As a kid with my best friend Stephen, the two of us would lie in the always damp green grass that made up the school's baseball backfield and watch the tiny airplanes with long cotton trails that looked like so much yarn. We never knew where the planes came from nor did we have any idea where they were going, we just knew that Stephen never wanted to be near one and that I wanted to be on every one I saw. I had no bug for travel. I never pictured myself as a modern day Magellan. I just wanted to go somewhere, anywhere, away from where I was then.

I liked my parents, my father the bluest white collar worker, and my mother a data processing clerk at a bank that alternated being bought and sold depending on whether the year was odd or even. I even liked my sister though I resented the attention lavished on the small baby as yet incapable of abstract thought. I just didn't like my place in life. I wanted something more. More exciting, less normal, was what I'd tell my parents every time I left the house with a packed bag containing a few days of white briefs, a days worth of socks, a favorite shirt or two and another pair of dungarees. That was all I wanted out of life.

As a child who's peak television watching years were in the mid 80's it only made sense that of my potential role models, Michael J. Fox was the one chosen to lead the way. He was smart, he was witty, he always got the girl, but he was also clever and no matter how ridiculous his scheme he always pulled it off. It was because of Fox that I figured the only possible place for me in the entire world was New York. New York, where a mail boy could fake being a senior vice president, actually pull it off, and eventually own said company. New York, where a hotel concierge could steal a rich guy's girl and still get the money he needed to turn an old loony bin on Randal's Island into a hotel of his very own. I didn't like Chinese food but I knew that if I lived there, I could order it twenty-four hours a day.

Before I was ten I'd hatched more than a few crackpot schemes in part of my constant effort to make enough money to leave for the big city, not a few of which got my parents written off enough Christmas cookie lists that they felt isolated on our suburban street. By thirteen though I'd found my niche and managed not to be black listed at the same time: lawn mowing. It stemmed from the chores my dad passed out when he noticed that I was starting to grow and it quickly turned into a nice little business. Before the end of my first year I was mowing every lawn on the block, followed then by two more blocks, and soon, the entire street. As first, I mowed them all, half on Saturdays and half on Sundays but it quickly became too much for me alone and I realized that I was going to need help. I first hired Kevin, the second baseman on my baseball team then Harry, a friend I made at swim practice. Because I found the lawns, I took a cut of twenty percent, and they mowed as many as they could handle.

At sixteen my lawn care company was making so much money I was audited by the IRS for not withholding taxes and I was forced to give up the lawns to each of the kids mowing them – I'd stopped doing anything but bill collection the year before – and was left with no income at all. My father long figured that it was Harry's dad who snitched me out to the feds but with no real company and therefore no legal recourse, I resolved to forget it and find another source of income – though after what the IRS took I was little better off than three years before. And since the law had screwed me, I decided that it was time to screw the law. To make my money back I needed to commit some good old-fashioned crime.

The nice thing about being sixteen is that every service job is corrupted by your peers. I had friends who worked at Toy's 'R Us, Egghead Software, Ace Hardware, the Gap, and any other sales establishment I could think of along with a few who were scattered at the various movie theaters and drive-in's in the area. With the holes that I had access to in the system, the schemes were simple. I would visit garage sales on the weekends and buy someone's old Nintendo or Sega game system then buy the same thing at a toy store, open the package, swap the systems, return it to the store as defective, then sell my newly stolen item for a little over half the store's price to the other kids in my high school. Since my friends sold me the systems then accepted the returns, no one was the wiser and all the risk was put on them for a small cut of my earnings.

The friends I had at the grocery store sold me liquor and cigarettes underage which were then peddled out of the trunk of my car at twice the price, while my friends at the theaters would sneak in those who wanted to see a movie but could only pay half price. I would even scalp tickets to popular concerts. I did everything short of dealing drugs though had I known where to get those chances were that I might have done that too. By the time I graduated high school, I had a "C" average, a ticket to New York, and a rolled up stack of twenties and hundreds rubber banded together in my pocket that would help me find a place to live.

As my plane took off and climbed to its cruising altitude, I watched the lights of my hometown fade away beneath the clouds. Everything I knew was being left behind with those lights and everything I hoped to find would be lit under a set of new and brighter ones three thousand miles and a continent away. I reclined the seat all four inches and got comfortable with the pillow provided by the airline. When the plane landed, I had big things to do.