By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

girl, I could go get her and say, “Hey, come with me” and bring her back to his bedroom.
    I told Joe about the mescaline, and we decided we were going to steal it. I was sort of a street kid and had a reputation for being very smart and daring and tough. I knew that the act of stealing it would be simple—you just put the shit in a bag and throw it out the window—but that doing it right and not getting caught would be the hard part. I knew we needed a plan.
    The deal at this guy’s house was that no one could use his bathroom, because it connected to the bedroom where he kept the mes-caline. So if you had to use the bathroom, you had to go to a nearby gas station. So one day I told him, “You’re not going to get laid if people can’t use your bathroom. No girl would think much of a guy who makes you do that.” He said, “Really?” He wasn’t all that bright.
    The brilliance of this plan was that everyone in the neighborhood knew that my friend Joe had to be home at five thirty every night for dinner with his parents. Joe could basically do whatever the hell else he wanted, but dinner at five thirty was written in stone at the Klug house. So one day Joe and I were hanging around the foosball house, playing foosball, listening to music. At a quarter after five, Joe made sure everyone saw him leave. But instead of going home, he just went and waited below the guy’s bedroom window, as I’d instructed. A little while later, I acted like I was going to the bathroom but actually slipped down the hall into the bedroom, where I grabbed the mescaline and dropped it out the window to where Joe was waiting. I’d toldhim, “Don’t try to catch it, just let it hit the ground, then pick it up and run like hell back home.”
    After that, I went to the bathroom and then went back and started playing foosball again. Eventually the guy who lived there went back to his bedroom and realized that his mescaline was gone. I acted like I was just as stunned as he was and actually helped him search everyone who was there. Of course, he couldn’t find drugs on anyone. Later I went over to Joe’s, where we split the haul. I was pretty proud of myself: I remember telling Joe, “I can out-hood the hoods.”
    The craziest part of it all is that when that guy needed to buy more mescaline because he had all these people wanting it, I told him, “I know someone who might be able to sell you some.” But I wanted to get him desperate so that I could jack up the price, so I made him wait awhile. Then I had a friend sell the mescaline right back to him. I never got caught, and the guy was killed in a car accident twenty years later, so it’s safe to say I’m off the hook on that one.
    But at the same time all that was going on, I secretly wanted to be an actor, and a plan started taking shape in my mind. I had seen movies like Taxi Driver, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Deer Hunter. I had read a book about James Dean and a biography of Montgomery Clift that made me even more fascinated by the prospect of pursuing an acting career. It was really Taxi Driver that did it, though: my dad and Uncle Barry took me to see it when I was thirteen, and halfway through, my dad whispered to my uncle, “We shouldn’t have brought Tommy to this.” But I didn’t agree. The movie blew me away. I’ve now seen it more than thirty times. And there was something about the alienation and beauty of actors like Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and James Dean that captivated me. Still, it was more than reverence that I had for them: I somehow already identified with them and saw myself as being at their level. It’s hardto explain how this was true, but basically, my life had always felt heightened to a degree—even as a kid my life felt very dramatic, and because I was sort of simultaneously wild but very together, I knew people gossiped about me. And I had a sort of anger that I didn’t know what to do with, and acting felt like it could