High School. in the case of Davis, notably Senior high school, which constitutes sophomore, junior, and senior year only.

The first event for this year was really that day in ninth grade we had to come to DSHS and setup or schedules for sophomore year. Then, a big break, in which the summer seems so busy that ninth grade is a distant memory, and a few days before Labor Day I have to show up at the crack of dawn to get a picture taken for the yearbook and my student ID.

I ended up standing in line next to Jim, completely randomly, probably told him about how I had been up all night talking online, I was pretty chatty and so is he. Then saw Sam’s mother providing snacks for everyone as they came out. Which is an interesting note, since I think Sam was doing independent study, I don’t remember seeing him at any of the high schools in town or being even listed in the yearbooks, so I don’t quite recall why she was there. I know she was a teacher from time to time, so maybe she had been working on something else. I don’t know, she was there, I think Sam was too.

And then we hit September 7^th and the first day of high school.

That picture is actually from junior year, but we can just pretend I took one that day.

Dragging my carcass out of bed for a first period class for the first time in my life was painful. Luckily the class, World History, was something I could wing without being conscious. By this time in my life, I was into enough history and geography on my own, that the high school intro classes could be done with relatively no effort. This is how I maintained a B in the class with shotty attendance and just downright sleeping in class.

The class was in the auto-shop class and the teacher would sort of lecture on about things, I remember a whole thing about the health care debate that was going on in the media at the time and his insistence that if one had Kaiser they had all the health care they needed. It was also nice that the teacher for that class was okay with non-class interaction as long as you had the chapter test turned in on Friday and took the exams. I kept managing to get most of those in on Fridays, so I never really got nagged about it, or much heat for being out of class Monday through Thursday. It was a good class.

That became an M.O. though for most of tenth grade. I even got to a point, which oddly it seems Chris M. did as well completely independently from me, of not bothering to make it all the way to school some mornings. Those days I would just sleep at the project play park in the community park adjacent to the senior high school campus. My life was becoming way more about the stuff we were doing away from school. I hung out a lot with Jake, and running the new Deathrow BBS with Marty were a couple of these things.

I think that is a somewhat period accurate picture of the park, it had that big structure in the middle one could lay down and sleep in. Also I am here to point out an error when I wrote that above line, the BBS I had just started with Marty was apparently some form of TiT0rs still, there is a lot of confusion over all the dates and BBS eras, and for some reason when I wrote this I thought sophomore year was Deathrow BBS, but that is still a year away, hopefully I just call it the BBS from this point out, I guess I’ll see while I edit this.

I have a bit of griping to do here. The main one being the BBS. As I have gotten older it has come to my knowledge that in other areas in the world, things like running a BBS during those times was something some schools put prestige onto and could, or should, have been something I could have added to a repertoire of school activities. Instead, it was a distraction from the design of our senior high, which was a preparatory school for four-year universities and had a pretty strict road of classes you had to take every year to be able to fill out the college applications the way the admissions officers wanted. Oh well, back to high school.

I think it wasn’t until post-Christmas break though that ditching school came to a head. I managed to slide by in World Civ, P.E. and oddly Algebra, well not oddly, since I had taken it the year before but was repeating thanks to whatever happened in ninth grade. More than likely had something to do with my non-awarded my credits the year before. I just aced all the first semester tests and quizzes and generally goofed off when I went to that class.

As always math had the sillier characters in class to goof around with. Which makes sense now because Algebra as a tenth grader was being behind. So, the class is full of kids that even if not bad, are now being herded into the underachiever category and so maybe in response are acting out, or not stopping others from doing so. Long story short a goof-off culture logically forms around these courses and puts a lot of similarly jaded kids in a room together with a teacher that had probably been teaching since the 1950s, I keep doing the math in my head, that statement is right but it sounds insane. The 50s are black and white, right, and wrong. 1993, 94, we are now completely escaped from the 80s pageantry, we have computers in the house, the internet, tragedies, cable television, HD TVs will start popping up before the decade is over. Math is a class of kids not terribly happy to be there with Beaver Cleaver’s Math teacher, duck, and cover, I guess.

The class had taken to doing the Nelson laugh from The Simpsons as a way to get under the instructor’s skin. A simple sound, but when everyone does it once the teacher’s back is turned it can start an epidemic. Now too me, a year behind in math and bored, I really became one of the willing participants in in-class misbehavior. Our teacher who was older than dirt at the time was prophesized as some strict disciplinarian but ended up being a patsy for kids in an unwanted math class. To her credit we did act like we were on drugs, on purpose to get to her, which it obviously had. However, when I got knowledge of that during my transfer meeting the counselor in charge also shrug off the comment as something that crazy old bat would write and had no bearing. It was both the worst class to have to go to and the most fun.

I had the fortuitous chance of having Brendan in this class with me, who maybe hasn’t come up yet. He was a friend of Jim’s. Probably Jim’s best friend and happened to be in the band with Jim that I wrestled Jake away from in junior high. Jake and Brendan would have an interesting relationship actually, I don’t think they were always on the best terms, but I don’t know the whole of that story and maybe one of them will fill in the blanks for that. Either way, he was an Emerson kid, so this was the first time I had a class with him, but through mutual friends and interests I knew who he was.

Well back to the good luck. Anyway, this class over the course of the year started having a high transfer rate, as in, kids started getting out cause the whole thing was a mess. Spoiler alert I will be one of those. Anyway, since Brendan and I would become closer friends as time went on I got to ask about how this class ended since it was some memorable, and to little surprise he told me by the end of the year it had a butts in seat count of about seven.

Going backwards a bit, before Math I had English. Which was a very forgettable class from what I don’t remember. But it was my daily check in with Erin. Of course, the picture above is from 10^th grade, because well no camera at this time on my person. But I would get out of P.E. and go rest up against on the poles at the entrance of the humanities building, as it was called then. Then before class Erin, leaving whatever class it was she had, probably English, would give me a run down of events for class or just the hot gossip of the day.

Since I had sort of gone rogue with school attendance over this time, and very rogue with working on the BBS and staying out of some of the high school “drama” that was going around I would get my updates on friends like Chris H, or Jared and so on. Notably I can remember when she came out and told me about the classmate that got high and ran out onto the freeway, lived surprisingly, and other such weekend mayhem that I might have missed, including some weird stuff that I still wonder if it was the cause of Jared moving away from Davis.

So oddly Erin who wasn’t even in the class with me was who I remember talking to most when it comes to this class. I don’t remember a lot else, I got the low down of “Of Mice and Men” in P.E. class before the test on it, and we watched the movie “Gallipoli”. Some other assorted memories but not much. I think after my morning rest in world civ class, then listening to this one kid talk about stuff in P.E. I was just ready to check out and English class was where I did it. A calm before getting to math and needing energy to misbehave.

Then there was the afternoons. Nap time, I guess. In second semester in Sex Ed class, I developed an ability to sort of prop my head up and pass out. While Mrs. Kim was always entertaining to listen to, I had no energy to be conscious by that time of the day.

And then I had the most dangerous class seventh period when tired. Film. I signed up for the film class because I thought, cool making movies might be fun. Turns out with the old editing machine and having to rent the camcorder the school had since we didn’t own one was going to be a menace. And all of that work was to be done at home. I somehow figured film class would be like a film crew making films at school. Instead, it was like ten kids in the drama room watching foreign films. The drama room, with its couches and fold-out chairs. Sitting in the dark, watching art films in another language. That’s just how to describe falling sleep.

If I made it through that, I would get home, turn on the old television box and fall asleep during the cartoon blocks that aired. I am fifteen, sleep is more of a way of life than something you do for a few hours at night. In fact, it was at night that I would spark up a little bit and probably stay up to late watching David Letterman and wondering what possum George had just chased up the fence when he wouldn’t stop barking.

By third quarter we hit the give up on school quarter. Even though I was sliding by drama away from school, that being mainly with little miss Kim was just keeping me from wanting to get up in the morning. Young and dumb I guess but I really let that all get under my skin. So eventually we tried King High School instead. Shorter days and kids like Marty already being there, gave my mother an alternate perspective on alternate education. The complete change of venue into fourth quarter of Sophomore year helped a lot. Getting recruited into the elementary school teaching Four-H sponsored program was something I seemed to gel with. Getting to keep my PASCAL class at the senior high school fifth period helped. Being able to work on a new computer (386 or 486) that the math teacher at King purchased for school credit, was way better than just doing Algebra 1 again during math.

Oh yeah, Turbo PASCAL class.

So, turns out I managed to keep and find one of my floppy disks from that class. From it I can see the last saves of countless class projects and get a better understanding of the first part of this school year since in some of the source codes I wrote notes to myself about being tired.

This is where early on I see that I am complaining about being up late working on a BBS with Marty, and that the BBS sucks. Thanks to a paper I will write later in high school, these notes help add to the confusion of how and when TIT0r’s/Imperial City BBS existed. But it seems after the summer Marty and I revived TIT0rs, under that name, only to later change it to Imperial City. Hopefully I will get that all covered in their sections.

While staying up late wasn’t helping me, I guess considering some of the drama I was hearing about from Erin, going computer nerd at the beginning of the year wasn’t the worst thing a kid could do for their parents sanity.

The next thing that the PASCAL files help me lay out is that this fall I was also working a lot with Doug on computer focused projects. The main one being his attempt to make a door game like Hack and Slash that was runnable on our PC based BBS systems. This is why Doug we be around for George and his seizure during the holiday season in 1993. And I guess this is where I transition to “though I was sliding by drama away from school, that being mainly with little miss Kim”.

End of ninth grade, everything is roses it seems, I get those nice letters during the summer all of that. Even though I don’t remember how everything plays out, thanks again to having some old computer files backed up I can see that in fall of 1993 Kim is so involved in things she has a user that is a “co-sysop” on the BBS. Then it seems we have the mystery of November 21^st, 1993. Something happens with Marty, and his lust to have Kim to himself that he writes a letter, email style on the BBS, to Kim, apologizing for stuff, but in an oddly teenage boy love me manipulation kind of way. Don’t worry I am not above this, I will do the same, just with a paper letter. I just remember at the time finding it weird, weird enough that I saved a hard copy of the letter.

Weird because I knew better on what the email was meant for, and weird because why are you sending a private letter on a system where all the guys around you are going to see it, know what’s up and have an opinion. Thus drama.

So, there is a window here of pro-Marty, pro-Me, BBS drama with Kim. In which I think I get everyone on my side, because well as I said Marty wrote the “private” letter somewhere where it would be public. I wrote a lot on this to myself as I was timelining things out. Let’s see how concise I can be.

For the next couple of months this is going to cause some turmoil in the BBS power structure. Having to remember as much as I can as an adult makes this all seem silly, but I think the immediate of the public/private letter was that Marty got demoted on the BBS. Not a mature response on my end, but this isn’t the most mature situation. From this I think Doug gets expanded domain. Which is something I had kind of forgotten about. The fact that Marty’s attempt to run off with Kim, at the time excommunicated him and allowed Doug a bigger voice around the campfire.

Since I was so invested at the time with where Kim went, I never really noticed the social dynamic that was going on at this time. After the summer had wound down, I stopped hanging out with Tom as much. Not for any particular reason, I just think school and BBS, and then his college and whatever proved to not give us as much time as during the summer when I was free to move about the city.

Partnering with Marty on the software company and then the BBS also had me replace some of that hang out time from the summer with Tom with Marty. I had also started during the summer hanging out with Doug a lot. Doug didn’t like Marty. There was some compartmentalizing I had to do there to keep those two worlds from being a thorn in my side.

Kim, initially was sort of a girl I talked to and no one really knew. As I am always for whatever reason trying to not compartmentalize my friendships, over time I slowly introduced her to everyone, via the fact that we were talking regularly enough guys would just come over. She then had talked to Doug without me as a go between, she might have done the same with Jake, and then eventually through the BBS Marty got to talking to her. For Marty, and this isn’t a disparaging comment, just something I can see from the benefit of maturity and hindsight now, this was the only girl that was friendly with him, so I see why he took the risk, the problem was I don’t think he knew all the back history that was going on, like me having to wade through some stuff with her during the summer.

But then as we see, once he treads onto what I felt was my toes, especially with one of the close friends at the time whispering in my ear about how aggravating Marty can be, it was easy to let the issue escalate versus maybe having a rational conversation about it. Although I am 15, Marty I think is feeling desperate and Kim, well she slightly hunted the drama, I think. So, then of course the most logical teenage thing happens, I demote Marty and then everyone gets Kim to choose a side, which ended up being mine, but was also kind of Doug, and Jake and well everyone else. I was in a unique position with almost all our friends besides JF that Marty pissing me off gave opportunity for the other friends to say “see I told you not to hang out with him” or words to that effect.

And so that would be the holidays for 1993. I see that right before thanksgiving I updated my TIT0rs PASCAL files that ran ads for the BBS to say the sysops were me, Kim and Doug. And then I don’t make a lot more stuff for a while.

I was actually pretty shaken at this point. My trust wasn’t actually that good with either Marty or Kim after the whole ordeal. I don’t remember what day to day life was like much during this couple month span, but I do remember that things were eating away at me behind the scenes when I went to bed at night. Which is a strong contrast to how Christmas went down. This is the first Christmas Chris M started staying for the holidays and included him losing his mind Christmas night on FF4, then a few days later would have been when I was playing Super Empire Strikes back and Doug, me, mom and Chris M all found out about George and his seizures. Long run, those are the events I recall, but I know I was putting on a bit of a game face.

I also know this came to a head after break. When I decided I needed to vent my issues Marty style with a letter, except I gave Kim a paper letter and not one for everyone to see. That didn’t go well either. I don’t think it was her intention to like clingy gentlemen. The problem was, almost all of us lost our minds when things felt more intense, we are young and governed by stupidity.  So, once again, she took the easy route and chose to move away from a letter. While I say after Marty’s letter she chose me, I really think she just chose the easy road of staying on the status quo. But the whole thing ate at me, so I eventually had to have feelings and so she did the easy thing and looked elsewhere again.

The good news, I was able to start mending fences with Marty, and so the BBS would start its chance into Imperial City and for a time Marty and I will get back to our normal friendship. So was Kim this sort of shatter point for the whole event, kind of. Doug was another interesting cog in this machine. Because he did take Marty’s spot, he was there over the holidays, watched George have his issues and everything else. I think it was even during break that he did the old crash the DSHS internet server.

This server crash which was a simple execution of copying all the public ftp files from UC Berkeley to DSHS, was done on a night that, once again me, Doug and Chris M were hanging out. I also remember it for being the night that Doug just played the calling Chris M “Fuzzy” a nickname of his BBS handle Fizban, so much that it oddly became uncomfortable. Which is a weird statement. In retrospect again it makes more sense, but at the time Doug’s behavior seemed erratic. And so, after break there was this realization that he was also kind of selfish too and not as fun to hang out with as we used to feel, and it became hard to deal with compartmentalizing friendships, so when I started letting Marty back in, Doug dipped. He had his swing kids, and Graham after all. But going through the holiday span to my birthday, which is around a two-and-a-half-month period, we have a drastic shake up to things. And the aftermath for now of Marty’s initial letter to Kim, is we all move forward without Kim and Doug.

The only thing to do is get a one gig hard drive. This is where the exact dates of everything other than the day I got the hard drive are a little vague. Given that Doug made a new multinode BBS write up referencing the fact that we should have a gigabyte hard drive, I can see  that the plan was set in motion for the big birthday gift a bit before and that oddly breaking off from Kim and brining Marty back, who also is referenced as someone to avoid in the write up, changed whatever plans were going on drastically.

So, step one, get the drive. I was turning sixteen this year, hey look we are actually in 1994 now! I think I have spouted this story off elsewhere, but here it is again, Mom, who ended up being the one that gave his plan the green light, decided that since I seemed to have chosen against trying to get my license on my birthday that this thousand-dollar hard drive was no different than me wanting a car.

That statement seems weird to me when I think about it. Because for years they were saving one of the Mazda GLC’s for me just in case. However, I think the VW station wagon had caused so much turmoil in their lives and with the paper route’s with Dad in the morning, that the GLC got traded in with it to get another car like the Ford Taurus we had that they liked. Thus we went down to three cars I think sometime during the year between 9^th and 10^th grades, and we had the Taurus and a 1992 Mercury Tracer that Mom got vanity plates for. MSCLDY, for her music business name, the Music Lady, just note that.

Without a hand me down and without wanting to drive desperately at the time, the money was thought good spent on a hard drive, considered at the time, so large it would full fill all our BBS and beyond needs. Don’t look ahead a couple years into the future. At the time, the drive was so massive we didn’t just have to buy the drive, but we had to get a special interface controller card to use it. Luckily, we had Oak Tree computers half a block away, they ordered the parts and we got everything set up in the evening over there. A dollar a megabyte. When I am writing this, you can get access to multiple gigabytes of hard storage for free, at the time though I felt pretty cool.

It was up running and with Marty’s downtime he wanted to have a BBS pirating group that did all the cool things kids of that era that were awesome. Downloading and distributing pirated software, pretending you know how to hack a payphone, etc. and ANSI art packs. It was that last thing I would get super into and have a couple of sections on.

While my teenage brain processed the previous few months of drama, deciding to not be a driver right away, fighting over a girl with a friend only to have her walk away from both of us, and then sort of forgoing the friend that wanted me to forgo the other, I dipped into making ANSI and RIP graphics for Marty’s big plans.

This heading into March was where I gave up on third quarter at school, and we have caught up on the personal drama with what I was talking about with school.

After this High School would make sense. Over the next two years I would get my GPA back up over three and graduate on time while generally not skipping any more school. I mean I would get sick from time to time but it wasn’t a big deal. There are reasons 1994 ended up being a memorable time, fixing school was a big part of it. Changing schools also made this a weird school year. I would end somewhere else than I started. Except mind you fifth period PASCAL class, which Marty and I would continue going to and do next year first semester as well.

This would lead to lunches at DSHS every day for the next couple years with Marty, Me, next school year Alyssa and then the boys, Karl, Nate and so on in front of the music room. This would make a marked change from junior high where I went home every day. It is also worth noting, here in spring 1994 that over Karl’s left shoulder in that picture of me and him from the fall is where Kim and her friends would sit. That’s what we call foreshadowing.

For now, though, all good. April 4^th is the best estimate as to which day was my first at King. When you start there, you have to take a two-week introductory crash course. I think so that the bad kids like me get the idea of what is and isn’t expected there. Interestingly, and completely independent of what was going on in my life, I remember Chris H. being in that basic, as they called it, class. While I had been going through my BBS summer and all my sophomore drama, he had been going down his own new path and both led us to a new High School fourth quarter. So it seems I probably would have ended up with the same set of issues regardless of going with Jake or Chris H’s band ideas.

Now this could have been some amazing story about how after branching off from Chris H around this time last year Chris and I reform the band and I dump all the drama that has come with… No this isn’t happening; it was just cool to see him again. Plus, he was going to a different session in the afternoon of school, so after these two weeks I wouldn’t see him at school again.

Nope I did mornings, so that Marty and I could keep walking to DSHS after we were excused, go to lunch and then hit that Turbo PASCAL class. Without the stress of proving our worth to a young lady things went pretty well. And as I have said the new school went very well. Having Chris H back around though did get me to make this ANSI:

Which I know was inspired by him and his tagging because it’s literally in the file name.

This means we end this school year very upbeat. Along with this the summer has a big trip planned this year. Unlike last year where I bummed around all summer, I had dates in the Midwest and then Germany to attend to.

Summer 1994

As things change, my transitions from section to section aren’t the greatest. But June starts in 1994 and the single quarter I have taken at King High now ushers in the era that feels like High School to me.

That may be a strange statement, but sophomore year was this island between what junior high was and the life beyond. It was riddled with ways to not go to class, weird BBS drama, friends not being at school and just a ton of changing things to make the year itself feel out of place.

The summer of 1993 was so eventful that in some ways going back to a school routine felt strange, and then I never got into that routine.  I ended the 93-94 year in such a different spot than the 92-93, and in such a different spot than I started the 93-94 that it almost doesn’t seem like school happened, just some weird extension of ninth grade, the summer and other things until in April I seemed to settle down.

Then after all this time to get settled my parents plan a massive trip during the summer, which is going to take June and some of July and rearrange things again.

I don’t know why I have a copy of this, luckily I think all the personal information and company are just gone, so I’ll post it. On March 25th my parents plopped down a considerable amount of money, which to be honest I would have been happy with a new computer for that price. Anyway they slapped that down on the table and setup a whole plan for me to get to Germany with my brother.

Now this is only part of the plan, the first part is flying to Chicago and staying with Cindy before the mid-June departure to visit Reise. Anyway this means that 1994 marked a return to large scale family trips during the summer. Mom and Dad got hooked up with a travel group called People to People. The details I am a bit fuzzy on but somehow, they got to go on a tour of a few European countries through this outfit, in trade for Dad, who about a year later would help host an event were some Europeans, Russians if I recall, got to come to Davis for some music related event.

So, a plan for that summer was hatched and it was an interesting one. Once school was out my parents got on a plane for Europe while I boarded a plan for Chicago and stayed for a while with Cindy. Then I would load up a few weeks later on a flight to Munich and meet up with Reise who was back living in Augsburg Germany again, he moved around a lot in the Army. Then Mom and Dad would take a train from their last destination into Germany, and we would spend some time with Reise in Germany again. This trip once, I got to Germany, was where I started getting into photography for a little while and why I suddenly have pictures from 1994.

The first leg though in Chicago. This now was the second or third time out to this location. I’m not going to lie this stay over is excruciating in my mind when I remember it. At this point in my life, I was sixteen and had what I considered to be my own life and I had things I liked to do. So, staying at my sister’s house somewhere away from friends was a little torturous. To boot at that point, I felt endlessly different than her kids.

The above is a 2020s google earth image of Cindy’s place, but it remains relevant because there is still a basketball hoop in the same spot on the side driveway, and you can see the little pond/lake across the street on the left-hand side.

To add to this, for some reason her smaller children were on a cycle of watching the movie Homeward Bound on repeat. For a few days I was in hell. Don’t get me wrong there was some effort to keep me from snapping. Rich drove us out to their areas Six Flags and roller coasters are hard to mess up. But there wasn’t a whole lot for me to do from what I recall other than hang out in the house and watch TV, so the Homeward Bound movie was like a prison sentence.

They did luckily tape the series final of Star Trek the Next Generation, so I was able to watch that later in the night once the smaller ones were off in their beds. That TV also brought us the infamous O.J. Simpson/Bronco low speed chase. Which for those who didn’t live through that weird moment in history is still an odd experience. I know it’s mundane now but at the time was just so different, too bad it was a sign of what was to come and not an anomalous event.

Basketball was also a big thing to do at this age. In Davis, J.F., myself, Marty and Chris M. would play a lot, either at Holmes after school was out or on the weekends at Hickey Gym at UCD. So, since Cindy and Rich had a hood up in the drive way I would shot around some too. While this seems a pretty dull note, the only real part of this that is memorable is that it was the first time I was aware of midwestern humidity. We played in the heat a lot in California and would sweat. This wasn’t nearly as hot, but when I was done my shirt was wet like I had jumped in the lake next to the house. You don’t sweat like that in California even in the intense heat.

                So where are Mom and Dad during this time. Well Austria and Polland I know for certain. While I am either burning a hole in the Star Trek VHS or having a hole burned in my head by Homeward Bound for the 1,000th time, Mom and Dad are living it up in Prague. Not a bad gig, go on a tour and let the grandkids kill my will to live in the meantime. 900+ dollars well spent!

Eventually Rich would take me to the airport to get on the next leg of the trip. Now here is another side note of this trip. In 1994 during the summer the U.S. was hosting the world cup, which is this major soccer event. While professional soccer is not a huge deal in the U.S. like youth soccer is, the event itself is like the Olympics in as much as involving tons of different countries. O’Hare airport then was oddly busy with all this during our travels. This is also the old days when people without tickets could wander the airport so Rich hung out with me while I waited for my flight at the gate. So, we met some of the representatives for the Djibouti national team while waiting to board my Non-stop flight from Chicago to Munich. That’s a long flight.

Long enough to mess with one’s night and day quite a bit. If I recall we left decently early in the day from Chicago, then I had about a twelve-hour flight. Something like that. Then when I was to land in Munich it would be like 8 in the morning and time to start a new day, even though it should have been bedtime. Even though I tried to sleep on the plane, which I was normally pretty good at, the weird way that worked out was hard to deal with and I ended up trying to get my hands on as much caffeine as I could get. By the time Reise would come and get me I was probably wired and tired, I don’t remember much from the first day there.

In Germany before Mom and Dad got there it was kind of the same deal as being at Cindy and Rich’s a bit although, with less little kids around there was some more focus on activities. To boot Reise and Karen had this insane log of movies they had fastidiously recorded over the years and catalog, so there was a lot to watch during down time.

I did a lot of solo wandering in downtown Augsburg, which is where Reise was stationed. I bought the new Pantera album at some record store there, which I thought pretty clever since the CD Research back at home always charged extra for the German imports of albums for some reason. It was during these wanderings that I saw the Tie Fighter demo at a computer store and reassured myself that I must have that game. I also got quite adept at ordering a double quarter pounder and large orange Fanta at the McDonald’s.

The McDonald’s, which I guess would be constituted in downtown, old town, whatever it’s called in cities that have bene around since the dawn of time. Anyway, that McDonald’s where I learned to order a groß Fanta was also the location I left the camera I got all these lovely pictures from at one of the stalls, for like 30 minutes. Luckily, unlike what I thought would happen, when I returned to the restaurant the camera was still there on the table where I left it.

Interestingly, trips to the record store to look at CDs, McDonalds, trying to find computer stuff, I basically was doing the same things I would that summer in downtown Davis, even though I’m in Germany now. And before Mom and Dad get there, I am not even taking pictures, just watching movies and shopping for CDs. Then playing the CD when I get back to my brothers loudly on the stereo system.

Thanks to my brother living on base too, mornings were Pop Tarts, just like back at home, and so even though I am about to spend weeks overseas this summer, other than some tourist stuff a lot of the things I will do, especially on my own are not exclusive to Europe.

One morning Reise took me out to play ultimate frisbee with some Army guys. I got a good idea of how much homophobia was rampant in the military at the time while playing that. No, this wasn’t a given, if what I grew up around was considered bad, which it honestly wasn’t, this was beyond next level in comparison. To my determent, it gave me a more well-rounded idea of the issues that were currently all the rage with homosexuals and the military during that time. I realized there were people as strongly against the idea as there was for it, since I had only seen those for it my whole life it did make me wonder if it was a safe idea at the time. That sort of anger I didn’t grow up with. Back on topic though.

It was while running around with Reise for some reason or another during this time that I got my funny car story for the trip too. Reise, being Reise which maybe is hard to explain, at the time had traded cars somehow and ended up with a 1960s, like 68 maybe, red Mustang as his commuter car. It was kind of a neat car and in Germany with the autobahn he had the fun luxury of really getting to push some limits when we went places.

And I won’t lie, that was fun. Since it was an older car, it was devoid of modern conveniences like air conditioning, so we would roll down the windows during these land speed tests going from town to town in Bavaria. This was the first time in my life I ever did something as dumb as see what high speed winds felt like on one’s face. After that it was mainly the hand that would feel the resistance as we screamed down the road.

That is note two, screaming down the road. Another issue with his car was that something as afoot with the muffler or some such nonsense, making his car loud, like, really loud. Reise was not one to shy away from enjoying that either though. I mentioned I think briefly about our weird travels in Bonn back in 1987 and the incident in Cologne Dad had. Driving in Germany is not the same as in the US. Which is odd considering how much more one has to go through to drive there. But the open door lets race down the street policy was there. Yeah that’s a thing that happened once, Reise opened his door to talk to another driver on that specific subject once.

Reise enjoyed having the loud flashy classic American car to run around in. I was sixteen and kind of enjoyed being with him while he did these silly things too. I was also sixteen and would sometimes be more adventurous than just the quarter pounder and orange soda I had learned to order. Now I don’t know if this is a culture norm, or a trend at the time, but one in 1994 in Germany at the age of sixteen could order a large amount of Coke mixed with lemonade to wash down their meal. This was something I would do a lot as well. In fact, at some renaissance fair, we went to, maybe it was this day I am about to talk about, I had got a giant stein which I had filled with the concoction and drank a lot it.

So it was that this one day screaming down the autobahn, full of caffeine and how know what else that my stomach got mad at me. Now the autobahn in Germany while the example for the American highway system isn’t that same. At least back in 1994 there wasn’t a gas station every five miles right off the freeway. So when ones stomach got upset we had to hold until we could get to the next little hamlet and find a public water closet.

So my brother drove faster and found us a little town that had a tiny grocer with a public toilet. He parked out front and I went sprinting in to find it. Relieved I eventually came back out to find my brother taking to the proprietor of the store. They were both laughing out near the car. My brother said a couple things to him in German waved, they laughed and we got back into the car.

I asked my brother what that was all about as we started our way back out. He told me that when I ran in the owner came out in disbelief. Apparently he couldn’t believe it, but here it was in front of his little store, the loudest car in all of Germany. It seems somehow in that small time with the mustang my brother’s car had built up a reputation for its excessive noise pollution and the grocer was amazed that this fabled vehicle had pulled up in house town of all places.

His car truly was celebrity loud. That wasn’t the only time it got spotlighted either. He in fact got at least one visit from the MP on base over complaints about the decibel levels the car was achieving.  And if I recall this lead to his time with this car not being very long. But for one afternoon on the autobahn were the car made my brother famous in some random little Bavarian town.

Once Mom and Dad got there, they had the camera and the new laptop we bought for the trip. The laptop was pretty neat for the times, although the VGA graphics were on a black and white screen. It allowed Dad and I to bring Civilization with us! And of course like I said I would pick up the camera from Mom at this stage of the trip. Now I suddenly will start having pictures from the Summer of 1994 onwards because photography became a fun little side thing I did.

I would bring Mom’s little no zoom point and shot camera around with my quite a lot for the next few months. It was basically my necklace. Marty would wear a chain, I would wear a camera. Now since I had the camera most of the tie I don’t know what it looked like to see this teenager walking around with one on all the time, but my photos became popular with my inner circle of friends. I would start to keep and album, and bring the film to Long’s to get developed all the time. As much  so that I learned I had to tell them to develop all my pictures because for whatever reasons they would pick and choose when I had similar copies of pictures on the negatives.

My constant photo taking caught on enough Karl started doing some later on in our high school careers as well, although his family had a much nicer camera with a telephoto lens and all the other trimmings. Because of this we are lucy to have a lot of random photos from the bulk of our high school careers. The trend will taper off a bit after 1996, but luckily digital cameras are just around the corner and that opens another flood gate of picture taking, to which the world hasn’t really recovered from yet.

With the folks back we did a lot more stuff in Germany. We visited Dachau again. We did this in 1987 too but I don’t know it’s a haunting place to visit and I guess since it wasn’t that far away, we decided to stop by it again. We went to a German renaissance fair, which may have been the catalyst for my pit stop on the way back with Reise. And then other tourist trappy things.

There was one Monday the boys all got together and drove around looking for something to do. Of course as always Monday is like Sunday, so almost everything was closed. So, we spent an awful long time attempting to trespass some castle off the side of the road.

Then of course the longest trip with everyone was up to the Eagle’s nest. Look WW2, while Germany wants to push past it in some ways, when it comes to places to go, the country is littered with History around the war, and since they were what could be defined as the bad guys, not to disparaged anyone there now, but the nazi’s weren’t the greatest. However because of this, the stuff they left behind is endlessly interesting. So yeah another trip in our trip was to a big WW2 site.

High up in the Alps, the Eagle’s nest was confounding in how long it took to get up and into the mountain itself. It’s not wonder top military brass during the way thought it a good place to hide. We explored the area for quite a while. Did the hike up to the top and so on. What’s interesting is with all the historical societies have preserved there is a lot of stuff that remains ruined from that area and the fighting or bombings that took place and are essentially open to walk around and explore.

The sad part is one of the most memorable highlights of the trip was going home. I don’t know why the flights home were booked so oddly, but Mom and Dad left on earlier flights than I did. I was on a flight from Munich, Germany to Newark, New Jersey as my first leg going home. I had to switch flights in Newark, I had the ticket and everything ready to go. We touched down very close to my departure time, so I got my gate and verified it with the flight attendant on the way off the plane, then booked it to the next gate, which I recall not being terribly close.

I ran and got in line as the plane was boarding, showed the attendant my boarding pass and then heard that I was at the wrong gate. My flight had been moved elsewhere and I had to go to a different gate instead. When I got there that flight was gone. Through the shuffling of gates, I was left in Newark with a flight that was gone and a duffle bag with my stuff in it.

Being that this was 1994 I didn’t have a cell phone. So, I collected myself and found a pay phone. I wasn’t really flush with money being sixteen, so I had to call home collect. Luckily, and I don’t remember why, Mother was already home by now, like I said I don’t remember why she was home before Dad and I, but she was. I explained the situation to her, and we got on figuring out what was going to happen.

image 81 riding the people mover at the Newark International Airport (1994)

I then played a long game of riding up and down the people mover waiting to hear my name on the airport P.A. asking me to get on one of the white courtesy phones. Turned out as I came to learn that the airport was pretty inept that day and had been switching flights around. Beyond that there was some sort of storm issue somewhere that was causing odd delays to incoming and outgoing flights. As it turned out I didn’t actually miss the flight I was supposed to be on, it got changed to another flight, which of course in the days without instant internet didn’t get reported down the line for the one connecting passenger, me, from Germany.

Hours later after resigning myself to just being a permanent resident of Newark, I was finally awarded an outbound flight time. I went to the new gate and was allowed eventually to board the plane with my new flight to Chicago O’Hare Airport. Then we sat on tarmac for about an hour and a half waiting for clearance to take off. By now I was almost the whole day into being at the Newark airport. By the time we were finally cleared to leave it was dark outside.

Once arriving in Chicago, Dad was either supposed to meet me there earlier in the day for a connecting flight home or had managed to change his flight to wait in case I came in that day. I don’t remember which scenario it was, although I think it was the latter for some reason or another. All I remember is I got in around one in the morning, I was on one of the last flights in as I recall. Then we got an airport shuttle out to one of the hotels that the airline gave us to stay in. I guess at this point the errors on the flight connections coupled with me being a minor had allowed my mom to burn someone enough to get the airline to cater to us a bit.

The next morning, we got up and I remember there being more confusion on what flight we were going to be taking back home. Eventually Dad decided in his frustration to start haggling with our tickets. He got the airline to take our up in the air later in the day nonstop flight tickets and traded it for a series of smaller flights that we took to go from Chicago eventually to Sacramento International. Including a stop in Nevada where we got on a tiny little plane and hopped over the Sierra Nevada mountains to land in Sacramento. Of course once in Sacramento that ended the ordeal of getting home, much to the delight of George who had been missing us something fierce.

image 82 George with his new haircut after we got back from Germany (1994)

Once back on American soil there wasn’t much time for turn around. Coming soon was a school sponsored trip to Southern California. This paves the way for one of the shorter feeling summers at home in a while. The first day back I still had some unused film from the trip, so I loaded myself up on my bike and cruised town capturing pictures of friends and places. I hopefully can get all those pictures found, I think one of them is of Tom’s car that was the vessel of consequence the summer before.

For the next year or so though I will continue to use the same camera and develop pictures, it seems I even had the camera with me the night of the skylight incident. Oddly I think I may have mentioned I remembered checking the batteries while we made our first stop with Jake after the fall. Those batteries would have been the ones for the flash in the camera, which is probably why I don’t have damming evidence of what happened that night, no flash.

image 83 Tiffany and Lacey filling up at the former Shell station on 5th and G street, the 76 across the street is now a bank, where they are standing a coffee shop. taken while finishing up my last roll of film from Germany (1994)

I had some film left over in the camera, so the day after getting back I rode around on my bike and captured really the first pictures I would have of everyone. I went back and forth between downtown and everyone’s apartments until eventually ending up back home with Mom and Dad and it seems Chris K.

I noted that as weird because I don’t recall Chris K. coming over much after the summer of 1993, but I wager I was just looking for anyone that afternoon to hang out with. I wouldn’t be surprised if Marty or Chris M came over after I killed the roll of film to take to Long’s to get developed.

But yeah its also weird because since, especially 8th grade when my secondary school life became real, we have gone 8th, 9th and 10th without any photos of anyone save the school pictures I have pulled up from the yearbooks:

Hopefully all from the same 9th grade year book, so 1992 is the year most of those pictures were taken we see some of the kids I will later have photos of this year, Jake, Chris M., Jeaneave (which I talk about from that time in 1992 but don’t have any pictures of), Chris K, Me and then Vanya and Erin, which were all over that Ninth grade year book. But I had these real life references for those time periods and that is it, the rest of that era was cartoon/cartoon/cartoons of everything, I don’t know if that skews my minds eye on what everyone looked like during those times but it’s worth noting that even though we see Chris K, for example in the yearbook with a pretty normal amount of curly hair. Junior high brains for us had him as the curly haired mess on the cartoon drawings.

Thus, starting to take real pictures of everyone helps a lot with going back in time. I wish we would have started with it earlier and been more persistent over the years. Not having pictures of Chris M, before his substantial growth spurt is like missing an entire character version of him. While tall gangly Chris M. became the norm after it happened, the times when he wasn’t that person are just as important and should have been remembered in the same light. Instead I just have comic versions of him being tiny with a pizza lip.

This is why although the Germany trip was a memorable life event, the biggest change to life as a whole wasn’t visiting on concentration camp sites or seeing places the youths didn’t get to see much in those days, but it was getting ahold of that not to fancy camera and being able to document some of the everyday stuff, that unlike the Eagle’s Nest, would pretty much be forgotten if there wasn’t a picture of it to spark the memory circuits.

Another note on this trip to Germany before I get into having a camera now, and more summer hijinx. Kim, whom last summer was a big part of things, thanks to teenagers and emotions, we hadn’t talked since probably around the time Mom and Dad finalized trip plans. Maybe a bit later, but that last quarter at King High was pretty Kim devoid after all the Kim-centric time that we had before that.

But in the back of my head, I knew her family was going to Germany at the same time. It was something that sat in the back of my mind. Obviously, I spent a lot of time in Augsburg, her family probably wasn’t hitting up renaissance fairs in Bavaria or exploring closed Castles on a Monday afternoon. No, they were probably hitting the bigger tourist spots that we did as a family seven years before. But I wondered how weird it would be if we ran into them.

We of course did not, but out of an inability to not know everything, once I got home, I did make a call to find out where she had been and to see how close two kids from Davis came to overlapping in Germany. It seems silly, but then my parents had run into one of their church friends at a cemetery in either Polland or Austria, I can’t for the life of me remember which. And I am young and dumb, etc. it does seem oddly reasonable that we might have been doing the same things.

This somehow quickly iced over the hot rage (lol), and Kim would come back to the fold this fall and would get involved in some adventures. This adds to the question, where are the pictures of her. Well other than a couple of times this was over the phone etc. Also, and maybe this helps explain the lack of pictures during Halloween. I can almost remember her being weird about letting us take pictures of her. And I can remember this being a weird thing.

This picture is one of the items about it being a weird thing that I remember. Ninth grade yearbook, volleyball team picture. Not only is Kim looking away from the camera, since I talked to her on the phone and she brought this picture up, I know she was purposefully turning her head to try and escape the picture. The exact reason isn’t clear, it was strange. But then we all were back then, but there was some weird teenage girl reasoning too it.

As, Jake and I especially, got into photo documenting everything, I know it came up again, this weird, camera shy, not camera shy thing. This led way to a very weird compromise on the subject.

One day during lunch, she came over and gave me one of her school pictures, so we had something to add to the photo album. Once again, whether this was arranged ahead of time or some weird guilt thing escapes me. I wish it didn’t, because if it was guilt that she wanted the camera out of the Halloween festivities it would explain that very strange gap of having pictures from a lot of those eventful nights in the fall this year.

Although it isn’t without some precedent. I think I have one picture of Marty and JF managed to stay off camera until 1997. Some people are weird about photos, but all these years later I am trying to remember how and why we did or didn’t do certain things, and the Halloween night, which was such a big deal for us, is also a strange undocumented anomaly.

Anyway, Jake and I would instantly start becoming dummies with the camera.

Once again after coming home from my next summer trip, Jake and I started really getting into dumb posed pictures. Why I didn’t take too many before that trip (I seem to have Chris M. playing Tie Fighter), is a little bit of a mystery. While I can’t remember the details, it does occur to me that once we developed the Germany rolls Mom took control of the camera back and it was this next trip, I took on my own that got me to nestle it away full time.

                What’s amazing is that these pictures from August, just a few weeks after the end of the Germany rolls show how much has changed in a short time during this summer. That being my room, which is now a different setup, that once again is the setup I relate to being in High School. So much so that in my mind, sophomore year me came home to this setup and that the event that sparked the rearrangement, which was Chris K. killing the bottom bunk while being a bit to rough with it, was something that happened back in junior high, and not a month before Junior year.

                I’ll talk about this in my art section here, but in the picture of me straddling the guitar I can see I had started in earnest on figuring out how to get girls to look right for my comics. The cartoons that were the pictures of the times up until this point also pretty much feature the boys since I couldn’t get them right. Then initially sparked with the Sophomore yearbook and some ads in the paper I started trying to break that open so I could poke fun at everyone equally. The drawing in the upper left hand corner was one of the first attempts I was happy with.

                Oh yeah, I got that camera for a school trip to stay at UCLA for a bit.

Before I get into the trip itself I will throw up one issue that does come from now having color photos of my life again (ever since mom decided to stop documenting things around fourth grade). Since I am taking most of the photos, more often than not, in a day without preview screens, any picture of me is a guess and hope for the best selphie, as is my one picture from the UCLA trip in front of the library. Which interestingly enough is closed because of the Northridge earthquake that happened earlier in the year.

Later that summer a 4-h sponsored program I had been doing through school put four of us students with one faculty advisor on a plane for L.A. to attend some sort of leadership conference. It was my first time flying into L.A. and let me tell you, seeing the smog zone was something else as we came into land. Also, one of the students, Sonia, I remember being deathly scared of flying this being her first flight, she sat next to me, and for the next hour dug her nails into my arm almost constantly. The ride home functioned better, but she was deathly scared on the way there.

This trip was highlighted by be being late and not dressed up for the dinner with Jane Goodall and a trip to Magic Mountain after the weeklong stay at UCLA. I accidentally got assigned a room by myself which was great until some narc sold me out and I had to share a room with others. I spent most of the time there just wandering around campus. We were supposed to attend seminars, I remember doing one of them. I also remember falling asleep during it.

image 84 out and about at UCLA (1994)

During the seminars “Activity” phase though I met a girl from Lodi named Shelby and hit it off enough to start hanging around with her and her friends for the rest of the trip. Because of this I ended up with a full series of photos from the camera, which I brought with me.

What I ended up with is days of silly pictures, mainly featuring Shelby from the seminar and one of her more outgoing friends Cassandra. With others mixed in at times. The picture of Shelby up the tree came about from just going around campus, I don’t remember though how any of use communicated when we had free time and stuff, there must have been someway to pass messages around the dorms, but we are in a constantly online era so how we arranged all the hanging out is pretty impressive.

Afte that I was pretty much either hanging out with her or doing what I was assigned to do. I was late to our dinner with Jane Goodall, because, well, I was taking photos around campus. Luckily I was 16, so walking into an event that was supposed to be dress your best for in my regular baggy jeans and skate shirt didn’t really embarrass me. Instead Jane and I stood out as the two people dressed like we normally would for the event.

Then there were seminars I slept through, some weird mass group activities and a dance. All of which weren’t terribly amazing. It’s the pictures I got leading up to the mass activity that were the most fun. Once we got there, sitting on benches and listening to others talk, well, 16 so I was bored. I spent most of that time chumming it up with a girl that had to play Vanna White in some wheel of fortune skit.

The trip ended with our teacher, Val, getting the four of us that attended from King loaded in a rental car and then driving up to Magic Mountain for the day, before having to drive back to Burbank airport to fly home. I had a souvenir picture of his that I used to carry around on my wallet chain, but it like the chain I think are now lost to time. I assume I spent most of the time making sure Sonia didn’t pinch my arms as hard as she did during the plane flight.

Oh yeah, Sonia, a girl from school I got a long with came on this trip with us and it was her first time ever on a plane. She was scared of air travel, so I lent my arm to getting ground into with her extremely long nails as she feared that the 50 minute flight might be the last thing she did on earth.

She did of course survive both flights, but I wouldn’t be shocked if some of the red on her nails wasn’t my hard working blood.

The line between the Summer of 1994 ending and the beginning of the new school year is blurry in my mind and blurry in the hard record. When I started reminiscing on my childhood I started here, in early fall/late summer of 1994 for one reason, one evening we had an adventure that led to a story that continued to be passed on for years later. As I worked on the story, I started finding more and more out about it myself, lost memories and the like and now we have what really is the start to the penultimate year of high school, which I started by calling:

Sometime in 1994

image 1 Karl, Jake and Chris on the couch deciding what to do on a Friday night sometime in 1994. George sleeps on not caring. Art by Ryan House. Images 2-5 Karl, Chris, Me and Jake that night in 1994.

The year is 1994, it’s the late fall, probably sometimes in early November. We are in The L Street house, of course, it being the place I grew up. The suspects are Myself, Karl, Jake, and Chris M (I’ll be using last initials on Chrises because we have a lot of them).  Location, Davis, California in the late afternoon. I wish I remembered what the real reasons the four of us go together that Friday night, but a weird thing happens to your memory as you get older, you remember key events, but the mundane details around them start to slip away. This is one of those times.

Where to begin? My friend Karl, who is one our characters at the L Street house tonight, turned sixteen in June of 1994.  What day in June? Well, that is another story. I have known Karl know ever since he was around six years old and moved to Davis from North Carolina. I have a friend that calls him a Tar Heel from time to time, but his father was going to Duke if I recall so he was really a former and current Blue Devil, but I don’t think our friend Jim was referring to the college mascots when he called him that.

 As he turned sixteen, he was still pretty much what I would call “kid Karl”.  Sophomore year of high school (93-94) is when he first started to grow his signature long hair and go away from his short hair with a magic poof of bangs hairstyle, he’d been carrying most of our young lives. I will always remember that hairstyle of his because he would wear these little bicycling caps all the time and his magic poof would stick out the front, sort of like Bill from the Bill and Ted movies did with the little gap in his adjustable baseball cap. However, by late junior high Karl was trying to be “edgier”. In the eighth grade he was still quiet with his poof, but he would draw guitars and Metallica logos in his notebook in Ms. Corletts English class. Freshman year he had a metal band with some of our friends (which I will get to later) and by sophomore year he was trying to be a true metal head and have the long flowing locks that go with that attitude.

Now if you have never grown your hair out when its naturally curly, which both Karl and I suffer from, you don’t understand how much longer the in-between stage of long and short hair are. But believe me it is an absolute mess. Which leads to an overly amazing picture of Karl in our sophomore high school yearbook. In the picture Karl is locking up his childhood BMX bike that he had been milking along since elementary school with his awkward in-between hair while still wearing the bicycle hat. All that was said about the picture in the yearbook was something about sophomores having to ride their bikes to school, like some weird forms of proto adults.

image 2 Oh the life of a sophomore, Karl and Nate get hijacked into the 1993-1994 DHS yearbook.

By the summer following that sophomore year Karl was probably even more motivated to not be ridiculed for riding a bike any longer. Even though I think he was technically the youngest of us our friend group that was in that sophomore class when turned sixteen, I believe he was the first to go through all the hoops to become a teen driver, or what is also known as the second greatest danger to mankind. In general Karl was probably a more responsible teenager than the rest of us at that point, if I were to be honest about things, and he had, compared to some, an easier road to go about getting his license. This isn’t really a knock-on Karl being spoiled by any stretch, but some of the other kids I knew didn’t have the same parent resources that Karl and I had, and Karl was better behaved than I was, so driver’s license.

This bleeds into the real start of our story though. Once completed, Karl, also unlike some of our other friends was granted access to having his own automobile. And Karl being Karl, this is way he told me the story, the first thing he did was to have his dad take him out to look at Porsches, used though let’s not be crazy. His dad, a doctor but not known for spending much in the way of money, shocked at the sticker prices Karl thought reasonable, somehow led into Karl going for a literal monster truck his father was able to purchase through a family friend, if I recall the end of the story accurately, I tend to focus more on the, let’s go look at a Porsche part of the story.

Thus began two years of high school with the truck from the final scene of Back to the Future.  No kidding, a black Toyota pickup, roll bars, raised chassis and mile high tires. The teenage boys now had a mobile jungle gym to harass the locals with. Thus, it was with this rolling hell beast of a truck that one Friday night in the Autumn of 1994, that four teenagers made a plan to go out and be dumb. If you were never a teenage boy that sentence may make no sense but “dumb” or being “dumb” is something boys will purposefully go out to do. Is that logical? No. But it happens, and this night somehow was going to be one of those dumb nights.

Since Jake didn’t yet live at the L Street house with me and my folks, an event that was soon to happen, he must have been planning on staying over. Chris M. was at the L street house that night, so he was probably planning on staying all night as well. For Chris M. this would have been right in the wheelhouse of the great McGhee brother versus brother civil war era (1993-1995-ish), so most likely this was his weekend at the L street house instead of his brother Marty who we will come to know later. Now Karl we didn’t have every weekend, or every other, like the other two, so sometimes we’d all have to go out on foot to do our “dumb” things. But this weekend we had him, so extra dumb things in an automobile, fit for a pro wrestler, was on the menu.

Not all weekends in 1994 were dumb weekends though. Truthfully for the most part late Friday nights and on into Saturday were mostly for playing video games, but when we could, on nights like this when we convinced Karl to come out, we did enjoy Friday evenings out in the wilds, of Davis. Bear in mind we are teens in the pre-everyone has a cell phone era (2000 until something better comes along). Which was actually quite nice because once we organized ourselves and went out, it was pure freedom. Where this night of pure freedom began one can only guess. I mean probably downtown, probably with food, possible the video arcade library, which at that time was called “The Library” (more on that later). But somewhere during the regular course of events that night a game of “I can do something stupider than you!” began to unfold. I think it started with Jake trying to defecate through a tire at the adult park on Oxford circle near the college dorms, although that may have been a reaction to Chris claiming he could urinate straight up from the ground at the nearby parking garage and hit the ceiling (Don’t worry he got gun-shy of doing it while we all watched and laughed).

Whatever the catalyst was, it led us out to the outskirts of town, to a church were this madness would continue. But as games that no one wants to really play go eventually we just ended up climbing onto the roof of the church and just hanging out. While we were taking this break from doing dumb things, Jake decided to do a dumb thing not under the crux of the game. No while the rest of us laid back on the roof of the church to enjoy the heavens, he sat the on the plastic dome of a skylight, starting a debate with Karl about the safety of doing so. Which then led to a demonstration from Jake of how wrong Karl was to question the safety of plastic, since plastic was, after all, a “wonder material”. Then Jake decided to demonstrate to Karl how wrong he was by tucking in his legs into his chest, wrapping his arms around his knees and beginning to jump up and down on the skylight. Well, he did that until it broke, in which he plummeted through the skylight and to the ground below. I guess he made Karl’s point instead.

The rest of us stunned, watched as his last remnants of long stringy hair vanished from sight. Jake was after all into metal music at the time like Karl, so that mandated a lengthy drape of hair on a teenage boy’s head. Then, at least for me, instinct kicked in. I barked at Chris M. to get to the ground and find an entrance into the church, while Karl and I approached the hole that just moments ago housed the skylight’s wonderous plastic dome. When I looked down through the hole there was Jake still in the same crouched position he used to jump on the skylight laying on his back, shrapnel from the skylight all around him. The assumption of course in my mind was, “Great I’ll have to jump down there”, hope he isn’t dead and get him out safely. But to my surprise as I yelled down at him, he replied.

Let’s take a break from the story for a second to go over, as adults now, how ridiculously lucky Jake was in this instance. In my time on this Earth, I have known of young men falling a lot shorter instances and that being the end of their days. This guy Jake however, while exerting his force downward, on purpose mind you, flew all the way to the ground, managed nary a scratch, was able to answer my calls coming from up above on the roof, get up and walk out of the church under his own power. Lucky son of bitch. The next thing that was surprisingly lucky was that there was no alarm set to the doors when he exited. Although we didn’t trust that it wasn’t some sort of silent alarm and the three of us swooped him up with the monster truck and got out of there quickly.

The night took a turn from four boys doing dumb things, to three boys worrying about a friend that took a trip through a skylight, and that traveler was just getting demanding on them, with no real direction once they were on the main road. So, we drove his dumbass around. We stopped in a parking lot first to check on his wounds, of which there weren’t many. Then he started having us essentially run him places, which eventually led to his girlfriend Liz’s house, and what I can only assume was Jake attempting to use his tumble for sympathy from his girlfriend. He hopped out of the truck told us he was just popping in for a second to see if she would tend to his battle scars. But we waited and waited. Around half an hour later another friend of ours, Jim, came by Karl’s truck when he spotted us just sitting there. He had been hanging out with Liz prior to our and Jake’s arrivals and we eventually found out that Jake probably had no intentions of coming back to us that night whatsoever.

Now pissed offed, we drove back to the L street house. Bewildered, we kept being awestruck by the stupidity of the night and played an old Star Trek point and click adventure game, while laughing at the absurdity of Jake jumping through a plastic bubble. In the morning Karl drove home, to be honest though “Saturday morning” in teenage boy terms probably means afternoon, since we had stayed up all night. Chris M. finally fell asleep and probably stayed so until Saturday night. Before Karl went home though, he and I drove out to the scene of the crime, saw no real activity, and chalked it all up to getting off real lucky. I had him drop me off at Jake’s mother’s apartment on his way home. Jake had returned home in the morning from Liz’s house, so, I maybe made like the FBI had shown up and all manner of silliness to the church that morning when Karl and I went back to check on things, er afternoon. This was met with Jake wanting me to take some extremely dumb pictures of him, not a care in the world of it.  And that would be one night, in the fall of 1994.

With diligent work as I could find the time, I have found that, well I guess obviously from the header to the story, pictures were taking that night. A seemingly weird choice, but since this seems to have been quite possibly the first weekend of Junior year and I had just spent the last two months taking photos quite regularly, it somehow is not as odd in the timeline to find out I have some record of it. In fact for some of these early fall months it seems weird I didn’t snap some picture while out somewhere. Anyway lets start.

Karl eating a pizza, pre-skylight excursion. However, we have already started on the Star Trek 25th Anniversary game, which I was able to find a screen shot of the section Karl was on while eating pizza. It’s of note that his pizza is Mom’s homemade style pizza. Which is usually a Thursday night thing, but I am guessing since we had a full house that night, we swapped it to Friday night. It’s also hard to make out the computer screen, but I worked on it and found the section of the game he was on when being fed dinner.

Chris seems to have also dabbled in some Tie-Fighter that night, in fact this picture may come from the morning after staying up all night, It is the last picture I have before I went over to Jake’s apartment.

Look, I find it completely crazy that I am lucky enough to have found some photographs from this day. I knew I had a couple weird ones from the day after, but I didn’t realize we had a somewhat documented night. Oddly the nights legacy was talking about it so much that these pictures became forgotten about, and over time I just thought were pictures from that era and not or infamous night itself.

Decades later it is amazing how oddly important one night hanging out with a, damn we were lucky no one got hurt situation, ended up being. The Skylight night will end up being a story I will tell strangers when I first meet them years later during a trip to Southern California. I can bring up the idea of “A wonder material” to Karl or Chris M. and both instantly know what I am making fun of.

And as I said, for the most part it was just any other Friday night at that age for us.

But let me end the Sometime in 1994 section here, because I have more Friday night pictures in September to now go over, and Tie-Fighter goes in another section I had written for 1994 as well, so remember all of this and jump to either the rest of 1994, which will be up until Christmas, or Video Games, if I get that section big enough.

Later in that era, or rolls of film as it were there was another night out. This night which started it seems at my house. Then it seems Cy dropped me off to met up with Liz, whom waited with me at a bus stop, presumably for Jake, who didn’t show up after we sat around for a while.

Well sat around as in Liz climbed up a tree and started shelling spit wads at the traffic as it passed by. Until we gave up, walked to Alyssa’s, waited around, went out, smoked a little drugs with Mike and everyone, then finally met up with Jake, who brough a box of wine to get Liz drunk on, and I, in my enlightened state cut the number 9 into my arm hair while we sat around Alyssa’s room.

Just another Friday night. True it was almost a completely different cast, Me, Jake, then Alyssa, Mike G., Tim, Cy and another fellow who’s name escapes me were the culprits this time. But still another Friday night out wandering through town.

Now that already seems to speak volumes in my memory of how many things were going on, but wait I know this is all just as school began this year. Because I will talk about how Jake and I hatch a plan later on for him to move in, well:

We went to Lyon’s to hatch these plans, and it seems I grabbed a couple pictures for the record from that event. Which interestingly seems to have fallen between the Skylight night, and the next weekend. Another thing this then shows me is that a couple weeks later in our photo timeline Aly snapped this photo of me and Karl:

Where as the day after the Skylight Jake took this terrible picture of me:

It’s hard to see, but I don’t have the mohawk in that overexposed picture, but I do in what seems to be about three weeks later. This makes it look like the weekend I got out and get the mohawk is probably the weekend after I cut the 9 into my arm hair.

That gives such a small amount of time to go from September to November 1st with all of these weekends. What I find surprising is that I don’t have Halloween here. I think I must have just run out of film before then, then I think the amount of comings and goings at the L street house became so much that remembering the camera is going to become a major roadblock into having photos for stories. But from September to October I have a pretty solid log of what was going on with photos.

The lack of Halloween also highlights another weird issue, the photos are of like 75 percent of the goings-ons. Marty, Kim, J.F. from this time period I have next to nothing, anyway let’s get into these stories.

Fall 1994. Junior year of High School, this would be year one, disregarding the nine weeks we had at the end of last year. As I said, this would be year one of King High School. King, unlike the “regular” high school was split into two halves of the day. A morning session and an Afternoon one. Morning students would attend school from 8:00am until noon, or 11:30, something like that, then afternoon would come in afterwards and go until three. Now one could sign up for both halves, but most did not. I prescribed, as odd as it seems, to morning.

One might think, if they knew me, that afternoons, which Chris M. was going to start after he completed his basic transfer course this same fall, would be my choice considering my sleep patterns. But there was something to the idea that you went to school in the morning and were out before the afternoon that just appealed to the part of my brain that thought I was getting away with something. For my efforts I would get Marty in the morning sessions with me, followed by Alyssa soon after the completed all of her transfer requirements to come to King.

As far as school is concerned, this is an interesting year, because it’s span of my memories makes it feel like it must have been two years. I think it adds to things that I remember King high running in a quarter system, versus a semester system. This system would make class changes much more frequent and give the illusion to future me that more time passed from the Fall through the Summer than actually did.

For our part here though, it is important to focus on Marty and I being done with school around noon. While I can remember some of the classes at school. It’s Marty and I leaving King, walking down B street to DHS, going to lunch with Karl, Nate and the boys and then for a time being enrolled in the fifth period PASCAL class we had taken the year before.

Afterwards, Marty and I would usually walk to the L Street house from DHS were we would settle in for the afternoon. This is Phase One of the Junior year. It is oddly what I think of most when I think of this year and is strangely the days, we didn’t take pictures. I think by now I have mentioned the weird dynamic between both Chris M and Marty. This led to two major moments in time during these years. One, which I think was about now, the two were so at odds with each other, that for a period of time one would not be over at the house if the other was.

The amount of time they spent at the L street house being considered then, they would usually just swap out when time came for one to be over or the other. Since Chris M. was taking afternoon classes, it sort of turned out that he would come over Friday afternoons then crash for the weekend, giving Marty most of the time during the week. The second major thing with them was JF’s vision and Chris M getting grounded from staying the night at the L street house for six months. This I think was a middle of ninth grade thing, and I think it was slightly circumvented with the ability to stay at Sam’s House. Which by eleventh grade was no longer an option. It could have also been tenth grade, it’s hard to remember.

Obviously, this wasn’t our first rodeo with Marty. But, even with all the BBS stuff, the software company, Junior High, and DHS, it is this period, truly starting at the tail end of the previous school year through at least December that sticks out in my memory as who teenage Marty was.

Now there is a caveat to that as well. Marty was two years older than both Chris M. and me. So, what would be a big thing at the beginning of this new school year is that Marty turned 18 setting some things in motion for the Fall.

So, anyway after all that exposition, the crux is Marty and I would walk home to the L Street House. Now more exposition. During the Summer, which I was missing a portion form because of all the traveling, Marty had been able to use a very strong school/summer work program available through King High to get a job at the UCD Bookstore’s computer department. Which back in these times was full of software mainly, but might have been selling kids some parts as well, this was right at the birth of the PC explosion so a computer department like that would usually dabble in everything, not knowing what they might need for their student consumers.

It was while working this job that Marty somehow got introduced to talk radio. My assumption is that someone played it in the back while he sorted stock or whatever task they saw fit for a teenager to do that the government was subsidizing to work there. The details as to why Marty latched onto talk radio so hard is a little fuzzier. In retrospect, it just seems inherently part of his personality because I lived through these times, but something had to resonate with him to make him start his obsession with the medium.

I think it, and not meant derogatorily, but I think it is akin to streamers on the internet and parasocial stuff that is big in the 2020s. While there were no live chats going on during a broadcast, one could call in, and Marty had made it a thing to call in some of the national and local shows in attempts to either joke or attempt to share his mind on subjects during this time.

The pinnacle of shows he had to hear every afternoon then was the Don and Mike show.

I don’t know how it worked out, but it feels like we would get to the L street house around the same time every day, and that show would be either just starting or had another couple of hours to go. While the most memorable and his obvious favorite, most of what this led to was some fun Christmas time stories and Marty’s claim to fame that he could through the call screeners to get on the show.

That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but for Marty it was. I had sort of glossed over it in my recollections, then going through old floppy disks I found this:

“

INFINITY BROADCASTING OF

WASHINGTON D.C

PHONE 703-691-1900

10800 MAIN STREET

FAIRFAX, VA 22030

                                                                                                                                September 12, 1994         

To whom it may concern,

                Joe Magee was an employee at Infinity Broadcasting from the period of June 22, 1994 to September 12, 1994.  During this time he was employed as an "On-Air Radio Personality" on the nationally syndicated Don and Mike show.  On a number of occasions he made telephone appearances on the show and entertained both the listeners of the show, and everyone in the studio.  He used several routines in the course of his employment, many of them to the delight of listeners.  One such routine was that of "Slow Joe".  A highly skilled computer programmer who lacked social skills, this bit was played often as the listeners seemed to enjoy it greatly,  this was also a  favorite of Don and Mike.  Mr. Magee has a natural skill at entertaining, he often ad-libs in favor of using prepared material.  Although I am less than pleased at his decision to leave Infinity Broadcasting, and to seek employment elsewhere, I highly recommend him for any on-air radio broadcasting position that he may wish to undertake.  Please consider Mr. Magee for employment in your company, as he is a skilled entertainer with a knack for making people laugh.

I will be unable to be reached until January 12, 1995 as I will be on vacation.  If you have any questions please feel free to leave a message on my voice mail box.  at 703-691-2099,  I will return your call as soon as possible.

                                                                                Sincerely,

                                                                                Ken Stevens, Program Director WJFK FM/AM

“

I completely forgot that he went to this much trouble to support the idea of his calls being something more than they were. Sort of. I don’t totally remember the context of this letter, why he wrote it and who it was for. However, as much as I have tried to write it off as a joke, which I probably did as a kid, the fact that Marty went to the trouble to misspell his own name to make it seem like they maybe kind of knew who this kid was that called in, but maybe not, you know, this focus on detail ambiguity is suspect as though he thought he could con it by someone.

Which is a part of who Marty is. He likes “jokes” that are also may be completely believable. Come a few years from now I have a good story about Marty, a police report and James VaderBeek. What this does now though is lay the groundwork for how into these radio programs he was, and how much he and I, and well J.F. listened to them.

 Yup, J.F. is now seemingly almost a daily ride home at the end of the day for Marty. J.F. always around to troll an opinion, especially if it happens to be related to sports and politics also finds his place amongst Marty’s new hobby.

And while the sports part is important, it’s that second, we will start with. 1994, while not a presidential election year was a volatile election year. Well at least in California, and for the most part revolving around one proposition, that one being number 187. Also remember Marty had just turned 18 and was into talk radio now. This would be his first eligible election year. So, politics became very important to him.

It also didn’t help that Marty’s old identity from late jr. high and into the BBS phase of high school was that he liked gangster rap and that culture. Prop 187 also had the odd coincidence that, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg had made the term, 187, which was California's penal code for murder a popular saying a few years before. But it was the issue of social services for undocumented immigrants, called almost exclusively illegal aliens at the time that caused all the media fare on the issue.

Now I can’t remember what Marty’s politics were like before this all started, but somehow in some sort of landslide, Marty while getting into the talk radio pundits, started to lean a lot more conservative in his takes. Although I don’t think he would have expressed it that way. This also coincides with his decision that post King High he was going to join the Police force. And for his 18th birthday he got a gun, a Glock, which interestingly harkened back to his rap genre and was apparently also popular with law enforcement.

It also so happens that while Don and Mike was an entertainment show, a fair amount of the radio shows were heavy into political debate. Fueling the fire at home when J.F. and Marty would pick up a subject and then run with it. J.F. is a troll, we are well aware of that term with the internet these days, back then it wasn’t a well-defined term, even though it was used. So more often than not J.F. would just take up an argument to poke holes at what Marty was up on his soap box about on a given afternoon. It was an interesting time and generated an endless amount of inside jokes.

The interesting thing is Marty, as preachy as he would be, would never want to seem like he didn’t want to get the joke over on everyone, so he started to run with his feelings into the area of satire, thus clouding what his true feelings were on some subject matter. I think this allowed him to act like J.F.’s trolling didn’t piss him off, cause he was just joking too, but it did give us some gems for papers he wrote at school, notably this one that I kept around forever.

Obviously, a joke, but I have other documents, not printed out where a teacher, for instance, made Marty write about both sides of the gun control issue. It’s funny at how condescending his writing is when going over the views he didn’t find to be particularly, well, correct.

It wasn’t all politics though, since Don and Mike were more of a comedy show, we would just start developing humor from there. I don’t know where the weird cadence and saying “Don and Mike are chill” originated from. But it was said to the point where others were annoyed by it. And something on the show at some point and had brough poop humor back into Marty’s life and then all of ours.

Then there were sports, J.F., Marty and local radio host Grant Napier. I don’t even know how I describe this properly. Marty liked sports, J.F. liked sports, J.F. liked to be a contrarian in his sports teams and takes. Marty liked, for the most part, whatever was the dominant force at the time. The local radio show was for homers. Marty would get mad at how stupid he thought Napier was, maybe even call in to make fun of him. The J.F. would poke the bear.

It was kind of wild but it interestingly coincided, or helped me getting back, after a couple years of moderation, into sports on television. It also helped in cementing football into a Sunday tradition. Which I guess it always kind of had been, but without church to slow me down and a couple of jerks spouting off their opinions all week, it would be this year 1994 that would cement the NFL’s legacy for me.

Anyway, these lazy afternoons would be the norm for this time period, say four out of five days a week. And while they have somehow escaped the photo record, they are not any less relevant than all the stories from this time that can be well told, hopefully and have a photographic history as well. Working on the new BBS, getting another phone line, calls in the late afternoon with Jake, talking to Kim, hearing the day in day out arc of Ally J. and whether she liked boys or Cy, this all went on during these afternoons and evenings that started with Marty and I walking down B street after morning session of  King.

However though, it’s the big stories, like that Friday in September, here Jake goes plummeting through the skylight that we remember as events. And it was during those that we ended up with photos.

Just replace Jake with Marty and Chris M and Karl on the bed looking through last year’s yearbook and you have those days. Of course, these pictures, well one is skylight night, so for some reason the camera just missed some of the participants during the 90s.

Jake himself was also inserted into a lot of the afternoons as time went on, which of course would come to a head in October. One afternoon event was using the fancy business phone I yoinked from Mom to speaker phone call, just everyone. Both Jake and I had started keeping a pretty extensive phone list. And Jake would thoroughly enjoy calling girls other friends either liked or had dated and, well, taking shit. There was one boy, Casey I think it was. That had played with Jake in a metal band, maybe just the year before. Jake, while I call Casey his “friend” maybe wasn’t his biggest fan. And so a lot of those example calls were done with him in mind.

That all culminated into a night at Woodstocks, when Jake and I showed up there and ran into Jim and this “friend” of theirs, Casey. Before we sat down with them Jake told me, since I didn’t know Casey personally, to tell him that I had heard a rumor he was gay. So, we sat down introduced me to Casey and I very matter of factly said “Oh, are you that kid Casey that I was told is gay?” to which he responded with a disgusted “no.”

Even though I said it like I was genuinely curious, it seems Jake knew this was a button to push, and Jim told me for years Casey always hate me because I asked that question as though if I heard that rumor I should have just kept it to myself. Oddly never did he say he thought Jake might have set that situation up.

Then there was Ally. She was another “friend” of Jakes. It was a weird dynamic in which she was almost seeking his approval for her life choices and I somehow, starting with the speaker phone calls, became involved in this. Obviously Jake and I had become somewhat “silly” at this point.

After the skylight night, we had the night out on the town with Alyssa and company, and then somewhere in there I got the mohawk that so upset my mother that she cried. This was the one time I got so upset at the accusations thrown my way by Mom and Dad that it turned around went back out the door and ended up shoulder tapping at 7-11 with Jake and did a little experimentation with alcohol that night. It was an actual night of rebellion and might have been the last stop in bonding Jake and I into the plot to move him into the L street House itself.

September was a hell of a month in 1994. Luckily while still exciting October would see a little bit of a slowdown. One reason was that there would be a major SNES video game release, that being the next Final Fantasy game, which at the time we would know as Final Fantasy 3. The other reasons, who knows.

While getting used to my new life of not having to go to church and watching the new NFL broadcasts on fox, the first weekend of the month I headed over the Karl’s house, turned on the Niner game, which quickly spiraled and then spent the afternoon recording some major silly garbage with him on whatever instruments he had available in his extra room. Yeah, Karl had an extra room at this time, I don’t know the details about it, but it seemed nice.

We played weird sounds into his recording device, and I sang lyrics that were just Calvin and Hobbes comic strips in a nearby book in the room.

Next we need to roll back a quick second before moving forward. Another major side project is born here. I will a couple years later refer to it as me wanting to have a BBS in the house without having to deal with being the SysOp. What it becomes is I let Marty run “his” BBS, Dearthrow, on my system. I of course have all the access etc… but he get’s the clout. I tag in Kim to hang out with me on there, since I was a teenage boy, and she had always been working the angel of wanting to use the modem at her house. I am sure somehow Graham was involved too, but I’ll go over this all in it’s own section:

Hut Hut Hike:

Sunday Afternoons. Okay up to the Philadelphia game that weekend, while being into what was going on, somehow, I had missed some of the 49er games, and it had to have been due to the weekends. Sure, there were the big weekends with my mohawk and the skylight, but also, unlike the afternoons, the weekends were the domain almost exclusively of the other McGhee, Chris.

With Chris and Marty having their disagreements on whether the other deserved to live in the same space as the other, Friday evenings would become more of a staple for Chris M. Also barring the weekends, I sort of highlighted already, Chris M. and I were a little bit more prone to just staying up late and just gaming with our free time. Sure Chris M. was along for the skylight, but even that night degenerated into him along with Karl playing Star Trek 25th Anniversary.

These nights had already become somewhat standard through junior high, and after Chris’s banning from staying over the night, these gaming nights, well gaming and TV watching would become so normal that years and decades later after Chris’s exodus that still feels like a more ideal thing to be doing with ones Friday night then things that would come and go over the years.

<chris drawing playing Zelda 2>

Saturdays would just be a lazy mid-day awakening, then depending on schedules we would just chill until Chris got taken home, occasionally he would stay until Sunday and by Sunday night the relaxed feeling would make Mondays and the switch back to Marty political afternoons and interesting contrast. So much so that they don’t almost feel like they should be sharing the same time.

It was during one of these weekends, the one after going to Karl’s that the whole feeling of football changed. Not like little league, or I guess Babe Ruth and playing did a couple years ago, but it changed. Because let’s not understate this, even though I am writing now about the football-reawakening, it had always been an institution at the house. Those Saturday mornings, wouldn’t be surprised if Chris M or I wouldn’t be playing some Madden from time to time. For one.

Then of course there was the time in the 80s. That game Dad had taken me too teen years before in 1984. That and that super bowl had always made football special to me. Which I know was one of Dad’s hopes. See Dad, being a bigger gentleman had, at least from what he told me, managed in the 1960s to be a part of a “semi-pro” football team. I would assume this was in Chico but I don’t remember much but him talking about it and seeing a couple of pictures as a kid. For those that don’t know, semi-pro was an interesting idea that sports leagues that wanted to make a quick buck but not pay for employees hatched up before professional sports became what it is today.

His love did pass to me, and although I mainly played in the early 90s I did try to keep up with the 49ers. Steve Young, the current quarterback in 1994 of the team was a Mormon kid named Steve, so Mom, without her background like Dad, found herself in love with the team anyway, a good Mormon kid named Steve, well sign her up. No offense to my brother Bob, but Mom seemed to love the name Steve a lot. She never told me why. But since I got thrown in the House boy naming convention, Steve obviously got the name Mom wanted her kid to have.

There is our lead up to October 9th, 1994. A 10 in the morning game on Fox, the week after all hope seemed lost for the team when the lowly Eagles beat the pants off them and made sweet little Stevie Young say some things on the sideline that made my mother blush, I was up, Chris was either asleep or went home the night before and I started watching.

I don’t know what it was about this game, famously known for the game that Steve Young got beat up so hard in the beginning that he had to crawl off the field, but something turned on in my head as he fought and drove the team back to win that game. It was that I liked this team and I loved the narrative of watching football on TV. This is the moment I can look at and see my brain hard set Sunday’s and Niner games as something that mattered.

With all of that out of the way, let’s talk about football, video games and Nik. So, when I talk about it being hard to remember just what happened when during this time, this is a prime example. Nik went to school with us from seventh grade until graduation. In 1994 he was deeply entrenched in playing guitar with Karl in his high school band Silvara.

This is when I got re-introduced to Nik. I did remember him from seventh grade, as being the kid that made fun of another kid in science class for living in a trailer park. It was a weird interaction. I was somewhat cool with the other kid, so I had maybe judge Nik harshly for that incident, along with a couple others that happened then. He wasn’t the only kid in that seventh grade science class that was someone that grade and some else though by junior year. So, as he developed a friendship with Nate and Karl I came around.

He would eat lunch out in the same area that Marty and I would met up with everybody, every day. Now there is a series of events that go on this year, and for a while Marty and I, once again won’t be on speaking terms. It is during this time that I think I found out Nik didn’t have a fifth period. So, after lunch Nik and I would take off to go play video games, which was something I found out Nik was very much into.

I don’t remember much about Nik’s parents, but he did live in one of the nicer parts of town and he did have access to all of the current consoles at the time, or so it seemed. He had some of the more expensive obscure ones if I recall, like the 3D0. So, we would alternate going to each other’s house to check out games. From this I remember a long string of playing football, or more precisely Madden. I bring this up for one, to add to the football narrative and because I have a copy of, what I think is either Madden 95 or 96 that has a dent in the cartridge for Nik getting upset with my use of running back M.Bates, who I think was on the New Orleans saints. Anyway I just kept using the same back and same play to drive up and down the field on him, while referring to my running back as Master Bates in a bad English accent to a point where Nik couldn’t handle the obnoxious and the losing and punched my copy of Madden.

Madden was serious business. Not this year but soon after, with the SNES multitap we would play up to five player games of Madden. Marty taking advantage of some bad coding that made the hail Mary play to Micheal Irvin always work became archenemy and it would honestly take four of us playing defense to stop what I guess was calculated as a 100 percent of the time play in the code.

The games coupled with the now brewing narrative back in 1994 of the Steve Young season really gave some sort of personalization to the players on the field. I at least would know who was on what team, and who we liked and didn’t. In an age, or more accurately a year or two before it became mainstream, fantasy football, Madden made game watchers out of us all.

The Steve Young show:

This would include getting into January with meaningful games. Including my favorite of all games, that 1994 NFC championship game.

Two weeks after that game I would watch the Niners win the super bowl with the Chrises in the Living Room. And until I would move out, there would always be the reminder of that day in the ceiling where the chair dented it while horseplay was happening.

After the Lion’s game I didn’t miss a telecast. Even though one week in early November I had to watch them play while hanging out at Woodstock’s Pizza. Jake and I went there, pretty early in the day if I recall, so I had to watch out of the corner of my eye on one of the monitors at the parlor.

This was going to culminate in the November 13th game with the Cowboys. This was the marquee game of the year in the NFL. The past two seasons, the championship came down to both teams, and Steve Young had been getting a lot of criticism for not winning the only game that mattered, the Cowboys game. Too add to things, it was an afternoon game, so Mom and Dad could watch and, there was Marty. So, I mentioned earlier that Marty seemed to cheer for whatever seemed dominate at the time. I am sure he will say that is not the case, but sporting Bulls and well Cowboys as his teams during this era, as a kid in California via Missouri is an interesting couple choices.

Because of this as the game unfolded, the amount of agony Marty would suffer from the loss was nice. There was doubt in his stance that he was on the side of winning. An almost Chris M. like denial during the previous years playoffs when the Giants fell behind the Niners would emerge.

This feeling of happiness with the team followed on throughout the season and into the playoff, culminating into my favorite game of all time, the 1994, played in 1995, NFC championship game. Well favorite televised one. Again the Niners one, and two weeks later, with some slight damage done to the ceiling of the L street House living room, I and the Chris’s watched the 49ers finish off the season as Super Bowl Champions. But we had more going on through those months than just the Niner game, I should get back on track.

Jake’s move in was quite the event. I can remember that move, I think it was a Wednesday the week preceding that November 6th game. How can I feel confident in that? Well for one moving generally occurs at the beginning or end of a month and Jake wasn’t living at the L street house the week prior because that was Halloween. That year for Halloween we actually went trick or treating for the first time

Halloween 1994 – Move in

That Halloween, in 1994, was really the last Halloween I ever trick-or-treated as a child, I would be roped into following kids as an adult, well and following some adults as an adult. But those are a story for another time. To be honest though, we were too big to go trick-or-treating as sixteen-year-olds. We shouldn’t have been engaged in doing such silliness and in all fairness the night wasn’t planned out that way, it just kind of happened, spontaneously.

I have also covered the weird part about not having pictures from this night.

How that night started is shrouded in some mystery. I know thanks to the power of computers that Halloween that year fell on a Monday. Since it was a regular school day and I know Marty was part of the Halloween party, not only do I remember him being there, since the afore mentioned daily pattern had already taken place as though it were any other day. So, pre-festivities more than likely Marty and I had been doing “whatever” at the L street house, then Jake who was set to move in soon and was on independent study at the time probably came over wanting to do something with us since it was Halloween and slowly the pieces assembled.

Did we formulate a solid plan then? I don’t know, probably not. I do possibly recall J.F. leaving as darkness approached. I know Jake wanted Karl over to drive us around town to do various activities that he saw fit for a proper Halloween excursion and so I think we were outside having J.F. depart as Karl showed up. Which is good, where we had no business being stupid that night, J.F. who was about six years our elder at the time had even less business going on with us for Halloween. Karl though was notoriously late to events, it was part of his modus operandi. I though, being a teenage boy, was able to strike at the heart of that matter and a few others, by hunting down the one female I thought might join or mayhem. Well not the only one I could think of, but the one I was trying to get to come out with us, and the one that Jake and I knew would light a fire under Karl’s ass to pick us up at a reasonable time, Kim. It was a big help, because once Karl became aware of what was transpiring, we saw him within minutes of getting off the phone with him. Which was quite a feat in those days since we all sort of knew Karl as someone who would take his time to show up to events. The allure of Kim got him there toot sweet.

Then a funny thing happened. We didn’t all load up in the truck once Kim arrived. Instead, Jake got it in his mind that we needed to dress up and he knew as what. Remember that I mentioned Jake had his long “metal guy” hair earlier (I hate using the term metal head, its connotation is for all the wrong bands). Well sometime earlier in the Spring of 1993 I was a younger lad, and I had a dream. A dream that four junior high school kids would get together and form the most important little punk band of their time.

Well, it didn’t happen, but this boy with a dream did start the band, and it was called, wait for it, I.D.S. What does that stand for? Doesn’t matter at the moment, because that’s not the part of this story that is important at this time. What did happen was that these four dreamers, Myself, James, Chris H. and Chris K. didn’t last. So, I took my dream and hooked up with Jake, who could play guitar and was completely not into punk music at all. And then introduced him to my friends and sold him on the idea that punk could be fun.

One of those friends, Mike G. was a little bit older than us, and to put it lightly a lot more “old school” punk than really, we were looking to be. But as part of his indoctrination, he made us all watch the 1983 film Suburbia. In this film a group of essentially homeless punk rock kids form a gang of sorts called The Rejected or T.R. Jake took to that film, in other words he liked it a lot. So that Halloween night he thought it would be clever for us all to dawn flannels and then we made armbands that bore the letters T and R on them like the kids from the film.

But now our plans of having Karl drive us off somewhere to do “bad stuff” got derailed.  Once in “costume” things evolved into us all going out in the neighborhood to trick-or-treat. Now I keep saying that sixteen-year-olds are too old to be doing this. Well, I fibbed a little, Marty had actually turned eighteen that year. One thing that we began doing from time to time was heading down the local convenience store and buy cigars as an eighteen-year-old could legally do in the state of California at that time. As fate would have it that night, we had recently done so, and Marty had these cigars on him that night. So dressed up as what amounts to juvenile delinquents for Halloween we decided it in character to light up Marty’s cigars while going door to door and demanding candy that was really meant for much younger children.

To this day, that last part sticks out to me as ridiculous, teenagers smoking on your porch and asking for candy. This should have garnered a call to the police or at least produced an unanswered door. Instead, we were giving the goods and occasionally met with a laugh. Perhaps people back then weren’t as easily shook as they are in more modern times, who knows, but no one was called on us, no one asked us to put them out on their porch and in one cause someone that thought it was pretty darn silly. That extra tolerance for juvenile stupidity helped make it a night to remember though.

We did eventually use Karl’s truck and headed to other parts of town. We didn’t end up doing anything too stupid afterwards, perhaps deciding not to press our luck any further. Really, we ended up spending most of our time hanging out at central park downtown, where I spent most of my time letting Kim sign songs to me, Jake hit up the swings and probably talked to Karl about music and where Marty was at this point, I don’t know, we might have dropped him off at home by then, since he and Chris M. didn’t live to far from downtown. At the end of the night everyone went home though since Tuesday was a school day. Then either that day or the next we moved Jake into the L street house.

Moving him in, while an event, was a surprisingly easy ordeal. I guess at sixteen a lot of kids don’t have too much stuff compared to when we get older. So, we hastily and sloppily filled the back of Karl’s truck with Jake’s worldly possessions. While Karl’s monster truck was large with its humongous tires and roll bars, the bed of the pickup was rather pedestrian. Our solution was to just stack up everything Jake was moving nice and high like some sort of scene out of a comedy depicting how not to stack items in the back of a pickup. Then with his goods mounted nice and high we slowly cruised the bike lane for about a mile and a half to the L street house with Jake and I hanging off the back making sure nothing tipped over or feel out.

Now I realize I have been sort of just matter of fact talking about Jake moving in, but I do get having a friend move into your childhood home is not that normal a thing to have happen. But feel safe my parents were fully aware of the situation so it’s not like we showed up that afternoon with a truck full of junk and just threw it in the house. Jake’s moving in had been planned for a couple weeks. His Mother was moving up north to the city of Lakeport, Jake did not want to follow. He had grown accustomed to his teenage life in Davis and didn’t want to have to start over. One day in October we had a Ryan and Jake official meeting where we hatched the plan that maybe my parents would let him move in. Now, maybe unfairly or maybe not we were able to use his mother’s inability to really watch him much to tug at my father’s heartstrings. Dad was a bleeding heart to kids he felt were in bad situations, Jakes mother worked nights and didn’t have a lot of money nor time to deal with a teen, which is probably why we had him over at the house a lot anyway. Jake had also recently struck out into the world of trying to make himself finically independent and got a job at a local sandwich restaurant.

Jake and I discussing the angle to get him moved in. Why we went to Lyon’s, who knows. If Jake hadn’t spilled his milkshake all over the place, maybe I wouldn’t have a photo of the meeting, but I have it.

We presented the situation to my folks and with a very minimal rent agreement and Jake’s mother allowing governorship of her child to my parents, he moved into what was the tv room in the back of the L Street house. The television room prior to the move in featured the main television in the house but was also home to all the framed family pictures and Dad’s brass collection. The move forced Mom and Dad to move the television into the front room and pack up some of the family photos. But they didn’t move everything out, the brass was still there, and some of the photos on the wall. Thus, there Jake was, in a room with red shag carpet, wood paneled walls and my brother Reise’s senior portrait from around 1981 with a beautiful burgundy butterfly collar, moved in and ready to fill out the rest of 1994 as the back of the house, were too much would go on.

The L Street house was already sort of a hotbed of activity anyway. Years later my mother admitted to me that she tolerated all the teenagers coming in and out of the house because making our house the central location for planning and chilling out gave her some idea of what was going on. That was what I thought was going on with Sam’s mother too, but that turned out a bit crazier. Anyway, Mom’s plan makes some sense. Beyond Jake moving in, some of our friends would stay for days on end and as I previously stated, most of our silly behavior ended with us coming home and watching tv or playing video games. So, Mother never had to wonder where her children were at night. However, with both back bedrooms filled with knuckleheads it made November of 1994 a good time to be a knucklehead in Davis at the L street house.

THANKSGIVING 1994

This did lead to what I assume was one of Dad’s happier memories from that year. Dad as curmudgeonly as he would act sometimes about the youths’ behaviors in the modern world, wanted more kids all the time. Mom later in life told me he was always pestering her about foster kids and the like. Of course, the house was almost always bustling. By 1994 the L street house had a pretty long history of kids, and even more so teenagers living at all times in the house. There was a bit of a recourse from the mid-80s until 1991 but other than that the L street house was the real Davis Teen Center. Add my mother’s business of private music students and the amount of people coming in and out of the house during the day was not your normal amount.

With all this one would think Dad would be happy. But Dad always wanted visual representations of this plentiful family. My parents, being church going folk, had caused Dad to have a dream of filing a whole pew at church during sermon, which is called testimony meeting in the Mormon church. Unfortunately, teenagers aren’t always known for good church attendance so while this was a vocal dream it never really happened. That’s why I say this November was probably special to Dad. While not a church pew, this Thanksgiving with Jake living at house and both Marty and Chris M. already making themselves holiday fixtures, we were starting to look at filling a table the likes that had never been seen during the holiday. We had Bob and his wife Julie coming, my brother Steve with Jill along with their three rugrats Justin, Krystle and Meghan coming as well. My mother’s sister, my aunt Dorothy was also attending, luckily not with Sadie. Actually, I joke but by 1994 Sadie was hanging out with Napoleon in doggy heaven by then, in their honor George would eat table scraps. The L Street house dining room wasn’t really designed for fourteen, so this year we would have to put in the dining table extensions and move the kitchen table down to accommodate the mass of people.

This Thanksgiving though was already bustling before the meal rolled out anyway. Why? Well thanksgivings weren’t all about rolls, although there is a strong argument it could be, or turkey at the L street house. Thanksgiving, since 1989, would actually start the night before.

This meant that by the Wednesday night prior to Thanksgiving, if you had say a father that had accumulated a large amount of routes in the city you live in (He would expand from the one large one he started on in South Davis), you would have a dining room full of newspaper ad inserts that had to be pre-folded and ready for the small news portion of the newspaper that was going to showing up around 4am Thanksgiving morning. This would mean Wednesday night we would have to form an assembly line to pre-folded all those ads so that Dad and whoever drew the short straw could get up in the morning and fold the inserts into the new section and get them out for delivery. Now who drew the short straw depended on who Dad tried to fiscally motivate to get up at the crack of dawn with him. Originally since I had my own route, I would have to get up with him and we’d just do all the routes at once, but as I got older, he would bribe Chris M. or guilt Mom into it, since we all hated it. It was not a fun job but sometimes it really had to be the whole crew. The key point here being that unlike the weekends, where all those boys would be sleeping in. Thanksgiving everyone would have been up the night before folding then up in the morning to help get those god-awful papers out and then have to celebrate Thanksgiving.

Before any guests truly showed up that Thanksgiving then we had a bunch of frazzled boys suffering from sleep deprivation. Thank goodness for caffeine and the common place of having Mountain Dew in the house during this time. Me, Jake, and Chris M. just caffeinated up to get through the day. Marty this year too, even though in a civil war with Chris M. may have stayed the night, having a holiday treaty of sorts. Then even though I called them rugrats, Steve’s eldest kids the twins Justin and Krystle were almost newly minted teenagers. By dinner time, with the table additions, and sliding the kitchen table in with the dining table, that Thanksgiving had so many people at it that it bleeds out of the dining room and into the kitchen itself.  Dad’s wish for an out-of-control thanksgiving achieved. For the next few years this would be about the norm, and all the kids were only getting bigger. This though would be Jake’s only thanksgiving at the L Street house, and still stands as the largest one during my days.

Now one thing about us all being around each other so much and having these traditions such as newspaper routes and massive sleepover on the holiday, is that some events during Thanksgiving Day are hard to distinguish between one another. From 1993 through 1997 a lot of the same Hijinx would happen. That being we’d go outside or walk to Holmes and play football, we’d play games like Street Fighter II and yell at each other and so on. However, there was a distinct Thanksgiving memory from the 1994 edition. Recently Jake and I had become privy to a pet peeve of Marty’s. This issue he held was with hearing the sound of teeth biting down on an empty fork. So, throughout the course of dinner that evening we would antagonize him by doing just that. Another couple items that set this one apart was that we were antagonizing Mom by finding nonsensical uses of the word poop and it being the first Thanksgiving I remember having onion pie, which was good.

The rest of dinner hit the one staple of any holiday dinner at the house, which was the attempt to control my mother’s crescent rolls at the table and then consume copious amounts of them. Yes, this was such an issue Mom had certain rules in place for. Like no placing the rolls in front of any of the boys (Bob and Steve included) and even sometimes not letting the rolls come straight out to the table, instead distributing them later from the kitchen. Truly there is an argument in here that without the rolls the holidays just didn’t exist.

Thanksgiving ending though meant that 1994 was coming to a close the previous few months had made for what memory serves are years’ worth of history, even though I have only covered Fall so far. The teenage playground that had become the back of the L street house was always open and what day say Christine would show up dressed as a boy versus what day we all got together and abused the speaker phone to call everyone under the sun in our class, could have fallen at any point in the timeline from now through 1995. What sticks with me was just how fun it was and there wasn’t ever the feeling that people were alone, or more accurately lonely, in the house. The dynamic of having the two rooms also made for extra drama when needed. And this all started that November.

 Christmas:

image 34 One of mom's attempts at a Holiday picture of Jake and I in December of 1994. Jingle Cats Meowy Christmas and a radio controlled monster truck. Same design as the one we broke in a week.

December would bring of course Christmas and then a new year. The second half of 1994 had been great though, so it was kind of sad to know it was coming to an end. Mom, who never seemed to be one for Christmas cards, randomly one day lined Jake and I up in the front room for “Christmas” photos. It didn’t go well, we were wise asses like always and the pictures were technically unusable, but funny. At this point in time, we had multiple PCs in the house, a pretty-slick Super Nintendo and all forms of wants for these devices. But what will stick out as a present from Christmas in 1994 will be one stupid joke brought to an extreme.

Back in September Marty had introduced us to his new job’s gift of an addiction to talk radio. As we dove into the holidays in 1994 one holiday ad struck our funny bone. I don’t remember what it was for, but there was an ad with an extremely exaggerated voice saying, “and a radio-controlled monster truck!”. We found it hilarious for whatever reason and pushed successfully to get a radio-controlled monster truck that Christmas. Joke completed the sad part of the story, or funny part, is we played with it so hard that it didn’t make it as a working radio-controlled monster truck into 1995.

The other big holiday purchase that year also came by way of Marty’s radio shows. One afternoon, on the Don and Mike Show, we were introduced to a Christmas Album made up for cat sounds. Titled Jingle Cats “A Meowy Christmas”, we went out and bought a CD copy of it and played it almost nonstop that year much to the chagrin of George, who couldn’t make heads or tails of where the evil cat sounds were coming from or what they meant. Good times.

Of course we still got video games. We’re coming off the FF4 Chris M. Christmas night spectacular. That is going to be probably the highlight of Christmas SNES fun. Nothing will lodge in my memory like that. This year our big SNES game is going to be the final chapter of what was then the entire Star Wars saga, Super Return of the Jedi.

To be honest this game was as fun as the others. To also be fair, this game was not going to be the pleasant surprise Super Star Wars was, nor will it name our BBS and software company. As well as not having one’s favorite household pet have a seizure during it’s climax, as Super Empire Strikes Back did. This Christmas we would just get a solid conclusion, that would be fun, but lack outside events to make it memorable.

Which is fine, the only weird part for this one is I remember playing the game, but the angles I’m playing at don’t make any sense. Which I think adds to the mystery of why this Christmas, which would have been a spectacular is somewhat forgotten, it was all radio-controlled monster truck and Jingle Cats I guess. It is indeed weird to me that the McGhee’s and Christmas became so normal, that the first one that would have had Marty and Chris I can’t remember any details from.

The Games of 1994

Some of this is going to cross over into other areas. But the window for new games, from getting home mid-July from Germany through Christmas has some background to it. Karl, above, might have been playing a game 1993, but it doesn’t mean it was always old games at the helm. Around the time I was doing the visit to UCLA I had found another city builder that I got really into for a while.

It was here that I finally started to have some time to live my normal life. And it was here that Marty and I sat down and played DoTT. Another game this summer I tried to fit in time for was a Sierra game called Outpost.

Outpost was a title I really wanted to get into. I bought it between Germany and Southern California and was really hoping for a space SimCity. Before the UCLA trip I even bought the strategy guide to try and see what I couldn’t figure out on my own. I remember the strategy guide though more, since it used the Turkey’s we used to ride by on our bikes during the Camp Putah years as an example for some extreme gravity experiments that had apparently been tested on them at UCD during the 70s.

I came to find out years later the reason I could never get all the fun I wanted out of the game was that it shipped incomplete, and I think there is now supposedly some sort of patch to make it playable, which makes me want to look into it again.

Of course Tie Fighter was out and I would get that soon, But DoTT with Marty, Outpost. The summer was devoid of a lot of gaming with all the trips, save it for the new laptop and having Civ to play with Dad during the trip and on all the planes.

Now back to our show:

One of them is Tie Fighter, which Chris can be seen playing:

At different times during the course of months from July through October. I cover it and its father, X-wing in 1992 when I told the story of PC Games. But the pictures fit here somehow. I don’t understand why.

                Tie Fighter is such a interesting pivot during the summer. Chris K. when I got back from Germany was playing Civ, which by 1994 we had been playing a ton of, for years.

The insanity of coming over to play a game we have had for a few years already is that Dad and I used that Tandy laptop to play the game while on the road. So getting to pivot into a 3D starfighter game would have felt pretty cool. Then of course on Skylight night we were playing the Star Trek 25th Anniversary Adventure game. An odd choice, because there it is next to Chris K playing Civ. I don’t know what caused us to switch up titles that day, but something compelled the three of us to play a game that had just been sitting around the room instead of the newer fancier game.

                I also think here is a good spot to mention that X-Wing and Tie Fighter may be the first really nice 3D games we played, where 3D wasn’t the gimmick, but was just the best way to present the game. I dare say I remember the game seeming much less blatantly 3D or as cheap feeling as a lot of what is coming in the next couple years. Just an observation.

                Of course, in between Star Trek and Tie Fighter, Marty and I cracked open DOTT. So while we are starting the foray into 3D games, two of the three new games to this short time period are still Adventure games. Same for development, coming from LucasArts, which oddly started us down the road of Adventure games with Monkey Island 2 before I got to open up all the new Star Wars titles that were coming out in this era.

                This Christmas was going to give us Super Return of the Jedi, the last in the the line that gave us our fake software company name. This helped my resurgence with Star Wars even more, I had a Star Wars project at school with the Zahn Trilogy and new computer games which started a dedicated look into the Role Playing Game.

                With all that, the highlight game of the year wasn’t out until October, was on the SNES and wasn’t in a galaxy far far away. Instead it was a sequel to another game changer in the house:

(queue the music…)

One of these times was in between Jake’s tumble through the skylight and his moving into the L street house. In mid-October Final Fantasy 3 was due out and all drama aside, me, Chris K. and Chris M. had a need to play it. Of course, like FF4, Final Fantasy 3 was not its actual release in the cycle. No also unknown to us at the time was that it was really Final Fantasy VI (FF6) which is what I will call it from now on.

image 51 a still image of the pit and some of the attendees of the Opera House scene in FF6

This games release brought both Chrises together the first few weekends the game was out. One of those weekends occurred during a piano recital weekend. See my mother being a piano teacher was prone to having these soirees from time to time. Exhibitions for her students to play newly mastered pieces for their friends and loved ones. Then eat food. These events would take up the front of the house and required the rest of us to either attend or to be as silent as the dead. Now this shouldn’t be an issue, I had my own television, we could just hold up in my bedroom like fugitives and play all day. However, the new television was nineteen inches remember. We can’t play our first playthrough on my little thirteen-inch boob tube. No, we need the big boy, luckily this game came out shortly before we lost the television room to Jake and so during the height of Mom’s recital, the two Chrises, Georgums and I experienced the Opera scene from FF6 for the first time.

What a time to be alive in the 16-bit graphic era. The narrative of this Opera scene was as follows. Our heroes are invited to an Opera house to help the owner with a veiled threat at the great female lead of the production. It just so happens that one of our heroes looks just like the star and we can disguise her in character as the starlet and she can perform the Opera and surprise the would-be terrorist when he strikes. And so, starts the adventure. Now here is where it gets fun, the culprit we are looking for turns out to be a giant purple octopus that has been annoying us throughout the plot of the game. His plan, push a giant four-ton weight from the rafters above onto the star and destroy the production. Luckily for us the weight is so heavy that he gives us a nice round number estimate on how long it will take him to push the weight and our heroes are off to save the opera.

Bolstered by the game’s composer Nobou Uematsu’s score, we race through the drama with the opera going and the piano recital adding backup to all the games drama. We wouldn’t finish the whole game that night, but we did finish the Opera scene and then had the goodies (food) from the recital. Once Jake moved in a week or so later, I moved the SNES with the television to the front room of the house. There we finished the first playthrough of the game during a weekday afternoon, while students practiced their pieces in the background for the next recital. The end of the game was too easy, we had the best spell in the game learned on our main heroes and we just plowed through the end game, but all these years later the two separate parts of the play through match up in time with the move in of Jake and the awe of going through some of these new FF6 events for the first time.

FF4 brought the world of Final Fantasy to the L street house, FF6 was our example of big narrative games matching with events in real life. Surprisingly Final Fantasy VII managed to top both SNES games as far as gameplay and emotional weight in real life, but that’s not part of the SNES era, the next game in line is part of another console generation. But there were more games than just those. As confusing as it is to shorthand these games, by now we’ve noticed that I jumped from FF4 to FF6. What of Final Fantasy 5? (FF5), well it wasn’t until around 1998 that I ever really saw the game.

Which sprouts up another world of gaming I haven’t touched on yet, console emulation. By the end of the 90s, home PCs were getting powerful enough to “fake” older consoles hardware to allow us to run the older game ROMs. ROMs standing for the Read Only Memory that the old NES and SNES games were stored on in their cartridges or Arcade games on their arcade boards. It was around this time that Marty got into MAME, which was an emulator for old arcade games. He would play hours of Shinobi, to an extent where I was getting really tired of the short games narrative to be honest.

image 52 Shinobi for the arcade and the ROM hack of FF V.

But the world of emulation and game ROMs was open. In that world I discovered that someone had taken FF5, a Final Fantasy only ever released in Japan, and had painstakingly translated the story into English, which with the help of a SNES emulator that could be installed on the PC, allowed one to download the hacked ROM game and play it. This let English speakers be able to read the story without having to be literate in all forms of Japanese writing.

A year later, Squaresoft, Final Fantasy’s development studio would just straight release an English translation of the SNES game for the PlayStation. Now I could go back and hit those old SNES Final Fantasy notes again. I tried real hard, I think I played about half way through on the PlayStaion version before sputtering out a bit. The game was fun, but by this time I had gone through the worlds of the PlayStation era Final Fantasies, so going back to the simpler SNES times was a bit hard. Then the game sat there. It wasn’t until the 2010s that I finally gave the game a full push and enjoyed it.

1994…five actually.

And so, comes the new year. Early 1995 plays a lot like the fall of 1994. In fact, most likely this front end of 1995 is when Christine decided to play the fourth Chris for a bit and when Jake and I decided to dabble into everyone’s affairs on the speaker phone, that I may have attributed to 1994. But one of the more memorable happenings of 1995 was the day Karl’s truck had been on the back end of a small collision of automobiles on the way to school one morning.

Karl’s truck being made for running over most standard sized cars, didn’t suffer anything beyond a little extra paint on the roll bar bumper. But since the collision involved multiple high schoolers it was the talk of, well not the town, but maybe the school at least. I guess it was the talk of the town a little bit, the afternoon edition of the Davis Enterprise had published a picture of Karl’s truck from the incident. Which of course, Karl had cut out to show off with pride. Oddly enough one of the many girls we had been stuck with in Sunday school earlier in our lives Denise was also one of the cars in the whole accident and her group of friends usually sat out in our same hidden grassy area out by the construction trailers. But that’s not why we remember that day, oh no, that was the day Marty decided to push boundaries with Karl.

How does a minor car incident lead to that? Well see Marty I think fancied himself as the main character of whatever content was going on at the time in our lives and for some reason he was recently on a story arc of, how close one could skirt the lines between acceptable offensive humor. Essentially being a bigot. That may be a strange sounding sentence when read aloud, but I think it is thanks in part to the UseNet group alt.tastless.jokes, Marty was branching into the world of racial and offensive humor. He wasn’t actually a bigot or anything, he just really seemed to enjoy the rush that comes from offending people with tasteless jokes, the teenager search to seem edgy.

Of course, now I probably need to take a quick detour to explain a UseNet group and what that all meant. Well prior to the use of Netscape to browse the internet, us old people had to browse the internet with what was essentially a command prompt and load text-based software to load up different kinds of content. Usenet groups were networks of messages and files that were all themed by these long titles, as in the alt.tasteless title implies. From there you could look for any group hosting files or messages on any subject you wanted to read up on, pretty much just like we do with the internet now but using the old ways.

Now I mentioned earlier that as kids we were into and ran quite a few local BBSs. These were online places one could call to do local file sharing and post messages and play games with people usually in the same area code and city. While text-based they tended to be colorful and setup to cater to their specific audience. To venture on the internet at the time you had to have access to a computer that could get on a network that could then get on internet back then. Luckily, we were in a college town and every student at the university got one. Thus, our years of having friends that were in school helped us get onto the internet and access to even more files to add to our local B.B.S. systems. And of course, to see what a lot of basement dwellers were thinking of as tasteless jokes back then, along with some other deviations. It was to like the Isla de Muerte from The Pirates of the Caribbean, unless you knew how to get there no one knew it was there.

Marty’s delve into this world got him on a lot of feces humor during this time. This led to our overuse of the word poop back then and then of course frustrated my mother to the point where I finally heard her cuss over an unwillingness to say the word poop. This was major since it may have been the only time she ever did so. He also spent some time in the tasteless.racist jokes section. As I’ve said, even though modern society doesn’t tend to believe it possible, Marty wasn’t a racist, he just really enjoyed pissing people off with the jokes, and that would do it. Different times different folks. Back to our story.

That day in school Marty and I had taken a school administered “personality” test. It was one of the more common ones where they fit who you are into one of four simple colors. These colors represent personality archetypes. This of course, will help teenagers understand themselves if they test in as orange or green or periwinkle, I lied it doesn’t really matter. While laying on the floor talking about the ins and outs of the test in my room Karl calls either me or Jake on the phone to talk about his exciting day. During this odd window of time Karl is the only one going to the main high school, the rest of us are all in some other program. Marty and I didn’t go by the regular spot for lunch that day, so none of us knew about the accident.

During this call it leads to Marty seeing what ethnic jokes he could spew at Karl. Why? Like I said, I think to test boundaries. At the time It felt like it came from nowhere. Anyway, why Karl, Karl is technically mixed ethnicity, not visibly or in any mainstream sense. But enough for Marty to make some jokes at Karl’s expense. The slurs that Marty was throwing out were ridiculous garbage that weren’t really all that offensive and mainly made up of Taco Bell menu items. As I sort of keep defending here, he didn’t go in on the big obvious mainstream slurs, he was using obscure nonsensical stuff people on the internet were making up to see what would stick. That day the term that got overused was “mexi-melt”, like I said Taco Bell menu items.

But this sparked an idea for a prank. Pranks now have sort of bad, and for lack of a better word, lame connotations, but bear with. Karl under the guise he was heading over because of the slurs actually offended him, was, in reality, headed over to bask in the glow of his car’s new fame. When he arrived, he went straight into Jake’s room without announcing his presence to Marty in my room. From there Jake and I would march back and forth talking about how offended Karl was about the comments earlier on the phone.

As luck would have it, J.F. decided to take a parental stance with Marty and told him he should go apologize after hearing what was going on. That was the perfect bit of extra pressure because an apology is something Marty’s teenage ego wasn’t willing to do. Marty began becoming distraught with the idea of “having” to go across the hall and apologize for being a jerk. I believe the exact quote was “Do I really have to go over there and apologize?” as though he lost a sporting event to a rival he felt cheated him. It became very funny for the rest of us in on the situation. We all knew his actual motivations weren’t malicious but Marty’s unease with facing consequences for his actions was just delightful karma. Life was simple then and that is a good thing.

This would not be the last time one of Marty’s jokes would come at Karl’s expense though. As we move onto another major event for this year.  Here is where some context for the next “joke” starts. During junior year, Marty being a little older and was in what would be considered his senior year, although we were in a different system in school at that time. That being the case, especially on the back end of the school year in 1995 he was all about what he was going to be moving onto past High School. For Marty he was going all in on law enforcement. He was going to be a peace officer and that’s all there was to it.

We would go to the library, the actual library not the video arcade version, and he would look up penal codes and sometimes a group of us would go outside and he would practice pulling over a group of us for arrest. Usually with its own comical results as most of us were smart asses so we would “resist” arrest. This developed into a fair amount of “play” around town that had to do with laws and oddly enough gun play. The latter being important for this story.

HARD TIMES 1995

Now another “thing” was happening around this time. Karl had now been driving for a while, especially when you are not but sixteen years so months feel like a long time still and he was getting more bold driving that monstrosity of his around. Some random afternoon a trend with him would start, that some may call unsafe, and that trend was running the red lights in front of the police station downtown. I think it started one lunch break when I was a passenger in the truck with him. That time we just skimmed the red light and made a pedestrian dodge out of the way. That poor pedestrian was met with a slurry of bad words and gestures from me. Being teenagers we found that funny. So, a little while later in a similar situation Karl said something to the effect of “screw it” and just ran the light out right.

Once a couple of runs snuck by with no punishment the “joke” of the red lights in front of the police station being just a suggestion was born. This joke and Marty’s law enforcement play helped shaped the course of a night later on down the road. But now we must set the scene of the weekend before. Part of the immersion of doing the fake police play (that’s what I’ll call it), became using the cheap little orange cap guns we could pick up around the corner at Long’s drug store as firearm stand-ins. From that we instantly found another fun game we could play with those cap guns which was cap gun Russian roulette. For those unfamiliar, that just entails putting a lone cap in one of the cap guns cap chambers, blindly spinning said chamber and then putting the cap gun to your head and pulling the trigger. The loser is the one that pulls the cap.

One night Karl brought over a cap gun he had that was “broken” and therefore magically made a louder pop than the ones we usually had around the house. Initially it just made for a more rousing session of roulette. Later that night though we got into a game of “let’s do something outside!”, in other words we got bored just being in the house all night, those games have worked out so well in the past after all. Someone, I won’t name names since it really could have been anyone of us and everyone was down with the idea, but someone suggested a fun time would be to load up in the bed of Karl’s pickup and drive around town and fake drive by shootings with the cap guns, with an emphasis on Karl’s loud cap gun.

It was a piss poor idea but being teens everyone thought it sounded like great fun and we engaged in operation drive by shootings. We drove around town and hit up some people’s homes that we weren’t to terribly fond of and just had a great old time. As the night grew on, we grew bored of the game and somehow ended up at the UCD humanities building on A Street. This building has a unique architecture that earned it the nick name “the death star” and was a popular place to run around for events like water gun fights and other juvenile hijinks.

That night we just essentially played cops and robbers with our cap guns. Not a terribly sophisticated game, but none the less enthralling with all the places you could hide around corners and shoot of balconies at others. When it was one of my rounds to hide somewhere that night I decided to think out of the box and hid across the street in the bed of Karl’s pickup hoping to surprise snipe them as they became perplexed as to where I was hiding.

Instead, what happened is after a while of fruitless searches Karl and Marty decided to see how Karl’s loud capper would sound if they fired it off in one of the echoing elevator shafts. What followed was a series of three loud bangs, the first two paired with Marty’s voice screaming in response, the last one with no response. I shot my head up when I heard this only to see the two of them running towards the truck at full speed. In my peripheral I saw a light turn on in a nearby window in the death star and as the two ran towards the street I saw a stranger run towards the newly lit window and frighteningly watch Marty and Karl run across the street and jump in the truck.

Then like speed racer Karl starts up the truck and zooms off down fifth street. We run every red light from there to L street. Karl’s ability now to run red lights has become so proficient that we didn’t run one light, but three. We turn on the L street and clam down to a more reasonable speed. A couple blocks later he drops me off at home. I go home (I think jake was still living here note//) and do whatever then hit the hay, clueless to how the rest of the night was about to go.

The next day though I get filled in on the details. After dropping me off, Karl took Marty home. At the time Marty was living maybe a mile away from the L street house near the main branch of the local post office in these neat little apartments. The apartments don’t really have a big parking lot, just a little area that houses about eight or so cars where Karl can pull into and drop him off. As he does so they realize they are getting pulled up on by four police cars. Turns out that most likely that frightened man from earlier saw us speed off and called the cops and was able to give an obvious description of Karl’s rather distinct vehicle.

At gunpoint they are told to raise their hands and exit the vehicle. Luckily thanks to Marty’s pull over training game, they had some experience. I bet no one is going to resist this time though! One of the officers then begins patting them down. Now since I wasn’t there, I might be remembering the next part wrong, but I recall either Karl or Marty telling me when they were patting them down they were being told that a car matching Karl’s trucks description was reported at the sight of a shooting on campus. In fact, one of the police cruisers at the current scene was UCD police vehicle. However, as the officer started to pat Marty down the culprits of that’s night events started to manifest itself. One cap gun, and then another. Also, at this point one of the officers on sight happened to be an officer that was at the time, or had up until recently been assigned to the high schools and junior highs as a liaison and recognized Marty. It started to become painfully obvious that the “shooting” reported was a couple boys playing with cap guns.

The event then deescalated, and Marty struck up a much looser conversation with the liaison officer. At that point Marty then started showing off the cap guns that the searching officer missed when checking them out, to which I am told the liaison officer had a little giggle. Miraculously once it was deemed that, yes, the call was on some boys popping of cap guns, it was categorized as just mischief and they were let go. A stroke of luck, or was it?

 A week later, on either a rainy Saturday or Friday night, Marty and I head over to visit Karl since his parents are out of town. Karl, being a band nerd, had just finished up some day long band play-a-thon to raise money for the high school jazz band. This was just one of many tortures they would put the kids through to keep their music programs. When Marty and I showed up around one in the morning, Karl was a little tired and a little wired.

During this time and for the next year or so Marty had hit his heights of having to argue with everyone about everything. He had also hit the point where he was notoriously covering his ears and singing to not hear counter arguments. One of the more memorable times this occurred was a short time prior, when J.F. and Marty engaged in a debate about the validity of eating dogs. Marty reaction to one of J.F.’s points was to just sit there like a hear-no-evil monkey and mouth sounds in retort. Oddly that was not the most memorable part of the argument, no it was J.F.’s dead pan statement of “I wouldn’t eat your Georgums, but if I was in a country where it[dog] was served to me..” while George looked up confused as to how his name got in the mouths of the crazy people in the front room. Georgums(jorj-jums) of course being one of our dog George’s many nicknames he always had to be aware of.

This night though at Karl’s we weren’t in a heated discussion about different culinary dos and don’ts. No, tonight I couldn’t get Marty to acknowledge that he had an abnormal obsession with the porn start Long-Dong Silver, just a that he had a fascination with him, a semantics argument as though one is any less weird for an eighteen-year-old boy to have either. When the discussion got out of hand, in other words ears were covered and nonsense singing occurred, the suggestion to go out and do something was brought up, always a winning idea. Seems an oddly mature move for our group to suggest such a sensible way to diffuse an argument, right? Well, let the record show when the suggestion is made it’s near to three in the morning, keep that in mind. Also bear in mind what happened the week prior when we went outside to do something. But here we are all near adult males loading up in a comical monster truck and parking downtown on the top of the movie theater parking garage, as we always did when galivanting around downtown at some stupid or sensible hour. No big deal everything is fine.

As we proceeded on our walk around a mostly empty downtown, a patrol car passed us. Marty, taking into account his “I’m going into law enforcement” wisdom, tells us that the cop wouldn’t turn around if we all looked back at him once. Like trained animals all three of us turn our heads back. Then Marty continued with, “but if I do it two more times...”, he looked back two more times as Karl and I watched. On the third turn Karl and I both turned back to look, and he was right, the cop car’s brake lights came on and the officer was beginning to make a U-turn. Stunned by why he would want that to happen Karl and I blindly stared at the situation for a moment, then Marty escalated the engagement by taking off like a lion after a water buffalo on the plains of the Serengeti.

Puzzled and in fear of this new development, we started to chase after him as he ran down the street, then across it, into a public parking lot and then into an alcove between business in a back alley just down the road from where the officer turned around. Not knowing what to do I took the down time in the alcove to catch my breath. I vaguely recall Karl asking Marty why he ran, to which I think the answer was some form of “why not?”. I just continued to rest, I was in baggy pants and about twice the size of either of them, sprinting and dodging for blocks downtown was a pretty big effort when your pants are always trying to tie up your ankles on every stride, plus it felt safe in the hidden alcove, it was my new home away from stupidity.

But as time passed Marty had left the hiding spot and so did Karl, so I regained my sense of safety and headed back out into the alley way, only to be met with Karl and Marty being detained and a cop car blocking the exit, its headlights blindingly on and pointed towards like some giant spotlight.

That is when that night became interesting. Next, I was treated too what I could only describe as one officer, there were two there, needlessly flaunting himself as an authority over children. When I was stopped, I was asked who I was and then was told why my friends were being held because of their current states. That state being on illegal substances. Now this was a surprise to me, I had been with Marty all day and he wasn’t on any drugs, and until recently Karl had been playing a saxophone or guitar for hours. Nope no drugs there. However, what followed that was that I was given a list of exactly what drugs they were on and that they would have to be detained and taken to the police station for testing.

Why I needed the exposition of what I just walked into is a valid question. One would think I might be a drugged-up youth seeing I was hanging out with the other two delinquents. Oddly though I got sent away after hearing the rundown of my friends evil doings. As I was leaving that same officer told me to look at Karl’s eyes, yes, the line felt awkward, since they were “as big as an owls”. It was strange encounter for me to say the least. Why I was free to go? I didn’t know, why did he just present his “evidence” to me about my friends? Who knows I wasn’t a judge but I walked away because I was told too and didn’t really know any better at that age.

About thirty seconds later Marty came running up behind me. Seems that somehow as the discussion went on after my departure he was suddenly cleared of all charges, he was now, toxicated? Instead of intoxicated. With that bit of news, we stopped walking for a bit and assumed Karl would be coming shortly thereafter as the officer realized we were just weird kids wandering around, way after normal hours. But as we waited Karl never came. Beyond not knowing what was up with him and holding those worries a new issue dawned on us, he was also our ride. Then like something written for dramatic effect by some evil screenwriter in a movie the rain started coming down, hard.

We then walked in the pouring rain all way to Marty’s apartment, I don’t know why, perhaps it was slightly closer to downtown, but not by much. When we got there Marty went to change his wet clothes immediately. In doing so we unavoidably woke up Chris, who as part of the ongoing feud with Marty wasn’t even willing to share a room with him anymore and was sleeping on the fold out couch in the front room of the apartment. We told Chris the story of what had just transpired, and their mother wandered to listen. The decision was made to call my parents and all three of us got picked up and went to the L street house. Then my dad got to work on trying to locate Karl and/or his parents, who were as I said earlier out of town. Turns out when there are no cell phones, Mom and Dad are gone, and the police detain a minor, it becomes real hard to get information from the police about him. Also, without cell phones being able to contact Karl’s parents becomes real hard.

What was happening to Karl though was just that the officer detained him and then had him take a drug test in order to prove the allegations of rabid drug use. Karl upset at the false claims said sure let’s do it, but after he took the test, he had no contactable parents to be released too. So, they kept him there at the station for a bit until they realized couldn’t detain a child in the same lockup as adults for much longer. Thus, they did the only rational thing and moved him out of the city to the county juvenile detention center to spend the night and then the following time until someone could pick him up. Of course, he wasn’t convicted of anything so he couldn’t be in with the general population, so they locked him in a room by himself to spend the night listening to the sounds of juvey, a wonderful album by all those kids that were there for criminal reasons.

Hours passed while dad gathered that information. As the day went on, we added more people to our waiting party. Eventually to pass time Mom loaded up a bunch of us and we went to the Woodland mall to get a video game we could all play while we waited. I think it was a Babbage’s then, the video game store in the Woodland Mall in 1995. The game we came home with was Electronic Art’s NHL 95. That afternoon the house NHL league was born. While we made trades and setup lineups, which was quite a task since this was the days before in game franchise modes for sports games, we waited to hear updates on Karl’s ordeal from Dad. As the day grew older, my dad had eventually convinced the authorities to give his parents until around 5 or 6 in the evening to get home or he could go collect Karl. As luck would have it, what seemed like just minutes after my dad achieved that feat, we heard from our friend Nate, who lived across the street from Karl, and was on driveway watch duty all day incase Karl’s folks arrived home. Nate had called to let us know that Karl’s wayward parents had just returned from their weekend away, presumable about to find their teenage son was in jail. Good times!

And that may have been the last joke Marty was ever able to pull on Karl.