Miskito

Introduction to me

As a child violence came easy enough not to have to call it violence. I thought everybody fought. We moved from the projects, called estates in England, to the ghetto and from the ghetto to the Haight-Ashbury, called a neighborhood in San Francisco. I learned about violence there. They taught me that I should not do it, which sort of defined it. So, I used to go out of the neighborhood to do some violence.

There are three important memories of my youngest years: my dog Rover getting run over by a train and having to pick up the pieces; awakening in my uncle’s car in old Tijuana when I was five to the gunshots of a vaquero raised up on a white horse floodlit in front of a church; Mrs Rice, my 3rd grade teacher at Dudley Stone Elementary School telling me that I could write stories.

I used to climb out of our back window to do my adventuring. North Beach held my attention for all of my formative years. I could easily get laid by the beatnik women by just reading some Kahlil Gibran and playing congas for wine. I could get as high as I wanted as the foundation for the much later hippy movement to happen. I was wild and free and a light skin black boy who was not that bad to look at and had that mean streak that nobody expected.

I am now a sailor. I used to be a sailor who wrote and now I am a writer who sails. I do a lot of maritime heritage writing, mainly in the Caribbean. We, I met my partner in Tulum at the site of my first shipwreck, I am a single-handed sailor, live now in London and are raising our two and two-third year old Samson Zamas Brightwell Ross. That is my world today.

Oh, there are a lot of other things that might make me seem interesting, but this is the crux of the me I think.