by Matt Mcmillan

Created on: July 31, 2009   Last Updated: August 01, 2009

And here I thought all along that we were normal kids living a normal childhood in a normal town. I mean it wasn't abnormal. Abnormal is a goiter growing out of your Uncle Horace's neck, or the fact that your great-Aunt Petunia wore a wig, or that your grandma used to pop out her dentures at you. Abnormal was Clifford the stuttering boy and the guy who used to ride his touring bike down Embarcadero Road, no handed, his arms outstretched, a grin splashed across his face, basking in the applause of an audience only he could hear. Now that was abnormal.

Us? Well, didn't every boy between the ages of seven and fifteen enjoy throwing rocks at each other? Or throwing eggs from the pedestrian/bike bridge on to the freeway? Normal boys loved setting fires and shooting bottle rockets at each other. To us, a normal day wasn't normal if it didn't include some degree of violence. That violence was usually directed at each other.

Allow me to first introduce the players here.

At first it was just the two of us, both from the neighborhood. The neighborhood consisted of one street two blocks long. That's where I grew up. Amarillo Ave. Greer Park was three houses away from mine. Next to Greer Park was the abandoned Palo Alto Drive-In Movie Theater. I was the oldest of three. In these early years it was just two, me and my brother Dan, but Gabe came along when I was eight and that just added further confusion and drama. My mom and dad were there, too, of course, to feed us, clothe us, yell at us, and discipline us for our average stupidity and evilness and meanness.

I was pretty average looking. Dark brown hair, blue eyes, dimples. I could look innocent and angelic at one time, and like a slobbering lunatic at others. It all depended on my motivation.

Greer road crossed Amarillo Ave., and if you rode your BMX bike down Amarillo, as I often did, turned left on Greer, and rode past Metro Circle on your left, past Van Auken Circle on your right, you'd come to Moffett Circle on your left. Now these circles weren't cul-de-sacs. They were, well, streets that were a circle with houses on the left and houses on the right. Tom lived on Moffett Circle.

Tom had this shock of sandy-blonde hair that would stick up here and there in the back whenever he had just had a haircut. He had freckles on his nose and big buck teeth. This wasn't just your everyday overbite. These were some serious buck teeth. They stuck out so far that some kids called Tom "Bucky

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