Title

By Robert I. Kabakoff

Subjects: juvenile delinquent, teenager, Jewish American, seventies, Clockwork Orange, hippie, teenage runaway

Description: Growing up is a lot of fun, but not for everybody. Recently, after telling one of these tales to my nephew he asked if there were more good times than bad ones. Interesting question. I’d never considered it quite that simply before. Pressed for an answer, what came out off the top of my thoughts was surprisingly true and succinct. I had a lot of excitement, mostly brought on by my own decisions and actions. Yes, growing up as a teenager in the seventies is probably not a lot different than growing up any other time, except in the ways it was. This memoir would be about that with one distinctive caveat: I never really got there. Not then. My teenage years were a time of intense, existential, turmoil: drugs, alcohol, hospitals, heartbreaks, fistfights, journeys, abandonment, incarceration, and homelessness. These are the tales of a troubled Jewish American teenager living in a post-hippie Clockwork Orange fantasy world, trying to work things out and find his place in the real world while narrowly avoiding the abyss. Apart from that, it was a blast.