Teenage runaways do not fit into the scope of this book because they seldom change identities. They are young and it is relatively easy for them to establish new lives once they reach their destinations. They are not encumbered with the problems and established lives that require adult runaways to build completely new identities. In fact, most teenage runaways re-establish their family ties somewhere down the road.
One of the interesting aspects of teenage runaways is that they often possess the skills and background to become successful adult runaways. They have severed their emotional family ties early in life while developing the skills to survive as "strangers in strange lands." Successful identity-changing later in life will be much easier for these kids than it is for the run-of-the-mill estranged spouse.
The foregoing are only a few of the many reasons for the inaccuracy of missing persons statistics. Some others: people who are murdered but whose bodies are never discovered; people who die without identification, particularly when they are some distance from home; people killed while posing as someone else. Many people who die in airplane crashes and shipwrecks are never identified or incorrectly identified.
WHY PEOPLE DISAPPEAR
Now that we have examined
who
disappears, we will try to understand
why
they do it. What motivates reasonable people to take the severe, difficult and often painful act of complete detachment?
Through my encounters with the disappeared I have found three major motivations for the decision: legal, financial and psychological. While some of the cases described below fall neatly into just one of these categories, most people who disappear are motivated by a formula combining all three.
By far the strongest motivation for disappearing is psychological. There are many ways to deal with life's difficult situations without disappearing. Most people fight to overcome their problems through the use of marriage counselors, attorneys, accountants, etc. When they lose, most people do their time, whether in prison or an unhappy marriage. Those who disappear are neither willing to do their time or to battle for something that's not worth the fight.
Generally speaking, deliberate disappearance is a defensive reaction to overwhelming and intolerable social pressures. Furthermore, successful identity change takes a special kind of psyche. Many of those who attempt disappearance are unable to cope with the stark reality of displacement or with the longing for reunion. They find that it's easier to deal with the problems of home than the problems of not having a home. The successful disappearee usually has a taste for risk, the ability to think and act quickly, and either a strong resistance to, or fear of, re-connecting with their past.
Let's look at some of the specific reasons that compel people to abandon their former lives and create new identities for themselves.
Marriage, Divorce & Revenge
As mentioned earlier, the prime reason for disappearing is an unhappy marriage. Men and women caught in an unhappy relationship often dream about leaving their partner and everything else behind and starting over in a new town with a new name. Fear of the unknown and lack of knowledge about identity changing prevents most of them from acting on their wishes. They may even take off one day, but a few nights in boxcars brings them back or they fail to disguise their identity or location and are forcibly brought back. They do not have the psyche of the identity-changer.
For a rare few individuals, the dreams of leaving their spouse eventually develop into concrete plans and a successful escape. I met such a person one evening at Specs' 12 Adler Place Saloon in San Francisco. He recounted his story over a Green Death using the transparent guise of his "friend," a convention I had become familiar with already.
"This friend of mine was in his mid-forties when he decided he'd had enough of his wife. They had been married for many years but never had any children. He had a job that paid him pretty well but was dog-ass boring. About the only thing that meant anything to this guy was model trains. He belonged to a 'model railroaders club' and spent most of his evenings building these complicated models in his basement.
"His pride and joy in life was this elaborate scale model of a High Sierra logging railroad. You should've seen it. He built it all with his own hands and it was the envy of the club. There were articles about it in model-builder magazines and even a feature spread in the local paper.
"One evening his wife followed him downstairs after supper. A man's got to have a private place, you know, to be by himself and that basement was his private place. She shouldn't have gone down there. She was all uptight because he wouldn't go visit her folks with her. She started bitchin' and naggin' and working herself up into a tirade. And what do you think she said to him? 'You think more of that damned toy train set than you do of me.'
"There was something about her tone of voice when she said 'that damned toy train set' that made the light go on. I guess he suddenly realized that she was right, he did care more about his models than he did about her--a helluva lot more! And he knew that this was about as sad a commentary as it's possible to make about the relationship between a man and woman."
"So he split right then and there," I offered.
"No, not just then. She stomped off saying, 'If you want to talk to me, you can reach me at Mother's.' Can you imagine that, a woman of thirty-nine going off to her mother's house?
"He just sat there for a while thinking about what she said and how miserable his life was. Something inside of him clicked and he knew he couldn't take it anymore. He got up, went out to the garage and got a sledge hammer, came back and smashed that model train set-up to
