The basement flat they lived beneath his grandmother’s house was somewhere he was used to, accepted, even at times taking it for granted.

But the garage was different. The garage was a sort of hell, its God-awful floor of foul-smelling puddles and grease stains, its walls piled high with junk, its interior a towering maze of old machine parts and scraps of metal to cautiously thread through so as not to step on a nail or slice off a finger or arm, the junk towering over the boy’s head in a mess of broken ceramic pots and cracked windowpanes, dead chainsaws and dirty motors, moldy refrigerator doors, worn out wheels. His father and grandfather grunting in the corner over an engine or model train set or the pages of a Playboy magazine.

It was there in that garage, that the boy’s silence, his sadness, must have begun.

His grandfather whacking him hard to the back of the head if he couldn’t lift a carburetor. That feeling growing inside that everyone thought he’d never be more than someone who would stack oil drums on the back of a pickup truck headed for the junkyard. What was he good at anyway? He was fourteen when he snatched the keys to his mother’s firebird, his heart hammering as he came upon the tollbooth and the utter relief and surprise—the sheer euphoria!—when he was waved through without incident. At the airport, he could almost taste his escape as he put all the money from his pocket on the counter, asking for a ticket on the next plane, he didn’t even care where it was going. The representative in the pussy bow blouse with JACKIE pinned on a badge over her breast looked at him strangely; she told him that without ID or an adult accompanying him, he wouldn’t be going anywhere.

“Is there someone we can call to come get you?” she asked.

And the boy’s heart seemed to expand with great sorrow, yet he wouldn’t admit defeat. For a long while he stood at the window watching the airplanes taking off, then when no one was looking, he walked down the long corridor towards the area where the passengers boarded, thinking he might somehow sneak on, but his feet hurt and there was a gnaw in his stomach, and he ended up sitting down on the floor, leaning against a set of double locked doors with his knees to his chest, watching the shoes of the passengers as they passed.

Time slipped by. He stared into space. The truth came and struck him like another smack: he had never really lived in this world. As far back as he could remember, he had done nothing but try to survive.

And then a light, just on the periphery of his vision.

A flash and another flash and another.

A figure was coming down the long corridor, the famous runner who’d just won the gold medal, the greatest athlete in the world!, surrounded by photographers, his hair flapping all about his head as though thick brown wings; he wore tiny blue gym shorts and a red tank top with USA in bold, white letters across the chest. Tube socks and sneakers. He looked exactly as he did on the Wheaties box the boy ate every morning.

The boy scrambled to his feet.

The famous runner was standing now in front of him, smiling, speaking to him.

“Show me your shoe, son,” he said, asking the boy’s name.

“Bruce,” the boy replied, the name sounding new in his mouth like he was saying it for the first time in his life.

“Aren’t you something else,” he winked, scribbling his name on the side of the boy’s sneaker before vanishing through the doors.

The airport went on again just as before. The boy thought maybe he’d imagined it—the doors behind him had opened for a moment only to be locked again—but there was Bruce Jenner’s autograph on the side of his shoe, no one could say otherwise.

The boy heard a familiar grunt. Silent, he watched his father standing there, his hair sticking straight up like he’d been electrocuted, his jeans and shirt hanging on him like a scarecrow. The boy put on his shoe and followed his father back through the airport, but his feet felt lighter now. Everything felt lighter now. He was nearly floating. Even the beaten, old pick-up truck waiting in the parking lot, piled hopelessly high with its junk, didn’t bother him.

His father drove them down the highway, always the slowest vehicle, and whenever the children in the other cars passed, their heads turned, and their mouths gaped open at the hill of junk tied up behind the boy and his father. Some of the children laughed and pointed. Someone called out Junk’s Son! a nickname that stuck with him throughout the four years of high school, snickered at odd times in the hallways and shouted across the track field whenever he’d win a race.

Beside him on the nightstand, the boy kept the shoes tied together and would turn on the bedside lamp in the middle of the night just to look at the autograph again. He remembered every detail of that moment in the airport and how it had been like nothing that had ever happened to him before. Aren’t you something else.

His senior year, he applied to the university thinking he’d never get in.

But he did. Somehow, impossibly!, he was granted admission on a full scholarship. His trembling fingers holding the crisp, white letter with the raised gold seal like a heavenly decree.

He took barely anything as he knew he would. Even the shoes (which were three sizes too small now) he left behind; the shoes that had made him want to break free, fight for his own life, start again. One night, not long after he’d gone, the shoes were snatched in a drunken rage from his room, put into the garage, then thrown onto the pickup truck days later and driven to the dump where they flew down a shoot and spun about in midair, almost beautiful, before toppling down a massive mountain, one after the other, a man’s ratty woolen overcoat coming and quickly covering them, then a tremendous tangle of telephone wire, and finally oil drums, one after the next, burying the shoes beneath.