David Johnson Passed Through Here

They thought of me as odd. Some made fun of me. Others attacked me. And now and then someone took pity and befriended me, and was there when I tried to talk. But for years after I would still awake screaming in the night, terrified, thousands of miles away, dreaming it over and over David Johnson is a young man on the run. Behind him lies the wreckage of a broken childhood and a broken home. The memory of beatings that never end. The piercing hatred in his mother's eyes. Behind David Johnson lies a past as harsh and vivid as an open wound-a dream that becomes a nightmare from which he may not wake. Boston. Paris. New York. New Orleans. Hobbs, New Mexico. San Francisco and L. A. There is no pattern to David Johnson's flight, and no direction. What friends he makes along the way he quickly loses. The jobs he has are meaningless. His future is as empty and as threatening as his past. And then comes the day when David Johnson discovers he can run no further-that the nightmare of his life is not a dream at all. The story of David's descent into madness and the brutally affirmative beginnings of his struggle up again is an extraordinary reading experience. The voice of the narrator is the voice of one who has known the pain of which he writes-and savored the triumph of his survival. By his candor and art, he makes that pain and triumph ours.