An Unexpected Journey

By Woody Lassitor

Have you ever been so mad at a teenager that you could just grab them by the neck and squeeze until their face turns blue? When you were a teenager, were you ever so mad at your parents that you would flee through two states to elope with a guy (or girl) whom you believed you would just absolutely die without?

After driving 1400 miles, smoking a carton of reds, spending $700 on hotel rooms and high-priced gas, missing work for a week, being issued two speeding tickets within 24 hours, and fighting off a rabid pack of backwoods hounds, my girlfriend and I finally managed to rescue her reckless daughter from making the biggest mistake of her short, miserable life. She thinks it’s miserable, but you know how teenagers are.

I swore off having kids a long time ago when I was still young enough to know better, but I had never taken into consideration getting mixed up with a woman who had kids. That’s the kicker: A person can promise every day to do his or her part to help stifle overpopulation, and then get stuck with raising a kid anyway.

And the ones who aren’t yours are the worst kind. They don’t give a crap about you, particularly when he or she has already gone through puberty and “figured out” the world on their own.

I didn’t get along with any one of my three stepdads. Two of them beat me until I was black and blue and the third drank so much that he usually didn’t even know I was there. Being a stepparent is not easy. Being a stepchild is even more difficult.

My girlfriend’s daughter is seventeen going on twenty-five, and the whole three years my girlfriend and I have been together I’ve gotten fewer than a dozen sentences out of her kid. I can talk and talk and my words run into thin air. A man can become jaded after a while, facing such flippant disregard.

Seventeen-year-old children (anything under eighteen and legally declared a minor is a “child” to me) pay little attention to what their parents have to say. Maybe I’m generalizing, but it seems like a standard truth for most parents. And if you try to tell these kids what’s good for them, try to make them do right and not screw up their young, yet-to-be-consequential lives, they’ll spit in your face, stomp on your foot, and push you down the stairs.

My girlfriend and her daughter, whom we’ll call Jane, got into a huge knockdown, dragout fight a couple of weeks ago about whether or not this child, who is still a junior in high school, could sleep over at her twenty-year-old boyfriend’s apartment. The boyfriend, we’ll call him Dick, dropped out of high school at Jane’s age and went to work as a car mechanic, a position he still holds, but only part-time because he likes to sleep.

Now, even if the guy had been in his third year at Emory University, with hopes of getting into med school, Jane would still not be staying with him unsupervised. However, Jane thought that Mom was being unreasonable.

Where was I during this verbal debacle? On the couch, watching “Roller Girls,” eating chips and salsa, thinking about changing a flat on my wheelchair. Like the Guardian Angels, I only get involved when a call to action is requested.

Then the yelling stopped. No doors were slammed, no sniffles were heard, not even a peep emanated from the back bedrooms where the fracas had migrated. I perked up my ears out of curiosity, hitting the “mute” button to try to catch the latest development on the fallout.

Jane came pounding down the hall, suitcase in hand, with Mom not far behind. There was some weeping, but the two were eerily silent.

Jane had decided to leave, said Mom, who believed Jane was heading for a friend’s house. I didn’t believe it for a second.

We gave her about an hour then drove by Dick’s apartment. Sure enough, Jane’s crappy little Subaru was parked out front. Unfortunately, Dick’s apartment is on the second floor, so I was not able to charge the door, bang the hell out of it, and wait to punch the kid in the groin and rescue Jane. That’s what my old man would have done, that is, before he abandoned me and my mom when I was 12.

Instead, I waited in the car like a good little gimp, my hand resting on the grip of the shotgun. One can never be too careful.

Another cat fight ensued and Mom lost again. Exasperated and defeated, she plopped down in the car and motioned for home. It wasn’t until two days later that the high school telephoned to inform us that Jane had not been attending school.

We went back by the apartment, but it looked vacant. Mom went hysterical. Phone calls were made while we drove around, searching the hangouts, hotspots, and haunts of Jane’s friends.

Mom finally got a hold of a friend who was willing to talk. The girl was sympathetic to our plight because she also believed Dick to be a scumbag.

“Yeah, yeah,” said the friend, “I saw them at McDonald’s this morning. Jane was being a bitch, bragging that she didn’t have to go to school anymore. She said she and Dick were going to Tennessee to live with his grandparents.”

Yikes. I ran away a couple of times when I was a kid, but I never made it farther than across town. Jane, who had never even really been across town, was now across the state line.

Mom telephoned another one of Jane’s friends and she too confirmed the escape.

Mom and I grabbed what we needed and hit the road, taking the route the escapees would most likely travel. We hit it hard and fast, seldom going under 70, thinking that if God (Jah, Yahweh, the Great Spirit, Muhammed Ali) were on our side, we may catch them.

My girlfriend tends to make things more complicated than they need to be. During the first three hours of the trip, she hemmed and hawed about devising a plan for the rescue. When she finally asked my opinion, I said the plan was simple: we knock her out and drag her little ass back to her cage.

Of course, we notified the authorities that a kidnapping had taken place. It’s funny how black and white legal definitions can be, but a kidnapping is a kidnapping, especially when someone’s little girl has absconded with a mother’s worst nightmare.

We would have notified Jane’s father, but state prisoners cannot accept phone calls during the week.

There were no police to be seen, until one popped up in my rearview mirror, three inches from my bumper. He was sorry for our troubles, after he verified the Amber Alert, but he gave me a ticket anyway, marking it well below the speed at which I was actually traveling.

I can never remember, do you actually have to pay out-of-state traffic tickets?

It took two days of driving before we crossed into Shelby County, Tennessee, and then another day or so to track down the grandparents. How did we find Dick? Well, let’s just say his last name doesn’t take up too much space in the Memphis phone book.

We made it to the grandparent’s place and after we explained who we were, they welcomed us into their home. They claimed they had not seen Dick, nor had they heard from him. We began to worry that we had left the city in haste to go on an interstate goose hunt.

Mom began to cry and I rolled to her side to wrap my arms around her waist. The grandparents served us a good southern meal to put some food on our stomachs before we made any efforts to continue the search, or at the least decide what in the heck we were going to do.

In the driveway, I shook the grandfather’s hand and Mom hugged the grandmother. The grandfather said he was surprised that a man in my condition would go through the trouble I had gone through to chase down another man’s daughter. “Crippled or not, it’s my responsibility,” I said, and with a straight face I might add.

For the first time, I appreciated and understood all the fuss parents make about their kids. Children are very special, and no matter how bad you may screw them up, no matter how mean they get, they will always be a part of you. Family is a funny thing. As it turns out, it takes more than blood to make a family.

They say in life, timing is everything. Loading my wheelchair into the car, I happened to look up the street where I thought I saw a crappy little Subaru. Jane stared back from the car in disbelief. They had taken the scenic route to Memphis, yet had made it just in time.

I half expected them to run again, but I’ve been wrong before. Jane pulled up to the curb, flung open the door, wrestled with the seatbelt, broke free, and sprinted across the yard into her mother’s arms. It turns out she had second thoughts somewhere around Oklahoma City, realizing she might not be quite ready enough to be on her own.

Dick had little to say. Apparently the love birds had been quarreling. Spending 12 hours cooped up in a car together will do that.

For once, Jane wanted to come home, so Mom rode with Jane all the way back both days. I never complained about driving alone. Besides, it gave me the opportunity to work on my singing career as a Huey Lewis impersonator.