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Growing up in a small town in Vermont was all but difficult. I woke up, helped out my mother around the house, and went to school. That’s where things got a little more complicated. I didn’t struggle; I was actually one of the brightest students in our small class of ten. But I was easily distracted; when I got bored, I doodled on the desks. Most of my after-school activities involved cleaning said desks as punishment. I started writing poetry at night when I couldn’t sleep, thinking that it could help relax my over-active mind. As time went on, however, it became a hobby. Throughout the rest of my school years, I wrote at least two hundred poems. I still keep them in a manila folder under my desk.

By my sophomore year, I realized that I was different: I had little attraction to not only the girls in my class, but to women in general. Thinking that I was just developing slower in that area, I never told anyone.

One day, I was painting, lost in my thoughts, when a comment from my teacher brought me to discover my love for all things artistic. From writing to drawing, painting to music, anything where I could express myself became my passion.

When I was eighteen, I bid farewell to my hometown and relocated to a much larger town in southern California to expand my knowledge. I got a part-time job as a newspaper columnist, and became a local source of material for an art museum a few blocks away. Only three years later, I went back to Vermont for my father’s funeral. He had died suddenly from a rather nasty case of pneumonia, and I lingered there for a few days before heading back.

Between painting, writing, and working, I somehow got involved with Rebecca, an aspiring actress from Montana. Although it was my very first relationship, we quickly jumped from milestone to milestone, becoming engaged after eight months. But even at this point, I just couldn’t understand why I kept changing the subject off of marriage or was repulsed by the very thought of sleeping with her. I broke it off; giving her no reason other than “It’s not working out.”

After that, I kept to myself, only going out for career-related celebrations. On a whim, I bought a medium-sized house a few miles away from town, next to the ocean. A week later, an earthquake hit the area at three in the morning, completely demolishing the studio apartment I had been renting. Had I stayed there, I would have been killed.

I had frequented letters to my mother after my father’s funeral, and was devastated to find out that she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I flew back to Vermont once again, and stayed by her side for almost a year before she passed away in her sleep. It was December 26, 1949. I was thirty-five.

After a year of alternating between writing music and critiquing others, I received a letter from a Mr. Andrew Ryan, inviting me to be part of a select group that would be the first witnesses to a ‘utopia’. Intrigued, I pondered the offer for a few days. The idea of living five hundred feet below the Pacific was a concept that shook me, but in the end, it was one that I was willing to encounter. I accepted his offer and, packing my bags for the millionth time, bought a ticket to New York, sealing my fate.