Dad was an accountant for Borden's Milk Company. He got transferred to San Jose. The timing seemed perfect. I had just finished elementary school and I would get a fresh start in a new town. I’m sure that’s how Dad would have presented it to me. I can’t recall that it made any difference to me. I do remember that on one house-hunting trip, we stopped at a shopping mall for a break. They had a small selection of carnival rides in the parking lot. I fancied going on the whachamacallit: two bullet-shaped pods on either end of an I-beam. So, there I was going round and round all by myself, being spun in every direction, thinking after about 30 seconds that I’d had enough. But, as I was the only paying customer, the guy gave me an extra long ride. Man, I hated that.

Our new home in San Jose was exactly like our old home in Pleasant Hill: it was once again in a brand new, grid-layout, residential development, so we were the first occupants of the house. There were schools within walking distance, a shopping centre and a rudimentary park. But this time, we had sidewalks, the streets were wider and the telephone poles were at the back of the houses, so everything seemed bigger, more tidy. The modest landscaping and sycamore saplings put in by the contractors would take a long time to mature, but it was a pretty nice place. On a clear day in the winter, you could see snow on the Mount Hamilton range to the East. The best part was that I had my own bedroom for the first time since I was four. We liked the new house. Everything was new, and we were having a fresh start. Every time I moved to a new town after this, I would feel the same way: time for a fresh start. Clean slate. A chance to rectify past mistakes. Trouble is, history has a tendency to repeat itself.

Shortly after moving to San Jose, Dad took Susan and I to see where he worked. All I remember is that they were having a taste test at the time. Susan and I got to taste three different brands of ice cream and say which one we liked best: A, B or C. What a great place to work!

Borden's had a whole family of cartoon cows to market their products. Elmer and Elsie were the dad and mom, Beauregard and Beulah were the kids. We each had a coffee mug at home: Elmer for Dad, Elsie for Mom, Beauregard for me, Beulah for Susan. Dad later got a job at Stanford University, managing the budget of the Anaesthesiology Lab. It was a much better job and he had it until he retired, but I always had a soft spot for Borden's.

Finally, even Borden's got out of the milk business and all they made was Elmer's Glue-all. Their ice cream was a lot better.

It was a bit of a shock going to a new school where I knew absolutely no one, rather than moving up to a new school with the rest of my class. The fact that I had no friends, plus the fact that I was now the youngest in the school, made the transition much more intimidating. As it turned out, I really only had to deal with one problem.

San Jose was spreading south into the Almaden Valley. It was mostly orchards and farmland. Landowners were selling parcels of land to property developers and getting rich. Our neighbourhood bordered onto orchards of fruit and nut trees. Many of the farmers and most of the farm workers were Mexican.

Four older Mexican boys caught the bus to school at my bus stop. Except, they made it immediately clear that I was catching the bus at their stop. They also made it perfectly clear that I could expect trouble if I was to continue to wait for the bus at their stop.

There was no point complaining to my Dad. He was at work by then, and I certainly wasn't going to have my mother escort me to the bus stop. I mean, I was twelve! So, I did what I had to do: if I was out of the house early, I'd walk to school through the orchard, taking the opportunity to feed on whatever was growing at the time, or I'd walk an extra seven or eight minutes to the next stop. It was a different route, too, so I didn't even have to see those Mexican boys.

By the time I got to senior high school, they must have moved away. Or, one of them got to be old enough to drive and they all went to school in his car.

It wasn't long before I began to make friends in the neighbourhood. Ken was my first, and best, friend. Ken was one of the most industrious and driven people I ever knew. Before he could drive, he had absolutely the coolest bicycle ever. It had a smaller frame size than my standard Schwinn, but he had it all tricked out: custom paint job, high-riser handlebars (ape-hangers), a banana seat, extended forks ... clipping playing cards onto the forks with clothes pins so that the spokes would make an "engine noise" was merely a passing phase. He could pop the longest "wheelies" and spin the best "brodies".

Even before he had a driving license, he bought a non-running MG Midget to fix up, but only because he couldn't afford the car of his dreams - an MGB. I can't really remember him driving it, though. It was always up on blocks in his parents' garage while he rebuilt the engine, or did a brake job or a million other modifications. Even when he did take it out, he brought it right back to make it better.

He idolised his older brother and, following in his footsteps, became the Senior Class President and the starting quarterback of the Pioneer High School Junior Varsity football team (only because he was too small to play Varsity). He dated the most popular cheerleader. He studied trigonometry, physics and German ... and was disappointed if he didn't get straight A's.

He was accepted to The University of California at Berkeley as an honours student. I think he was studying law. I met up with him one last time for a game of tennis at his campus. Naturally, he blew me off the court. He had to ease up on his service so we could have a brief rally. I met his new girlfriend that day. Ken went for drinks and, while we were alone, she complained to me that Ken seemed unable to commit to a relationship. I said, yeah, he'd just dumped a girlfriend of six years when she asked if they were ever going to get married.

Ken died two years later of leukemia, age 25.

Norman the Nerd. I liked Norman. He was a science buff. He would take a length of electrical cord and split the end of it up about 12 inches. Then, he'd strip the insulation off the two separate ends. Then he'd plug the other end into a wall socket. Then, he'd place the two bared ends of the cord about 12 inches apart at the end of a dampened bed of paper towels. Then, we would start touching the paper towel about 16 inches away from the "electified" end of the towel. Gradually, we would move our index finger closer and closer to the "electrodes". What started out as a barely noticable tingle, would be come an uncontrolable spasmodic convulsion of the arm. Cool. We'd have a competition to see who could get the closest, and Norman always won.

Norman was also an ace hunter/killer. Almaden Creek was a fifteen minute walk away. It was quite full during the winter, but in the summer the flow would cease and it would just be damp, or have small pools left behind. It was a great place to go bug collecting. On one occasion, Norman, Ken and I went to see what we could find. They were a bit miffed when I showed up with my sister in tow, but Mom made me. I said, "It's okay, she's a tomboy." And, she was. Susan was not the least bit squeamish about bugs and kept up, no problem.

We heard you could find scorpions down at the creek, but we never did. However, on this day we made a terrific find. We caught a tarantula and an alligator lizard. We brought them home to Ken's house, put them in big Mason jars and sat in the shade to study them. Norman would let the alligator lizard bite him on the finger, but we all left the tarantula well alone. We decided that we'd better go back to the creek and collect bugs for them to eat, if we were going to keep them as pets.

By the time we had returned with our bugs, the sun had moved around the side of the house and baked our new pets. I expect Norman took more notice of planetary movements after that. In fact, he's probably with NASA now.

I read once that you are likely to have the most friends when you are 12-15, plenty of friends during high school, fewer friends during your college years and, by the time you reach adulthood, you're lucky to have any friends at all. The exception to this rule is my parents, who seem to have as many friends now as they ever did - because they're good fun and they make the effort to stay in touch. Sadly, their friends are starting to die off. Nothing you can do about that.

I ran with quite a sizable pack when I was in junior high, although I'd have trouble naming them now. And, we could be a pack in the worst sense of the word.

Susan Deschamplain stood over six feet tall. She had the biggest nose I have ever seen. Usually, when you are unfortunate in one area, there are compensations in others. Susan got a really bad deal of the cards. The kids used to torment her something fierce. It was like "cooties" were invented for Susan. She would ignore our taunts for as long as she could, then give chase through the corridors of the school, legs and arms akimbo. Think: Olive Oyl, only ugly. Where were the teachers, I wonder. Certainly, the squealing must have attracted their attention. If there will be a judgement day, Susan must certainly be a black mark in my book. Susan, I'm sorry. I hope life was more kind to you than kids.

I favoured the fiction section of the school library. I loved to read the books of Jack London. White Fang was a favourite. But the best book I read then was called Hot Rod, by Henry Gregor Felsen. This was a story of young love and cars. The hero was a really nice kid, tormented by bullies. But, he had a girl who loved him. In the denoument, the hero and his girlfriend, having just become lovers and won the first prize in the car show, are racing the bullies back to town. The hero's car is now fastest by a mile and they are in heaven. As they cross a bridge at speed, they hit a pothole, the car is flung out of control, they crash through the bridge railings and plunge into the cold, dark river below. They are killed.

Okay, okay. There is a moral here, I understand that. Speed kills. It always needled me that Mr Felsen couldn't let that kid live and be happy. In fact, it maddens me even now. What that book said to me was, why bother? I'll bet Mr Felsen was one mean son-of-a-bitch.

I can't remember many of the teachers I had back then, but Mr Lawson springs to mind. He was the music teacher and band leader. I had a semester in the band, when I learned to play the flute. Now, the flute would not necessarily have been my first choice. Dad played the drums in school and Mom played the clarinet. I fancied a trumpet or trombone, but only flutes were left. So, I played the flute. At least it was easy to carry home, even if it was a bit sissy.

Mr Lawson was a pretty good sport and had a decent sense of humour. But, he was famous for his temper. He would get angry with a pupil in the back, for whatever reason, and fling his needle-sharp, cork-handled music baton at the culprit - usually, Bill Taylor on tuba. Fortunately for Bill, and Mr Lawson, he always got hit with the cork end.

The high point of band practice was knocking Erica Johnson off the first chair. She had been playing the flute for a while and was not very pleased that I had demoted her to second chair. She made sure to win the chair back at the next opportunity and never let me have another look in. I liked Erica, and she figured strongly in one of my great high school disappointments.

Bill Taylor and Michele Gallop were the first steady couple that I can remember. They were certainly a very high profile couple on campus. Bill was a handsome scamp. Michele was a very pretty, dark-haired Jewish girl. I remember she was Jewish, because she used to make such a fuss about the swastikas that Bill used to wear to school all the time. Bill was certainly not that popular with the teachers, more because he was a cut-up than because of his Nazi posturing. I remember he used to call everyone "Jew bastard" all the time.

I wasn't really sure what a Jew was. Heck, I didn't even know what a bastard was. In our school, there was a small percentage of Mexican kids, maybe slightly fewer Japanese kids and hardly any black kids at all. I couldn't tell that there was any difference between me and Jewish people. I went around with Nadine Rosenthal for a few weeks and was never aware that she was Jewish, except that Michele Gallop was her good friend.

I didn't know that Jewish people were different from the rest of us until I moved to New York.

I started to become sexually aware at the age of 12 or 13. I must have had my first wet dream about this time. Talk about an upside and a downside! Too bad you can't have these things when you're an adult and know what the heck is going on. Anyway, I digress.

A pack of us boys used to go up to Don's house, because both his parents worked. This was pretty unusual at the time. We would sit around and tell jokes for a while, then Don would get out the phone book and we'd make crank calls and fall about laughing. They were never nasty, more along the Bart Simpson variety, but nuisance calls nevertheless. I wonder what his parents' phone bills were like.

Masturbation was a new one on me. Don used to boast about how he could jerk off from one end of his bed and hit the bedpost at the other. We all laughed and fell about and called him a liar. He offered to prove it, but we all demurred. Frankly, I didn't have a clue what he was on about. I was better able to fathom a guy like Ron Wilhide, who used to light his farts. He could suck in air and expell it through pretty much any orifice. Once, in a fit of originality, he decided lighting farts through pants wasn't good enough. He dropped his trousers and everything else, fired up his Zippo lighter, and singed off all the hair around his asshole. Apparently, it was pretty painful.

I was surfing the Web the other day and ran across Classmates.com. There was Don Williams! I wonder if he is the same guy I used to know? He was the only one on the site to post a picture of himself. He's currently single, but been married five times! What the heck does he do, wear them out?

While I'm at it, what the heck am I doing?

One day, Dad made sure we were alone in the backyard and asked me if there was anything I needed to know about sex. I probably turned ten shades of red and said, "No." But, he perservered. "The best advice I can give you about sex," he said, "is keep it zipped."

Not bad advice, really.

Dad used to keep an issue or two of Playboy magazine in the headboard of his bed. Everytime Mom and Dad would go shopping, I would make a beeline for their bedroom, make a quick mental note of the general arrangement of things, hunker down by the side of the bed with his magazines and read every single last word - completely ignoring the pictures, of course. Those wonderful, full-colour photos of pneumatic young women with their airbrushed bush. What an amazing physical transformation overcame me simply from looking at one of those pictures! Fantastic. I can feel my heart racing even now...

But the thing that really held my attention was the letters to the editor, or the stories that detailed sexual activity. Now, this was a proper learning ground. Dad also had some adult paperbacks which were even better in that regard. No pictures, but what the heck. I learned all about the clitoris: where to find it, what it looked like and what to do with it when you did find it. I learned about the areola. (Actually, I typed this 'aureola' until I checked the spelling just now, which is a wonderful mistake.) I learned about the nape of the neck, the inside of thighs, ear lobes. It seemed like anything you touched would send women into spasms of ecstacy. I learned how to French kiss, in theory, and other places you could put your tongue. I learned about different positions, cunnilingus, fellatio, unexpected orifices. Heck, threesomes!

As Playboy only came once a month, my thirst for knowledge forced a more serious exploration of my Dad's bedroom. On the top shelf of his closet, he kept an old Army bag. Inside the bag, he kept war momentos (which were interesting in themselves) and also an Army-issue sex manual. I learned all about sexually transmitted disease, prophylactics (what were they?) and saltpeter. He had a civilian sex manual that told you how to make babies, complete with explicit diagrams. This was my first sight of a stiff penis that was not my own, even if it was a drawing. And there was no longer any doubt about what you were supposed to do with it.

But here's what I want to know: does every kid do this? I mean, I knew that I was doing something wrong by going through my parents stuff. I knew that if they caught me at it, there would be serious hell to pay. "How would you like it if we went through your things?" And, they'd be right. But, where does a kid find out about sex? This worked for me.

I sometimes wonder if there was a manual that I failed to find, entitled "How to Teach Your Kids About Sex Without Embarrassment", that detailed just where to leave literature lying around so they could find it.

Also, about this time, I discovered another use for a bar of soap in the shower. "Hey! Are you about finished in there?" "Just about!" I finally understood what Don Williams was talking about.

Access to my father's sex library, regardless of the circumstance, made me a bit of an expert on the subject among my peers. Any curious classmates with questions knew where to come for the answers and, for the most part, I did not disappoint.

I began to apply my artistic talents to the graphic depiction of the sex act, fleshing out the diagrams I had seen in Dad's manuals and using a bit of imagination. Specifically, I can remember doing this in Mr Tobenkin's geometry class. As he was driving home the practicalities of the hypotenuse, I was busy exploring the intricacies of the threesome in my notebook.

Having been taught the value of a dollar, I began charging curious classmates to have a quick peek at my notebook after class - and sometimes, if they were very persistent or bigger than me, even during class. There was a begrudging admiration of my drawing ability. Some kids even paid for two peeks. But, after a while the thrill was gone.

Or, it was cheaper to steal Playboy.

Mom and Dad were blessed with a little surprise package about six years after they quit trying for a third child. My brother is eleven years younger than I. He slept in our parents' bedroom until he began sleeping through the night, and then he was moved into my room. "Sorry, Jerry, but it makes more sense to have the two boys together in the same room." I might have been disappointed at the time, but I never really minded. I thought it was probably nice for Steve to have someone in the room with him when he woke up. He used to stand up in his crib and wait patiently for me to wake and offer to lift him out. "Mom! Steve needs changing!"

What I was jealous about was that Steve got all the best toys. By the time he came along, Dad was pretty well established and had his financial plan buttoned up. Steve had more toys than you could shake a stick at, but they were all too small for me to play with. Fortunately, I enjoyed playing with Steve. He had a horse on castor wheels that he could really scoot on, giving the horse a little twist at the last moment so that he spun around and crashed into the walls backwards.

He later excelled at motocross, but suffered the same problem I always had: lack of funds.

When I was thirteen, Dad's brother and his partner (as I can now call him - at the time, I called him Uncle Bill) took me away from home for the first time since my week at summer camp. We went on a month-long tour of Mexico. In retrospect, from their perspective and mine, I was probably too young to make such a long trip, and it was not as pleasant an experience as it should have been. However, a few moments really did stay with me.

First, let me say that Uncle Jerry deserves a whole book of his own. And he deserved better behaviour from me on this trip, but we've both gotten over it. Anyway, before we got to Mexico we stopped at a motel for the night in Flagstaff, Arizona. Bill and Jerry, both Kennedy supporters, were indoors watching the Democratic national convention coverage on television. I was outside by the swimming pool watching the bats catching bugs attracted to the lights. I marvelled at the bats. I threw up pebbles into the air and they would silently swoop to the pebble and flit away at the last moment when they realised it was not edible. I remember they were big bats.

We crossed the border at Nogales. The border guards were just like their stereotypes on TV, ours flashed a big grin and showed us his gold teeth. Shiny black hair, brown skin, tan uniform, gold teeth. Excellent. Bill spoke very good Spanish and we sailed through. I was impressed. I'd never heard a foreign language before, but Bill was a professor at UC Berkeley and taught linguistics. I made up my mind to stick pretty close to Bill's side on this trip, as Jerry didn't speak Spanish.

We stopped for a Coke around Hermosillo. It was hot, and once we left Nogales everything started looking pretty desolate. I saw families living in abandoned railway cars. Everything looked run down. I wasn't in Kansas anymore. Some Mexican kids sold firecrackers to Bill, who then told them to go across the road and set them off. The firecrackers were made of bamboo, five inches long and loud as heck. They would set off a whole string at once, or shove them down the necks of Coke bottles for added effect. The kids thought Bill was okay for a gringo.

Bill and Jerry were on a cultural trip. They were visiting the famous sites of the Aztec ruins and collecting collectibles. I was getting my eyes filled with sights I'd never seen, and not sure how much more I wanted to see. About two weeks into the trip, we reached Mexico City. We went into Sanborn's, an American cafeteria, and without hesitation I ordered a burger, fries and milkshake to get the taste of refried beans out of my mouth. Bill and Jerry were disgusted, but later confessed that my burger looked pretty damn good.

Without a doubt, the high point of my trip was San Blas. You would not go to this town unless you had a purpose. It was down a rough road that ended at the beach. Bill knew the owner of the hotel in the centre of town. The hotel was a two-storey affair with a central courtyard. We were in the jungle now, and the courtyard was full of palms, banana plants, exotic flowers and a couple of house parrots that had the run of the place. Bill said the owner was a remittance man, and I wondered what one had to do to get paid to stay away from home.

Bill gave some of the local kids that the hotelier knew enough money to take care of me for the day and I went and had my adventure. I have got a website page open as I type, about San Blas: "Once a filthy little town, filled with stagnate water, garbage and starving dogs in the streets, the citizens have taken an immense pride in civic improvements to make San Blas a more pleasant place to visit and to live." In other words, they've ruined it.

The fences, such as they were, were stone walls with huge iguanas atop them, basking in the sun. There were pigs in the street, rooting around for grub, cleaning up after the humans. There were butterflies the size of my hands dancing in the sunlight. This was paradise. The kids took me through the market square on the way to the cinema. I saw sides of beef hung up, black with flies. I smelled food like I had never smelled it at the supermarket back home. I saw "The Fly" with the Mexican boys, in English with Spanish subtitles. It was the only English I heard all day.

San Blas was also the beginning of the low point of my trip. I'm sure it was the shaved ice "sno-cone" the boys bought for me that caused my dysentery. Bill and Jerry carried a pharmacy with them for such an emergency but, while it kept me from embarrassing myself, I still felt crap for five or six days. They would pull up to some ancient Aztec ruin and I would hunker down in the back seat of the car with a comic book. How many times, I wonder, did they wished they'd not brought me along?

I was feeling better by the time we reached Oaxaca. Compared to San Blas, Oaxaca was an urban paradise. The townsfolk all wore traditional dress. I don't know if there was a festival going on, but the clothes they wore were wonderful. Colourful serapes and oddly shaped hats, not sombreros. The local speciality was a pottery that turned a shiny black when fired, and Bill and Jerry collected a lot of that, both vessels and figurines. Bill bought me a potato-shaped whistle with holes to finger for notes. My flute practice proved useful, finally. There were loads of tapestries, all done in distinctive geometric patterns in black and a wheat colour.

We stayed in a pension, with the evening meal included in the price. One evening as we finished our meal, the woman who had done the cooking came out to see how we enjoyed it. She placed a bowl of vanilla ice cream in front of me, then stood behind me with her hands on my shoulders, I'm sure telling Bill and Jerry what a fine boy I was. I couldn't wait. I took a huge mouthful of ice cream. Have you ever seen "Big", when Tom Hanks takes a huge bite of caviar? Well this was not ice cream, but some sort of soft goat's cheese. I thought I was gonna die before the woman left the table and I could finally spit it out.

Food was once again a source of merriment when Bill ordered camiones, instead of camarones. He'd ordered trucks, instead of shrimps. The waiter couldn't stop laughing.

I've seen photographs that prove that I actually did climb some of the monuments left behind by the Aztecs, but I don't remember much of that. What I do remember is this trip impressed me with the fact that there is a different world out there, outside the borders of America. When I got to high school and took two semesters of Spanish, I really paid attention.

The night we returned to San Jose, Bill and Jerry smudged my face with a blackened cork, put me in a serape and sombrero and sent me to the front door alone. Mom burst into tears to see me and I probably did too. I was never so glad to be home.

Jerry lived in Berkeley with Bill Shipley. It was always fun to go visit them, because they simply lived differently than anyone else I knew. I thought it was a bachelor bohemian-type of living arrangement. I didn't realise at the time that they were a couple. Their home was full of interesting things. In fact, there was probably not one single ordinary thing in that house. Even the toilet paper holder had a brass cover. Each item had a story and usually came from some exotic location.

I once went up to stay with them for a week. During the day, I helped Jerry nail cedar shingles to the side of his house. He lived next door to a whole house full of girls. Their father was the hairiest man I ever saw and his wife had borne him seven daughters. They were all too old or too young for me, but I used to like to hang around anyway. George was bald to the tops of his ears, then he had the thickest, darkest covering of hair - more like a bear than a man. He said he had to shave twice a day. When he wore a shirt and tie, the hair stood out in tufts at his collar and cuffs. His shirt looked like a lumpy cushion, even though he was a fit man. He liked me coming over in case I wanted to take one of his daughters off his hands. I liked George, too. What a happy guy!

Jerry was/is a painter. He was listed in Who's Who in America for several years and ran with a pretty arty crowd. He had sold paintings to Vincent Price, Eve Arden, Stanley Holloway and Peggy Guggenheim. On this visit, he invited me to sit in with the rest of his house guests and take a role in the reading of King Lear. This was a bit different than any party I had ever been to, before or since.

Jerry proved to be a major influence in my life, I would say as much as my father. Dad taught me the ground rules for a decent life - I've never known a more honest, or more cautious, man - Jerry gave me a spirit of adventure. Two more different men would be hard to imagine, yet they are brothers, born only two years apart.

One of Dad's uncles had drawn out a pretty thorough family tree on this big long roll of butcher paper. It was probably about 20 feet long when you rolled it all out, and yet he had not been able to trace the Davis family out of the country. Dad's great grandfather Mayberry Davis had been a judge in the Gold Rush era of Northern California and could be traced back to Illinois, but no further.

Mom's side of the family was much easier to trace. They were Italian from Cadarese, Domodosola. Giovanni blazed a trail to America, got a job as a lumberjack in Washington and made enough money to buy a farm in Napa and send back to Cadarese for his wife, Teresa. They raised seven kids, my mother being the baby.

Susan and I used to love to visit the farm in Napa. As my Uncle's house was a wonderfully different place, so was the farm. Giovanni (John) was by this time a gravedigger at the local cemetary. He would always stroke us and give us a silver dollar when we came to visit, but as neither he nor Teresa spoke much English, we never got much of a feel for what they were like.

The farm had a vegetable garden, a chicken coop and some pasture for the few cows they milked. We use to follow Nona, as we called Teresa, out to the chicken coop and watch as she flared her apron out and cornered an unlucky chicken, grabbed it by the legs, carried it to the tree stump and lopped its head off with a hatchet. She'd hang it to bleed out and we'd go into the coop to gather eggs. I'll never forget the sensation of picking out my first egg from a hen's nest. Every other egg I'd ever handled had been cold out of the refrigerator and this one was warm. The hollow, translucent eggs were a mystery until it was explained that they were put in the nests to encourage laying. The chicken would reappear in a casserole later.

(to be continued)