In October of my nineteenth year I was released from the Federal Correctional Institution for Boys in Englewood, Colorado and  was taken to the Denver Greyhound Bus station, where I got on the bus for South Carolina, changing buses at Saint Louis, Missouri and again at Memphis, Tennessee.
     At that time smoking was permitted only in the back of the bus and since I smoked that was where I was riding when the bus headed south out of Saint Louis.  We didn't get much further than the city limits when the bus driver pulled off onto the shoulder of the road and stopped.
     He had walked back to me and said, "Boy, you're going to have to sit up in front of the bus."
     "But Sir, I want to smoke."  I had told him.
     "The back of the bus is reserved for the Colored Folks and you'll have to ride up front."  Then  adding, "You can do your smoking up there."
     I was nineteen years old, I hadn't even suspected there was anything like discrimination, racial or otherwise.  To me what he was telling me, was that the "Colored Folks" were better than me, a kid just out of the federal correctional institution.  I went up to the front of the bus.
     No, I didn't know that there were such things as segregation, discrimination or anything else like it.  My second best friend, Theodore Gatewood, at the juvenile home had been black.  The boy at the Iowa Training School for Boys who had beaten me in the only fight I had ever lost was black. (his name had been Gaylord Washington)  Those had been the only two boys I had known who were black.
     I never thought of anyone in those terms, not in the terms of discrimination.  It didn't make sense to me.  So in that aspect I had been pretty well protected.
     As I rode through the South I started noticing signs of segregation.  At first I didn't understand it but it was there.  The restaurants, the drinking fountains, the rest rooms, I noticed they all had signs on them, usually white signs with black lettering.  They weren't big signs but big enough to be easily noticed.  "WHITES ONLY," "COLORED."  I had noticed the sign that said, "COLORED" didn't have the word "ONLY" on it but I didn't think I was allowed to drink from that fountain, eat in that restaurant or use that rest room.
     Arriving in South Carolina, I found my brother Jimmy was there.  I don't know how long he had been there no one had told me he had been found.  It had been over eleven years since I had last seen my brother.  He had been six years old and I was eight.  Though it had been most of my life, I still remembered him well as I had last seen him.  I had laid awake many nights thinking of him and wondering where he might be.  Every time I was in isolation over the years, I was always sure to think of him and sings songs about him.
     I wanted to talk with him but I quickly found we no longer had anything in common.  Maybe it was I still remembered the little boy back at the orphanage, now he was almost a man.  The days we had been together before we had been separated were all but a forgotten memory to him and he wasn't interested in what I had been doing since we had lost each other.  There seemed to be some sort of barrier between us.  He seemed to act as though he was much older than I was, as though he was the older brother by seven or eight years and wanted nothing to do with his younger brother.
     I have often wondered, if it wasn't because he had been placed for adoption and had grown up there where I had grown up in the institutions some of them reform schools and he had looked down on me because of it.
     I quickly discovered my mother favored my brother as most of my relatives did.  In a conversation they always listened to him, I was usually ignored like a small child among adults.
     My brother and I slept together in the same bed, something I didn't like to do for I was accustom to sleep by myself but that had been the only place for me to sleep.
     Thanks to my brother, I had gotten a job at the same grocery store where he worked.  But other than that we had done very few things together, he was usually off doing things with his friends.
     Jim had a friend there in New Ellington.  (It seems everyone who I associated with after I had met up with my brother were his friends not mine).  He was a big fat kid about Jim's age.  He owned a Buick convertible that he thought was hot.  At the time I was in my stepfather's new pick-up truck when I told him I would drag him and see how hot his car was.
     Going out the south end of town was a blacktop pavement.  The embankment on the west side of the road was about a thirty foot drop.  At the edge of town we had lined up side by side, with him to my right, at the drop of his hand we took off.  Before we had gone a quarter of a mile he was ahead of me by at least four car lengths.  Something had happen and he lost control of his car for he shot off to the right towards the embankment, hitting a culvert then flipping end over end, throwing him through the canvas top of the convertible.  As I had seen him go through the top of the convertible, I thought, "Oh my God.  He is going to be killed!"
     I brought the truck to a stop as quickly as I could and then ran down the embankment thinking I would find him laying at the bottom dead.  I found him sitting there with his back against a tree, laughing as hard as he could.
     One time when my brother and I had been together had been when we went to Miami with another friend of Jim's.  Our excuse for going had been to look for work, something we had no intention of doing.
     Shortly after starting for Miami we found out the brake fluid for the brakes on the car leaked out badly.  We didn't have all that kind of money to fix it, only enough money for gas to go down and back.  Not wanting to turn around and go back we kept on going.
     The first night out we ran off of the road trying to avoid rear-ending another car taking out several mail boxes because we didn't have any brakes.  It had been dark when we had ran off of the road and some black guys had ran up to the car, I guess to see if we were all right.  One of them had asked if we had any brakes and the kid who was driving, pretending to push down hard on the brake peddle said, "Sure I have lots of brakes."
     Getting to Miami we had drove around for a while and finally wound up in a residential neighborhood.  Someone had noticed the coconuts laying in the front yards of the homes.  I had never seen coconuts before and seeing that there wasn't anyone out in their front yards and I wanted to get some coconuts, I told the kid to stop so I could get some.  Jumping out of the car, I started picking up coconuts as fast as I could throwing them in the trunk of the car, fearful someone who lived in the house would see me.  I was throwing my first arm load of coconuts into the car when a man came out of the house where I had just picked up the coconuts and told me to take all I wanted for they were a nuisance and he didn't want them.
     Then there was that stop during the night at the orange grove on the way back home.  That ditch I didn't know was there, the water had been fairly deep.  But those oranges had been good.
     Other than going to the ocean with my stepfather, mother and Jim, and Jim and I going to a couple of drive-ins together, Jim and I didn't have much more to do with each other.
     It had been in November, about three months after I had gotten home, I decided I would hitch-hike alone to Charleston, South Carolina.  I had been there once before when we had all gone to the ocean, otherwise I didn't know anything about the place.
     The first night I was in Charleston, since I didn't have much money, I had slept in a park behind some bushes.  The next day I walked around until late afternoon, winding up in the old section of Charleston and was sitting on a bench in front of a floral shop when a guy had come out of the shop and started talking with me.
     He was clean and was nicely dressed.  After learning I had only arrived in Charleston the night before and I didn't have any place to stay, he offered me a meal at his apartment, which was just around the corner.  Even though I had enough money for supper, I had accepted his offer and we had gone to his apartment which turned out to be on the second floor of the building right behind the floral shop I was sitting in front of.
     He had told me if I wanted to I could take a bath as he was making supper for both of us.  I had gone into the bathroom and was taking a shower when he had come in, taking my clothes he told me he would wash and dry them for me so after we had eaten supper I would have clean clothes to wear.  They were the only clothes I had, seeing I hadn't brought any with me.
     When I had gotten out of the shower all I had to wrap around me after I had dried off was a towel that barely went around my waist.  It had been so small I had to hold the ends of it together on my left hip.
     By the time I had taken a shower the table in the dinette had been set and the aroma of cooking filled the apartment.  He had been in the kitchen cooking and seeing the dinette and the kitchen were separated by a low partition he had seen me as I walked into the dinette area.  He had told me to sit at one of the chairs at the table and supper would soon be ready.
     As he finished cooking we had talked mostly about me.  My favorite subject.  He asked where I was from, not just recently but where I grew up at.  I had told him I had been raised in institutions in Iowa.  That I had lived in Denver for a short while.  I never went into a lot of detail about any of it.
     After we had finished eating he put my clothes in the dryer and suggested we go in the living room and sit on the couch and drink coffee until my clothes were dry.
     I was sitting on the couch when he had entered the living room with the coffee and cups on a tray.  After sitting them down on the coffee table in front of me he sat down on the left side of me.
    We had continued talking and every now and then he would touch the top of my bare leg, near my knee, with his hand as though to emphasize something he was talking about.  In about five minutes or so his hand remained on my leg as he talked.  At the time I hadn't felt uncomfortable about his hand being on my leg, if anything it sort of had a reassuring effect on me as he talked. Even when he had started rubbing the inside of my leg near my knee was I really aware of what his intentions were, not until his hand started to slowly move upwards and under the towel had I been fully conscious of his hand.
     As his hand had slowly worked up the inside of my leg, testing how far he could go, I had made no effort in stopping him, if anything I had pretended I didn't notice.  I didn't know what to say or to do.  He had let me take a shower, fed me and had washed my clothes, now I couldn't be angry at him and walk out.  Even if I had been my clothes were in the drier yet.  Without me showing any resistance in what he was doing he had gone further and further.  The next thing I knew we were both nude and in the bed room laying on the bed.
     Afterwards he had offered to let me stay that night and seeing that the next day was Sunday he would show me around town.  After I had gotten dressed I had declined his offer to stay for the night, telling him I wanted to go home.  He had seemed disappointed as he had driven me to the highway where I might catch a ride.
     I wasn't angry at him for what he had done to me, for he hadn't hurt me.  Maybe I felt a little  uncomfortable about what had happened for it was something I was never to tell anyone.  For years I was to blame and wonder about myself for I had felt what had happened had been my own fault.
     I had gone back to New Ellington, Jim, my mother and stepfather.  But all was not well there.
     It had been in December shortly after I had returned from Charleston when my stepfather had hit my mother.  I wasn't aware of what had happened for I had been asleep but Jim was awake and Jim had been so mad he was going to tear our stepfather apart.  That was something about Jim, he could get mad, I never could.  I would have tried to smooth things out.
     We were living in a trailer home at the time and my uncle's trailer was about fifty feet from ours.  My stepfather took off for there, where my uncle would protect him from Jim.  My uncle was my mother's oldest brother and he always sided with my stepfather when my mother and him got into it.
     My mother decided Jim and I should go back to Nevada to stay with our grandparents until she could come and be with us for she was leaving our stepfather and was getting a divorce.
     Jim and I had returned to Nevada and had been staying with our grandparents for several days, we were broke and our mother hadn't come yet.  I knew where there was some money that had been set aside for Jim and me when our dad had died almost fifteen years before.  I told Jim about it and we went to see if we could get it.
     We had been able to get a little over two hundred dollars between us.  Jim had taken his share and went back to live with his adopted parents.  To the people who he had lived with all of the years we had been separated.
     I took the bus to Denver, telling myself I could get a job there.  But arriving in Denver I didn't have the least idea where to look for a job.  I didn't have any idea where I could stay or even get food.  To make matters worse I was running low on money.  It didn't take long before I decided to return to Nevada, Iowa but now I only had enough money to get me to Cheyenne, Wyoming.  I got a ticket to Cheyenne thinking I could hitch-hike from there back home to Nevada.
     It had been very cold and late at night when I had arrived in Cheyenne but I had quickly found U.S. Highway 30, the highway that would take me all of the way back home to Nevada.
     I knew from past experiences it would be hard for me to catch a ride in the dark so after walking several blocks towards the east side of town I stopped across the road of a new car dealership.  I wanted to stay in a well lighted area so people could easily see me and pick me up.  After standing there in the bitter cold for over an hour and seeing the dealership across the street from where I was standing  I decided I would steal a car and drive back to Nevada even though I didn't have money for gas.
     Going to the alley behind the new car garage I quickly found a window I could go through.  Breaking one of the window panes out I reached inside and unlocked the window, then swinging the window out and up I crawled through and into the garage.  Once inside of the garage I opened the overhead garage door leading to the alley.  Sitting inside of the door was a new Chrysler.  The keys were in it and it had a about three quarters of a tank of gas.  Starting it up I drove it out into the alley stopping only long enough to close the overhead door.
     I was about half way across Nebraska when I had ran low on gas.  I knew how to get gas out of a car by taking the plug out of the bottom of the tank.  Something I had learned while I had been at the Federal Correctional Institution for Boys.  I had also taken some wrenches and a funnel out of the garage when I had taken the car.  I had the wrenches but I needed some sort of can to catch the gas in.  I had driven up and down several of the alleys of the town I had stopped in, looking until I found a pan I thought was suitable.
     Parking at the first car I found, I crawled under it, put the pan under the tank and removed the plug from the tank.  When the pan was full I put the plug back in the tank and then slid the pan out from under the car.  I did this until I had drained all of the gas out of the tank.  Then I moved to another car a few feet away and did the same thing.  My gas tank was full before I had emptied the second tank.  This tank of gas took me into Iowa where I started to run low on gas again.
     Remembering a stunt Robert and I had pulled when we had ran away from the juvenile home, I drove down the first country road I came to.  After driving for ten to fifteen minutes on the country road I seen a farm that had a big gas tank near the barn.  I pulled up into the driveway and got out to see if anyone was home.  Going up to the back door of the farm house I knocked on the door.  If anyone came to the door I was going to ask if they could tell me where the Jessie Ross farm was.  Of course there wasn't a Jessie Ross farm for that had been my adopted name when I had been placed for adoption back when I was eight years old.  No one had answered the door so I had backed the car up to the gas tank by the barn.
     After filling my tank I took off, driving all of the way to Des Moines, Iowa where I left the car parked on the north side of the street that passed the capital building.  I had hitch-hiked about forty miles the rest of the way home to Nevada.
     I hadn't stayed around Nevada much more than a couple of days.  I was still fearful the sheriff might pick me up for something and send me back to the training school.  My mind still hadn't caught up with my biological age, that I was now too old for the training school.
     I guess the only reason I had decided to go to California was because I had been there before and I couldn't think of any other place to go.
     I still had the key to the car I had left in Des Moines and I was sure it was where I had left it.  So hitchhiking back to Des Moines I found the car was sitting right where I had left it.  Starting the car I seen I still had more than half of a tank of gas, more than enough to get me into Missouri.
     Highway 69 ran south to Kansas City and on down to where I could pick up Highway 66 to  Oklahoma City and on west to San Diego.  The same route I had taken a couple of years before with another stolen car.
     I had been fairly tired the next day when a few miles east of Amarillo, Texas a state police car going in the opposite direction had seen me and had turned around.  At first I hadn't thought he was after me but he had quickly closed the distance between us and had turned on his red light and siren.  I was dead tired for I had been driving all of the way from Iowa with little sleep.  So I had pulled off to the side of the road, hoping to bluff my way through.  I knew I couldn't drive, at least not fast, it had been getting difficult for me to drive even at a normal speed.
     I sat there as the state patrolman approached me from behind.  He had asked me for my  driver's license and the registration for the car, not having either, I had told him I had lost my driver's license and that I didn't know where the registration was.  He had told me to sit there as he went back to his car to check out my Wyoming license plates.
     The state patrolman (I believe he was a Texas Ranger) came back to the car and told me, he had found out the car I was driving had been stolen in Cheyenne.  Then he told me to get in the back of his car.  He didn't use handcuffs on me but then he probably knew I wouldn't give him any trouble not as tired as I was.  I thought the way he talked and acted that he was very pleasent and nice towards me, which had been a memerable and unusual expericence for me.
     I was taken to the county jail in Amarillo and placed in with adult prisoners.  An experience I never want to go through again.  During the day the prisoners were allowed to roam the cell block.  Me being the youngest there and even looking younger and most of them quite a bit older than I was, I wanted to be locked up away from them all of the time.
     They had looked like harden criminals to me.  I was constantly being harassed by them, they would grab the top of my pants as though to pull them down, telling me how they were going to make a girl out of me the first chance they got.  I couldn't tell anyone how I was being treated, if I did I knew what they were doing would get much worse for me.  So when the day of the hearing finally arrived, I was glad to go, even if that meant I would be going to a reform school.  At least I wouldn't be with adults but with boys my own age.
     At the hearing I tried to be as polite as I could.  There was no point in making matters any worse than I had already made them.