Late November, 1998.  My eccentric roommate just became more eccentric. (#200)

Thank you so much, readers, for sticking with me through 200 episodes of this story.  At some point in 2019, during year 1 of this story, I estimated that I would need about 250 episodes to tell the whole story, and it is finally starting to look possible that I might get to the end someday.  I’m glad to have you to share it with.  And if you know anyone who might like a nostalgic coming-of-age story set in the 1990s, please share this with them.

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From: Michelle923@aolnet.com
To: “Gregory Dennison” <gjdennison@jeromeville.edu>
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1998 12:40 -0500
Subject: Re: hi

Hi! How are you? How’s teaching going? Your X-Files parties sound really fun! I’ve only seen that show a few times, but it looked pretty good from what I saw.

I’m excited because Thanksgiving is coming up next week!  We always host it at our house.  My grandparents will be coming, and some of my aunts and uncles and cousins.  We have a lot of family in the area.  I love Thanksgiving dinner… What do you have planned for Thanksgiving?  Will you be going home?  Does your family live nearby, or did you go far away for school?

I have class this afternoon.  What about you?  Are you teaching today?  I hope you have a great day! Talk to you soon! :-)

–Michelle

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I met Michelle a few weeks ago on an Internet Relay Chat channel.  A few years ago, when I first had access to chat sites on the Internet, my mother was always fond of reminding me that these girls I was talking to could be creepy old men for all I knew.  Back in the 1990s, chat sites, and the private messages that came from them, were entirely text based.  The technology for video chatting had not been developed yet, and digital photography was in its infancy, beyond the average user’s capability or budget.  If I wanted to send someone a picture, I had to take a traditional film photo of myself and put it on a flatbed scanner to convert it to a digital image file.  I did not own a flatbed scanner, and while there were a few in computer labs around school with flatbed scanners, I also did not like most pictures of myself in the first place.  I had not sent Michelle a picture yet, nor had she sent me one, but she seemed really sweet.

Michelle was a community college student, a few years younger than me.  She lived in Michigan with her family.  A large Thanksgiving with aunts and uncles and cousins sounded nice to me, but the Thanksgiving I had to look forward to this year would be much smaller.  I clicked Reply and started typing.

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To: Michelle923@aolnet.com
From: gjdennison@jeromeville.edu
Subject: Re: hi

Your Thanksgiving sounds like fun!  I will be going home to my parents’ house.  They live in a little town called Plumdale, in the central part of the state near the coast, near Gabilan and Santa Lucia if you know where those are.  It’s about a two and a half hour drive if traffic is good.  When I was growing up, we had a big family Thanksgiving that sounds more like yours.  My dad grew up in Bidwell, a ways north of here, and we’d drive between four and five hours to have Thanksgiving at my great-grandma’s house every year, with a lot of his relatives there too.  My great-grandma died in 1994, and some of those relatives have moved farther away, and now my brother is

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The phone rang, interrupting my typing.  Back in those days, most people used dial-up Internet, connecting through the telephone line, but I had my email set up in a way that I could read and write messages offline, not tying up the phone line, only connecting for a minute when I needed to send and check messages.  I picked up the phone and said, “Hello?” 

“Hi,” a young-sounding female voice said on the other end.  “Is Jed there?”

“He’s not home.  Can I take a message?”

“Can you tell him that Jamie called?”

“Sure,” I said, writing “Jed – Jamie called” on a piece of scratch paper.  “Does he have your number?”

“I think so, but let me give it to you just in case.”

Back in the days of landlines, someone who moved had to get a new phone number in the new area code, so it was possible to tell where someone lived from their phone number.  I could tell from Jamie’s area code that she was probably someone Jed knew from back home, not a Jeromeville local.  “Sure.  I’ll give him that message.”

“Thank you!  Bye!”

“Bye,” I said, hanging up the phone.  I continued my email to Michelle.

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in high school on the basketball team, and his season starts the week of Thanksgiving so we can’t travel anymore.  So I’ll be back at home with just my immediate family and my grandparents on Mom’s side.  I miss going to see Dad’s relatives in Bidwell.  My great-grandma lived in the hills just outside of town with lots of places to hike and explore.  It was beautiful.

The X-Files parties are always fun!  It’s funny how that group has kind of developed a bunch of inside jokes.  Like there was this time when I

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I was interrupted from writing my email again; this time, I heard the doorbell frantically ringing.  I jumped out of my seat a little, then cautiously walked down the hallway to the front door.  I opened the door a crack and saw Jed, with his bicycle propped against the wall.  “Can you go grab a couple of towels from the bathroom?” he said, somewhat frantically.

Confused, I looked at him again and noticed that his right hand was dripping blood.  Without asking, I ran to the bathroom and brought Jed two towels.  He wrapped his hand in one of them and held it in place.  “I’m going to need a ride to the Student Health Center.  I’m really sorry, I hope I’m not bothering you.  Are you the only one home?”

“Yeah, I’m the only one home,” I said.  “I’m not doing anything urgent.  Let’s go.  Should I put your bike inside?”

“Yes, please.”

I noticed that the right handlebar of Jed’s bike was also covered in blood, so I carefully held it by the other handlebar and wheeled it into the laundry room, the closest part of the house, just to get it out of the way.  I locked the house and walked with Jed to the car, hoping that the two towels would soak up enough blood that he would not bleed inside my car.  Jed carefully pulled himself into the passenger seat, also being careful not to get blood on anything.  “Can you buckle my seat belt?” he asked.  “It’s kind of hard to hold on to anything with my right hand.”

“Sure,” I said.  I buckled his seat belt, then got around to the driver’s seat and attached my own.  As we pulled away from the curb, weaving through the neighborhood toward Andrews Road, I finally asked, “So what happened?  Are you gonna be okay?”

“It was a freak accident,” he explained as I turned right on Andrews.  Gesturing toward the intersection behind us, he continued, “I was slowing down to turn here, on my way home from class, and the whole brake lever broke off.  It fell to the ground, bounced off the spinning tire, and ricocheted right back at my hand.  The sharp metal edge where it broke sliced my finger, and it hit me so hard I think my finger might be broken too.”

“Holy crap!” I exclaimed.  “That sounds painful!”

“It is,” Jed said.

I continued driving, unsure of what else to say.  The Student Health Center was at the north end of campus, on Colt Avenue just south of West Fifth Street.  I knew of this building’s existence, but I had never actually been inside; fortunately for me, I had never been sick or injured seriously enough in my four years and two months as a University of Jeromeville student to need a doctor.

I turned into the parking lot, looking to see where I could get a visitor permit since I did not currently have a permit to park on campus.  I noticed a sign saying that the section of the lot closest to the Student Health Center was reserved for patient parking, and that if I needed to be there for more than an hour, I could get a parking permit when I checked in.  I parked there and walked with Jed to the lobby.  Jed could walk just fine under his own power; only his right hand had been injured.

The Student Health Center was a low one-story building, resembling any other doctor’s office or urgent care center that one might find off campus.  I walked into the lobby, holding the door for Jed.  A receptionist sat at a desk, with upholstered chairs lining the remaining walls of the lobby.  Jed explained to the receptionist what had happened.

“You need to fill this out,” she said, handing him a clipboard with a form on it.  “Is that your writing hand that you hurt?”

“Yeah,” Jed replied, almost chuckling at his misfortune.  Gesturing to me, Jed asked, “Can he fill it out for me?”

“Sure,” the receptionist answered.

I took the clipboard from Jed and sat in a chair.  He sat next to me.  I took the pen and started writing.  “‘Name,’” I said, reading from the form.  “Wallace, comma, Jedediah Andrew.  Right?  Andrew is your middle name?”

“Yeah.”

“‘Student ID number?’” I asked.  Jed told me the number, and I wrote it in the blank.  “‘Address,’ I know that one.”  Jed chuckled as I wrote 902 Acacia Drive, Jeromeville, which of course was also my address.

“‘Emergency contact.’  Your parents?  David and Sherri Wallace?”

“Yes.  S-H-E-R-R-I,” Jed spelled, presumably to make sure I did not write Sheri or Sherry or Sherrie.  Jed then told me their address and phone number in Sand Hill, at the opposite end of the state, which I copied onto the form.  The next section asked for a detailed description of the injury.  I asked Jed exactly what he wanted me to write, and I wrote the description that he dictated to me.

After we finished filling out the form, the receptionist told us to wait.  I had no idea how long of a wait it would be.  It occurred to me a few minutes later that I had left a half-finished email to Michelle open on my computer.  I thought about telling Jed this, but I preferred to keep my conversations with girls from the Internet private, so I did not say anything.  I then started to worry that one of the other housemates might find it.  Although Brody and Sean each had their own rooms, I would not at all put it past Brody to go into my room, borrow something without asking, see the message to Michelle, and intrusively tease me about her later.  Or, worse yet, to reply to Michelle in my name, telling her all about my herpes, my missing teeth, and my recent realization that I was gay and fooling around with my 60-year-old male professor.  None of that was true, but Brody would find all of it hilarious.

I remembered something else that happened earlier before Jed got home.  “In all the chaos, I forgot to tell you.  Someone named Jamie called for you.”

“Jamie?  Did she have a high, soft voice?”

“Yeah.  And she gave me a number to call back, with a Sand Hill area code.”

Jed nodded knowingly, grinning.  “Trouble.”

“I actually wondered if that was who it was, when I saw the area code,” I said.  Jed got involved with swing dancing last year at the University Bar & Grill in Jeromeville, when swing dancing suddenly became a huge fad.  He went home to Sand Hill over the summer and found a place to go dancing there.  He had told me once about one of his friends from dancing back home, a seductive-looking blonde with the nickname Trouble.  “That was nice of her to call you,” I said.  “I haven’t heard from any of my friends back home in a long time.”

“Nooooo!” Jed shouted, louder than was expected in a doctor’s office waiting room.  I looked at him, as did two other patients in the waiting room.

“What?” I asked.

“This broken finger means I can’t go dancing!”

“Oh, no!” I said.  “That’s disappointing.  Hopefully you get better soon.”  My own experience swing dancing was indefinitely on hold.  The last time I went was a few weeks ago, and I had no definite plans to go back any time soon.  Most of my friends were not going there anymore, I was getting rejected often when asking girls to dance, and new episodes of The X-Files had started, on the same night of the week.  I was enjoying the X-Files watch parties at the De Anza house more than I was swing dancing at the moment.  But Jed still loved swing dancing, and now he would have to stop for a while until his finger healed.  I felt bad for him.

About twenty minutes later, a nurse walked out and called, “Jedediah?”  Jed stood up.

I asked, “Do you know how long this will take?  Do I have to wait here?  I don’t really know how this works.”

“I don’t think so,” he replied.  Turning to the receptionist, he asked, “Can my ride go home, and I can call him from here when I’m ready to be picked up?”

“Sure,” the receptionist said.  “We’ll do that.”  Turning to me, she continued, “Go do what you need to.  We can take care of it from here.”

“Sounds good.”

“Thank you so much for the ride,” Jed said to me.

“You’re welcome.  I hope it’s not that bad, and that it heals soon.”

Jed’s finger was that bad.  He needed stitches to stop the bleeding, and his broken finger was in a metal splint for four months.  I got the call to pick him up just as I was about to get ready for bed that night, after I finished writing my email to Michelle and grading the quizzes from my student teaching class.

Jed continued going to class, getting notes from classmates and finding ways to hold his pencil to make his writing legible for his instructors.  He took the bus to campus, since he could not ride a bike with the cast and his bike was still broken.  He still went home for Thanksgiving, but he had to buy expensive last minute plane tickets instead of making the seven-hour drive by himself.  He found someone else to give him a ride to and from the airport in Capital City.  I wondered how airport security handled the splint on his finger.  When he came home on the Sunday night after Thanksgiving, he was wearing his usual driver cap, polo shirt, and business-casual slacks with athletic shoes, but he had something new around him, a long, wide, dark blue velvet-like fabric piece down his back.

“Hey,” I said as he walked into our shared room.  “What’s with the cape?”

“It’s a cloak,” he said, extending his arms and unfurling the cloak to its full size.  It was attached around his neck at the top.  I nodded.  “My cousin got it for the Renaissance faire a few years ago.  We were standing around outside after Thanksgiving dinner, I got cold, and I was having trouble putting my finger through the long sleeve of a jacket.  My cousin gave me his cloak to try.  It’s so much more comfortable with my broken finger, and it keeps me really warm.”

“Makes sense.  Glad you found something that works.”

Jed took off the cloak and tossed it on his desk chair as I got everything together for student teaching in the morning.  My eccentric roommate just became more eccentric, I thought.  I tried to picture Jed walking around campus wearing the cloak, and oddly enough, it seemed like exactly the kind of thing I would expect him to do.  Jed was going to do his thing that made sense for him regardless of what the rest of society would say about it.  And that was actually an admirable quality.  I wanted to live that way, being myself without caring what people thought about me, being unique and mysterious unlike all the other boring people out there.  It was difficult sometimes, though, especially given my history in childhood of being bullied for every imaginable reason.

Jed’s cloak became a well-known part of his personality.  I once met someone who did not know him personally, but knew who I was talking about when I said that my roommate was the guy with the cloak who works at the Coffee House on campus.  A year later, I was no longer a student but still attending Jeromeville Christian Fellowship sometimes, and on the Friday before Halloween that year, I had heard someone at JCF say that there was a Halloween party at the De Anza house afterward.  I got a brilliant idea and rushed home.  Brody was the only one home, so I asked him, “Where’s Jed?  There’s a Halloween party at the De Anza house, and I’m going to dress as Jed.  I want to ask if I can borrow his cloak.”

“Just take it, if he’s not wearing it,” Brody said.  “But if you really want to ask, he went to rent a movie from Blockbuster.”

I got in the car, drove the quarter mile to Blockbuster Video, and walked quickly up and down the aisles looking at the other customers.  Jed had a girlfriend at the time, and I found the two of them in about thirty seconds.

“Jed!” I called out.

Both of them turned around, and Jed said, “Hey!  How’s it going?”

I blurted out quickly, “Brody told me you were here.  There’s a Halloween party at the De Anza house, and I’m going as you.  Can I borrow the cloak?”

Jed looked at me for a few seconds, puzzled by what I said.  After his brain finished processing, the two of them both started laughing loudly.  “Go for it,” he said. “That’ll be hilarious.”

I went back home and put on the same kind of business casual slacks I wore for student teaching, a dark solid color shirt, the driver cap that I used to wear swing dancing, and white athletic shoes.  I then fastened the cloak around my neck.  Jed had not gotten home from the video store yet, but Brody saw my costume before I left and insisted on taking a picture.  He could barely keep a straight face.  Most of the people at the party knew Jed well enough that they recognized me.  Tim Walton said it would have been funnier if Jed had been there too, and 3 Silver said that I should have bandaged my finger to complete the costume.  He was totally right; I wished I had thought of that.

A few years later, I was living in Riverview, but took a day trip to Jeromeville on the day of the Spring Picnic.  At one point, I was walking across the Memorial Union, and I saw a slightly shorter than average young man with bushy blond hair and a dark cloak about ten feet in front of me.  I was excited, because I had not seen Jed in a while at the time; he was married by then, and I hung out with him and his wife for part of the day. 

I have never had a trademark article of clothing that people always associate with me, like Jed had with the cloak.  As I mentioned before, I had my own driver cap, similar to Jed’s, that I had gotten for swing dancing, to look the part.  As the weather cooled down in that fall of 1998, I started to wear it to class and in public, but this was a style I borrowed from Jed, not my own.  These days, I wear a baseball cap most of the time, but I go back and forth between several different ones, and there is nothing unusual about wearing a baseball cap.  Of course, this represents a major change for me, since I never wore a baseball cap in my days of being a student at UJ.  At the time Jed acquired his cloak, I had not worn a baseball cap for nine years.  But how that changed is another story for another time.

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Is there an uncommon article of clothing that you are known for among your friends and acquaintances? Or do you know someone like this who usually wears an uncommon article of clothing? Tell me about it in the comments.

Thank you again for sticking with me for 200 episodes! If you are new to this story, why not start from episode 1 so you can see how this story unfolded? Click here!

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