Leaving home.
A sketch of a body of water that reflects the word STAR spelling it in reverse.
Saul Steinberg, “Untitled” (Reflections) 1977 © The Saul Steinberg Foundation

Recently I saw in a newspaper from Hudson, Ohio, my home town, that they were about to tear down the town’s water tower. In principle, I don’t care anymore how things I used to love about Hudson change or disappear. Each time a big change happens, though, I feel a moment of resistance before my lack of caring returns. The town’s water tower, built in the early nineteen-hundreds, was its civic reference point, as its several white church steeples were its spiritual ones. The water tower was higher than they, and whenever you were walking in the fields—the town was surrounded by fields—you could scan the horizon for the water tower just above the tree line and know where you were. The cone-shaped top, and the cylindrical tank below it, gave the water tower the aspect of an old-time spaceship, though more squat. Its dull silver color and the prominent rivets in its sheet-metal side added to the antique Buck Rogers look. Or, to switch movies, the tower looked like the Tin Man in “The Wizard of Oz.” Two generations ago, water towers like this one could be found superintending small towns all over the Midwest and West. I’m sure the Tin Man was even based on them.

I lived in Hudson from when I was six until I was eighteen. Sometimes I try, usually without success, to describe how sweet it was to grow up in a small Ohio town forty years ago. As I get into the details, corniness tinges my voice, and a proprietary sentimentality that puts people off. I say the names of my friends from back then—Kent, Jimmy (called Dog), Susie, Bitsy, Kathy, Charlie (called Dunkie), Timmy, Paul—and they sound somehow wrong. They’re like the names of characters in nostalgic mid-American movies or Bruce Springsteen songs, and I start to think of us as that myself, and a blurring sameness sets in, and the whole business defeats me. But then a friend from Hudson calls, or I run into somebody from there, or I hear the rattle of shopping-cart wheels in a supermarket parking lot, and for a second I remember how growing up in Hudson could be completely, even unfairly, sweet.

Most modern people don’t belong anyplace as intimately as we belonged to Hudson. Now the town has grown and merged with northern Ohio exurbia, so it’s hardly recognizable for what it was. Some of the old sense of belonging, though, remains. A while ago, I went back for a funeral. I took the bus from New York City to Cleveland overnight and then drove down to Hudson in the morning with my brother. We walked into Christ Church, our old church, now unfamiliar because of remodelling, and sat in the back. I saw not many people I knew. Then, over my shoulder, in the aisle, I heard a woman say, “I think I’ll just sit here next to Sandy Frazier.”

To return home, to have a person call me by name; and to look up and remember her, forty-some years ago, as a junior-high girl in Bermuda shorts at the town’s Ice Cream Social, an event sponsored by the League of Women Voters on the town green, where I and my friends chased her and her friends between tables and chairs and across the lawn flicking wadded-up pieces of paper cups at them with long-handled plastic ice-cream spoons, bouncing the missiles satisfyingly off the girls as they laughed and dodged—

I should finish that thought, and that sentence. But the service had begun for Cynthia, a friend to my family and me. She was dead at sixty-seven of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Back in the nineteen-sixties, someone climbed the water tower and wrote Cynthia’s name on it, billboard-large, a declaration of love. It stayed there above the trees for a long time, until the town painted it over. When I was eight or nine, Cynthia made a point of coming up and saying hello to me in the basement of the Congregational church. I was there, I think, because my mother was helping with the scenery for a play. When I was just out of high school, Cynthia heard me telling my friends a story in her living room, and afterward she told me I would be a writer. When I was in my twenties, I came back to town one night from hitchhiking someplace east or west, and I found nobody home at our house, so I went over to Cynthia’s, and she put on a bathrobe and came downstairs and heated up a bowl of soup for me and sat with me at the island in the middle of her kitchen as I ate.

In those days I was constantly leaving town. Hudson was made for leaving. The Ohio Turnpike, also called Interstate 80, crossed the town from east to west behind a chain-link fence. The distant sound of traffic on the turnpike was part of the aural background of the town, like the rising and falling of the whistle in the Town Hall every noon. After the turnpike, other interstates came nearby. In Hudson Township, you could go from shady gravel road, to two-lane county asphalt, to far-horizon, four-lane interstate highway in just a few turns of the steering wheel.

When I left the first time to go to college—the original leaving, which set a pattern for later ones—my plane to Boston was on a Sunday morning, and I spent all the preceding day and night going around town, seeing friends, saying goodbye, standing and talking under street lights in hushed, excited tones. Early Sunday, I was lying on the floor of a living room with Kent, Bitsy, and Kathy, listening over and over to the song “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Nobody was saying anything. The girls were quietly crying, not so much about my leaving as about the overwhelmingness of everything: the year was 1969. I cried, and also pretended to cry, myself. From ground level I looked at the nap of the rug and the unswept-up miscellany under the couch. I would never be even a tenth as at home anywhere again.

Four years later, I graduated with a degree in General Studies and no clear plans. Mostly I wanted to go back home. I had had enough of the East, a place I was unable to make much sense of. My college girlfriend, Sarah, whom I was too self-absorbed to appreciate, became fed up with my increasingly wistful home-town reminiscences as graduation day approached. “Don’t invite me to your Ohio wedding” was one of her last remarks to me. After I received my diploma, my father came over to me in the courtyard of my dorm as I was talking to friends and hugged me so hard he lifted me off the ground. We loaded the trunk of the family Maverick with my belongings, the textbooks dumped in any which way, and drove straight home on Interstate 90 and the turnpike, arriving before dawn. I stayed awake and had some scrambled eggs my mother made, and then I went into the yard and watched the sunrise through the newly leafed trees. It rains a lot in northeastern Ohio, so the trees are extremely green. All around me, the summer landscape draped like a big hammock. I felt geographically well situated, and defiantly at home.

I didn’t bother to take my books out of the trunk of the car—just left them in there, rattling—and a few days later someone ran into my mother from behind on Middleton Road, and they scattered everywhere and got run over. My mother, as of course she would, carefully retrieved them. I still have several of them—for example, “The Power Elite,” by C. Wright Mills, with a black Ohio tire tread running across the cover.

Why did Hudson enchant me? Why was life, there and then, so sweet? I think a million reasons happened to come together, none of which we grasped at the time. We had plenty of leisure. We had cars to drive. Gasoline was still so cheap it was practically free. Our parents, to whom the cars we drove belonged, had leisure, too. In their ease, they were inclined to take long vacations, and indulge us kids. Fathers (and a few mothers) had steady jobs, pensions, health insurance. The economic difficulties that would later take a lot of those away and that I still don’t understand had not yet visibly begun. Vietnam was winding down. The draft had just ended, removing a load from all our minds. Et cetera.

In my case, life was good, by comparison, because it had recently been so bad. The previous December, my fifteen-year-old brother, Fritz, had died of leukemia. After that, the last thing my parents wanted to do was to keep my other siblings and me from having any fun we could have. Dad and Mom would be gone a lot of that summer, travelling in India. At our house, I would be in charge.

And then, as a further reason for life’s sweetness, there was hot, drowsy, hilly, expansive Ohio itself. Not so many people lived in Ohio then, and its commercial sprawl had narrower limits. Some of the local roads still were dirt, and bisected working farms. Everybody still knew everybody. At Kepner’s Bar on Main Street, I might run into a woman in a wild dress and hoop earrings who, it turned out, I’d known since first grade. To the west of town, on the turnpike, the highway went through a cut topped with a scenic (though otherwise unnecessary) bridge supported by a graceful arch that framed a mega-screen view of the Cuyahoga River valley and sunlit points beyond. Too big to punish, we could now go where we wanted; a kid I knew got the urge to hitchhike to the East Coast one afternoon and set out in his bare feet, and travelled barefoot the whole journey. I was done with school—finally and thoroughly done. Vague possibilities shimmered in every direction.

Back then it seemed there was a lot more room, especially outdoors. In a town like Hudson every piece of ground did not have to account for itself, in real-estate terms, as it does today. On the edges of town and sometimes beside roads and buildings were plots of weedy, dusty, driven-over earth that no one had given much thought to since Hudson began. At the Academy, where I went to high school, the shadows of trees at sunset stretched three hundred yards across the school’s lawns. Often on summer evenings we played Wiffle ball there. The game was like baseball, only with a plastic ball that didn’t go as fast and wobbled in flight, and could be caught bare-handed. You didn’t need shoes, either, in the lawn’s soft grass.

After a game of Wiffle ball at sunset—after running enormously far across the lawn to catch foul balls, sliding shirtless into base on close plays, reclining itchily in the grass waiting to bat, quitting the game only when it was too dark to see the ball—we would go to the beverage store downtown and stand in the pleasantly frigid walk-in cooler, deciding whether to buy the evening’s supply of Stroh’s beer by the twelve-pack or the case. And then the evening would continue. At this hour, girls we knew might be sitting on somebody’s front porch smoking cigarettes. Twenty minutes of driving around would discover them.

That summer, a woman I’d gone out with when she was a girl happened to be in town. Her family had moved to Wheaton, Illinois, but she had come back to stay with her sister, who lived in an apartment above a store on Main Street. I climbed the outdoor stairs and knocked on the apartment door, and Susie came out, keeping one ear open for her sleeping nephew, whom she was babysitting. We were kissing at the bottom of the stairs in the shadows when she considered me for a moment and declared, “You’re a real person.”

The “you” was emphasized: “You’re a real person.” She meant this not as a compliment but as a statement of fact. I understood what she meant. After growing up in Hudson, where anybody you met you already knew, you found it hard to take people from anyplace else quite seriously. They might be nice, and interesting, and all, but they had a transitory quality. Only people from Hudson you’d known forever could be completely real.

Now I see Hudson as the place where I was spun and spun throughout my childhood in order to have maximum velocity when it finally let me go. My leaving-for-good happened like this:

I hung around that summer until my presence became otiose. Friends’ parents started asking me how long I would be in town. My parents, back from India, began to suggest chores, like mowing the lawn. There’s a certain nightmare time-warp feeling that can come over you—a sense that you’re your present size but sitting in your old desk from elementary school, with your knees sticking up on the sides. The feeling can motivate you to plunge into any uncertainty, just so long as it’s present-tense. One morning in late August, I packed a suitcase, jumped the turnpike fence, and began to hitchhike west.

First, I went to visit my best friend and former neighbor, Don, in Colchester, Illinois. Colchester is smaller than Hudson, and more intoxicatingly Midwestern. The back yards on Don’s street were all clotheslines and garden rows of corn, and beyond the corn ran the tracks of a main rail line bound for St. Louis. Don and his friends and I used to smoke dope and sit by the tracks at night waiting for the eleven-o’clock train. At first, it was a little, faraway light, and then suddenly it grew into a blaring, blue-white beam and gigantic noise pounding immediately by. Then in a while the night would be its quiet self again. Just to lie in the back bedroom of Don’s house with the curtains billowing inward on the breeze was middle-of-the-country nirvana for me.

From Colchester I continued on to Chicago, where I got a job on a European-style skin magazine published by Playboy. The magazine’s editor had written to the Harvard Lampoon, which I had worked for in college, and had offered a job to any Lampoon person who wanted one. The offices were cavelike, with halls resembling tunnels and fragrant dark-brown corkboard panelling on the walls. In a short while, I learned that writing captions for photos of naked women is a particular talent, one that is surprisingly difficult to fake. I quit the day I was supposed to get a company I.D. card, which I feared would be a raised bunny head—the Playboy logo—stamped on a photo of my face.

Then I lay around my small North Side apartment for a few months on the bare mattress that was its only furniture and read books or looked at the plaster floret on the ceiling. Somewhere I had come across Hemingway’s list of the novels he thought it essential for every writer to know and I started in on them. I also spent weeks at a time in uninterrupted, not uncomfortable despair. On Wednesdays, I would go to the newsstand across from the Ambassador East Hotel and buy the latest issue of The New Yorker, and then on my mattress I would read every word in it, including the columns of small type in the front. When Pauline Kael reviewed a movie by Sam Peckinpah, I told Susie that Kael had called him “a great and savage artist,” and that I wanted people someday to say the same about me. Susie was going to school at the University of Northern Iowa at Cedar Falls. I sometimes took long Greyhound bus rides out to visit her.

My grandmother, a can-do person who enjoyed the challenge of setting wayward relatives on their feet, sent me many letters telling me to come visit her in Florida, and after about the fourth letter I agreed. Before I left Chicago, I gave up my apartment. The landlord was glad to get rid of me. He said that he thought my mattress, surrounded as it was by all the books and magazines I’d been reading, constituted a fire hazard. From Chicago I rode Greyhound buses for forty-five hours to Key West. On one bus I saw a skinny white guy with combed-high hair try to pick up a black woman sitting next to him, and when she politely moved to another seat he drank a pint or two of whiskey, began to shout at his reflection in the bus window, asked the old woman in front of him if she was wearing a wig, pulled her hair to find out, and eventually left the bus in handcuffs under the escort of the highway patrol, an expression of calm inevitability on his face. Between Georgia and Miami, I listened through the night to a Vietnam veteran with hair longer than Joni Mitchell’s talk about a Vietnamese woman he had killed during the war, and about many other topics, his words flowing unstoppably and pathologically until I came almost to hate him. When I finally shot him an angry look, he gave me back a stare of such woefulness and misery that I was ashamed. Out of South Miami I sat next to a psychiatrist who explained to me in psychological terms why the passengers sitting near him objected to his chain-smoking. He was the only seatmate I openly argued with. When my grandmother met me at the Key West bus station, I was furious at her for all I’d been through.

Unlike my parents, Grandmother did not believe in depression. If my mother fell into a gloom, she usually nurtured it into a dark and stationary front that hung over the kitchen for days. As for my father, his strategy when he became depressed was to move from a regular level of depression as much farther down the scale as he could possibly go, getting more and more depressed and thinking up consequent sorrows and disasters of every kind until he reached a near-panic state. Then when he came to himself again, and looked at the actual situation, it seemed not so terrible after all. Grandmother’s approach, by contrast, was never to give depression the smallest advantage. Whenever she sensed its approach, she attacked it and routed it and slammed the door.

In Key West, she didn’t even allow me to be horizontal for longer than eight hours of sleeping a night. Early in the mornings, she appeared at the front desk of the Southern Cross Hotel, where she had rented me a small room, and she sent the plump and sarcastic German manager to pound on my door with a German-accented witticism. Then she would give me breakfast and hurry me off to the job she had found for me, doing gardening work for a lady even older than she, Minona Seagrove. Minona Seagrove walked very slowly and couldn’t really bend down, but she loved to garden, and every day I served as her robot gardening arms, trimming palmetto fronds and planting bulbs while she stood behind me and said what to do. In the evenings, Grandmother made dinner for me and my cousin Libby, who was also visiting. Then sometimes we would play long games of Scrabble with Grandmother, her friend Marjorie Houck, and a very old English lady named Mavis Strange, who consistently won, using words that are in the dictionary but nobody has heard of.

Grandmother’s closest friend, Betty Stock, had a daughter named Isabel who worked for The New Yorker. Under the name Andy Logan, Isabel wrote the Around City Hall column for the magazine. Just before graduation, I had half-heartedly applied to The New Yorker for a staff writing job. Grandmother said if I tried again she would ask Betty to ask Isabel to put in a word with the editor for me. This idea seemed kind of far-fetched, but I said O.K.: I hadn’t brooked Grandmother in anything so far. Grandmother didn’t like my hair, so she sent me to her longtime hairdresser and had him cut it. It came out looking bad, though not as bad as I had expected. Grandmother also went through my wardrobe, if it could be called a wardrobe, and singled out a pair of khaki slacks, a shirt, and a blue sweater as acceptable clothing to wear for New York job interviews. I trusted her unquestioningly as an authority on what well-dressed office workers in New York City wore.

After a month or so of this retooling, Grandmother was satisfied, and ready for me to move on. Libby drove me in Grandmother’s Ford Fairlane a few miles up the Keys to a good place to hitchhike. In a night-and-day hitchhiking marathon, I made it from the Keys to Morgantown, Kentucky, where my friend Kent was doing volunteer work for the Glenmary Home Missioners. Along the way, I got some wacky Southern rides, including one across South Carolina with a Post Office driver in a small refrigerated truck carrying, he said, “human eyeballs.” He was taking them to an eye bank somewhere.

In late afternoon, I arrived at the slant-floored mountain shack Kent had rented, and I was so tired that I immediately lay down and fell asleep on a bed in a side room. It happened that Kent was having a party for the entire community that night. As the guests came in, they piled their coats on top of the bed, on top of me. At the party’s height a man and a woman entered the room and closed the door and, not knowing I was there, lay down on the coats and began to talk about the extramarital affair they were having. I emerged from sleep to the sound of their French-movie-type dialogue: “Oh, Roger, I’ve felt like crying for the last three days!” “Oh, Arliss, [mumble mumble mumble].” Then suddenly the door opened, and from it, like a super-loud P.A. system, the voice of the outraged husband: “Get out of that fuckin’ bed, Roger!” The two men adjourned outside for a fistfight while the woman stayed on the coats, sobbing. I began to stir, poking part of my head out from under. The sobbing stopped; silence; then, in complete bafflement, “Who’s he?”

A few days later, I was back in Hudson. At this slow time of year, none of my friends were around, except Kathy. She had a job at a small, classy store on Main Street that sold women’s clothes. I thought that now would be a good opportunity to tell her of the crush I had on her, but as I stood in the store watching her refold sweaters or sat with her on the couch in her family’s TV room talking about what our other friends were doing, the moment never came up. Late one night, I went over to her house with an idea of throwing some pebbles at her window, waking her, and telling her how I felt. When I approached through the back yards, the light was still on in her bedroom; as I got closer I saw in the dimness a guy at the edge of her lawn staring so raptly at her window that he never noticed me.

I faded back into the next yard and cut across it and then went to the sidewalk, and as I passed by the front of Kathy’s house I saw a cigarette glow on the front steps. She was sitting there, and didn’t seem at all surprised to see me. I told her about the guy in her back yard and she smiled. She had a quick smile that went horizontally, like a rubber band stretched between two fingers. The corners of it were so cute they drew your eyes into closeup frame. With undisguisable happiness she said, “That was John.”

And so on to New York City. Early one morning before work, Kathy gave me a ride to Exit 13 on the turnpike, just east of town. Local hitchhiking wisdom said that more eastbound trucks got on the highway there. After a friendly hug across the front seat I got out and she drove away. I carried my same suitcase and a cardboard sign on which I’d written “NYC” in large letters with a Magic Marker. I was keyed up. I hadn’t asked my parents for money—some of my Minona Seagrove earnings still remained—and I intended not to come back without something to show. I stood, heroic to myself, on the shoulder of the on-ramp in the smell of diesel and the gusts from traffic blowing by. After half an hour or so, a truck pulled over. That moment is always a thrill, when the air brakes hiss and the big machine swerves over and stops just for you. I ran to it, threw my suitcase up through the open door, and climbed the rungs to the cab.

I didn’t go very far that day. Many short rides and long waits put me after nightfall at a truck stop in central Pennsylvania. The place had a dormitory floor upstairs and a dozen beds for truckers, and bathrooms with showers. I signed the register in my own name, boldly wrote down that I drove for Carolina Freight, and paid my five dollars for a narrow metal-frame bed. I slept well in a room with a changing group of truckers, each of whom put in his few sleeping hours determinedly and then was gone. In the morning I showered, ate a big breakfast in the restaurant, and, caffeinated and pleased with the day so far, stood by the parking-lot exit with my sign.

The truck that pulled over for me there looked so unpromising that I hesitated before getting in. The tractor was gas-powered, not diesel, with a rusty white cab and a small trailer—the kind of rig, smaller than an eighteen-wheeler, that hauls carnival rides. Its driver appeared equally off-brand. He had strands of black hair around his too-white face and he lacked a few teeth. After saying hello, he told me that he had just taken a lot of methamphetamines. I asked if he was feeling them yet, and he whipped off his sunglasses and said, “Look at my eyes!” Bedspring spirals of energy seemed to be radiating from his black irises. He was beating on the steering wheel with his palms, fiddling with the all-static radio, and moving from one conversational topic to another randomly.

It is perhaps unfair to say that drivers of carnival trucks are horny guys; free-floating lust howls down every highway in the world, sweeping all kinds of people along. This particular speed-popping driver, however, closely fit the horny-guy profile. As his conversation caromed around, it kept returning to, and finally settled on, the subject of a whorehouse he said was not far up the road. He talked about how much he liked it, and what he did there, and the girls who worked in it, and the old man who owned it, and how popular he, the driver, was there.

Soon the driver was going to suggest that he and I make a visit to this whorehouse. I could tell; clearly his drift tended no other way. As he went on, I considered how I would respond. Sanity said, obviously, no. Under no circumstances go to a whorehouse with this guy. Say thanks but no thanks, and jump out as soon as possible. I was ready to be sane and do that. But then I thought . . . I wasn’t bound for New York just to demur and make my apologies. Begging off of anything at this point didn’t feel right. New York City was the big time, and I wanted to be big-time when I got there. When the moment came to jump, I intended to jump. Right then the guy turned to me with a wicked and challenging glint to his sunglasses. Almost before the words left his mouth I thanked him politely and said that yes, going to this whorehouse sounded like an excellent idea.

For a while after that, the guy fell silent. I flattered myself that maybe I’d taken him by surprise. He turned the truck off the highway and proceeded along a two-lane country road. I had no idea what I would do when we got to the whorehouse. The thought of going to it scared me dizzy. I figured I would come up with a plan when I had to. Ahead I saw a tall, narrow, three-story house, its bare windows sealed inside with blinds. A small neon beer sign lit a side door. “There she is!” the driver said, perking up. No cars were in the gravel parking lot as he coasted in, downshifting. He leaned across the dash and pulled over by the side door to examine it closely, giving a few light taps on the horn. No reply or sign of life. More taps on the horn. A few minutes passed. Then, reluctantly, he concluded that no one was about, and he headed back to the highway.

Oh, the intense and private joy of the uncalled bluff! Until now I had experienced it only in games. This felt a hundred times greater than any game. Keeping my face nonchalant I exulted inwardly, and made a resolve that in my new life in New York City I would bluff whenever the occasion arose. At that moment on the road in the middle of Pennsylvania, I quit living in Hudson and began to live in the world.

The guy let me off someplace in eastern Pennsylvania. By then, the pills he had taken had evidently set him back down, and he looked different, kind of shrivelled and mumbly, behind the wheel. I was relieved to be shut of him and out of his spooky cab, and I shouted with the pleasure of being alone as soon as his truck was out of sight. The next ride I got was with a guy about my age from San Isidro, Costa Rica. He must’ve been part Indian, because he had straight black hair like a Sioux’s and an Aztec nose. He was littler than a Sioux, though, and olive-skinned. He drove a big-engine car, the kind they had back then that looked like slabs, and its rear seat was full of cardboard boxes of his stuff. He had lived in Chicago and was moving to New York City, he said. I told him I was, too. With a companion we knew better each of us might have been cooler and more restrained, but as he maneuvered the big car through Jersey traffic we cheered at the first glimpse of the city skyline faintly gray on the horizon.

I hadn’t seen a lot of cities then, and I didn’t know that New York, to a traveller coming from the west, affords the best first-time, big-city view in the U.S.A. The guy from Costa Rica and I cruised across the long and splendid drumroll of open-sky swamp up to the Hudson River. Then we swerved down the elevated highway toward the Lincoln Tunnel, and the city suddenly and manifestly filled the windshield and side windows, rising from the Hudson as if lifted by eyelids when you opened your eyes. No skyline I know of is its equal; across the windows it ran, left to right, like a long and precise and detailed and emphatic sentence ending with the double exclamation points of the World Trade Center towers.

It was a mild day in early March, just before rush hour. Lights had come on in some of the buildings, and dusk was beginning to gather in the spaces between them. We went through the Lincoln Tunnel and popped up on the city floor, with buildings and vehicles impending all around. Our windows were open; the city smelled like coffee, bus exhaust, and fingernail polish. The Costa Rican was going to stay with relatives in Queens, a place as exotic to me then as Costa Rica. I was going to Greenwich Village to meet my friend David, who had told me he could find me a place to stay. I got out at Thirty-fourth and Seventh, the southwest corner. When I pass by that corner occasionally today, I still think of it as the place where I landed. The Costa Rican and I wished each other good luck, without pretending to exchange phone numbers (we didn’t have them, anyway) or saying we’d keep in touch. We were now each a little part of the other’s past, and in New York the past was gone. ♦