Cascade Jr. High was a big school. It was a much bigger school than I had ever attended. I took my 7th grade year in Santa Clara, Ca. We had lived in the Bay Area since I was 5. We moved in the summer and I started my 8th grade year in Eureka, Ca. It was not working out so the remainder of my 8th grade year I went to live in a suburb of Seattle, Washington with my father. I remember, my first or second day of school, being approached by three rather aggressive young men my age. Their sole desire in approaching me was to know if I wanted to fight. I ended up talking my way out of the fight. I was a big kid and made a large target for those who spoke with their hands. It was a unique form of sign language that I learned quickly. I joined the basketball team and the concert band thereby cementing the association I have always made between the physicality of music and the musicality of sports. It seemed at the time,however, that I was far too physical to fit into the band and far to musical to fit into the sporting world. The only thing left for me to do was fight. At this, I had no real experience. I remember one evening in particular. In the kitchen, after he had returned home from work, my father was giving me pointers. He was demonstrating how one could feign indifference to the would-be assailants and then turning on them in a brief but decisive maneuver. The object was to cause significant but not lethal injury to the area around the nose so as to render the opponent incapable of retaliation. My father´s wife and her son and I were seated at the kitchen table. He commanded our utmost attention. My father was 6 feet 6 inches and 250 lbs. He practically filled up the small kitchen by himself. My father was deeply intent on equipping me with the most up to date information in stealth techniques used at the eighth grade level. He used me as a substitute bad guy, to show me what I needed to do and how to act. He was so intense and scared me so I thought I was going to pee my pants. I was excited, I let it be known, to experiment with these new techniques at the next available opportunity.
My Pitts come into my life just around this time. One day, as fate would have it, I was running away from a group of young men. One of them had a bloody nose. I ran into the school office and the first man I saw I asked a simple but impassioned question. ” Can you help me, please”. He said he could and ushered me into his office. He was the head of the guidance councellors for the school. Mr. Pitts, it would turn out, would become a friend and help to me through a rough patch of life. Even when I learned that he called and talked, regularly, to my Father to inform him of my insecurities and progress, I knew that he had my back and that meant a lot to me at the time.
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