Read Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography for Free Online Page A

great.
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    I’m playing Nerf football with my friends in the mud and slush of a mild winter day. It’s tackle, as usual, and we light into each other without fear of injury, absolutely hammering each other. This is a daily ritual for our gang of friends, football in the cold, kick-the-can when it’s warm; huge games with kids everywhere. I’ve got my uniform: a “breakaway” Steelers jersey over a sweatshirt and Levi Toughskins. I see my mom on the porch waving me in. “Gotta go, guys!”
    “Come on, Lowe! Just a few more plays! You pussy!” they yell good-naturedly, and I am happy that in spite of our different backgrounds, we’ve become such good friends. I lope down the block to my house.
    I cannot remember the specifics of what happens next. I have spent hours, days, and years trying. It is like the Rosemary Woods twenty-minute gap in the Watergate tapes of my childhood. I’ve come to realize that the first divorce and subsequent move was painful enough to block the second one out of my long-term memory. But the facts are clear enough: Mom and Bill are over, my mom will make us forsake Ohio and its gray “unhealthy” winters for a move to California. She has friends there that she met while in the allergy hospital. Unlike the conversation in the lumberyard, I have only vignetted memories of this entire chapter of my life. Clearly, I had learned my lesson well: I would black out, avoid, disassociate anything and everything beyond my comfort level. Saying good-bye to my home, my friends, my dad, Bill, and my grandparents, to leave for a place I had never been or seen, was just too tough for me to process properly. Years later, I would learn the filmmaking phrase for my random, isolated memories; it is called a “montage.”
    Cue the music, Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” as I kiss my grandparents and hop into the packed car. Bill is not there, he has gone, unable to watch, saying his good-byes and hugging us boys in the middle of the night.
    My football gang is there, too, the kids of great hardscrabble North Dayton families: the Freemans, the Scarpellis, the Eiferts. They run alongside the car as we pull away. I want to jump out, tell my mom, don’t do this; don’t make us go, I’m scared. I want to stay here with my friends. But I say nothing, I’m frozen inside. My brothers and I watch as our friends begin to stop running, falling by the wayside, unable to keep up, as our car speeds off into the distance.

CHAPTER 4
    I have never seen so many cars in my life. Our Volvo station wagon is stopped dead in the middle of the biggest, busiest freeway I have ever seen. It’s eighty degrees in the middle of winter and the sky is the color of a baseball mitt. To my left, eight guys in a pickup truck are blasting accordion music, like what you might hear at a circus. To my right is a trailer hauling cars. One of them is the Batmobile. Welcome to Los Angeles, kid.
    My mom navigates the traffic jam as best she can with little Micah crawling like an ape around the car, trying to remove the oxygen mask she’s taken to wearing. Her new hero, Dr. Wilson, of the allergy hospital, has prescribed the mask and a number of other remedies, as a way to prevent allergy flare-ups. The horrific brown L.A. air suggests that the oxygen mask might be a sound idea, but I have no clue why she is also wearing thick, white gardening gloves. (Later I learn that they supposedly protect her hands from the toxins “out-gassing” from the plastic steering wheel.) Now, out my window I can see the Pacific Ocean. It is rugged, crashing, and huge. A sign says, “Welcome to Malibu, 22 miles of scenic beauty.” I’m feeling a queasy mixture of homesickness and gurgling excitement, beholding this stunning, alien world.
    Point Dume sits at the westernmost edge of Malibu. A breathtaking, palisaded promontory, it looks like a sawed-off volcano, jutting its jagged cliffs into the crashing surf below. Named after the