.

I had thought dodging the police would be a challenge because they always taught us in school the police were there to help you and take you by the hand and lead you home if you got lost, the last thing I wanted. But the police didn’t seem to care about us kids. Maybe they knew we weren’t lost.

Or maybe they had more fun harassing hippies and older teenagers; they sometimes rounded them up for no apparent reason and stuffed them into police vans. I was too young, with hair too short to draw attention; I could walk right past a police officer and he wouldn’t even look at me.

I usually liked being alone—away from my father and Jake and the bullies at school and the empty vessel that my mother had become—but those weeks in Los Angeles were a different kind of alone. I wasn’t alone in my room or the backyard or down by the creek. I was alone in the universe, a vastly bigger stage.

No one at home knew where I was; and no one in Los Angeles knew who I was. And after the first week, I too began to wonder where and who I was.

There wasn’t much to think about other than primal needs: food, water, shelter, safety. I was becoming feral. During the days I roamed side streets, sat on bus stop benches and watched people go by, camped out in playgrounds or parks and drew pictures, nursed soft drinks in fast food restaurants. I read every free pamphlet or newspaper I could get my hands on and spent hours in the safe confines of the public library on Sunset trying to look like a schoolboy doing homework.

I spent an entire day in a cemetery sitting under a shade tree between two tombstones reading a long book on Hindu gods that had been handed to me by some bald guys in orange robes who were chanting and dancing on the sidewalk.

I talked to Sirius—or rather, to his ghost; I could see him even though I knew no one else could. He always was with me at night, when the sidewalks teemed with drunks and bums, and police cars whizzed by with sirens screaming. Sometimes people would stare at me as I talked to my dead dog. They probably wondered how someone so young could already be so crazy.

Those people eventually looked away. No one wants to deal with crazy people, even if they’re crazy kids. We’re all just a few steps away from the nut house and we don’t like to be reminded of that.

Finding a place to sleep at night was my biggest challenge. With a 10:00 pm curfew for young people, I had to be out of sight. The cemetery would have been perfect except the idea of being alone in there all night creeped me. Because I was small, I could squeeze into tight places and stay out of sight, but these usually were disgusting places—between dumpsters, in the alley doorways of abandoned buildings, places like that.

By day I could relieve myself in fast food restaurants or gas stations, but if the urge struck at night I had to go alfresco. One night I had a bout of diarrhea but of course no toilet paper, so I wiped my ass with my only pair of socks and left them in the tall weeds behind a liquor store.

My life those first weeks was a series of random motions with no plot or meaning, other than responding to primal needs. I lost track of sunrises and sunsets, which were the only markers of time. I was unsure whether I actually existed or was just an observer of existence; whether I was dreaming or was being dreamt. I sliced my arm one night with a shard from a broken bottle just to make sure I bled, to make sure I was still alive, to make sure I could still feel something.

It bled all right, but I didn’t feel much. I lay on my side under the loading dock behind a grocery store, my bleeding arm outstretched, my rucksack under my head, and saw a weed that was growing between a tight crack in the asphalt. It sported a perfect little blue flower. It seemed happy, that flower, even though it lived in a crack in the asphalt under a loading dock.

I wondered how it survived, why it survived, why it felt compelled to live and be beautiful in such an ugly situation. I stared at the weed and its little flower and cried. I fell asleep right there, dried blood covering my arm and hand. I awoke near dawn to see a humongous rat about twelve inches from my nose right next to the little weed. He was devouring a piece of rotting lettuce while side-eying me, suspicious. I lay perfectly still, frozen by horror and fascination, and watched him eat.