I was wrapping up my freshman year when Dad decided to try retirement again. In the summer of 1987, we moved to a house on a cul-de-sac by a small canal in Port Charlotte, and for the next year or so, he kept collecting those Department of Defense checks to pay most of the bills.
Florida didn’t feel like a fresh start. It felt more like the universe had just misplaced our paperwork. We had family scattered all over the state, yet it still seemed like nobody was really expecting us. I was used to country roads and rolling hills; this place was flat, structured, and suburban. To me, it felt like nearly hell. The only saving graces were the lack of Ohio winters and the ocean—which, apparently, was exactly what my parents wanted.
I was an adventurous kid, nervous as hell but always pushing forward. When I learned to ride a bike, I immediately started looking for new ways to get hurt, and that energy never left me.
So, my parents gave me a car.
It was a 1980 Pontiac Phoenix, seven years old and rusted through. She’d survived seven Ohio winters, and the road salt from back then had eaten everything underneath her. She was loud, unreliable, and held together by stubbornness and whatever hope my parents had left. It was my fifteenth birthday present. In Florida, you could get a permit at fifteen-and-a-half, so my dad handed me his beat-to-hell Phoenix like it was some kind of rite of passage.
Then came the wait. Six months before I could actually drive her. My birthday was in June, but the permit wouldn’t come until January.
So, she sat in the driveway, baking under the tropical sun. I’d already christened her a few years earlier in Ohio with a set of scars on the trunk and roof. I was messing around with friends in the front yard, climbing through the car like an idiot, and I kicked the shifter out of gear. I watched her roll backward, pick up speed, hop the driveway, and plow right through the neighbor’s barbed-wire fence. One of many stupid things I did as a kid, but hey, I did learn how to mend a fence. Literally.
Baseball was still my first obsession, and I was excited to try American Legion ball down there. We’d heard stories about the kids in Florida—six feet tall, throwing ninety miles per hour, crushing wooden bats, playing year-round. The rumors were mostly true.
The first game with the new team was in Fort Myers. My parents dropped me off so I could ride down with teammates. The other kids drove their own cars. I rode with an older player in a new Firebird, and that thing was stupid fast. He floored it on I-75, and I swear we hit one hundred and fifty before he backed off. We covered the thirty-mile trip mostly at a hundred and twenty, getting there fifteen minutes ahead of everyone else.
I was terrified and thrilled at the same time—a combination I would spend the next thirty years chasing on purpose.
Once my knees stopped shaking, I warmed up with the rest of the team, grateful just to be alive. But we were losing late, and the coach cleared the bench, which meant me. Right field. Again.
Except these kids could hit to the opposite field, and every ball found me. The other team saw the weakness and went after it. Two sailed over my head. Then I dropped a line drive, fumbled the throw, and got booed by parents from both teams. I batted the following inning and watched three ninety-mile-an-hour sliders go by while I jumped out of the way like they were heat-seeking missiles. No swing. Three pitches. Sit down. I never wore that uniform again.
When fall came, I thought about football, but then I looked at the team. They looked like a college squad. I hadn’t lasted three days of two-a-days in Ohio, and those kids were giants. Plus, August in Florida is not football weather. Forget it.
Then the assistant basketball coach started stalking me in the hallways, insisting I should try out. I’d left Ohio at five-foot-ten and started my sophomore year at six-foot-three. My body was hurting all summer, and I was always hungry. Growing into a basketball body had never once crossed my mind.
School was harder too. Bigger classes, tougher teachers. I dropped Spanish II because the teacher was from Spain and spoke only Spanish in class. What I had learned back in Ohio was a Mexican dialect from my friend Miguel’s kitchen table, and I couldn’t understand a damn thing.
Basketball became the focus. I practiced at the local park after school all that fall. I barely made JV. Varsity was good, and we rode their success. I played in a few games: six points, six rebounds, two turnovers. And I got a pair of Air Jordans out of it.
Years later, I found the shoebox at my mother’s house. She’d been keeping family photos in it. I enjoyed finding the box more than I enjoyed the pictures inside.
There was something else I didn’t have words for at the time. I was an outgoing, funny kid. But as my body turned into an adolescent’s, the thing I noticed most was that I got sensitive. Enormously so. I got nervous about the smallest things. My confidence slid out from under me. I was uncomfortable nearly all the time.
Nobody around me had a word for it either. All I knew was that I felt bad most of the time, and drinking made the feeling go away.
At a party up the block one summer night, I got drunk and stoned and ended up on the terrazzo bathroom floor driving the porcelain bus. That was my second drunk, and this time my parents had front-row seats. There was no absorbing it into somebody else’s crisis. I got grounded. I can’t remember for how long, or what else I had coming. The hangover was the worst of it. Maybe they figured the hangover would do the teaching. It was a bad one. It taught me nothing.
In January, I got my license, and after that, all I cared about was driving that car. Basketball was done for the year. My father was juggling two mortgages, trying to keep the Ohio house afloat, and he’d taken a railroad job that bounced him around the country for on-site training. I think he was in Connecticut then. My mother was pretending we weren’t drowning.
Even Sandy hated Florida. During a late-night thunderstorm, he jumped through the glass louvers in the patio door, ripped his mouth and tongue to shreds, and bled all over the terrazzo in the kitchen.
I didn’t understand much of what was happening. What I knew was that I had a car, new friends, and freedom. The only time I wanted to be indoors was at midnight, when Headbangers Ball came on MTV. Otherwise, I was driving as long as somebody had gas money.
We went to Englewood Beach, and I got sun poisoning. We went to an abandoned railroad trestle in Arcadia, and I put the Phoenix on her side, trying to slide around a sandy corner. It was a slow roll—more of a fall. Five of us climbed out the passenger windows, flipped her upright, and drove away.
We cruised Fort Myers Beach and got lost in endless rows of undeveloped streets left over from the sixties real estate boom. Stop signs, street signs, no houses. In the eighties, they were everywhere in southwest Florida, and they were creepy and cool at the same time.
At home, things weren’t improving. Ever since the growth spurt, I’d been a strain on the family grocery budget. I don’t remember the exact moment. What I remember is my mother standing in a kitchen in Port Charlotte with two mortgages on her back and my father somewhere in Connecticut, watching a fifteen-year-old eat faster than she could shop.
You already know what she said. It’s the first thing I told you in this book. What I left out of that version is that she was right, and that I knew she was right while she was saying it, and that I wasn’t hurt for a second. I had been looking for a reason to be somewhere else.
The place was a pizza shop up the road. Dishes first. Then the phone. Then, once they trusted me with a car, deliveries.
It was the first time I ever saw a business from the inside. The ordering. The waste. The way a Friday runs at a completely different speed than a Tuesday, and how everybody knows it’s coming and braces for it. Nobody explained any of that to me. I watched it happen around me a few nights a week and started to work out what I was looking at.
I was fifteen, and for the first time, I had somewhere I was supposed to be. That mattered more to me than the paycheck.
One night on a delivery run, the transmission finally quit. We couldn’t afford to fix it. So, my mother looked at the fact that I had a job and decided I could handle a car payment.
Most of the decisions my mom made about me came out of fear, and you’ll see she had good reason. This was one of the few times she bet the other way.
She was wrong.
The car was a 1984 Toyota Corolla hatchback with a five-speed, co-signed by her, and within a few months, she was quietly covering the payments I missed. Sorry, Mom.
But she made the bet anyway. It was the first time anybody handed me a real responsibility and trusted me to carry it.
I’ve thought about that a lot over the years, usually from the seat of a repossessed car, a jail cell, or a rented room. I can’t blame her for not making many more bets like that.
The Phoenix was gone. I was moving up.
Our time in Port Charlotte was running out. The house in Ohio never sold, and with two mortgages, we were one more than we could carry, so we sold the new one instead. I helped my mother load the moving truck and said goodbye to another group of friends.
Another run up I-75.
I drove the Corolla the whole way. Twelve hundred miles at sixteen years old, following my mother’s taillights up the length of the country.
It was not exactly a solo voyage. All I truly had to do was not lose her.
That didn’t matter to me one bit. I have crossed this country in every direction since, in trucks and vans and campers and cars I had no legal right to be driving, and I have never once felt the way I felt on that drive.
I also had a quarter ounce of weed hidden behind the glove box. I was thrilled to be driving and terrified of getting caught. Another dysfunctional trend was born.
I came back to Ohio taller and convinced I had survived something significant.
In reality, I had survived humidity, an epic hangover, and a pizza job.
At sixteen, that felt like a saga.