I became a writer when I was hit on the head with a rock. It was 1969, I was 6 years old and my mother had dropped me off at a friend’s birthday party. It was June, and I remember the backyard of that house, in Mandeville Canyon, the hot California sun on my hair, the screams of the children as they ran around the yard. The partygoers had assembled into a big and rowdy gang, chasing the birthday boy, trying to get him to crawl through the spanking machine (a joyful and sadistic enterprise in which the children stood in a row and the birthday boy crawled through their legs, getting whacked along the way). The adults gathered inside, trying to ignore us. Then the birthday boy picked up a big rock. And he threw it.

I remember standing outside of this, observing some children wriggle through a colorful nylon caterpillar tunnel. And then, whomph! I suddenly could not stand and staggered backward onto the grass, where a strange adult grabbed me and carried me to the table that held the birthday cake. The party had changed into something unexpected and new.

There was blood everywhere. They actually had to move the birthday cake so it wouldn’t get bloody. That was one of the first lines I remember, that perception, and I remember saying it later with a mixture of wonder and pride. There was a sense of wonder that I had so much blood in me; there was pride in that suddenly I, a mere guest who didn’t even know the birthday boy that well, now had the power to get the ceremonial cake moved off the table; there was awe in that the words “blood” (with its implication of life and violence and injury) and “birthday cake” (with its implication of sugar and floral icing and longing) were even spoken in the same sentence. I needed that observation, for it gave me a way to control the fact that I was now laid out on the paper tablecloth, with the other 6-year-olds ringing the table to stare at me in horror. That first sentence gave me a way to spin it, to make the sloppiness of the experience somehow my own.

I remember other things — sitting in the doctor’s office, a needle piercing in and out of a gash one inch above my right eye. I remember my entire head feeling like concrete, wrapped in an enormous bandage for a week. I remember the rock-throwing boy’s small voice apologizing over the phone and how he and I did not talk to each other for years afterward, as though the incident had shamed us in some inexplicable way.