Once I was back home in the duplex on Michelle Drive, my mother came down very hard on me, as I expected she would. First order of business was the haircut, the result of a threat to turn me over to the local juvenile authorities. I'd already had a taste of that back in New York, and so I decided an occasional haircut was a small price to pay to gain some time to get back to my native state. As always, the intervals between haircuts would widen over time, and the amount of hair left on the barber's floor would be less each visit. By my senior year, I had stopped going altogether.

By this time, I had my own room, Bob having moved out to make a life with Sally. This was the room my mother occupied when we first moved in. It was smaller than the one my brother and I shared, but it was perfect for me. I decorated the walls with pictures that best expressed my state of mind at the time. There was a framed picture of my hero Allen Ginsberg over my bed; a collage showing President Lyndon Baines Johnson superimposed over an atomic mushroom cloud, below the caption "All the way with LBJ"; and framed pictures

of Bob Dylan at the height of his popularity playing a Fender electric guitar and blowing into the ever-present strapped-on harmonica.

As always, my mother respected my freedom to decide what I could read and what I ideas I could explore. This pacified my urge to rebel openly — for a while. At the same time, it fortified my resolve to create my own self-image and return to my native state, the one I assumed as a runaway.

Over the next five years, in one form or another, I would seek to recreate and relive that self-image, reading up on all the beat poets who were my heroes on the road and writing my story in blank, unrhymed verse or in rhymed lyrics. I took up smoking cigarettes, and I would go weeks without shaving — which gave me a slightly surly look sabotaged by a baby face and the lack of any real stubble. I shaved maybe once a week, which I invariably did when the so-called "beard" began to itch. I had only a week or two before school resumed, and so — beard or no beard — a decision was made that would change the course of my life and set the tone for the remainder of my time on Michelle Drive.