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glow. I sat there looking at her body and fondling her breasts, and arranged myself on her and crawled over her. She was all mine; she belonged to me and to me alone. Had she known of my blinding worship of her, we would have married on the pinnacle of Magellan’s cloud and then, bejeweled in ourlove, I would have taken her in my chariot made of flawless diamonds beyond the stars, beyond time, and farther than light to eternity.
    Ermi had a boyfriend named Wally. When I was seven, I was playing by myself near a stream when I saw them kissing in a car. I was mystified, but had no idea of the disaster that this event foreshadowed. When Ermi left me not long after that to get married—not to Wally, but to a boy named Eric—I was devastated. She never told me she was going to leave or to be married. She merely said one day that she was leaving on a trip and would return soon. (In fact, she did return—twenty years later.)
    The night I realized Ermi was gone forever, I looked up and saw a buttermilk sky. There was a full moon behind the clouds and as it seemed to skip overhead across the saffron universe, I felt my dreams die. It had been weeks since she had gone. I’d waited and waited for her. But I finally knew that she wasn’t coming back. I felt abandoned. My mother had long ago deserted me for her bottle; now Ermi was gone, too. That’s why in life I would always find women who were going to desert me; I had to repeat the process. From that day forward, I became estranged from this world.
       When I was six years old, we moved from Omaha to Evanston, Illinois, near Chicago, where my father established his own company, the Calcium Carbonate Corporation. I think I was probably ready for a change.
    At Field Elementary School in Omaha, I’d been the only one in my class to flunk kindergarten; I don’t remember why. Perhaps it was because I was starting to resist authority. All I remember about kindergarten was that I was the bad boy of the class and had to sit under the teacher’s desk, where my primary activity was staring up her dress. I must have had dyslexia, although there wasn’t a name for it then. Even now I often have to work carefully with words and numbers, one at a time, one sentence at a time, especially if I feel under stress, and I still can’t dial a telephone correctly if I look at the numbers; I have to dial without looking at the keyboard as if I were touch-typing.
       My mother’s drinking got worse in Evanston. Sometimes alcohol sent her into a crying jag, but initially it usually made her happy, giddy and full of mirth, and she might sit down at the piano and sing to herself, and we often joined in. But she was seldom home. With Ermi gone, I was alone a lot, and it was shortly after this that I found myself behaving in odd ways. I was failing in school, I was truant, I became a vandal and trashed houses that were being renovated; I shot birds, burned insects, slashed tires and stole money. At the same time I began finding myself not wanting to go home, and spent most of my time at the house of Jimmy Ferguson, a classmate and longtime friend, or at the house of a Greek family who lived up the block and across the alley.
    I also began to stammer, so noticeably that I was taken to Northwestern University for speech therapy, where I was treated unsuccessfully. With my BB gun, I accidentally shot a chauffeur, and I also shot the big bay window in our house and cracked it, which brought a ferocious reaction from my father. In one of the lighter moments that I remember, we had a woman helping us who was from Martinique, and in an effort to please my father, she emptied a carafe of water and filled it with gin. The next morning he sat down to breakfast, took several large gulps of it and went to the office half snockered.
       Like all recollections, my memories of those times are colored by later events and distorted by the blurred prism through which my mind now chooses to examine my life. I