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Without waiting an instant, I run to the opposite side, and I stand hoping for some miraculous avenging car to plunge over him.
               But it didnt come.
               I went back to him, helped him up, and we walked the rest of the way in thundering silence.
               And then, when I was older, possibly 13 or 14, I was sitting one afternoon on the porch loathing him. My hatred for him by then had become a thing which overwhelmed me, which obsessed me the length of the day. He stood behind me, and he put his hand on me, softly, and said—gently: “Youre my son, and I love you.” But those longed-for words, delayed until the waves of my hatred for him had smothered their meaning, made me pull away from him: “I hate you!—youre a failure—as a man, as a father!” And later those words would ring painfully in my mind when I remembered him as a slouched old man getting up before dawn to face the hospital trash....
               Soon, I stopped going to Mass. I stopped praying. The God that would allow this vast unhappiness was a God I would rebel against. The seeds of that rebellion—planted that ugly afternoon when I saw my dog’s body beginning to decay, the soul shut out by Heaven—were beginning to germinate.
               When my brother was a kid and I wasnt even born (but I’ll hear the story often), he would stand moodily looking out the window; and when, once, my grandmother asked him, “Little boy, what are you doing by the window staring at so hard?”—he answered, “I am occupied with life.” Im convinced that if my brother hadnt said that—or if I hadnt been told about it—I would have said it.
               I liked to sit inside the house and look out the hall-window—beyond the cactus garden in the vacant lot next door. I would sit by that window looking at the people that passed. I felt miraculously separated from the world outside: separated by the pane, the screen, through which, nevertheless—uninvolved—I could see that world.
               I read many books, I saw many, many movies.
               I watched other lives, only through a window.
               Sundays during summer especially I would hike outside the city, along the usually waterless strait of sand called the Rio Grande, up the mountain of Cristo Rey, dominated at the top by the coarse, weed-surrounded statue of a primitive-faced Christ. I would lie on the dirt of that mountain staring at the breathtaking Texas sky.
               I was usually alone. I had only one friend: a wild-eyed girl who sometimes would climb the mountain with me. We were both 17, and I felt in her the same wordless unhappiness I felt within myself. We would walk and climb for hours without speaking. For a brief time I liked her intensely—without ever telling her. Yet I was beginning to feel, too, a remoteness toward people—more and more a craving for attention which I could not reciprocate: one-sided, as if the need in me was so hungry that it couldnt share or give back in kind. Perhaps sensing this—one afternoon in a boarded-up cabin at the base of the mountain—she maneuvered, successfully, to make me. But the discovery of sex with her, releasing as it had been merely turned me strangely further within myself.
               Mutually, we withdrew from each other.
               And it was somewhere about that time that the narcissistic pattern of my life began.
               From my father’s inexplicable hatred of me and my mother’s blind carnivorous love, I fled to the Mirror. I would stand before it, thinking: I have only Me!... I became obsessed with age. At 17, I dreaded growing old. Old age is something that must never happen to me. The image of myself in the mirror must never fade into someone I cant look at.
               And even after a series of after-school jobs, my feeling of isolation from others only