Sitting here now, on a Sunday morning in February, the last day of the 2022 Winter Olympics, I’m still trying to tell the story of how I came to be at the Cultural Education Center, the building that houses the New York State Library, the New York State Museum, and the New York State Archives, on a sweltering day in July, 1984, during the Los Angeles Summer Olympics. Probably because it isn’t a story about how I came to be there but a story about what happened after.

I met Craig and Tex in Lenox, in the dead of night, after escaping from DeSisto and walking alone for over three miles, hiding in ditches when cars passed. After our joyful reunion, we walked to Pittsfield, to the bus station. I don’t remember how we did that; three non-driving kids without GPS or phones, far from their native territories. We walked through the night and got to the station in the morning, bought tickets to Albany because that was as far as three of us could go on the $50 I had. It left us enough cash to buy three packs of Marlboros, and about $10 remained for later. We were not bothered by this. We were heading to California and one leg of the journey was bought and paid for.

We rode in the back of the bus, grateful for the comfortable seats, and disembarked about an hour later into the steamy diesel noise of Albany—smells reminiscent of New York. It smelled like a school field trip without chaperones. But now that our bus ride was over, we felt aimless and tired. Golden arches acted like a homing device, and we walked up the hill toward them, but didn’t go inside. Didn’t want to spend any more money just yet.

That’s where he found us, sitting on the ground, leaning against McDonald’s, trying to cool off in the shade. I was wearing jeans and knee-high moccasin boots, with a black, long-sleeved gauze Indian tunic belted at the waist. Craig and Tex were also dressed in jeans—Craig had his jean jacket with an upside-down cross painted on the back and glittering crust of band pins all over the front. Three sixteen-year-old kids languishing in their coolness outside Mickey Dees in the middle of a school day.

He walked up to us, older but still one of us, not an adult. Friendly, asking after our business, and we gladly told him, eager to share our daring accomplishment. We had run away from school and were heading to California.

How did he say it? I don’t remember. But he happened to know some people in The City who also want to go to California, and they can help get us a car. We could all go.

Just like that, we had made a friend and benefactor—a guide. We now had a purpose, a reason to move from our patch of shade. He would take us to a friend’s house for the night, and in the morning we’d hit the truck stop for a ride to New York.

He led us on, up the hill into the heart of Albany. It was sweltering, and we hadn’t eaten anything for almost 24 hours. We probably had water, because water fountains still existed back then, but not much. A swig or two at a time, and all the walking we’d done…we were exhausted. Seeing our lethargy, he told us he knew of a place we could go, to cool off and rest.

We’d been traveling uphill for some time when we reached the hot shade of a massive building that went over the wide street. The city traffic echoed in the tunnel. Our guide finally turned in at some revolving doors and we followed, carried through into the cool, much quieter interior. He led us through the lobby to the back, where we entered into a darker, cooler place: the Eastern Woodlands, with its longhouse and Mohawk Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) family living peacefully together. I still like to visit that exhibit once every few years.

After the museum, we decided to spend our last ten dollars to purchase a bottle of Southern Comfort, and went to a place by the railroad tracks, where we sat in the now-lengthening shadows, passing it around. I don’t remember much about that night, although I didn’t get drunk or anywhere near. We visited an apartment, where Elvis hung over the stairs on a black velvet canvas. I remember a little girl, maybe two years old, her dad hit her with a wire hanger. Maybe it was her mom. I remember taking a bath with Craig, and cockroaches floating in the water. I don’t remember spending the night, or how we got to the truck stop the next morning.

In the morning, Craig and I scored a ride almost immediately. Tex and our guide would come along when they could and meet us in New Jersey, just outside The City.

A couple hours later we arrived at the Vince Lombardi Truck Stop, said thank you to our ride, and settled in to wait. We waited a long time. The bustle of day quieted, the sun went down, and we waited. In the middle of the night, when Craig was sleeping and no one else was there except the lady at the food service counter, I slipped out of our booth and went over to her. I told her we had been traveling and hadn’t eaten for a long time, and was there any work I could do to earn some food? Maybe there were dishes to wash in the back? She looked at me a moment, then said, you take what you need and never you mind. Just don’t tell my boss.

I got a tray and pulled two hot dogs and two fries from under the heat lamps and a large soda from the machine, thanked her very much, and brought the food over to Craig and woke him, feeling the joy of feeding someone for the first time. And food is never better than when you’re truly hungry. We felt better after that and slept.

The sun brought the place to life—slowly at first, then insistently. We began once again to scan the trucks for our friends. When things got really busy, we decided to place ourselves centrally, near the main doors, at the coffee counter. There, a trucker struck up a conversation with us, asking where we were going, and when Craig told him we were going into The City to meet some people and get a car his face darkened. He said he just came from that place, that he’d stopped to drop off his load, and got out of the cab to go around to the loading dock. He was gone just a couple seconds, and when he came back the cab door was open and his radio was gone. They even took all his tapes. He said that place is bad, you should not go in there, you won’t come back out. I saw an image of dark city streets then, an image that was the seed of recurring dreams for years after. In one I am walking alone on a dark street in “The City,” and two men come, flanking me. I want to escape, but my feet aren’t quite touching the ground. They grab my arms and easily lead me away with them. In the other dream, I am trying to help someone, but I can’t do it alone. I yell as loud as I can for help, but the sound of The City drowns my screaming, and no one comes.

You want to go to California? Tell you what. I live in Ohio, and I’m going home. After my experience, and having no music, I’d appreciate some company. Why don’t you ride with me? It’ll get you a third of the way.

We’d been waiting almost 24 hours, and he had made us scared. We looked at each other and agreed. Bob—the truck driver’s name was Bob—wanted to get a nap in before we hit the road, so we climbed into the cab for a snooze. Craig sat in the middle, and we leaned against each other. I tried to fall asleep, but I’ve never been good at sleepovers. After a while, I sat up and looked out the windshield. Right there in front of the cab stood Tex and the guide. In a split second after I saw him, Tex looked up and saw me. I looked straight into his eyes, and very slowly shook my head back and forth. It was a No that came from my inner Being, from beyond me, more through me than from me. I looked straight in his eyes and said No, then I lay back down on Craig and did not look again. When Bob woke up, we drove away.

I later learned that Tex did not go to New York. He went back to DeSisto. Our guide, being a guide and not a strongman, gave up his quarry and went back to Albany. I have been haunted ever since. In that one turning point a thousand different futures split off, and we died a thousand early deaths. They drugged us, split us up, raped us, and put us on the streets. Except on the brink of destruction, life offered a different path, and we turned to face a different fate.

We were troubled kids. Acting out, skipping school, doing drugs, smoking, driving our parents to their wits’ ends. We acted tough, we acted like we didn’t care about anything to show our parents we didn’t need them or their world. We were troubled kids, but we weren’t bad. If we had been truly mean, belligerent, disrespectful, we would not have been open to talking with a lonely truckdriver down on his luck. We would not have been open to our salvation.

∞

Craig died in 2002. Tex, I barely knew and never heard from again, but I found out later he made it back to school safe. All this time, I’ve felt guilty for leaving him there, for not even talking to him to tell him we weren’t going. I don’t feel guilty anymore. I told him exactly what he needed to know, and he listened. That is all that matters.

I went back to my parents’ house, and they put me in another school down on the Hudson River, where I earned my high school diploma. After many dark wanderings and false starts, I ended up attending UAlbany, for library science. So it happened that, on a beautiful May morning in 2011, I walked through those same revolving doors, into Cultural Education Center lobby, to start my new job at the New York State Library.