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My very first New York City apartment was where I was born at 50 West 9th Street in West Greenwich Village, but I refused to sign the lease. My mother was a successful dress designer and my father was a salesman. They worked very hard to give me the best possible childhood home because they did not want to raise a child in the city. So first, they rented a summer vacation house overlooking the Croton Reservoir near Mount Kisco, and my first clear memory was at about age 1-1/2. I remember hoisting myself up in my crib, peering over the crib bar and looking down the hall to my right, seeing my parents kissing each other and thinking "Oh, that's very nice". When I was three years old, my parents moved out of the West Village apartment and purchased a home in Stanwood, Mount Kisco, again overlooking the Croton Reservoir. Here's a photo of it after my mother had it painted yellow, which was her favorite color.

Even after we moved into that beautiful home, we used to visit the old summer house quite often because it had large raspberry bushes all over the property, my parents adored fresh raspberries, and so did I. There was a huge fruit bearing mulberry tree in the front yard which they called "the umbrella tree" because its branches grew up and over and then cascaded all the way down to the ground, forming a huge shaded umbrella. I believed that I could hide in the privacy and cool shade underneath the umbrella tree so that nobody would find me. Munching on those sweet and flavorful mulberries with my hands full of fresh raspberries, I first began to contemplate the world inside my mind.

As you can see in the photograph above, our home was surrounded by a pine tree forest on three sides. Pine trees have many strong branches that grow closely together so it was easy for me to become a talented tree climber by the time I was three years old. I remember my father came home from work one day and he saw me at the very top of one of the tallest pine trees swaying back and forth dramatically in the wind. Of course, that frightened my dad and he called out to me, "Peter, come down out of that tree this minute!" But I went right back up the next day because I found a sense of peace up there where I couldn't hear any sound except the birds and the wind, but I could see for miles across the lake. I clearly remember having some pretty deep thoughts at that young age, like "What is all this life around me about?", "The entire world can't possibly be this peaceful", and "Why do I feel so alone?" Both my parents worked at jobs where they had to commute more than an hour each way to and from work and my sister wasn't born until I was 7 years old. I had a strong sense that other people also feel loneliness even though they appeared to me to be quite happy. I had many friends in Stanwood and my three best friends were all girls named Madeleine, Pamela, and Laura Webster. I've lost touch with all of them and I can't find any trace of them through any kind of research. But I think the significance of having that kind of friendship was that I got clued into female psychology at an early age. My father was a very sensitive and intelligent man, and he taught me all about male psychology simply by being himself and demonstrating love, patience, caring, and true sensitivity. My mother created a big problem for both of us by making the mistake of thinking that just because she worked and could not spend much time with me, she had to cram all the discipline into the few hours that she did get with me, and that was a big mistake. She simply picked the wrong soul to play that game with and instead of teaching me discipline, she taught me to question and resist all authority, and she created that particular pattern for my entire life.

My father used to take me to see the holiday parades in Mount Kisco. No matter what the holiday was, there were always many marching bands performing and I was instantly captivated by the vibrational impact of the drummers. Those beats went straight to my heart and soul and it stirred some kind of primal force that has never stopped throbbing inside of me. A short time after that, I discovered rock and roll music by listening to one of the very first rock music radio shows called "The Crystal Ballroom" and it aired once a week on Friday nights. I fell in love instantly by sitting on the floor with my ear glued to the radio speaker, and I began buying my favorite 45 speed records with every cent I could save from my $1 a week allowance. My mother loved classical music and she was good enough to be able to play the piano, so typically, she forced me to take piano lessons which I hated simply because it was not my choice. But I had begun to write poetry during those early years, and I started experimenting around on her piano, putting lyrics to melodies that came into my head as I toyed with the few major and minor chords that I knew. The first real song I ever wrote was called "I Sit Here", and it's on this web site tucked away in a hidden corner because a song with that kind of subject matter is nothing short of completely devoid of interest, even to me. I mean really, Peter, you and the Buddha? But one other less notable experience that is worth noting is that I had a relatively rich friend whose family lived a few miles away, and they were the only ones I had ever met who had their own private swimming pool. I fell madly in love with that wet and wild luxury and I swore to myself that I would have my own pool someday.

Going on great vacations has always been a strong theme in my life and my parents set the pattern. Every summer we used to drive up to Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod and stay at Captain Jack's Wharf. Provincetown is an old fishing town, and there are a lot of fishing towns in New England, but Provincetown is the most famous one because of its history, its quaint architecture, its beaches, its restaurants, its profusion of artists and art galleries, and because of the amount of fun it's possible to have there. During the summer, the water is very warm because Provincetown is located in the Gulf Stream. Captain Jack's Wharf is the only wharf in the entire town that has rental units right on it and my parents had the class and intelligence to know a great secret when they found one. My sister and I used to play on the beach adjacent to the wharf, and we used to explore underneath the wharf at low tide. When the tide goes out in Provincetown, it goes WAY out, and you can walk at least a half mile out into knee deep shallow water. My sister and I used to have great fun together there playing on the small sandy beach which we could walk right down about five weather beaten wooden stairs to get to. Going to Captain Jack's was my very first vacation, and as you will see near the end of this page, it was also my last.

My father had at least one heart attack that my parents kept secret from me because they didn't want me to know about something as potentially fearful and depressing as a heart attack. In order to reduce his stress and his commute time to work, they sold our home and moved to Mamaroneck, N.Y. Moving was a traumatic experience for me because I felt I was being ripped away from my childhood friends completely against my will. I remember us all driving away in our car for the last time, with me in the back seat crying and waving to my friends who were also crying. We moved to a house on "Millionaire's Point" in Mamaroneck which my parents rented for a year so that they could take their time to find the best house they could afford to buy. During that year, I became friends with some of the rich kids in that magnificent wealthy neighborhood where the homes faced the Long Island Sound. Every single house had a huge property with a private pool, a dock, and one or more boats. It was there that I learned what being rich is all about. It's about having absolutely everything you can possibly want whenever you want it - a state I've never even come close to attaining. From Millionaire's Point, we moved to a three story house in Orienta Point, another wealthy area where I first discovered my rather uncontrollable sexuality at age eleven. I won't go into details here, but I did get myself into some embarrassing trouble which my parents had no idea how to handle. Enough said on that particular subject. What I did know is that I wanted to learn to play the drums. Not the boring old piano, and not the trumpet that I had to try out for a year in school, but those intensely sexual, orgasmically beating drums. So I attacked my parents' objections head on, without letting up, and eventually they caved in and bought me a practice drum set. I began to teach myself the art of drumming by playing along with my favorite records and I must have driven my parents nuts with the loud and obnoxious sounds that vibrated throughout our house.

We moved out of that house to a smaller one in Larchmont because my grandmother who had been my best friend and had been living with us died of Parkinson's disease and my parents wanted a smaller house with smaller house payments. I was practicing drums one day in my bedroom when our phone rang. It was Tor Pinney on the line, a guy I had known since we were in class together in 6th grade, and Tor was the leader of The Dolphins, the most popular band in the area at that time with a number 4 regional hit record called "Surfin' East Coast". Tor told me that their drummer had quit and he asked me if I'd like to audition for The Dolphins. With some trepidation, I packed my drums into my parents' car and drove over to Tor's house to audition. To my astonishment, they only asked me to play three songs with them and all three were ones I had been practicing along with so I knew them inside out. I got the job, and so I went straight from my bedroom into a rock and roll band with a hit record, and I became a mini rock and roll star overnight. Only a few weeks after that I met my future wife, Mona. I was climbing up the stairs in Mamaroneck High School one day and I happened to gaze up under her dress. Kind of stunned, I asked the nearest girl "Who IS that?" and I was told her name was Margaret Campbell. I went down to the school office, looked up her class schedule, and saw that she had gym class at the same time as I had a study hall I could get out of. So I began to hang around outside the girls' gym, watching her through the gym door window, waiting for her gym class to come out so I could introduce myself to her. Apparently she saw me out there in the hall and wondered to herself, "Who IS that?" When she finally did come out I gathered up my courage, said "Hi, Margaret", and then asked her for a date to see a movie the next weekend. To my surprise, she said yes. But about two days after that I was downstairs in my home when I heard my father call out in a voice that sent shivers up my spine, "Peter, come here!" I rushed up to the bathroom and found my beloved father lying flat on his back on the floor having a severe heart attack. He said, "Call an ambulance right now!", which I did because my mother was not there at the time. The ambulance did not arrive until over an hour later, and by that time my father had died with his head cradled in my arms on our bathroom floor. I suppose calling that my second traumatic experience would be an understatement.

I felt real grief for the first time in my life but somehow I had it together to call Margaret and cancel our first date, putting it off until the following weekend. She later told me that she was very impressed that I had the grace and thoughtfulness to even think about her at a time like that. My mother took my dad's death very hard. These two were typical of their generation because they were completely in love with each other, they never had a thought about cheating or even lying to each other, and there would never be another man in my mother's life. She became extremely lonely and her neurotic side took over. The movie that I took Margaret to see was "A Thousand Clowns" starring Jason Robards Jr., and to this day it's one of my favorite movies. I think it was Jason Robards' first starring role, he was funny and quirky in a New York City kind of way, and there were many classic lines in it that have become part of my lexicon. The central one that I will never forget is when he explained the story that gave birth to the title of the movie. He said something to the effect of, "Have you ever seen one of those tiny little red cars stuffed with clowns and when somebody opens the car door, they all come spilling out endlessly like there are a thousand of them?" Now isn't that what life should be like? A thousand happy clowns spilling out endlessly? I think that's what life should be like, but it isn't.

After four consecutive weekend dates with Margaret, we were standing outside in Tor's driveway one night while The Dolphins were taking a break from rehearsing. We kissed each other for a long time. We looked deeply into each other's eyes and I said "I think I'm falling in love with you". She said "I think I'm falling in love with you too" and we both knew in our hearts that it was the real thing. Shortly after that, she started calling herself Mona because neither of us liked her given name. Whispering Margaret in her ear just didn't work for me because it had no sexy sound at all. Tor had begun to let me come out front on stage and sing Bo Diddley's song "Mona", and that was the sexy boy that Margaret was falling in love with so she suggested changing her name to Mona. I thought that Mona had a sexy kind of moaning sound so we both agreed that she should change her name. To this day her legal name is still Mona, many years after divorce, and I have no idea why she would do that. Sometimes I care, and most of the time I don't, but I do think it's very strange. I also remember quite clearly that shortly after my mother met Mona she took me aside and said "That girl is going to break your heart someday". That simply made me angry and I ignored her, but many years later I remembered her prescient intuition and I'm astounded that she understood something that significant so fast.

I played many exciting gigs with The Dolphins where we backed up some great 1950's acts and you can find them listed in The Interview with Peter Cross. I played drums on my first professional recording which was The Dolphins' follow-up record Endless. Unfortunately, The Dolphins experience was not endless. The band broke up at the end of the summer because Tor's brother, Roy, and our keyboard player, Brian Kelly, both left Larchmont to attend college. Later that same year, Tor formed another band and he immediately brought me in as the drummer. I came up with the name for the band, The Haymarket Riot, which was actually a labor union riot that occurred in Chicago in 1886 where a bomb was exploded that killed eight police officers. The reason I thought of that name was because two of the band members were real bad boys, Tor had always been a wild spirit, and I liked to think of myself as a potential bad boy as well as a wild spirit. My mother took an immediate dislike to the entire band. Fortunately for her, the band broke up after only a short time together because the keyboard player quit. He thought he was a star and we were all geeks, and he was wrong on both counts. Here's a great photo of our band that Tor's mother took right in front of their house in Larchmont. I'm in the center and Tor is looking over my left shoulder.

Soon after The Haymarket Riot broke up, Tor and I both were accepted by Syracuse University. Tor started another band at Syracuse and of course brought me in as drummer immediately. Once again, I came up with the band name which was Grief because I was feeling that feeling once again, only this time it was due to being separated from Mona by 400 miles. We had the best rock band on campus and we played the best gigs, including a lot of wild frat parties and a few wild sorority parties too. Our keyboard player was named Harry Meyer and he was the best keyboard player I had ever come across, the only one I've ever seen who could improvise counterpoint melodies. He was also a true nut case right from the get-go. Harry's thing was methamphetamine, and after about six months of playing together, he got on a jag of meth and stayed up for one entire week without sleeping at all. Actual men in white suits with a straight jacket came and took him away, put him in an asylum and forced him on a regimen of Thorazine. When he came out of the asylum his coordination was totally shot for good and he was never the same. He went into the asylum as a heterosexual and he came out of there as a homosexual with a strong preference for young boys (a "chicken chaser"). Grief broke up because Tor quit school to marry his high school sweetheart and he moved back to Larchmont for a while. I hated Syracuse University and I was dying of loneliness for Mona, so I applied to New York University downtown (at Washington Square) for a transfer and I was accepted. At the end of my awful freshman year in Syracuse, I moved to New York City and rented a two bedroom apartment at 49 Prince Street in the heart of "Little Italy" for $63.90 per month.

For a while, those were the best of times. Mona was still living at her parents' house in Larchmont, trying to finish high school. She used to lie to her parents by telling them she was having a sleep-over date with one of her girlfriends in Larchmont. Then she would take the train in to visit me, sleep with me overnight, and be home the next morning before her parents woke up. Whenever her parents tried to check up on her, her friends would cover for her and we never got caught until the shit hit the fan big time. To move back in time just a bit, Mona and I had both "turned on" to pot together at the exact same time in the exact same place. It happened at one of her friend's houses one night at a party, and it was Harry Meyer who supplied the smoke to both of us. At first I didn't feel anything at all and I wondered what the whole thing could possibly be all about. But Harry kept on supplying and I kept on smoking, just sitting on the floor wondering if anything interesting would ever happen. I stood up to go to the bathroom and that's when it hit me. I got extremely dizzy, the whole room started spinning around me and I fell backwards in slow motion as time slowed down dramatically. I felt the back of my head smash against a metal radiator but I felt no pain at all. I couldn't move, so Harry helped me up and then I got sick and vomited out the bedroom window. Almost immediately I felt much better and right after that I experienced my first serious case of "the munchies". Mona's girlfriend brought in a box of something that was a combination candy bar and cereal called "Golden Nuggets" - little chocolate bars with caramel and rice crispies. I chowed down the entire box and it was the best thing I had ever tasted in my life. It was simply an orgasmic eating experience unlike anything I'd ever felt before, and I said to myself, "Ahhhhhhh, NOW I understand what this is all about. I LOVE this! Beer is a complete waste of time, THIS is where it's at for me!".

I had to tell Tor all about this brand new high I had discovered and I wasn't all that surprised when Tor said, "I've been a Head (pot head) for many years, Peter, but I didn't want to be the one to spoil your innocence". The next thing I discovered is that music can be indescribably more enjoyable when heard in a state of stoned ecstasy. Tor took me to a party at Frank Mambelli's apartment. Frank had been the bass player in The Haymarket Riot, and his party that night is when I heard Jimi Hendrix's "Are You Experienced" for the first time. Unfortunately, Frank's tiny little record player had tiny little speakers so I completely missed the real Experience the first time around. Tor used to drive himself deep into the Bronx and just stand on a particular street corner looking totally different from the homeys in the hood who understood quite well what he was there for. He would buy a pound of Mexican weed, break up the pressed green brick into ounces, sell off enough to pay for the pound and have all his smoke for free. Tor was a true visionary and he was always ahead of his time. We were the lucky people, the "beautiful people", and the very best smoke like Acapulco Gold was about $30 per ounce when Sergeant Pepper surprised the living daylights out of us. We were all calling each other on the phone and saying "You've GOT to get over here, get high and listen to this album!" No matter how many times we all listened together, we kept hearing new sounds we hadn't heard before. So many new groups and memorable hit songs kept coming at us in rapid succession and there will never be another time in all of musical history that was so much fun in terms of the simple joy of discovery, the mutual sharing of all our newly discovered sounds, and the enjoyable high that we all experienced together.

We were the ones who invented the concept of "free love". In some ways it was a natural reaction against the "uptightness" of our parents' generation, but we all believed that it was inspired by the whole experience of getting high on pot, losing our inhibitions, and just reveling in pleasureful experiences. I was performing on stage, literally surrounded by girls and I could see no logical reason why I should restrict myself to Mona alone. It just so happened that Mona was beautiful, sexy, strong minded and very independent, and she had the exact same attitude as I had. So after discussing this with each other, we came to an agreement that was later called an "open relationship" by the people who were analyzing that kind of life style. But my big endless party shattered into smithereens one night about eight months after I had moved into the Prince Street apartment. We all believed that getting high on marijuana produced peace and love and that we were going to change the world once and for all. We wanted to stop the Viet Nam war and teach everybody how to relax and have fun. Because my mother was very lonely with no joy in her life, I got a foolish idea into my head that I should turn her on to my new life style, which turned out to be a BIG mistake. After listening to my best sales pitch, she said, "Peter, I don't agree with you, this is a very bad thing you're doing and I'm asking you to stop." With my automatic resistance to authority, I did just the opposite. She kept on nagging me, she consulted with the most knowledgeable friends she had, and they all told her that I was really committing a form of suicide that only she could stop. She warned me on numerous occasions that she felt she had no alternative except to have me arrested. I was intelligent enough to take her seriously so I moved all our stash out of the apartment and up onto our roof where I hid it in the water tower. Each time we wanted some, I only brought down barely enough for us to smoke to completion. One night, Mona and I were fast asleep in my bed when there was a huge loud crash which turned out to be the sound of our apartment front door being smashed through. I woke up to find a greasy Puerto Rican guy in jeans and a white T-shirt strangling me by the throat and screaming, "Where's the stuff? Where's the stuff?" I couldn't breath to answer him so I punched him in the face to get him off me and that's where the resisting arrest charge came from. His partner, a big fat Irish guy, came into the bedroom and slammed me up against the wall. Then he looked underneath our bed and pulled out four small manila envelopes, exclaiming, "Oh, what's this?" I had never even seen manila envelopes used that way before. He said to Mona, "Get up and get dressed, you little whore". He led her out, and the Puerto Rican guy cuffed me and took me to jail.

In hindsight, my entire life changed that night. My innocence died, never to return. I was charged with statutory rape, corrupting the morals of a minor (Mona), possession of a dangerous drug, of course resisting arrest, and illegal possession of postal bags! We had been using an old discarded postal bag as our laundry bag and had no idea that was a crime. Unbeknownst to me, there had been a huge anti-Vietnam war demonstration that same night at the United Nations building, and a left wing student group named Students For a Democratic Society had several hundred members who were also arrested. When they moved me out of my holding cell, I got handcuffed to one of them. SDS bailed out all their members and they bailed me out too by mistaking me for one of them. The very next day, I called my uncle Henry (my mother's brother) and it was Henry who told me that my mother had me busted by narcotics cops. I went through the roof in a blind rage and I stayed that way for many years. A college friend of mine and I hopped in his car and drove all night long down to Fort Lauderdale because I had to get away from the whole scene and party as hard as I could. Without my favorite high, I was forced to drink massive amounts of beer, and all I can remember is being drunk all the time, vomiting on the beach, vomiting on the streets, and not meeting one single girl. Miserable. By the time I went back to N.Y.C. to make my first court appearance, I found to my astonishment that two unexpected developments had occurred. Three months prior to my bust, the laws had been revised to lower the age of consent for a girl in New York State to 16 years old. Mona had turned 17 just before that time so the statutory rape and corrupting the morals of a minor charges were dropped. Good thing too because that's serious shit ! And the other thing that happened is that the two narcs in my case were busted for extortion in connection with another case, so all their court cases were dropped, including mine. I walked away from it all, case dismissed, not even a charge on my record.

I'd like to digress a bit and discuss my only sister, Susan. I loved her from the moment of her birth, she looked up to me and idolized me, and we were very close. When I left home to go away to Syracuse University my poor sister was left alone with my neurotic mother and apparently that experience crippled her on a deep emotional level. During her late teens she fell in love with her only boyfriend, moved in with him, and started spending all her money on him to put him through college and buy him all the things he wanted. One day she found out that he was in love with somebody else and that broke her fragile heart. She ran screaming into the nearest Buddhist temple for protection of her spirit and she never came out of there. Eventually she became a Buddhist nun, shaved her head and took the vow of celibacy. She lives in Paris, France, and she runs the Zen Centre de Paris. The order of nuns she joined has a strict rule that their members are not allowed to have any contact with their relatives. To me, that shows a basic misunderstanding of the Buddha's teaching, and it leaves me feeling very sad and lonely for her. People who are on the spiritual path are actually supposed to be available to their relatives in order to lend them strength and give them the benefit of their spiritual wisdom. Relatives are supposed to be even more important than the rest of the world because of the special karma that's involved. One of the Buddha's most important teachings is "Moderation in all things", and cutting a nun off from her only brother is definitely spiritual extremism.

The next milestone in my life occurred in my sophomore year at N.Y.U. I was playing in another band called The Chains with Tor when he was approached by Joe Messina, a music business manager who was working with Paul Leka, a producer for Mercury Records who already had one hit record called "Green Tambourine" by The Lemon Pipers. Here's a photo of The Chains that was taken by Tor's mother.

This is the only time I ever sported a mustache, and the star shirt is a bit of unaware foreshadowing for Starcrost. Moving counterclockwise, it's Tor, Don Bosson who played bass guitar in Steam, and Brian Kelly who plays the very catchy keyboard part at the beginning of Endless. That's one killer sexual look on Brian's face. Paul Leka had just gotten another smash hit record called "Na Na Hey Hey, Kiss 'em Goodbye", and Joe asked Tor to put together a band to go out on the road as Steam. The deal was simple. All we had to do was play Na Na one time at each performance and the rest of the time we could play our own original songs and get paid for it. We jumped at the chance and began rehearsals for about a month before the tour began. Tor had given me his old electric guitar, and the first song I wrote on it was Favorite Toy. Our rehearsals were extremely intense because three of us in the band were songwriters and of course we had to argue about everything. By that time, the pedophile nut case Harry Meyer had changed his name to Chris Robison which was some kind of bizarre imitation of Christopher Robinson from the Pooh Bear books. You might ask why we would allow a sick character like that in our band. Good question. It had something do with taking advantage of his awesome ability to arrange vocal harmonies, but it also had to do with the fact that we were all professing to believe in "free love" and being as young as we were at that time, the rest of us were close to crossing the age line into jail bait anyway. Our thought was "Who are we to judge him?" so we closed our eyes to his behavior and just tried to create the best band we could possibly create. Most of the story of the Steam tour is in The Interview with Peter Cross, Part 3 so I don't want to repeat it here. But after about a year on the road, we all decided to break the band up because the stress was too much and we were all fighting with each other.

I had foolishly given up my apartment at Prince Street when I went out on the road with Steam. Looking back, it's hard for me to believe I could have been so cheap as to give up a N.Y.C. apartment that cost only $63.90 per month. But at the time, I was convinced that vast riches and fame were just around the bend and I was ready to leave the shitty city anyway. So when Steam broke up, I found that I had nowhere to live. We were starting to hear a new form of music called reggae and I had always wanted to visit Jamaica just to meet the Rastafarians, get stoned with them, and see what the red variety of Jamaican pot was all about. We were getting the green variety and it was pretty powerful but we had heard that the Rastas saved all the red stuff for themselves. The story of my trip to Jamaica is in Jamaica Dandy and also in Rastafarian so I don't have to repeat any of that story either. But I learned the hard way that Jamaica is not a very nice place to live, the people are destitute and they don't like white Americans coming down there and taking what little they have for themselves. So I took my first opportunity to leave N.Y.C. and move to California, the land I thought would have everything I always wanted. As it turned out, I was correct.

Mona and I hitched a ride to California with a girl from N.Y.U. who had a Volkswagen van and was looking for passengers to help her pay for gas. Somewhere out in the boondocks of Oklahoma her van broke down and we were stranded for a whole week while she waited for it to be repaired. We ended up staying on a farm with some wonderful people who took me out one night to the black part of their town to see the local blues band. When we walked into the all-black club, people gave us the strangest looks as if they were seeing visitors from Pluto. But the band members were all authentic blues men and all of them were old except for the drummer who was the guitar player's grandson. It just so happened that the drummer was sick with the flu and when they found out I was a drummer, they asked me to sit in with them. Now I didn't tell them this, but blues music is very simple to play on drums. In fact, the essence of good blues drumming is to simply keep the beat, don't even try to fill the holes, and just let the guitar player, singer, and harmonica player do all the work. All I had to do was watch their cues to know when to start playing and when to end the song with them. These guys were very impressed with me and I was certainly impressed with them. They kept on asking me "How is it possible that you know all our songs so well?", and I never told them the secret. But after playing with them for an entire week, I left that town with one authentic blues experience that I will never forget.

Because my uncle and my cousin Mustang lived in Laguna Beach, I headed straight for that most wonderful town. Coming directly from the filthy streets of New York City, it was a real culture shock that I adored. Laguna Beach is continuously lined with great beaches and it has almost perfect weather. It was a town with true class that was a direct result of the kind of people who chose to live there. At the time I moved there at least 75% of the residents were artists of some kind. There were musicians, painters, writers, sculptors, photographers, craftsman, etc., all of whom had achieved enough financial success to be able to afford to live in such a gorgeous location. People like that tend to be spiritually evolved and are making intelligent life choices like choosing to live in the most perfect location they can afford. Because everybody who lives there can afford the life style, the town is chock full of wonderful and interesting restaurants, art galleries, book stores, and boutiques. I lived there for one year and towards the end, I rented a house at Paradise Point in South Laguna overlooking Thousand Steps Beach. The house was built by Bette Davis, a very short woman, and the ceilings were about 5-1/2 feet high. I had to bend over constantly, but it was worth it because I was situated right at the edge of the cliff with an unobstructed view in every direction. I think that Thousand Steps Beach is the best beach in all of southern California for a number of reasons. The tourists don't even know it exists and most of the locals are discouraged from going there because there really are about 280 concrete steps leading from Pacific Coast Highway steeply down to the beach. It's bad enough going down all those steps, but you'd better not forget anything crucial because going back up is the killer. The beach is unique because there are all kinds of tropical flowers and unusual plants that decorate the steep hill all the way down to the beach. Some of the homes overlooking the beach have mechanical funiculars the residents can use so that they don't have to climb down or up any steps. It's a huge long beach with a big cave at the south end that you can actually go into when the tide is low. It's always relatively uncrowded and many women feel safe to be topless in the sun. Because of the low number of visitors, and also because the ones who do visit are conscious of the pristine beauty, the beach is kept clean and there are none of the usual clueless beer bums who always leave their cans and trash behind. The waves are always high, and the people are even higher.

At the end of my wonderful year in Laguna Beach, I took a trip up to northern California and I have no memory of why I did that. But it was there that I met an engineer named Pete Slausen who was running a small recording studio at the Mill Valley heliport, an old building which had been badly burned in a fire and had been gutted and refitted into small recording and rehearsal studios for local San Francisco bands like Hot Tuna (Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Cassidy, formerly from the Jefferson Airplane). Pete was running Studio B, and Hot Tuna was in Studio A. This is where I met Jorma, who I met again many years later at Wavy Gravy's camp for adults called Camp Winarainbow. And speaking of rainbows, there actually was a magical double rainbow hovering over San Francisco Bay on that same afternoon when I walked into Studio B and met David Lewark and David Raeder - one outstanding guitar player (Lewark) and one weird guitar player (Raeder). And they just happened to be looking for a drummer so that they could start a really good band. How fortuitous! I showed the two Davids some of my original songs and they were both impressed. We jammed all day long, and a great band was formed which I named Magic - a concept I really believed in.

Willy Truckaway was also working with Pete Slausen, and Willy had been contracted by Warner Brothers Records to cut a version of Roller Derby Star, a song written by Kent Housman, a San Francisco songwriter who Warner Brothers had signed to a record contract. Kent's best song was Roller Derby Star, but Kent's version of his own song apparently wasn't good enough for Warner Brothers. I worked with Willy to make the arrangement much more driving hard rock, and he let me put my trademark vocal harmonies in the chorus because Kent's version had no vocal harmonies at all. I also sang the higher vocal harmony along with Willy's lead vocal. My drumming is my best work that was ever recorded successfully except for my own song Favorite Toy and that's the reason Roller Derby Star is on my web site. But it's not for sale for obvious Warner Brothers kinds of reasons. After the recording was finished it sounded awesome, but then Slausen got what he thought was a creative idea to go out to a roller derby stadium, set up his microphones underneath the wooden roller derby track and record the raucous noise. He then mixed this crap together with the instrumental tracks and put the damn levels up so high that a lot of the brilliant guitar playing and drum work is obscured. When radio stations tried to play it, their needles went clear off the scale so it got no airplay and just died a pathetic death. I was royally pissed because all my best work was wasted to create a rock and roll masterpiece out of somebody else's song!

Magic got the job as the house band at The Boathouse in Sausalito, and that's when I realized that there was no point in keeping the house on Paradise Point. Of course I remembered my big mistake when I gave up my Prince Street apartment in N.Y.C., but our job as the house band was a long term contract and I knew I would not be going back to southern California. Sausalito is northern California's version of Laguna Beach, without the beach. The Boathouse was THE place to be, it was the place to be seen, and it was the scene to be properly placed in. The Boathouse was actually situated on a dock overlooking San Francisco bay. We used to take our breaks between sets by going out to the end of the dock with the free drinks that were gratis for the band, and the not-so-free smoke that we provided for ourselves and just breathe the fresh salt air in between inhaling the world's best cannabis. A super successful dealer named Steve who had a house on Tiburon island had attached himself to our band and we used to go over to his house regularly to score. Whenever we went over there he always had a big black plastic bag in his closet filled with something highly unusual and suited for the gourmet tastes of the rock stars he wanted to hang out with. Steve had a kind of microscope I had never seen before because it shined a light onto the subject and magnified it about 100 times. I had never examined super pot before under a microscope and it was fascinating, kind of like the magnified lawn in "Honey I Shrunk the Kids". He had the real Columbian Gold - bright yellow bricks with a delicious taste and a psycho-active high, and each brick was imprinted with a round "Santa Marta Gold" stamp. One time he had something called "wacky weed", also from Columbia, but when examined under his microscope, I could see every color of the rainbow in it and the power of this stuff was simply not to be believed. I remember him having a pound of some stuff from Guatemala, something called African black, Maui Wowie, Jamaican Red, Panama Red, and the list went on and on. People nowadays believe that California homegrown sensemilla is the best in the world, and it can be, but young Californians have no idea of the variety of super pot that we used to get. They are under the impression that all our homegrown is higher in THC content than anything from the old days, but they are wrong.

One night when we were in the middle of our set at The Boathouse, Gary Kelgren and his partner, Chris Stone, came in and sat down at one of the front tables. Gary and Chris were the owners of The Record Plant in Sausalito and Los Angeles, and both studios were the state of the art at that time and still are to this day. Gary called out to us, "Hey, can you play something original?" So we launched into "Make Love" which was a song I had recently written that I thought was the most commercial song I had at that time. Gary literally fell out of his chair with astonishment so we played some more of my original songs for him and when it came time for our break, Gary invited us out to his famous Rolls Royce which had front and rear license plates that said "Greed". Gary was really into that famous white powder that had never done anything for me, but I was totally into Gary and his recording studio because I knew who they both were and so I knew that Gary really could do something very valuable for me. Gary recorded Magic many times without ever charging us for studio time, but we never achieved any real magic on tape and I have no doubt Gary must have known that because he was not only famous as a recording engineer, but he had the talent to back up his fame.

One day when I was working in the studio, Gary walked in and said to me "We can't concentrate here. I've got a house on Paradise Island in the Bahamas and I'm gonna send you down there for a vacation. We'll take a bunch of portable recording equipment with us, some cash for spending money, and you can work at the same time as you relax and have fun." I looked at this crazy man and thought, "Well, if you can't concentrate at The Record Plant, where the hell else can you concentrate?" But I jumped at Gary's offer because I had already been to The Bahamas several times and I just adored the place anyway. Gary gave me $10,000 in cash and told me to strap $5000 to each ankle when I went through customs so that he could avoid paying duties on the money and wouldn't have to explain where he got it from, which wasn't The Record Plant, you know. When I got to what Gary called "The Clapp House", I was stunned by it. Paradise Island is a long thin island right across a short stretch of water from Nassau, and that's where all the best hotels and the former Club Med are located for very good reasons. The Clapp House, which had nothing to do with venereal disease, was situated right next to the Club Med and its property stretched all the way from the bay side facing Nassau to the opposite ocean side. The main house was a gorgeous Spanish mansion with a classic red tile roof, white walls covered with flowering vines, and an artisticly tiled courtyard. In the middle of the property there was a uniquely shaped swimming pool which had a blue lighted cave you could swim underwater to get into. The entire property was landscaped with lush vegetation, and there were colorful tropical birds and many different fruit trees. On the side facing Nassau, there was a boat house with a dock, and there were several Boston Whalers which we used to take out for water skiing and to ferry us over to Nassau at night for dinners at the really expensive restaurants in town. On the ocean side was a beach house with guest bedrooms overlooking the crystal clear Carribean ocean, and of course, a stretch of pristine private beach. I was so inspired by the place that I sat right down and wrote two songs that are on this web site now, Too Young to be Lonely, and Sweet Pain, plus another really good rocker called "Rowdy" which was never recorded by Crossfire (whoever the hell they are).

Feeling like I had done the job Gary sent me down there to do, I went out on the beach trolling for girls. I ran right smack into a group of beautiful British foxes and the hound invited them up to the house to party. That's when I met dear sweet Rosie. Rosie had reddish blond hair down to her waist, a gorgeous face and smile, a body to die for, and when she opened her mouth and that sexy British voice spoke to me, my knees trembled and I almost collapsed right there on the sand. Rosie and I became lovers that same night and she taught me some great tricks that I have never forgotten. I fell in love with her fairly quickly but I was also missing Mona rather intensely. Because I had a non-refundable round trip airplane ticket, my time eventually came to say goodbye to Rosie. With sadness in my heart I kissed her goodbye for the last time and I never heard from her again even though I did try to call her when I got back to California. I have no idea what happened to her.

Gary had invited Ringo Starr down there for a free vacation too. Gary knew just about everybody in the rock and roll business at that time and he was known as a really fun guy to party wildly with. I stayed in the Clapp House with Ringo for just a few days and I asked him how he could possibly go on in music after The Beatles. He said "It's not easy, you know it just ain't easy" (the title to one of Ringo's solo hit songs). We smoked some Thai sticks together one sunny morning on the ocean side beach and he told me about a photography project he was working on that intrigued him more than music at that particular time. He called his project "Passersby", and what he did was go all over the world incognito wearing sunglasses and a fake beard. He would sit on somebody's outside stairsteps and just snap photos of every single person that walked by. He told me that he intended to assemble it all together and create a book out of it someday. I got to ask him some questions about how The Beatles got some of their sounds, and I will never forget what he said when I asked him how he got his drum sound on Mr. Moonlight which is on the Rubber Soul album. He just looked at me and said, "Tea towels. Some bird brought us in our tea on a silver platter, and I just took the little doilies from the platter and put them on my tom toms." I suddenly understood the whole concept of "chemistry" in the studio and I realized that literally every single silly idea that popped into their minds just worked! And when the exact same thing happened to me in the studio with Crossfire, I thought about Ringo and realized that one of my great dreams was finally happening to me after all those free hours at The Record Plant with Gary and Magic where nothing we ever recorded turned out perfectly enough for me.

At that time, I was renting a room in a lovely house in Mill Valley right in the middle of a redwood forest that had a stream running directly underneath my bedroom floor. All good things must end, so from there I moved to an apartment in Noe Valley, San Francisco, a very classy neighborhood with its commercial center at 24th Street. Among other things, San Francisco is a "restaurant town" and I had plenty of money, so Mona and I used to go out very often to whatever restaurant struck our fancy that particular night. My favorite place was a small unknown French restaurant called "Rive Gauche" which was run by an actual Frenchman. He treated me like some kind of star, always giving us the best table and personally serving me my favorite meal which was filet en croute with a delicate strawberry tarte for desert. But the best restaurant I ever experienced in all of California was Auberge du Soleil in Rutherford in the heart of the Napa Valley wine country. Auberge du Soleil became famous many years ago because of a genius chef named Masa Kobayashi. Masa was Japanese but he received all his training in France from Master French chefs. When he first came to San Francisco, he invented a new style of cooking that combined the French sophistication with his Japanese artistic sense. For example, he was the first to use squid ink just to decorate a plate. Far out, Masa! It didn't take long for San Francisco's rich people to discover this man and make him famous. Apparently he used his connections to finance and open up Auberge du Soleil, and it was an immediate success because not only did it offer a continually changing menu that featured Masa himself as the creator, but it was gorgeously designed with a commanding view of the entire Napa Valley. I dined there many times and my best memory is one time when Mona and I had dinner on my birthday when Jason was a baby. Being typically perfect, Jason slept quietly on the booth seat next to me throughout the entire two hour meal without creating any disturbance. The sad part of this particular story is that Masa was murdered in San Francisco, and to this day, his murderer has never been apprehended.

A bizarre comment:   I don't think many people notice this but there are NO cops out on the roads in the Napa Valley. It's probably the only location in the USA where people don't get DUI's. The tourists as well as everybody who lives there goes wine tasting and drinks wine at the restaurants. The Valley is so huge that there's no possible way for people to go out for their wine experience by taxi and the whole designated driver concept is absurd anyway because that would require one person for every vehicle to have no fun at all. I believe the explanation for the lack of DUI's is that the cops have decided not to ruin the economy of such a world famous region.

While I was living in Noe Valley, I owned a small health food store in West Portal. A very unusual 90 year old man named Harry used to come into my store just to shoot the breeze with me on his daily walks around the neighborhood. Harry's job for his entire life had been picking winner stocks and one day he said to me, "Peter, buy Com Disco." I said "Com what?" because disco music made me nauseous. Harry explained to me that Com Disco leased used IBM computers and I wondered how any company could possibly make a decent profit from only leasing used computers. I have no idea why I did this but I actually bought $5,000 worth of their stock. Within a very short amount of time, Com Disco issued a 2 for 1 stock split, and then it split again, and when my stock was worth about $15,000, I sold it. I put my original $5,000 back in the bank, and with the remaining $10,000 I took Mona on a world class two month vacation trip to Europe. First we flew into London and stayed there for a few days. We drank English dark ale, ate steak and kidney pie, and I got to see Rudolph Nureyev at the London Ballet Theater (which was much better than the pie). From there, we rented a car and drove around the English countryside for a bit, randomly staying in farmhouses and of course, stopping at Stonehenge. Then we drove up into Wales where we actually stayed on The Isle of Mona. I loved Wales because it is so ancient and quaint. I felt as if there really were trolls and fairies all around us. Then we took the ferry over to Amsterdam where we intended to buy the best hashish we could find for the rest of our trip, which we did. We took a train from Amsterdam to Brussels where we sprouted with each other overnight, and then we continued on to Paris where we stayed in a lovely pensione right next Notre Dame Cathedral on the Seine. Paris was great, but it's really just another big city with too many people who have bad attitudes. I remember eating in a stand-up cafe deep down in the Paris subway system and being totally impressed with a hot Roquefort cheese tart. Imagine that. A melted cheese tart way down in the bowels of a subway system! In New York, it's cockroaches and rats. The French hang works of art on the walls of their subway stations. In New York, it's obscene grafitti. Of course, we dutifully trucked ourselves over to the Eiffel Tower but we decided not to go up because there was a three hour waiting line for the elevator, and coming from New York City it hardly made sense to wait three minutes for any kind of elevator.

But it wasn't until we rented a car and got out into the countryside that I experienced the real France and the genuinely friendly French people. We drove from Paris to Versailles, the castle of the Kings, and from there we went to Mont St. Michel, a famous monastery built right into the ocean on the east coast of France. Following rivers like the Loire from then on, we stayed in many romantic castles and discovered Rocamadour, the famous city built entirely on the vertical face of a cliff. From the river country, we drove down to the Riviera but decided that the beaches there were hopelessly overcrowded and couldn't hold a candle to California. On the way to the Riviera, we stopped in a tiny nameless town and bought indescribably delicious fresh pastries from a window in the kitchen of somebody's home. We ended up in Lyon on my birthday and I had planned it that way on purpose because I wanted to eat at Paul Bocuse's restaurant. It was then and will always be necessary to book a reservation at Bocuse's restaurant well in advance, if you're lucky enough to get a table at all, considering how famous he is. Paul invented "haute cuisine", and the French government invented the national Grand Chef award for Paul. The entire story of the best meal of my life is in The Interview with Peter Cross, Part 3.

Still high on Bocuse's champagne and munching on the box of original cookies that he gave me when we left, we drove up into Switzerland and stayed in Inverness. Of course, we had to take that famous tram ride that goes all the way to the top of the highest Alp in the area and I could have sworn I saw Heidi herself taking care of a flock of sheep up there. From there it was an incredibly beautiful drive down into Italy, and we went directly to Lake Como which is Italy's version of California's Lake Tahoe except that Lake Como is ancient, the architecture is ancient, and that ancient beauty which has been preserved perfectly for thousands of years is nothing short of perfection. We had to tear ourselves away from Lake Como reluctantly, and then we drove down to Rome to drop off our car. Rome was certainly interesting with the Roman Forum, the Coliseum, and the Trevi Fountain, but once again it's just another big city and if you're from The Big Apple, who needs city people with bad attitudes even if they are Italian? But Italy got better after Rome. We stayed in Florence, a city that is chock full of art and architecture. We also visited The Vatican where I got totally turned off by the outrageous affluence, gilded gold walls jam packed with valuable paintings, and conspicuous consumption in the Pope's home. That's not exactly following Jesus' teaching about giving it all away to the poor, is it? So then we took a train to Venice, and THAT was a city high point that exceeds San Francisco in its uniqueness and true class. We walked until our feet wanted to drop off, over picturesque canal bridges and through tiny winding alleys which led us to the world famous Piazza San Marco and the Ponte di Rialto. We stayed in a pensione that was featured in a romantic Kathryn Hepburn movie called "Summertime" with Rossano Brazzi. The back yard had an old iron arbor covered with flowering vines, and we used to sit out there in the heat of the day, relaxing with a bottle of Italian wine and watching the gondolas go by in the adjacent canal. That arbor was my inspiration for the arbor I built many years later at my dream house on Creston Road, Walnut Creek.

Leaving Venice, we took a train back to Rome and then hopped on a plane to Athens, Greece. I almost wish I had not planned that part of our trip because I had no idea that Greece was not a place I would like, and it was a bad place to end a fabulous vacation. For one thing, the food was atrocious. Almost immediately I got a stomach infection that gave me the runs for the entire rest of our vacation. I sat at The Parthenon and read the pamphlet they hand out, realizing that what I was actually looking at was not really The Parthenon at all. I was actually looking at a partial reconstruction of the place that had been done 400 years ago after the stupid Turks had leveled the thing in a war. Athens is not only just another big city, but it's a filthy city filled with low class men who had a bad habit of yelling catcalls at Mona and annoying us with their lustful tongues hanging out of their drooling mouths. After three days of this crap, we hopped on the first boat to Skiathos which was supposed to be a most romantic and beautiful the Greek island. Not particularly true. As soon as we got off the boat, a group of young Greek shitheads surrounded us and began to torment me, pinch Mona's ass, and threaten to steal her and rape her. Mona was truly frightened so we walked into the local police station where they just yawned and did nothing at all to help us. So we paid too much money for a boat ride out to what was supposed to be the best beach in the Greek Islands with world famous deep purple water. As soon as the boat had deposited us on the beach, it turned right around and left us stranded there and it never came back to pick us up. That world famous beach was all sharp rocks with no sand anywhere. We hadn't even thought to bring any food with us and when the sun set, it became cold and we were hungry and afraid. We could have eventually died of starvation and exposure out there had it not been for a boat full of very nice British people who saw us waving to them for help. They picked us up, rescued our sorry souls and brought us back to Skiathos. There wasn't one single bus on the entire island of Skiathos that wasn't jam packed with sweaty stinking people. Enough said on that subject. Feeling gladness to get out of there, but sadness in our hearts because our two month vacation was finally over, we took the plane from Athens all the way back to San Francisco.

From Noe Valley, I moved to Walnut Creek in Contra Costa County. I wanted to buy a house with a property that had privacy, a swimming pool, and a good location. Privacy was important because I intended to grow marijuana. The swimming pool idea went all the way back to Stanwood when I was growing up and had decided that someday I would have my own pool. The location was important because we intended to have children and wanted to be near good schools. I will never forget the moment that our real estate agent drove down Creston Road and I saw one house which had a six foot high wood lattice fence around the front yard. I said to the agent, "You wouldn't be taking us to that one, would you?" And that was the one! I walked through the front door and immediately saw right through the big glass French doors in the rear side to the pool which was located in the middle of a wide open back yard. The place was a total "fixer upper" that had been trashed by a very stupid guy who had gone broke mismanaging his business. The entire house and yard was a mess and the pool was filled with leaves and trash. But I clearly recognized this diamond in the rough and bought it for $135,000 which was a lot of money for me at that time. Within one week of moving in, the worst and heaviest rains in recent California history began and it rained steadily for a full six months. Two disasters occurred simultaneously. A huge weeping willow tree at the very back corner of my yard came crashing down in a storm, and we developed some serious ground leaks into all our rooms. I found to my dismay that the property had a reverse slope back from the street so all the rain water flooded up against the intersection between the walls and the slab, leaking profusely into the interior. I had no idea how to handle either problem. About a day after both these things happened, I was shopping at the nearest supermarket and just happened to complain about my problems to the cashier. An old hippy with long hair tied back in a pony tail was standing there and he said to me, "Hey, I know how to save your tree. Want me to come over and help you?" His name turned out to be Bird Morningstar (really!) and sure enough, Bird knew exactly what to do. He tied some strong rope to the nearest trees, set up a pully system, and together we hoisted my weeping willow tree back up into position. Then Bird filled the inside of the tree trunk with concrete and bound the whole thing with strong metal wire. He saved my tree.

Next Bird proceeded to help me dig a deep trench around the entire house adjacent to the slab, and into the trench he put perforated drainage pipe and then covered it all with large sized drainage rock. The entire trench sloped back to the rear side of the house where he dug a big hole, put in a perforated barrel with an electric sump pump that automatically drained the barrel whenever it filled up with rain water from the trench and then kicked all the water out to the street via another pipe. I was so impressed with Bird's knowledge and expertise that I hired him to help me landscape the entire property. We worked together every day for about four months with me doing most of the hard manual labor. We dug all the trenches into which Bird laid the pipes to form an automatic sprinkler system for the new lawn that covered the entire front and rear portions of my property. As we worked together and became friends, I discovered that Bird was also from N.Y.C. and that he was an expert in the growing of marijuana as well as every other plant. He told me a story that was hard for me to believe. He had been hired by the Federal Government many years ago in N.Y.C. to manage a secret experiment in the scientific cultivation of marijuana. They gave him a high level security clearance, leased a couple of huge warehouses in the Bronx, and subdivided each warehouse into segregated rooms with twenty foot high ceilings. In each room Bird grew a different variety of pot using humongous grow lamps and huge air conditioning systems to keep the entire place ventilated at all times. I would not have believed his incredible story if Bird had not shown me the photograph album he had kept as a record of his experience. I saw all the photos of every room, from when the plants were babies to when they were harvested at full height and maturity. This is the truth. I have no reason to make up a story like this.

So Bird helped me achieve my life's dream of owning a house with a swimming pool, where I could stand in the center of my property, turn myself around in a 360 degree circle, and every single thing I beheld was something I had created with my own two hands. Here's a photo of Jason and Alex being typically photogenic in a poolside pose:

I had planted east coast red raspberry bushes along the entire back fence. I had planted night blooming pink jasmine bushes along the entire rest of the side and front fences. The vines from these bushes eventually completely covered the wood fence and exuded a heavenly scent of perfume every night. Our gorgeous bright green lawn extended all the way from the front of my property to the rear fence where the raspberries grew and I loved to mow it myself simply because it was my lawn. My entire property was a virtual Garden of Eden and its purpose was to be a our personal playground. Here's a photo of Jason and Alex when they were very young running through the sprinklers in the front lawn with their little raincoats on to keep their clothes dry:

At the right rear corner of my property, Bird and I built a large wooden arbor that was inspired by the arbor in the Venice pensione where Mona and I had stayed. I planted purple trumpet vines all around the arbor, and eventually they grew in such a way that their vines completely covered every square inch of it. I had also planted every conceivable color of flowering rose bush, blue aggapanthas, yellow euryops, very rare black calililies, a fruit bearing mulberry tree (just like my childhood "umbrella tree"), and four raised vegetable beds which were also on the automatic sprinkler system. I grew the best tomatoes, corn, lettuce, blue lake green beans, cucumbers, carrots, squashes, pumpkins, watermelons, and succulent red raspberries. I installed a custom made hot tub right into the pool deck so that we could all relax in it and step down directly into the pool. I had taken advantage of the left rear corner of my property to construct two standing racks for solar panels to heat my pool. I put a solid wire see-through fence around the pool so that my children who were about to be born would be completely safe playing in the back yard and the pool would still be visible. There were four 10 ft. x 4 ft. panels on one standing rack, and the same number on another rack separated by a space of about 15 feet. Both racks were tilted to face the direction of the sun, and the space in between the racks could not be seen by any of my neighbors. So that's where Bird and I began our secret garden.

Bird had been saving his best marijuana seeds for many years and he chose two varieties for me. One was called Afghani Kush and the other was Purple Zacatega from Mexico which has now become one of the most popular varieties in California. Bird taught me all the tricks, and believe me, there are a lot of them that most growers don't know about. It's not at all easy to grow the world's best pot, but it can definitely be done in a back yard in Walnut Creek. Bird taught me how to prune properly and with the Afghani Kush variety, he pruned it in a different way so that instead of having a main trunk with many branches, it had about ten main branches that sprung out in a circle like a strange kind of cactus. This type of plant only grows to a maximum height of about five feet, but each of the ten branches form one continuous enormous bud that is about as long as my forearm and about five inches thick. Bird knew exactly how and when to spike the plants with chemicals that maximized the THC content, and he took care of spraying them to prevent bugs from damaging the buds. He also knew exactly when to harvest because as it turns out, if you wait too long, the THC content diminishes. The last step was to hang the harvested plants upside down for slow, low temperature drying. So I not only had the freshest and most potent pot of my life, but I was literally awash in it. With my property and children at stake against a new law that gave power to the police to totally confiscate the home of a known grower, I had no intention of selling any of it. Instead, I gave Bird all he asked for, and it became one constant party for all my friends. Can you possibly imagine my joy and ecstasy being partially submerged in my solar heated pool, getting blasted and just tripping out on the extreme beauty I had surrounded myself with? Words fail me, and I'm supposed to be a Word Master now.

OK, so now it's time for the Word Master to tell the ecstatic and tragic story of my two precious children, Jason and Alex. As I've said, Mona and I had an open relationship since we first met, and I'm not telling the sex part of my life story on purpose because my web site is intended to be appropriate for all ages and that kind of excitement simply doesn't belong here. Maybe some other place, some other time, but I will say that we both decided to terminate all outside sexual activity because we both believed that it would not be at all appropriate for children to know about. Mona was like so many other women who at a certain time in their lives feel that their "biological clock" is running out of time so she decided we should have children. I did not have the same feeling, but I had always given her absolutely everything she wanted and needed so I gave her that too. Almost immediately after getting pregnant, she discovered that she was "high risk" because for more than four months she vomited constantly every day and night and I often had to take her into the hospital for intravenous feeding. All she could absorb were ice chips that I brought to her and an occasional meal of fried eggs and "tater tots". I held her hand and comforted her throughout the entire ordeal, doing everything in my power to reduce her level of pain and discomfort. Mona was a nurse whose specialty was womens' health so she quit drinking and smoking pot. Much later she resumed a bit of drinking but she had formed a new negative opinion about marijuana that backfired on me big time as you will soon find out. Bored to tears, I sat through those awful Lamaze classes with her in preparation for a natural child birth. But when her first labor began and lasted 19 hours without a birth, she began to compromise her principles. When the third labor occurred and the birth process actually happened, she was screaming for every drug in the book and she took whatever they shoved into her mouth. The entire experience of pregnancy was horrible for me because I couldn't bear to see my love in such pain. I was there in the operating room when baby Jason popped out. Up until that very moment, I was still not into the idea of having my own children, but when they put that tiny little life form into my hands, lightning struck me in the heart. I literally staggered from the sudden impact and I fell totally 100% in love with Jason from day one.

Jason was born physically perfect and I soon became aware that I had a very advanced soul in my keeping. His face was charismatic, his hair was gorgeous, he was adorable, photogenic, and cute in the most surprising ways. I nicknamed him "JJ" because I thought that was a cute name, and I also called him "my little man" because this tiny little boy gave off the aura of a mature man. Here's my proof - a photo of my little man at age 1-1/2:

One day when Jason was about 2-1/2 years old he came out of his bedroom with his hands on his hips, looked up a me with indignance, and said, "I NOT JJ, I Jason Burger!" That was not the first time Jason had astonished me and all I could think of to say was, "OK, Jason, whatever you say. Jason it is from now on". When Jason was three years old, Alex was born and it was the exact same story with the horrible high risk pregnancy and the lightning strike of love straight into my heart at the moment of birth. Alex was born with pyloric stenosis, a condition in which the pyloric valve leading into his stomach was closed so that he couldn't even digest breast milk. To save his precious little life, we had to take him to Childrens Hospital in Oakland for an emergency operation. He was only the size of my right hand, and I sat there with him day and night watching over this precious tiny baby with a horrible styrofoam cup tied to his head and a tube leading into it. Mona probably saved his life one day at the hospital when she caught the doctor making a huge mistake by giving him the wrong meds. You might imagine this nurse's fury at that kind of medical incompetence. Alex also developed severe asthma, headaches, and skin rashes. We had all sorts of treatments for his asthma, including little inhalers that he carried around with him, a hospital supplied breathing machine when the hand held things ceased to be effective, and ultimately, many emergency trips to the hospital to save his life. His awful headaches used to break my heart on a regular basis and make me want to scream in frustration and smash my own head against the nearest wall because there really is nothing much you can give a very young child to stop that kind of pain. He used to just stand there clutching his poor little head with both hands, weeping, and I would just cry my heart out. Even now as I write these words, tears are coming to my eyes because those painful images in my mind will never go away.

The very same day that we brought Alex home from the hospital I witnessed a brotherly love that was unlike anything I'd seen in my entire life. Jason immediately took Alex under his wing, adored and protected him, and Alex worshiped his older brother. They both had superstar quality and together they had nova star quality. I called them "my all-stars", and here's why:

For about 10 years, they were absolutely inseparable and everybody I knew saw the same thing in them that I saw. Many people used to tell me how special and unique they both were and all I could do was agree with them. Here's another photo of the inseparable brothers that was taken in the middle of a pumpkin field by my sister during her last visit with me before she became a Buddhist nun:

During their teenage years, they used to fight with each other in a special way too, just expressing their teenage craziness and aggressiveness safely with each other. I used to tell them to save that fighting for when they were with their mother but it didn't do any good, they were just doing what came naturally. Nowadays, they are inseparable again, with an amazing mutual love and respect for each other that is simply unlike anything I've ever seen in other siblings in my entire life. I could go on and on endlessly about all the magic times I had with those two boys before the end came for us all. Soon after Alex was born, Jason discovered the movie Ghostbusters and became a Ghostbuster himself. I put together some spare PVC parts that I had lying around and made him his "Ghostbuster gun". He used to roam throughout the house and property, busting ghosts left and right in order to keep our home safe for all of us. Both Jason and Alex went through the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles phase together, constructed vast empires out of Leggos, and just before I lost them, they had both gotten serious about collecting Spiderman and X-man cards and comics. Both my boys used to frolic in our hot tub and float around our heated pool like they were born for the life, which obviously they were. Jason always led the way for Alex, trying out new things and activities that Alex invariably wanted to do with his brother. They were best friends, best brothers, and no other friend of either of them could possibly come between those two.

I turned the vacation theme of my life into a fine art for my family. I took them to the Bahamas where we stayed in a private rental house on a pristine and gorgeous private beach where my sons could romp around all day long with no clothes on. I took them to Disneyworld four different times. The first time was for three days and we stayed at the Polynesian Resort. Here's a photo of me and the boys which was taken on the beach facing the Magic Kingdom:

The second time was for five days and we stayed at the Carribean Resort, the third time was for seven days, the fourth time was for nine days. On both of the last trips we stayed at the Yacht and Beach Club Resort which was the finest hotel I had ever stayed in. They have a world class swimming pool which is shaped like a very complicated lagoon, and instead of concrete, it has a soft sandy bottom. At one end there is a huge wrecked pirate ship where you can climb a ladder up the mast and then go through a long covered chute that deposits you into the pool. There are waterfalls, the entire pool area is landscaped like a tropical paradise, and there is even a whirlpool in one portion that spins people around in a circle. The Yacht and Beach Club Resort has two first class restaurants. One is the Yachtsman's Steak House - great steaks, great side dishes, and freshly baked little loaves of bread that are accompanied by little bowls of baked fresh garlic cloves that you can spread on your bread. The other great restaurant is called Ariel's, a classy fish restaurant serving fresh Maine Lobster and abalone among other things. You'd think that after all the time I've spent at Disneyworld I would have seen and done it all, but that's not true. I could spend my entire life inside of Typhoon Lagoon and never want to leave there.

Our last vacation together was one that I had planned almost a year in advance. I booked the very end unit on Captain Jack's Wharf in Provincetown. Lying in our beds, we could look out through the huge windows and see the entire unobstructed view of the harbor that wrapped around all the way from the right side to the left. We flew into Boston, rented a car, and drove up the Cape to Provincetown. But instead of taking the highway that runs through the middle of the cape to save time, we took the small road that runs along the interior bay side. This is a famous scenic drive that many people take because the road passes through all the small and quaint little towns that line the coast. Along the way are hundreds of places to stop at and buy real antiques, and the New Englanders have turned that activity into a verb. They call it "antiquing". I had been having some marital problems with Mona for quite some time and my intention was to overcome all that through a wonderful and memorable family vacation experience. While I was driving along, my attention was grabbed by a beautiful old three story house which had a big sign out front that said, "The Quilt Lady". Previously, Mona and I had talked about wanting some kind of nice quilt for our bed, so I stopped the car and went inside the house. The Quilt Lady turned out to be a woman who had somehow cut a deal with the Amish people to market their quilts all over the world. The Amish women are world famous for creating the most gorgeous hand sewn quilts. They work in teams, with somebody designing the patterns for each team. Each woman has her specialty talent, and it's all combined to form unique works of art. All three floors of this house were crammed full of quilts hanging side by side on long hangers. The Quilt Lady told me that the first two floors had the least expensive quilts, and those were created with light pastel colors that the Amish women believe are the least desirable. I didn't see anything that really turned me on, so I asked her to take me up to the third floor. Immediately upon entering the large room, I saw it. The thing just jumped out at me and screamed, "Buy me!" The quilt was a combination of dark blue and dark purple colors with a big round flower design in the center that was ringed with hand crocheted red hearts. Feeling the fear of poverty I said to the woman, "OK, how much is that one?" Her sales ability attacked my financial sensibility when she said, "Oh, you picked the best and most expensive one, didn't you? It's $1,100". I reflected for all of five seconds and then pulled out my Mastercard, thinking to myself, "I have absolutely no idea how I will pay for this quilt but I'll figure out the answer some other time". And that's the secret behind what now covers my bed and is called "The Love Quilt".

Jason and Alex loved Captain Jack's Wharf, they loved the beaches, they loved the town with all the fishing boats, and we had a blast together. Unfortunately for me, Mona wasn't enjoying herself anywhere near as much as I was. One day, I bought two big live lobsters right off the fishing boat because the boys had never eaten lobster and they simply don't get any fresher and better than the ones I bought. One lobster weighed three pounds and the other one weighed five pounds. So then I had to borrow a huge pot to cook them in because there wasn't any pot that large on the wharf. That night I boiled this huge pot of water and while the boys watched, I dropped both lobsters into the boiling water. You may or may not be aware that lobsters give out a tiny scream when they hit boiling water. That sound freaked both Jason and Alex and then they both refused to eat anything at all. So there I was with eight pounds of cooked lobster and Mona didn't want any either. What could I do? I would never have a feast like that again. So I began swigging some vodka, got rolling drunk, and ate the whole eight pounds in one giant lobster pig out. Seeing this, Mona was rightfully repulsed and with Jason and Alex both looking on, she took a huge swipe at me and hit me upside the head, knocking me clear off my chair and yelling, "You big fucking PIG!" That's my last memory of our last family vacation. If there was more, I don't remember it and you can probably understand why now.

The end of my dream life came suddenly, shattering my world in an instant. On Sunday night, May 4, 1994, I put Jason and Alex to sleep in my usual manner, singing them lullabies that I had made up and stroking their hair until they fell into blissful sleep. On Monday morning when I woke up, they were gone. I didn't know that anything unusual had occurred until later that night when nobody returned. The next day when I realized that they were REALLY gone and that something cataclysmic was actually happening to me, I panicked and began calling Mona's friends who confirmed to me that she actually had left me and taken my children away. I was scared out of my mind and I didn't know what to do, so I left the house and drove into San Francisco to be with one of my "friends" who I mistakenly thought might be able to help me. When I returned to my home, it was shut up tight and the locks had been changed. I was trying to break into my own home and apparently one of the neighbors saw me and called the police. They threw me into jail in solitary confinement in a small cold concrete cell that had no window in the solid concrete door. There wasn't even anything to sit on, so I just sat on the floor and screamed until they let me out the next day. The police gave me a copy of the court approved restraining order which I had not known about until that moment. Mona had totally prevented me from seeing my children, talking to them on the phone, writing letters to them, or even getting within 100 yards of my own home! You might well ask how she managed to do that to me. Mona had told the judge that I smoked pot, but she lied and said that I could be "potentially dangerous" to the children. To this day, the courts view marijuana as an issue which is legal justification for taking children away from a pot smoker. That makes two women who crucified me over pot.

What I now call my Great Agony began in earnest. Since I was prevented from going anywhere near my home or my children, I rented a series of pathetic rooms that were within walking distance of my house in the mistaken belief that the close proximity would somehow allow me to be able to see my sweethearts. When I was STILL prevented from seeing my boys, my loneliness and pain increased to the breaking point so I started drinking heavily to achieve unconsciousness because I was having severe nightmares every single night about losing my children. This was actually what was happening to me during the day and that was horrible enough. I was forced to pay $2000 to a complete shithead of a psychologist "court evaluator" who of course wrote a bad report. After about two months of not having any contact at all with Jason and Alex and being almost out of my mind with grief, the court allowed me to see them on the condition that I agreed to submit to the most humiliating experience of my life. Supervised visitations. I had to pay those creeps $35/hour just to be able to see my boys. It cost me over $100 to take them to a movie and I had to pay for their popcorn and soda too!

I spent about $30,000 on three different lawyers in an attempt to break that restraining order and the damn supervised visitations. As each lawyer completely failed to obtain one single benefit for me, I fired them and hired another one. But when my money ran out, I had no alternative except to represent myself in court In Pro Per. And that's when I learned what really goes on in there. I had experienced more than enough degradation by that point so one day I stood up in court, looked that judge straight in the eyes and said, "Your honor, I will NOT allow my children to see me being degraded in front of them like that by those cursed supervisors. If you will not get rid of them once and for all, I will simply choose not to see my children any more. If you think that's what's in their best interest, then so be it". The judge looked at me curiously and said, "You don't seem at all crazy to me. I have no problem letting you see your children unsupervised. I agree with you, let's get rid of them". I learned a very important lesson that day about what lawyers do and what lawyers don't do, and it's all in The Truth About Lawyers. Well, my visitation situation started to improve dramatically, but then it was Christmas and Mona took the boys back east to visit her family who lived in New York and Washington DC. While back there she met a man we both knew, fell in love and got married. You will NEVER guess who Mona picked to be her second husband. Not in a million years would you ever guess it, so I'll have to tell you. She picked old Harry Meyer, the nut case pedophile keyboard player from Steam who became Chris Robison, the Pooh Bear guy! Understandably, I completely freaked out. But when she brought her marriage certificate back into court, the judge called me back into his chambers, sat me down, and spoke the words to me that will be carved in my mind forever. He said, "Peter, I want to tell you that you've been fucked over worse than anyone who's ever come through my courtroom. But the law is clear on this issue and I have absolutely no lattitude whatsoever. She is free to move back east and she can take your children with her". It was then that I gave up my will to fight, and even my will to live anymore. I soon lost my job because I was unable to function on any level, and I slowly came to a tragic decision to sell my dream home because I simply could not afford the house payments and the punishing child support payments. Of course when I made that horrible decision to sell, housing prices crashed for the first and only time in recent California history and I took a $5000 loss just to get out from under the weight of it all. My Great Agony turned into a very quick descent into Hell itself. I was completely crucified by Mona and I felt like I was right up there beside my beloved Jesus on the cross, being tortured with him. And THAT's when I changed my last name and became Peter Cross. The lucky star that shined down on me all my life had gotten severely crossed by very real evil energy, and now you should be able to understand how Peter Cross became Starcrost.

The rest of my story of how I came to write many of the songs that are on my web site, and the creation of my web site itself are in The Swami and Me and also scattered throughout these web pages. Lots of much less interesting stuff has happened since then and most of it is irrelevant and not particularly happy or worth writing about. But this story is in the process of writing itself a happy ending and since anybody who is reading this sentence has probably gotten this far without quitting, why not continue on by clicking on Peter Crossing the River Styx in the Opposite Direction?