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How To Escape From California
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File type: Text File (.txt) [Download] -----------------------------------------
How To Escape From California
I have an I.Q. of one hundred and fifty five. I've been in three different mental hospitals. I can roll my eyes independantly like a chameleon. My best friend since kindergarten is a computer genius who's terrified of pornography. I once helped my mom catch a mouse with a box and some peanut butter. I once hallucinated a white kitten in the middle of the night while I was sleeping on the couch. I once spent a hundred dollars on a stuffed animal. I once wrote a 178 page novel in thirty five days. I once was watching Saturday morning cartoons, had to pee, and then the entire concept of toilets completely vanished from my mind. Not knowing what else to do, I was about to pee in the kitchen trash can before I finally came to my senses.
I've been mildly in love with four girls. The first, in sixth grade, and the one I loved most, moved away and I never saw her again (though in some movie I watched, the murder victim's name was the same as hers and I yelped right there in the theater). The second one shaved her head bald and tried to convert me to her religion. The third one casually announced to me one day that she'd burned down one of the high school classrooms months before for her own amusement. The fourth one was okay, but both her parents were so morbidly obese they could only get around on little scooters, and her brother, who lived on the second floor, was too lazy to go downstairs to use the bathroom at night so he saved his Numbers One and Two in jars in his room, which I actually saw with my own eyes. I'm 90% sure I'm gay now.
But that's not the point. The point is my big story. My California trip.
I'd been friends with two guys on the internet for a long time, and I'd saved up a decent wad of money workin' at the video store, so I finally made plans to meet them. It would be a two part train trip for me: first to meet Vornoff in California, then to visit Ray in Texas. I would leave a week or so before Christmas and get back a week or so after New Years'.
The train ride took two days to get from Michigan to California. It was wonderfully relaxing and the view was beautiful. One afternoon, just to see if I could make stamp collecting sound exciting, I B.S.ed two nice old ladies in the dining car into believing I was heading to L.A. to purchase a four million dollar stamp before my arch rival could snatch it up. They were quite thrilled.
Vornoff, a rogueishly handsome and charming recent addition to the U.S. Air Force, was in California to meet with a girl named Natasha he'd been talking with on the 'net for a long time too. They were madly, even Shakespearianally, in love. Unfortunately, she was only fifteen. This did not deter my friend's heart, and so, while I walked roughly eight million miles through uncharted L.A., looking for a motel for us and schlepping four enormous suitcases in a luckily-found shopping cart, Vornoff was off canoodling with the girl of his dreams in a movie theater parking lot.
However, her father spotted them just as he was getting to second base. Her parents are both religious fundamentalists (and quite crazy too, from what she'd emailed me), so they were rather miffed at my friend. I was told this after I'd found a motel and we'd crashed there for the night.
The next morning, Vornoff tried to patch things up with his beloved's parents by offering to marry her. I became aware of this while the two of us were hurriedly evacuating our motel room and taking a cab to an Air Force base where we could stay for free for a week. Once we got there and found our room, we'd just unpacked when Natasha's parents called. They were not soothed. They ordered Vornoff to get out of California in 24 hours or they'd sic the cops on him for statutory rape.
Around this time I realized that the plastic thermos I'd hidden all my money in, along with my train tickets, had been left behind at the motel. By now it had undoubtedly been stolen by one of the maids.
We were so incredibly screwed, we just stood there in the room and laughed like maniacs for about five minutes. Honest-to-god. There are some moments in life that are so horrendous, your only options are to either laugh, or go insane and die.
Vornoff jetted back to Washington state, leaving me with $60 bucks out of his wallet; all he could spare. Since he was the Air Force guy, I could only stay on base with him as a guest. Once he was gone, if I left, I couldn't come back in. I proceeded to live on cans of Dinty Moore beef stew and snack foods ending in 'itos' for four days until my family could wire up some replacement dough. Staying on base wasn't too bad actually. The palm trees and the sunsets were gorgeous, and I watched a lot of TV. I particularly remember a special on animal cannibalism where they showed a mother mouse eating her own children, who really didn't seem to mind that much.
Finally, a money order was mailed to me. I treated myself to a grilled cheese sandwich and fries that night (my most extravagant meal in days). In the morning I trudged off the base and aimlessly headed down a main road to locate a check-cashing place. I found a dinky one and successfully got my money back. There was an arcade game in that place, and as I waited on my cash, every few seconds it would scream 'MOOON-WALKAH!!!'. I will never forget that sound as long as I live.
I could get replacement train tickets at the station, but they'd have to be for the same dates as my original ones. That meant I had three more days to kill until it was possible for me to leave. So, what did I do? I hopped on a bus and went to Disneyland of course!
I got a two-day ticket and got my money's worth. I bought lots of frighteningly expensive souvenirs. I went on nearly all the rides. I ate a four dollar hotdog. I got my picture taken with Chip & Dale. I tracked down the one piece of merchandise in the entire park with my favorite cartoon character on it. I rode Space Mountain twice in twenty minutes. I lost my pair of yellow sunglasses. I slept in a $35-a-night motel down the street on a bed that was filthier than the seventh circle of Hell.
By the second day at the magic kingdom, which was Christmas by the way, I had been walking constantly for almost a week. My feet finally gave out somewhere in Frontierland. The pain was unspeakable. I knew I simply could not walk back to the entrance on my own, so I had to ask for a wheelchair. I was 3000 miles from home, on Christmas, in Disneyland, in a wheelchair.
Wheee.
The next day was an absolute masterpiece of timing. I had to get from Anaheim to Union Station in exactly ten hours. I killed four at the Orange County Mall, then came terrifyingly close to missing my connecting Metro-train-thingy when one of the wheels on my suitcase finally broke. I made it to the station with a single hour to spare. I had planned out and filled an entire week down to a single hour.
I went on to Corpus Christi to visit Ray, a medical lab technician who's old enough to be my grandfather and is also unquestionably the nicest guy in the world. His family were incredibly generous hosts. However, Texas was having its coldest winter in about forty years, and his house's water pressure was screwed up too, so I was only able to take one bone-chilling shower in two weeks and my bedroom was below freezing at night. On the upside though, I got to look through his astoudingly huge collection of strange books found in no public library on earth, he showed me around several nifty local flea markets, and he also made some terrific sweet 'n sour Spam casserole. My birthday is New Year's Eve, so I celebrated with his family. I also tried one of his backyard Jalapenos, which nearly blew my lips off.
It was hard saying goodbye at the end of the week. Texas had been as easy-going as California had been chaotic. I had also fully realized that Ray was one of the most serenely wise men I've ever met.
On the train ride back home, I finally used up, to the penny, the very last of the five hundred dollars I'd so carefully measured out over the whole trip. This led me to the discovery that a man can survive for two days on nothing but mayonnaise packets.
My last day of travelling, we ended up four hours behind schedule and the train pulled in at two in the morning, long after my ride had given up and gone home. I trundled my bags home through the snowy, silent streets a few miles or so. By then it was nothing.
It was the most exciting time of my life, and some of the most fun I've ever had.
But there was a reason it all happened.
You see, my mother is insane.
She is a woman with severe mood swings, a Jeckyll-and-Hyde personality, and a pathological inability to accept blame. For the fifteen years she raised me, I was in constant flux. One moment she would be my bestest best friend in the world, and the next she would viciously turn on me, finding any way she could to manipulate my emotions and blame me for whatever imaginary sins she could think up.
To cover up her own mental problems, she claimed that I was crazy. She took me to a thousand doctors, getting me put on countless prescription drugs I didn't need. One of them even caused a dietary reaction that has literally scarred my body for life.
As a boy, I wore myself to nothing trying to follow all her constantly shifting rules. So I could be a Good Boy. So Mommy would finally love me. Things would get better for a day or so. We'd have lots of fun and we'd laugh until our sides hurt. Then, the second my guard was down, she would betray me and the cycle would begin again.
I actually wished for physical or sexual abuse. That way, I could have gone to the police and they would have made her stop.
I once noticed the clinical definition of a sociopath in a college psychology textboox. My mother fit it exactly.
She did everything she could, for a decade and a half, to make me believe that I was too lazy, worthless, selfish and stupid to ever accomplish anything on my own.
And yet, when I was stranded across the continent with no money, no idea where I was, and no one familiar for miles, I got myself home. I escaped by my wits and my feet. More than that, I finished my vacation as planned and had fun.
How? By simply deciding that I was going to do it, and that no other outcome was even possible. And it worked.
So there, Mommy. I won.
I want to go back to California again some day.
Alex Reynard
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How To Escape From California - by alexreynard
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Every word of this is true. I was inspired by a really interesting book called "I Thought My Father Was God" wherein people tell real stories from their lives, most of them truly fascinating. I thought a bit about what my life's story was, and this was the obvious answer. (written in 2005) |
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