My academic and social education began in 1962, at Sunnydale Elementary School in Burien, WA. I quickly found that I was good at learning stuff, and that I was perhaps just a little bit smarter than most of the other kids. I was always in the most advanced reading and math groups, and I was relatively well-behaved in the classrooms, so the teachers tended to like me. I sucked up just a little bit -- for example I gave my 2nd grade teacher, Mrs. Paise, a giant sugar pine cone that I plucked from our Sugar pine tree in our backyard (rather than the proverbial apple!).

Sunnydale was an old school, built in 1904 and painted yellow when I attended there. I still remember all my teachers: Mrs. Vliegenthart, Mrs. Barr, Mrs. Paise, Miss Tatayama, Mrs. Gary, Mrs. Mitchell, and Mr. Fosnick. I was tall for my age so in the 5th and 6th grades they strongly suggested I play basketball on the school team, which I did. Starting in 3rd grade, I was handed a trombone which I played in the school band. For a couple of years I took piano lessons after school from a friend of my parents, whose name I can't remember -- but those came to an end when she moved away.

In the 6th grade I caught the fashion bug of the era and began to wear brightly colored striped or plaid bell bottoms to school, which prompted my teacher, Mr. Fosnick, to nickname me "Elvis." I recall it was in the 5th grade, that the girls were finally allowed to wear pants to school rather than just dresses. Starting in the 4th grade, we could wear our cub scout uniforms to class on the days we had cub scout meetings after school, and in 6th grade the school allowed us to wear our little league baseball caps in class during the spring. I played for the team sponsored by Crombie Chevron.

For most of my grade school days I was well-behaved and avoided trouble, but the only time I landed in the principals office was in the 6th grade, when I hung out during recesses with this kid named Nick for a couple of weeks -- he apparently had social issues and would bully other kids and I was with him once when he threw a football into some kid's crotch and we both got sent to the office. I don't know what happened to him, but my good record got me off with a warning to be careful about who I hung out with, and since I didn't think hitting a kid in the balls with a football was very cool, I didn't play with him after that.

I wasn't particularly street smart in grade school, in fact I was rather sheltered, although I did learn all about swear words in cub scouts from the other boys and learned how to properly flip people "the bird." Nevertheless, I quickly made up for my early naivete when I started attending Junior High.

I began 7th grade at Sunset Junior High in Burien in the fall of 1970. Right around that time my dad fell ill, and was eventually diagnosed with a brain tumor. They operated, but it was before the time of laser surgery, so the surgeons had to use an actual physical scalpel, and therefore they were not able to remove it all, so we knew he had only a short period of time to live. That, of course, had a powerful effect on my young brain. I tried to mask it at school, but it was difficult.

Because I did well throughout grade school, I had a relatively close relationship with my father. I read a lot, and my parents encouraged that. My dad was the only person in his family to graduate from a four year university (University of Colorado), and he was proud that I liked to read, so every week I would go with him to the Burien library and occasionally to the big library in downtown Seattle, where I would come out with an arm full of books on rocks and dinosaurs. I would also often go with him to used bookstores where he would buy me whatever books I wanted. So after his operation, his personality changed, and that bothered me so much that I began to avoid him, by focusing on school, on playing the trombone, on boy scout activities, and sports, especially baseball. But I knew that he was suffering and could have used my support and love, but I just couldn't deal with it, and that made me feel very, very guilty.

Sunset Junior High was a fairly new school, but it was an odd one. Shortly after it was built, the big Seattle airport, Sea-Tac, expanded and built a couple of new runways, and Sunset was right on the landing zone for the airplanes, so every 3 or 4 minutes the teachers had to pause in class to allow the noise from the planes to die down before continuing their lessons. We got used to it, but it was very strange. They eventually closed the school a few years after I left and built a new Sunset Junior High at a quieter location.

I continued to play the trombone in Junior High, and the band teacher invited me to join the jazz band, which was more prestigious than the normal band and a lot more fun. I made the transition from grade school to Junior High fairly easily, and did well in my classes; I took Spanish, and I recall reading "cool" stuff in my English class such as like Bob Dylan poetry and writings from the Beat generation.

It was during this period that I learned about masturbation -- some dude was telling me about it and I was skeptical, but I had to try it out and I became a believer! (We, of course, didn't have the Internet, so it was much more difficult to figure that sort of stuff out). I was also exposed to Playboy magazines during 7th grade, and tried my hand at shoplifting, and smoking. It was simple getting cigarettes, for 50 cents I could get a pack of whatever from the cigarette machines in the lobbies of any apartment complex, and no one cared. Camels were my favorite, but I tried them all. I also tried cigars and rolling my own cigarettes from tobacco I would steal from small markets.

This year I also got into BB guns and I had a mini bike that I would ride all over the place. I had a bit of money for mini bike gas and other expenses like cigarettes because I had a paper route. I had a nice little collection of porn magazines because I would steal them from the stores. When Spring came, I played baseball, I was old enough for Pony League, and played for the Boulevard Park Apts. Giants.

When Summer came, my dad was worse, so I was left with a friend's family and my mother took him to Idaho to see his parents one more time and he died there in Nampa Idaho and was buried there. When the baseball season ended, I really went off the deep end. I thought "Fuck god, fuck everybody, if the Universe doesn't think I need a father, then obviously I don't and I'm going to do what I want. I started drinking beer and wine, and I acquired a "lid" of Marijuana from my friend's hippie sister. I had wanted to try it for a while, I figured that maybe I could ask god myself what the hell he thought he was doing. I started hanging out with little hippie girls and I would sneak out my bedroom window late at night to be with them.

Eighth grade started and I was still at Sunset Junior High for a couple of months, but my mother sold our house and we packed up and moved to Mesa, Arizona because she thought that Mesa would be a better environment for my brothers and me. I continued 8th grade at Kino Junior High.

Moving to Arizona was a cultural shock. Things were so different between the Northwest and Arizona. For example, in Seattle wearing cowboy boots was cool among the hippies, so the first day at Kino Junior High I wore my cowboy boots, and that caused quite a stir. Everyone kept asking me "are you a stony?" "Are you a stony?" and I would keep saying "what the fuck is a stony?" It was so stressful for my first day that I had to go out and get a different pair of shoes just to shut everyone up. I later learned that a stony was a fake cowboy -- someone who would wear a big hat, have a big belt buckle, cowboy boots and chew tobacco -- like a "drugstore cowboy." They were not considered cool.

In Mesa, I hated the palm trees, the cactuses, the way people talked, their slang, the weather, how everything was brown and dirty. It took a while to make any friends, so I sat around at home by myself and listened to the few records I had. I would walk down to the school yard and shoot baskets by myself, and for the first and only time in my life, I listened to basketball games on the radio every night -- the Phoenix Suns -- because it made me feel less alone. I didn't do drugs, not because I didn't want to do them, but because I didn't know where to find them -- they were not common yet at the Junior High level. After a few months of loneliness, I finally had found a friend, an outcast named Steve. His father was the Commissioner of the Scotsdale School District and they lived in a big fancy house with a swimming pool. His mother was a major bitch. He had been adopted, but shortly thereafter she miraculously got pregnant, so when the that child was born, he was showered with love and praise and gifts and my friend was totally ignored and neglected. A horribly dysfunctional situation. So I hung out with him and made him feel a little better.

For Christmas that year I was given a record player and an electric guitar. Both were very inexpensive because my mother didn't have any money. Without my dad she had to try her hand at working, which she had never done before, so she sold Tupperware, sold Avon, then got into babysitting. My grandmother bought her the house we lived in, and bought her a truck with a camper shell to carry around all of her boys, and she had a little of my dad's life insurance money left, so we at least didn't have to worry about losing the house or anything like that.

My record player was cheap, but it was a stereo and worked well enough. My new guitar was a Teisco from K-Mart and it came with a cheap little 10 watt amp. So I began learning how to play. I put some decent strings on it, worked on the action and it wasn't too bad.