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Dad sent me into the kitchen to get him a cup of coffee. He would have done it himself, however he had my sister Deirdre sitting in his lap.

As I returned with the hot liquid, Dad twisted in his swivel easy-chair and the back of the seat struck the cup, knocking it out of my hand. The cup flipped over and it landed in Deirdre’s lap.

She screamed from the pain of the hot coffee. Furthermore, she was wearing tights and the coffee was trapped against her skin.

Within seconds, Dad had her tights stripped from her legs. But by that time the damage was already done.

He rushed Deirdre to the bathroom and placed her in the shower, where he turned on the water to cool off her blistered legs. Shortly thereafter, Dad and Mom decided to rush her to Seaside Hospital in Crescent City for emergency treatment.

I locked myself in my closet and cried until I was so exhausted I fell asleep.

As a child I had a problem that plagues most kids, who are first learning to write. I was ambidextrous.

My first grade teacher, Mrs. Helen Puls thought it was a problem and she set out to find out which hand I was more prone to use. Her plan was simple, but very effective.

Mrs. Puls had me slide, like a baseball player, into the corner behind her desk. The leg I led with would ultimately decide which hand I would learn to use when it came to writing.

Today, I’m right-handed and at times I still like to put my left hand behind my back when I’m writing, exactly like Mrs. Puls instructed me to do.

I’m also a better writer than I am a ball-player.

Over the years I’ve been called by a number of nicknames: Tommy, Little Tee, T.J., etc. Two of the worst involved being tongue-tied and the other was about a television show called “Kung Fu.”

But it can all be traced back to one singular event.

It was the day I introduced myself to my next-door neighbor, a blond hair and blue-eyed girl, named Goldie Arnold. We were the same age and became immediate friends since we shared the same duplex near the end of Sander’s Court.

Unfortunately I was horrified when I discovered she was introducing me as Tommy Garbage.

Adam and I were playing in the woods around a cluster of Redwood trees, we had named, “Darby’s Castle.” It was play off the old song, our last name and the fact that the trees created a natural fort, if you knew how to get inside.

It was situated on the right side of the old logging road that lead deep into the National Park’s “Experimental Forest.” While that’s what the sign read at the park’s entrance, we had no idea what it meant.

Anyway one late Sunday afternoon, the two of us were exploring the area, when I fell through a hole near a large fallen tree. I grabbed the end of a tree branch in order to keep from falling all the way to the bottom.

As I screamed for Adam to come help me, my mind raced and pictured all sorts of horrible things that could be waiting for me if I couldn’t hold on. It could have been a bear den or held some other wild animal or have pointed sticks to fall on or worse, be bottomless.

Adam struggled to pull me out. But I was too heavy for him to lift.

So he ran all the way home to get help. It felt like forever, but soon Dad rumbled up in his old Studebaker truck, to rescue me.

He yanked me out of the hole and made sure I was okay. Then he grabbed the large flashlight he normally wore with his service uniform and peered down the hole.

He looked up at me in disgust. He also complained about being pulled away from the last couple minutes of a football game he was watching.

I figured I was in deep trouble. But then he laughed, letting me off the hook.

Looking down the hole, I could see it ended about half a foot from where my feet had been dangling.

Perhaps it was to help curb the cost of heating or maybe Mom had been visited by aliens, either way she decided one afternoon to wallpaper our bathroom in aluminum foil. Yeah, I know — weird.

She didn’t take very much time in planning it out. She jus’ gathered together supplies on hand like some old contact cement used months before to put up paneling in the living room and hallway.

She also grabbed the several rolls of Alcoa aluminum foil she had stored under the sink. Alcoa Aluminum’s advertisement tagline was: Alcoa can’t wait.

By the end of the day, Mom had a real mess going. She had put up the foil and tried to flatten it out; however it tended to tear, leaving the wall behind it covered in the yellowish-brown glue.

It would take her three days to peal and reapply the aluminum foil to the wall. By that time she had discovered what she would later call her “technique.”

Once she was done, she proudly called everyone into the cramped little space to show-off her work. I’m sure we lauded her for her creative redecoration of our home’s only bathroom.

As she worked on this bathroom project the one comment that kept coming back to her time and again, and first uttered by my youngest sister

Marcy was: “Uh, Mom—-Alcoa can’t wait!”

It was potty-time.

As difficult as it is to admit…bad things of no fault of our own sometimes happened to us kids as we were growing up. One of those bad things was having been raped by a mentally ill man as I was delivering newspapers.

I will not name the family of this man, as I don’t want anyone to think I feel vindictiveness towards them.

What happened was beyond their control and how they dealt with it afterward came to be a point of grace in my life. It started one late afternoon when I missed the front porch of a residence.

I stepped into the brushes to retrieve the newspaper and was attacked, and forcefully raped from behind.

When I woke up, it was very late in the day and I realized I’d be in trouble if I didn’t hurry and complete my route. I pulled up my pants, jumped on my bicycle and rode for all I could to get the job done.

That night I decided to take a shower, something I normally did in the morning prior to school. I was a bloody mess in my skivvies and ended up using one of Mom’s sanitary napkins to stem the flow of blood.

Two days later, I was still bleeding and I needed to tell someone what had happened. As scared as I was of his reaction, I told Dad, fearful that what happened would be the gossip of Klamath.

He did neither. Instead he took me up to the base infirmary and had me checked out.

He kept the entire situation quiet. Furthermore, Dad quietly went to the family of the man and told them what had happened.

The family took immediate action and had their son placed in a mental health facility in Napa.

And while my physical injuries healed, I had some emotional wounds that no-one could see. And looking back, I know this caused me to act out in some very weird and embarrassing ways.

Like I said, it was no ones fault and I hold nobody responsible. I jus’ wish I could have talked about it back then.

It was a conversation between Dad and Mom. They were angry at the fact that a neighborhood committee had given them a list of approved colors they could paint the house and that each color had a fee of some sort attached to it.

As I recall the main complaint was that this group had the audacity to tell my folks what color they could or couldn’t paint their home. Worse yet, it would cost them for selecting a color scheme from the chart they’d been given.

Then my parents found a loop-hole in the committee’s planning. There were two colors that weren’t regulated.

One was on the list, but considered so outlandish that it was believed no one would use it. The other was so common, it wasn’t given a price.

That’s how our home came to be painted white with black trim.

My guard was up as I had been ambushed once and locked in the display case along Del Norte High School’s Senior Hall. I didn’t want it to happen again.

However my vigilance didn’t pay off.

Without warning I was jumped and dragged out of the locker room where I had jus’ stripped down, preparing to take a shower. This time I found my eyes and mouth being covered with tape.

I could neither see who was doing this to me, nor could I yell for help.

Within seconds I was back out in the main hallway, but instead of taking me to the right, I was carried to the left. It occurred to me that I was about to get tossed in the girls locker room naked so I started to struggle for all I was worth.

Turns out I was wrong. It never occurred to me that I’d be hoisted off the ground and duct taped in place against the wall, leading out of the girls gymnasium.

I had tape covering my arms from my bicep to my wrist and my legs, thigh to ankle.

There were also several straps of tape across my stomach and even more holding my head in place. I was trussed up with no possible way of escaping.

The bell rang and I heard girls streaming passed me. Some gasped, some giggle, others touched and still others, I’m certain, though I couldn’t see them, averted their eyes.

As I hung there, I remember thinking that I felt like a bad piece of art, left unattended.

One person later told me that when she saw me, she thought I was some sort of screwed up representation of the Crucifixion. Great!

Before the next bell rang I was being cut from the wall. I was quickly covered and hustled into the boy’s locker room, where Mr. Dowling worked for nearly two classroom periods removing the tape from my body.

I recall screaming more than “Ouch!” and Mr. Dowling allowing me to get away with it.

Senior Hall of Del Norte High School ran from the main entrance to the doorways leading outside, jus’ pass the girl’s locker rooms and gymnasium. Midway down the hall and in between the entrances into the boy’s gym was a large glass trophy case, mounted to the wall. P.E. for me was my very first period.

I had jus’ entered the locker room when I was grabbed up by several “jocks,” stripped down to my bare essentials and carried out into Senior Hall.

Without fanfare I was shoved inside the glass display case and it was locked. Minutes later the bell rang and the hallway filled up with kids going from one class to another.

While I did my best to hide my face, several people stopped to look at me. Some laughed, some, mostly the girls, were completely horrified at the sight of me locked in the case.

Then the second bell rang and the hallway emptied out. It wasn’t too soon afterward when the schools assistant vice-principle Mr. Raleigh and our custodian, Mr. Cassidy came rushing down the corridor with keys to the case.

The words “humiliation,” and “humility,” are so close in nature.

It would be three weeks before my cousin Billy would arrive from Washington State. He had already told me that he planned to out-fish me while he was visiting.

To keep that from happening, I decided to rig our fishing spot. Everyday until he arrived I took a can of corn with me to the old saw mill-pond and generously sprinkled handfuls of the yellow kernels into the brackish water.

Billy could hardly wait to get to the pond edge the day he arrived. We packed our bag lunches, dug up a few worms and hurried to our spot on the west side of the lagoon.

When we got there, I told him I wanted to try something a little different that I had heard worked. Instead of putting a worm on my hook, I balled up a tiny piece of Velveeta cheese, pushing it onto my hook.

“Worms have always worked for me, so I’ll stick with them.”

Within minutes I had a trout on the line. Billy was amazed, but he called it dumb-luck as he was six years old than me and felt he had the better fishing skills.

This continued for the next few hours and I eventually ended up with 12 trout in my basket. Billy had a total of three.

Billy mumbled all the way home. He was mad that he’d been out fished.

He was so mad in fact that I didn’t have the guts to tell him that I had “seeded” the old mill-pond. I knew that he’d hold me down and give me “purple-nerples” until I begged “uncle.”

The price of cunning in this case was silence.