chapter one

“Oh shit, I’m late!” I have said this to myself and aloud a hundred times before. My folks had a standing rule that I was be home before the street lights come on, and once again I had failed. This time as with most of the others, wasn’t my fault.

I had been “out and about” with my incorrigible friends doing things best left undone. Of course we didn’t see it that way.

I should start by telling you who and what we were.  My name is Jim, not as wondrous as Ishmael in the Moby Dick novel but that too was not my fault. I was thirteen and like all thirteen year old boys was indestructible and knew everything. My friends were Bill, a sixteen year old Italian from the city, and Rick, another thirteen year old suburban from the upper middle class.

While me and Rick had been raised in the “lap of luxury’, Bill had been learned in the streets of San Francisco. Our folks had told us many times that we didn’t know how good we had it. Little did they know just how good we did have it. We would go out on our own with the help of “forbidden fruit” and found just how good life could be in suburbia.

Seems life in the northern suburbs of San Francisco, though boring to most folks our age, could be quite adventurous if you saw it in the right light, and that’s where Bill came in. Seems on the streets of San Francisco in the late sixties the world had found a new path, and Bill was our conduit to that new path and I shall always owe him for that. We would always be wandering the creek that ran through our town, jumping over the pools and throwing rocks at the turkeys that would roost in the trees. From time to time there would be a view into the windows of the folks who lived along the creek, giving us all something to fantasize about in later hours. Life was good. Sometimes life on the creek was, well, dull and we would venture off into other things more adventurous.

Our town had a population of around nine thousand and a police force of around fifty. Seems that those fifty were always fighting over who would get the use of our six prowl cars and this made the usually bored cops rather testy when they finally got out on the streets looking for some crime wave or another to break up that night. That usually meant us. We saw this as a bit of a challenge, to entertain ourselves while not being caught by the cops. Bill, bless him, seemed to always to have a plan. Rick and I could never seem to come up with the proper argument against his plans, so off we would go. It is a wonder we lived through some of them.

And these are our stories…