Chapter 1, Living in the woods.

The oldest of memories, the Great Swamp and the Passaic River.
Our oldest memories, which really are just pure energy, or as I now understand, the information in the energy, follows us from dust to dust. Memories become the foundation of each one’s personal values and belief systems, which in turn guide us. To understand why a person behaves as one does, you must look at the earliest memories. You can always find the foundations right. 
The following is a description of some of those particular parts of my life that ultimately became the foundation of my journey for 40 years that followed.
From my very beginning I found myself on the outside looking in, just trying to understand just what mysteries live below the shiny mirrored surface of life. My path was always my own unique way of following my heart’s directions. It was the life of a oncer which certainly can be a gift. Doing it once and then moving on to the next experience, that was my way.
The trail of fire begins right here alongside the winding path of the sometimes-turbulent running waters which sparked my earliest fascination with all glassy material in any form: glass, water, gemstones and certainly the captivating quality of the sparkle of jewelry. My family and life on the farm became the base of this twisted journey. These early moments, were a time of innocence and much joy. Then as life moved on, I learned about deception and the very valuable craft of negotiating.
Let’s start with my earliest memories. My father’s first farm in The Great Swamp in northern New Jersey. The Great Swamp sounds like it could have been a terrible place to live. I think that most people think of swamps as dirty, stinky, smelly places filled with bugs, snakes, and all kinds of dangers. Yes there were parts just like that. But my reality was just the opposite. Our swamp was teeming with life and unlimited possibilities for exciting adventures. I felt very lucky and comfortable growing up in a place where most people would not want to go, a repeated theme throughout my life. At a very young age I developed a love and respect for being alone, keeping secrets and visiting the running waters often.
The Stone family farm was big, a very old, dilapidated 110-acre horse property. It was spectacular. The Passaic River ran through it on the edge of the property. We had forests and fields where we grew all kinds of farm fare, sheep, chickens and a huge garden covering acres. There were open lands where we could hunt duck and pheasant. The Passaic River was very fertile and full of chain pickerel, bass, crappy and catfish as big as a dog.
The farm was located on Pleasant Plains Road in Harding Township, New Vernon, New Jersey. A place filled with WASPs and I don’t mean the insect variety. The main house was a 100-year-plus old farm house. When we first moved in there was almost no indoor plumbing and very little electricity. It was really just a rundown old farmhouse.
There was no heat and during that first winter. In the mornings we would all gather around the central fireplace to stay warm while we got dressed and breakfast was prepared. I got into trouble with the fireplace more than once in those early years. In the evenings in the earliest days on the farm, the water for the bath was heated on the stove. We all shared the warm bath water in an ancient old cast iron tub with legs.
That very tub was later recycled into a tool used in the family slaughter days. The smallest kids bathed first with dad, followed by the larger kids who got their turn. By the end of the bath sessions the bath water was, shall we say, well used. I can vaguely remember that first winter occasionally using the outhouse out in back of the main house before dad finally got all the plumbing hooked up and running.
Years later the outhouse just disintegrated into a rotten messy hole. It eventually bled itself back out into the swamp. There was some type of old septic tank system out in the back yard which was covered with two big slabs of slate. Often Dad had to open the top and clean it out, a truly disgusting job. The smell was truly awful.
The house had a semi-underground “root cellar” that was wet all the time. During the spring it often flooded. It had a permanent “sump pump,” which ran on and off all the time. It had that wet dank odor of a root cellar.We stored enough jarred and preserved food there to last most of the winter.
I always enjoyed a trip to the cellar because it was dark and warm in the winter and cool in the summer and it was a safe place where I could be alone. There were always interesting things to explore in the root cellar, mostly because that’s where we kept some of the best food that we raised on the farm. I think my favorites were the jarred peaches and pears right off our trees. You could go down to the cellar by yourself, open a jar of fruit, eat the whole darn thing, put the empty jar back on the shelf and no one would be the wiser. Obviously, I have had a lifelong love affair with food. Being raised on the farm with unlimited access to great food was probably the main reason I grew up a fat kid.
On the subject of food and eating food, we raised chickens and sheep. We raised a huge garden of fruits and vegetables. It always felt like there was never much money in the Stone household, but we always seemed to have had plenty of food. I became very good at knowing exactly where the food was stored and knowing how to prepare it myself. From a very young age I would get home from school and fix myself a snack, before dinner. My snack was usually about the size of the evening meal. After that appetizer I would then also sit down with the family and eat yet another full meal.
I was able to handle myself in the kitchen from about age 8. By age 10, partly because I came from a delicatessen family, partly because I was raised on a farm, I knew how to cut up and prepare any cut of meat. I learned how to start a fire anywhere and cook on anything from a stick to a cast iron covered pot. I always had some kind of food in my pockets.
My favorite kitchen tools at the time, other than a knife, were the frying pan and matches. I loved fire from the time I was small. Those tools are still my favorite ones and I almost never spend a day without visiting those two tools, never.
Nothing beats a good skillet and a good hot flame, fresh picked wood mushrooms, garlic and a few herbs for creating an edible masterpiece.There were always eggs. Dad taught me at a young age how to poke a little hole in a raw egg using a 16-penny nail and then suck out the insides, right out in the hen house while we were collecting the day’s eggs. That made for great snacks while you were doing your chores. Though the chicken coops were by far the worst and most disgusting part of the farm.
In the early years, even though Mom had a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering from NYU, she was “little Miss Suzy homemaker.” I suspect based on her stories about her youth in Romania, that her parent’s summer home up in the Carpathian Mountains (yes, as in Count Dracula) was somewhat similar to being on our farm in New Jersey. Her grandmother, who lived to over 100, planted and tended her own garden until her last day.Mom was very fond of her grandmother, spent much time with her and learned much from her.
Both were fabulous cooks and bakers, right to the very end of their lives. As a retired old lady my mother would spend much of her time baking the best cookies and pastries you could imagine and then making up and giving away little gift boxes full of sweet treats to everyone she met. When Mom passed away just before her 90th birthday, she still had a house filled with her homemade pastries.
For many years people would come into my gallery and ask about my mother. After her passing, my sisters and Mom’s grandchildren all wanted her recipe box. I have it and I suppose that someday I will do a “Grandma’s Favorite Recipe” cookbook.
Here is just a bit more about farm life. Dad loved his animals, all of them. So we ended up with lots of them, which meant lots of work for him and for us. Two really great old dogs, a boxer named Daphne and a mutt named Rover. They were great farm dogs. We had cats, lots of cats. Now as an adult, I fully understand just why a farm needs so many cats, 28 at the height of out-of-control cats. But at the time they were another blistering source of lifelong emotional pain for me. At the time I really did not like them. I remember doing awful things to all of the animals during those early years.
I suppose that the artist in me started to appear at a very young age. I must have been about 8 at the time of this brutal incident. Dad had left some silver paint out on the back porch. The cats were out there doing their usual, trolling for food. There was this one very large, very forward black cat that was not afraid of anything. I got the bright idea that I could use the silver paint Dad had left on the porch to paint a stripe down his back and turn him into a skunk. I thought it was a brilliant idea. Unfortunately, my dad and the cat did not. The cat licked off the paint, which turned out to be poisonous and he died. Turned out that very cat was my dad’s favorite cat. Remember that my father came from a very physically abusive environment, the Lower East Side of New York at a time when gangs and crime were prevalent. His reaction to losing his favorite cat was to beat me to the point of being bloodied.
As I write this, the pain of that beating is still very much with me.An emotional scare is a scar. I was an innocent child who did a very stupid thing; not a criminal who deserved corporal punishment. The lifelong scars of that abusive beating are not only with me to this day, to this day I still struggle with painting anything.
It took most of my life to be able to have and appreciate house pets of any kind. Think about how the fear of a paint brush works for someone who should have been an artist. It was also my earliest memory of being the victim, which ultimately manifested into becoming the bully victimizer I later became.
Please don’t beat your kids. Take a moment to stop and explain what is wrong and how to fix it. Corporal punishment is never the answer. It was only after I married the second time, to Carol, that I finally and fully warmed up to cats and now have two that I love, most of the time. They are pretty pesky, but good kitties. (Insert here cute pictures of buster and Kanga)
As awful as this it sounds, chicken slaughter days were some of my favorite days on the farm. We raised chickens for Campbell’s Soup. We would get them in January and raise them until July or August. Campbell’s Soup Company would come and pick up their chickens and leave us 10% for our efforts of raising them. Which, was just yet another hand job, because it cost far more to feed them than the meat was worth. But Dad was a farmer not a business man. In late July early, August after the bulk of the birds left the farm, we would slaughter the remaining animals and freeze them for winter meals.
We had to set up sort of a killing/cleaning/packaging and freezing assembly line. We had a long skinny sort of barn between one of the chicken coops and the covered barn where we stored our hay. At the open end we set up the killing station where the kids brought the captured birds. Dad would slit their throats with an old straight edge razor and then dump them in a can upside down. This was designed to allow the birds to hang upside down and bleed to death. They would squawk and kick, but only for a few minutes, then they would go quiet.
Death, it’s a real interesting experience, 200 times in two days. Occasionally one or two would wiggle out of the can and start running around spurting blood everyplace.
 One of my jobs was to run it down, catch it and return it to its can to die. Farms, there is always lots of blood on farms. Once they stopped moving, they were thrown into a large wheelbarrow and rolled to a giant metal garbage can of actively boiling water where they were dipped first by their head then by their feet for just a few moments, to loosen their feathers. From the boiling water they were sent to the “Plucker”.
The “plucker” was an arcane torture device made of an electric motor and a rolling galvanized steel drum with little rubber fingers sticking out. The fingers had ridges and would grab the wet feathers, pull them out of the dead chicken and spit them out the back. You would hold this dead but still warm animal by its neck first and bounce it on the plucker until most of the large feathers were removed. Next you would turn it around and hold it by its feet and repeat the action until most all of the remaining feathers were plucked.
The wet feathers, which stank terribly, had to be disposed of later along with the other parts of the chicken that stank terribly, parts that we did not use, things like the feet, head and innards.
The next step was to burn off the smallest feathers and hairs that the plucker missed. Yes, chickens have something very much like hairs. We would hold the now naked chickens over an open flame and singe off the small parts. There’s that flame thing again. Imagine what that smells like, sort of like when you singe your own hair or get a serious burn, times a hundred, for hours, in the midday summer heat.
Fire, my personal lifelong favorite. There was always fire on the farm, mostly from stove fuels and gasoline for the equipment. There were always other fuels as well and lots of reloading and relighting.
We had different types of fire for different jobs. I started helping with the fire chores at a very young age by learning to build the fire in the giant fireplace in our house to keep us warm.Fire seems simple but there are all kinds of fire and each has its own traits and requirements. Once I discovered matches it was like I had died and gone to heaven. I love matches. Fire ultimately became one of my many lifelong addictions. Gasoline became my favorite fuel of choice and firecrackers my favorite ignitor. Playing with fire from such a young age was probably one of the main reasons I grew up to become a glass blower. I ended up in trouble more than once for playing with fire.
I had to live through this ritual every summer and now so do you. Now, you have these naked, warm chickens and you must cool them quickly, otherwise they will start to rot. You needed to complete one operation on all the birds before you moved on to the next part. We would slaughter about 100 chickens in a very long and usually hot day. The operation would start at 6:00 AM and by the time we finished and cleaned up it would be 9:00 PM. Farmers work very long hard days.
We would get up the next day and start the process all over again. We usually got it all finished, 200 chickens over a single weekend. Thank heavens it was just two days a year.
But the food was great during the slaughter days. Mom would always make a great barbecue of freshly killed chicken and we would have vegetables freshly picked from our own garden for the evening meal. The meal would end with a fresh pie from the fruits we raised. Believe me when I say, chicken that is freshly slaughtered and cooked over hot coals tastes very different than any chicken you buy in the grocery store.
The next part is equally as disgusting. You could not make this stuff up and I suspect most farmers have stories just like this or worse. I personally think living on a farm is great training if you want to grow up to become a serial killer. After slaughtering, plucking, and soaking the chickens in cold running water we would cut them open from the back, scoop out their insides, cut off their heads and feet, wash them yet again in a cold running bath and bag them up for freezing.
Chicken insides are very interesting. It used to be that when you got a store-bought chicken you got the heart, liver and stomach or gizzard. Did you ever wonder where those parts came from and what other parts there might be that you don’t use? Well, all of those parts come from the inside of the chicken. To get to them out you must to slice it open from the poop hole, up towards the breast bone and open a hole large enough to put your hand in. Next you reach inside the flesh with your hand, as deep as you can, get a strong hold on all of the internal parts- which are still connected to each other and the inside of the chicken.
Then all in a lump at once, pull until everything releases with a sound similar to a fart. Now you have a pile of bloody bird guts on the table, and yes more blood. The inside of the chicken is still warm, wet and squishy when you perform this operation. It is a pervert’s dream, an action I performed hundreds of times. Have no doubt; there is some sort of primal perverse pleasure in bleeding out a live animal and eviscerating it. This whole operation is a great skill and experience to give a developing young man, don’t you think? Teach him how to make knives razor sharp and use them to kill an animal, to slit the animal’s throat and watch the life ebb out of their open flesh. Most normal children never experience this thrill.
Once the pile is in front of you, you separate the parts-hearts in one pile, livers in another. Gizzards must be split open and peeled clean first. Heads, necks and feet are separated and discarded. This is the stuff of horror movies.
By the end of the day we’re covered in blood, with a wheelbarrow full of fresh discarded chicken parts and a half a garbage can full of chicken blood.
We had to get that stuff in the ground before we could finish the day, so off we went to the swamp, to dig a hole. It really was like digging a grave. The hole had to be large enough to hold everything and deep enough so the wild animals would not dig it back up that night-and so it would not smell.
It was just a short side-step from helping dad during slaughter days to learning all about fire. It started fairly simple with just helping light the stoves for the day. Then it was the duty of refilling the stoves and relighting them. It was what happened next when you were sloppy and spilled some fuel on the ground that most interested me. Very quickly one can get the hang of igniting the flame. The next part of the lesson is to understand just how close you can get to the flames before burning yourself.
Lastly you learn you can control the flame’s size and where it goes. I started out by just making little paths of gasoline and lighting them up and watching where they would go, how long they took to burn out and how much fuel was needed to keep them going. I then got the idea of having them go to a little pile of sticks and set them on fire.
I got good enough to be able to time exactly how long it would take to get a pretty good blaze up and burning. But the real good stuff did not happen until I got a hold of some firecrackers. Wow, they really made the whole fire thing exciting.
First you pour out the gasoline, then you build a little house with a package of firecrackers inside and finally you light the gasoline. Everything was going pretty good until I got the bright idea to hold a firecracker in my closed hand, light it and see what happened. Yup, I almost blew my hand off. I only had to do that once, thank you.
As an adult, once at a company picnic, I was given the task of lighting the barbecue. That was a mistake. I totally lost control, jumped up on top of the outdoor grill and started squirting charcoal fluid all over the place and then screaming with out-of-control ecstasy, I lit the thing up, danced around like I was out of my mind and proceeded to almost start a forest fire in the park. That was the last day on that job. By the way, every real glassblower I know is a pyromaniac. Every last one has some kind of “burn down” story. 
During those early years, my parents were big believers in all forms of cultural exchange. Mom was from Romania, Dad’s family was Polish/Russian living in the Lower East Side, so there were a lot of Eastern European cultural influences in our household. While living in Harding, we also had a string of live-in housekeepers, from all over as well. Mom’s family had lots of servants when she lived in Romania. In many ways our lives in Harding were a distorted mirrored reflections of Mom’s life as a child.As children, we also always had lots of other guests in our big rambling farmhouse. Mostly the city relatives, including my mother’s sister, Aunt Litze and her husband, Uncle Bob.
Besides the relatives, for several summers we had exchange students from “Experiment in International Living,” an organization still in business today. I think it was my parent’s idea, if they got some college students to come to the farm for the summer, they could be pressed into assisting on the farm and help keep track of the kids while Mom and Dad worked. All in exchange for room and board. It was not exactly a great idea. But thankfully, it was only for the summer months and it wasn’t until the third summer that yet another disaster, involving an exchange student hit me square in the head.
I think I was 11 that we hosted Mr. Henry Bosimio for the summer. Henry was from South Africa, a very tall, thin and handsome black man. He was the oldest of 13 children. He was going to stay in the U.S. and study at Princeton at the end of summer. I don’t remember much about Henry except that he seemed a kind soul. He lived in one of the five bedrooms, the one next to my Parents’ bedroom.
As an adult and having experienced my own “exchange student” experience, I imagine it was quite a shock to leave his wealthy home in South Africa and end up on a farm in Northern New Jersey. I vaguely remember that it caused quite a stir with our WASP neighbors. Not only were we the only Jewish family in all of New Vernon, we had a young black person living in our house. By the way, our farm was not far from Donald Trump’s New Jersey home. But that particular exchange student experience was a good one that we would repeat two more times.
Next, we had a student from Indonesia, Matzi Parabatasari. Matzi was not a citizen at the time, but somehow, he ended up in the Army and was destined to fight in Viet Nam. At that point he just fled. We never saw him again. We did however get a package sent to our home from him several months later.
It was not addressed to us, but it was addressed to him, so Dad did not open it and just put it in the attic and figured that he would retrieve it at some point. Shortly after that we received a visit from two FBI agents, the men in black. I remember they were rather intimidating and asked my father lots of questions about Matsi. What we knew and did we have any idea where they could find him? Dad mentioned we had received a package from him, and the agents insisted that Dad turn it over to them, immediately. Dad retrieved it from the attic and handed it over. The agents eagerly shook it, smelled it and finally opened it to find only dirty cloths. It was all very strange.
The last exchange student while we were still in Harding was Carl, whose last name I can’t recall. Carl was from Germany, very proper- always well dressed, well read and well spoken. He also went on to be an undergrad at Princeton University.
That was the summer Dad was putting in an above ground swimming pool. Carl was quite strong and helped Dad move earth by wheel barrow to the pool site. I ribbed him about his strength and the weight of the wheelbarrow. He bragged that he could move it completely filled with dirt and me on top. I took him up on his offer. I shoveled the wheelbarrow overflowing with moist dirt and climbed on top. We had to go a couple hundred feet. At the end of the run, just before he stopped moving, he dumped me off in front of the wheelbarrow ran over me with a full wheelbarrow, slicing my left leg open.
Guess who got in trouble for that one. Not only was I hurt and bleeding, my dad had to come over and smack me a few times for creating the problem in the first place. This was not the last time I was to be disciplined by Dad because of something with Carl. Nor was it the last time trouble seemed to find me.
During his stay, at one point I was in Carl’s bedroom without him, just checking things out, kid stuff. Shortly after that Carl went to my dad and asked if there was any chance one of the kids were in his room, because he was missing a contact lens. Of course, Dad came directly to me. He was livid. I was really scared because I knew exactly what this line of questioning meant.
Dad roughly dragged me up to Carl’s room, threw me on the floor and told me that I had minutes to find his lens. I was so scared I couldn’t think. The fear of retribution froze me into inaction. I just wanted to hide, get away, anyplace. But Dad was standing guard at the door and yelling at me the whole time.
I hid under the table in Carl’s room. I was so darn scared I couldn’t look at my father and then I pissed in my pants. For a moment, think how scared you would have to be to piss yourself.
Then it started. First with his foot, kicking me to get me out from under the table, then he used his belt until I had welts all over my body. He finished with a few good solid slaps. By then I was covered in blood, and urine soaked. Nice way to treat a young frightened boy who is your own son, don’t you think? And people wondered why I became an angry misbehaved bully as a young adult.
Now, as an adult, after years of therapy, after spending much of my adult life in that space in my head; I can now finally understand a number of things which were totally wrong about that entire incident with Carl, way wrong, and unjust and by today’s standards criminal.
First, anyone who ever owned a pair of contact lenses knows how easy it is too lose one. In those days they were only made from glass, and very expensive and hard to get. I sure don’t remember touching or losing his lens. Is it possible he lost his own lens and was to get another without accepting any responsibility? I wasn’t the only child in that house. Could one of my siblings have been the one who touched his lens and lost it? How come no one else was even questioned? Why was it about that incident that my dad went directly to me, sure that I was the culprit? In fact, Dad never treated any of my siblings the violent way he treated me. Was it that darn black skunk cat yet again? 
In the earliest years on the farm my mother did not work outside the house. She had four young kids and she and Dad shared the farm duties that. Mom was very busy to say the least. The first thing she made Dad do when we first moved in was install a fuel oil gas hot water heater which was used to heat the house and supply hot water for the kitchen and baths. Next thing was to get the laundry up and running.
We were immediately instructed on how to wash our own cloths. For a while it was OK. The washer was off center so when it would wash and spin, the entire machine would shake, rattle and roll. Also, it was in the room with the central heater that heated the entire house so it was always warm in the winter. Repeat theme; I seemed to like everything warm to hot. We would take turns riding it for kicks.
We also very quickly became responsible for our own laundry. My personal way of dealing with this chore was to not do my laundry and wear the dirty clothes, for days on end. In those days I had a very distinct odor about me, which only brought on more unpleasant moments from family and classmates.
I believe that was the primary cause of me being labeled a “dirty Jew” early on. In one of my earliest therapy sessions, the doctor asked “Well are you dirty and are you Jewish?” That was the day I decided that I could not change my religion, but I could change my personal hygiene habits. I became committed to showering daily, sometimes twice a day and wearing only clean clothes, a new obsession which I carried for a very long time.
The housekeeper thing was just another interesting journey as well. Our first housekeeper was Ethel, who was from someplace south of the Mason Dixon line. This was before the Civil Rights Movement. She came from a family of former slaves. During her first stay with us she was a truly sweet, kind old lady who took very good care of our family and was really part of the family. She was extended every kindness one would expect from family. My memory was that Mom and Dad treated her very respectfully. We loved her and it seemed that she loved us.
Something happened and she had to go back home. She was gone for quite some time and we had several other housekeepers before she came back. Come back she did, but it was after the wave of civil rights movement had washed over all of America. She came back a very different person. She was angry and often would argue with Mom and Dad. She would visit her relatives in NYC on weekends and then come back and refuse to do the work we had come to expect. In the end, however it ended, she went away.
Other than making me aware that something was wrong in the world and bringing the Civil Rights Movement into my awareness the Ethel experience was actually pretty good. The real trouble for me was with two housekeepers who came in between. First there was Annie Lennon, an Irish immigrant here on a work visa. She was a beautiful young girl, maybe 18 or 19, bright red hair, freckles and a great shape. I think she did a good job for our family but we were simply a way for her to become an American citizen.
She wasn’t with us long. It was, however when I became aware of my sexuality. By then I was drawing pictures of naked women and imagining what it would be like to touch them. I was a pubescent young man with great sexual fantasies and desires and I was a very bold troublemaker without many boundaries, except fear of my dad’s strap. This was a bad combination, very bad. Annie was not very fond of me. She would often slap me and the worst was she would grab my skin, pinch and twist it, often drawing blood.
But that did not deter me. I was deeply in lust. I guess I was torturing her and that was why she took such a defensive stance, maybe. She had her own bedroom next to my parents’ bedroom. The very bedroom where I was so mercilessly beaten by my father just a few years earlier. I developed the bright idea that I could sneak in her room after she went to sleep and touch her. Yeah, it was really stupid and creepy. But I was a 13 year-old boy with a need.
One night I waited until everyone had gone to bed. I checked to make sure everyone was asleep and quietly slipped into Annie’s bedroom. I pulled up a chair and sat next to her bed trying to figure out what to do next. In an instant I remembered the beating I had received for Carl’s missing lens. I suddenly realized that Annie’s room was right next to my parents’ room. If I touched her and she woke up and screamed, it would wake my dad. I shuddered at that very thought.
I quietly moved the chair back to the table I had hid under the last time Dad beat me and slipped away back to my own room. I was thankful that somehow, before I did anything even more stupid, I figured out that a significant danger was eminent and changed course before any serious damage occurred.
But my life was still on a crash course with housekeepers and sexuality. After Annie came Ruby. Ruby wasn’t a good cook, was a lousy housekeeper and did not do well with the Stone children. She was maybe 18 or 20, very large and very black. This was about 1964. I was already been banished from public school and was an inmate/day student at St. Bernard’s Academy, a school for the misbehaved young men of the privileged class. I was already hanging out with the older guys, high school men at the school. I was introduced to many things most young men never experience. Most of which-even though I am revealing much about myself - I still don’t feel comfortable talking about.
Ruby was from someplace in NYC, maybe Harlem. She also would go back to her family on weekends. She had a very scary boyfriend, about 10 years older, who sometimes would spend the weekend in our house. He was a big tough guy with a scar across his face from a knife fight. I should have had enough sense to steer clear of this guy and his girlfriend. But noooo, I was that stupid hormone driven 14-year-old who had been sexually aware for three years, but was still a virgin.
That Christmas all the kids were home from school and Mom and Dad were working. Ruby is supposed to be watching us and doing housework. She and I are in her bedroom and she asks me about having sex. I’m fourteen; she is 18. That afternoon I became a man. But, having sex with this older woman who had this boyfriend was really scary. As any therapist worth their salt will tell you, by going through that door at such a young age, you become scarred for life. Sexual abuse by itself, in any form, at any age becomes a driver which distorts your entire future. Add that the brutality of being beaten by a parent and older school boys and a child ultimately becomes disconnected from all humanity, always.
Because Ruby had this boyfriend who I thought would either beat the daylights out of me or worse if he ever found out I was fucking his girl, she used that as a threat to get whatever she wanted whenever she wanted it and lastly because once she opened that door - the sexual act - I had to go through it at her behest many times before Ruby finally left our family.
It wasn’t until I was in my late forties, after various therapists that I finally began to understand that I did not need to be that person anymore and I could release all that anger, pain and emotional stuff. A selfish act perpetrated on a stupid young man meant a lot of wasted painful years hitting the instant replay button.
But, now, here is the really funny thing, fast forward to the end of my mother’s life some 50 years later. It became my job to disperse Mom’s belongings after she passed. By age 90 she had given away, thrown out or sold most of the mountain of crap she accumulated during her lifetime. But she loved pictures. I have boxes and boxes of old archival pictures that needed to be gone through. I started to look through them a few years after her death. Near the top of the pile was a picture of Ruby and her boyfriend with his scared face. Bam, yet again I was confronted with the painful memories of the past, except this time I looked at the picture and thought to myself, how lucky a person I was then and now.
Many things seem to have played over and over during my journey. One of them was cars. Cars were my father’s thing and me and my brother caught that addiction. The earliest cars I can remember on the farm were Dad’s 1953 Ford station wagon. He drove that junk of a car until it rotted right off the chassis. As kids, the floorboards were totally rotted away in the back seat and you could see the road through the hole.
Dad was a great collector of other people’s junk. Uncle Kurt gave us a couple of old Willys cars. Neither ever ran. But dad and Uncle Kurt thought that they could salvage parts from one to make the other one work. That never happened; they ended up in the junkyard. They would have been prime fodder for the website BarnFinds.com. Almost all the cars we owned, over all those years are now considered collectables.
During our time in Harding, we also had another Ford Station Wagon given to us by Mrs. Joseph, a member of our synagogue. It was also an old beater. It was more or less the same model as Dad’s, just a few years newer. We called it the Green Hornet. It was really the first car that I drove.
One day when Mom and Dad were at work, I took it out one on a joy ride with Ruby and got it stuck in the swamp. While trying to get it unstuck, I burned out the clutch. You can guess how that ended.After the Green Hornet, Uncle Bob gave us his old beater B18 Volvo. It was in pretty good shape. It had a four banger with a four speed. It looked like an old Plymouth. I was 14 or 15.
I was really into cars, driving and racing. I desperately wanted to learn to drive something other than a tractor. Dad would not take the time to teach me how to drive a car, so I taught myself. In the process I damaged his new used piece of crap Volvo. I did not tell him about it. We were on our way to school at 6:00 in the morning when he discovered the damage. I was scared to death of a serious beating.
Because we were on our way to school and work, all that he said was “You hit the garage when you pulled it out, didn’t you?” He dropped me off at St. Bernard’s and Dad went to work. When he picked me up that evening, he didn’t say a word. He did not talk to me for days. Mom finally told me that he had wanted to punish me but decided against it. But he was processing the incident and when he was ready, he would talk to me about it.
That was the last time Dad and I had any serious discipline issues over anything or for that matter any meaningful conversations until many years later. Two things were at play here. One was that he realized that all the beatings in the world, no matter how violent, were not going to make me behave any better. In fact, I was getting worse. In school, because I was a physically big person, the big guys were rough on me. To survive in that environment, I became quite tough myself. At that point I was bigger than Dad and I think he understood I was on the verge of challenging his physical dominance, abuse and authority.
The car thing just continued. We also got an old Renault for free, which also never worked. About 1966 something happened for Mom and Dad financially because they walked into Swartz Motors in Dover and bought, not one but two, brand new Saab cars, a station wagon that carried six people and a little four seat sports car. Eventually, I rolled them both.
Just how did I go from an idyllic-looking childhood, living among the most natural country settings imaginable, in one of the most prestigious places in all of New Jersey to being a hoodlum? I’m not exactly sure where it all went really bad. But at a young age I became very good at getting away with mischief. Recently through the internet I reconnected with some of my grammar school friends, who reminded me of some of my antics. The internet can be a wonderful and terrible thing.
Some years ago, I was sitting at my computer early in the morning when I got a message from someone I did not know, asking if I was the Jimmy Stone from New Vernon, New Jersey. As an adult I just wanted to forget everything about New Vernon, except the famous Meryl Streep, who ended up in a funny way reappearing in my life, twice. There really was much that was wonderful about living in the Great Swamp, especially during the late fifties and early sixties. But it was also the home of so much abuse, dysfunction, physical and emotional pain. At one point the pain was so bad I tried to hang myself in the front yard.
So, for many years as an adult, I chose to distance myself from that time and place by denying its existence. When the message came in, I rudely responded “NO, Jimmy Stone died many years ago.”
I explained I was James Stone and yes, indeed I had lived in New Vernon. This person, Robert Everest Johnson, sent me his number and asked me to call. Being the ass that I am, I called and said, “OK, you got me for about 5 seconds, make it quick and make it good.”
Robert immediately asked, “Do you remember a Rinker Buck from New Vernon?” I was more than a little bit startled. Rinker was one of my only and best friends in grammar school. I really only had a couple of other friends at Harding Township School, but Rinker was way up on the list.
Here it was 40 years later, I had not seen nor heard from him since the day I was expelled from school and ended up at St. Bernard’s and now Robert found me on the internet, asking if I remembered Rinker. I demanded to know what was up and why was Robert reaching out to me? He replied that he had no idea why Rinker Buck was looking for me. He was simply an internet sleuth contracted by Rinker to find me. He gave me Rinker’s number and asked that I please call Rinker so he could get paid.
That was one of those calls that slaps you right up-side the head and you see stars. It was just about 6 AM West Coast time, the number was obviously an East Coast number but what the heck? Robert called and said Rinker was awaiting my call.
Ring, ring, a voice picked up and I said “Rinky, it’s Jimmy, what the hell is going on and why are you looking for me?” Rinker started to scream into the phone, “Jimmy, Jimmy I can’t believe that we found you. We all have been looking for you for years. We all thought that you were dead. Where the hell are you and what’s going on with you?” As I, reliving the moment still brings tears to my eyes.
This conversation didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Why would they think I was dead and who were “they?” I assured him that indeed I was not dead. I asked who he was talking about. Who else was thought I was dead and why had everyone been looking for me for all those years?
Rink exploded into an expletive laced diatribe. “That motherfucking pedophile bastard Blair Holley. You totally disappeared after he got you thrown out of school. We thought that you got killed in the reform school over at the Bonney Bray School because no one ever heard from you again.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Someone other than me and my family knew about what had happened that spring when I was undergoing psychiatric evaluation to determine how to handle a social misfit. Forty plus years later came confirmation of the abuses I suffered at the hands of Blair Holley, Paul Wert, Ms. Valentine and the teachers at Harding Township School. Living proof that it wasn’t an illusion, that it all had actually happened, exactly the way I remembered it.
My heart was beating fast and my head was spinning out of control. Not only did someone confirm the abuse, apparently others knew as well.
“What the fuck, Rink? Who are the others and what are you talking about? It’s been over 40 years. You people are still talking and thinking about me. Who else is in the group?”
Rink explained that he; Craig Barry and John King stayed friends all those years. They regularly scheduled reunions and at every reunion they would play the “Where in the Hell is Jimmy Stone?” game and ask each other if any of them had heard anything about me. Needless to say, I was pretty stunned by the whole thing. But wait, this is the gift that just keeps on giving.
Some time ago I began this journey of documenting my life and maybe this journey began because of this very incident. After I reconnected with Rinker and Craig, I encouraged to reconnect with some of my other grammar school friends. I connected to Chip Frost who was on a Facebook page I began following. I didn’t remember much about Chip except that I liked him and he was very smart. We exchanged a few emails and then I sent him a 5,000 word catch up note. His response was that he remembered me as a very angry young guy. That comment struck a chord and got me thinking about the thread of anger I have carried throughout my entire life.
Recently, while working on this project I was chatting with Rinker, who told me about an incident in grammar school where I lost it and started to chase the guys around the playground with a baseball bat.So even though it took me 50 plus years to understand that I indeed was an angry child, my friends knew that about me way back then. Just a few months ago when I joined the San Diego Jewish Men’s Choir at the suggestion of my friend Matt, he noted “James you are a very sensitive guy” and followed up with “and volatile too.”
My behavior as a child was way out of control. I had been living out in the country, really out in the country and I can honestly say I was a problem. The real issues began to surface in third grade with Miss Amos, was a kind soul who understood problem children.
She treated me in the way she had to in order to get me to behave. I really loved her. She had patience and would always help me stay focused and on track. Unfortunately for me, in the spring of that year she left the school. I can’t remember what happened, but she left and a temporary sub who took her place. That is when the trouble really started to get rolling and things headed in the wrong direction.
I was smart, very smart but I had the attention span of a gnat. I clearly suffered from what we now identify as “attention deficit disorder” or in my present state as “adult attention deficit disorder.”In those days there were no school psychologists. If you were really a bad problem child you ended up in psychiatric care under the direction of a doctor and ultimately in a lock up school or reform school.
I wasn’t particularly afraid of a lock up school because - starting in fourth grade the school’s way of disciplining me was to lock me in the WC by myself for hours at a time. From fourth grade on until I was permanently expelled from public school, my reputation preceded me. I had no idea I was creating all these problems myself and even though I eventually ended up being tested, no one ever explained that it was my own behavior precipitated these really painful and unpleasant outcomes - just kept getting worse.
I was born into the Jewish faith. That means that I was circumcised at birth, presumably by a Rabbi who was known as a Moil. For a Bris, everyone gets together, says a prayer or two and then the Rabbi cuts off the end of your dick. Throughout history when Jews were relentlessly persecuted, one way the persecutors could absolute definitely identify Jewish men was to look at their dicks. Men were stripped naked. Anyone circumcised was pronounced a Jew and usually lost his life.
Growing up, at least in the early years, I did not think much about being Jewish or being different. It was just the way we were raised. We celebrated the Jewish holidays and we went to a Jewish Sunday school.
The farm was so remote we did not have Jewish friends to play with during our down times. So, I became very aware of being Jewish. But I had no idea that Antisemitism existed. I had no clue that people discriminated based on their beliefs or that discrimination could impact one’s life.
The first time I remember being confronted face to face with a violent anti-Semitic situation was at St. Bernard’s with the good Reverend Nelson, who loudly and aggressively publicly called me a “dirty little kike.” I had no idea what that term even meant until my Jewish classmate Michael Mince had a fit and explained it to me. It took many more years before I fully understood bigotry, anti-Semitism and all of the evil ways people can treat other’s openly or behind their backs.
This type of hidden bigotry played a big roll in my journey. Unfortunately, I did not realize that bigotry was so prevalent and could affect my life to such a degree. When I was about 45, and changing jobs, one of my regular clients at Primavera Video, who was Jewish, warned me that the new video house I was moving to was owned by the worst type of anti-Semite. One who never speaks about their hate, but just quietly treats Jews and minorities badly. Robbie Summers from Western Video opened my eyes to all the ranges of bigotry.   
As a child I loved television from the first time I saw the Mickey Mouse Club Show in black and white on a very small, tube-powered television in my parents’ bedroom. I became obsessed with television. It was right up there with matches and fire. I not could get enough of it. The Mickey Mouse Club show came on just when Mom would be serving dinner. Dad would have to come to the TV, shut it off and get angry with me. I couldn’t do my homework. I couldn’t sleep. Television took over my life.
The TV my dad got for free because it wasn’t working. It had glass vacuum radio tubes, that looked like they were on fire when they were hot. We would sit on the floor as a family and watch, “Mickie Mouse Club,” “Rifleman,” “Twilight Zone,” “Alfred Hitchcock” and “Bonanza.”I wanted a horse so badly. Keep in mind that we not only owned a farm, it had been a horse farm. So we had horse barns and stables. I begged my father to get a horse. Dad said it was simple; would I be willing to eat my horse? Ugh, no I would not eat Trigger. What the hell kind of question is that?
He said plainly, “On this farm we only feed things we are going to eat. So, if you are not willing to eat your horse, you don’t get one.” Great! Of course, in just a few years I ended up in a “reform” school that had also been a working farm before I arrived and had been converted to a school/farm for the misbehaved sons of the rich. Rich people have horses and expensive sports cars, as you will hear, so here I was smack dad in the middle of my desires.
Every so often the TV would stop working. Dad would take it apart and we would trek down to the local hardware store, test all the tubes to find the ones that were burnt out and replace them. Dad was pretty good at diagnosing problems, at least mechanical ones. He wasn’t so good with the interpersonal ones, mostly because he was always working on something or drinking or both.
Like so many of us I was in love with Annette Funicello. No other female at the time caught my attention as much as Hayley Mills. “Parent Trap” hit on all the highpoints for a pubescent boy. I have ALWAYS had a thing for older women. I suppose this was the beginning of my love of performing as well. The first movie that I can remember other than Disney animated ones was “Days of Wine and Roses” with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick. I did not understand the storyline at the time, but the onscreen talent was compelling and eventually I definitely understood the story. I’m not exactly sure how or why I ended up watching so many adult content films at the time, but by the time I was 10 I knew quite a bit about women and sexuality, especially the older ones. Here’s to you Mrs. Robinson.
 A few films proved to be pivotal in my life. The first and by far the biggest was “West Side Story.”The year 1961 started with a bang. “West Side Story” came out, and somehow, I got to see it in the theater, and it immediately rang my bells.
Now the story starts to get interesting. I rode school bus number 7 though many of us still disagree about the number- was it 6 or 7?). It was driven by Mrs. Ballantine, who I did not know at the time was related to the monster Blair Holley. On that school bus was a student, the one and only Meryl Streep. The very one who went on to become an Academy Award-winning actress.
In 1961 for many months, we rode that very bus and she made us all learn the music from the movie. She would divide the bus in half and half of us would be the Jets and the other half of us would be the Sharks. To this day, I remember every word in every song from the movie.
Shortly after that I discovered musical theatre. I learned all the words to the music from “Man of La Mancha,” “Camelot,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and more. I wanted to dance and sing, but both my parents were engineers and very much had a “refugee” mentality. In their minds the performing arts were not a way for a good Jewish boy to make a living. So, there was no support for any of my artistic passions or efforts.
Even when I had opportunity, my parents would not hear if it. I never understood before how important it is to surround yourself with people who support your dreams, especially as they are taking shape. Everyone needs a champion, someone to help lift you up, especially when the road is rough. I understand that now and try hard to lift up young artists who don’t even yet understand what it is that they want.
For all of us, there are defining moments in our lives, moments frozen in our psychic mind forever. Powerful moments which instantly change the course of our life. I have many of those memories and often they have are linked to yet another moment and another and they became the essence of the glass thread, my journey in this life story.
The entire experience in Harding Township was full of these moments. One happened at the science fair during 4th grade, a school-wide event with students of all grades entering something. I can’t remember what I entered, but I vividly remember one person’s entry which was the story of the Herkimer Diamond Mines from Herkimer, New York. At that mine they mined double-ended quartz crystals. There was a small example of one that was part of the display.
It was a beautiful clear crystal which sparkled in the light. It was wired into the display so no one could steal it. I was so captivated by that stone that I had to have it; the Gollum in me took over my common sense. Sometime within the week-long display I snuck into the auditorium and snatched the crystal. My skills as a sneak thief were starting to develop. I calculated when I could get in and how long it would take to undo the wire. I pulled it off without a hitch and never got caught.
This incident turned out to be the beginning of my journey of being captured by what we capture, a life of torture and pain, repeated over and over for many years. I now understand that it doesn’t matter if you release whatever you captured back to the winds of chance. You grabbed it, you possessed it, you left your mark on it and it left its mark on you, for all of time.
The science fair yet again made its presence felt in my psyche. In 1963, the year I was expelled from public school, I chose to do my science project on the then little-known topic of UFOs. At the time my mother worked for the Department of Defense and had Top Secret security clearance. She was a frequent traveler to the Wright Paterson Facility where she tested guidance systems for rockets and missiles.
During the research phase of my project, I discovered something called “Project Bluebook,” a U.S. government funded research program to investigate unexplainable reporting’s of events related to alien visitation. It turned out that the entire program-investigations and reports-were held at Wright Paterson. Mom was there often so I asked her to see if she could get access to the reports. To my surprise she came home with redacted photocopies of one of the investigations.
I used that as the centerpiece of my science project claiming that UFOs really existed and that they were most probably alien. I built a model of what I imagined an intergalactic spaceship might look like. My parents and I had lots of discussions about this topic from an engineering point of view. Dad’s position was that there was no physical evidence, no proof that was available, so in his mind my thesis was faulty.
Mom, on the other hand, was a big believer in science, scientific exploration and scientific data. From an aeronautical engineering point of view, the reported eyewitness sightings seemed to indicate that the laws of physics were potentially being broken. Her point of view was that more research and testing were needed to prove their existence. I followed her direction, did my report and promptly got an “F” because Blair Holley felt that the entire report was nonsense and that the photocopies of “Project Bluebook” were not real, after all where would a 12-year-old get their hands on legitimate government documents? 
Yet another lifelong thread from Harding Township days was the stage. In the early sixties there was a trend in schools to foster at some level, the performing arts. Most schools had some type of stage and organized stage productions. In our grammar school every holiday season someone put together a Christmas performance, which included every grade singing a song or performing a skit on stage, often in costume. I really can’t remember too much except that I loved being on stage.
The entire atmosphere of the lights, hiding in the wings, coming out on cue and being out there with all of my friends and having people applaud, felt somehow, comforting and inspiring. Unfortunately, the next chapter did not include any type of stage performance. But the grammar school stage experience planted itself deeply in my psyche. How many people can say that they were on stage with the great Meryl Streep even once, let alone more than once? You could say that I got the bug and I really think that she gave it to me. She Infected me.
The year 1963-64 was such a big year in my life. So much happened so fast: being kicked out of Harding Township School, surviving an intensive psychiatric exam designed to lock me away in an institution, my Bar Mitzvah, getting laid for the first time, my father stopping beating me-and the biggest thing that seems to have bound almost everyone on the planet together from that time- black, white, young, old an American citizen or a visitor-was the day that JFK was assassinated.
For most of my adult life I have asked almost everyone I know if they remember the exact moment that they heard that JFK had been shot. Universally every person who was at least age 8 on November 22, 1963 remembers exactly where they were and what they were they were doing and exactly how they were informed of this horrific tragedy.
That was a life altering event shared by the entire population of the United States. That moment was probably one of the best examples in history of being bound by the energy of a massively shared emotional experience. Think about it, the incident happened in an instant. In that instant the world changed. So much was written that there is nothing for me to add, except where I was and what was happening in my life on November 22, 1963. I was taking the entrance exams to be admitted into St. Bernard’s School for the bad boys of the wealthy. I had just finished and was returning my answers to the office. The office gals had a radio playing. As I walked into the office, I heard the announcement. I really did not understand what was happening, but I will never ever forget Mrs. Ford’s reactions. That moment became permanently welded into my psyche.
As mentioned, this was a big year. Being raised Jewish I was obligated to have a Bar Mitzvah at age 13. My birthday is in the first week in June. In those days school went into about the second week of June. For those not familiar with the custom of a Bar Mitzvah, it is the religious ceremony when a boy is declared a Man. It’s a really big thing in the Jewish faith.
In all branches of Judaism, the Bar Mitzvah boy is expected to read from the Torah in Hebrew and from the half Torah as well. Then he is expected to give a speech explaining what he just read in Hebrew and thank everyone who helped him reach the auspicious day. I mean no disrespect to anyone in my family or to my born faith, but my experience with my Bar Mitzvah was a major hand job that left much emotional scaring.
First thing, my brain just does not remember things, period. I now understand that in part it was the ADD and a lifelong hearing disorder. Foreign language has always been a problem for me.My mother used to tell me that she would cry because she could not remember the language, she was learning during her school years. Somehow, she was able to overcome this challenge and learned to be fluent in five languages, which saved her and her families’ lives during the occupation. But she never recognized that I lacked that skill and so never addressed it.
Learning Hebrew was way beyond me at almost any level, at any age. The Rabbi in our synagogue, Rabbi Levy was a putz who also had no interest in teaching me about my religion or how to read Hebrew. Lucky for me my family knew an ancient old Jewish Rabbi who had the patience to take on the job. But he did not teach me to read Hebrew, he made me memorize the entire Hebrew sections I had been required to read, word for word. On the day I was supposed to perform what was supposed to be a really great thing, right in front of me, my mother went to the Rabbi and said she wanted me to wear my uncle’s prayer shawl. That was the first that the Rabbi or I had heard anything about the prayer shawl.
The Rabbi blew a gasket, disrespectfully taking my mother’s dead uncle’s prayer shawl, crumpling it up into to ball and throwing it in the trash can, screaming that I had no right to wear that in his synagogue.
This happened less than an hour before we are scheduled to start. I actually did get up in front of a couple hundred people and said all the prayers and recited my portion of the Torah. I did a pretty good job considering that my mother was treated pretty badly right in front of me by the leader of our synagogue and I was subjected to an adult’s childish temper tantrum.
At that moment, in an instant, I realized that even though my religion had a long history, I did not have a need to believe in it or be part of it anymore. At the time when a very troubled young man needed stability and moral guidance, the very hypocrisy of that violent and inconsiderate act changed the course my journey yet again.   
In these closing moments of this chapter, in what I now call my “Captured by What We Capture,” phase, as we leave the place of my childhood, let’s examine what we have gotten from this insane beginning. We have a bold young man with experiences way beyond his years, a young man physically larger than his peers. Who by action and physical appearance and size, many people assume to be much older than his actual years.
He is a boy in a man’s body who knows no boundaries. He is growing and developing somewhat like his father, violent and intuitively smart. He is an outsider. Who has already successfully made his own way, regardless of the law, parental guidance or consideration for anyone around him.
He has no real friends, no support systems and no one in his life to really look to up to or emulate, except a violent hard-working and alcoholic father who was too busy with his own life to give much in the way of guidance, direction or the needed support for raising healthy normal children.
I was a very large and capable bundle of raw energy with no guidance. I became a young man who was constantly in trouble, at home, at school and in general in life. I became very accomplished at getting whatever I wanted through deception or lying or just being a bully. I was very good at avoiding any consequences of my bad choices.
I was that person, who was innocently, out of control, who lacked any consistent good moral.A person who was on his own voyage of discovery, wandering down all the wrong roads like a new stream right after a fresh thunderstorm. I was a prime candidate to be locked up. I was comfortable being on the outside, not on the inside. I was finding my own way at any cost. The brewing storm of fire and flood was just beginning.
There was so much that I never learned during this part of the journey. First, I was stacking up the negative karma that always finds its way back into your life to balance out your life journey. As they say “payback is a bitch.” The list of things I did not learn during this part of my life is long.The biggest thing I did not learn was that people you may not even know, talk about you. They can make your life miserable. Your words and actions give them fuel and arm them to come gunning for your soul and they Do come after you.
I did not understand that it was my own behavior that lit the fuse which developed into my own personal trial by fire. Which was at the heart of the fire storm that sent me sailing out of control down the ever-changing rivers of life.