The astonishing thing, in retrospect, is that no one ever says, What were you thinking, Mark? Why did you do that? Much less suggest that perhaps it would be a good idea for me to talk to someone.

(What do I think those men in the hospital could have done? They tried, in a rather bold way for the time, to reach out to me, and yet when I think of their gestures all I can feel is a heated, steely anger. “Decent enough?” “Not normal?” An awkward silence in a dark hospital room? Couldn’t we do a little better, for a boy who’s just swallowed a bottle of pills?)

Perhaps it’s that the nurse’s tale—an amateur expert’s conversation with my father, perhaps with both my parents?—has told them all they need to know. Maybe it’s that the idea of a counselor, a therapist, is so far outside their experience it doesn’t ever occur to them? Or is it just more trouble, what’s happening to me, a boiling brew of it, and there’s no room in their already turbulent household for such attention?

Whatever the case, my parents settle on a remarkable strategy. They not only do nothing, they effect a policy of Leaving Me Alone. Hair, clothes, friends: leave him alone. Hours, whereabouts: likewise. It takes me a while to understand what’s transpired, the loosening—the abdication—of limit. It’s as if I’ve been cut adrift, in a way, in my freedom: I can eat and sleep in their house, most of the time, though I start looking for friends’ houses where I can stay when I need a respite. This new adult prospect—go where you want, where would you like to go?—brings a kind of exhilaration with a funny note of sadness in it, as if in my excitement I sometimes barely notice a feeling like the floor slipping out from under me: who knows, just now, where I am?

Maybe you know a little place you can go to

Where they never close—Downtown.

The actuality of downtown Tucson doesn’t seem like what Petula had in mind: empty storefronts with soaped windows. The Greyhound station, where sorrow and trouble have soaked right into the varnish on the scarred wooden benches. A sad pawnshop (INDIAN JEWELRY!), repository of the lost treasures of the poor. Fading department store where nobody goes anymore. The movie theaters I loved as a kid are mostly gone, too, except for the seedy and dangerous Lyric, where once the luminous Beast from the future enthralled me. Now its screen is patched with tape and gangs of tough kids from the nearby barrio my father’s helping to bulldoze for a new civic center hang out in the aisles, spoiling for a fight.