“When I was a kid I read the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and it changed my young life completely. I wore old dungarees and raggedy tee-shirts and even an old straw hat. I thought I was the coolest kid in the neighborhood. It wasn’t like today where kids have to all look alike to fit in.
“On weekends me and my buddies would walk the train tracks and pretend we were hobos. We did harmless things like putting pennies on the tracks so the train would squish them. Once though, we hopped an empty boxcar and rode it for over two hundred miles, way into New Hampshire.
“I called my father for a ride home and at first he didn’t believe we rode the train all that way. He called us juvenile delinquents and I remember we all laughed about that after I hung up. It took him over four hours to drive to where we were. When we got in the car I could tell he was really angry.
“I tried to make a joke of it but that just made him angrier. He threatened to make us all walk home to teach us a lesson. My buddies were scared and kept quiet but I kept taunting him and bragged that we could camp in the woods and walk home the next day.
“He said, ‘Oh yeah?’ and slammed on the brakes and tried to pull over but the car was skidding sideways. A truck hit us hard in the door and we nearly flipped over. When everything stopped I could see one of my friends in the back seat was covered with blood and he was pointing to his mouth. He couldn’t breath.
“I looked at my dad because I thought he would know what to do. He just sat there gripping the steering wheel. I jumped into the back seat and started breathing into the boy’s mouth but I wasn’t doing it right. He passed out and I thought he was dead. I started screaming at my father and he looked at me like he didn’t even know me.
“Finally I laid my friend down and started pushing on his chest. I was crying and cursing and pounding on his ribs. All of a sudden, he opened his eyes and took a deep, gasping breath and I turned around and hit my father hard on his head. Then I climbed out through the front door and ran into the woods until the ambulance came.
“I don’t know if something else happened during that trip, or even if I remember the way things really were, but that day sort of marked the end of my Huck Finn life. From then on I was a serious kid.”