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wanted to start a fight for the stupidest reason. And the last thing I needed was to get in a fight.
    Maybe he just wants to borrow a dollar, I figured. He didn’t say that, but maybe that’s what he meant. He’ll give me the dollar back tomorrow. By just giving him a lousy buck, I figured, I would get him out of my face. I pulled a bill out of my pocket and handed it to him.
    â€œThat’s a good boy,” he said, and walked down the hall. Right away, I wished I hadn’t given him the dollar.
    Â 
    Back when I was ten, keeping my stunt work to myself wasn’t a big deal. Nobody ever asked what I did after school or on weekends, and I didn’t tell. If a kid invited me over to his house to play andI had to shoot a movie that day, I just told him I had a dentist appointment or had to visit a relative or something.
    In the last couple of years, though, things have changed. Kids notice everything now. This really pretty girl in my class invited me to a school dance last year. I couldn’t tell her that I wasn’t allowed to go to dances. After I turned her down with some lame excuse, I guess she told everybody, because the next day, a lot of kids looked at me like I was weird.
    It has made things difficult for me. When a group of guys would pick up a football at recess and start throwing it around, I’d pretend I didn’t see them so they wouldn’t invite me to play. When kids would gather in the playground before school and start talking about what they were going to do over the weekend, I couldn’t tell them the truth—that I would be having a fistfight on top of a speeding train, for instance. I’d say I had to visit my grandmother, or some other boring thing I wouldn’t actually be doing. Kids must have thought I was boring too. I suppose that’s why I pretty much stayed by myself.
    I’m proud of my stunt work. I wish I could brag about it. But sometimes I regret that I ever got started stunting in the first place.

8
TIME OF MY LIFE
    I was ten when it all started. Dad had just had the accident at Niagara Falls and I was going out of my mind at home. I had always been a daredevil, but Dad was always around to supervise me. When Mom caught me jumping off the garage one day, she was pretty upset. I could understand it. She had just lost her husband and she didn’t want anything to happen to me.
    Mom suggested I take up gymnastics. I guess she thought that if I got into a sport, I might get some of that energy out of my system. Maybe I wouldn’t follow in Dad’s footsteps.
    I had seen gymnastics on TV during the Olympics, and it looked pretty cool. I gave it a try for a month or so. But somehow, vaulting off a pommel horse didn’t give me the same rush that I got from vaulting off the garage. It just didn’t make my endorphins kick in, I guess.
    Mom tried to get me interested in team sports after that, but I never really liked them. I mean, look at baseball. The nationalpastime, they call it. What a lame game. You wait like an hour between pitches for something to happen while everybody stands around spitting and scratching themselves.
    Most sports are the same, it seems to me. They’re just a simulation of warfare—two teams trying to push their opponents across a battlefield and score a goal on them. Soccer—run up and down a field kicking a ball. Hockey—skate up and down a rink pushing a puck. Basketball—run up and down a court dribbling a ball. Football—run up and down a field knocking each other over. They were all the same as far as I was concerned, and I just wasn’t into them.
    â€œHow about bowling?” Mom asked one day when I was moping around after school. “You don’t run up and down a field in bowling.”
    â€œBowling?” I asked, incredulously. “That has got to be the all-time most boring sport in the world, Mom! You roll a ball down an alley to knock down pins. Snooze! I