My mother, six years dead now, had dragged me from doctor to doctor when I was twelve years old, to find out what was wrong with me; the sunny, happy kid who turned sullen and withdrawn, so quickly then sunny again—“mercurial,” my mother, Blossom, had commented.
My father tousled my dirty blonde hair and assured me I was a “normal teen.”
It was “puberty,” my pediatrician said, I"d “grow out of it.”
Then when I started crying from bellyache, breaking up the furniture and setting fire to the drapes, Social Services got involved. I was diagnosed with amphetamine psychosis or mescaline intoxication. Perhaps schizophrenia.
The day my lawyer father left us for good, for a Dutch woman in Curaçao he"d met through the internet, I roamed through Woodworth"s Department Store and stole at random,
