Before we move onto other adventures in the 90s and beyond (well and some before). I feel I need to now take a second or two to explain who everyone is a bit better. I am, well Ryan House, born on February 3rd of 1978 and I have a lot to say about that, but as many things here that is coming. In 1994 I had a lot of friends I would hang out with but, as one can tell from my stories, a few reign more supreme then others. While I mentioned some background information on those few while telling the story of the fall of 1994. I think it’s time for context of major players before we get back into things.
image 3 Chris M. making Totino’s pizza in the kitchen of the L street house circa 1997, Marty flipping the wiffle ball bat during Christmas 1998.
Let’s start with the McGhees. Chris and Marty were brothers that initially lived down the road from the L Street House at the 320 K street apartments. I name that apartment complex, because like the house on L street a lot of stories will end up taking place there. Thus, the location is part of the story. They lived in that complex with two other friends from junior high school, Keith and Chris K. Chris K. is our second Chris and why I have to organize them. More confusingly during junior high, he will cross paths with Chris M. a lot. Keith was a friend of ours that moved out of Davis near the beginning of the eight grade and was the friend in which I was introduced to both Chrises and Marty.
Overtime in the early 1990s both McGhees would become so ingrained into the L street house that they were family. But initially Chris M. seemed to be around only when we were playing video games over at Chris K.’s apartment and Marty was only around when we were running around outside causing mayhem. Because of that I oddly remember more of Marty back in the olden days of 1991 and the seventh grade.
Marty was a couple years older than our baseline age then of 12/13. He was a year ahead of us at Holmes Junior High School and had been held back a year by then. So, when most of us were in the seventh grade he was an eighth grader. If that sounds off, it was, I don’t think I was ever privy to the full details, but I believe it was during his families move to Davis that he missed some considerable school time and ended up getting held back a year. Maybe it was something else, I am not one hundred percent certain on the whys. Either way that put him a year ahead in school and a couple in birthdays.
In seventh grade (1991) Marty seemed to always be hanging around with another kid, Sunjeeve. They would come over or be over at the 320 K apartments and spend a lot of their time trying to hurl insults at Keith. Why? That I was another detail I was never a hundred percent in on either. I gathered it was some sort of rivalry from their martial arts class. I wasn’t in that whole scene but, I knew Keith was taking Tae Kwon do over at a school on G Street and I always took that as being the place where that all began. So, for whatever those reasons were, they had a need to constantly belittle each other. But the main insult seemed to be that Keith’s middle name was Maurice, which it was not. I guess it was a play on his mother’s name of Maureen. How it was insulting I don’t know. But damned if I didn’t hear them both say and or call him “Michael Maurice” a whole lot back then. (so it seems the main reason was that when Keith made his yells in class it sounded like Maurice, vaguely)
One day back then Marty ended up hanging out around the L street house with me after everyone else was gone, which was odd for that school year. I invited him to come and do my paper route with me. At that point in my personal paper route career I was kind of over it, so since Marty was chilling with me and he seemed to like a good joke at Keith’s expense, I thought it funny to change the headline in that day’s periodical to “Party at Keith’s”. Which I wrote on every single newspaper, then folded and delivered while he followed along on his bike. I guess that got me street cred with Marty from that day on and he would come up and tell me random stuff at school as kids that age were prone to do during.
Chris on the other hand was a lot more into the video game scene we had back then. Of course, it wasn’t until the Fall of 1991 that the Super Nintendo would come out, so Chris’s motivation to come to the L street house didn’t really materialize until I had purchased the machine and the word was out about it. November of 1991 introduced us all to a game that what was called Final Fantasy 2 and Chris K. who through Keith had started hanging around with me a lot purchased a copy. From what I recall he did so without owning a super Nintendo yet, since they had only been out a month or so at that point. So, to play what was the sequel to the original Final Fantasy on the Nintendo, a trip down the street to the L street house was required.
Suddenly Chris M. started materializing at the L street house and wow, was he loud about wanting to play. It initially rubbed me the wrong way. I remember one time his mocking tone and nonstop motor mouth got so annoying I started physically dragging him out of my room until I worried I hit his head too hard on the baby chair in my room. (a baby chair being what we called my undersized wooden chair). However, I also remember that being a turning point, Chris M. got a little more respectful and over time I found I had a lot more incoming with his play style than I did of Chris K. Chris M. also started to just like being around the house, our dog George gelled with him and before we knew it Chris started staying over nights and holidays like we got shared custody of him from his mother.
Not to be outdone Marty started doing the Holiday thing as well and if it were not for the fact that Chris and Marty would have month long fights with each other, both could have been constant fixtures at the L street house. Instead, they mainly traded off on all non-holiday occasions when they were younger, they got older and made sort of an accord to tolerate each other, or just got older and didn’t have the will to fight as much, until Chris M. left in the late 90s for the Air Force, in which Marty became a every weekend fixture.
image 4 Jake standing on the sidewalk on G Street in downtown Davis, 1994. Jake eating a burrito at Central Park in Davis, 1996.
Next there is Jake. Jake came to us via his guitar playing, I think. He was the same age as me and Chris M., which is our baseline, but like Marty was in the wrong grade for his age, he was somehow a year behind at Holmes with Chris K. when we met. He had been playing in a band with an old friend from elementary school Jim, who we’ve mentioned now a few times and is coming up, that went to Emerson Junior High across town called “Heresy”. As my punk band (I.D.S.) was having issues, I somehow convinced him to come play with us and then the rest of the history.
Later Jake and I would head up our own silly punk band, and it was enough fun that we spent a lot of time hanging out together, so that by the Fall of 1994 we asked my parents to let him move into the L Street house. Now the weird part is that I think Jake was initially introduced to us all to get with Karl, in a band kind of way, who was into a more similar type of music. But life is unpredictable, plus, I was a lot more fun to go downtown and mess around with back then even without the Monster Truck, take that Karl!
image 5 Karl in the backyard of the Baywood rental with his only friend Mr. Beer after a show in 1997. Karl smiling like a clown during my birthday Feb. 2004.
Karl. So far Chris M., Marty and Jake are all friends I know through going to Holmes Jr. High. Karl is a more classic story I guess, as fabricated stories of kids go. When we were around six or so his family moved to Davis. Our parents were both Mormon, so we didn’t meet at public school, but instead in Sunday school. Then demographics had us hanging out together because as odd as it sounds, for some reason in our age group at our Mormon church, we were the only two boys in our Sunday school class. Just us and a bunch of girls. (Maybe I should have stayed in church!) Which is great if you’re older, but when you’re seven it is the worst. Karl and I shared a struggle and bonded from there.
Weirdly as we got older, we started having some of the same friends outside of church. Karl’s neighbor Nate was just this stand-up kid that I played a lot of youth sports with. Well Nate happened to live right across the street from Karl and was just Karl’s shadow, so there was no issue with hanging out with everyone there. Later on, Karl would meet people like Jake, who I met as well due to common interests, so we never lost touch while both of us got older and gave up on going to church. I also would sometimes just try and get Karl to come over and do things since I never liked losing touch with people. Something I would have to get over as I got older.
Sam was another in the line of UCSC kids that came to settle in Davis for a time like Chris K. and Keith. He most notably became the owner of a house we would go to for large chaotic sleep overs during our Junior High school years mainly. It wasn’t terribly often that he would go to other’s residences. After Sophomore year in high school Sam begins to disappear for the landscape however, he ends going to UCSC later in life, during the same time as another friend and stories of his introverted ways make it back home.
Then of course we have Keith. He was the initially branch into the rest of the characters I’ve mentioned here, except I guess Karl and technically Jake. Keith just happens to tie both into the K street apartments where he lived with his mother and then with Chris K. who lived there tied us all in with the other UCSC kids. Keith would also do a lot of skateboarding while he lived in Davis which would bring us another branch of players in the grand play of life.
image 6 I’m J.F. 1999, playing Goldeneye in my room, and at his apartment.
Speaking of older, then there was J.F. J.F. was around six years older than all or most of us. We met J.F. because Street Fighter II (SF2), which was a video game that ruled the world for some of the early 1990s. Now if you didn’t live through that time it’s hard to explain now, but occasionally there were games that you couldn’t play on your home console or PC. Some of those games were bigger deals than anything you could buy either. So, kids had to go to the video arcades and feed quarters into an arcade cabinet to play them. The local video arcade, The Library, is where we met this older guy named J.F., who liked to play SF2 and had a car.
Now to clarify after making him sound like a predator, as modern culture would make out someone in their twenties hanging out somewhere kids would be. J.F. while he was in school at U.C.D. at the time, we always mistook as a High School kid. He wasn’t a big guy, he looked young and played that way too. As Marty initially got to know him, they found out he would play some sort of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pen and paper role playing game produced by Palladium Books with them too. Over the years once J.F. proved to all the adults he wasn’t a predator and just a twenty something teenager, he just became part of the gang. Which growing up in a college town wasn’t as odd as one might think, especially back then.
Later, through the Bulletin Board System (BBS) I would hang out with Tom who was also a U.C.D. student even though he grew up in nearby Woodland (is that a jab at Woodland?) and we would hang around other older, guys mainly that were part of the BBS scene. Too bad the internet got way to infiltrated with weirdos, now if you get caught up in a bunch of messages with an older man all kinds of alerts go off.
image 7 Jim at Sudwerk's in 1999 before the Star Wars nerds ship off to southern California and in line for Goliath at Magic Mountain, 2003.
Jim actually pre-dates everyone here, we met in kindergarten way back in 1983. Kindergarten is a subject we will get to later of course. However, there is a large portion of time from sixth grade until 199 where Jim wasn’t around the L street house, and I didn’t really see him much in school. So, while Chris M. and Jake and Karl are falling through buildings Jim, Jim was either making up a year or just recovering from breaking his femur, I don’t totally remember the timeline on that story.
As kids he did come over in elementary school, in the fourth grade, once, for a very memorable night in which his parents forgot which one was supposed to pick him up. Leaving us with Jim and the adventures in making buckeyes and dinner. But then a lot of not around the L street house as I said. That wasn’t to say he didn’t pop up from time to time. There was the skylight night back in 1994, there was another time around then he brought Jake a jar late at night and I remember the femur. He was also in that band with Jake in junior high school and would eventually over time came to replace Nate as the bass player in Karl’s band named after a Dragon.
But it wasn’t until 1999 that Jim really reappeared in the daily narrative of things. With Jim come a couple others, Brendan who is sort of like Jim’s Karl smashed with Karl’s Nate, the friend that was always there growing up. Brendan like Jim was also involved with other communal friends, he and Jake one time hit up a concert that required my parents to go over the plans with while Jake was living in the L street house and somehow he was known to Marty.
Jim was also dating a young lady named Jackie. Jackie had come to our attention initially from all places, Sam. Then when she started showing up to the Davis Teen Center run music “shows”, there was a big push from Jake and Jim for Karl to date her. This didn’t work out but instead led to Jim and Jackie, who became a solid thing for a long time and would eventually get married in the 2000s. Jim ends up being a replacement, for lack of a better term, for Chris M. and Marty in the timeline. Jim’s nightly visits oddly match Marty skulking away.
I met Tom in the summer of 1993 (which is its own topic). I met this gentleman through Purgatory BBS. He was older, around 21 at the time, but he did happen to live about a block away from the L street house and had a car. Early on that summer he hosted one of these BBS get togethers that would be all the rage during those years. At this event we famously had another young man have a seizure. That event caused such a big stir that for the rest of the summer it kind of bonded the rest of the crew that was there for that incident.
With most people that used BBSs at the time having some interest in computers, hanging out with Tom that summer introduced me to Adobe Photoshop. He gave me a copy that resided on like three or four 1.44 Megabyte (MB) floppy disks and from this the world of graphic design opened up. Up to this point I was doing ANSI graphics for the BBS I ran and that was about it. We used BBSs online then, so that was what made sense to learn. Photoshop would open up avenues down the road though that I didn’t realize at the time.
The BBS scene would introduce us to a few more daily friends, Mike G. who was the big indoctrinator of punk rock, was our friend Alyssa’s boyfriend. Alyssa was another friend that came through the Purgatory BBS, which was run by her mother’s boyfriend. Alyssa’s friend Christine was another friend with an aggressive automobile. She was a bit extra confusing for my mother since she introduced herself to my mother as Chris one day. Which of course we already had a Chris M. a Chris K. and a Chris H.
Oh, the third Chris, Chris H. He was another friend that came through Keith. But he wasn’t a member of the 320 k street gang, or from Martial Arts class. Instead, this Chris skateboarded with Keith, and for a long while when he was recovering from a year of breaking arms over and over again. The side effect of his one-armedness was that he became one of those permanent residents of the L Street house. But mainly only through Junior High, he like another friend who lived down the street, Jared, both tried to branch out into teen party life, as ill call it, during sophomore year that I just didn’t care about enough to follow into and sort of dissipated into a background character.
//JEN, NORA? Who else…?
I would meet Jen through a web site. Not a dating one, but a Star Wars message forum. As I will cover again a bit when I get to that phase of my life. During that time I was transition how I interacted online, one the transition from local to global, and two from a home grown community that was built online too this star wars site. During this mess Jen and I would start chatting, at some point my number was given out and then she spilled soda on her keyboard.
That disaster and need to go to fry’s electronics to get a new keyboard had her calling me in a semi panic over whether she could save the old keyboard. Then photoshop happened. Eventually we would move in together in San Diego, California where she was attending school.
From there Jen will take over as having a major involvement off and on in things for the next few years. She managed to match her timing with Jim and his odd swapping out of Marty from the L street house and therefore my relationship with Jen coincides with an utter change in life “phases” in mid-1999. Jen would also befriend Jim as best one could over a long distance and would also then not really know Marty or Chris or anyone that came before, except for Karl, who managed to stay through both groups.
Later Jen would get to know Nora, another lady I would meet. This time at work later in the 00s. Nora will play out a bigger role after this “childhood” portion of my life plays out, but gets a mention for being part of this whole thing, even though for this write up it is at the tail end.
There are the friends of the L street house, now let’s do an immediate family run down. When I was a young lad, I had older siblings, it wasn’t all friends and teenage mayhem. How many were living at home, the L street house, is in question since I was little for most of their time. But I do know the last to leave was Reise, and I was five when he did so. Steve, who left home when I was alive ran off with his older girlfriend (Jill) to a trailer park in Woodland. I know I was alive because I remember having to go with mom when she was looking for him. Why do I remember that specifically, I think mom was pretty distraught that day so it stuck in my mind.
image 8 Steve, Mom, Me and Reise (1978)
So, Steve and Reise are the next two youngest siblings. Reise would join the Army and marry a local girl named Karen. Over the years they would live in Hawaii and of course Germany which is where I intersect with them a lot, Mom and Dad did a lot of vacationing when I was little and Reise maybe had the best locations to visit.
Steve stayed in that trailer in Woodland, and had three kids, the twins, Justin, and Krystle, then Meghan later on. The girlfriend he ran off with he then finally got married to at the Gibson House in Woodland and they moved into a house on that side of town. Since Woodland neighbors Davis, Steve and his family would intersect a lot the comings and goings of the L street house. Justin would in fact find himself in some trouble as a teen and even stay extendedly at the L street house.
image 9 Cindy and I am not sure who.
Next up is Cindy because I know she was at the house for a while. Cindy had a kid the same time I was born and from what I have been told things just didn’t work out with her gentlemen caller. This is why Melanie, Cindy’s first kid, and I seem to be sharing a lot of pictures from my earlier years. I can specifically remember our beds in my room in the L street house and so on. I guess before she met and married Rich, there was some time she stayed at the L street house with Mel. Of course, Rich would win out and Cindy and Melanie would move to Sacramento. From there Cindy started on having another six more children. Stephanie being the last I think born in California.
After that they would move to Arizona, Ohio, Indiana and eventually Texas, giving them Mom and Dad’s next best vacation destinations and of course where all the cross-country driving would come from until Mom and I couldn’t stand being the car that long anymore.
image 10 Back: Steve, Reise and Russ, Front: Randy, Dad holding a tiny Ryan. (1978)
I have been told Randy, the eldest of all the siblings spent some time in the L street house as well. Randy, Dad’s oldest child was I believe already 18 when mom and dad got married so he moved down to Davis out of necessity. I don’t know if any of that overlapped with my time as a baby, but I do know that moving to Davis helped Randy out a lot. Cindy’s friend, Dominque eventually became his wife and they moved to Utah and three children.
Randy would cross a lot with the same vacations that Mom and Dad drove off to visit Cindy. His house in Utah was magically a day’s drive from Davis and made for a good stop before heading other directions. Thus, I don’t remember how many summers we just went to Utah to visit or visited on our way beyond.
image 11 Bob visiting the L street house after basic training in the Navy.
Bob, the oldest of om’s first batch, of course lived in the L street house, but joined the Navy out of High School. Thus, I don’t think I ever had any overlap with Bob. When he left the Navy, he ended up in Chico, of all places, which was where Dad had moved down from along with Randy and Reise. Seems Bob floated around there for a bit, including staying with the only unmentioned sibling yet, Russel, before meeting his future wife Julie and heading to the Bay area, and eventually having a couple children of their own.
Bob being so close to home also put him in the same category of Steve as far as an overlapping time, however since Bob and Julie’s first child didn’t come to be until around 1999, we didn’t see them nearly as much for babysitting activities as we did with Steve through the 80s and 90s.
Then there is Russ, I think the only one of us seven to never actually have his “room” at the L street house. But since he stayed in Chico with his wife and two kids, we would see them, especially when Dad would go up to Chico to visit family. Russ also worked for PG&E, and we would find him in the area on work and he would stop by for cookies and the like.
image 12 the L street house (1999)
Finally, we have the L street house. While not a person this house, this house which I believe was purchased by my mother and her first husband in the 1960s was the central location for almost all things family for the next near-half century. It will be the primary location for a lot of events, Christmases and Trivial Pursuit games and so on, and carry its own presence throughout my time in Davis as a youngster.
So, there is your House-Ewing family, wait hold up. I have skirted over one very important family member that lived in the L street house in the 90s. George. George or Georgums as he was affectionately called was the family dog from the summer of 1990 until February of 2000, a good solid ten year run if an animal ever had one. But the story of George doesn’t really start in 1990, we have to turbo back to 1984 and a kid getting in trouble in the first grade.
That kid would be me by the way, it’s always me when I talk about getting in trouble in the 1980s. On a rainy fall day, a young something or other, okay me, maybe acted up in class, just a little bit. What I had done that day is not important, mainly because I don’t remember. What was important was two things, one, I had to have my parent come to class to pick me up after school and get the rundown of my bad behavior. Two, in an odd twist it was my dad that was sent to pick me up that day instead of Mom. Judging to that fact Dad was picking me up, Mom must have had something important to do that day and Dad took the day off specifically to pick me up from school.
To say Dad was annoyed would be decently accurate. I was in trouble, there would be no Scooby Doo this afternoon. Since it’s 1984 there is actually a whole afternoon of amazing cartoons I’m just going to miss out on because of my transgressions in school that day. After learning this news I was a depressed little man. Dad loaded me up in the Mazda GLC and I prepared for the horrors of being at home after school and in trouble. But something strange was afoot, we started going the wrong way, in fact Dad turned down the country road to Woodland instead of staying on the main street home to L street.
This of course meant it was it. Dad had enough of my b.s. and was taking me out in the country to end me. We sat quietly in the car and just keep going down the road, my nerves on high alert because of the impending doom coming my way. After about ten minutes of heading down the road to nowhere Dad turns left, I know this drive, this is the drive to my brother Steve’s trailer, I was being disowned and dropped off! I was going to be stuck there with my brothers two little babies, maybe just being dropped off in the middle of nowhere was better!
Then we turned left again, it started to dawn on me where we were going now. The dog pound. Now here we are going to take a break from the story. As I said it was quite unusual in these days for my dad to take a day off work and pick me up from school. My mother was a private piano teacher, meaning she worked from home, so her workday didn’t usually begin until after three o clock to coincide with kids getting out of school. This also allowed Mom to take and pickup little ones from school.
Now there is an exception to this, around this time Mom also started going back to college. She had taken a long break from it and was going back. So, from first to about third grade some days she would come get me, or a friend’s parents would get me and drop me off in day care if needed. Eventually she would pay for a bus to come get me, since Davis had cancelled their school buses somewhere around 1979. “Day care” most of the time, was really a family friend that just housed some of us while our parents were busy. Adding this information to the other, a dad pickup day was a very rare occurrence.
With those facts in mind, as an adult and dealing with children some things about this day dawned on me. I grew up with this fun little story of dad taking me to the pound when I was busted to look for a dog and because it’s my father it does fit with his personality and makes for a cute story, however, I can also logic out now that Dad may have already decided that this was his plan for the day and just used my behavioral issue to hold the suspense a little longer.
At the time though I was puzzled. Here I had a bad day at school and Dad has me at the pound looking for a dog I think “Mom would allow us to have”. This doubled up when we found one. Mom, worried about dog allergies and some other issues when the discussion of a dog had come up recently said, if we were to get one, we needed a poodle since they were hypoallergenic. And there at the pound was a five-year-old little man named Napoleon, a pint size poodle that met all the criteria we had been given. Once again, now older, I wonder if this hadn’t been pre planned in advanced because the likelihood of having a house-trained little man the right breed seems at the pound that day, seems way to coincidental. However, the startle mom will have when we bring the little emperor home means that one, it was just a crazy coincidence or two, mom was an exceptional actor.
When we found him, of course for a five year old boy it was love.
image 13 Me holding Napoleon for mom to take a picture of in 1984.
We told the pound we intended to adopt the little dictator and sure enough Dad went through the paperwork and we drove back down the country road with a new family member. As I said Mom was stunned with the late arrival from school, but more so our cat, Muffin, was supremely stunned at another furball in his presence. Napoleon would be our family dog until 1989 when he started to get too sickly to manage. The hole left in the house without a dog would come to a head though a short while later.
image 14 George catching a rest during Christmas Eve dinner 1990
In the summer of 1990 I really started missing Napoleon. So, I went on a full court press to get a new family dog. I laid the sad faces on, I would go through books and magazines that had pictures of dogs and so on until Mom was willing to drive out to the pound and see what dogs they had. Of course, once the mistake is made to go, it’s hard to not come home with a new family member, I have had to do it as an adult and one time we did go with the caveat that we couldn’t get a dog on that trip, boy did that set of the waterworks when we left. So, It’s really almost an impossibility, once you go, someone is going to get a parent to fall in love.
On this day it was a weird red haired purple tongued mutt of a chow-chow named George. I don’t remember what drew either one of us to him. Maybe it was because he was different, he had enough chow in him to have the dark purple tongue and fluffy red hair, but his mixes also made him bigger than a chow, so he was just a unique almost bear looking little dog man. We took him out to the test area the pounds have to see if the dog is a fit and Mom was really pleased with how laidback he was. So, without consulting Dad (kind of the opposite of the napoleon story, maybe) Mom and I brough this majestic beast home.
Then, on the way home, we found one of his weird idiosyncrasies. We had the window rolled down for the car ride home, as one would for a puppy dog and everything seemed fine, but once we stopped in the driveway Dingbat, I mean George, just jumped right on out the window. What we were about to find out is that George, who was a very pleasant and mindful dog, also had some weird call of the wild when he was outside. Without restrictive borders he would just take off and do as he pleased.
A short time later when he snuck out the front door we thought we just lost him as he ran off down the road, but when we finally came home that day from looking for him he had come home and was waiting for us in the front yard like it was just business as usual. But rest assured after day one we learned don’t let George out the front door. And maybe his wanderlust wouldn’t have been such an issue if not for idiosyncrasy two, he hated anything non-human.
George was a good boy, he would let kids wrestle with him, you could muzzle him and he would just me the happiest camper on the planet. But if you walked on four legs instead of two, well he thought you needed to be dead and displayed for the bipedal overlords to see. So as good as he was, we did always live under fear of him getting out the front door and picking fights with any locals that couldn’t be bothered to obey leash laws. Which did happen once.
I grew up in a town where some of the citizens maybe adhere to the “do as I say not as a I do” mantra and so we had a neighbor down the road who just never walked his two dogs on the leash, ever. This drove George nuts. He knew when those guys were out in front of the house doing who knows what. He didn’t like it. Well one Saturday evening my parents were having a small dinner party with their friends and George used this event as an opportunity to sneak around an unsuspecting dinner guest to get out of the house, which just so happened to match up with this neighbor and his dogs going down the street.
George got out and ran full speed to engage the evil dogs and protect his house and the dinner guests from their evil plots. It was a scene, the owner of the dogs realizing his dogs, although large were not up to the challenge of a red-haired psycho dog ready to protect his family at all costs tackled George. Which George allowed since well two-legged person so, completely obedient and then started to hit George. Which was horrifying, especially considering if he would have just controlled his dogs my dad would have got to George in time. Instead, my dad had to go smack the man off George to get him to release. Suffice to say after this incident for years that man had angry teenagers yelling at him from his front lawn.
But that was George, he was one hundred percent loyal and did everything as hard as he could to please us. Which makes his time, especially through junior and senior high for me, interesting. In the seventh-grade we kids were weirdos. At this time Mom and Dad hadn’t remodeled the garage from a play area, which it was when I was little, into Mom’s piano studio. So, after school sometimes me and my friends would go out there to do dumb things away from the curious ears of my mother and her students in the front of the house. The garage had its own door that we would use so as to not disturb the piano lessons. The door was behind the locked side gate which I knew how to get into. The we had a garage and back yard as a free space to play in.
Now that side door also had a doggie door, which sadly for George, when we did the house remodel took away his ability to come inside when he didn’t want to be outside by his own accord. But at this time he had it which meant he was basically in the same play space as all the boys coming over, the garage and the side yard. At this point in time all I had video game wise was a Nintendo, which I had hooked up in my bedroom, so if we were relegated to the garage we would have to actually play game games in real life. Which we did.
In the spring of that school year Mom and Dad took out the old above ground pool we had in the backyard. So, for a while we started playing backyard whiffle ball games. We had a whole structure to it, where the bases were in the yard, the pictures mound, foul polls etc. and it was exactly like one would expect a kid organized game to be with special rules. One of the most memorable being that if you hit a home run over the fence into what was right field, you also had to retrieve the ball from the psycho dogs yard. This yard was the back fence neighbors, and they had two small dogs that were just out for any flesh they could try and get too. They were so set on this goal that they would put their tiny little noses through the knot holes on the fence and snarl. Of course, my mom thinks one day George actually nipped one of them pretty good during one of these snarls thus severing good back fence neighbor relations for the rest of our time there.
Over time though whiffle ball degenerated into sword fights with the whiffle bats. And that game came with all the rules you would expect from kids. Including something dumb like “free” shots where the other person could only block if they violated some given gentlemen’s rule of the beat each other with blunt objects game. This was most notable for a time Jared acquired a free swing at Chris H. and then we all got into a tizzy because Chris’s “blocks” were just outright danger swings. We also had an older friend named Randy who enjoyed the chaos of some of these violent games.
Randy not to be confused with my brother of the same name, was a couple years older than us, and if you aren’t familiar with the difference between a seventh grader and ninth grader, it’s like a big child and a grown person in some cases. So, the bat game would sometimes become they stop randy from killing you game. Which honestly was out of hand, but were kids so yeah, we thought it great fun. One day though the game got stepped up and Chris H. jousted the empty bar bell of my weights set into Randy’s gut. Honestly, I thought that was going to be bad, oddly Randy just said “ouch” and came after both of us with a little more intensity.
So, we ran into the garage and locked the door. So randy tried to enter through George’s doggy door. Now I have had other dogs besides George so maybe I’m used to how humans use doggy doors. You don’t try and go through it, you just get your arm in it and then unlock the door and come in like a normal person. Randy didn’t go that route, he tried coming in through it and got stuck. But to his credit his rage at Chris H. was still solid and continued the battle with him while jammed in there.
Now this is where I get to poor George. George who has only really lived here about a year of his four years on earth and is super laid back with people had to watch this all the time. And his doggy brain would be confused. For a long while Randy was terrified of George, since once bat wars would begin George would just jump around and bark so that he could be involved. Being he wasn’t a little dog though if you didn’t know he was a total sweetie I could see where one might gain a sense fear.
But what George must have wondered in his little doggy mind the day the one kid that shied away from a bit was trying to crawl through his door. Who knows? But to look at him was to just see what looked like a constantly puzzled dog. Us kids were weirdos that needed protecting but we just didn’t play in a way that he understood. That seventh-grade year was an interesting time for him, and probably pretty engaging.
Over the next two years we would remodel the house on him, he would lose his garage, my parents would install a bigger above ground pool in the backyard, and he would lose that space for a while too. Along with that early into eight grade I would get the Super Nintendo and thus started a trend of not going in the backyard as much. Add that with Mom’s studio being closer to the back yard it did move us further from adult supervision of the studio and to go the video game route in the afternoons.
It wasn’t all bad though, Dad eventually built a deck in the backyard to make the above ground pool seem like a regular one. Since the deck was elevated, the dark areas below became George’s new hunting grounds. At night not only did the deck provide him shelter but all manner of vermin that might try and sneak into the house would come through there and he could destroy them and then show us in the morning by lining up their little possum bodies along the sliding glass door. Throwing out dead animal carcasses, Dad’s everywhere favorite activity.
While George was a good boy besides his idiosyncrasies that revolved around protecting us, he also had another issue, the poor guy. He was epileptic, which was a condition we didn’t know about when we got him. In fact, it probably led to him getting in trouble and losing stay in the house privileges when we were gone. Since part of his epileptic seizures involved losing his bowels, he got a bad boy moniker one day and had to start staying outside when we would go places. However, we did finally find out, obviously, about his condition.
During what I want to say was winter break, although I could be wrong, I was playing Super Empire Strikes Back, I think this was winter break because I thought I got each of the Super Star Wars games in successive Christmases. However, I want to say I was playing it while Chris M. and Doug were over, and that particular game’s release date was in June. And June would be a month that made the pairing of Chris and Doug being over at the same time make more sense, but maybe eventually ill figure that one out. But for now it was a Christmas gift being played during a school break.
Doug was a boy in Chris K.’s class in junior high school that came to us during the summer of 1993 as well, mainly through the BBS scene, but he was also friends with a lot of the kids Chris K. was and other ones we had around the neighborhood. During that summer Doug visited quite a lot and he was particularly fond of Chris M. However, at some point he had a large falling out with the older and some of the younger crowd, which is why wondering if I waited the six months from the games release until Christmas to play it is a hard question to know.
Anyway, I remember that I was the one playing the game while the others spectated. An oddly specific thing to have in the memory banks, not really though. Those games were fun and also we were at the end of the game, which is a long drawn out duel with Darth Vader, so I was in that moment. Until I wasn’t, because during the duel George walked up to us and just sort of froze and generally acted odd for him. Then he began to shiver and lost his bowels. It was rather scary for us to behold. We called mom in the room and didn’t know what was up. Luckily George had his moment there and then was back to normal. But yeah, we paused the game and took him to the veterinarian immediately and from then on George got a piece of American cheese every day with a tiny phenobarbital pill hidden inside.
George was pretty good about the whole thing, I knew he didn’t want to interrupt us beating Darth Vader, those Super Star Wars games were very fun, and George liked being in the room with the kids while we played. (Which you will see in a lot of the art I made for these stories.) He normally though would just choose a spot and curl up, occasionally breaking for a fevered scratching session. But he was a Star Wars dog. He was also the L street house’s last dog, and last pet in general but and that was pretty impressive given the history of the L street Animal House.
image 15 Muffin and me having a disagreement about ice cream (1979 or 80)
Alright, so I covered the L street dogs, well the ones I had a hand in, Napoleon and George, two leaders of nations that none will forget. One conquering Europe and the other crossing the Delaware. However, the menagerie at the L street house was much greater than just two canines.
Let’s start from the beginning, the lead fixture of the four legged contingency at the house when I was born was an ornery Siamese cat named, … Muffin. Don’t get me wrong I loved the guy when I was little even though the only photo evidence I have may say otherwise, but Muffin was pretty much the opposite of his name. Muffin will come in and out of stories until I am around eight years old, so just know he exists and has a bit of a temper for now. A temper possibly groomed by my older brothers, since Reise told me there was a time when Steve used Muffin as a fill in for a calf when practicing his lasso techniques.
Now, I have an early memory of being in the backyard at the L street house when we still had the weird fence in the middle dividing it from a large garden in the back and seeing a dog run across the garden as the bigger people scrambled. I don’t know to whom the dog belonged, I know there is a rich history of pre-1978 animals, I mean look at Muffin, but I don’t think this dog was any of ours and more likely the neighbors.
But next to the garden in the back of the backyard we had a dank wooden shed and in that shed was one of Dad’s projects that Mom miraculously let happen. Rabbits. When I was very young my Dad raised rabbits in the backyard shed. More Rabbits than I could count, well I don’t think I could count much anyway at two years old, but they were there, and I loved them. Did they have names, I can’t remember, they were just rabbits and soft.
However, they had to be caged because of predators. What was their biggest advisory? Muffin of course. When Melanie and I were tiny we were each allowed to claim one of the bunnies as our own. Mine got out one day when we were on top of the shed picking pomegranates and Muffin chased him, cornered him in a crevasse behind the shed and then murdered him dead. One furry friend down. Like I said earlier I loved me the Muffin, he got to be in the house and roam around and would be nice to the little kids, but I also knew from a young age he was a killer and that stayed in my mind.
The next few years was when all the older siblings started filing out of the house and eventually by the time I was starting Kindergarten the house was down to just me, Mom, Dad and Muffin makes four. Of course, I have already covered the next thing that happened, Muffin got a new friend in the way of a little white poodle named Napoleon. While initially, or day one actually, Muffin didn’t seem very keen on adding a fifth family member, oddly and rather quickly they managed to work their differences out.
So, for a small amount of time, I had a dog and cat, He-Man and Star Wars, and just a nice cozy little kid life, I no longer had to share blocks and I had friends I could talk with that responded in snuggles instead of pulling my hair (Melanie). Good times. Then came Aunt Dorothy.
I don’t know the story behind why Aunt Dorothy was moving from Indio, California all the way up here. We had in the past gone down south to visit her and my understanding was that she didn’t have any fiscal issues, so the story behind her move is still one I don’t really know. But when I was around seven or eight, she packed up her life and came to live with us while she transitioned into being a Northern Californian.
And this was fine, Dorothy was the artist of that line of the family which by this time in my life was super cool, but Dorothy had her own dog. Her dog was an Australian shepherd named Sadie. Sadie changed our lives. Sadie was a mean old git and as Mom put it, she thought it her job to herd me around the house by nipping at the back of my heels. Thus began a period of time when I had to construct pathways through the house with dining room chairs to avoid the dog’s malice. I am not joking when I say that the entire time that dog lived with us, which was a little over a year I think, I never once was able to pet the dog, Sadie wouldn’t let that happen.
Sadie’s domineering attitude carried over to the other pets. Napoleon, who notoriously was cool with kids and females oddly got along well with the beast, but Muffin had his issues with her. And those issues didn’t relent into any sort of accord. In fact, as time went on and Sadie got to stay in the house Muffin finally got pissed and manipulated a couple of graduate students living in a rental a house two houses down to start feeding him and letting him in so he didn’t have to stay in this oppressive dog house anymore.
While strange, with the animal tensions being what they were, we just started visiting our cat down the street. I would go sit on the porch and pet him and we’d fill up his food dish. I don’t remember there being much of a bad relationship between the couple and Mom and Dad but come that August when it was time for the couple to move out, Muffin left with them.
Now adult me would wonder if they discussed it with my parents and with the idea that my parents didn’t know how long Sadie was going to be around, they okayed the heist. However, Mom never seemed to react that way and gave a clear picture that they just snuck off with Muffin without asking permission. So, we have a second time Mom was either A plus acting or another fast one was pulled on her. This is kind of doubled down on the fact that we didn’t get any contact information for where they went or any information on Muffin after that, so as far as I know he is the longest living cat in history and is still alive somewhere out there in the world trying to figure out if it’s time to move back home.
A little while later Dorothy found a place to live in Davis and her and Sadie moved out as well. And now we were back to four, Mom, Dad, Me, and Muffin’s former best friend Napoleon. Thus started a phase of me deciding I loved animals. I think happy with my liberation from Sadie’s evil reign and the loss of the Muffin I wanted to new pets. A variety not just a new cat, which I think at this point Mom was realizing I had an allergy too.
Now the order of these may not be correct, but the Pet store became a stop on shopping trips. In Davis the one I remember was on Fourth street near the intersection of fourth and E streets downtown. That was the place I wanted to go now, all the time. First, I think was Brian, the Siamese fighting fish. Sharing the nation of Siam with Muffin was just a coincidence, the reason he was the first out of the gate was the sales pitch of low maintenance from the pet store. A fish you couldn’t over feed, would live in a little solitary bowl and would just mind his business on the mantle in the family room, perfect for a hyperactive little boy.
And that is what Brian did, he ate cute little worms that waved like grass at the bottom of his fishbowl, and he just slowly swam around his domain making sure other fighting fish didn’t disturb him. He would be our longest living small pet by a country mile, which I take are a meter or two longer than city miles. Other than some exciting bowl cleanings which required moving him to a temporary home and him jumping out of the fish net he just survived all things with his simple pattern. I don’t think he moved on until just before Junior High school, and like I said he was simple and didn’t interfere with anyone’s lives, when we left for vacation, we just dumped a ton of worms for him in there, and then whoever mom had watering the plants would check in to see when he needed a new dump of worms.
Next came Michelle the hamster. I don’t remember why I got into hamsters at that time, but I was ready for a rodent. Admittedly I did love the little thing, she was fun to play with, she wasn’t a biter, and she got her own house, er cage. The only real stressful times were if she managed to sneak out during a feeding or cleaning time and Napoleon wasn’t outside. Napoleon didn’t notice nor care for her when she was up on her table in her cage in the family room, no bother. But if she got out onto the floor with no containment, he was ready to solve the problem. Seeing as he could catch a bird midflight it was a worry for Michelle and the rest of us.
Michelle however didn’t make it more than about a year or less. Unfortunately, she had a bad habit of wanting to sleep under the slight drip her water bottle had and during a cold day in the winter being wet and cold did her in. If not, I think we would have had a lot longer and fonder memories of the little rodent, but sadly she didn’t get to much time with the family.
Which brings me to the next caged addition to the house, which will sadly end during the winter again. Tommy the Box Turtle. Much like Brian, lauded for how easy he was maintenance wise. And for the time we had him was fun to let crawl around on the family room carpet. But then I got introduced to the idea of turtles and hibernation. With him being purchased in the summer if I recall, it was only about five months into his stay that he decided it was too cold and went to bed and then never woke up.
After a long period of being down we started to worry, Mom had me try and wake him up and then I got the haunting image that his eyes were gone, and he had left his mortal coil. I still liked turtles moving forward, but that was enough to make me not want to deal with animals that sleep for too long in the winter knowing that can be a side effect.
After Tommy’s exit we would eventually lose Brian and Napoleon and it wouldn’t be until George’s adoption that we welcomed a new family member again. Maybe older with more interests and friends George never had to deal with another low intelligence sibling. I mean his nature of wanting to kill everything not human probably helped in the lack of other pets during his reign, but George was a good enough boy for all of us anyway.
Now when I was super little, I know I missed some stuff. in the back of some birthday pictures from the 1970s there is a distinct bird cage in the family room that I can remember being lived in by some bastardized dinosaurs, but I don’t remember names, stories or really much other than some noises and beaks. Which means, especially before kindergarten there was probably a few little animals that passed through the house that I was unaware of.
After George’s departure in February of 2000 the L street house would forever be without, up to the sale of the house in 2007. That wasn’t the last of in-house companions though during this time. By Fall of 2000 I was back in a house with a menagerie. The house Jen and I moved into in Mira Mesa, California featured two dogs, Bruno and Brittney and two cats Ipus and Holly. These four would be my last four-legged friends during this extended childhood time period (1978 – 2007). Holly being most noticeable for thinking Jen and I took her room.
image 16 Holly hanging out on the back of the couch in MIra Mesa, CA, (2002).