One summer afternoon in 1957, while working in my father's tool shop, I used a hand-saw and actually cut up my baseball bat ––– three careful slices, straight through the shank. Decades later I heard that Jeffrey Dahmer had done the same thing. Budding serial killer at 14, Dahmer did it to make a club, then hid in the bushes by a jogging trail, lusting to bag a health nut.

Budding serial creator at 16, I cut up my baseball bat to make two disks for "eyes" to finish a painted artwork. I had begun the mask-like object a few days earlier by dribbling enamel paint, ala Jackson Pollock, over the surface of a board about a foot and a half long and six inches wide. To this I added a nose of copper-tubing, spiky hair made from pinched bristles from my mother's broom, and a mustache of black tree seal painted around a bent aluminum rod mouth. The piece was finished by daubing the mouth with yellow paint.

Pollock, Dali, and Picasso were my art heroes. Adults said ... "my five year old kid could do that" ... I knew they were wrong because I was trying as hard as I could and "failing". Early on I learned to be quiet about art.

As I levered dad's bench-vise down hard, steel teeth bit into the bat with a pleasing crunch. In my adolescent soul I was not destroying my baseball bat, just using it for art supplies. A little later ––– no doubt called to the scene by demon spirits ––– dad suddenly appeared in front of the vise where the stub of my “ruined” bat rose to meet him like Loki's middle finger. For one incredulous moment my father stood glaring, as if blocking the rude image with a mental broad sword, then barked, "YOUR BASE ... BALL ... BAT ...!?"

Dad yanked the piece from the vise, pointed the raw end at my nose and commanded, "Why David! I want to know WHY!"

"I needed to use it for making something,” I answered.

Erik The Red yelled back, "for christ's sake, WHAT!?"

Indicating the mask on the floor, I said, "... eyes, ah ... I needed eyes ..."

My father looked directly into the wooden eyes of my art-piece as though seeing himself in a mirror. And for one extremely long moment he even looked like my artwork, fright-wig, oogly-eyes, copper nose and all --- as utterly stunned as if I'd crapped on the coffee table.

"Well, it is ‘MY’ baseball bat," I defended.

That did it. “MY” was "talking back". Dale and I always knew when we'd blown it. The worst thing you could do was challenge my father in any way. When Erik The Red was about to go crazy his jaw muscles would lock and bulge, and his lips would begin to tremble, especially his lower lip. There was something wounded, almost tender in the violence of his lower lip, while simultaneously bright red color shot over his face. And that color change, quick as an octopus, always signaled the exact second before my father might haul off and punch out with a Viking fist. Dale reminded me of dad’s eyes changing color too, from blue to steel grey.

The hair on my neck stood up like a bottle brush.

He lurched toward me, then stopped, straining to control himself. Then just as suddenly his anger shorted out ––– possibly because he was holding a club in his hand ––– he sighed deeply, and with the defeated resolve of a condemned prisoner stepping up to a noose, dropped what was left of my baseball bat on the floor and walked out the door hissing through his upper plate, "Jeee-sas Kee-rist! ... I'll ... be ... god-damn-go-to-hell ... if ... I ... know ... one ... damn ... thing ... any ... more!"

My father had a nether-region, one step over the edge of reason, not to mention common sense. On ancient parchment, an illuminated warning would have read: "Beyond Here Be Dragons." His flare-ups were at best, short lived, at worst, capricious. He could strike for next to nothing one day, then ignore a felony the next. Talking back could evoke a proto-death penalty.

I was angry too. Sometimes in fact, my anger overwhelmed my best survival instincts. Once, in what can only be described as a nihilistic epiphany, I actually clobbered my dad in the back of the head with a ukulele. Hard. I can still hear that horrific sound, like the dead clunk of a boat hull against a rock. And the fact that he just happened to be driving our Pontiac sixty miles an hour on the highway and our whole family could have died in a ditch right there, didn't lighten the burden. And it seems amazing to me now, but I pretty much got away with that. I guess the whole event was so outrageous my parents didn't know what to do. I still have the ukulele. And it gives me no pleasure that the best I have to say about the whole incident is, my father did not deserve it, that time. Because no matter how happy his surface features seemed to the neighbors, my brother and I knew well the danger lurking in his deep:

Yet, I did not care what my father thought of my art piece. I don't know how I knew I was right, I just did. In fact, Picasso and I spent the next few weeks secretly carving the leftover rounded end of the bat into a cartoonish head, sort of a goofy penis with eyebrows.

The linguistic spaces in my brain between "baseball" and "painting" are wider than physicists say are found in subatomic particles. I don't know where I even got a baseball bat, but I sure never used it for baseball. I was attracted to team sports about as much as I was my father's favorite Norwegian snack: Limburger cheese with smoked oysters and warm buttermilk.

Except when absorbed in my passions: adventure books, magic, art, and skin-diving, I was utterly miserable.

Swimming, especially skin-diving, and later SCUBA inspired me. My aunt Dorothy taught me to swim when I was around six, in the campground pool at Big Sur, which was much more like a lake than a pool. I remember vividly the day she instructed me, turning me on like a flailing meat-motor. I would roar as far as I could in a straight line on one breath then finally stand up in the shallow water gasping. No one could stop me. I had to be carried from the pool, blue. And I wanted to go right back in the water.

The first time I went skin-diving was off the rocks at the foot of the Union Oil dock in Avila Beach where my father worked as a tug boat operator. I was around ten. I asked dad to stand on the rocks holding one end of a long rope I had tied to my waist. I couldn’t admit even to myself, just how much I expected to confront sea monsters. Dad never belittled me once. Very often, he was patient, kind and encouraging. In the early fifties the California sea was a terrifying place. A sort of Jungian collective shadow best left alone.

People fished and swam in the surf but they did not skin-dive much at all. That sport was like hang gliding is today. A few hardy individuals diving for abalone could be found here and there. All commercial diving was done in hard-hat, awkwardly moving along the bottom in heavy lead boots. Skin-diving enchanted me, never failing to evoke a trance state, much the same as painting and drawing. Even in the high school swimming pool I was suddenly unburdened of all problems, free to fly and tumble. In the water I could be a ballet dancer and be praised for it. I was even used by the enemy coach every year to demonstrate my perfect limp-wristed Australian crawl for all the team jocks.

In high school around 1955, my friend Bob and I sent away for aqua lungs through an ad in a magazine. There were no SCUBA courses around at the time so we learned on our own. We had one pool lesson with the only diver we knew. He said: "Never hold your breath, otherwise your lungs will explode". That was the lesson. We dove for years together having great adventures along the California coast as well as at the Santa Barbara Channel Islands and a few times in Mexico.

Age 16 with Sierra rubber boa / 1957 / Yosemite National Park

Sunday morning pundits like to call mine, "the spoiled generation". Yea, well growing up in a town full of pedophiles spoiled me all right. That, and spending grammar school diving under my desk and grasping my hands over the back of my neck during atomic bomb drills. The idea of fending off atomic weapons with your skinny-ass-kid-arms was to me, insanity. The teacher warned us, "During an attack, do not to look toward the windows because the flash will be so bright it could blind you.

"After the flash," she'd say, "stay where you are! Don't move because it will take time for the atomic shock wave to reach us. And when it does, this entire glass wall will fly across the room and you'll be safest under your desks".

Using my skin and bones to ward off boiling radiation and flying glass was stupid and I knew it. So did all the other kids. I imagined us lined up in rows, like roasted turkeys in smoldering shoes, with enough glass shards stuck in our bodies to make a stained glass window.

Today, enlightened space-agers that we are, we have "how to" books for suicide, but in the 50's taking your own life was more than unfashionable. Lucky for me my guardian demon cattle-prodded me into art.

If my father could have known how important art was for me, that in fact my life depended on it, I like to think he would have picked up a hand-saw and joined me. I would have welcomed him. We worked on many projects together, especially before I cracked him in the back of the head with a ukulele. He had no idea of the importance of art to me, but then, neither did I. In the 1950's in San Luis Obispo, no one had much of an idea about anything. He could be rough, but in those days it's only fair to say, most all blue collar fathers were tough.

My father had grown up dirt-poor on a forty acre patch of poisoned alkali-land his father called a farm. It produced two major year round crops: puncture vines and tumbleweeds. He was only six months old when his father, Otto Gerhardt Nelson, made the worst mistake of his life. In 1913 he sold a successful dairy farm on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, and sight-unseen, moved his family to Chowchilla, California in the San Joaquin Valley. The place was a dusty disaster.

When my father finally made it out on his own, his first steps were taken directly into the national hurricane of the Great Depression, then World War II. Coming from that background, the idea of "wasting" anything, let alone a perfectly good baseball bat, was inconceivable to him. Seeing the remains of my Louisville Slugger that day, must have felt like a shot of cold air on a psychic molar.

Palmer Stewart Nelson, never spoke of my art-mask again. He died of a heart attack less than two years later, at age 47 --- on Father's Day. Earlier that day, at our kitchen table, I had given him the gift of an autumn colored plaid shirt. I did not wear plaid again for twenty years. When Steve Martin made a movie called, “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” I thought, “... screw you Martin ... like you know anything ...”.

His death also brought an immediate sense of relief. A call of freedom that would plague me with guilt for years to come. It even affected me physically. For decades I could wear no chain or necklace. Also, inexplicably, I could not tolerate any pressure on my chest, even of clothing. The arms and hands of sleeping comrades were especially intolerable. I would always slide the hand of a bed mate away from that area, wondering why.

I still have the mask and I would not trade it for anything. I found it one day in the rafters of my mother's garage where it had rested on its back, staring at the roof for over three decades. The face was covered with a two inch layer of dust and cobwebs. I took it from the dark garage into the backyard sun light and carefully cleaned it with a damp rag. I have read that Picasso would not clean his studio in the belief that dust preserved things. He was right. This was an archeological find. A rare bone. Years later, in the mid-Pacific Ocean, as a crewman on the schooner Goodwill, sailing-master Milt Reynolds told me something I have never forgotten.

"Ordinary seamen work for money David, but a 'Corinthian sailor,' now they're a whole different breed. A Corinthian sails for love of sailing."

Now if that is true, and I believe that it is ––– for I never met a finer man than Milt Reynolds ––– surely then, that mask of a summer so long ago was crafted from the heart of a Corinthian boy.

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