7- The runaway

So enamored was I with the relationship between Jimmy and Frank at The Little Falls Laundry, I decided to apply for a job there the next time I ran away from home.

I was always running away. Home life sucked.

My mother was crazy, and years later, I came to understand that the rest of my family was, too, only they hid it better.

I felt the constant tension, put up with the constant fighting, and often became the target of their frustrated aggression.

When very young, I stole money from my uncle Ritchie, hid it in my closet and made plans to build a tree house where I could live separately from my family. I even drew up plans and outlined a budget for the purchase of the lumber. I just didn’t have a tree to build the house in, keeping all this secret from my family when they found the money hidden in an old shoe box.

I was less wise in my later attempts even though I was older. The most inept of these occurred in the 9th grade when I decided I hated school and my home, and just went for a walk – which started out going to Garret Mountain, and then once there, I thought maybe I could eventually walk to California (I believed all the hype about going there) and just kept walking.

I had two cents in my pocket and no sense in my head.

I got as far as Little Falls when a cop car pulled over and the cop asked why I wasn’t in school. I tried to convince him that school only had half day (I invented some holiday) but the cop looked at his watch and said, “but it’s only 11:30,” and would not accept the excuse that it was the first half of the day I had off, not the second half. He drove me to the police station on Stevens Avenue where I foolishly gave him my right name and where I lived, and who I should call, and my uncles soon came to fetch me.

So, when I decided to run away again in the fall of 1968, I had real plans for survival – I would apply to the Little Falls Laundry for a job just as Frank had, and then I would share the daytime duties with him and Jimmy, singing songs as we loaded trucks together.

Of course, like all of the best laid plans of the past, I did not at that time see the fundamental flaws until after I had already embarked on the new scheme – and had it not been for Jimmy’s intervention in getting others in the Garley Gang to help me, the whole disaster would have turned out worse than it did.

Jimmy obviously saw the most troubling aspect right from the start and made a deal with Alf to let me sleep in the back of Alf’s car until I got my first paycheck and could afford to rent a room somewhere.

My plan was also based on the misconception that the job the laundry assigned me would be with Jimmy and Frank.

As it turned out, it was not.

The bosses decided to install me inside the belly of the beast, the massive production area behind those windows through which the boxes came to feed the trucks.

Yet as massive a space as that factory was, not an inch of it was wasted.

While this maze between pressers, folders, steamers and other machines must have had some logical order, I didn’t see it.

All I saw was a chaos of noise and all I felt was the unbearable heat.

I soon learned that each employee was in a way part of this vast machine, assigned a particular role that had to be done in order to the next person to perform the role he or she had. Some workers stuffed giant washers with dirty laundry, while others pulled out these wet items, dumped them into carts to be dragged to machines that wrung out the wet, or allowed workers to stretch them out before giant heaters to dry.

All I saw were hundreds of hands in constant motion determined to keep up with the insatiable hunger of those machines.

I wasn’t even sure that the right hand knew what the left hand was doing, all seemed focused entirely on their small part in this vast operation.

All this stunned me and made me aware of just how flawed my plan was. Instead of having the carefree life that Jimmy and Frank seemed to enjoy in the loading area, I was condemned to this dismal circle of hell where I could hardly breathe.

I was condemned to hard labor, when Jimmy and Frank clearly where not.

And things, as it turned out, only got worse.

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