The sound of screams had me shaking as I hid under the table in our tiny kitchen; my dad’s raging abuse of my beautiful mom is one of the first things I can remember hearing as a young child. “Your life belongs to me, so don’t ever think about leaving with my kids. Because if you do, I’ll hunt you down with a bottle of acid and throw it right in your pretty little face.” Blaring, hurtful words designed to inflict pain and fear, relentlessly torturing my mom and terrifying both me and my younger sister, Dawn. We were used to screams, but that didn’t make being in this horrific environment any easier.
I came into the world on November 8, 1961, a loud and feisty Scorpio born smack in the middle of Hollywood. It was my mom, Carolyn, who gave me my name because it means “beloved” in Norse. My middle name, Per, means “rock,” also “strength.” As my mom tells it, I did everything early. At six months I was swimming in the pool, at ten months I was walking, and at a year and a half I was speaking in complete sentences. No time to waste. I’m the same way today.
My sister, Dawn, was born fourteen months later. Most of the memories I have of my dad, Rick, involve yelling at and berating my mother. Automatically, I was protective of her. Maybe it’s because she’s a fellow Scorpio, or maybe it’s simply the special bond that I think exists between most mothers and sons. Fathers seem to decide, early on, what they want their sons to be, in many cases. Mothers, I would suggest, are more given to allowing their sons to bloom into what they naturally are destined to be.
Regardless, it was hellish at home.
I remember a trip to the Grand Canyon when Dawn, just a couple of years old, dropped something over the rail. My father held her by her ankles upside down, taunting and tormenting her, even shaming her for daring to make a simple mistake. Even in my young mind, I wanted to be away from this situation.
Thankfully, when I was five years old, my mother packed us up and we left him. Or he left us. It’s hard to be sure what happened, but my family did become separated at that point. The lack of a father figure is something I have struggled with my entire life, and looking back, I am sorry things started out this way in my life. But there was no other choice. My mother had to survive, and she wanted to protect us from what was going on. I know it was hard for her. She came from a generation in which many women were scared to speak out against men. Her upbringing reinforced much of that attitude. Women were subservient to men and oftentimes, like children, they were to be seen and not heard. Leaving my father was a very big deal for her, and I think it took a lot of guts. Being a single mother with two children in the mid-1960s was a far more radical decision than it is today.
My mom was a costume designer by trade, so the next couple of years for us were spent in an artistic, almost bohemian kind of existence. We had very little money (my dad was not providing support), so we lived in an eighty-dollar-a-month house in what was called a shack flats community, lots of small old bungalows, near Hollywood. There was a diverse cast of characters surrounding us: two female impersonators, a bongo drummer, singers, actresses, and a musical group called the Mushrooms, who would later go on to become Seals and Crofts. It was a highly theatrical and dramatic environment, and even at that young age, I related to them. I liked the crazy, open, freethinking spirit that they all seemed to embrace.
I also liked the fact that my mom was so artistic. She grew up near San Francisco and originally made clothes for herself and even Dawn and me. But soon, in Hollywood, she found herself designing outfits for Marlo Thomas, Judy Carne, Burt Reynolds, and many other actors and performers. The more she worked, the easier it became for us to move into a slightly nicer apartment. We moved a bunch of times during this period, but we really settled in when she found a $125-a-month house in a fairly nice family neighborhood in Burbank.
I was a handful back then, and I know it. I fell in love with skateboarding, and I was constantly getting scraped and scratched up. I had plenty of accidents that required stitches, and I broke my nose more than once. I was basically a sports freak and one of those kids who actually picked things up pretty quickly. Whether it was baseball or football or skateboarding, I seemed to be a natural athlete. And everybody would tell me that! I also loved playing with my Hot Wheels, and cars in general held a basic fascination for me. I had an early love for speed, thrills, and spills, with no fear of any of them. I was rambunctious and even a little reckless. I would jump from windows in our apartment into the swimming pool—and not just from our apartment. I would visit neighbors and do the same thing from their windows too. I was a daredevil, and even though I was basically shy and quiet on the outside, on the inside I was a bit of a wild child.
I didn’t like conforming to what everybody wanted me to be. By the age of six I had started wearing my hair a little bit long, and at school some of the kids—and even some of the parents—would give me a hard time because they thought I looked like a girl. I was an average student, but I wasn’t crazy about school. I liked thinking about all of the creative people we had grown up around; their lives seemed to have far fewer barriers and rules. That appealed to me.
My favorite memories around this time were going up north to the San Francisco area to be with my mom’s family. That’s where I really got to be a kid—where I would hang out with my cousins and their friends. They lived by the bay in Marin County, and my uncle co-owned Edgewater Yacht Sales, which meant we were on the water a lot. It was so much fun to hang out with all the kids up there, especially my cousin, Peter. He was my hero from day one. He’s about five years older than me, and I always knew he was special. He was a true alpha male: incredibly good-looking, very athletic, and truly charismatic. In the absence of any real male influence in my life, I looked up to Peter from the moment I met him. Everybody up there called him “Peter Perfect.” Peter had such an effect on me.
Doing a kick turn on a small ramp with my 3ft Sims downhill board with Gullwing trucks, in bellbottoms.