The beginning

Home neighborhood: Del Monte Park, in the middle of the peninsula, at the north bend in Highway 68, in the top ridges of the next-to-highest mountain range. Not as idyllic as advertised, if you’re not rich.

2010: this genetic monster is 52 in this photo

My next-oldest brother’s name is Danny. He’s an athletic bad-ass; you can see him do crazy-athlons online, and if you’re into MMA, he devised the only sensible scoring system known. But back in 1970, he was a buck-toothed 12-year-old whose big brother called him “Toothpick,” with a hyper-imaginative six-year-old brother reading at his grade level, and one thing he could do to make me less obnoxious was to read comics with me. Later, when he got all jock-ish and grew up and stuff, he left the pile to me.