Experience the charity, horrors, and wonders of hitchhiking seven thousand miles alone. Raised in a home that wasn't safe didn't prevent Steve Theme from being selected Scholar/Athlete of the Year as a senior in high school, but hiding one life from the other has broken him into fragments. He leaves Seattle in 1978 as a know-it-all whose hobbies are shoplifting malt liquor and despising his university classmates. This remarkable memoir traverses a journey of doubt and growth against a backdrop of constant vulnerability and danger. Theme is a captive witness to dozens of people’s stories until, finally, he’s able to tell his own. Asphalt Asylum carries the reader on a unexpected journey where an alienated young man eventually understands that he’s always been part of the fabric that connects us all—love.