Fourth Avenue Junior High School

I started classes at Fourth Avenue Junior High in Yuma, Arizona in the fall of 1982. That first day I remember getting lost when trying to find my English class on the third floor. I walked home with a guy named Billy Bush (who my mom used to predict was going to grow up and change his name to Billy Tree). We were so excited about all of the events that were going on in one place everyday. Just the sheer number of fellow students was overwhelming to us.

As you're looking at the head-on view of the school, there was a snack bar called the Falcon's Nest just below the stairs leading up to the front main doors, on the left hand side, which was actually a room built into the stairway. All of the jocks and cheerleaders used to hang out around that area. Ice cream sandwiches cost 25 cents and bullets were 50 cents.

I had a dream back then involving this campus in which I was walking from the tennis courts (which used to be on the south side of this building) towards the building in the pictures, when I witnessed a Concorde aircraft do a nose dive into the desert about 5 miles away. In this dream the crashing of the jet resulted in a nuclear-type mushroom cloud which developed into an outward moving wave of dust and debris which approached me as if in slow motion. Everything was caught up in it and the moment the debris cloud reached me, the dream went completely silent. I tumbled through the air slowly as if weightless in outer space, while all of the bits and pieces of flying matter whirled around, crashing into each other and splintering into smaller pieces without every making a sound. That was how the dream ended, with me floating and tumbling slowly over and over, somehow immune to what was happening, as everything around me was being destroyed by this wave of destruction.