One Way Ticket to Anywhere

RICH'S mother kicks him out of the house in a drunken fury when he refuses to eat kidney beans. The sixteen year old is put on a bus and rides cross-country to meet his father, whom he had been conditioned to fear as the monster who abducted him as an infant. Two months later, his step-mother offers him a one-way bus ticket to anywhere he wants to go. After perusing a road atlas for a place to finish high school, the protagonist devises a plan. He'll "Go Greyhound" from Idaho to his former hometown, Lindale, Texas. He'll build a fort in the woods behind the high school where he'll sleep until he can land a job, cash some paychecks, and find a room to rent. As he steps onto the bus and into adulthood, he counts his belongings as twenty dollars cash, fifty dollars of food stamps, and a garbage bag full of clothes. One Way Ticket to Anywhere is the sad-yet-hard-not-to-laugh-at story of a teenage boy's struggle to avoid becoming a high school dropout while he deals with the emotional, financial, and social ramifications of parental abandonment. The book captures the essence of a boy's resilience, but is at its most compelling when it reveals the way human beings react to his situation. An encounter with a frumpy middle-aged lady sitting next to him on the bus changes his perspective on life. His psychotic head football coach terrorizes him in bizarre and creative ways. A kind-hearted young accountant, rents him a spare room in his office building and becomes a big-brother figure. But, perhaps the most endearing supporting characters are Rich's friends-teenagers themselves-they'll do anything to help him survive. One Way Ticket to Anywhere is a memoir that never strays far from its resonating message of perseverance and resolve of a boy who becomes a man with each turn of the page. The reader will cringe at the seven-year-old being told of the birds and the bees by his inebriated mother, laugh at the young teenager who's terrorized by the vicious family dog, and root for the nomadic young man who is stripped of everything typical of the senior year experience except for his goal to simply walk across the stage.