I grew up in a prison called Brooklyn. And the longest days of my youth were spent writhing in desperate efforts at escape.

It was a Chinese puzzle of a prison, a prison within prisons—escaping from one cellblock only put me behind the more fiendish bars of yet another set of bars.

There was the family, and the entanglement of parents and siblings and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and second cousins and paisans from all over the place. Plans for me, expectations to be met: Frankie's so smart he has to surpass all others; he's got to make a lot of money, win a national spotlight.

He couldn't be an iceman like his grandfather or a garbage- man or certainly not a lawyer (Nickie the lawyer was that and he was a jerk). He couldn't be an ordinary teacher, certainly not an artist or writer (the very directions I wanted to follow). An actor? A man of the theater? Forget it. Above all, he couldn't be a priest—not one of those black-robed phonies who run off and gamble away the money they squeeze out of poor working people and who take their collars off to go drinking and wenching and who eat chicken on Friday—no, not a priest and certainly not a Trappist, off in some monastery with his lips zippered, no sir, not our Frankie.

Oh, I was bound and gagged and in solitary confinement in my family prison. Imagine being shuttled to these fish-fragranced, tomato-sauced, garlic-delightful stinking hallways that led into overstuffed houses with ladies in black stockings who rarely washed thoroughly and their stubble-faced, tobacco-breathed men who talked interminably about nothing and with great excitement while I sat on dumpy sofas, staring mutely at the lion's paws and griffon's claws that held up their tables and chairs.

Then there was the day-to-day coercion about eating and homework, all floating on the surface of and sometimes submerged beneath the depths of emotional upsets—disgruntlements and snarling, whirling emotional explosions. And always there, hanging on a nail by the refrigerator like a snake, black and shiny, was the strap, the leather belt with the shiny buckle that was always in easy reach of my mother whenever my wiseacreing ways became unendurable.

So, from that domestic prison I was allowed to escape to Public School 201, a militaristic-sounding outpost where the torture was regimented and keen. Marching down echoing halls that reeked of chalk dust and floor wax, quaking before white-haired spinsters like Mrs. Monroe, who'd batter the blackboard with her bony knuckles, the better to drive mathematics into our aching skulls. Each room was a tomb as dry and dismal as any chamber of the Great Pyramid. It was an excellent place for the creation of corpses.

If I could detect the possibility of escape in the papers and pencils and books that were also there, I knew I'd have to put those keys together by myself, without the help of my so-called teachers. They couldn't see that they were jailers charged with keeping prisoners under control, and so how could they ever help me escape the very place they maintained?

I escaped, as best I could, to the street. But the street was the land of lunatics. On the street, anything went, and frequently did. Situated as I was, a mainstay of 81st Street, a colorful name for a block of dull brick houses, identical but for the color of the trim and the type of fence and whether there was a birdbath in the garden like the one Mr. Silvestri had. The street was dirty and clotted with people who were going nowhere fast and were only too eager to enlist you in their idiocies.

All of this is leading up to my telling you something that may by now seem obvious enough—I needed a person, somebody to help me get the hell out of these prisons-within-prisons. By the time I was ready for college, having somehow survived the various heartbreaks of young love and rejection, I knew in my heart how true the saying was about Brooklyn and boys. Brooklyn was in this boy so fully, so perfectly that I carried my prisons about me like a mud-turtle does his.

I thought I'd made my great escape when I went off to college. Not for me the foreign hills of faraway universities, with their bohemian college towns and innocent girls from tiny places in exotic Wisconsin or Indiana. I was destined for—what else?—Brooklyn College out on Flatbush Avenue and Avenue H. I had to take two buses to get there and what I saw when I arrived that first day was a quadrangle and more grass than I'd ever seen in one place, except for Ebbets Field, and a lily pond and benches where you could sit and sun yourself when cutting classes. And, I nearly forgot, a library where I could roam the stacks in the dust and the must and the barelight bulbs on the prowl, like some frothing Steppenwolf, though I hadn't heard of Hesse yet and found him dreadfully dull and creaking when I forced myself to read him because Bill Butsy swore by him and our friendship was at stake.

Bill finally chose Hesse over me, but that dim old library at least introduced me to Stephen Crane and his Black Riders, a fact for which I'm still grateful.

So, if college was a prison that at least afforded a few benefits to denizens, I continued to stagger into ever more grand and glorious enclosures. I went to live in New York. I got involved in the muck and mire of theater, where the lie unadorned is worshipped and adored—they call it the ego. Before too long, I was swept into yet another penitentiary of the spirit. Imprisoned all my life as a Catholic, I stood up for what any sane Christian would—I refused to be drafted. My only escape route from the prison of the military was almost laughably absurd. I willingly served a two-year sentence of what my draft board euphemistically called "alternative service" in a mental hospital. Wanting only to do something useful or constructive, I left the asylum's dark corridors (so reminiscent of PS 201) all but despairing of ever finding a way out of the newest prisons I'd broken into: the antiwar movement, more theater and, alas, marriage.

But despite it all, I was on the scent. And one day, I discovered the man whom I'd been searching for all my life.

To be continued next month.