Nefarious Jerrius

Out On My Own

2008-08-10T17:03:00.002-05:00

When I was 19 or so I had a good job with a steady income. Things were going my way. I decided it was time to leave the nest. So I packed up my bed, desk, typewriter, stereo, and a pile of clothes and moved in with my buddy Brad. It was in a little two bedroom apartment in a nice part of town. In my mind I envisioned Party Heaven. And for the first month or so, that is exactly what it was.

Then the economy stumbled. The people who'd bought my Dad's company laid me off. Sitting around in that apartment with nothing to do, my muse long gone on vacation somewhere, it was horrible. I couldn't write because I was too worried about money. I couldn't get a job, because my skill set was strange and I'd only really worked for the family business. My experience might have been able to land me a job in Hollywood, but not in Stockton.

My friend Tony told his mom, and his mom got me a job at Zody's Department Store, which used to be a kind of Wal-Mart or K-Mart type place. I ended up in the photo department, selling cameras, stereos, and records. It was supposed to be part time, but the other employees were so unreliable - and kept getting busted for theft - that I ended up not only working full time, but overtime as well. They even fired my manager. I was on my own in an orphaned department as the Christmas season began.

One night, after a particularly long stint at work, I came home to the apartment and opened the door to see Brad and my friend Don huddled around another friend, Stephanie, who was lying on the couch crying. It was hysterical crying, like something was really wrong. The first thing that came to my mind was that she'd been raped or maybe her parents were dead.

She held her arms out and screamed my name. I hurried across the front room, diving to my knees, and embraced her as she wailed loud and hard. "What happened?" I kept asking. She couldn't answer through her sobs, and Don and Brad said they didn't know. They'd found her crying hysterically on the front doorstep, calling my name.

Stephanie was a lovely girl. She had curly black hair and a face that reminded me a bit of a young Shirley MacLaine. I really cared about her, and it was breaking my heart having her cry like this. I had Don call her best friend, Alex, to ask if she'd come over. Don said Alex was on her way.

Stephanie stopped sobbing long enough to tell me she was going to throw up. I smelled the alcohol on her, so I knew she'd been drinking … now it was clear just how much. In the bathroom I held her hair out of the way as she prayed to the porcelain gods.

Don gave her some 7-up, and she drank it down, still shaking, and then threw that up too.

Alex arrived and took over. She managed to calm Stephanie down a bit, and after I carried her to the couch, Alex called Stephanie's mother and told her what was going on. She said that we'd keep Stephanie until she was better - we were not going to let her drive. Then Alex pulled me aside, out of Stephanie's earshot, and started talking in a low voice.

"She always does this," she told me. "This is like the third time."

"Why?"

"I don't know. She gets drunk and then decides she absolutely has to be with somebody." She was looking at me with a serious, concerned expression. "She really messes up guys minds." She leaned closer. "I don't want her messing up yours."

I felt a big rush of love for Alex. She was one of my very best friends, and I'd always had a thing for her. She knew this, I think, but also knew I wouldn't do anything about it. I valued her friendship too much to ruin it by crossing that line, no matter how much I wanted to. I loved her so much. I still do. To be honest with myself, I have to admit what really held me back was that, if she rejected me, it would have crushed me completely. So I didn't dare.

We hugged, and then went and bundled up Stephanie, and I carried her into my room and put her into my bed. "I'll just sleep on the couch tonight," I announced, just so that it was clear. Then we went into the kitchen and sat around the table, talking in low voices for a while, recovering from the event.

Then Don and Alex went home. Brad went to bed. I sprawled out on the couch and tried to sleep.

About twenty minutes later, Stephanie came wandering out. "What are you doing out here?" she asked.

"Um…"

"I don't want to be alone." She held out her hand. I took it and she led me back to my bedroom.

I got her settled back into bed, covered her up, and then laid down on the floor. Stephanie peeked over the edge of the bed at me. "You don't have to be down there," she said.

I looked up at her through the gloom, wondering what she really wanted. I mean, I had no intention of making love with her. It would just be wrong. But, at her insistence, I climbed into the narrow little bed with her and held her. She finally went to sleep, and I lie awake all night, very aware that there was a beautiful girl in my arms. A beautiful girl who had the sickly-sweet smell of liquor vomit in her hair.

Around dawn, I woke her up and gave her a large dose of Tylenol, then had her go back to sleep while I watched TV for a few hours with the volume off. She woke me up later on the couch, and thanked me for giving her the Tylenol - she barely had a headache, thanks to that - and we hugged and she left.

And then nothing ever happened with her again. At least, not with me. I never found out why Stephanie chose me that night, why she had to see ME of all people. Within a week she had a new steady boyfriend. It wasn't a friend of mine - in fact it was someone I didn't really like. After him, she started seeing my friend Ted.

About a month after this, some psycho bastard murdered John Lennon, and Alex started dating my friend Dan, and Brad got involved with a group of the first true computer hackers. These hackers nearly landed Brad and I in jail, and so I moved out. Back home again, to my parent's house. I ended up at my parents house several times before I really got out on my own for good.
By the time I was out for good, it wasn't the same. That wonder at being on my own was gone. That heady excitement and feeling of freedom.

It wasn't new anymore. It was commonplace.

Subaru Brat

2008-07-31T23:11:00.000-05:00

When I was 17 years old I was thumbing through one of Dad's Penthouse magazines, and I saw something I wanted badly. No, not what you think. Well, besides that, anyway. It was a car review.

I can still see the picture in my mind: a cool little blue pickup with a white camper shell. It had white spoked wheels and a big white push-bar up front. There was a stripe going up the side, and a logo that read: "BRAT."

It was the first time I'd ever seen a Subaru Brat.

I have no idea why, but I fell in love with it the moment I saw it. There was just something about the design that meshed perfectly with my personality. It was something that was just so me, at least the teenage me.

I took it as fate when my father pulled me aside just three days later to drop a bombshell on me: "Son," he said, "we're just making too damn much money with the business. The tax is going to kill us if we don't spend some of it."

I just stared at him, electrified. What was he about to say? I had no idea, but I definitely wasn't expecting this: "I want you to go pick out a car, and the company is going to lease it for you."

"I already have a car picked out," I told him. I was in a kind of daze.

"You do! What is it?"

I went and got him the Penthouse magazine and showed him the picture. He frowned and scoffed. "What do you want that for? I'll get you sports car, or a Cadillac like your brother's."

I didn't want a Cadillac. I didn't want a sports car, either. I wanted a Subaru Brat.

I went down to the car dealership with good friend Brad, and we walked right up to a salesman and explained the situation. My father was getting me a car. The financing was already arranged. I wanted a Subaru Brat.

The salesman led us right over to one. It was red and ugly – I wanted a blue one like in the Penthouse magazine. No problem, I was told. It would be arranged. Did I want to take a test drive?

Brad and I looked at each other. It had never occurred to me that they were going to let me drive one. "Sure!"

Brad rode in back, in one of the jump seats. I drove it around the block and then back into the car lot. "Yes, this is what I want," I told the salesman.

They led us into a room, and then the salesman excused himself. He had to go take care of "paperwork." Brad and I talked excitedly about the fun we were going to have with a Subaru Brat. The places we would go … the girls we would pick up. Little did I know but that office was bugged and the salesman and his manager were listening to us. I found out later that – at least at the time – this was common practice. Now whenever they do that I sit silently for a few minutes and then say, "I'm going to walk out of here if that idiot doesn't come back." Magically the "idiot" always returns, and quickly.

Anyway, the paperwork was done. My car arrived from another dealership. It had the white spoked wheels, the white push-bar, and the white camper shell. It looked exactly like the picture in Penthouse. I was deliriously happy.

I zoomed home and parked in front of my house, but before I could get out of the car, I spotted my friend Larry from down the street coming out of his house. So I started it up and zoomed off over to Larry, not realizing my Mom was out the door and walking up to see her son's first new car. This hurt her feelings, and she didn't want to see the car after that. It took me two hours of groveling and apologizing to get her to come out and see the Brat. We went for a drive, and she forgave me, and when we got home she approved the little pickup. She thought it was cute.

A few weeks later, when my father needed some parts couriered down to San Diego, he decided the Brat was handy. I was able to fit the big alloy turbines into the back just perfectly, yet the truck was still small and quick. I zoomed down south and came back the next day. From then on if he needed something special picked up in the bay area, or dropped off in Sacramento, he'd send me and the Brat.

For Christmas I got a really cool sound system that replaced the cheapo AM radio, and we'd take it cruising up and down the Avenue thumping out the tunes. The drawback was that, especially in the winter or summer, the friends sitting in back would either freeze or sweat. The air conditioner worked fine in the little cab, but wasn't able to do anything for the passengers in back even with the little sliding window open.

During one trip down to LA, my friends and I discovered we could actually squeeze through that sliding window while on the road. We'd take turns driving, riding shotgun, and standing CHP watch (looking intently out the back window for the Highway Patrol, because back then the speed limit was 55 miles an hour and no one – especially me – ever drove that slow on the freeway).

Dad's business hit one of its lulls, and the money dried up. He wanted me to start paying for the Brat's lease out of my own pocket. If I worked full time, most of my wages would go to the car payment. Being a spoiled brat myself I didn't think that was fair, especially after having it free for so long.

My 18^th birthday happened right around then, which complicated things. I came out and declared myself no longer subject to my parent's rules, and they shot back that – as long as I was living at home – there would be rules no matter what my age. This fight escalated to the point where I just walked out, leaving the Brat and everything else associated with them behind. I stayed for 2 weeks with my friend Jeannette, avoiding my father's attempts to find me – when he finally did catch up to me he just told me to come home. I had won.

(By the way, I'm being paid back for this – in droves – by my own kids.)

Since I refused to pay for the car, I also refused to drive it – so the Subaru sat down at his shop unused for about two months. Finally my Dad told me I might as well drive it until it gets repossessed, and I thought about it and decided he was right.

Knowing I wasn't going to have it much longer made me use it more than usual. I'd scrounge gas and snack money and my friends and I would take it on long drives up and down the coast. It was especially fun to drive on Highway 1, with all it's snaky twists and turns. For months, when the repo men came looking, the Brat was nowhere to be found. It was out having fun.

Once my friends took it out on a beer run, and then had to call from the liquor store – the Brat was in the field across the way, stuck in the mud. While the little truck was a 4WD vehicle, it didn't have a whole lot of clearance. We had to give two rednecks a 12-pack of Coors to get them to pull it out with their pickup. My friends were very, very sheepish on the way back to the party.

The repo men caught up to the Brat soon after. Dad's business was still slumping – I went back to using the Corvair. That was a letdown.

Several month later, parked out in front of Carnations restaurant – our hangout at the time – was none other than my Subaru Brat. Out of nostalgia I had kept the old Brat's key on my keychain, and to my amazement it unlocked this Brat's door. They hadn't even re-keyed the locks. But it was very neat and clean inside, and had a girl's knick-knacks and some feathers hanging from the rearview mirror. I thought that, if the new owner loved it half as much as I used to, it would be a horrible thing to come out and find it missing. We shut and locked the doors and went inside the restaurant. Though we watched everyone who left, we somehow missed seeing the new owner take off in the Brat. I was going to offer her the key.

About two years later I saw it one last time. I knew it was the same one because it had the same license plate. The camper shell was long gone, and the body was beat to hell. It looked like it had been in the middle of a riot.

About a year after that, my good friend DT found an actual plastic model of the Subaru Brat, and gave it to me for my birthday. I very slowly, carefully built and painted it to look exactly like my real one. I even had to hand-make the push-bar out of sprue. This model lasted for years, but didn't survive the last move. It was time to let go of it anyway … I mean it was just a car, after all.

But I still have pictures.

I Was A Teenage Anarchist

2008-07-26T23:11:00.000-05:00

During my teenage years, back before there was HBO, there was this thing called "Channel 100." It was our first premium movie channel. It played the same movies over and over and over again for a week. One of these movies was S*P*Y*S with Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland, a silly spoof where at least one set of bad guys were bomb-throwing anarchists. That was the germ of the idea.

Later, when I was around 18 or so, I started writing a (really bad) novel called "Freedom At Large." The bad guys were going to be anarchists who've built an atomic bomb. In my mind I had the picture of the anarchists from S*P*Y*S, but I really knew nothing about anarchy or anarchists, and decided I'd better research it. The bad guys in my story had to have some semblance of realism.

I cracked open Volume One of my Encyclopedia Britannica, thumbed through the A's, and found the listing for anarchism. As I read about anarchy, my interest began shifting. I liked what I read. Lord help me – it was the beginning of several strange years. Anarchism, I discovered, has been given a bad rap through the ages – and whoever wrote that Britannica article really believed this.

If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Of course any government is going to slander and villainize a philosophy which declares government undesirable. Many anarchist philosophers (they weren't leaders, because anarchism doesn't have any) were very peaceful people with a high set of morals. Some were even Christians. They were the one who started the idea: "Educate, don't legislate," and were very much opposed to radical behavior and terrorism. In most historical cases, the acts of terrorism attributed to anarchists were actually perpetrated by the governments trying to persecute them.

So what is anarchism about? For one thing, it's utopian. The goal is to raise everyone's morals and values to the point where laws become unnecessary. The dream is to raise a society where everyone knows what's right, and everyone acts accordingly. Decisions are made by groups in a democratic fashion. Any type of government is avoided because, to quote the anarchist's motto, "Power corrupts." Anyone who has a position of power over others is in danger of becoming corrupt. So in an anarchist society, everyone has power over one person – themselves. Everyone is equal. Everyone. No one is "more equal" than someone else.

This explains what was going on in my head when I adopted anarchism as my philosophy. To an idealistic teenage mind, anarchist philosophy is wonderful. That's because an idealistic teenager has yet to figure out that no one is perfect, and it would take perfect people to make anarchism work. Just look what happened in the 1960's, when people decided that there could be a new, better society. How long did that last before self-indulgence overtook the movement of peace and love? About four or five years, tops.

I think I realized this even back then, but I didn't care. Announcing to the world that I was an anarchist caused some interesting reactions. Within a month I had a whole new persona. The more I studied anarchism, and the more I talked about it and preached it, the stronger this new persona became. People who met me had a label to put on me. "Jerry, you know, that anarchist." It was fun for people to know an anarchist. That made it fun to be an anarchist.

The down side was that, as an anarchist, people expected me to act in an outrageous fashion, and I felt I had to oblige them. Many things I did as an "anarchist" were, in retrospect, very embarrassing. In junior college, when I was first getting into journalism (and reading too much Hunter S. Thompson) I was in a classroom and the students were each asked to introduce themselves. We were asked to share what made us want to become journalists and write for the college paper. When it came to my turn, I stood up and said, "I used to draw on the walls with a crayon, and I feel that qualifies me to write for the paper." The few others in the class who knew I was an anarchist laughed, but the rest stared at me in shock. The instructor didn't know what the hell to say to that. A bit flustered, he went on to the next student.

This wild anarchist persona made it my duty to park in wrong places, to drink on campus, to sit where I wasn't supposed to sit, and to walk through doors that said "Do Not Enter." It justified driving over the speed limit, running stop signs, and ignoring No Trespassing signs. "Property is theft!" I would yell.

My friends who knew me before I'd adopted anarchism would just laugh and say, "Yeah, whatever." Other friends seemed to take pride in knowing an anarchist. My friend Mike, in particular, seemed to enjoy introducing me to people. "This is my friend Jerry, he's an anarchist." That was my cue to say, "Where's the beer?"

As the teen years passed, and I started working up into the twenties, I began shedding the anarchist persona. It was becoming impractical if I wanted to remain employed anywhere. I said goodbye to it by writing a silly novel about pure anarchy, one which had portions published in a San Francisco literary-comedy magazine.

The novel ends with this epitaph:

"…I got older, got married, became a father, and the weight of civilization pressed down on my shoulders. There's no way I could be an anarchist. Morality caught up to me. This novel is all the anarchism that I once held dear."

That about sums it up. I no longer consider myself an anarchist. I copped out, I joined the evil empire. I played the game and made a niche for myself in this capitalist society.

But every once in a while … when someone steps all over me just because they can, because they're in a position to do so … that anarchist inside me pops open a lid and stares hatefully out, riling at the injustice, and wishes for that utopia he's glimpsed and can never quite let go of.

Spinning in San Diego

2008-07-23T23:08:00.000-05:00

"Looks like you're going to be on your own for the next few days," the biker told me. I don't remember if he really was a biker, but he looked like one. Long curly hair, beard, thick gold ear ring. Come to think of it, he looked more like a pirate than a biker. "Here," he said, "this will keep you company." He handed me a zip-lock plastic bag.

The bag was full of weed. I was a bit afraid, but I didn't hand it back. "Thanks."

He said goodbye and left. I sat down, staring at the bag in my hand. I'd never had more than a single joint in my possession. Here was at least thirty joints worth.

The biker/pirate was one of my brother's employees. I was at the San Diego apartment that the company kept for northerners, like me, visiting the offices down south. I was in town taking promotional shots of work being done at the shipyards, and had more to take on Monday. There was no going home for the weekend – my father had flown me down and wouldn't be back until next Tuesday. I had no car. I was stranded.

Unlike the first apartment we had in the area (which had been on Mission Beach) this apartment was inland, on 4th Avenue by Balboa Park. The sight of airlines coming in for landings would fill the whole window – they were close and very loud. Needless to say it was a cheap apartment.

I think I held off about an hour. Maybe two. There was nothing to do and the TV didn't work, and I didn't even have anything to read. I was already a writer by then, but was in the middle of a writer's block (one of many I had when first starting out). I did have my cameras, though, and there was a nice park up the street.

I rolled a fat one and lit it up. I was still rather new to it – my joints kinda looked like a damaged Hindenburg – and I only dared three hits before I let it go out. Then I took my cameras and went for a walk to see if the marijuana would enhance my creativity.

By the time I made it to the park, everything had become funny. Unfortunately, everything was fascinating too. A crack in the sidewalk looked like the etching of a tree, and I had to photograph it – 24 times! I took pictures of leaves. I took pictures of stucco. I accosted people in the park, yelling "I'm a lizard!" and photographing their reactions.

At some point I spotted another photographer with some really pro equipment, taking shots of a pretty waiflike blonde woman who was standing in a fountain. I went and stood next to him, zipping off a few shots of my own. Boy did that piss him off. He had a British accent and swore like a sailor, and he threatened violence. The girl – who turned out to be some minor fashion model / actress (I saw her later that year in a silly TV movie) – scolded him in return, telling him not to be such an asshole. She posed for me a few times, but the other photographer was literally shoving me away. I called him a dickhead and walked off.

I moped back to the lonely apartment and consoled myself with some more weed. That was a big mistake. I was already high, and so I wanted to get higher. Nothing seemed to happen, so I smoked more. And more. By the time things did start to happen it was too late.

The room began to spin. It started slow but gained speed, and soon it was impossible to stand up. If I tried, I'd fall right over. I had to crawl to the bathroom to throw up. But that didn't help any, because the bathroom was spinning too. I crawled into one of the bedrooms and up onto the bed, and the bed was spinning. In fact, the bed was spinning worse. It was spinning so fast I was positive I'd slide right off of it.

On my back, staring up at the ceiling, I wished I would just die and get it over with. It went on for hours upon miserable hours. Intellectually I knew that at some point the THC would wear off and the spinning would stop – but emotionally I was terrified that the spinning would go on forever. I was afraid that, even if I managed to go to sleep, I would still be spinning in my dreams.

The bed wasn't working at all, so I crawled out to the back patio and onto one of the rickety chairs, sitting there staring out at the distant water and the sprawling airport. I hung onto the railing so hard my knuckles were white. It occurred to me as I was sitting there that what I was feeling was the actual spinning of the Earth. Us Earthbound humans, born and raised on this spinning planet, were used to it and never noticed it. Something that the THC had done to my brain had enabled me to feel it. The spinning. The Earth's rotation.

Staring at the horizon helped a lot. No matter what I was feeling, my sight told my brain that I was NOT spinning. Slowly my brain began to accept this, and the spinning sensation began to fade. It was replaced by an incredible case of the munchies.

I spent $25 on junk food at the local 7-Eleven that late afternoon. The guy behind the counter gave me a knowing look. I had to go back there later that evening for aspirin and Pepto-Bismol.

I learned one solid lesson from the experience: smoke marijuana in moderation. Of course now I don't smoke it at all. Not because it's illegal, but because I'm a father. Don't want to set a bad example, you know – at least not any worse than I already have.

The next day, Sunday, I smoked more of it. This time I was very stingy with myself, which helped. I got a good solid buzz going and then went to the zoo.

The giraffes for some reason were hilarious.

Avila Beach

2008-07-20T23:07:00.000-05:00

Seagulls are cool. One used to hang out with me when I was a teenager – it was a fair-weather friend, though, because the bird was only in it for the bread crusts and potato chips.

My father's business was doing so well that he had to spend money to keep from getting killed with taxes, and he expensed an apartment on the beach. The main reason was for my mother, who used to suffer in the horrible brown air of the California central valley during the summer. The theory was that if she were on the beach, with the wonderful, clean Pacific breeze constantly blowing in, her allergies would clear up. It worked to an extent.

The seacoast town Dad chose for the apartment was Avila Beach. I had graduated from high school early and started going to junior college, but took a break and went to live on the coast for a while. Dad would only show up on weekends.

I would wake up in the mornings and look out the balcony window at the shore. The window was open all the time – the sound of ocean waves would lull me to sleep at night and greet me gently in the morning – but when the sun came up, the seagulls began screeching. Not enough to be annoying, though. It was usually in the distance, and only once in a while.

That is, until I'd go to the balcony and start throwing pieces of bread crust.

It pissed off the neighbors because it would attract every seagull within 20 miles and they'd go into a flapping, screeching frenzy. They would hover right out from the balcony and catch the bread in mid-air. When I was done, all but one of them would go away. The last one, my fair-weathered friend, would sit on the balcony railing and stare at me.

Avila beach is a small town with a main drag along the beach, and houses and small businesses going inland. It's between a big golfing resort and an oil refinery. My dad did business with that oil refinery, which was why he could write the apartment off as a business expense. I spent a lot of time walking up and down the beach – mornings, afternoon, and night – and that's where I met my muse.

Muses are real. They actually exist. Mine started talking to me while I was on those lonely walks up and down that beach. I'd listen to her whisperings and take notes, then go up to that apartment – mainly out on the balcony, sitting next to my seagull friend – and work on my first serious story.

I had written things before. They were silly kid things, little novelettes involving my friends in wish-fulfillment type plots. Most were directly inspired by Rick Brant and Ken Holt books, and their cousins Tom Swift Jr. and The Hardy Boys. My muse had nothing to do with these early stories.

She had everything to do with my first science fiction story. She was even in it. Inconstant Island, it was called, and I wrote and rewrote that story until I could practically recite it – and when I finally typed it out from my handwritten original, it was 50 pages long!

George H. Schithers was editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine at the time. I sent it to him, and he sent back a long, hand-typed note, telling me he enjoyed the story but that the ending didn't work for him, and he told me why. Then he told me to send him something else. That was a mistake on his part. I sent that poor editor so much tossed-off garbage that he eventually stopped reading them, and sent everything back unopened and refused. That's what he got for encouraging a 16 year old writer. (I have a lot of respect for editors – it's not an easy job.)

Avila Beach ended up becoming my fictional town Cameron Cove. Cameron Cove shows up in a lot of my stories – I don't know why, really. Maybe it's because I'm paying homage to the place where I met my muse.

Nearly 30 years later, I sold a very different and updated version of Inconstant Island and, at least at the time of this writing, it's available to read on the Internet.

My One Covert Mission

2008-07-16T23:06:00.000-05:00

Back in the mid 1970's, during a period when my Dad's business was going full blast, we had an office down in San Diego that was being run by a crook. We didn't know this at the time, but we should have. As Dad liked to brag, this was "one of Nixon's old dirty-tricks guys." He enjoyed having one of Richard Nixon's dirty-tricks guys on the payroll. I don't want to use his real name, so let's just call him "Dick Headley."

I hated the guy the moment I met him, and that's a rare thing for me. He was somehow oily, slithery, in a social way. Smarmy and smart-ass. I could just tell that everything he said was a lie. He was the type to talk to you like a best friend and then insult and make fun of you the moment you walk away.

Dad realized there was something weird going on when a big check showed up at the office for work we had no record of performing. Another thing we noticed, is every time my Dad left to go down there, our office manager would call Dick Headley and let him know Dad was on his way. She did it, said another office assistant, even after my Dad told her not to.

We found later that this office manager was having an affair with Headley. We also suspect Headley was slipping her money under the table. It was a fact that she was spying on the main office for him.

What my father suspected was that Dick Headley was running side operations, using our employees and equipment, but pocketing the money. The check sent in for work we didn't perform had actually been performed, on the side, and the innocent customer had sent the check to the wrong place. According to Headley, business was slacking down there. During one "slack" week, my Dad called me into his office, and with the door open, said, "Hey son, how'd you like to go trout fishing with me up in Oregon?"

I gave him a funny look. It was a Wednesday. He wanted to go trout fishing? In Oregon? "Um," I said, "sure, I guess."

"We'll fly up tonight," he told me, saying that we'd stay at his friend's ranch. "I need to get out of here and relax."

When we left for the airport, my Dad explained what was really going on. He wanted me to go with him down to San Diego, and sneak around without the office manager tipping Dick Headley off we were in town. I was going along to photograph evidence.

I'd never seen Dad so paranoid. He acted like Headley might have spies everywhere. We got into his plane, took off and flew North as if we really were going to Oregon, but after we got away from town he made a wide circle round to the south, and we followed the coastline down to the bottom of California. When we landed, it was at an airport he never used.

We rented a car that no one would recognize.

Dad got us a hotel room and we ate in, watching TV, and then he made some phone calls. One of the calls was to Headley, telling him he was up in Oregon and would be incommunicado for a few days. Still no work? No? Got any promising leads? Yes? Great! Go get 'em!

The next morning we started snooping around. Dad made phone calls to some of our established customers to see if there was any work going on. Nothing was brewing, although some said they'd have work for us later in the month. Then one of the people he spoke to said he'd seen one of our trucks working at another site. My Dad inquired where and when they'd seen the trucks working. They were working that very day, down in the San Diego shipyards.

Bingo!

Dad and I piled into the rented car and zoomed out there. We drove up and down the shipyards until we spotted one of our white vacuum trucks, removing sandblast sand out of the inside of a ship. Dad had me sneak up and take photos of the truck and the workers with my telephoto lens. I got a lot of shots, from several angles. I recognized the guys who were working.

Then Dad walked right past me, out in the open, and crossed the yard to where they were working. I followed, feeling nervous. What was he doing? I'd thought this was supposed to be a covert mission.

Dad asked them how the job was coming along. The guys looked freaked – they all had that "Oh shit!" look on their faces – and Dad poked around and asked how long they'd been working on this job. They all gave different answers, but it was clear it had been going on since Monday at least.

"Well, keep up the good work," Dad told them, and he walked back toward the car. He was walking so fast I had trouble keeping up with him.

He drove in a rush across town to the local office, which was a small warehouse in a shabby business park. The place was closed and locked, and Dad's key didn't fit – Dick Headley had changed the locks. There was a window open, though, up on the second story. "Can you get up through there?"

"Uh…" I looked it over. "Yeah," I told him, and started climbing. I had to get on the roof of a lower building and work my way over the top of a large sliding door. Swinging one leg through the window, I found … nothing. There was no second story inside. The inside wall, however, wasn't finished – there were beams and supports that I used as rungs to work my way down inside. I unlocked the door and let my Dad in just as someone pulled up. It was one of Headley's guys, a shop mechanic, coming back from lunch.

"Hey!" he yelled. "What do you think you're doing! I'm going to call the cops!"

"Excuse me," my Dad told him, "but I own this business."

"What?" He looked unsure. It took him a few minutes, but he changed his tune, and afterwards was following my Dad around helping him.

Dad was confiscating all the paperwork. The receipts, the ledgers – everything. He went through all the drawers in the office, all the file cabinets, all the desks. When the guy asked him what he was doing, Dad said, "I'm performing an audit."

We piled it all into the trunk of the car, and locked it up. Before we could leave, though, Dick Headley himself came driving up, very fast, like there was an emergency. Apparently he'd gotten a call from one of the guys at the job sight. The car slid to a stop in the gravel driveway, and he jumped out. "Jim!" he said to my Dad. "I thought you said you were in Oregon!"

"I thought you said we didn't have any work."

"We just got some today. I was about to call you."

"Uh-huh."

Dick Headley was desperately trying not to lose his cool, quick-talking a mile a minute. Dad wasn't listening. At one point, Headley began getting belligerent, like my Dad had no business sticking his nose into what Headley was doing. Dad, in one of his rare shows of restraint, just rolled his eyes and told me to get into the car.

Dad had an accountant go over the papers and receipts, and as it turned out, there were two separate ledgers. This didn't surprise the accountant – this was common. Usually it was one real ledger and one for the IRS. In this case, it was one for the company and one for Dick Headley. Dad was able to take this down to the DA's office and get a warrant. They used my pictures as evidence, too.

Dick Headley went to jail. At least, he ended up there for a few hours, only long enough to get himself bailed out. He still had some strong political ties, as strings were pulled and he was let off, after paying back part of the money he stole. It was only a small fraction, though, and then Headley walked away. Smirking.

And people wonder why I'm cynical about the American justice system.

We didn't get a chance to fire the office manager who was spying. She quit the moment she heard what had happened. She was gone by the time we got back.

Heather's Difference

2008-07-12T23:05:00.000-05:00

Heather was a mutant.

She was a beautiful mutant, though. A very feminine California blonde with sparkling light blue eyes and an infectious smile. She wore that glossy lipstick that was popular at the time, and always had painted finger- and toe nails. Her earrings were usually large and intricate, like miniature jeweled wind chimes.

I met her though my friend Ronny who was the girl-magnet that lived across the street. He brought her over swimming one day, and after he went home, she stayed behind. We were having too much fun talking. Movies, I seem to remember, was her thing. She loved movies and could tell you who played in what, and knew the director's name, and the year it was made. You name the movie, she could tell you the stats. I was interested in that, and in the fact that she wore a gold chain around her hips.

I'd never seen anything so exotic in my 17 years of life. A beautiful blond, tan, blue-eyed nymph with glossy lips and a gold chain around her midriff. There was something almost magical about her, like she was a girl who would be seen with a unicorn. I had her maneuvered into my bedroom, and sitting on my bed. And it was there, on my bed, I discovered she was a mutant.

We were talking about movies, and rock albums, and sitting side by side with our arms touching. I looked down at her legs to see she also had an ankle bracelet – the same fine gold as her belly chain, but with little heart trinkets spaced out around it. While looking at her ankle, I looked at her feet. Looking at her feet, I saw the mutation.

Not only did she have webbing between her toes, but two of her middle toes were grown together as one. "Oh, that's cool!"

"What?"

"Your toes. That's neat."

"Oh, yeah." She lifted her foot and wiggled the toes. "I'm a mutant."

Mutant was not a word that would have come into my mind when describing her. "No wonder you swim so fast," I said.

"I don't think it makes much of a difference, really."

"It doesn't?"

"No." She looked at me challengingly. "It doesn't gross you out?"

"No!"

"It grosses some guys out. Ronny doesn't like it."

I rolled my eyes. I could care less what Ronny thought about her. "I think it's cool. Makes you kind of unique."

"I guess you're right about that. I never thought about it that way."

"Does it bother you?"

"Sometimes. But usually it's not what guys are looking at." She gave her shoulders a slight shake, which caused another part of her anatomy to jiggle. We laughed.

Heather came over to swim several times that summer. One time when I was driving her home, we were talking and giggling about something, and I think I was tickling her. As I turned a corner in that old Corvair, she reached over and gave the steering wheel a playful yank. Not much of one, mind you, but just enough at just the wrong time.

It startled me and I overcorrected, which threw the car to the side, and then I overcorrected in the opposite direction, which threw the Corvair into a spin. Since we weren't wearing seat belts, I was thrown out of the driver's seat and into the passenger side, smashing Heather against the door.

The front of the car bounced over the meridian and hit a speed limit sign. I saw all this in slow motion. I saw the sign magically become separate from the ground, and go twirling into the air like a giant baton and out of sight. The car continued spinning and the rear wheels smacked into the meridian, and the car was suddenly still.

Fortunately there wasn't another car in sight, and there were no witnesses. The Corvair's engine was silent. I scrambled back into the driver's seat, and then looked at Heather. She looked completely calm. "Are you okay?" I asked her.

"Yeah. You?"

"Yeah. Okay. We're okay." I started the car and pulled off the meridian, and then drove quickly back onto the street where I lived. The car was making frightening sounds, and was wobbling. As soon as we were away from the main road I pulled over and stopped, and we leaped out to inspect the damage.

Two rims had huge gouges in them from going over the meridian, and the tires were flat. The front bumper suffered a minor ding from hitting the speed sign. Other than that, the car was okay.

Suddenly it was funny, and Heather and I started laughing and we gave each other a long, strong hug. It was pure relief. I knew my dad was going to be unhappy, and it was going to cost me to fix the tires, but it could have been worse. There could have been other cars involved.

Somehow – and I've never figured it out – the city knew it was me that busted the speed limit sign, and I was sent a $35 bill for repairs.

Heather stopped coming over after this happened. It had nothing to do with the accident; she just happened to meet and fall in love with another guy. According to Ronny, it was some drug-dealing, chain-wearing, cocaine-sniffing macho man with a black and red Trans Am. An awkward geek like I was, back then, couldn't compete with that. Even if I did have a swimming pool.

The Corvair

2008-07-10T23:04:00.000-05:00

Okay, brace yourself. I'm asking you to really shake the dust out of some of those brain cells. Many of you may be too young to remember.

There was this 1960's Japanese television show called Ultraman. It was in the same vein as those goofy old Godzilla movies, and Ultraman would always "get big" to fight off the rubber-suited monster of the week. While small, Ultraman (aka Science Patrol Officer Hayata) drove around in a 1960 Corvair (which the Japanese considered futuristic).

I had one of these Science Patrol cars! I had a 1960 "unsafe at any speed" Corvair.

Actually it was my Mom's. It had started out as Dad's, back in Tucson, but after we moved to California and my Dad bought a Caddy, Mom inherited it. It was easy to work on and very easy to drive. Like a VW Bug it had a rear engine that was air-cooled, and when it was running it was so quiet that it sounded like a sewing machine. Inside, a tiny shift switch on the dash controlled the automatic transmission. When I was 12 my dad would let me drive it around on dirt roads. At home, I was allowed to back out of the driveway, and pull it into the garage. When I was fourteen, my mom would let me take it to the store (less than a mile away) even though I didn't yet have a learner's permit.

It was the summer of that year that my parents started leaving me at home on weekends while they took their boat out. My friends Brad and Pat were over one of these weekends, and I got a wild hair or something and decided we should take that Corvair for a ride. Brad's father had a cabin up in the nearby foothills, so we loaded up on soda pop and Cheetos and took that Corvair out on the open road.

I knew the rules of the road. I looked at least 17 or so. We pulled it off, though we never did find the cabin. We did get completely lost in the woods and took hours to find our way out, and then headed back home to arrive just after dark with barely any gas in the tank.

My father, upon their return, noticed that the gas – which had been full when they left – was way down, and there was strange red dust in the wheel wells. "This car has been up in the mountains!" he exclaimed. "You took this car up in the mountains!"

"No I didn't." I proclaimed my innocence over and over, and since he didn't have any real proof he let it drop.

It was about a year and a half later that I got my learner's permit. I took driver's education in High School and then my parents rounded it out by sending me to Sears Drivers Training School. My instructor was a belligerent dickhead. We drove around in a special car with a steering wheel, gas pedal and brake in both the driver's and passenger's side. He seemed to love throwing on the brakes for no reason and yelling at me for imaginary mistakes. "You just wiped out a whole row of parked cars!" he yelled once.

I looked around and wondered where these cars were. There wasn't a car within 100 feet of us, parked or otherwise. It turns out I was supposed to pretend that there were parked cars in every parking space, but he'd neglected to tell me this up front. When I pointed this out to him he just got more belligerent.

This guy was everything I hated about adults all rolled into one incarnate butthead.

Regardless, I passed and got my certificate. I also passed my driver's test and got my real, actual driver's license. The first thing I did was take the Corvair to pick up Brad, and then Brad and I drove to our favorite place, Tower Records. I bought Leftoverture, the new album by Kansas (which gives you an idea when all this took place).

Though the Corvair was still technically my Mom's car, I was the one who drove it. She didn't need it, because whenever she wanted something from the store she'd just send me. If she actually had to go somewhere, she usually went with my Dad.

If you haven't heard anything about the 1960 Corvair, there's one thing you should know. This is the car that Ralph Nader made his reputation on. The car was poorly designed and very unsafe. I found this to be true over and over again through the years.

The first time was when I was driving to my friend's house near the local university, and I made a right turn and the car leaned over and stopped. I got out of the car and found, to my horror, the right rear wheel was about two feet from the car, like the rear axle had telescoped out. I called my Dad and he knew instantly what was wrong. It seemed this had happened to him before. He drove out with his toolbox and had me jack the car up, and he crawled under and reattached the axle to the transmission.

Years later, after this car had been passed back and forth in-between family members several times, it ended up as mine again. This time it was actually registered to me. I was newly married, struggling to survive, with a new baby at home that needed food and diapers. I got a job as a computer repairman for ComputerLand and used the Corvair to make house calls. There was this one call I was going out on for a professor at the University of the Pacific, and I hadn't gotten three blocks from ComputerLand when I saw smoke pouring out of the vents on the back hood. I whipped a quick U-turn and zoomed back to the store, and once in the parking lot I got out and raced around to the back end. Opening the hood, I discovered the engine was on fire.

Panicked, I raced into the store, startling sales people and customers alike, ran to the break room and grabbed the two-gallon coffee maker. I raced back out carrying the coffee maker, again startling everyone in the store, and dumped all two gallons of coffee onto the burning engine. It put the fire out all right, but after that the car smelled like burnt coffee for over a year.

One good thing came out of it, though: ComputerLand bought me a van to use for company business.

More years passed. The car passed hands again amidst the family, and ended up as mine one last time. My baby daughter Danielle was now 4 years old, and her and I had been with my wife at some event and decided to leave early. It was past dark and getting close to my kid's bedtime. My wife, having her own car at the time, stayed behind to finish up.

As Danielle and I were driving home on the freeway, the car began to shudder. My first thought was that the engine was freezing up. Our exit was within sight, which was a relief. I let up on the gas pedal and let the car coast, but the shuddering continued to increase. It became violent, and Danielle started screaming, and then suddenly it stopped and the Corvair very slowly tilted to one side. Moments later there was a muffled dragging sound. I let the car glide over to the side of the freeway and stop.

"Daddy!" Danielle was crying, "I'm scared!"

"It's okay honey. A wheel just came off the car. We're okay now." I got her out of the car and we started walking toward the off ramp. She was still shook up and frightened, and in an effort to console her I said, "It's okay sweetie. We're having an adventure. This is a real, true adventure! Isn't it exciting?"

It took her a moment, as I guess she was thinking it through, but then she said, "Daddy?"

"Yes sweetheart?"

"I don't like adventures."

After that, I gave the car back to my Dad and never touched it again. He called me one day and said, "You know, I've got your Corvair all fixed up. You can pick it up anytime."

"No, Dad," I told him, "that's okay. You can have it back. It's yours."

Squandering Hawaii

2008-07-06T23:11:00.000-05:00

I fell into a black pit so deep that I couldn't see the bottom. The feeling of freefall was extreme, but I forced myself to remain calm. I can beat this, I told myself. I have to fight my way back up.

I had no idea where this black pit had come from, or how I'd stumbled into it. I don't even know what it was. By sheer force of will I stopped myself from falling. Struggling with everything I had, I began to rise. It was like trying to swim up a waterfall.

The opening of the pit loomed near, and the closer I got the faster I rose. When I came out of it I was flying. The opening of the pit turned out to be consciousness, and I literally leaped out of my bed and tumbled across the floor. I sat there in near shock, panting, my entire body soaked with sweat.

What did it mean?

We were leaving for Hawaii in a few hours, on a long flight over the Pacific Ocean in a jumbo jet. The dream I just had, was it a premonition? I wondered if I should tell my parents. I weighed the premonition in my mind against the prospect of a month in Hawaii. Reluctantly I dismissed it as superstition, and nothing more than a nightmare.

I had never been to Hawaii before. I'd been down in the Sea of Cortez, and up and down the California coast. I'd been in lakes by the dozens, from the Salton Sea up to Lake Tahoe. Nowhere had I ever seen a coral reef, or tropical fish, or a live volcano. This was to be an adventure of a lifetime.

I had just turned 16 years old. I had changed my hairstyle and adopted a new wardrobe. I was wearing pooka shells. I was ready for this trip.

We left for the airport on the day after Christmas, 1976. Jimmy Carter had just been elected President, and everyone was completely sick of hearing about the nation's bicentennial. My dad's business was booming, and he had a lot of money to spend. It was always either feast or famine when I was growing up, and this was one of times we were feasting.

The San Francisco airport was foggy that morning, but it wasn't stopping any airplanes. We boarded the 747 and sat in the first class area (Dad always travels first class if he can get away with it). I was armed with two SLR 35mm cameras as well as a sound Super-8 movie camera. My window seat was comfortable, but all I could see outside was fog. There was nothing visible. Nothing of which to take a picture, that's for sure. I turned away from the window, settling in my seat. My excitement about Hawaii was severely damped by the notion that I was about to die in a plane crash.

I remained stoic as the big plane taxied out onto the runway. I'd flown a lot with my father in his small planes, and it was always under optimal visibility. He would never have taken off into the fog like this. As the jet turned out onto the main runway and poured on the throttle, I remember closing my eyes, prepared for whatever was going to happen. The engines screamed, and I felt myself sinking back into the seat. What monstrous engines! Pushing this big hunk of metal so hard through the air, and right up into the sky. Incredible.

I peeked outside, and still saw nothing but fog. I couldn't even tell we were off the ground until the plane broke through into the sunlight, which was startling and brilliant. We were flying over a world made out of puffy white cotton. I gaped at it for several minutes, and gradually began to relax.

The airplane climbed to an amazing altitude. I looked down on layer upon layer of clouds, amazed that they were so far below. My dad commented that he could kind of make out the curvature of the Earth.

The neat thing about the Boing 747 is the little upstairs cabin. In this plane it was the first class lounge area. I climbed up a tight spiral staircase and to a little room with a wet bar and sofas. There were stereo headphones that could be plugged in, and various "channels" issued forth specific music genres. I sipped a Coke while listening Supertramp's song Bloody Well Right, which was the first time I'd ever heard the band. (I later bought the album.)

We landed in Hawaii and my dad rented us a drab brown Dodge sedan, and we drove to the hotel. This was in downtown Honolulu, quite a ways from the ocean. Talk about disappointing! It was smoggy, dirty, and reminded me of San Diego. So much for the island paradise of Hawaii. Throughout the trip, though, my Dad kept getting me my own hotel room, probably with the idea that I was going to find some bikini clad beauty to spend time with. Instead, I went down to the closest convenience store to buy a snack and find something to read.

A Playboy caught my attention. Then a Penthouse. But then I saw something so nasty and unwholesome I was immediately attracted to it: Hustler magazine. I'd never seen it before. So I bought it and shoved it into a paper bag, and snuck it up to my room.

During our stay in Honolulu we took daily trips to the beach, but it was very crowded and there was nothing for me to do besides snap candid shots of bikini girls with my zoom lens. I had a swim suit but no diving gear. At one point I wandered into a bar and discovered the drinking age in Hawaii was only 18 years old. When I was 16, I looked 19. So I bellied up to the bar and ordered a beer. Much to my amazement and delight, I was served without the slightest hesitation.

I was in Hawaii drinking in a bar, and there was a Hustler magazine in my private hotel room. Boy, I felt like a grown up! This was the life!

New Years Eve arrived and I kept hearing firecrackers going off. They were everywhere. That didn't seem fair because, well, I didn't have any! And no one was selling them, either. They were strictly illegal. So where did they come from? I never found out. But as I wandered the downtown streets that evening there were kids throwing firecrackers out of high-rise windows, trying to bomb pedestrians such as myself on the sidewalk. Some of them were whole lit packages of firecrackers, making a machine gun racket all the way down the side of the building. Others, as I found, were those little teardrop-shaped ones that explode on impact. My father knew what they were but I'd never seen them before. As I walked along the sidewalk, whole lines of these little bombs exploded around me as if I were being strafed by a fighter plane. Later I found unexploded ones in grassy areas, and was able to gather a small handful for myself. I took them up to my room and threw them out my own high rise window, but by them there were no pedestrians foolish enough to walk down the street. It was just not fair at all.

New Years morning there was so much paper and debris from the illegal firecrackers that it literally covered the streets and sidewalks like a blanket of snow. An army of workers swept and shoveled this paper for hours. It was one of the strangest things I've seen.

After New Years we packed up and headed off to Maui. Let me tell you, Maui was much, much nicer than Honolulu. We were in a deluxe hotel on the shoreline, and the beach was not as crowded. It was less like San Diego and more like an island paradise. I persuaded Dad that I needed a mask, fins, and snorkel, and so he bought me a deluxe set.

I had never snorkeled in warm water before – at least, not outside a swimming pool. This was wonderful! I cruised along the sandy bottom, checking out the sea life. There was the occasional poisonous Lion Fish, which I'd only seen before in aquarium shops. They were red and white, and looked like they were covered with danger flags. Then I discovered little 5-inch long Halibuts, which are strange fish with two eyes on one side and none on the other, and they swim around sideways and spend time resting on the bottom, completely camouflaged.

While spending all this time in the sun, I of course got a massive sunburn, and had to spend the next few days inside. This is when I went to a bookshop and bought Dune by Frank Herbert. I'd never read any of the Dune series before. I was instantly hooked, which pissed off my father. He was paying for me to have a private room on an island paradise, and all I wanted to do is lounge around reading books.

We left Maui and made our way to the big island. This was the island with the volcano. Dad had us booked in a brand new resort hotel, which was incredibly luxurious (and wasted on me – I had a three-room suite all to my lonesome). I continued reading Dune, sitting in a recliner on my patio, sipping Pina Coladas brought by room service. Right in front of me were several macadamia nut bushes, and on one of them – to my surprise – appeared a green Anole lizard. I had no idea there were American Chameleons in Hawaii. I used to buy them at pet stores or order them through the mail. Here was one on my balcony!

So, me being the complete geek I was, I spend a large part of the remaining vacation hunting lizards. I found four different types: two different species of Anole; little nocturnal Mediterranean Geckos; and some tiny brown skink native only to Hawaii. I was in heaven.

My parents grew worried about me. They'd only see me for breakfast (waffles with coconut syrup, yum!), and when they came to visit my room it was full of lizards. So they insisted I go with them to see the volcano, which was a long boring trip through very monotonous, ugly terrain, and then we only got close enough to see a little glow of red flicking out on the horizon. Ooo! Lava! It was a 12-second thrill, then I wanted to get back to my lizard hunting.

So in desperation my father booked me on a catamaran trip that was supposed to take me out diving amid the most beautiful coral reefs in the islands. This, I thought, had the potential to be more interesting than lizards. So I gathered up my snorkeling gear and headed out with the group on the catamaran.

We cruised around for an hour while the tour guides frowned at the water. Occasionally a pair of porpoises would swim alongside, but if we jumped in they'd leave so fast we'd only see an afterimage of their tails disappearing into the distance. Apparently Flipper was no where to be found. Then the tour guides finally announced that the water was too choppy to take us to the reef. Swimming around the sharp coral in rough water was dangerous.

Instead, they asked, would we like to go see some whales? There was an enthusiastic yes from everyone on the boat. The big catamaran turned around and we headed out into the open sea.

Apparently the tour guides knew exactly where to find some whales. We were alongside a pair of them within twenty minutes. They stopped the boat and said, "Dive in!"

I wasn't ready for the size of a real, honest-to-goodness whale. I guess when I was looking in the water, I didn't see the whole thing. But when I jumped in right along side one of them, and had it about an arm's length away from my face, it finally hit me. These animals are huge! I looked right into one of its eyes, and it looked right back at me. I guess it didn't like what it saw, and decided to dive. The whale bent in the middle and plummeted for the depths, and the thrust from its tail sent me spinning away. I guess I went sort of nuts, and I dove down after it.

I'd been swimming like a fish since I was a little kid, and I could hold my breath for a minute and a half. So there I was in the ocean swimming straight down after a whale, and everyone above freaked out. I don't really know how far down I went, but it was far enough so that when I finally stopped and looked back up, the catamaran was a toy on the surface of the water, and the others swimming around it were the size of little army men. I hung there for a while, ogling at the sight, while they all stared back down. They were probably wondering what to say to the authorities after I drowned.

It hit me, then, that I was going to need to breathe soon, and so I shot upwards toward the surface like a missile. It still took a long time to get back up there. I was only halfway when I began wondering if I'd made a fatal mistake. The last 20 feet were torture, because my lungs were demanding that I breathe NOW. I broke the surface and gasped an enormous gasp, and the tour guide was looking at me like either I was an idiot, or some sort of diving god. "That was kinda deep!" he said. "We were wondering if you'd make it back up."

"No problem," I told him. "Do it all the time."

At this, everyone around me assumed I was some sort of professional diver. They gave me beer and we talked and laughed for the rest of the trip, and spotting a few more whales and a school of dolphins, all of which scattered before we could get close. I arrived back on the shore with a renewed enthusiasm for snorkeling, which my parents must have thought was healthier than reading and hunting lizards. I don't think they really believed me when I told them about the whales.

It didn't occur to me until much later that my dive down toward the dark heart of the ocean, and then my subsequent struggle to get back to the surface, was exactly the experience I had during my strange dream. It was like a psychic link through time and space, warning me that I was going to do something stupid. Of course it was probably just a complete coincidence, but it did make me wonder.

Anyhow, there were only a few days left on the big island after that. I spent most of them swimming off the beach from the resort, out past the coral reef and over a deep shelf. The water was crystal clear, so I could hang there on the surface and stare 70 feet down at the huge schools of barracuda and the occasional shark. I preferred that to swimming around the coral itself, because for one it was sharp, and two, there were these big scary eels that for some reason enjoyed springing out at me. They probably got a kick out of seeing the funny human creature thrash and scream.

There was one last time I was out there, hanging over that drop and watching the spooky shapes swimming far below, and I looked up to see a shark coming right at me. All I could think about was the monster shark in Jaws, so I outright panicked. I swam for the nearest land, which unfortunately was an outcropping of coral that barely broke the surface. I swam at that bit of land like I was trying to do an imitation of a cartoon character sputtering over the surface of the water. What was worse, every time I braved a glance behind me, I saw the shark was gaining.

Up I scrambled onto that outcropping of coral, cutting good long gashes in my legs as I went, and I stood there with blood streaming down my legs with a shark below me in the water. Now, while in the water looking through my mask, this shark looked like it was at least 12 feet long. Out of the water and looking down, I saw it stretched maybe a whole 4 feet from nose to tail. I remember the moment clearly, especially as there were two islander boys on surfboards laughing at me.

It was the last bit of diving I did the whole trip.

A day or so later we flew back to Honolulu, but instead of staying inland my father managed to get some rooms at the Royal Hawaiian. I spent more time reading the Dune novels and drinking in bars. During one walk down the beach in the early evening, I stumbled upon Don Ho, who was doing a show on the beach. That was weird. I half expected to run into Jack Lord from Hawaii Five-0, but no such luck.

Three days later we were flying back to California in another jumbo jet. Hidden in a secret compartment of my movie camera case was a whole collection of Hawaiian lizards, which I kept thriving for years. I had them, and a lot of pictures of cute girls I didn't even talk to.

When I look back on the experience, I think to myself what a waste it was. Besides swimming with the whale, I squandered the whole trip. If I were to live my life over again, this is where I'd start. I'll take that trip once more and make the most of it, having the experience and ability to truly appreciate everything.

Going Completely Wild

2008-07-03T23:11:00.000-05:00

Total freedom. That's what I experienced for the first time when I was 14 years old. I was both ready and unready for it. The expanding horizons of total freedom were overwhelming, and I got drunk on it and craved it like a drug.

My parents had little idea what they'd done.

I had my first real job that summer, which was cleaning out railroad boxcars down at the Southern Pacific Railroad yard. It paid a whole $5 an hour, which at the time was nearly 3 times minimum wage. For a young teenager after a two-week payday, I was rich.

I was late coming home that fateful Friday because I had to deposit my paycheck and missed the bus home. My dad had been preparing to go out on one of our frequent boating trips, but they had no idea where I was. Impatient to get going, he made a strange decision. I'm not sure why, but I didn't have a problem with it … although it's not something I would have done with my kids.

I arrived home and the boat was gone, and so was the car he used to pull it. And so were my parents. They had left without me.

I felt hurt for about 30 seconds. The note they left instructed me to go stay with my brother. Like hell I was going to do that! My mind was already buzzing with the images of the pool party of the century.

I started calling my friends. "Guess what! My parents are gone for four days!"

"What?"

"Get your ass over here."

"Your parents are GONE?"

"It's party time! Bring your bathing suit."

"No way!"

"Yes way!"

"I'm coming over!"

Before any of them could arrive, the phone rang. It was my older brother calling. I told him I was okay, things were cool. No I didn't need to come over to his house. Yes, I was sure. Yes, I could take care of myself. Yes, things were perfectly fine. No, I wasn't scared. I guess I convinced him because he said, "Well, okay then," and gave up. He told me to call if I needed anything, or if I changed my mind I could come over. I thanked him and said goodbye.

My friends arrived. The stereo volume went up. I broke into my parents liquor and played bartender (I was already an accomplished bartender at 14, having served as one many times during my parent's frequent parties). My friends weren't as used to drinking as I was. Neither were the neighborhood girls.

A half-hour after dark our clothes started coming off. The main reason was that to get the maximum amount of velocity on the water slide, you needed a bare buttocks. The slippery blue surface of the tall, steep slide was nearly frictionless against wet skin. We'd go zooming down that slide and skip across the surface of the water like a flat stone. Besides the occasional wipeout (if you landed wrong you'd get a pool-water enema) it was awesome.

Unfortunately the girls went home early. Some of the guys were able to stick around, and we explored drunkenness to deeper levels. We discovered the reason that most famous philosophers were also alcoholics – everyday things become unbelievably profound after the brain has been saturated with alcohol. Our slurred but very earnest discussions lasted far into the night.

Afterwards, most of us ended up getting sick off in a corner of the yard, and the next day I nursed a minor hangover (I was already used to them, but my friends weren't). I cleaned up the house, hosed down the back yard, and did some pool maintenance. Then I was ready for more.

Nobody else was, for some odd reason.

I don't clearly remember what else happened that weekend, though I think I started my first novel. What a happy weekend that was. When my parents came home, it was like going from Capitalism to Communism at the flip of a switch. From then on I could hardly wait for my parents to go off on the boat, and from that point on I rarely joined them.

I moved out on my 18^th birthday. Though I went back several times because of financial problems, I've always loved that sweet taste of freedom.

The Imperial Marsupial Players

2008-06-29T23:11:00.000-05:00

I started playing with tape recorders at an early age. I would make up my own radio shows, play at being a DJ, record sound effects and make weird noises. Then I'd play them back and laugh hysterically whether it was funny or not. The fun was in the creation.

It wasn't long before I got my friends involved. There was Larry from across the street, and Kim and Debbie who were the girls next door. There was also Mel from school. I think our first written and performed comedy skit was Kim making moaning sounds and calling out "Fred," and I would groan and say "Judy," while in the background we made bed spring sounds. After a few seconds Mel started groaning and saying, "Oh, Judy." Kim started saying, "Oh, Marv!" So now it was Fred and Marv, and it built to a climax and then there was silence. Then I said, "I think she's dead," and the recording stopped.

You had to be there, I guess. We thought it was funny, but then again, we were just kids. Sex was this forbidden thing that made us snicker.

Pat and David from around the block started joining in. By this time I had graduated from a portable tape recorder to a stereo with dual microphones. I played with this a lot. It was fun making my voice go from one speaker to the other.

We made several comedy tapes and decided to give our little group a name. I don't really remember where "Imperial Marsupial Players" came from, but it was most likely under the influence of Monty Python and the Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time Players. Soon we added more members from Junior High, which were Brad, Mike, and Don. It was right about then I got a super-8 movie camera (with sound!) We were ready to make movies!

We shot and developed a lot of expensive film (all at the expense of my dad's company). Not much of it made any sense, but we had a lot of fun doing it. By the time Dan and DT and Jeannette were involved it looked like we might actually start getting good.

One very underground hit we had was called "Red Sidewalk" which was a send up of the bloody driver's education film "Red Asphalt." Instead of cars, I used stop motion photography to have the "drivers" scooting along the sidewalk on their butts. Driver inattention would cause collisions, followed by scenes of gore that featured entire bottles of ketchup sprayed everywhere. We actually showed this at school and got wild laughter.

There was occasionally talk about going professional, and we would make up schemes to get famous. None of it was serious, though. I don't think any of us believed it would really happen. Personally, I was too nervous to ever go up on stage and perform, so I was concentrating on film and recordings. Even having people watch our films made me turn red as a beet. What it was all about, to me, was an excuse to have a group of friends all doing something together. Everyone had talent, but it was too obvious that we were all heading in different directions.

Toward the end we did come up with a movie script that was so funny that, even reading it years later, I still laughed my ass off. We even filmed parts of it. It was to be a spoof of Reagan's anti-drug programs, filmed as a new documentary. Called "Placebo Madness" we were going to warn the populace of this dangerous, uncontrolled drug. Commonly thought to be harmless, these placebos were destroying today's youth. We would show its illegal manufacture (made out of candy), it's distribution (a pusher on the street selling placebos to addicts), and have interviews with placebo users (wearing paper-plate masks with happy faces drawn on them to protect their true identities). Law enforcement was helpless to stop it, because they couldn't prove in a court that it was even a drug. If not stopped, it would be the end of civilization as we know it.

The group started splintering off before we could finish it. Everyone had their own interests, and we were getting jobs, and were going on dates. I continued making tapes, but not as a member of the Imperial Marsupials. By this time I had returned to using a portable tape recorder which I could take along with me and interview people at random. We took it to the beach at Santa Cruz and made a really wacky tape with strangers we met on the beach.

If the experience taught me anything, it was that comedy can't be forced. It takes true talent to perform it (which I never had). Above all, it's a state of mind. You have to think funny to be funny. You have to allow yourself to be weird to see the humor in situations.

I recently went back over all the old tapes I'd made; listening to it with the thought of "Do I want my kids to hear this crap?" That which failed my listening test, I destroyed. The small percentage that passed my listening test, I converted to MP3 files and put on CD. These samples will probably be played at my funeral.

My Love Affair With Photography

2008-06-26T23:11:00.000-05:00

When I was a teenager I stole my father's camera.

It was a Canon FTb, heavy as a brick and fully manual. All metal, it was an SLR with a bright 50mm lens, 1/1000 shutter speed, and a hot shoe mount for a flash. A good, solid, semi-pro camera, especially for back in the mid 70's.

It wasn't that I was particularly interested in it. All I wanted to do was take some pictures of my pet lizards. I had a Arizona horny toad that I'd managed to keep alive and healthy for a couple of years, and when I found my father's camera in the hall closet I thought I'd try taking pictures of it. Sunlight was coming through one of my bedroom windows, shining on my old green bedspread, and so I put my critter there on the bed and aimed the camera at it. The camera wasn't all that hard to figure out. Focus was a no-brainer, and I somehow knew to match the needle with the circle for the light meter. When I pressed the shutter button, it made a healthy whack-clunk sound, which was strangely satisfying.

A few weeks later my father had developed the film and gave me my prints. I was surprised by how well they turned out. Amazed, actually. For not knowing a thing about what I was doing, it worked out pretty well. This encouraged me to experiment further.

I don't think I ever asked him if I could use the camera. I just took it over. My friends and I went out on long walks and I took pictures of the silliest things, but I was slowly getting the idea of how it all worked. Most of the pictures turned out stupid, but a few were real winners. My dad must have been impressed, because he relinquished control of the camera to me without a word.

His company had accounts down at the local camera stores, and my dad arranged for me to use them. I'd take the bus across town every other day to drop off film and buy more. For my birthday he bought me a zoom lens.

When I was a sophomore in high school I started taking the camera to school. There I captured some goofy shots of my friends and classmates, but timidly, stealthily, I started taking candid portraits of girls. Girls playing soccer, talking with their friends, sometimes dancing. They were turning out rather well. I began bringing the prints to school and showing it to them, and giving them copies if they liked the shots. Many of the girls didn't like it, but some did. Some liked it a lot. Thinking back about it, many of these girls were pretty but didn't realize it, or for some reason had a bad self-image, and just the fact that a boy was inclined to take their picture made them feel better about themselves. Of course some of them were just vain. The end result was that I started making some close friendships with girls, who until this point seemed unapproachable to me.

One of these girls started taking me shopping and buying me clothes so that I wouldn't look like such a dork. I had no fashion sense, and my parents were more inclined to get me weird polyester crap that you'd find on old men in Florida. Finally, toward the end of my high school experience, I was kind of cool and somewhat accepted. I owe that directly to the camera. Instead of Jerry the geek, I was Jerry the photographer.

In college I took a lot of photography courses, and one of my instructors was a prodigy of Ansel Adams himself. This is when I stared becoming an actual expert, understanding light and color, depth of field, and darkroom techniques. I was doing so well at this point my dad bought me an entire darkroom setup, and gave me a room down at his office building to set it up.

Soon after this I got myself a business license and had cards printed up. "Davis Photography Ltd." Everyone wanted to know what the "Ltd." was about. It means "limited company" and is used primarily in England, but my friends and I just thought it looked cool, so that's what I used. Then I put an ad in the paper and started getting a lot of work.

I specialized in doing model portfolios, brochures, and weddings, but what I really wanted to do was album covers for rock groups. This never happened, though I did take a few shots for the band I was involved with. Weddings were complete hell, though I always had satisfied customers. It's just that most of the weddings I did were disasters (disasters that had nothing to do with me), and the bride usually ended up crying over some detail that wasn't right. Emotions were high all over. It felt like shooting portraits in a war zone, and I bowed out of that even though it was my biggest income.

The old Canon FTb was traded in for a professional Canon F1 with a 7fps motor winder. I also had a fully automatic Canon A1 for more informal situations. I never did a lot with lighting because I was more of a candid portrait artist than a formal one.

I remember this one model I was shooting; we were doing bikini shots around my parent's pool, and after twenty minutes she said, "Hold on" and took her bikini off. "I want to get some nudes," she told me.

"Okay." Not a problem for me. I think I did a good job hiding my sudden nervousness. I kept expecting my mom to look out the window, and had no idea what would happen. I had her pose on the diving board, then by the water, then told her to get into the pool. The lighting was perfect for the pool shots, the ripples in the water obscuring details but revealing enough to be alluring. The angle was wrong, though, so I got into the water with her and got some great shots at the perfect angle. What made them so good was that I was catching her reaction to me being in the pool with all my clothes on. She thought it was hilarious and her smile was genuine.

Bit of a portrait tip for you: Fake smiles backfire on film, but genuine smiles always shine. They're precious and golden. Do anything you can to get your subject to laugh.

After this I started asking some of my regular models if they'd mind doing nudes. Most of the time the answer was a big NO, but on occasion there would be a hesitant yes. Nudes were very interesting for all parties concerned; the model, the photographer, and the viewer of the pictures. It stems to the fact that people are interested in seeing intimate moments, because that's when people are the most vulnerable and the most real. Walls are down when someone doesn't have clothes on. There's a trust, a sensuality. When it comes across on film it can be magic.

Amidst all this I was also working for my father, doing promotional shots for his industrial equipment and services. There was this one job in Sacramento where I almost fell off a building. My brother's company was removing gravel from the roof of a high rise building using one of my father's vacuum trucks, and there was this dramatic 6 inch pipe snaking all the way up the side of the building. Unfortunately I was having a problem getting good shots of it. The view was best from up top looking down, but I had trouble getting the perfect angle. So without thinking about it I started climbing down the outside of the building, hanging by one hand and one foot while I snapped away. The workers thought I was suicidal, and in retrospect I guess it was. I couldn't get back up, but I could get to the balcony below and to the side. So I jumped and landed on this balcony fifteen stories up, surprising the hell out of an old Norwegian guy who was standing in his bedroom dressed in an oversized pair of boxer shorts. I tried to explain what was going on, but I don't think he fully understood. I don't think he cared. He was lonely – apparently no one ever visited him – and he didn't want me to leave. He immediately gave me a beer and a sandwich, and started showing me his old family photos. It took a half hour to get out of there.

During all this time I was also trying to become a professional writer. It was rough juggling two major goals at the same time, and after some long, deep soul searching it became apparent that one or the other would have to take a back seat. Writing is what I've always loved – it even predated photography.

I sold the cameras in the summer of 1984 to finance a love affair in San Francisco. The affair only lasted a few months. I was heartbroken for a decade. But now that the pain is long gone, I want those cameras back!

My writing career took a left turn when I discovered computers. Now I'm a technical writer and computer expert instead of a great American novelist. It was my friend Dan, the born comedian, who became a professional writer.

I've now graduated to digital cameras, which I love because of how you can see instantly what your photos look like, and you can take as many pictures as you want without worrying about development costs. This gives a photographer much greater freedom to experiment. We have definitely entered a new age in photography, but there are days, though, when I miss the delicate art of chemicals, film, and paper. I don't think traditional photography will ever die out. It'll be relegated to a classic art, much like painters who still use a natural fiber brush instead of a digital pen.

Up Feather River

2008-06-22T23:11:00.002-05:00

I. The Garden of Eden

One of the nice things about being me as a kid was that my parents had no problem pulling me out of school for weeks at a time. My dad's attitude was that I would learn more from "the school of life" than I would in the classroom. We would get away with it because, at least back then, the California school system would graduate a drug addict in a coma.

My favorite destination for these times away from school was the Feather River Canyon up in Oroville Lake. The canyon was a Garden of Eden, full of beautiful secret places with water falls, and rivers full of fish, and animals everywhere. Nowhere else had I seen a more thriving area with so many healthy, well-fed species.

I would take long walks for miles along dirt roads that wound through the mountains, and trek up rivers and down hidden paths. The place was beautiful, and as long as we were there during weekdays we had the place to ourselves.

We visited this place for several years, but I most remember the times when I was between 13-15 years old. I was still very much into Herpetology and had become quite sophisticated in my specimen hunting techniques. It seemed that every day I spent out in the wilds I would discover something I'd never seen before.

II. The Snake Pretending to be a Stick

Out lizard hunting one morning I saw a pair of very fast, thin snakes which crossed the dirt road in front of me, side by side, their heads held high off the ground. The two looked like a team, and this sent a thrill through me. I'd never seen snakes do this before. Their movements and attitude denoted high intelligence, and they looked somehow professional, like pack hunters.

All the snakes I was familiar with were loners and they kept low to the ground, moving in the traditional slithering way of snakes. In contrast, these two held themselves up like cobras, and even when they crossed over into the tall grass I could see their little black heads darting back and forth, very alert. They saw me coming after them and zoomed quickly to a nearby tree.

There was nothing slow about these snakes. It didn't take them more than a few seconds to slide right up that tree and into the branches. Then they did something really interesting: they froze.

The only reason I could see them in the tree is because I'd watched them climb. To anyone else they'd be invisible. Their bodies were telling the world, "We're tree limbs! There's nothing interesting here. Go about your business." Even as I approached the tree they maintained this façade. Even as I began to climb.

There was one snake lower than the other, and so I moved carefully toward the lower one. It was thin and dark, and there were no obvious poison sacks on its head. I had an idea of what kind of snakes they were, but didn't know for sure. I thought it was funny that it was going to stay there and let me grab it. I kept expecting it to shoot away. Lord knows that, on the ground, I would never have been able to catch it.

Okay, I thought. Here goes nothing.

I reached out and grabbed it as close to the head as I could, which wasn't nearly close enough. The moment I touched it, the snake whipped its head around and bit me. It locked its jaws about four inches above my left wrist, and it hurt. I didn't let go, but I was holding on to tree limbs with the other hand and couldn't do anything about the snake. I had to climb down the tree one handed, even as blood began streaming down my arm and dripping from my elbow. I kept wondering if I were wrong – wondering if this was a poisonous species after all.

I slowly, carefully, made my way down the tree. Once on the ground I was able to grab the snake's head and pull it off my arm. Instead of the fang marks I was fearing, there was a neat, elongated oval of bloody holes. Then I saw the snake's teeth, which were long and curved. Up until that point I'd never seen teeth like that on a snake, ever.

It began whipping violently, trying to get loose, but I managed to slip it into my specimen bag and close it tight. It made a real ruckus inside that bag. Its partner, still up in the tree, had climbed all the way to the top and was pretending to be a stick again, but it was watching me.

I was a long way from the boat, so I stopped at a clear stream and rinsed my arm until it stopped bleeding, then began my long trek back. It was noon when I finally reached the boat. My mom applied bandages to my arm and both her and Dad kept asking me if I was sure it wasn't poisonous. I was sure, because by then I had already looked it up in my field guide.

The snake was called a Racer (Coluber constrictor), and was described as arboreal and its main diet consisted of birds. This explained why it would pretend to be a stick, and also why it had such large curved teeth. These snakes sit in the trees waiting for birds to land, and before the birds know what's happening they've become lunch.

Later I let this snake go back in the area where I'd caught it, hoping it would find its hunting partner. I thought perhaps they were a mated pair. Nowhere in any of the field guides did it mention these snakes staying together in pairs or groups. I may have witnessed a fluke, or some behavior no one had ever seen before.

If I look really close at my arm, I can still make out the scars from the bite. That was one cool snake, but one I'd advise people to leave alone. Because of its hyperactive temperament, I don't think it would last long in captivity.

III. Mel And The Rattlesnake

For years I'd been telling my friends about this beautiful canyon up on Oroville Lake, and finally I was able to bring my friend Mel up to actually see it. He spent the night at my house and we woke up early, and helped my dad pack everything up. At this point we were leaving the boat up at the lake so all we had to do load the supplies into the car and go. Once we were on the road Mel and I fell asleep in the back seat.

We reached Oroville Lake in the late morning, and had breakfast on the boat after we were underway. An hour or so later, in the middle of the lake, my dad stopped the boat so we could all go swimming. This was in the middle of the summer and it was probably about 100° F in the shade. So we swam around a while, then piled back into the boat and continued on our way.

Winding our way up the Feather River canyon was, to me, like going back in time. I could imagine steamships cruising the waters, and Indians on the shoreline. By the time we got to our favorite spot, the sun had slid down behind the mountains, and the air was considerably cooler. There were still hours of daylight left, but it would be in the merciful shade.

Mel and I were up on the bow, ready to jump. My dad nosed the boat up to the shore and we made the leap, and I quickly tied the bowline to a tree. Mel was bending down, looking at something, and suddenly said, "Whoa! A kingsnake!"

There was the tail of a snake disappearing into the grass. All he saw was the black and white markings, but what I saw was the rattle at the end of the tail. Mel reached down to grab the tail and I dove forward, clutching him by the midsection and yanking him away from it.

"What the hell are you doing!" he yelled.

"It's a rattler!"

"No it isn't!" Mel was angry.

"Yes it is!" I grabbed a stick and used it to drag the snake out into the open. The last 5 inches of the snake did look a bit like a kingsnake, but the rest was all rattler. It was rattling by this time as well.

"Whoa!" Mel said again. "I almost picked that up!"

"What is that?" my dad was calling from the boat. "Is that a rattler?"

"Yeah," I said, busy pinning it's head down with the stick.

"Kill it!" my dad said.

Confident I had the head pinned down, I grabbed the rattlesnake by the neck and held tight. As I lifted it up, its body curled angrily around my arm. Its mouth was wide open, and the fangs were out. Mel was having a fit.

"Don't play with it!" my dad was yelling. "Kill it!"

The snake was strong. With most of its body wrapped around my arm, it was trying to pull its head loose and I had to struggle to keep that from happening. But while I was holding it, I wasn't worried. I was admiring the colorful patterns, and stroking odd-textured skin. It felt different from other snakes I'd held. It was rougher, more leathery. Some of the scales were more like lizard scales. Then reality set in – I was holding a poisonous snake.

I didn't want to kill it. I would have rather taken a long walk and let it go somewhere. But my father was ashore now, and was insisting, so I sighed and pulled out my knife. It just took a second or so. Afterward I felt like a murderer.

If I had been older and wiser, I would have defied my father and simply let it go. Rattlesnakes are part of nature and have an important niche in the environment. Killing them just because they're near you is not cool. People should either leave them alone or use a long stick and push them away. They won't attack. They don't want anything to do with people. They just want to eat mice and bask in the sun. Rattlesnakes only bite people when people scare them, and all they're doing is defending themselves.

Mel and I buried the snake in the woods, and were jumpy during the rest of the trip. I had nightmares about the snake pulling free and biting me. Even now, thinking about holding a rattlesnake gives me the willies.

IV. Alligator Lizards In The Air

The biggest lizard I ever caught was up the Feather River Canyon. There was a beautiful little path that followed the river up toward the falls, where it was green everywhere, all shades of it, and walking along one morning I spotted a huge Alligator Lizard (Elgaria multicarinata) lying on a tree branch that crossed right in front of me. He just sat there looking at me, just above eye level, sure he was invisible because of his camouflage.

That lizard was a foot and a half long. He was mostly tail, but still – compared to what I was used to he was a monster.

I reached up and grabbed him like he was a snake, holding tightly right behind the head so that it couldn't turn around and bite me. I'd been bitten by these guys before, and it was more than just a pinch. This big grandpa would have broken skin for sure. He was big enough to feed it mice.

He squirmed angrily in my hand, his mouth open, and his eyes rolling around in panicked rage. Alligator lizards have two things in common with snakes: a forked tongue and a prehensile, snake-like tail. His tail wrapped around my arm as I held him. "Relax," I told the old guy. "I'm not going to eat you." I was checking him for ticks and looking for scars. I expected a big old guy like this to be ancient and battle-scarred, but he wasn't. His scales were pristine. This was a prime, grade-A specimen.

I dumped in him my collection sack. This bad boy was going home with me for a while. So I continued on my hike, spotting bluebellies and whiptail lizards, then later retired to the boat.

A few days later I had the alligator lizard at home and set up in one of my terrariums. He was a grouchy old guy so I nicknamed him Gramps. Gramps didn't eat for the first few days, but as he settled in to his new surroundings he finally started taking crickets and grasshoppers.

I kept Gramps for a month or so, and then took him back up to Feather River on our next trip. I released him on the same tree limb where I found him, and two days later found him sitting right there again. This time I just smiled and let him alone.

He watched me very warily as I passed underneath. I don't think Gramps wanted to go on a second vacation to Stockton. I can still see his bright little eyes watching me with an intelligence uncharacteristic of lizards.

There's a song by the rock group America which has a line that goes, "…alligator lizards in the air…" While I never had a clue what they meant (other than they were probably on LSD when they wrote the song) it always makes me think of the first time I saw Gramps sitting on that tree branch and looking down at me.

V. Girl In The Secret Garden

The last time I ever went up to the Feather River canyon, I was traveling by land. The Girl Who Shall Remain Nameless (GWSRN) came up with me because I had told her so many times about the sheer beauty of the place. It took quite a while to get there because I got completely lost in the maze of unmarked dirt roads.

"Are you sure you know where you're going?" GWSRN kept asking.

I'd nod my head and smile with confidence. "Of course," I told her, lying.

Despite being lost I did find the place, eventually. I parked between some trees, and then led her down a familiar path toward the secret garden. The place was enchanted, I could just feel it. I'd been wanting to take a girl here for years. Just the sight of it would melt her heart.

There was a large bush blocking the entrance, which is why the place was secret. The only reason I'd found it was that, back when I was much younger, I'd chased a snake past this brush and almost fell over a cliff. Coming out from the cliff, on the other side of the bush, was a narrow stone bridge.

I had no idea how old this bridge was, but it was meticulously put together and there was no cement – the stones were all fit like a puzzle. It looked more like a wall than a bridge. "We have to walk on that?" GWSRN asked, her voice betraying fear.

"It's a piece of cake. Just follow me." I walked out along the narrow bridge, and it took us under close trees and up into a ravine. Below us was a 30 foot drop, with a murky pond on one side and a rocky stream on the other. The stream got closer as we walked, the drop not quite as far. By the time we reached the end it was a stone path between the stream and a hillside.

"This is beautiful!" GWSRN exclaimed.

"Oh, we're not there yet." I took her hand and kept leading down the path. The trees and brush around us were so thick you couldn't see beyond it. It was like a rainforest. It was like the Garden of Eden.

The path ended, dumping us into a clearing. The stream wound around large rocks and led up to a small waterfall. Sunlight pierced the green canopy in bright shafts. There was moss and ferns everywhere. It couldn't have been more perfect if it were a Hollywood movie set.

I looked at GWSRN to see her reaction. Her eyes were wide and her mouth was open. The magic was working on her. She still had a hold of my hand, and was squeezing tight.

"This is it," I told her. "This is my secret garden." I walked around behind her, slipping my arms around her waist. She leaned back against me, just looking, her eyes drinking it all in. The place was so beautiful that it was heartbreaking.

"This is wonderful," she said.

"I thought you'd like it."

"Thank you for showing it to me."

"Well, let's go enjoy it." I guided her over to a low boulder covered with thick moss. I brushed some broken sticks off it and sat down.

She didn't sit next to me. She was looking at it, unsure. I patted the moss next to me, smiling. "It's soft."

"Aren't there, like, bugs running around in there?"

I looked around me, and combed through the moss with my fingers. Had she seen some ants or something? I didn't see anything. "I don’t think so."

"I think there is," she said. She remained standing.

"Um, it's fine. It's okay."

"I don't know." She looked around, no longer smiling. "Why did you bring me here? I mean, really?"

"It's so pretty. I wanted to share it with you."

"And then what?"

My heart sank. I saw where she was leading. The magic hadn't worked on her after all, and my devious plan was transparent to her. "I take it you don't want to become one with nature."

"Um, no, not really." GWSRN was frowning at me. "I thought you were going to bring your cameras and take pictures. It struck me as weird when you didn't."

"I already have pictures of this place. I was coming for the experience."

"Well, it's really nice."

I nodded. I'd brought the wrong girl to the wrong place. "Well, then, let's head back to civilization and get some pizza."

She brightened at the mention of pizza. "That sounds good!" she said.

"Yep. Sure does." I don't know how well I was hiding my disappointment. I took her hand and lead her back out of the garden, carefully along the stone bridge, and back to the path. Soon we were in the car and winding our way down the mountain.

Later I learned that when I found the right girl, anywhere was the right place. I didn't need the secret garden. It was a shame, though, because the place really was perfect. I haven't been back there since. I doubt I'd even know the way.

Nana Arrives in the Mail

2008-06-19T23:11:00.000-05:00

I was a kid when my grandmother on my mom's side passed away. We were out camping at the time, so word didn't get to us until we returned from the trip. My mom was devastated. Her mother had choked on a chicken bone during a midnight snack, and Grandpa didn't find her until the following morning.

Years passed and the tragedy faded. We made the move to Californa. I remember this part clearly, because we were still living in the duplex, before we ended up at the house with the pool. At least three, probably four, years had passed since my grandmother had passed away.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, my dead grandmother arrives via parcel post.

I don't remember a whole lot about this grandmother. She's only a vague image in my memory, because she passed away while I was so young. Being that she was only 14 years older than my mom, she didn't feel she was old enough to be called "Grandma" so I was instructed to call her "Nana."

Nana and her husband, my mom's stepfather who they all called "Spud," were only occasional visitors. I mainly remember them from Christmas mornings. Grandpa Spud is especially vivid in my memory because of the year he dressed up as a convincing Santa and scared the holy hell out of me.

So, years later, Nana shows up at our duplex in California in a white box. She'd been cremated and these were her ashes. Obviously they didn't wait this long to cremate her, but I'm at a loss for why it took so long for the ashes to reach us. I'd hate to think they'd been lost in the mail all that time.

The ashes arrived addressed to my father, because Nana's will stipulated that she wanted to be cremated and have her ashes spread via airplane over a specific forest in Oregon. My father, being a pilot with his own airplane, was the logical choice. They had all lived in the same area up in Oregon in the 1950's, back when my dad was in the lumber business. I guess this forest was someplace dear to Nana; perhaps that's where Spud had proposed to her. My father was familiar with the place. The idea of flying up there and taking care of Nana's last wish wasn't a problem. However, it wasn't a priority either. After all, she was already years dead, and my father was a busy man.

Nana's ashes, still securely sealed in the white cardboard box, sat around the house for a while. It would spend some time on the dining room table, or the coffee table in the living room. Or I'd occasionally see it sitting on the kitchen counter. Finally during a frenzy of housecleaning, Dad took the box and put it on a shelf in the garage. There it sat for quite some time.

It was after Dad put the white box in the garage that Mom started noticing weird things going on. She'd be cooking dinner, and have the oven set to a specific temperature. She'd turn away and take care of some other detail, and turn back to see the oven temperature knob was not where she'd set it. Puzzled, she'd set the knob back to the proper temperature, then later discovered someone moved it again. This was unsettling, especially since she was the only one in the kitchen the entire time.

Then Mom noticed that someone kept changing the temperature on the air conditioner. This also was odd because it was happening while my dad was at work and I was at school. There was no one else in the house.

These things had been going on for a while before Mom finally mentioned it. She didn't seem frightened; she seemed bemused, almost comforted. It was familiar to her, because it was exactly the kind of things that would happen when Nana was around. Mom and Nana always argued about what temperature to set the stove or oven, and Nana always wanted it colder or warmer in the house than Mom did.

This talk of Nana's ghost being in the house scared me, but I didn't see any of these inconsistencies of temperature settings with my own eyes. I was 10 or 11 years old at the time. My toys weren't moving around, and I wasn't seeing anything strange. Nana wasn't appearing to me in a doorway or anything like that. So I didn't really believe it. It still gave me chills but it was fun to go along with it. Mom had always believed in ghosts. Ghosts were fun. Being scared was fun.

This changed when our little dog, Taffy, started getting involved. Dad used to call used her "Ten pounds of love in a five pound package." She really was a tiny little thing, but she thought she was a ferocious attack dog. Taffy had no fear, and she was on guard at all times to protect her family. She'd bark at the mailman, at other dogs and cats, and especially at visitors that she didn't recognize.

Suddenly Taffy had begun to bark frantically at things that no one could see. Especially in the late evening, she's suddenly start growling and barking for all she was worth at a corner in the dining room, or at a spot in the hallway. It didn't seem to be that she was barking at something she heard or smelled, because she had her eyes fixed on a specific point and all her attention was right there, right in front of her. She was barking and snapping at thin air.

This is something I witnessed personally. It was very freaky. I remember that it even disturbed my Dad. "Taffy!" he'd say. "What the hell are you barking at? Taffy! Stop!" He'd have to bend down and pick her up, and carry her away from whatever had her so upset.

Finally, there was the time when my dad was gone on an extended business trip, and my mom and I were up late and watching the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. We were sitting together on the couch, with Taffy at our feet, and Taffy started growling. By this time she'd gotten a lot less frantic about the whole thing, having become more familiar with whatever it was that upset her. She'd just stare and give a low warning growl.

On this night, she did more than just stare at a spot in front of her. Very slowly her head turned as she was growling, as if she were watching something cross the room from left to right. It was weird. I remember sliding over closer to my Mom. Taffy suddenly stood up, still tracking something with her eyes. She was pointing toward Dad's rocking chair.

As we watched, and as Taffy continued to growl, the chair moved slightly. Just a little bit forward, and just a little bit back, like something was trying to rock in it. I remember the look on Mom's face. She turned toward me to make sure I was seeing the same thing she was seeing.

I didn't have to convince her to let me sleep in her and Dad's bed that night. We slept with the lights on. As soon as my dad got home from the business trip, Mom told him that he needed to get Nana's ashes spread over that Oregon forest. He needed to do it now.

Dad agreed. He took me along as copilot. Back then he had a single-prop Cessna 192 and it took a while to fly all the way up to Oregon, but he navigated us via familiar landmarks to where we needed to be and then had me open the white box. Inside was a thick plastic bag. I'd expected the ashes to be white and powdery, like the ones in the fireplace, but they weren't. They were strange flat chips colored black and gray. After all those years, there was Nana – and now, as I'm writing this, when I think about Nana this is all I can see. Not her face or her voice, but these strange looking ashes.

In an airplane, you can't just crank down a window and toss something out. The only part of the window that opened was this little five-inch hatch, and when Dad reached across and flopped it open, the wind made an unbelievable wail and it was like a tornado had been let loose inside the cockpit. I had a hole cut in the plastic bag, and I shoved it up against the open window hatch as my dad dipped one wing low and circled. Most of Nana's ashes made it out the window, but a good percentage of it swirled around us in the cockpit. I even got some in my mouth. My dad was yelling and the airplane bucked and jumped. The ashes stung my eyes.

There was a sudden THWAK, and the window sucked the last of the ashes out along with the plastic bag. I shut the little hatch, and continued spitting out ashes. Dad leveled the airplane, and after a few moments began laughing. We turned south and headed back home.

After that day, Taffy no longer barked at invisible things, and the air conditioner and oven ceased changing the settings on their own. That cinched it for Mom. For her there was absolutely no other explanation than it being the ghost of Nana haunting the duplex, waiting for us to fulfill her final wishes. I think my father was convinced, too.

Me? I'm not so sure. I just remember those ashes swirling around me in the cockpit of the airplane.

My Biological Research Center

2008-06-15T23:11:00.002-05:00

In the summer between 6^th and 7^th grade, my friends and I had formed a science club. I think we called it the "California Science Association" or something like that. It sounded very official and looked good on a letterhead, and we were able to get a lot of free scientific samples and hardware by writing letters to places like Edmund Scientific. They thought we were adults or at least college students.

One of the experiments we did was called "Project Sublizard." I did a whole paper on it with drawings and everything. Yes, it sounds funny, and thinking back on it I find it even funnier because I was completely serious.

Project Sublizard consisted of a large gallon wine jug made of clear glass, two straps, four bricks, some sand, a long strand of aquarium tubing and an aquarium aerator pump. I put sand, some succulent plants, and a lizard in the wine bottle, strapped it to the bricks, and sunk it down to the bottom of my father's swimming pool (about 10 feet down). The aerator pumped a constant stream of air through the tubing down to Project Sublizard, providing positive pressure and a constant source of fresh oxygen. Also we found we could catch flies and put them into the tubing, and the aerator pump would send them down to Project Sublizard special delivery, like a vacuum tube at a bank. Actually this part was so fun that this was one of my most well-fed lizards.

The lizard thrived down at the bottom of the pool for about six weeks. When it was over I let it go, and it didn't seem to have suffered any side effects. What did we hope to prove? I have no idea.

It was just fun.

Another thing we did that summer was find a nice little sandy beach down one of the local creeks. This was about two miles down from anywhere, right in the middle of farm land, and it was big enough for 4 of us to spread out blankets and sunbathe. It was a sandbar formed by a flash flood sometime in the past. It was neat.

So being the junior geeks we were, we dubbed this as our biological research center. All my test tubes, sample collection jars, what-have-you went into an old metal ice chest that we buried in the sand where we could get to it easily. Sometimes my mom would drive us out and we'd spend the day there, wading up and down the stream catching baby catfish, pollywogs, salamanders … anything we could find. When Mom came back and honked, we would stow all our equipment into the ice chest and seal it shut (it was very waterproof), and brush sand over the lid so that it wasn't visible. The next day we'd come back, uncover the lid and open it up again.

Little did I know that these were my last days of childhood. These were the very last carefree days. When summer ended and we were all going into our first year of Junior High, suddenly everything was different. One of the members of our science club, my good friend Mel, wouldn't admit in public to being involved in any of this. He was hanging out with a group of stoners, and being seen with a geek like me was embarrassing.

My other friends went into drama or music, or both. Science was not a cool thing to be involved in. It wasn't long after that when I abandoned science as well, having discovered photography and girls (not necessarily in that order).

The next year, in mid-winter, I went down to our biological research center to see if I could retrieve the stuff. At the very least I wanted to get the ice chest back for my father (they'd had it since the early 60's). To my dismay I found someone had run a bulldozer down the middle of the creek, destroying it completely. I guess the water wasn't flowing fast enough. As I was walking along, feeling sad for our lost days out there, I spotted the crushed and mangled ice chest. Remarkably one of my biological field guides was still in it, and was still in good condition.

It wasn't a total loss, but it felt like it. It was hard to let that part of my childhood go. But the future held exciting things, and so I moved forward. Have I looked back since? Occasionally. I don't think I'll be building any more biological research centers, but if I ever get another swimming pool…

Project Sublizard 2.0!

Fun With Microscopes

2008-06-12T23:11:00.000-05:00

It was a strange feeling when I saw my first bulbous monster devouring another animal whole. It was like a creature out of a strange old sci-fi movie, or perhaps out of a nightmare. I wasn't dreaming, though – it was very real.

In 6^th Grade I was so into science that I asked for, and got, a microscope for Christmas. It wasn't a cheapo plastic kid's microscope, either. My father went out and bought a professional scientific 1600x microscope with a magnetic slide base, a built in light source, and a zoom eyepiece.

I think one of the first things I did was take this microscope with me to science camp. I think I was a geek's geek, because even other geeks made fun of me. One of these geeks later became my good friend Pat. He often recalled my dorky exploits with him at the camp, and laughed at my strange pronunciations of "proto-zoa" and "lar-vae".

The microscope came with a set of prepared slides. These were mounted specimens of bird feathers, hair, moth wings, etc. Boring stuff. We went out and got tiny ants, fleas, gnats, and other creatures that look awesome when magnified 500 times. But then we discovered the wonders of pond scum.

The light green stuff out in your local creek, the stuff that looks like wet green velvet, is a whole other world. Just a pinch of it is like an entire zoo full of creatures, a miniature wild animal park. The whole drama of life gets played out in a drop of water. Creatures graze, hunt, fight, and give birth right in front of your great magnified eye. Thanks to that microscope, I was quite popular by the end of our week at science camp. Well, at least among the other geeks.

That microscope was well used for years. Even when I was a teenager I found some use for it. I remember one day Pat dropped by while I was in the middle of an exciting bit of self discovery. I had him come into my room and look through the eyepiece. He peered into it and saw millions of brightly lit microscopic pollywogs.

"Whoa!" he said. "What the hell is that?"

"Sperm," I told him.

"Really? Where did you get it?"

I laughed. "Where do you think?"

"Eww!" He backed away from the microscope, suddenly disgusted. Then he thought about it for a minute, and said, "Can I borrow your microscope for a day or so?"

Decades later, and after surviving almost a dozen moves (the longest one being from California to Texas) that microscope still works.

Benjamin Franklin Rat

2008-06-08T23:11:00.002-05:00

I met Benny at the pet store when I stuck my hand into a cage full of baby rats. These rats, sold mainly as food for snakes by the store owner, were cute little critters with mixed white and brown fur. They had bulging eyes and twitching noses, and one came up and licked my hand. He didn't protest when I picked him up. "I'll take this one," I told the owner.

"So this little guy is going to be an astronaut?" the owner asked as he rang up the purchase.

"Yup," I said, handing over $1.49. "The rocket is all ready for him."

The store owner laughed. "Well, I wish him good luck." He put Benny in a cardboard box, and I took him home on my bicycle.

I put Benny into the payload compartment of the rocket, testing the fit. I could see him staring out from the clear plastic tube, his nose twitching. He had no idea what was going on. I took him out and put him into an old terrarium, his temporary home, and then put the rocket away. The launch date was set for the upcoming weekend.

The rat did not please my mother. She was used to lizards and snakes by now, but not rats. I told her it was just temporary, because I was firing it up in a rocket. When she heard that her attitude changed. "That poor thing! You're not really going to do that, are you?"

"Well, yeah." I shrugged. "That's what I got him for."

Benny's temporary cage moved into my room, and I ended up spending a lot of time with him. I had owned a hamster before, which was as dumb as a rock, so I didn't expect much more from this rat. I was wrong. Benny was amazing. Affectionate, curious, and personable, this rat was more like a dog than a hamster.

Bad weather scrubbed my launch date, being far too windy to send rockets up; we'd have to chase them for miles. We would try for the next weekend. In the meantime, I gave him a name: Benjamin Franklin Rat. It was better than calling him, "The rat." It only took him a few days to start responding to it. He would even come when I called him.

Taffy, our long-haired Chihuahua, didn't know what to make of Benny. They didn't fight, and they didn't run away from each other. Both were curious and became good friends. My mom couldn't believe it, and this is what probably first endeared her to Benny. Like me, she couldn't believe how affectionate and intelligent the little guy was. My dad took a liking to him too, and so the rat had the run of the house.

Another launch date came and went. Then another. By the time we had good weather, Benny had grown too big to fit into the payload compartment. By then I wouldn't have launched him anyway, as I'd become too attached.

Benny gave Taffy a second childhood, as she started running around the house like a puppy. They had lots of fun together. Sometimes Benny would actually jump on Taffy's back and ride her around. It was hilarious and their antics kept us constantly entertained.

My dad told his friends about Benny's happy behavior, especially about Benny running around and playing with Taffy. After that, dad's friends started coming over to visit the rat. Not us, mind you. They came over and asked about Benny.

Benny graduated to bigger digs, as my parents bought him a deluxe rat cage with spinning wheels and other toys. When they'd go out on the boat and leave me at home, the dog and the rat went with them. Benny had the run of the ship, and they would feed the little guy right at the dinner table with them. Sometimes I wondered if I'd been replaced.

My most vivid memory of Benny is when he'd squeal with delight after you gave him a treat. Like a dog, Benny would run around me and beg. When I sat on the couch with something like cheese puffs, he would jump up and sit on my knee, both front paws up, sniffing like crazy. I'd break off a bit of the treat and give it to him, and he'd take it with a squeal, and then jump around with joy, and run off to eat it. A minute later he'd be back and begging for another piece.

Sometimes I'd forget to shut his cage at night, and wake at 3:00 AM with Benny licking my face. If I ignored him, he'd run around on top of me, playing. "Go to sleep Benny," I'd say. "Go on, back to the cage." If I said it a few times he'd leap obediently up, crawling over various shelves until he reached his cage, and then go inside. He'd sit right inside the door and wait for me to shut it. If I didn't shut it, he'd come back out and start running around again. So I'd get up, shut the door, then go back to sleep. In the morning he'd wake me up again, because the first thing my mom would do in the morning was let him out of his cage.

Benny lasted about three years and then developed a big lump in his side. It was cancer. Domesticated rats seem to be predisposed to it. The lump got bigger and bigger, and he got slower, and he started squeaking a lot for no apparent reason. Benny was in pain.

One day I steeled myself for the hard job of putting the poor little guy out of his misery. He was in a lot of pain and was hardly eating. So I chloroformed him and got it over with quickly, then cried myself to sleep every night for a week.

Months later we got another rat, and while it was a sweet little guy as well, it wasn't the same. Benny definitely had a personality that was unique, and he fit right in with us. A silly little $1.49 rat had been a major part of the family. While his life was short, it was a good one. And at the very least I saved him from becoming snake food.

Stupid White Boy on a Girl's Bike

2008-06-05T23:11:00.000-05:00

Lying on my brother's roof at 2:00 AM with a bullhorn, making fart sounds; the neighbors started yelling for me to shut up. I think I was maybe 14 or so and was bored out of my mind. There was absolutely nothing to keep me occupied. The next night I spent in my nephew's kiddy pool, seeing if I could actually sleep in the water. It was just about dawn when I gave up because it was too cold.

By then I had come up with a bold idea. I would go on a quest: I would try to reach Tucson's A-Mountain.

I remembered A-Mountain from when I was a kid. My brother used to take me up there all the time. That was back in the late 60's, and there were usually hippies and marijuana everywhere. You could get a second-hand high just by driving along slowly with your windows open.

As the sun came up, I dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, put on my tennis shoes, and took my sister's bike and hit the streets. I could see A-Mountain from their neighborhood. It didn't look that far. Maybe four miles, I thought.

A-Mountain is a big hill in Tucson with a large white "A" on it. I don't know what the real name is, and I don't know any of its history. But everyone I've ever known has called it A-Mountain, and anyone in Tucson would know what I'm talking about.

I was in town on my yearly summer visit. In earlier years I'd brought whatever obsessions I was into; when I was a kid it was hunting for lizards. Then it was reading Hardy Boys books, or Rick Brant, or Ken Holt (I'd already read all the Tom Swift Jr. books). One summer I read all of Ian Fleming's James Bond books. The next year it was model rockets. This year, which I think was my last year because after that they moved to California, I had nothing. I was a void. I wasn't into anything, except maybe electronics. I had built an amplifier out of spare parts I pulled from an old tape recorder and a radio, and since I stayed up all night long, I went up on their roof to watch falling stars and tinker with the bullhorn. I'd make low farting sounds that reverberated throughout the neighborhood, and then giggle hysterically. It's a wonder my brother and sister-in-law slept through it.

It's a wonder none of the neighbors shot me.

Tucson had police that patrolled the city in helicopters, and the night I tried to sleep in the pool, I found that if I blinked a flashlight at these helicopters they'd fly over to check me out. They'd come right over the house and shine a 10,000 watt spotlight around, searching for the source of the blinking light. So the game I played was to get their attention and hide from the spotlight. They caught me after the forth time, and yelled "Stop it!" with their godlike loudspeaker. Feeling shamed, I eased my sorry, stupid ass down in my nephew's kiddie pool and stared up at the stars. Every fifteen or twenty minutes a U2 spy plane passed overhead, heading home for the nearby Air Force base. Everyone knew they were spy planes, but officially they didn't exist. I guess they were supposed to be our imagination.

When dawn came I was peddling my sister-in-laws old girl's bike across town, down any side street that looked promising, heading for A-Mountain. I passed through neighborhoods, passed the University of Arizona, passed strip malls and office buildings. Then it was neighborhoods again, and I had gone the 4 miles I'd thought it would take. Seems I'd miscalculated, but it didn't matter to me because I'd already come so far. I noticed the neighborhood looked less like the ones I was used to, and more like the poor side of town. It made me a bit nervous but, hell, I was on a bicycle and could outrun anyone on foot. Besides, the whole neighborhood looked asleep.

Finally the city ended and there was a strip of desert and a river between me and A-Mountain. I had not counted on the river. It was wide, but mostly dried up. The little spot in the middle with water looked maybe a foot deep. No problem. I rolled my sister's poor old bike forward, headed for muddy doom.

While the river hardly had a trickle of water running, it would be full to the banks anytime there was a rainstorm in the vicinity. So what I'd taken to be dry riverbed was actually a kind of desert crust over deep, gooey mud. I didn't get 6 feet into it before the bike was unridable. I got off and pulled the bike along, and 30 feet later found myself knee deep in mud and I'd lost one of my shoes. As I stood there struggling to get the shoe back I noticed that I was sinking further. It never, ever occurred to me that there might be quicksand out there. You'd think there would be big signs warning: Danger! Quicksand! Then again, no one would have thought a stupid white boy would want to go wandering into it, either.

Somehow I managed to retrieve my shoe, and was able drag my sister's bike back to safety. I was really disappointed. I was so close! But there was no way to get across that river, and besides it was getting into late morning and this was summer in the Arizona desert. Soon it would be hot enough to melt tar on the sidewalk. I hadn't slept, or eaten, and I was thirsty.

I got the bike up to the road and started riding back the way I'd come. Funny, I hadn't noticed I'd been going downhill, and now it was a long, long uphill ride. I made it about a half mile and was seeing spots in front of my eyes, and had to stop and get a drink of water. There was a little corner market and a nice Hispanic man let me drink from a water hose, but he said more than once: "Kid, you're in the wrong part of town. You better get your ass out of this neighborhood as fast as you can."

It never occurred to me that a desert born kid like myself would be unwelcome anywhere in my old home town just because I was white. A good third of my friends in grade school were Hispanic. It didn't matter to me. But I took the guy's advise and, refreshed by the water and powered by fear, I hightailed it out of that neighborhood and made my way back to my brother's house. It was like a ride through Purgatory. It was getting very hot, and I was exhausted and hungry. The last third of the ride I was lightheaded and dizzy and really wondering if I was going to make it. When I finally did, I parked the muddy bike in the back yard and collapsed into my nephew's kiddie pool. Then my sister came out and yelled at me for getting her bike all dirty. I apologized over and over, promising to wash it, and just thanked God I was still alive. It was a bad idea from the moment of inception, and was sorry I even considered it. Then again, here I am years later remembering it vividly, so it wasn't a total waste. We're all the sum of our various memories. This one must be an integral part of me even if I didn't learn from it. I did the same idiotic type of thing years later.

At least that time it was in Hawaii.

Bad Boys With Rockets

2008-06-01T11:11:00.002-05:00

With loud hissing and crackling the rocket leaps off the pad and streaks up into the blue. My friends and I crane our necks back so far we nearly fall over. If it wasn't for the smoke we wouldn't even know where it went. That thing was fast! Then there's a distant popping sound, and impossibly far above us blossoms a tiny white and orange parachute. My friends and I shout and whoop with excitement, then go chasing after it. We were young teenage boys and we'd just discovered a new thrill.

Because this toy was labeled as "science" and my parents liked the idea of me becoming a scientist, my mom was more than willing to bankroll the project. At the time model rockets were still illegal in California as they were considered fireworks, so I couldn't ride my bike down to the local hobby store and buy them. I had to get them via mail order.

I would gaze through the catalogs of the strange and exiting rockets, pick the ones that fell within the budget set by my mom, and fill out the order form. Mom supplied the handwritten check and the stamp. Half the money was spent on new rocket kits, the other half on engines. Then there would be two weeks of agony waiting for my rockets to arrive.

They came in long, rectangular boxes of white cardboard. The joy at seeing the mailman bringing one of these boxes up to my front door was equal to that of firing them off. The launching was not just something to do, it was an event. I would call all my friends. We would set a date and time. We would pray for good weather.

Sometimes I would experiment with the engines themselves. About the size of a big firecracker, they were high quality little cylinders of ceramic and dense, treated paper. Big hole on one side, little hole on the other. The little hole was the nozzle where the fire would come out. The solid rocket fuel would burn inside the cylinder and force high pressure gas out with a lot of noise and smoke, burning its way up the inside of the cylinder. When the propellant was spent, it would start slowly burning a delay charge which released smoke and helped us see the rocket while it was coasting upwards. When the delay charge finished burning, the fire would hit a little packet of explosive called the ejection charge, which would blow the ceramic cap off the other end and push the top of the rocket off, and also (hopefully) push the parachute out.

If used as directed, it was completely safe. However, I found I could wrap paper around the engine, gluing it in place, and form my own homemade body tubes. I could also fill this body tube with something other than a parachute. Oh, say, possibly firecrackers, which would be ignited by the ejection charge. I'd make my own paper nose cones and fins too, making the rocket expendable.

The model rocket manufacturers had spent a great deal of time and money making these little engines as safe as possible, and there I was circumventing all their efforts. This went against everything that model rocketry stood for – a safe, exiting, fun hobby for kids and their families. It just goes to show, you could put just about anything in the wrong hands and have it turn to evil.

I had one set up and ready to launch in my front yard, and my friend Larry who lived across the street and down a few houses was coming out his front door, heading my way. I yelled out, "Larry, watch this!" and shot the rocket off.

My paper fins, folded over in a v-shape and theoretically sturdy enough, weren't quite sturdy enough. The rocket shot straight up about twenty feet and then veered over, hurtling like a missile right at Larry. There was an instant of time where I saw the rocket heading right at him, and saw him standing there staring at it, eyes wide, and then at the last second it veered upward again and exploded about 30 feet above his head, showering him with bits of hot paper. "What are you trying to do, kill me?" he called out.

"It wasn't supposed to do that!" I yelled.

"That was cool!" he yelled back. He ran over to see the other ones I had made.

At night time we would shoot these into the air and couldn't believe how beautiful the colors were just coming from the rocket engines. They would explode about 1000 feet up and the firecrackers would come crackling down. For a few years the 4^th of July was especially fun. Some of our highly illegal rockets rivaled the efforts of the professional fireworks.

We also continued traditional, safe model rocketry, launching them out in a field beside the railroad tracks. I had ones that would fly up as a rocket but come down as a glider, and ones that had three stages and flew so high we never found them again. We also had ones that would carry things up inside, such as small lizards and tiny tree frogs, and I'm happy to report they all survived. Then there was this one day we were shooting so many off that it had become boring. When a train came by I had a sudden idea.

"Hey," I said, "lets shoot one at the train!"

I chose an older rocket that was beat up and on the verge of falling apart, and aimed it at the railroad cars as they lumbered past. It shot like the missile it was, and to our delight it went right inside the open door of a boxcar. My friends all laughed and one said, "Wouldn't it be funny if a hobo was in there?" Just as he said that, a hobo poked his head out the open door and shook his fist at us, and we all fell over laughing.

We were bad, bad boys. Would I ever let my kids do this? No way. I think that's why I'm so relieved to have only daughters.

Toward the end of my teenage rocketry career, I was in Arizona visiting my brother Hank and had brought all my rockets with me. We went out one afternoon and shot them off, which my older brother thought was amusing, and when the engines were all gone we went back to his house and found, to my complete amazement, a model rocket in his back yard. It wasn't one of mine, either. It was some other kid's rocket, and they had shot it off and it went too far up, and the wind carried it away, and it just happened to land in my brother's back yard right after we had been out doing the same thing.

Years later, after I'd grown up and gotten that horrible, bad, dangerousness out of me, I took my kids out shooting rockets at a big club in Dallas, Texas. Some of these guys were shooting off huge rockets with really powerful motors, and they weren't made out of cardboard and plastic, either. They were metal and hard PVC, and had sophisticated electronics aboard. These guys were very professional about the whole thing, and were highly safety conscious. I thought this was a good, safe way to introduce model rocketry to my kids.

One big, white rocket went up with a terrific crackling roar. I was video taping it, and heard everyone start yelling. It had gotten to the top end of its flight, which is called the apogee, and it turned around and started coming back down. The trouble was that the parachute had not come out, and now it was a deadly missile coming straight down. I turned the camera off and took a few steps back, because it looked like it was coming right at me.

The rocket hit the ground and exploded not more than ten feet away, showering me with stinging little pieces of PVC shrapnel, and to my horror I realized it had hit the curb right in front of my van, right next to a little kiddy table, right exactly where my younger daughter had been sitting not 30 seconds before. She had just happened to get up and wander away.

In all my years of abusing model rocketry, I had never come as close to disaster as these safe and sane rocketeers had. That was a sobering experience for me. Model rocketry was no longer fun.

The Tracks

2008-05-31T11:11:00.002-05:00

Summer morning, and I'd awaken and jump out of my bed, eat a bunch of sugary cereal, and then jam on down the street toward the train tracks to meet my friends. I had a Stingray bike with a tiny front tire, a banana seat, and a tall sissy bar. 5-speed, straight shift. Front wheel had a drum break. The bike was boss. It burned rubber.

I'd race down the dirt of the levy road, dodging shadows and fallen branches, then leap over a mound of dirt and rumble down a rocky trail to the tracks. Turning north I'd follow the tracks to the second bridge where the creek was wide and deep. Usually I was the first one there, but not every time.

Randy would show up, sometimes with his neighbor Philip. Sometimes Larry would be there. Other friends came and went; I don't even remember their names. All us boys were in-between the 4th and 5th grades. Lizard hunters, proto-motocross riders. Creek swimmers. Train challengers.

This was the lost Tom Sawyer boyhood of my youth.

The railroad bridge was a quiet place. Overgrown with trees and brush, the creek ran gurgling at a good pace. There were mini-rapids both upstream and downstream, but right around the oily, wooden bridge supports it was almost a pond. Deep enough to swim in, and if I stood it would come up to my neck. Because of broken glass, swimming with shoes was mandatory.

There were always new things to see or find. We'd catch at least one snake a day, but rarely do anything besides hold it for a while then let it go again. Only exceptionally cool snakes would be taken home so that they could escape and scare the bejeezes out of our moms. But there were also alligator lizards, and skinks (with really pretty red or blue tails), dozens of bluebellies, massive bullfrogs, and the occasional swimming turtle. They had the tendency to bite, though.

The really fun stuff was more dangerous. One of our favorites was to jump our bikes into the water. I only did this when I brought my second "junk" bike out. We would zoom down the short hill from the tracks, up a big lump of dirt, and fly 15 feet through the air and into the creek. Another favorite was to huddle under the bridge as a train went by. There was talk of actually lying down the middle of the track and have the train go right over us, but thank God no one actually tried it.

Then one day we found the hiding place of a genuine railroad hobo. Abandoned during the day, apparently this hobo returned at night to sleep in a corrugated metal pipe that ran under the tracks. There was clothes, cans of food, bottles of water, blankets, and a pile of really nasty, dirty magazines. They weren't like Dad's Playboy magazines. They were true porn: lurid and sleazy; wide open and shocking. We were fascinated, like deer unable to look away from oncoming headlights.

We didn't know what to do with this forbidden treasure. We were afraid if we simply left it, it would disappear. But no one would dare take it home. We could all imagine the nightmare of it being found. So it was decided we had to find a new hiding place for it.

We searched the surrounding area for a likely place. There were piles of old railroad ties, and boards under grass, and areas where there were piles of concrete. We were surrounded by farmland, and we found what we thought was a perfect place: another corrugated metal pipe on the other side of a barbed wire fence, right below a small tree. It was perfect. It was about a foot wide and hidden by tall grass.

The next day we came out and yes, the treasure was still there. We'd all pour over it, joke about it, ask each other question which none of us truly knew the answer (though it didn't stop us from bluffing and stating our guesses as fact). We were boys trying to fathom the mysteries of women. We were trying to integrate our knowledge of our mothers, sisters, and girls next door with what we'd learned from the dirty magazines. It was difficult and ultimately frightening.

I think we were all a bit relieved when several days later we came out to find the pipe holding our forbidden treasure was under water. As it turned out, the field was a rice field, and the farmer had come and turned the valve, flooding the area with water from the creek. The water had carried the magazines out into the acres of rice paddies and they were obviously ruined and lost. Our only consolation was that the next day we were treated to the joyous show of a biplane flying right over our heads, dropping sprouts into the fields of water. The daring of the pilot earned our undying admiration, especially after he waved at us from about ten feet off the ground.

After that it was back to normal at the bridge. Snakes, lizards, bicycles, and swimming. Seeing how long we could stand on the train tracks while a train bore down on us. Stupid boy things like that. I'm sure we spent the whole summer out there, but when school started again and the weather grew colder, it the place wasn't as much fun. Things changed, bulldozers pushed things around, and the old wooden railroad bridge was replaced by a new, modern, concrete one. And for some reason they cut down all the surrounding trees.

It was over. The next summer the tracks didn't hold the same magic, and it took many years to find a place like that again. By that time I was a teenager in a different crowd of friends, and girls were involved, and there was not much innocence left. People had jobs and responsibilities. Car payments had to be made. It was different.

Tom Sawyer had grown up.

Sea of Cortez Memoirs: A Mexican Romance

2008-05-30T08:40:00.003-05:00

It was time to go home, and so my dad backed the Cadillac with the boat trailer down the launching ramp, and mom and I guided the boat up onto the trailer. My dad winched the boat fully on, then went to the car to pull it out. The Cadillac's engine made its characteristic growling sound, and the tires scrunched on the wet concrete, and the boat came slowly out of the water. Halfway up the ramp there was a loud bang from the Cadillac, and my dad threw on the breaks.

I don't remember what it was on the Cadillac that broke, but it was broke. My dad, the inventor and adventurer, was also a master mechanic. He knew instantly what was wrong. The boat went back into the water and the Cadillac went to a garage. Some expensive part was needed, and there was none available. It had to be shipped down from the US.

By this time Dad was once again the boss of his own company, and we were doing well financially, so this wasn't a big deal. It was merely a reprieve to the end of the vacation. A few days more, no problem.

Well, the part got lost in the mail somewhere between the US and Mexico, and it took something like two weeks before we got it. In the meantime we stayed at a nice little seaside hotel, and I went out hunting lizards. At night we'd have dinner in the same restaurant, and I kept seeing this most beautiful girl. She looked about my age, had long blond hair and big, bright eyes, and was sitting at a table with her mom and dad. We kept stealing glances at each other, but I didn't have the nerve to go talk to her despite my father pushing me to do so.

During the days I would go catch lizards. I caught whiptails and geckos and those funny Zebratails, and not having a terrarium handy I kept them in one of the dresser drawers in the hotel room. Not being climbers, the whiptails and Zebratails generally stayed in the drawer, but the geckos were gone within minutes. By now my mom was used to this and hardly paid attention to lizards crawling on the walls. She'd be reading a book, glance up, and say "Jerry, one of your lizards is loose." Then she'd go on reading her book.

All hell broke loose when one of the poor maids opened the drawer. I don't think we had much maid service after that.

At night we would have dinner at the same restaurant, I would see the same beautiful girl. My dad kept saying, "Go talk to her. Go talk to her!" I just couldn't do it. Just the thought of it would cause my face to flush deep red and my vocal chords to lock up. I was too damn shy. Three nights in a row we saw her there, and I still couldn't bring myself to talk to her. She wasn't coming to me, either, but it was obvious we were looking at each other.

The next morning I was out walking toward the beach and there she was, cute as could be in a little pink bikini, walking alone by the surf. I don't know if she saw me first or what, but I followed her at a distance until she suddenly jumped and started screaming. I ran over to see what was the matter, and at her feet was a tiny, harmless sand crab. "Hey," I told her, "it's okay, they don't hurt." I picked up the little creature and let it scuttle across my hands. Oddly enough, she was no longer frightened. It was only a few minutes before I had it crawling over her delicate hands, and she was laughing about it.

She handed it back to me, then turned and walked away. I remember staring after her, not knowing what to do, but then something just kicked in and I went trotting after her. "Oh no," I told her, "you're not getting away from me that easily." I introduced myself and learned her name was Linda, and we went walking up and down that beach just talking, getting to know each other, and then I took her to the hotel room and introduced her to my mom. My mom seemed genuinely pleased to meet her, and then Linda and I went over to her hotel room where she introduced me to her grinning mom.

We were constant companions for the next week or so, and she even thought my collection of lizards was cool. Actually I had lost interest in the lizards, and her and I ended up letting them go. I don't know if it was because we were the only two English speaking kids of the same age, or if we were truly compatible, but we got along great and we were instant best friends. It was funny, too, because the hotel manager had a pretty daughter my age and he had her all dressed up in her Sunday best, and was introducing her to me every day, and I barely even looked at her.

One day a red tide came in so we couldn't go swimming, so my dad said he'd take the two of us out on the boat. We were going to head out to a nice beach he'd discovered, but when we got to the mouth of the bay we were shocked to see the swells were three times as high as the boat. We quickly turned around and went back, but it was too late; Linda got seasick. A couple of days later she had to leave.

I remember being very sad that she was going, and she was crying about it. She hugged me and kissed me and everything. We traded addresses, and her parents packed her up in their station wagon and they drove off. I moped around the rest of the day, but by the next day I was out catching as many lizards as I could, knowing we'd be leaving soon too. The auto part had come in and the Cadillac was almost fixed. I had to make sure to have plenty of these exotic lizards to show my other lizard hunting friends back home.

We packed up and left. We towed the boat back up to California, and I was able to smuggle the lizards across the boarder. At home I took the lizards to school, which my teacher actually encouraged. My friends were all impressed but no one believed the stories I told about whirlpools, upwellings, and giant fish.

I wasn't home a week before I got my first letter from Linda. Poor sweet girl, she wrote me letter after letter, and I was glad to get each one. But back then I wasn't much of a writer, and despite my mother's insistence I never wrote her back. I have no idea why. Finally the letters stopped coming, and after a few years I threw them away.

Sad, isn't it? I should have answered those letters. She probably turned out to be a fashion model or a brain surgeon. Even now, my friends tell me I really blew it.

Sea of Cortez Memoirs: Grouper in the Bay

2008-05-29T08:36:00.001-05:00

While my parents were recovering from their ordeal, I decided to go snorkeling around the docks. There were these really weird diamond-shaped fish, called "triggerfish," that had a crowded tiny mouthful of human-looking white teeth, and I was diving down under the docks to watch them eat clams and mussels. Their teeth were so strong they were able to chip away at the muscle shells bit by bit until there was a hole big enough to get the meat out of it. Some of the triggerfish were large and brightly colored, and none seemed particularly frightened of me. I didn't get too close, though, because judging by how easily those teeth bit through solid shells, I could imagine what they could do to me.

I swam along under the docks, checking out triggerfish and the various other finned creatures hanging around in the shadows, and then down at the far end, out toward the deeper water, there was this funny looking boulder. I'd been out there before and didn't remember it being there. It was deep in the shadow of the dock, hard to see with the bright sunlight shining all around, and I was right up next to it before I realized it was not sitting on the bottom. It had fins. Then I saw an eye, which was gold and black and about the size of my hand, and the whole thing moved slowly forward and a mouth opened. My whole head could have fit inside that mouth.

I swear to God, I shot straight up out of that water and onto the dock, all in one fluid torpedo-like motion. Just a big splash, and I was standing on the dock, looking down. It was still there, but moving out of the shadow. I looked around and saw some local kids I'd befriended, and I started shouting, "Look at this big fish! Look at this big fish!" They didn't understand any English but they understood I was freaking out about something, and they ran down the dock and peered into the water. One was a little girl, and she screamed. The two boys grew as excited as I was. The older one ran off to get someone. I stood there with the little boy and girl and watched as the massive fish slowly cruised away from the dock, having decided that it was no longer a good place for a nap.

Later I was told that it was a fish called a grouper and that it was really rare for one that big to have been up in shallow water like that. The speculation was that it was somehow driven into the bay by the storm. Another person said it was probably sick, and came up for the warmer water. Whatever the reason, it was one of the most intense animal encounters of my life.

Sea of Cortez Memoirs: Midnight Chubasco

2008-05-28T08:35:00.001-05:00

We made it back to port from our aborted treasure hunt and filled up with gas, and since we had a few spare days left on the vacation, my parents decided to go out and explore some of the nearby sea coast. It was only a few hours before sunset when we came across a beautiful cove and anchored off shore. This was an area of dramatic ocean bluffs, but beyond some jagged rocks there was a secluded sand beach that was lush and picturesque. We had to go ashore in my little boat because of the rocks, and we didn't spend a lot of time there. I can picture it all in my mind, illuminated by the "beauty light" of oncoming sunset. Soon it was time to go back to the TI-KA II

for dinner. After dinner I spent some time fishing, and caught some strange rockfish which we let go, then it was bedtime and soon the lights were out and I went to sleep.

In the middle of the night a storm came up, and the swells reached lord-knows-how-big (the way my father tells it, there were 40-foot whitecaps).The size of the swells pulled the anchors right off the bottom and sent the TI-KA II adrift toward the rocks, which would have smashed the boat to pieces and quickly killed us all. My dad started the engines and backed the boat away from the rocks while my mom pulled up the stern anchor, but with the waves and the turning of the boat, the anchor line got caught in the propeller. The engine went dead. The boat was dead, adrift, and heading for disaster.

So with a steak knife clenched in his teeth, my father dove overboard in the dark, in a storm, and swam under the boat and cut the anchor line away from the propeller. My mom said she watched the rocks get closer and closer, and by the time my dad climbed back onboard she thought it was too late. But he scrambled up to the helm, started the engine and threw it into reverse, backing away as waves broke over the stern and sent water streaming into the boat. When he had a chance he turned the boat into the waves and headed back toward port.

I'd gone to sleep out in the cove, and woke up – disoriented – back at a berth in Guaymas. I was somewhat upset because I was looking forward to more exploring and maybe some lizard hunting. I couldn't understand why we were back at the dock. My parents thought this was hilarious, and they told me they couldn't believe what I'd slept through. When they told me this story, I was glad I had slept through it.

Sea of Cortez Memoirs: Isle Pato

2008-05-27T08:17:00.003-05:00

The trip started with a map. Dad pulled it out and showed it to me, pointing to a tiny pinprick of an island labeled Isla Pato floating to one side of an oblong sea. "This is where it would be," he told me. "This is the logical place for the pirates to hide their treasure."

"Cool!" I don't remember which pirates he'd been talking about, or exactly why Pato Island was the perfect place for them. But I clearly remember the thrill of hearing about pirates.

"What I want to do is go down there with a good metal detector and search around. I bet we come up with some Spanish doubloons!" He looked at me with a smile in his eyes. "How about it? Want to go?"

I was about 11 years old and in the mood for hunting pirate treasure. "Yes!"

"Well guess what," he said. "We're going."

At the time, Dad had a big bronze 1964 Cadillac with 5-inch fins. He'd put a trailer hitch on it and hooked it to our boat trailer, on which sat the TI-KA II, a 25-foot Trojan cabin cruiser, all wood and heavy as a house. It was Dad, Mom, me, and Taffy our long-haired Chihuahua, and an 800 mile drive down to the Sea of Cortez. I couldn't wait because I knew there would be new and wondrous lizards to catch down there. I didn't really think we would find any pirate treasure.

The trip down was long and boring. I spent it as I usually did, stretched out in the back seat and trying to sleep, not wearing a safety belt (back in the1970's it wasn't yet a law). Instead of staying in hotels, Dad would pull over to the side of the road and we'd climb up an aluminum ladder to eat and sleep in the boat while it sat on its trailer. My most vivid memory of the drive was that during one of these stops I saw my first and only Collared Lizard (Crotaphytus collaris) which was ten inches long with a green body, a blue-green tail, yellow feet, and a yellow and black head. Around it's neck was a "collar" of black. I couldn't catch it, though, because it surprised me and was way too fast. It disappeared down a hole in the ground, gone forever.

We had a moment of excitement while we crossed a checkpoint down in Mexico, as the Mexican customs agent decided to search the boat and found Dad's .22 rifle onboard. I remembered sitting in the car behind my mom, frightened, and kept asking her, "Is he going to arrest us? Is he?" and my mom kept going, "Shhh! Shhhhh!" When my dad and the guy started smiling and joking my mom relaxed. My father had slipped the customs agent $20 and told him he wasn't about to go anywhere without a gun to protect his family, and the custom agent said he didn't blame him, and that he would do the same. He let us go, but kept the $20 of course.

We spent some time in Hermosillo, which I remember was hot, flat, and trashy. Then we went on to Guaymas which is a port town, and we launched the boat and Dad rented us a birth at a local dock. This place was cool. I loved it! I jumped in and swam around in the warm salty water, diving with my mask, snorkel, and fins. I would swim under the boat and check out all the fish in the clear water. On the dock there was a Fanta Soda machine that took 20 centavos for a bottle, and we got a 15 centavos refund for the empty bottles. The exchange rate at the time was 7 pesos per dollar, so the sodas cost a few pennies at the most. We stocked up the boat with food and supplies, and one clear, sunny morning left on our adventure. It was one that was going to last a lot longer than my dad anticipated.

Dad had taught me how to handle the boat, and so I was an all around junior swabbie. If I wasn't piloting, I was riding up on the bow. I was also the one designated to jump off onto a dock, or onto a beach, or into the water if necessary, with the responsibility of "dogging" the boat. That was Dad's sailor talk for tying it to something so that it wouldn't float away. So I spent most of the trip on the bow, getting darker and darker with each passing day until I looked like a sun-bleached-blond Mexican native. As Dad followed the shoreline, and I peered down into the clear water and could occasionally see the bottom. Every once in a while a porpoise would show up and swim alongside, giving me a big thrill. They were camera shy, though, because every time my dad pulled out his super-8 movie camera they would disappear. They probably thought it was a gun.

In the evening we would beach the boat, and I would hunt around for lizards but found mostly land crabs. They were odd, silly-looking creatures with oblong eyes, and sometimes very sharp claws. To either side of the boat were miles upon miles of virgin beach and not another soul in sight.

When we entered the straight between Tiburon Island and the mainland it was like going from the ocean to a river. It wasn't at all that deep, and so I had to keep a sharp lookout so that Dad wouldn't run the boat aground. Also, the big island made me nervous because my dad had told me stories about the Seri Indians who lived there and how they used to be cannibals. The rumor was, he told me, some of them still were. So as we were traveling along this wide, shallow river, teeming with sea life and the bottom littered with strangely-shaped sand dollars, I would look up to see Seri tribesmen. They wading far out into the water off the island side, fishing with nets and spears, and staring at us with an intensity that frightened me.

The truth was, however, that the Seri Indians (they call themselves Konkaak, which means "The People") were not and never have been cannibals. The rumor of cannibalism was a lie spread long ago by those who wanted to persecute them. I didn't know any of this then, of course, and they scared me something terrible. Especially when we anchored at night.

At the north opening of the straight we could look out across the expanse of water and see Pato Island, which was nothing but a big white point. The island was so white because, as my dad put it, "It's covered with bird shit." But the water beyond the straight was so rough that we got sea sick and had to turn around and head back. It was decided we'd go find a nice sheltered place in the straight and recover, and wait until the seas calmed down before making our run to the island.

Dad chose a secluded stretch of beach and Mom threw the back anchor out, and as the bow slid into the sand I jumped off with the line and ran up the beach. I found a boulder to tie it to and quickly secured it. Dinner was prepared while I explored the beach and the desert beyond. Later, after the lights were out and we had settled in for the evening, I remember staring out the window and seeing nothing. It was absolutely black outside except for the stars. There were no lights on the shore anywhere.

The next morning when we woke up it was obvious something was wrong. The boat was leaning far to one side, and my dad started laughing. The tide had gone out and the boat was nearly all the way out of the water.

It turns out that the tide is extreme between Tiburon Island and the mainland, because an immense amount of water is funneled in between the island and mainland shores, and also because it's so shallow. So this water will vary up to 25 feet between high and low tide, and as the tide is changing the current is so swift it literally looks like a river flowing. We propped the boat up and then my dad had to dig a hole in the sand under the propeller so that the shaft wouldn't get bent under the weight of the boat. When the tide was completely out, the boat was six feet away from the water.

There was about 20 minutes when it was safe for me to go out in my little rowboat. At low tide there was no current, and I paddled around with my face nearly in the water checking out all the fish and sea life. After fifteen minutes or so mom and dad started yelling for me to watch out, and I looked up to see two large fins breaking surface. At first I thought they were porpoises, but as they went past (and they were close) I saw they were too thin and both were longer than my little boat. No doubt about it, they were sharks.

My parents decided it was time for me to paddle back to shore.

Land bound, I wandered around through the desert looking for lizards and watching out for snakes. This region had the only known "rattleless" rattlesnakes, who don't give any warning at all before they strike. I'd read all about them and so was on sharp alert, but I didn't see any during the whole trip. I did see a lot of very interesting lizards, mostly whiptails (family Cnemidophorus) and some funny little guys with striped tails that curled up and over like scorpions, called Zebratails (Callisaurus draconoides). The Zebratails were exciting to me because I had never seen them before.

There's another creature that lives down there that I discovered, but it was not a pleasant discovery. As we were waiting for the tide to come back in, I was walking up and down the beach in about a foot or so of water (well out of reach of the sharks) and I stepped on something squishy. Split seconds later I was being electrocuted so bad it was like I'd stuck my toe into a power socket. My whole body vibrated with exquisite pain, and I screamed and yelled and danced around the beach thinking I'd lost my foot. Looking down into the water, I saw a flat thing go swimming away. It turns out I'd stepped on an "electric ray" which was lying buried in the sand. I really believe that, in the second or so I was in contact with the creature, my 11-year-old mind thought I was going to die. I ran screaming and crying to the boat and my parents thought I'd been bitten by a snake or something. No, not a snake. I can handle snakes ... this was a little monster. After that encounter I no longer walked in the water without wearing tennis shoes.

When the tide finally came in and we could get the boat off the beach, we went back out a ways and saw that the sea between us and Pato Island was still far rougher than Dad wanted to face, so we headed back in again for another night. This time we anchored far offshore, hoping to avoid being stranded once again come low tide.

Mom and Dad woke me up late the next morning, acting all excited, and told me they'd seen the strangest rabbit on the beach. They told me it was huge, and pink, and went around laying eggs. I looked at them with first alarm, and then complete skepticism. They had to out-and-out tell me it was Easter before I realized what was going on. Easter had been the farthest thing from my mind, and it was definitely the most bizarre one I'd ever had. My parents, planning ahead, had stowed away a bunch of colored plastic eggs, filled them with candy, and gone and hidden them around in the desert next to the beach.

After my Easter egg hunt, we had breakfast and then pulled up anchor. The tide was coming in and my dad wanted to make one more attempt for Pato Island. We were stretching the gas very thin as is was, and so his plan was to ride the fast tide to the island, anchor and explore, then ride the tide back when it changed. So we were heading out there, and the current was indeed pushing us along quickly, and that's when we saw the first whirlpool.

You've never seen a whirlpool until you've seen one in the Sea of Cortez. Of course I was only eleven, and to me it looked like it could swallow the boat. At least, it looked like it could swallow my little rowboat. In reality I don't think it would done anything to even the smallest boat but make the occupants dizzy, but it's definitely not something I'd want to be swimming around. I could imagine an ancient mariner seeing something like this, then telling family about it, and the family telling friends. After a week the story would go from "scary whirlpool" to some gargantuan maelstrom of water that sucked down entire ships.

That was just one strange side effect of the strong tide. The next one caused us to turn back and forget about Pato Island. As we were heading out of the mouth of the straight, there was this very strange looking wave that didn't seem to be moving. It was just this steep hill of water, and the closer we got to it the more frightening it was. It was eerie, looking like something caused by a sea monster. My dad nosed up toward it and then shook his head, and turned the boat around.

I don't think it really scared my father, I think he was nervous about how low our gas reserves were getting. The TI-KA II was not a sailboat, and we were a long ways away from any kind of gas station. We had what was in our tanks and also some 5 gallon cans, and we were approaching the halfway point. My dad had rethought our chances of getting back, took into account he had his wife and young son with him, and decided not to chance it.

I've since learned that this phenomenon is called an upwelling, where a strong current underwater hits some feature on the bottom that causes the current to turn upwards. They're not especially dangerous, just disconcerting, and we could have gone around it. But instead we turned back, and sadly never did make it to Pato Island to treasure hunt. Our adventure, however, was far from over.

The Magic Hole

2008-05-25T08:12:00.000-05:00

Our first house in Stockton, which was actually one-half of a duplex, was right on the edge of town in an area being developed. Directly across the street was a large empty field, a perfect place for us neighborhood kids to play. With this huge field of dirt, all we needed was a shovel. I provided the shovel, and we took turns digging. We all wanted to see just how big a hole we could make.

The project took weeks. At first we called it "The Hole," as in, "Let's meet at The Hole after school." "Mom, we're going to go play out at The Hole." "I did more work on The Hole than you did!"

The Hole became quite large, and then someone came up with the coolest idea. With all the construction going on in the neighborhood there was plenty of wood around (scrap and otherwise) so day by day we were able to start covering The Hole with a roof. As the roof was built, dirt was piled on top of it so that it couldn't be seen. It was at this point it stopped being The Hole and became "The Fort."

With The Fort in place amid all the weeds and tall grass, it was the best place on Earth for war games. We armed ourselves with cap guns, squirt guns, plastic battle axes and swords, and the filled that field with wars, insurrections, rebellions and general free-for-all mêlées. The Fort was a nexus for our little armies until summer, when a rival gang of kids (older and meaner) took it from us. Our interest in it waned, as we'd discovered new places to play (a creek with a railroad bridge, God help us) and so we finally gave up on The Fort. We let the bullies have it.

Then I remember the day we spotted a Caterpillar tractor out in that field, lumbering and squeaking through the tall grass. I stood on my front lawn with my friends, watching in fascination as the tractor pulled its plow back and forth across the field, edging closer to The Fort with each pass. Then there was this magic moment when the tractor completely disappeared from our view. From across the field came a terrific Wham!.

Little did we realize that we'd created the perfect tractor trap.

The tractor driver came up out of that hole hopping mad, and we ran. Later someone came door to door, inquiring about whose kids had dug a big hole in the field. My mom kept her mouth shut, no doubt fearing a lawsuit or something. Later it came out that the bullies who'd taken it away from us got blamed, and were in big trouble. Even to this day I still think: That's what they get for taking it away from us! The jerks.

They had to have a big semi-truck looking rig come out and pull the tractor out of The Hole. We stood on my front lawn watching that, too. Come next summer, they'd started building more houses there and soon the field was a block of brand new triplexes. It didn't take five years for the whole area to deteriorate into a slum.

Frankly, I liked it better as a field.

The Paper Airplane That Wouldn't Land

2008-05-25T08:09:00.001-05:00

A warm spring day in the 4th grade, out on the green grass of recess, we carried our binders out to the baseball diamond and stretched out on the ground to fold and create paper airplanes. Several designs were in our minds, but one seemed to fly the best on a moderately windy day. I made mine, threw it around a while, and the bell rang and we headed back for the classroom. One last throw, straight up, and the little white airplane glided in a large and perfect loop and was about to land on the classroom roof, but it didn't. Something unexpected and amazing happened.

The airplane hung suspended, bobbing in the air, right at the corner of the building. "Whoa! Look! Hey, guys, look!" The airplane just hung there in mid-air, still bobbing, surging forward and falling back, caught in a wind pocket created by the corner of the roof. It was a happenstance, once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon. "Look!" I yelled. "It's still there!"

The wind was coming in from the west, as usual, and wasn't gusty – it was an even, steady flow of air. The angle and speed of the flow and the shape of the roof were just right. The airplane just happened to insert itself into a kind of invisible bubble, trapping it, keeping it aloft. It hung in the air like a miniature kite.

My friends and I stood around it, looking up in amazement. A few of them, mindful of the bell having sounded, tore themselves away and went to class. I remained there in a sort of hypnotized state. I had never seen this happen before, and knew it would probably never happen again.

"Hey," I told one of my friends, "go get the teacher!"

He ran off without a word, and a minute or so later returned with our teacher. She was a very kind, caring woman who was concerned that something had happened. When she first arrived she didn't understand what we were looking at. When she realized she'd been pulled away from class to look at a paper airplane she was angry, but as the airplane continued to hover, her anger drained away. She, too, got caught up in the amazing sight, especially as it became apparent that it wasn't going to end anytime soon.

"That is something," she said. "Look at that."

The paper airplane stayed where it was for maybe ten minutes total, then the wind gusted and broke the spell. The airplane surged upwards and then turned, and floated off to land in the dirt. I ran over and picked it up and then went with my teacher back to class.

The event caused a paper airplane craze at the school, much to the consternation of the janitorial staff. Try as we might, though, we were never able to duplicate this stunt. Sometimes the airplanes would hang for a moment or so at the corner of a building, tantalizing us, but then turn or drop away. It never happened again.

Why Bluebellies Have Blue Bellies

2008-05-24T11:11:00.001-05:00

Out of all the reptiles I've caught and studied as a budding young Herpetologist, these wonderful little blue-bellied lizards were the hardiest and ultimately the most fascinating. Found nearly everywhere in California (with variations across most of North America) these rough-scaled, fast, nimble lizards get their name from brilliant patterns of blue on their relatively soft, smooth stomachs. I'd been catching them for years before I finally realized what the blue on their bellies was for. It was obvious in retrospect, but at the time it was a big revelation.

After being uprooted twice, once from my desert home of Tucson, and then from the crowded, foggy cityscape of the bay area, we finally settled in Stockton. I was about nine or so, and the first thing I did in this new place was to search out the local critters. The bluebelly was the first reptile I discovered, and the first Californian lizard I caught and kept. So you could say that these lizards were my first boyhood friends after that move.

The official name for the bluebelly is the Western Fence Swift (Sceloporus occidentalis). I checked out piles of books from the library, reading all I could about them. Then I begged and pleaded for a terrarium so that I had something decent to keep them in.

Females are generally more brown and colorless, and have a wider lower stomach. They have little, if any, blue on their bellies. The more feminine the female, the less blue. Conversely, the more macho the male, the more blue and black are on their bellies. Some are so heavily colored that they're actually gaudy. This should have clued me in on the real use of these decorations, but it never even occurred to me.

Keeping one or two at a time was okay, but I had to develop a lot of patience to actually see them do anything. I had my terrarium set beside my bed, and I would spend literally hours just lying there and watching. Then I would dump in some food, usually flies and crickets but occasionally some mealworms, and they would chow down and then settle again. Most people would consider them boring to watch, because when they know you're there they don't move a lot. They remain clinging to logs or sticks pretending they're invisible. Which in some cases they are, because their camouflage can be close to perfect when sitting on a log.

What I discovered later on, though, is you get a lot more entertainment value when you have four or five really macho males in the terrarium, and one or two full-grown females. Have them under a comfortable heat lamp (not too hot!) and give them plenty of food and water. Give them a bit of time to get used to their surroundings.

Then settle down and watch the fun.

I had never seen bluebellies go into full battle mode before. Normally they just nod their heads at each other, but when two or more challengers face off it becomes an all-out contest of intimidation. What they do is hilarious. They flatten themselves out vertically, so that their back is arched and their belly is pushed way down, which makes them appear physically larger. When their bellies are extended vertically like this, the blue can plainly be seen. That's what it's for. It's to say two things:

To females: "Hey babe, wanna party?"

To other males: "Don't mess with me!"

They leap, skitter sideways, push and shove, and occasionally snap at their opponent's tail. It happens all over the terrarium, very fast, and sand and gravel goes flying. The other lizards are caught between being interested, and getting out of the way. I had one stubborn old male who had no intention of getting involved, and remained where he was, eyes closed in annoyance, even as the other two repeatedly ran him over.

The mating dance is very similar, but it includes a lot more rapid head nodding while the female (generally) wants to be somewhere else.

Since these were wild animals, I never kept them for very long. I would routinely let them go where I'd caught them, and more often than not I'd end up catching them again later. I'd check them for ticks, apply medicine when needed, keep them for a while and then let them go again. Some I would let go in the wood pile in the back yard, and be tickled to later see tiny little babies running around. These would grow up and start another generation in the wood pile. I kept this up for years.

I never really grew out of Herpetology, and I'm amazed about how popular it's gotten (and how much more sophisticated the amateur Herpetologists have become). I'm not actively hunting anymore, because I had a bad experience: In the 80's I was in Houston and was amazed to find Mediterranean geckos running around the walls of the hotel at night. I was trying to coax one out of a crack with a stick when a man came barging out and accused me of trying to break into his daughter's room. When I explained to him what I was doing I felt incredibly stupid. So now if I don't have one of my kids with me, I'm not hunting lizards.

Supposedly there's bluebellies out here in Texas but I haven't seen one yet. Lots of Anoles, which are interesting lizards too, but no bluebellies. And you know, I really miss them.

Near Death in Seattle

2008-05-23T08:05:00.000-05:00

I was about 9 years old when my dad took my mom and I on a business trip to Seattle, Washington, and we stayed in a high rise hotel. I had never been in a high rise hotel before, and I was fascinated with the view. Especially since, directly across the street, giant cranes with wrecking balls were smashing away at an old building.

What is so fascinating, I wonder, about the sight of a building being torn down? Especially to kids. I watched for hours upon hours. The huge ball of metal would swing, smash into concrete and brick. Dust flew, debris fell. I waited breathlessly for large sections to break loose and tumble to their doom.

Back then, you could open high rise windows. You can't do that anymore, they're all bolted shut. When I found I could open the window, a whole new world of fun blossomed. I proceeded to take all the hotel stationary, fold it into paper airplanes, and send them flying through the air toward the deconstruction site across the street.

Again, why is this so fascinating? But to a small boy such as I was, I couldn't imagine anything more fun. Every scrap of paper I could scrounge flew out that window as one type of airplane or another. And then, watching one, it flew right into a window across the street, right into the doomed building being torn down. In my excitement, I forgot the window was wide open, and I leaned forward and fell out.

We were about 20 stories up.

I heard my mom scream and my father jump. He caught my legs as I was going out the window. I have a very vivid memory of seeing the gray sidewalk below, my hands stretched out in front of me. Little people walking on the sidewalk and small cars driving on the miniature street. Then I was flying backwards as my dad yanked me back through the window.

That was close. I mean, really. If my dad hadn't had such quick reflexes, this would have been a really short life.

My Lucky Pole

2008-05-22T11:11:00.000-05:00

My father's friend, the late opera singer Ted Novis, gave me my first fishing pole. It was just after we'd moved to California. In Tucson the only open water you'll see is either in a swimming pool, or raging down an arroyo during a flash flood. Neither is good for fishing, and so I had never fished before. This is why, when Ted took my father and I out fishing in the San Francisco bay, I didn't have a pole to use.

Ted picked one at random out of his huge bundle of poles and handed it to me. "Here!" he said. "You have a fishing pole."

"You mean, for keeps?"

He laughed. "Yes, for keeps!"

He and my father showed me how to set up a hook and sinker, and helped me bait it, and we threw our lines out and sat waiting. Not only had I never been fishing before, but this was also my first time in a boat. It was cold out in the bay, and I wasn't used to the rocking of the waves – it made me a bit seasick.

Dad and Ted were talking about adult things, which excluded me. I kept peering over the side at the water, wondering how deep it was. Minutes passed, then a startling thing happened to my fishing pole. Something down in the water was yanking hard on the string, and the reel began spinning and making a whining noise.

"You got a bite!" Dad was yelling in his loud, exited way. "You got a bite!"

"Real it in, boy!" Ted yelled.

I was flustered and excited and didn't know what to do, and whatever had a hold of the other end was threatening to yank the pole out of my hands. So I said, "Here!" and handed it to my Dad.

Dad laughed and cranked on the reel. "Whoa! You got a monster!" The fish was fighting hard.

"You're gonna lose it," Ted was saying. "Play it out a bit."

"No, I got it." Dad reeled it in, and Ted netted it. It was a fish about the same size and shape as a large frying pan.

"A halibut!" Ted said. "Look at that!"

Talk about a weird fish. My dad pointed out to me that it had two eyes on one side of its head. Born looking like a normal fish, one of the eyes migrates over time from one side of the head to the other. It was like a freak of nature, and it made me nervous.

Under my Dad's direction, I baited the hook and let the line out again. It wasn't ten minutes later I caught another fish. It was a 2 pound catfish, which confused Ted because he was sure there were no catfish in the bay. He'd never seen one in salt water before, and he didn't like the yellow color of its belly. We threw it back.

I got bites for the rest of the trip, but no more fish. Dad and Ted didn't catch anything at all. That night, Ted cooked the halibut and I ate some of it, but back then I didn't have much appreciation for seafood.

I was hooked on fishing, though.

Over the next few years I caught a whole array of strange fish using that pole. I caught baby sharks, sting rays, rock cod, and a really odd thing called a needle fish – a yard long but only an inch wide, and boy did it fight. Every time I went fishing, I caught something, even when no one else did. In Sacramento, I caught a 15 pound striped bass (my father was very proud of me for that). Up at one lake I even caught a turtle.

I thought it was normal to catch a fish every time I went fishing. This was truly a lucky pole. There's no other explanation.

Years later, up at Lake Tahoe, I was I huddled in my sleeping bag on the back deck of my Dad's boat with my fishing line out. My lucky pole was all the way in the boat, with only about 5 inches of it hanging over the transom. It was within easy reach of my right hand in case there was a bite.

I was just barely awake when it happened. My parents were asleep. I was squinting up at the stars, because they're bright up at Tahoe.

Something grabbed the line of my lucky pole and yanked it out of the boat. I heard and felt it being dragged up over the transom, and I sat up in time to see it sail off through the air and splash into the water about 20 feet away. My yelling and screaming awoke my parents and my dad came scrambling out onto the stern, dressed in his flannel pajamas. "My pole!" I was crying. "My pole is gone!"

After I explained the details to Dad, he shook his head and said it must have been a giant mackinaw trout. He'd heard tales of these giants, and he was sure that's what took it. Since then I've looked them up: The biggest on record is 37 pounds, but divers have reported seeing 50-pounders. Clearly these are big enough to yank a pole completely out of a boat.

Also, there's an ongoing story of Lake Tahoe having a monster. This monster is probably the result of some sturgeon that was released in the lake years ago. Sturgeons are known to reach lengths of 10-14 feet in the right environment (longer, actually – the record is 24 feet!), and they DO look like some sort of pre-historic monster.

Searching through the Internet, you'll find dozens of Lake Tahoe midnight-pole-stealing fish stories. I have no doubt there's a big nocturnal creature in that lake dragging dozens of fishing poles around through the water … and one of them is mine! My one and only lucky pole.

I've since wondered, what makes a lucky pole lucky? The smell on the line? The sound the reel makes when winding – does it attract fish? I wish I knew.

I haven't had one since.

Moving To California

2008-05-21T11:11:00.000-05:00

I'd never seen so many green trees in my life. It was like an alien planet, with an alien culture living in structures of alien architecture. After having spent my entire 8 years of life in that desert environment, moving to the California Bay Area was an extreme shock to my system.

My whole life, and the lives of my parents, had been completely changed by a bearing.

The business Dad ran in Tucson had been very successful. He designed and manufactured revolutionary, portable conveyor systems for mining operations. From what I understand, another company had approached him with their own "revolutionary" bearings that never needed to be oiled, and which would further revolutionize Dad's conveyer designs. Unfortunately these bearings, which never needed oiling, really could have used some oil after all.

There followed catastrophic breakdowns. Lawsuits flew in all directions. My dad ducked and ran, carrying us with him. We were torn from my happy home in the desert and landed on this alien planet called Los Altos, California, just months before the historic first moon landing. Dad had gotten a design job with a company that manufactured automation equipment for beer companies, and started working hard to rebuild his life.

Through some wonderful business contact (or perhaps a sheer stroke of luck) he managed to find a two story, 4000+ square foot rental house for only $50 a month. Even back in the late 60's this was an incredible deal. He got this deal because the house, which was a beautiful Victorian over a hundred years old, was slated to be torn down to make room for an apartment complex parking lot. We weren't really tenants as much as caretakers, watching over the doomed house until it was leveled.

The house sat on four acres of land, in the bay area, right next to a major freeway. There were trees all over the yard, including several large pine trees, one of which grew right next to my bedroom window and made a perfect ladder for me to climb out and down to the ground. Another pine tree – the big one – allowed me to climb up higher than the roof of the house and gave me a great view of the entire neighborhood. I had never really been a tree climber before, but I adjusted quickly. It's a wonder I never fell and broke my neck.

I made one friend who lived a few houses down, and we got along okay until we went to a hobby store to buy balsa wood gliders. I was incredibly bored most of the time, because there were no lizards or snakes to catch (this was in the middle of a city) and I missed my huge group of friends in Arizona. But I did persuade this one friend to go with me down the block to this hobby store that had 10¢, 15¢, and 35¢ gliders. I loved these gliders, they were something to do, and I wanted to share this fun with my friend. I don't remember his name, so let's just call him Bob.

Bob didn't have any money, though, at least none he was supposed to spend. But I had done such a good job in selling him on the fun we'd have with these gliders, that he dipped into the money he wasn't supposed to spend. I didn't know anything about this, I just wanted to buy some gliders.

So we're at this hobby shop, and we've chosen our gliders, and when Bob pays for his he uses some rare old coins that was in a collection his parents had started for him. The hobby store guy stopped, holding the coins in his hand, and said, "Are you sure you want to use these coins?" He said yes, and we bought the gliders, and we went home and built them and played with them until they were utterly destroyed (this was part of the fun with gliders). Bob's older brother saw us playing with these little airplanes and wanted to know where we got them. Bob confessed what he'd done and his brother's jaw dropped. "You did what?" He went to tell his parents, and the game was over. Bob was grounded for weeks, and was never allowed to play with me again.

Oddly I'd somehow became the evil one who'd coaxed Bob to do this. In his parent's minds there was no way Bob would have thought of this on his own, therefore the new kid was to blame for it. That wasn't the worst of it, either, because the mother was the president of the PTA or something and all the neighborhood kid's mothers were warned of this evil new boy in town, and within a few days nobody was allowed to play with me. I didn't understand what was happening at the time, but in retrospect it is the cruelest thing that I've ever experienced as a child.

Back in Arizona I had been a very social kid. Here I found myself not only in an alien environment, void of all things dear and familiar, but also shunned by my fellow children for no good reason. School became a complete Hell on Earth. Spending time alone despite being surrounded by others was a hard thing for me to deal with. As time wore on, though, an odd thing began to happen ... I started getting used to it.

A vivid memory of this time has me riding around on my bicycle with nothing to do, and at one point I just let the bicycle fall over and I didn't get up. It was at a corner, in some long grass, and I was just sprawled there and staring up into the sky. For months the loneliness had been like an oppressive weight, but as I stared into the endless blue above me I embraced that feeling, sought the center of it and let it consume me, and then I conquered it. I incorporated it into myself.

A station wagon drove up and stopped, and a lady was looking at me in alarm, and she made her kid roll down his window. "Do you need help?" she had her kid ask me. I shook my head and said, "No." The woman looked angry, mad that I wasn't hurt. She drove quickly away, and for a moment I felt a bit of shame for scaring her, but then again, I remember thinking that it was her problem, not mine.

Another thing I remember vividly was my dad letting me stay up all night watching NASA space reports, and staying home from school so I could see Neil Armstrong hopping around on the moon. It was all in black and white and the pictures were fuzzy. The moment Armstrong stepped into that freezing dust I saw my first computer graphics; ugly block letters spelling out "MAN ON MOON." My dad, a science fiction reader and space fanatic, was ecstatic. As his son I was ecstatic by proxy. I knew it was a big deal, but not really how big. I tried to share the experience with other kids at school, but continued getting the cold shoulder.

There was a big art project we were all working on, each of us having chosen a bird and was expected to draw it as lifelike as possible. I really dove into it, because I'd chosen a bird that represented my old home: A roadrunner. I worked on that thing night and day, in class and at home. When I turned it in the teacher gave me an A+ and it was hung on the classroom door for all to see. This didn't help my standing with the other kids, thought, it made it somehow worse.

I started doing a lot more creative things, drawing pictures and writing little stories. I invented my own paper airplane designs. I discovered there were new types of creatures to catch and study, as I had started finding tree frogs and salamanders. The loneliness was still there but I was dealing with it, and discovering more about myself. Had I not gone though this lonely time, I'd be a completely different person right now. I think this is where the seeds were planted that eventually turned me into a writer.

It wasn't quite a year before we moved out of that big old house. Dad moved to another division of the company over in Stockton, the heart of California's central valley, and when we moved it was into a new duplex on the edge of town. There were lizards and snakes to be caught, and lots of friends to be made. Life was much better. I was happy again.

Years later, though, when I think back to the "good old days" of childhood, it's not California that comes to mind. It's the deserts of Arizona. I guess in my heart I'll always be a desert rat.

The Deadly Kid Traps

2008-05-20T11:11:00.000-05:00

While I was growing up, my parents had two deadly kid traps in the house. One was the refrigerator, which wasn't that bad because I had no intention of crawling into it. It was never empty enough to do that anyway. The other trap, however, was much more tempting…

As a child in the 1960's I was a big fan of shows like Star Trek and Lost In Space. The cartoons I watched also had space or science fiction themes; things like Johnny Quest, Space Ghost, and the awesome Herculoids. So when I saw that gleaming white, front-loading washer of my mom's, with that big round glass porthole in front, I could only imagine one thing:

A spaceship!

It seemed to be designed specifically to trap kids such as myself inside. Why else would they engineer the latch handle the way they did? It could close and latch itself, but you had to yank on the handle to open it. And there was no way to open it from the inside. Also – and this is the part that convinces me – the damn thing was nearly soundproof. It was obviously designed to be a trap. Its primary purpose was to wash clothes, but the insidious real purpose was to capture kids and suffocate them to death.

One of my best friends at this age was a black Poodle/Cocker Spaniel mixed dog named Pepper (the one who chased the rabbit out of the house). He looked like a black Poodle with hair that was just a little too long and too straight. My constant companion, he endured whatever boyhood tortures I administered to him and still loved me completely, with no reservations, still willing to go where I went and do what I did. Needless to say, Pepper was my co-pilot when I decided to take the washing machine spaceship on a trip to Planet 12.

I climbed in first, and he jumped in right after me. Then the glass door swung shut of its own accord and locked. I don't recall if I panicked immediately or if I built up to it, but it was clear to me that I was in deep trouble. You see, I was perfectly aware that a kid I knew when I was even younger had been found dead in a refrigerator being stored behind an apartment building. I guess it didn't occur to me until right then that it could happen in a washing machine as well.

I banged and screamed and yelled for quite a while, but Mom didn't hear me. Dad wasn't around, because he was at work. It was just me and Pepper there in that space capsule, marooned and running out of air. I don't really remember what I was thinking. I just remember being very frightened in an I-might-really-die kind of way. I also remember staring to feel sleepy, and that means (though I didn't know it then) that suffocation was starting to take place.

Then I remember my older brother, Hank, walking into the room, and he looked down to see Pepper and I staring back out at him. "What in the Hell are you doing in there?" he said, amused. With a quick flip of his wrist he popped open the door, and I can still remember how unbelievably sweet and cool the outside air was. Pepper and I fought each other to get out first; Pepper won. I tumbled out onto the floor at my brother's feet, saved, given a second chance. I would have been dead if it wasn't for him. I would have been another one of those sad child-suffocation stories, a warning and a caution to others.

The really sad thing is, I don't think I ever thanked him for it.

Come to think of it, there was a third deadly kid trap at my house, and my brother saved my life by pulling me out of that one, too: The swimming pool.

I wish I could have been around to save him when he needed a hero.

Life as a Desert Rat

2008-05-19T11:11:00.000-05:00

When I was about 8 years old and was feeling the freedom of my first bicycle, my friends and I would go out and ride for miles down dirt roads that crisscrossed through the cactus and brush. We explored ruins of adobe buildings where we found old coins and bayonets, and played in arroyos where fossils were routinely sticking out of the sandstone walls. This is where I found my first clam shell, out in the middle of the desert. Of course, the clam shell was solid rock and hundreds of millions of years old.

The funny thing was, we didn't care much about any of these wonders. We were looking for lizards.

Horny toads where my favorites, but they were elusive and hard to come by. Spiny lizards were nearly impossible to catch unless you climbed a telephone pole or a cactus to get to them. There were "whiptails," which were really fast and had forked tongues like snakes. There was an occasional Chuckwalla or Desert Iguana (those were some big lizards, especially to an 8-year-old) but they were rarely seen, and probably would have bitten off our fingers had we tried to catch them. I never did see one of those poisonous Gila monsters, though one time I caught a very colorful small lizard and later found it could have been a baby Gila monster – but I'll never know.

Every once in a while we would run across the most beautiful lizard I'd ever seen. You'd have to find it by turning over big boards or rocks, where you were more likely to find a nine-inch scorpion. But every once in a while there would be this brightly colored flash and we'd grab – and grab carefully! – because the tail would easily come off and that would "ruin" the lizard. This amazing, beautiful little lizard was called the Tucson Banded Gecko, a subspecies of the Western Banded Gecko. We just called them geckos. They were yellow and brown, very soft, had large expressive eyes (the only gecko I know of that has eyelids), and a bulbous, fat tail. My other 8-year-old friends and I all agreed this was a "cool lizard."

In addition to lizards, we ran across the occasional snake. Out there in the desert, half the snakes we ran into were poisonous, and I'd seen more than my share of sidewinders. Thankfully I had enough sense as a child to just leave them alone. But one time, when we were out riding in the early morning, there was this amazingly large snake stretched all the way across the dirt road. I mean, all the way across. We had an older kid with us (the brother of one of my friends) and he knew what it was. He called it a "bull snake" which is a big cousin of the harmless gopher snake. It looked like a rattler to us, but he picked it up and showed us the tail and the head. There was no rattle, and the head was narrow, proving it wasn't poisonous. The darn thing was 8 feet long if not longer, and it just let us pick it up without even a struggle. We unanimously decided this snake must go home with us, and the big brother looped it around his neck and we rode back.

Well, his mother freaked out and he couldn't keep it, so with great ceremony he gave it to me. It was so cool I just couldn't believe it. Here was a snake that was bigger than I was tall, all looped around my neck and arms like a ... well, a snake. It was just too groovy. [Remember, this was the 60's. The words of the day were "groovy," "boss," and "far out."] So I brought it into my house and, not knowing where to keep it, I put it in the guest bath which was the third bathroom Mom wouldn't let us use because it was "for guests."

I, uh ... neglected to tell anyone about it, though. I knew if I told my mom, she wouldn't let me keep it, just like the other guy's mom wouldn't let him keep it. I figured no one ever used that bathroom so no one would ever find it.

I was wrong. Less than an hour later I heard my mother's hysterical voice calling out for my dad. "Jiiiiiimmmiiieeeee!" she was shouting, her voice quavering so that I knew she was jumping up and down. "Jimmmmiieeeeeee!!!!"

I hid under my bed and prepared for the worst. I heard my father shout, "Oh my God!" And then, "How in the Hell did that get in there!" Only a few seconds later he called out my name. I still have no idea how they figured it out so fast.

Fortunately my father found it too funny to spank me for, but I had to go let the snake loose out where we'd found it. My big brother drove me out there in his sand buggy. He, too, thought it was pretty funny, but he didn't tell me that until years later. It was the last snake I brought home until after we moved to California.

One thing I did bring home that the whole family did thing was wonderful was a young roadrunner. I saw it down in an arroyo when we were playing with toy cars in the sand, and chased it into a section of the arroyo where it was trapped. It tried to hide behind a big piece of plywood, ducking down and pretending to be a weed. I grabbed it, and it bit me, but I wouldn't let it go. This was a roadrunner, just like on the cartoon, and I had to show my family. So I carried it all the way home and let it go in the back yard.

Mom had a real way with birds, and it wasn't more than a day before she had it eating out of her hands. The problem was it liked bugs. So she was constantly sending me out to catch grasshoppers, and that silly roadrunner would squawk and flap its wings and hold its mouth wide open. My parents would laugh hysterically at it, and feed the thing, and then send me out to catch more bugs.

I quickly got tired of catching bugs for the silly bird, and the bird got hungry one day and decided to try and catch its own bugs. Unfortunately, the bug it was trying to catch was in the swimming pool, and the roadrunner was later found floating face down in the pool, drowned. My mother cried, and then scolded me for bringing it home in the first place.

It wasn't long after that when a friend and I caught a jack rabbit. We were lifting over boards and rocks looking for geckos, and under one big board was the rabbit. My friend dived across the board, trapping it while I reached under and grabbed fur. It came out kicking, and the claws on its hind feet scratched the hell out of my arm. I quickly dropped it into the pillow case we'd brought along (it was the best thing for keeping lizards in out in the field) and it thrashed around inside but couldn't get out. My friend and I looked at each other and shouted in pure glee. A jack rabbit! How cool was that? No one we knew had ever caught a jack rabbit before!

I promptly took it home and, once inside the house, called my mom and dad. "Mom! Dad! Look what I caught! Look at this!" And I dumped the jack rabbit out of the bag and onto the carpet. I don't even think my parents got a chance to see it, it was a brown blur that launched itself toward the couch and dived underneath. Oh, but my dog Pepper saw it, though! Boy did he! The chase was on, all around the house at full speed, right over furniture and across tables and under anything and into every room. They knocked over lamps and crashed into doors and pulled curtains off their rods. My mom was yelling and my dad was laughing, and Pepper was barking. I didn't know what to do.

Mom took matters into her own hands and opened the front door. The rabbit must have come close to breaking the sound barrier going through that doorway. Pepper tried to follow, but only got to the other side of the street before he stopped, panting like mad, knowing the fun was over. But he turned and looked at me, and I swear I could understand the look on his face. He was saying, "Oh my God! That was great! Can we do that again?"

Bucket 'O' Toads

2008-05-18T11:11:00.000-05:00

Summer nights in that small suburb of Tucson, out of my house would stalk a mighty hunter. Six years old, wearing shorts and a tee shirt, high-top tennis shoes, and carrying a flashlight, a bucket, and a butterfly net, I stalked off through the streets in search of prey. It was toads I was after, big ugly warty toads. And they were out there, hundreds of them, hopping from out of the desert and through the neighborhood, all answering Mother Nature's annual call of love.

During the day the only time you would see one of these puffy, awkward creatures was on the road, smashed flat as a pancake. You'd see a lot of them, everywhere, rows of them where cars would score more than one at a time. It was disgusting. Of course as a young boy I was fascinated by that, too.

But at night they were big, round, and alive. Not quite frogs, and not quite lizards, these toads had short legs and didn't jump as their froggy cousins did. No, they hopped. Quick, furtive, nimble little hops. Like this: Hop hop hop hop hop!

Being a born Herpetologist (even though back then I couldn't even pronounce it, let alone know what it meant) I didn't find these creatures at all ugly. They were adorable! I liked their weird bumpy skin, their gleaming eyes, and their humble just-leave-me-alone body language. To dogs, I knew, they were deadly poison. I remember at least once my dad sticking a running garden hose down my poor dog's throat after catching him chewing on a toad. There was poison in those bumps, and if you broke them it would come out and kill you. That is, if you happen to be chewing on it. Being that I had no intention of doing that (and this being a long time before people found they could get high by licking them) I knew I was safe.

I remember walking along the sidewalks, catching them in my net and dumping them into my bucket. I also remember dodging tarantulas and other assorted big bugs. One was a long beetle with huge pinchers in front, and if you picked these up and got them mad they'd hiss at you. I also remember some of my friends out under a streetlight with their father's fly fishing pole, whipping the fly around in the air and catching bats (who thought the fly lure was a moth, no doubt). But mainly I caught toads. Dozens of them. Literally, dozens, all piled up and hopping in a mass at the bottom of the bucket.

Then I'd bring the bucket of toads home and put them in the backyard. One time my future sister-in-law Cara was curious as to what exactly was in this bucket I kept bringing in at night, and looked down into it as it sat on the concrete of the back patio. I can still hear her piercing scream. "My God!" she shrieked. "That bucket is full of toads!" By the hysterical tone of her voice, it was like she'd found a bucket full of severed human heads. She did a frightened dance on her tiptoes and escaped into the house, complaining loudly about the Bucket 'O' Toads.

I remember one time I was out later than my curfew. I was late and I knew it. I don't remember why I was late; there must have been something extra interesting, because it was a conscious decision not to leave just yet. Then when I arrived home and my father said I was late and that meant a spanking, I voluntarily submitted, putting myself over his knee and telling him I was ready. That made him laugh; he thought it was hilarious. But the spanking still hurt.

Since being a 6 year old toad hunter I've learned that I was right about the creatures. They really aren't hideous little monsters. In fact, they're a boon to us because of the hundreds of tons of bugs they eat every year, including cockroaches. That's hundreds of tons of bugs that would otherwise be crawling around our homes.

Yes, this toad hunter has retired his net and bucket, but every once in a while I'll happen upon one of these little guys, and I'll pick it up and say hello. They're welcome around my house. That is, as long as they stay outside.

Myrtle the Tortoise

2008-05-16T11:11:00.000-05:00

Dad brought him home one night, after driving cross-country and finding him in the middle of the road, alongside dozens of other dead ones. It was mating season for the Desert Tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) and they were teeming across the road "like a field of combat helmets!" So Dad saved one and brought it home for me, being that I was a young boy and very much into lizards, toads, and turtles.

Mom was the one who named him. We didn't know if it was a girl or boy, and Mom didn't know the difference between a turtle and a tortoise. So our little desert tortoise became "Myrtle the Turtle". He was a lumpy little guy, with a hard old man's face, but he had bright eyes with which he'd look you over carefully. There seemed to be intelligence in those eyes.

Myrtle got used to 1960's suburban life rather quickly. His routine was to walk all the way around the back yard twice a day, following the fence. My mom had him timed: he'd make a circuit in 4 hours, and at the end of each circuit he'd stop at the back door and wait to see if it was feeding time. If not, he'd trudge off on his way around for another circuit.

Mom fed Myrtle by hand. She found he loved to eat little balls of raw hamburger, green lettuce, and celery (which in retrospect was a very bad diet for a desert tortoise). He seemed to thrive on it, though, which I've since learned means nothing – they'll seem to thrive on bad food for a couple years while they slowly die. This didn't happen to Myrtle, though. His fate took a different path.

One day Dad found Myrtle down at the bottom of our swimming pool. You see, there are big differences between turtles and tortoises, and one of them is the fact that tortoises are not creatures of the water. They sink like rocks. My dad pulled poor Myrtle out and his legs and head hung limp and dangling from his shell. He held the tortoise head-down, and water came streaming out the poor thing's nose and mouth. Frowning, he shook the tortoise, encouraging the water to drain. My mom was crying and telling him to stop, because Myrtle was obviously dead. But Dad stubbornly kept it up, flinging the poor animal until the water stopped coming out, and then he put it down on the lawn in the sun. "It's a reptile," he said. "You never know."

Sure enough, an hour or so later Myrtle was plodding along, a bit slower than usual but very much alive. Within a few days he was as good as new, making his slow 4-hour circuit around the yard twice a day, and eating his little balls of hamburger and chomping down the green lettuce leaves.

That fall he disappeared, having burrowed in the garden to hibernate. We never saw him again, and I can only assume that the next spring he emerged on the other side of the fence. I hope so. I hope he's still alive – which is possible, because they can live a long, long time – and I like to think that he's a great grandfather by now, plodding leisurely through the desert, avoiding the deadly roads and living it up in that hot Arizona sunlight.

The Lizard That Almost Killed a Kid

2008-05-15T11:11:00.002-05:00

I remember "spiny lizards" from my childhood as these huge scaly lizards as long as my arm that took two hands to hold. For young lizard hunters in that Tucson, neighborhood, these were the big game trophies. I caught one once, but don't remember the details. I just remember holding it squirming in my hands and being in awe of its size. The lizards I was used to holding were barely bigger than my hand. I was six, maybe seven years old at the time.

One nearly killed a kid. Not directly, but as a result of the kid trying to catch it. I don't remember the kid's name, so I'll just call him "Joe."

Spiny lizards are arboreal, which means they spend most of their time climbing up and down trees. In that neighborhood there were a lot of trees, but out in the desert itself there were mainly tall, green saguaros cactus and telephone poles. Yes, telephone poles. Spiny lizards seemed to be drawn to them for some reason, and when walking out in the desert and passing a telephone pole there was a good chance a spiny would race across the ground and go scuttling up one, keeping the pole between you and it.

I guess Joe saw an extra attractive specimen one summer afternoon on a telephone pole down the block, and determined to catch it he began scaling the pole itself. I remember looking down the street and seeing him climbing that pole, and knew instantly what he was after. He was holding tightly with arms and legs, slowly making his way straight up. The lizard, sensing pursuit, continued further toward the top. Joe was an older kid, and two of his friends were down on the ground yelling up encouragements. I hung back because one of the kids was a bully and I was afraid of him.

The spiny was panicking; you could tell by the way it kept going around the pole several feet above him. Its defense was to stay hidden on the opposite side of the pole from a predator, but this predator was on all sides of the pole and was slowly making its way up. The lizard knew it could only go so far, and knew it was trapped. It went to the top and couldn't go any further, and didn't seem to like being at the top either, because it kept coming back down and skittering to and fro around the pole. Joe, sensing victory, continued bravely upward despite him being a good 30 feet off the ground.

Remember, we were all just kids. We didn't know anything about electricity. I don't think anyone had bothered to tell us not to climb telephone poles, especially ones which were shared by power lines.

Joe was trying to get past some of the cables and he touched one, or touched something that was touching one. His whole body vibrated and he was slamming his face repeatedly – and rapidly – into the wood of the pole. I didn't know what was happening and remember thinking how funny it looked. Then mercifully he broke contact with the current and started sliding down the pole, his body rigid, in a kind of jerking fashion. About ten feet above the ground his arms and legs gave out and he dropped and landed flat on his back on the hard desert dirt.

Joe didn't get up. He was just lying there on his back. His friends dithered for a moment, and then one ran to get an adult. About ten minutes later there was a crowd of people and an ambulance came – the first one I'd ever seen – and they hustled him off to the hospital.

Joe lived. He didn't have any broken bones or anything. The lizard got away. Triggered by this event, my parents lectured me on the dangers of climbing telephone poles.

I was in my late 30's when I finally caught my second spiny lizard. It was out in Texas, and my older daughter and I were in a North Dallas park when I spotted one on a tree. It didn't move, convinced it was invisible because of its camouflage. I circled around to the other side of the tree, and had my daughter tell me how far it was from the ground. Then in a lightning move I reached blindly around the tree and grabbed. Got it first try.

They're not as big as I remember, of course, but they're a lot bigger than their little cousins (the common "blue-belly" or Western Fence Swift) which my kids were used to from California. It was a female, and very lively. We kept if for a day or so and then let it go.

Tiny Dinosaurs That Squirt Blood

2008-05-14T11:11:00.002-05:00

When I was about 5, Dad had closed his business dealings in Mexico and opened a new manufacturing plant in Tucson, Arizona, and we moved into a place way on the outskirts of town, so right across the street was open Sonora desert. In from this desert wandered all sorts of creatures that fascinated my younger self ... desert tortoises, tarantulas, huge black wasps with orange wings, lizards, snakes, and ... horny toads.

I think I was about six years old when I began catch the horny toads. Actually they're lizards, not toads, and I what attracted me to them is they look like miniature dinosaurs. Unlike regular lizards, these have a round pancake-like body, and out the back of their heads sprouts a crown of horns. Their scaly, thorny skin has a mottled white and brown coloration, which makes them blend in with desert soil, and they have a big, soft white belly that's speckled with tiny dots of black. All around the edge of their belly is a serrated row of soft little spikes, like a wiggly saw blade.

The most unusual thing about them is that they will squirt blood at you out of their eyes. This is absolutely true. You have to get them really upset before they'll do this. I remember the first time this happened, when I was catching a big one that was probably an alpha male. He struggled mightily in my little kid hands, and when he couldn't get loose (and I suppose he figured I was about to eat him) he folded his eyes back and ejected two jets of stinky red blood. It startled me and I dropped him, and he played dead for a minute or two while I wiped the blood off onto my pant legs. Then he blinked a few times to clear the blood away, and ran off. When I caught him again he did the same thing, but a lot less blood came out, and this time I didn't let him go.

Years later, in a junior high biology class, a teacher was telling the class that horny toads squirting blood from their eyes was a myth, and I raised my hand and told him that, no, it wasn't, that I'd seen it several times. He was skeptical even after I told him the story, and finally I had to show him a passage about it from the Peterson's Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians. I remember his only comment was, "I'll be damned."

I've always wanted to show my kids a real, live horny toad, but they're pretty much extinct now except in isolates spots, and by the time I have grandkids they'll probably have gone the way of their big cousins, the dinosaur.

Weightlessness

2008-05-11T11:11:00.001-05:00

My first experience with freefall was tumbling to the ground from that hospital bed. The next was from when I was four and my dad took me up for my first airplane ride.

I remember him showing me the neighborhood from the sky, wagging the wings to say hello to everyone below, then he took me on a tour of some big puffy white clouds. I didn't have a seatbelt on, and so wanting a better view I stood on the seat and crawled in the back, then ran back and forth from window to window. Everything looked so tiny. Everything looked like toys!

Little 4-year-old Jerry couldn’t get enough of that airplane.

Then Dad played a trick on me. He put the plane into what's now called a "vomit comet" dive, just enough to cancel out gravity inside the cockpit. The seat cushions fell away from my feet, and my butt bumped against the ceiling. "Look at you!" he said. "You're really flying now!" Panic didn't come immediately – I was in shock at being in midair, floating above the seats – then instinct kicked in and my little brain shouted "Danger! Danger! You're falling!"

When we went in for the landing, I looked out the front, over the nose and through the spinning blur of the propeller, and saw this tiny postage stamp thing that was the airport. No way, I remember thinking. That's not going to work. "Dad," I said, "we can't land there! It's too small!" Indeed, it looked like it could fit into our backyard.

Finally, on the ground, I felt queasy ... but I wanted to go up again. He laughed. "I'll make a pilot out of you yet," he said.

Several years later I was with him in one of his twin-engine planes, and we pulled the stunt on our long-haired Chihuahua, Taffy. She looked very confused as she floated up out of my lap, and her little legs went nuts, and she started spinning around. When she started crying I grabbed her. I felt bad but we were still laughing about it.

Another thing my Dad would do, is he would tell me to put my hands on the stick (which in most cases was a wheel) then he'd let go of his and say, "Okay! You're flying!" I'd tip the wings back and forth, do some shallow dives and climbs, and do a few lazy turns.

I never did get my license, but I do love to fly. Sure it's dangerous. But I'll tell you something ... you know why pilots become pilots?

Because it's so damn fun!

Double Scorpio

2008-05-09T11:11:00.000-05:00

Dad told me I was conceived on a cold February night in the mountains in Mexico, in a log cabin where the bathroom was outside in a tree. Not just a tree, but in a tree that overhung a ravine. You walked up wobbly wooden steps, entered the outhouse, flipped up the toilet lid and looked far down into a shadowy gorge full of wild pigs. My brother described more than once how much fun it made it going to the bathroom -- except for on cold windy nights, during which he would try to hold it until morning. I could imagine taking your life in your own hands just to go out there. I never saw the place, though, so I don't really know.

Always the entrepreneur, Dad built an entire city around his lumber mill, but you couldn't get there by car. You either had to land at the airstrip he'd built, or you had to pack everything in via burro. And that's how everything came in, one way or the other. I never thought to ask how he got the lumber out. I wonder if he ever got that far, because I came along and surprised them, and changed everyone's plans.

Mom had my brother Hank nearly 14 years before and try as they might, no other babies showed up (at least not alive, as I did hear stories about a still born brother). This far along in the game they'd given up on more children. So there they are in a remote mountain village, living in a log cabin with an outhouse in a tree, and suddenly Mom is getting morning sickness. She's nearly 40 and freaking out. We can't have a baby out here! This isn't going to work!

Dad bought a house on the American side of the border, in the sleepy little town of Douglas, Arizona, and moved the family unit in. I have pictures of the place, just a house among houses plopped down on the dusty desert soil, no picked fence, no lawn, nothing. Your basic temporary housing. This is in 1960, so in the pictures you can see all the cool old 60's furniture and fixtures. I recognize clocks and lamps that would go for a fortune on eBay.

They had a plan. Dad, being an American, could not actually own the land he occupied down in Mexico. But if their unexpected windfall child, me, came into the world on Mexican soil, I would be quite the resource. Graced with dual citizenship I could own land, cheap land, remote but valuable land covered by acre upon acre of prime lumber. No longer would Dad have to split the profits with the land owners.

I'd like to say this is how I, as a baby, became a multi-millionaire land mogul. The plan called for Mom to be rushed across the border to a hospital mere blocks from the house. But at the last minute, in the onset of labor, Mom vetoed the idea, opting instead for the nearby hospital on the States side.

At 5:20 A.M. on November 12^th, 1960, I was born at the Douglas Hospital, in Cochise County, Arizona. Dad was 40. Mom was 37. My brother was 13. I was zero.

Of course I don't remember that. I got it from my birth certificate. However, only a few months later, I made my first memory.

I remember an unfamiliar ceiling with unfamiliar shadows. Something felt different and wrong. I was not where Mom usually put me to sleep. I remember being unhappy and so I struggled to find my way back to where I knew I should be, and navigated a silver railing that, in retrospect, stood less than a foot tall, but to me it seemed huge and thick. Don't remember if I crawled over that bar or slipped between it, but I made it out and fell. A few moments of weightlessness and then I met a hard linoleum floor with a loud smack and a lot of stinging, and I lay there for a moment. Stunned, I suppose, staring at a large round thing as big as my head, which I now suppose was a wheel to a gurney. And then gathering all the power my little lungs could muster, I began to wail.

Lights came on. My mom screamed out my name in panic. Rushing huge feet. Me being picked up and held tightly.

That's all I remember.

I once shared this with Mom, who was amazed that I had such a vivid memory from so far back. She knew exactly when it happened. She and I were spending the night in the hospital because I had colic, and they'd put me on this hospital bed thinking there could be no way an infant could get over the railing.

Another memory from babyhood is due to repetition. At home, in my crib, I would wake up in the middle of the night and stare from between the bars at some strange object outside the window. It was oblong and looked like a flying saucer. It hovered there, night after night, the bottom half of it bright and glaring. I suppose it was a street light.

My next and final memory from babyhood is when I stepped on a scorpion. A toddler by this point, I walked barefoot across our garage at night toward Dad who was saying goodbye to visitors. All I remember is stepping on something lumpy. From there it skips to my parents holding me tight and Mom crying, and me crying, and they were holding my whole leg in a big bucket of ice water. My brother once told me that stepping on the scorpion wasn't an accident, that I had actually yelled out "Bug!" and ran over to deliberately stomp on it. According to him, my only reaction to the sting was to say, "Ouch!" It was Mom who, realizing it had been a scorpion, broke out in hysterical panic. My brother told me I didn't start crying until they jammed my foot into the ice water.

To this day I have a huge fear of spiders and especially scorpions.

Ironic because I am a Scorpio, with my moon in Scorpio. I'm like a double-whammy Scorpio. It's almost like it should mean something.