Tell me all about 10-year-old you

fuk.

1974-
I am 10. I live in a mobile home park in Southern California.
My mom has thrown my dad out of the house, for good reason.
My little brother is 3. He has severe, emergency-room asthma.

My 30 year-old dad is living in a motel with his alcoholic brother and fucking an 18 year old who will then become pregnant and call my mom to cry about it.
My dad doesn't give us any money nor pay any child support (and never will).
There is no family to help, and no savings account or property.

He buys a TV on credit and forges my mom's name. Creditors come to the door on the weekend, my mom sends me to answer, I hand over the Carte Blanche card to the nice lady who cuts it in half.

When the phone rings I am instructed in the many things I must say in order to not have the family broken up by the state, as I am too young to legally be home alone. I do not want to go into foster care, so I memorize the lies as best I can.

My 30 year old mom, who has a high school education and no life experience is working from 11pm to 7am for $3.65 an hour in an electronics factory.

(Who is at home during the night you may well ask? Me. Taking care of my little brother).

She works from 3pm to 11pm cleaning offices and houses. She sleeps when we are at school.

I mow lawns, wash cars, and clean other people's houses in the neighborhood, where I am a target for every perv.

I change my brother's Toddler Pampers, make the food, go to the store, do the laundry as best I can, and deal with my Dad's drunken visits to the domicile. On the weekends I help my mom clean the day care/preschool where my brother goes in exchange for a discounted rate.

On Sunday we are sent to church on a bus.

That is when I was ten. Just the facts.

I live in the nicest house my family will ever live in, a large ranch on several acres of land in a nice rural community outside of Ann Arbor. The house is set into a hill, with the driveway going down into the garage which is underneath the house and opens into the basement. Our basement is huge, it's a big playroom for my two brothers and me. My brothers are 8 and 12, I'm the middle kid. We have 3 cats and a dog, a basset hound. I hate having to clean up the crap in the yard from the dog, I don't like her much but my dad does. Our back yard has a big hill, at the bottom of it is a sand lot and woods that stretch back to the river. In the spring, the woods get really swampy and patches of quicksand appear; luckily, none of us get stuck in it, though it's one of my greatest fears.

I have to live in a room with my little brother, but it's ok for the most part. It's a big room. We push our beds together at night sometimes and pretend we are in the cockpit of an AT-AT from star wars. I think star wars is possibly the best thing ever in the history of humankind, and am constantly trying to figure out how I can get to their galaxy somehow.

I read non-stop, and always have. My earliest memory is from right before I learned how to read at age 3, looking at words and knowing all the letters, very frustrated. I don't remember how I learned, but knowing how to read made the first 4 grades of school pretty boring, and I had teachers that would get angry with me because I would wander off to read while the other kids were being taught about Mr T and his Tall Teeth along with the other letters of the alphabet. My family didn't have TV because my dad said it would rot our brains. To this day, I think it was probably the best thing my parents ever did for us.

I'm smart in school, particularly because of my reading/comprehension skills. I'm only OK in math, but the reading and language skills are so high that I always get treated like a whiz kid anyway. We have a class called 'special projects' where I get to leave regular class and go to a different room with the other smart kids, including my friend Frank, and do things like go to the cemetery next to the school and make rubbings of the gravestone inscriptions with wax paper and crayons. Luckily, this year my teacher is Mrs. Wol***ger, who was the same teacher I had last year. She's young and really cool, she switched grades so she could be our teacher for two years, and just about every single kid got to be in her class again. She makes us learn how to square dance, though.

I'm kind of a slow social developer. I'm not really interested in girls for another year or so, I'm more interested in the army. When I stay at Frank's house, we get up in the middle of the night and dress up in army gear his dad has left over from Vietnam. We tramp around out in the country around his parent's house for hours in the dark. He also reads voraciously, we've both read 'the lord of the rings' and all kinds of Piers Anthony and other fantasy books. We don't stay such good friends in middle school, though we still hang out sometimes. My best friend is a kid named Matt who comes from a very poor family, their house is barely more than a broken down cottage. His mom is really depressing, she's divorced with three kids. I'm at their house a lot, but I try not to be around Matt's mom. Matt is not good in school, but he's a great natural artist, able to draw things with uncanny precision, and pretty creative. He also is obsessed with the army, so are our brothers. We play army all the time.

I paint a picture in art, a stencil painting of a bird on a branch, repeated four times with a different colored beak each time. It gets sent to Japan for an art exhibition and I forget about it; seven years later it is returned with a letter thanking me for it, matted and in a nice frame. It's on my wall right now. Things at home are starting to worry me a little. My parents fight more than ever, and it's really loud. Also, my dad is starting to get really violent. I'm beginning to realize that other kid's dads don't punish them quite like ours does. One time he comes home at night with my older brother, whose face is totally covered in blood and swollen up. He makes my brother go back out to the car and clean the blood off the seat. When we hear his car in the driveway at night, everyone hides and is quiet, even my mom. He is a respected political figure in our town. Kids pick on me because of who my dad is all the time.

I'm mediocre at sports, but still playing most of them. I like soccer a lot, and I play baseball and floor hockey, which I also really like. I can't watch sports on tv though, so I don't know as much about them as the other kids. When fifth grade starts, I'm in a different school. All the kids want to be like the older kids now. I don't get picked on quite as much, I'm a little more anonymous in this bigger school. I don't like my teacher because she patronizes me. I hate all adults that patronize me, and most of them try to do it.

I've just changed schools. I'd been at the first school since the age of 4 or 5. The school has a large playground with a long wall with goals painted along it. We play football at breaks and lunchtimes. Due to it's layout we can't have the two goals facing each other, so we have this odd arrangement where we choose two of the painted goals and play in a semi-circle between the two. I'm a good footballer and get asked to join a Sunday league side, the Red Rockets, but my parents tell me I'm not allowed. There's a field next to the school which we use during the summer months - years earlier the school needed to expand to take more kids and they built classroom huts on the edge of the field. There are three of them slightly raised off the ground. We can't get underneath them but we imagine that they must have rats underneath. The one that was my classroom for a year also has my Starsky & Hutch Ford Torino model car underneath somewhere. In the boys toilets, there's a pair of y-fronts stuck to the ceiling - no-one knows how they got there. There's also the sole of a shoe. My best friend's little brother points at it and says 'David Soul'. My friend Dan saw an episode of Starsky & Hutch while he was on holiday in France. He says that, over there, the theme tune goes "Star-skiiii A 'utch la-la-la-la-la-la".

It's a strange time at school because we don't really have a teacher. We have a continuous stream of supply teachers. I don't think there was a curriculum, as such, and I don't remember learning much at that time. For the 20-30 of us in this class it's a really odd time - there is a palpable sense of community within this class. All the other kids in our year have had proper teachers but we are the 'lost kids' who get the supply teachers. We like Hong Kong Phooey - someone has a book which he claims is the 'Hong Kong Phooey Guide to Kung-Fu'. A lot of my friends have the 'Spy's Guidebook' - it teaches you how to write in code, the best places to leave messages for fellow 'agents' and how to work out whether you neighbour is running a counterfeiting operation. We all want to be spies when we grow up. My friend Dan, who has all the Doctor Who books, also has the Grease soundtrack album performed by the Smurfs. Years later I find out that he was just playing the stardard album at 45rpm. There are two girls in my class that I like - Heidi and Louise. I like Heidi because no-one else in the world is called Heidi except for the one in Switzerland. Heidi wears her hair in plaits. I don't know exactly why I like Louise, but I do. She has long blonde hair and is quiet. I name my bunny after her.

I like it at this school and have many friends, life is good. Then I get uprooted from this school and placed in another, a Church of England school. The new school is smaller and all the kids know each other really well. I'm an outsider. I'm really unhappy. We do a lot of verbal reasoning tests, in preparation for the 11-plus exam. Because the older you are the more intelligent you should be, there's a sliding scale of percentage points that gets added to your score depending on your relative age to the class. Being born in March I get 5% added to my score. In the test I score 98% so my final mark is 103%. We haven't really covered percentages at the time but it still doesn't make sense. I'm moved into a the 'A'-stream (crazy fule), so have to join a new class of people I don't know. Again I lose all my friends.

Why did I have to change schools? Because my Mum had a dream where God told her to put me in a new school. Both my parents have become religious. My Dad is being confirmed. My Mum becomes a Sunday school teacher. I have to go to church on a Sunday. I join the church choir and have to sing at weddings (for which I get paid exactly one of God's English Pounds). Sitting at the front of a church looking at the congregation gives me a unique perspective. The front of the church is full of people who get dressed up to go to church as a social engagement not because they have any faith. I hate church but my parents tell me I have to go. At no point do I ever believe that there is a God.

Life at home is dull. My Dad doesn't like having visitors to the house and my Mum doesn't like me going to other peoples'. It's as if I'm locked away. I have a sister but she's two years younger than me and we don't play together. I spend most of my time playing with Lego. I like to make space ships because Star Wars rules. My ambition is to make a really big (well, life size) Millenium Falcon (and still is). I worry about colour with my Lego-making. I prefer to make things all in the same colour, or at least make the colour symmetrical. My Mum has a friend who lives around the corner who we visit once in a month of Sundays, her son used to me my best friend at my first school. He says that the other kids at the first school thought that I had died. We play Lego together and he mixes the colours up - blue blocks with red blocks with yellow blocks. Nutter.

I also draw a lot. My Dad brings home from work reams of A3 tractor-fed continuous paper for us to draw on. My sister likes to draw shoes. She draws a small shoe in the centre of a page and then starts a new sheet of paper. My Dad is annoyed by the wastage. I get to draw on the back of the sheets that my sister's used.

My Dad is becoming increasingly distant. He's got a strange sense of humour and he thinks if he's wacky enough (in a Mork kind of way) then that'll see him through his parental duties. My Dad collects the bits of moulded plastic that are stuck to bits of cardboard when you buy drawing pins, for example - I think they're called blister packs. He fills these with plaster and sticks them to a piece of wood and paints it in different shades of beige. He mounts it in a frame and on the back he signs it with his name and underneath '1945 - 2010'. I've never asked him about this. He also collects milk bottles - at the weekends he gets up early and drives out until he finds a small local milk float and buys a pint of milk. He takes these home, takes a rubbing of the embossed dairy logo on the bottle and stores the empties in the loft. We have milk delivered but sometimes the top of the milk has been drunk. My Dad thinks it's the paperboy. He gets a fresh bottle of milk and carefully removes the foil cap and transfers the milk to another container. He washes out the bottle and then carefully fills it with white emulsion paint, replaces the foil cap and gets up early the next day to switch it with what the milkman brings. We stop getting the papers delivered.

My Dad's side of the family live far, far away in Kent, and visit rarely. My paternal grandmother adores my sister. We're in the kitchen and my sister, done up like a princess, has just flounced out of the room. My grandmother says to me "Don't worry, we can't all be beautiful" and follows her out of the room while I sit alone in the kitchen and cry into the sleeves of my Superman costume. All the attention and pressure on my sister will drive her into anorexia. Without any attention nothing as drastic happens to me, I got off lightly, but I will turn into a lonely, depressed teenager who finds it difficult to relate to other people and who will fail several A-levels and whose mother will beg him to say that he's on drugs, because she can't understand what went so very wrong. And so the fun began.

Hmmm, 1988. My family came back to England from Pakistan a year ago and moved down to Kent from the house we’d kept in Market Harborough all the years we were living abroad (since I was 2). I didn’t want to move to Rochester, as it sounds like ‘rot’. I like our new house, although the stair well is really big and dark at night, when the Victorian floorboards also creak because of temperature and humidity differences. We moved just after the big 1987 hurricane, and I kind of feel left out because our house roof didn’t get blown off. Dad's around intermittently, but still off freelancing in places like Bangladesh and Bhutan, but we've settled down as my sister is going to senior school next year, which is a good thing as she can't really handle it at our current school.

I’ve been going there for a while, and am learning lots of swear words. I didn’t know any before, and got told off one evening at dinner a little while ago for calling Eleanor a twat, when I’d just that second made the word up as a variation on ‘twit’. Some of the kids in my class don’t believe me when I tell them that I’ve lived in other countries, and I have to ask my mum if I can take a photograph from one of the albums in to show them. I have a pathological fear of not being believed when I really am telling the truth, and get hot and flustered when someone accuses me of lying. I am also starting to deal with being continually being called posh, when I just know a lot of words and how to pronounce them. I am busted one day for having painted the word ‘fluorescent’ in bright green on a piece of card that could have very well been used for lots of things if I hadn’t been so wasteful. They knew it was me because I’d spelt it correctly. One day a boy from the top class (which I will be in next year, when we will have to take peculiarly easy logic tests and copy out our best essays and send them off for the 11-plus people to look at) who has previously been known as the best person for drawing in the school, challenges me to a draw-off, as I have built up a reputation. I do a nice picture of a little fawn (I am a combination of very twee and horribly cynical at this time) in pastels on paper that isn’t really right and has the texture of cheap shiny bog roll and whup his ass to unanimous voting by all his mates. I can’t remember what he drew, but he is pissed off. It will be another year before I have an ongoing battle with the blonde chunky Daniel in my class as to who will win the weekly quickfire maths test set by the bestest teacher in the world, Mr Bryant.

I work out that boys testicles really are that sensitive when, after being goaded and asked by a friend to kick him in the groin, I do, and he doubles up in horrible pain. He obviously didn’t know either, or thought he was a superman or something. He doesn’t retaliate, as he is a good sport and walks home part of the way with me from school. I don’t think he fancies me though, and I don’t really like any of the boys at school. They’re all dumb apart from Neil, and he’s a little cross-eyed and shorter than me, so that’ll never work, haha.

I am a show-off and immensely arrogant, but also terrified of too much attention. I sort of want the fashionable toys and particularly Wallaby shoes that some of the kids have, but not really as I have a sneaking feeling that they’re really stupid. My favourite recording artistes are Jive Bunny, Billy Ocean, Madonna and the Academy of St Martins In The Fields (for their recording of minor Vivaldi concerti). This year I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Jane Austen for the first time, and think it’s ultimately cool. I still do.

I wish I had an Amiga like my friend Barry. His dad is a computer expert and a very strange man. When I once told him my family ate kosher, he asked me if I thought god would strike me down with lightning if I ate a pork sausage. I said I didn't think so. He is very grumpy and I don't like him being around. He also lets Barry watch stuff like Monty Python, Blackadder, and Not The Nine O'Clock News. I have never seen these before, but I watch them when I'm over at Barry's house and they are very funny.

I still have to go to Hebrew school every Sunday and I hate it. I think it is funny that we use a local Catholic school for our Hebrew classes and so there is a big statue of Jesus on the cross on the wall. In the week, I go to an all-boys school, so it is strange to see girls at Hebrew school, though sometimes they have differenet classes from us. I have a really big crush on Samantha Robin, but she is angry with me because me and another boy found a ribbon and started pulling it and playing with it and it turned out to be hers.

I really like pop music. I saw Michael Jackson and Kim Wilde at Wembley last year, and I also just saw MC Hammer and Snap, which was amazing! I read Smash Hits but I don't understand all of the jokes. I also listen to the radio and tape songs I like off of it, then record myself making announcements between them. My friend Daniel's brother also made me a tape with James Brown and LL Cool J on it. I listen to it until it breaks.

I am doing really well at school, especially English, because I have got the highest marks for every story essay ALL year, except for once when my friend Ian won. I LOVE writing stories and write in a sketchbook at home as well as at school. For some reason, I am good at everything except science. I get bullied a bit by some of the boys in the year above me, but people in my class know that I am funny so they like me. Soon those older boys will leave, I hope.

Every Friday I have to go and see a child psychologist in hampstead called Mrs Luchiani. It is because my teachers and my parents think that I have a very bad temper. I guess I do, but I enjoy having a bad temper, it is something I use to protect myself because I am quiet small. I think that they are all overreacting, but I had to start doing this because I beat up my friend Adam P1nk3rf13ld after school when he went around telling everyone that I am the devil. Mrs Luchiani is strange, she gets me to talk about my week and draw pictures. I mostly draw pictures of Garfield and Disney characters, which I am very good at drawing. Sometimes we just sit in silence and this makes me very uncomfortable.

Every Friday, my mum takes me to variety Video in Belmont Circle and I rent a film. She lets me watch most things even though I am young, and I see a lot of Steve Gutenberg and John Candy movies, as well as horror films like Poltergeist whcih scare me. I genuinely believe in ghosts and psychic phenomena, especially after my grandmother died and my mum says that she saw her ghost sitting on my aunt's sofa. I am also terrified of the possibility of World War III and a new holocaust, and have lots of nightmares about concentration camps and Nazis. I am convinced that a World War could start literally overnight without warning, and that people would come knocking on our door to take us away because we were Jewish. One night, there was an illegal rave in a field close to our house. I heard all the shouting and police helicopters overhead and was convinced that it was the beginning of the end.

Not much in the beging of being ten year old me. I had just started growing acustom to being the smartest one in the calss. Then Fourth grade was over. I went to NYC for a week during summer break. Spent the rest of summer in summer school. A couple of my friends were in the same summer school. Then I was off to Fifth grade.

In fifth grade a few things changed. As we all know, 9/11 happened. That was quite a day for a ten year old. You know, your grandma waking up at six in the morning and then minutes later wake you up by screamming at the television. Well, something else happened that year. A girl I only knew through one of my friend's sister had skipped a grade. She ended up in my class. So now it was, will Aja still be the smartest one? I think I was.

What else happened was the first time I was accused of liking boys. I was always a tomboy, and still am, so it was strange that I would like boys this young. The truth was, I didn't like any boys. I had however become friends with more boys, especially a boy named Luis. He is like the kind boy who doesn't play sports. So then every one was saying I liked him. That was so wrong. He liked me. He even told me. I decided I still wanted to be his friend. He says he doesn't liek me any more but others say he does. I don't care. We became good friends when we started talking about the Simpsons everyday. I hadn't quite discovered music yet, so it was all about the Simpsons.

Nothing much else happened. It was pretty much the same as all the other years of my life.

I thought I was gay. (I wasn't).

I thought I was pretty cool (I wasn't).

I thought that I could communicate complex thoughts nonverbally with my dog. (Unproven).

I thought there could be no better friend in the world than J3r2mi4h King. (There could, and dissecting cow's hearts wasn't fun).

I thought that sex involved ice cubes and pee. (Occasionally, unfortunately, true).

I thought that if I sat on the swingset and closed my eyes and fantasized about ice cubes and pee and a certain girl in my class nobody could tell. (They could: it was the raging hard-on that gave it away.)

I went by "J.C." and I spelled it "Jaycee." (Why, why, why?)

I read Watership Down for a book report and got my first F, 'cus my teacher didn't believe I could understand it. (Marxist bunnies!)

Physically yes, but mentally?

Physically yes, but mentally?

mentally, he's 30

The housemaster is Quack Mendl. He calls me the "the fairy footballer" and, in exchange for exemption from corporal punishment, tries to recruit me as a spy. When I tell my parents proudly about this they say "I hope you're not turning into a clipe". I learn my lesson. I try to teach the other boys how to masturbate (it somehow involves crushing a piece of paper against the mattress with your genitals) but they feign incomprehension. Or perhaps they aren't actually doing it yet.

I'm top in English and bottom in everything else. They call me "Nidge" because my initials are N.J. Or sometimes "Rabbit", because I have rabbity front teeth. I doodle on my school jotters and riff so fast during guitar lessons that the teacher tells me to slow down. I run everywhere, playing a game called "Greek Drivers" which involves overtaking on blind corners. I win a drawing prize and appear as Black Patch The Pirate in a school play called "Ultima Ora", the last shore. I completely fail to memorize my lines, and improvise instead. I'm invited to sing at the boarding house end-of-year concert. I do an acoustic guitar version of "She'll Be Coming Round The Mountain" and everybody joins in. Callum Campbell, who I love but also hate because he's good-looking but also savage, tries to get people to call me "Humperstink" because I'm a singer, but the name doesn't stick.

My cassette tape recorder gets confiscated. Transistor radios are banned in the boarding house, but housemaster Quack has never seen a tape recorder before, and it's not included in the rules. He takes it anyway. He also confiscates a book of sheet music from "Hair", sex manual "The Little Red Schoolbook" and a US military cap I wear in bed. I'm reading Gerald Durrell and Paul Gallico and Evelyn Waugh's "Decline and Fall".

I only really feel happy in the holidays, riding my yellow bike around the "fast routes" of Psychiko with my brother Mark, listening to the cicadas, playing with other ex-pat kids like Sisi and Lala, the hippy twins, or Martina, the American girl with the glass cube house. Highlight of the year is probably singing "Hey Jude" with the garage band belonging to "Monster", a rich American teen who lives in a big Hardy Boys house along Narkissou. I've never sung with a band before.

when i was ten i had just moved to brighton, brisbane, australia from margate in redlcliffe. (like a five min drive from my old house)i came to a new school and was surprised at how small it was (350/360 kids), i was givin (literally) a friend named alicia and i hated it, but she was the only one who would sit with me so i sorta just blocked it all out. i had friends in my grade that i could talk to but in lunch hrs and stuff they went off and i just didnt fit in. i stayed at alicias once (please never again!!!) and she was trying to give me alchohol (i was ten!!)but i didnt drink, after that i got a bf and she was like "its between me and him choose" and i choose her (who else would sit with me), my bf ran downstairs wen i told him i chose her and started hitting his head on a brick wall. 3yrs he got a brain tuma and had to go thruough kemo ect.. hes getting a lot better thank good but i cant help think that part of that all was my fault. but everyone says it was when he went head over heels off his bike. lots of people hated me in primary school because i told them what i thought of them. alicia turned nasty so i told he to get lost. then i found friends that i knew i was going to be friends for life with. brooke, kara and jacob. we were best friends for nearly 2 yrs and brooke, jacob and i all went to high school while kara went to a diff school, we all still keep in contact with her and i can tell you that even though when i wa 10 i hated most of it, i made the best friends that will always be there for me and that truely makes me happy.

My best friend Tricia Murphy said that Kevin Dunn's parents told him the facts of life right there at the dinner table. I am stunned by this information, mostly becuase I don't know what the facts of life are. When I asked my mother, she told me alot about birds and eggs, and then handed me a book about bees.
I feel that "the facts of life' are, indeed FACTS - and RULES - that everyone will become privy to as they grow older. Kind of like going from brownie to girl scout.
FACT: Work hard and you will progress.
That sort of thing.
I feel that my goal should be to figure out "the facts of life".
I am devastated when I realize it's just sex.

School starts and I have the teacher known for strict alphabetical order and forcing people to learn all the state capitals by heart. A boy I barely know let a crush on me fester all summer. He presents me, silently, with a thick handful of notepaper on which he has written my name, over and over, 4 columns to a side, each side, 5 whole sheets. I will still have these in my possession, 35 years later. Although we continue through school together for 7 more years, we never mention this incident. This is the year I want to be a detective. We have to write formal letters as a class assignment, so I write to President Richard Nixon, informing him of my current skills with cyphers and codes, asking for a job with the FBI.

I earn some money by babysitting for various neighbors on our quiet street and use it to buy an MIA bracelet. My parents (mostly my mother, for some reason) and I fight about it. I will wear it every day until I am 15.

My mother plays piano and our house rings with the music. We have a turntable in the living room and my sister and I play Tom Lehrer's album, the one with the red, white and black cover, with the devil playing a curving keyboard, over and over again, until we have it all memorized. Then we produce skits, acting out the songs. I don't understand the implications of My Home Town or The Old Dope Peddler for two or three more years. We see the high school production of Annie Get Your Gun. I fall in love with the guy who plays the lead.

Toward the end of the school year as my 11th birthday approaches, I proceed to fall in love with a boy in my class (not the one who had the crush) and scheme up a way to kiss him. Quite cleverly I say "Let me tell you a secret" and when he leans down I kiss him by the ear. He doesn't realize what has happened, wants to know what secret. I am overcome with something, possibly shame, and can not speak to him until we are seniors in high school.

It is a good year. The next year, life started falling apart, but when I am 10, things are okay.

~Rambling of a Procrastinator~

"Thank you, come again" - Apu from Simpsons

http://www.subsidesports.de/de/images/product/large/livass92.gif

- and wore the whole thing with pride. My best friends were M4rk Ashcr0ft and Ne1l Bra1den and on Saturday afternoons we used to go to each others' houses to play football outside and video games. Mark had Streetfighter II on the SNES so we used to play that a lot though I wasn't very good. When we went to Neil's we sometimes played Subbuteo though I could never really see the appeal. The prettiest girl in my class was called C4ther1ne Wyl13. She was beautiful but way out of my league. I fancied Judy Ch4n but she ended up going out with Neil, despite sending both of us Valentine's cards. I was sad but not surprised. He was funnier and better at football than me. And not as nerdy. I was one of the brightest in my class and used to have healthy rivalry with J0hn Denn1s0n and Ph1l1p And3rson for who would come top in class tests. I got 76/80 once in a mock 11+ - we did these every week. Once J0hn got 78 and I was a bit jealous. I'd never beat that.

When I was 10 my (paternal) Grandpa died. Mum got the phone call just as we were coming home one day and, crying, told us to stay in the car - presumably so we wouldn't hear it from someone else. The Troubles were still going on (I'm from NI) so I thought there might be a bomb in the house. There wasn't, but there was much crying when Dad got home. Mum and Dad didn't take us to the funeral, which I'm still not happy about. We were far too overprotected. We went to a memorial service a couple of weeks later though. I liked Grandpa - he always gave us Mr Kipling's almond slices when we went to his flat, and he had a moustache that bristled when he kissed me.

My brother and I were childminded by a friend of my mum's called Etta. We went to her house after school and during the holidays. I hated having to get up early all summer, but we could watch TV and play football in their huge garden with her boys, who were both older than us. They were pretty cool, and liked bands like Nirvana, the Chilis, Dead Kennedys, Alice In Chains and Mudhoney. I was a little intimidated by this stuff.

In all, I was a happy ten-year old, but probably a bit too precocious and nerdy for my own good. This would catch up on me at "big school".

6th grade.

Only been in North Florida less than a year.

Breakdancing, although very bad at it.

Hip-Hop fanatic!

I asked the Black girl in my class what she listened to hoping for the presumptious answer of the R&B/rap station Magic 95, but she said "Rock". I said "hard rock or soft". "Hard". Asked her about Quiet Riot and she never heard of them. (?!)

Remember seeing The Disco 3 on Video Soul. They announced they were going to change their name to The Fat Boys. Then they spat all over the place.

I began spitting all over the place.

The next door neighbor insisted on calling me a "Yankee".

I discovered the Lifetime Network and the Regis Philbin show. Thought I was on some underground shit.

Couldn't understand why I had gone from being the class comedian in Michigan to a total outcast in Florida.

Now know they were rednecks.

It was 1988, jeans were pegged and parachute pants were aplenty. I was a 5th grade student at Southern Elementary, here in Lexington, KY. I'm not sure what was big on the radio, but I owned 2 cassette tapes at the time: TMBG's debut LP and Fishbone's debut EP. I probably only knew who either of them were because of my dad.

I had a crush on a girl named Erin Gr4bh4m. Twice I had dreams of rescuing her from mountain lions wtf. Names kids called me: "Nicky Fumes" and "Stinkweed", insinuating that I smelled bad. I showered daily and even began wearing cologne, but they continued to berate me for my supposed consistant unpleasant odors. I promise I wasn't a farting machine or anything.

This year I had a friend whose name was also Nick, he was a year younger than me, and smaller, hence we were called "Big Nick" and "Little Nick". His sister was a 14 year old classic babe-in-disguise, her hotness masked by monstrous glasses and a horrible hairdo. (I remember this because it was around this time I got my first erection.) He shoplifted a LOT and after awhile I tried it too. I shoplifted a couple candy bars, a plastic parachute man, etc., until once my mom caught me and made me return the stuff to the store. I was then grounded for 2 weeks, during which time I took apart a crappy TV and never successfully put it back together.