FLOAT TRIP

By John Skow

Look, I never said I was Huck Finn in the first place, which is a not very bright idea thought up by some blurb writer at the publishing house and maybe some reviewers who weren't into original thought, and second, it was a lot easier to be an American archetype back when Huck and Jim floated down the Mississippi because they had a whole big river, which is a ready-made metaphor right there, and all I had was this crummy shopping mall in upstate New York. You can sort of float in a mall, but not too far, just around in the same old circle, which gets boring even if you manage to score some decent weed.

So that maybe is why my author Russell Banks got kind of desperate halfway through my story, which, because I got tired of my little kid name Chappie and called myself Bone when I was 14, is called Rule of the Bone (HarperCollins; 390 pages; $22). And that is how I got lost, and the story got kind of lost too. Not that I was doing that well before, with my mother and stepfather kicking me out for shoplifting, and having to crash at my friend Ken's pad, which was taken over by some really stupid but also scary motorhead bikers.

But at least I understood how to get by in this really boring town where I lived. My new rule as Bone was, "Basically don't bother your parents and don't bother the cops or one of them will sic the other on you, because to them, to all of them you're just another homeless stoned dropout dealing small-load boom to the locals." Great, but then Mr. Banks decides for some goofy reason to send me to Jamaica for further adventures. Which I never believed, especially some stuff about finding my jerk of a real father, and you won't either. I mean, Mr. Banks seems to know all about Rastas and dreadlocks and how to grow ganja; he's been there, I guess, so it means something to him, but I felt out of it, like I was supposed to be following some kind of yellow brick road. But now I'm 15, and that's too old for Oz. Which I'll explain to Mr. Banks when I see him at the mall.