I won’t tell you which one I
am. You’d know the name, either because you’re old enough to remember the
media coverage at the time or because you’ve heard of me since on TV or on
Yahoo! News when they mark the anniversary. If
you’re one of the older crowd, you’ve probably known the name longer than
I have.
I’m one of
the vanished, one of the famous missing children. Not all of us get to my
level of fame – there are too many, and most fail to make an impression
for one reason or another that’s not exactly flattering to the American
capacity for caring (too poor, not white, parents don’t look good on
television) – but I disappeared before it became a routine event, before
Amber Alerts and long before GPS chips were invented, let alone thought of
as something to implant in your baby. When I vanished it was unusual, and
my mother’s public appeals were new then, too. She used the media for all
they were worth, hoping that her pleas and the appearance of my photograph
on television and in print would lead someone to call the police with a
tip that would bring me home. It didn’t work, but I admire her for
trying.
The details
of my case were in newspapers across the country. And there was a book, a
melodramatic page-turner by a reporter who never asked my parents’
permission to write it. He used interviews they’d given him off the
record, they said, and they sued him. But I haven’t found any record of a
decision in the case, or a settlement, so I don’t know what happened with
that. The reporter was on the morning talk shows with his book, became a
nationally syndicated columnist, even had a radio show for a year or two.
He tried writing another book but didn’t get it done. Eventually he got
himself hooked on cocaine in a big way, which put him back in the news in
ironic fashion. You’d see his name in articles about the toll that drugs
were taking on the entertainment industry, along with Julie from The Love Boat and other
second-string celebrity foul-ups; then he died. I’ll admit that I find his
story oddly satisfying, the clear arc of it and the finality of the
ending. If there’s justice in it I don’t know. It seems to me he was just
doing his job, and that he was smart enough to recognize an opportunity
for more, when it came. He didn’t know what to do with success once he had
it, though. Is death the appropriate penalty for
that?
Or how
about this: is death the appropriate penalty for kidnapping? The law of
the land says yes; grant me that my own experience conveys some authority
on the matter and you might be surprised to know I’m not so sure.
Sometimes kidnappers are just doing a job, too.
The
details. At approximately 7:30PM on Thursday, August 7, 1969, infant me
was lifted from the covered baby carriage in which he slept as his parents
stood a bare dozen feet away by a park bench in a Midwestern city, his
father consulting a downtown map and his mother trying to calm a
distressed young woman whose heavy accent they would later be unable to
identify for police. This was, you should note, two weeks and change after
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had managed to bring some hope for a better
future to people like my parents, people who were doubting themselves for
having brought children into a nightmare world of war, riot, and
assassination. My mother swore there could only have been a minute that
passed in which she did not look to the carriage. She had never left the
baby for even that long before then; the newspapers were unanimous in
describing her as devoted and loving, and devastated by a single lapse of
vigilance. My father was stoical, reserved, private. He would sit with his
wife at every interview, stand with her before the television cameras. He
would stare blankly at all inquiries regarding his feelings. Asked if the
police had any new information, he would say, “Ask the police.” In the
book he is a cold and taciturn man, the product of unloving parents and a
childhood of hard work on a failing farm. His wife’s insistence that he is
a warm and loving husband and had always been an attentive father are
presented as evidence of her own generosity of
spirit.
I don’t
think of my father as a villain. Despite the theory, to be propounded in
the reporter’s unfinished second book (and now part of conspiracy bloggist
lore) that he had arranged my abduction himself for unknown reasons, when
I see him in video news clips online -- an average sized, average looking,
crew-cut man in unremarkable suits and tortoise shell glasses who stands
rigid and tight-jawed against an onslaught of microphones and shouted
questions – I see a man who simply lacks the ability and perhaps the
desire to express his pain. And I can relate. Which I suppose makes me my
father’s son.
I don’t,
actually, feel much like my mother’s. The aura of sainthood she acquired
in her pain distances us, and it’s my father, who sank off-camera into
alcoholism and whose salvation became his wife’s post-kidnapping mission
when months became years and it was clear I wouldn’t be coming back, with
whom I feel a bond. I’m glad she could save one of
us.
They live
in another city now, and I live in a third. The media leave them alone,
except for the occasional August 7th when the anniversary’s a
big one: 10th, 20th. 30th. The 40th
is coming on. I could make that memorable. I might wait until the
tabloid reporters arrive at their front door before suddenly appearing. Or
I could call the house in advance, arrange to meet them someplace far
away, the three of us and no cameras. But I won’t.
Why do it
now? They’re old people; I’m a middle aged man. My mother was a pediatric
nurse for decades and retired a few years ago, and my father still works
two days a week at the little accounting firm he established after he
drank himself out of a few jobs and finally surrendered to the Jesus cure
my mother worked on him. They had no children after me, but they have a
little white dog they walk together in the evenings and friends they meet
for dinner at the same restaurant every Friday. On Sunday they go to
church, the ten o’clock mass. They’re away for three weeks between
Thanksgiving and Christmas; I’d guess Florida. The dog stays with their
dinner friends. They hold hands almost always. They have reached a quiet
place.
I am not
what they need. I am all wrong for quiet places. I cannot imagine myself
into that carriage in the park, into their lives ever. I do not know where
I spent the first five years of my life and I would like to forget the ten
years after that. I have, in fact, forgotten some of
it.
I believe
that I have been sold twice. Once immediately after I was taken and then
again five years later. After that I was in Montana or Idaho. When I got
away, the man who helped me escape told me who I was, without telling me
precisely. He told me I was fifteen, which is about what I’d thought, and
he also told me to forget about revenge, about coming back. Best the gone
stay gone, he said. I couldn’t have gotten back there if I tried, which is
not a thing I have ever for a moment wanted to do. Through a rust hole in
the trunk of his car I saw one sign that said Idaho; the car had a Montana
license plate. That’s all I know of where I’d been.
It took
time to figure out who I was supposed to be. At first I couldn’t give it a
minute, because I needed to find somewhere to sleep nights. And something
to eat. To drink. To wear. I traveled a lot, hitching rides. I learned to
start cars and drive them. I learned many things, survival skills. I
stayed for a year, two years, in some places. I worked steadily in these
places, but it couldn’t last. Stay gone, I told myself. I never told anyone
my name, because I didn’t know what it was. I’d been called a name for ten
years that I knew was false. I wouldn’t claim a new one until I had it
right. It didn’t occur to me then that once I had it, it would become
something I didn’t want to share. My only real possession. The one thing I
take with me, wherever I go.
When I
started looking I went at it very seriously. Public libraries will teach
you to use the Internet and how to find information in books, magazines,
and microfiche. I have never been to school, but I have literally lived in
libraries. I was caught only once, when I overslept. It was unfortunate.
It was a fine library, one of the best I’ve known. I got out before the
police arrived. I didn’t hurt anyone.
Sometimes I
think it would be good to take care of the white dog for those three weeks
in winter. It wouldn’t be hard to get him away from the dinner friends; I
could watch for them to go out some evening, be in and out in a minute.
Get to know the dog, spend time with it, be part of the family that way. I
could even live in my parents’ house, if I made sure to hide or be out
when the friends came by to check on things.
I would be
careful. Leave no sign I’d ever been there. Leave them in
peace.
Best the
gone stay gone.
