August 1, 1997. Oh, how I wish that I might be the one. (#140)

August 21, 2022October 16, 2022 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 6 Comments

While I was in Oregon that summer, away from all of my friends and with less of a social life than I had in Jeromeville, my mind had plenty of time to explore some creative ideas. Since I did not have my computer with me, I could not make any new episodes of Dog Crap and Vince. I also could not work on Try, Try Again, a novel I had begun a year and a half ago about a high school student who needs a fresh start, but is not ready to move on to the next stage in life, so he runs away and fakes his age to get a few more years of high school. That manuscript was saved on the hard drive of my computer back in Jeromeville. By now I had lost interest in finishing Try, Try Again; I had moved on from whatever thoughts had inspired its creation. I never worked on it again; it remains unfinished to this day.

I was playing with an idea for a multi-part science fiction story, inspired by my recent rediscovery of Star Wars. My story began with humans living on another planet, ruled by another race. Their rebellion against their overlords would take up the first three stories. Then, hundreds of years later, in the next episode, it would be revealed that the alien overlords had been secretly living among the humans, plotting to reconquer their planet when the time was right. Unlike Star Wars, I was not going to leave my readers hanging with just the middle of the story, waiting to get the beginning and end of the story in movies that would never be made. My story had not only a beginning and a middle, but also an ending, in which hundreds more years would pass, and the humans would battle their overlords again, winning once and for all. But then I would write one more story, in which the conquering race would reappear. They could never truly be defeated. This idea never made it farther than an outline in which I would summarize each of the ten tentative episodes in one sentence each.

I had no computer in my room, so if I wanted to write for an extended period of time, I either had to write by hand with pencil and paper, or walk all the way to Keller Hall and use the computer in room 202, the study room for the other students from the summer math research program. Writing in 202 Keller carried the risk that one of my classmates would ask me about my writing. I did not feel particularly comfortable with the idea of sharing my writing with those people.

Also, with no computer in my room, I had to do all my emailing from 202 Keller. My mother wrote almost every day. I also had a few girls I met flirting in chat rooms who emailed me occasionally, and a few of my friends from Jeromeville actually checked their email during the summer when school was out. Many of my friends were currently on summer mission trips with churches or Christian ministry organizations; although they did not have frequent access to email, some of them occasionally sent out mass emails to their supporters.

I got one such email today, from Erica Foster. It was Friday, I was tired, and I decided in the late morning while sitting frustrated in front of a computer in 202 Keller that I was done doing math research for the day. Keith and Marjorie were sitting on a couch across the room, talking about things that were not math. Ivan and Emily, the other students working on the same project as me, each had their own things to work on, so I was not hindering their work by taking the rest of the day off. I closed the window in which I was writing scripts with the math software Mathematica and opened another window where I could get to my email.

This email was the first time I had heard from Erica since I left Jeromeville in mid-June. Erica, like me, was a youth group leader at Jeromeville Covenant Church. She was three years younger than me, having just graduated from Jeromeville High School; she would be joining me and most of the rest of the youth leaders at the University of Jeromeville in the fall. Her younger brother, Danny, was one of the kids in the youth group at J-Cov. Danny and his friends were a big part of the reason I got involved in youth ministry, after they randomly brought me with them on an adventure after church one day six months ago.

Erica was in Turkey for the summer, volunteering as a nanny for a family of full-time missionaries that J-Cov supported. The concept of mission trips and full-time missionaries was relatively new to me. I grew up Catholic, where missionary work looks a bit different from that of evangelical Christians.

In Erica’s email, she told all about the three children of the family she was helping, what they were learning in school, their hobbies, and what she had been teaching them weekly in place of a proper Sunday school. She also talked about helping their parents with the Bible study they had started in their community, and about some of the locals who had made a decision to follow Jesus or were asking questions indicating interest in doing so. At the end of the message, Erica had mentioned that the Turkish word for turkey, the animal, was the same as the Turkish word for India. “I wonder what they call turkeys in India?” she wrote. I laughed.

Erica was truly a woman of God. It took a huge leap of faith to go overseas and do God’s work, and as much as I supported the concept, I could never see myself as the one to actually go overseas. This trip seemed like the perfect experience for her; she had a very motherly side to her personality, suited to nannying, and having grown up at J-Cov, she had known this family that she was working with for many years. I needed to find a woman like that for myself, one who showed through the way she lived her life that she truly loved God.

Every once in a while, a poetic phrase will pop into my head regarding whatever, or as the case usually is, whoever is on my mind at the moment, and if the right words come, I will build a poem around that phrase. I was still thinking about Erica when I walked back to Howard Hall to warm up something in the microwave for lunch, and in my mind, I kept saying to myself, Reflected in her face, I see the Lord. Iambic pentameter, just like Shakespeare. This could work. By the time I got back to my room, I had a second line: Each move she makes the love of Christ reveals.

I would occasionally hide secret messages in my stories and poems. A few months ago, when Haley Channing told me she did not like me back and I was in the process of getting over her, I wrote a story in which the first letter of each paragraph spelled her name. Conveniently enough, “Erica Ann Foster” had fourteen letters, and a Shakespearean sonnet had fourteen lines. And the first two lines I thought of for my poem started with R and E, which were the first two letters of Erica’s full name spelled backward. I could hide her name in the first letters of each line, but spell it backward.

I wrote down the start of the poem as soon as I got back to my room. After I ate lunch, I went for a long walk around the Grandvale State campus, composing poetry in my head and occasionally taking a piece of paper out of my pocket and writing something I wanted to make sure to remember.

Erica had done another short mission trip over spring break, to northern Mexico, as part of the high school group at J-Cov. That was a big trip with hundreds of students from all over the West, organized by a Christian university in California. The students on that trip got a t-shirt that said “Be The One,” with a Bible verse on the back, saying to be the one that God sends out to spread the Gospel. I wrote that down, making a note in my head to incorporate that phrase into the poem somehow.

What was I doing? Was I developing a thing for Erica, falling for her? This could never work. We did not really have much in common other than being youth leaders at J-Cov. And what if Erica did become a full-time missionary someday? If something serious did happen between us, and we got married, I would have to follow her to some faraway land. Should I even be letting these thoughts into my head enough to write a poem about it?

Or, perhaps, could I incorporate these thoughts into the poem itself?

Somewhere around the seventh line, I got stuck; I could not make the poem sound like I wanted while making the line start with N, to fit the secret message. The line I had in mind started with I, and Erica’s name did have an I in it, but not at line 7. I decided to give up on making the first lines spell Erica’s name backward, opting for the simpler task of making the first letters of each line an anagram, unscrambling to spell “Erica Ann Foster.” This way, I would not have to change the first six lines that I had already tentatively written.

After I got back from my walk, I got out my copy of Needful Things by Stephen King, a long novel which I had been reading off and on all summer. I was near the end. I took a break from reading every once in a while to continue thinking about my poem. I warmed up something in the microwave again for dinner, and by about ten o’clock I had finished the poem. At some point, the pronouns in the beginning of the poem had changed, so that I wrote as if I were addressing the woman directly instead of writing about her.

“That I Might Be The One”

Reflected in your face, I see the Lord,
Each move you make the love of Christ reveals;
Through you, His love on everyone is poured,
Such strength in Him no worldly thing conceals.
Oh, how I wish that I might be the one
For which you save that special love, so dear,
In all your smiles I feel the shining sun,
No worries trouble me when you are near.
Now always will these dreams go unfulfilled,
Can bridges cross the years and miles between?
And we’ve no common ground on which to build
Except for Christ, Whose blood has made us clean;
Regarding this, I put my dreams aside,
And lift my cross, and let Him be our guide.

Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, with the Shakespearean sonnet rhyme scheme, and the first letters of each line unscrambling to spell Erica Ann Foster. It was perfect.

After my poem was done, I walked back to Keller Hall and went straight to room 202. This was exactly the kind of quiet, boring night that seemed perfect for logging on to Internet Relay Chat and finding strangers to talk to, particularly girls. I certainly was not meeting any girls here, and all the cute girls I knew back in Jeromeville were not keeping in touch regularly this summer.

A girl named Valerie whom I had seen off and on in this room for a long time was on tonight. We had talked some over the last year or so; sometimes she was friendly and sweet, but other times she seemed too busy for me. A girl who was outgoing and friendly and claimed to be young and pretty would be really popular in any Internet chat room, probably inundated with messages from lonely, horny guys like me.

gjd76: hey
sweetgirl417: hey u! what’s up ;)
gjd76: not much, bored tonight. i told you i was in oregon for a research internship this summer right?
sweetgirl417: no! how’s that going?
gjd76: i really don’t like it. math research is weird. and i don’t have anything in common with the other students in the program. i really can’t wait to get back to jeromeville
sweetgirl417: oh no :( when do you go back?
gjd76: i leave grandvale august 15, which is also my birthday. then i’ll be with my family for two weeks. then back to jeromeville.
sweetgirl417: happy early birthday ;)
gjd76: thanks :) i just keep telling myself it’s almost over… i’ve been telling myself that for a month now though
sweetgirl417: too bad your program isn’t here in missouri, then you could hang out with me ;)
gjd76: that sounds nice ;) i wish
sweetgirl417: so did you ever find a girlfriend? ;)
gjd76: no. there are four girls in the math program, they’re not my type.
sweetgirl417: anyone you like back home?
gjd76: kinda. i wrote a poem earlier today, it’s about someone i know back home who is a great girl but it just wouldn’t work between us
sweetgirl417: can i read it?

I sent Valerie my poem; she said it was really good. I did not tell her about the secret message, and she never found it. She asked me why I did not think things could ever work out with Erica, and I told her everything that had been on my mind lately. Valerie then messaged me a winking face and told me again to come to Missouri. I asked her if she had a boyfriend; she did not. She had gone through a breakup a few months ago and had not met anyone else, and the only guy interested in her was kind of a creep. I told her that she should come out west to see me.

After a couple hours of small talk, with lots of winking faces and some jokes about what it would be like if I went to Missouri to meet Valerie, and some talk of kissing, I asked Valerie what she was wearing. She said a tank top and pajama shorts. I looked around the room, hoping that, since it was almost one in the morning by now (and two hours later for Valerie in Missouri), no one would come to 202 Keller and ask me what I was doing up so late. I attempted to take the conversation in a much more intimate direction, and I was pleased that Valerie reciprocated. The flirty messages soon became overtly sexual, with a lot of touching myself on my end, and at one point I had to tell Valerie that I would be back in a few minutes, since I had to go to the bathroom and take care of something. I really hoped I was alone in the building, and that no one would question an obviously aroused undergraduate wandering the halls.

I had the sense to log out of the computer before I stepped away from it, just in case anyone else came to 202 Keller while I was gone, and when I returned a few minutes later, I logged back into IRC and typed to Valerie with my recently-washed hands that she was great and that I had had a wonderful time, but I should probably go to bed. She agreed, since it was even later for her. I told her that we would talk soon.

I always felt ashamed of myself for having these feelings and acting on them. My freshman year in the dorm at UJ, I had made the Walk of Shame back from the bathroom after taking care of myself in this way many times. Tonight, the Walk of Shame was much longer, walking all the way from Keller Hall across the Quad and down the street to Howard Hall. I was a follower of Jesus, and Jesus said that lust was a sin. I should be stronger than this; giving in to these moments made me feel weak in my faith.

About a third of the way across the Quad, I saw someone else approaching on the same path. Whoever it was, I hoped I was not going to have to interact; I was not in the mood. As the thin figure approached, I realized in horror that it was Marcus Lee, one of the other students from my math program. Now I was going to have to explain why I was making the Walk of Shame in the middle of the night. The Quad was wide open, I was over a hundred feet from the nearest tree or any other object that I could hide behind, and Marcus was only about twenty feet away now. There was no avoiding this interaction.

I looked up at Marcus. “Greg?” he said. “What are you doing out so late?”

“I was bored. Just doing stuff on the computer in Keller. Emailing people back home.” I was not lying; early when I was first catching up with Valerie, telling her about the math program, I had my email open in another window, and I had replied to one message. “I need to get to sleep.”

“Yeah, it’s late,” Marcus replied. “Hope you sleep well.”

“Thanks.”

I went straight to bed when I got back to Howard Hall, but my mind was so full of guilt and shame that it took a long time to calm down enough to sleep. Eventually my mind went back to the poem I wrote earlier. Oh, how I wish that I might be the one. Erica was a Godly woman who would never want to be with someone who talked dirty with strangers from the Internet. And neither would any other Christian girl I would ever be interested in. I was only making things worse for myself.

I never did find out why Marcus was out so late himself. Could he also have been sneaking off to do something he wanted to keep secret? Was he just out for a walk? Or was he going to work on math all night, since he was so focused on his career? I did not ask; it was none of my business, and if I did not want people to know where I was at night, it was not my place to care where anyone else was.

After tossing and turning for almost an hour, I read Psalm 51. “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.” I knew that God was a God of love, and that he sent Jesus to Earth to atone for my sin. I knew that no one was perfect, and that the fact that humanity needed a Savior just indicated that no one was perfect. Psalm 51 was written by King David after he slept with another man’s wife and got the other man killed to cover up the affair. I often read this psalm on nights like this. I prayed for a while, that God would create a pure heart in me, just as David had asked. I did eventually get some sleep, but not much, and I woke up with a headache. I was tired of being alone, I was tired of all the good Christian girls passing me up, but I still had no idea what to do about any of this, so I felt stuck as I drifted off to sleep, consumed by darkness.

Readers: Have you ever written anything with a secret message hidden inside? Tell me about it in the comments.

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October 23-25, 1996. A pen pal on another continent. (#106)

August 30, 2021December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 4 Comments

The way people communicate has changed radically over the course of my life. When I was young, telephone calls outside of one’s own city cost a lot of money, so when friends moved away, I often never heard from them again. Writing letters in the mail was an option as well, for people committed enough to do so. In high school, my friend Catherine went to Austria for a year to be an exchange student, and we wrote letters the whole time she was gone. When the young people of today have friends who move away, they stay in touch through texting and social media. Some of them have thousands of followers on social media all over the world, some of whom they have never met before. Many of them do not want to be bothered with traditional voice-based telephone calls, and many of them do not know how to address an envelope or use a stamp.

I attended the University of Jeromeville during an awkward transition period when both of these worlds existed simultaneously. Some of my friends used email, some of them communicated by writing letters, and some I never heard from again once I moved. I spent a lot of time on text-based Internet Relay Chat, usually looking for girls to talk to, because I was not good at meeting girls in real life. I stayed in touch with some of them by email, but I also sometimes got handwritten letters from them. Sometimes we wanted to exchange photos, and in an era when flatbed scanners were relatively uncommon and digital cameras were not yet mainstream, it was easier to send a photo in the mail. Other times, someone I know would lose access to email temporarily, and stay in touch by writing letters. That was the case for many of my university friends when they went for the summer. That was also the case with Laura Little, although her story was a bit more interesting.

I met Laura on IRC in the spring of my sophomore year at UJ. She was seventeen years old, and she lived in upstate New York, on the other side of the United States from me. In one of our first conversations, she told me that she was going to be leaving in July for a year, to be an exchange student in Switzerland, where she would not have Internet access. I had been getting letters from Laura regularly since she left; she had a difficult transition to life in Switzerland, and her German was not good, so she wanted to get letters to read in English.

Laura and I had never met, obviously. I did not know what she looked or sounded like. Right before she left for Switzerland, a romantic interest named Adam whom she also met on the Internet had come to visit her for a few days. Whenever she mentioned Adam, her answers were a bit inconsistent and evasive; first she said they had a good time but decided to just be friends, but then in the next letter she said something about having to get her mind off of what happened with Adam, and then she said something about regretting what she did with him, that she felt stupid and that she should have known better. Clearly I had not gotten the entire story, so the last time I wrote to her, I asked exactly what happened.

I got home in the late afternoon after a long Wednesday of classes to find a letter from Laura on the kitchen counter next to the phone; one of the other roommates had apparently gotten the mail earlier. Shawn was in the kitchen loading the dishwasher. When he saw me pick up Laura’s letter, he asked, “Hey, who are all these girls who write letters to you? You’re getting letters from all over the world! You’re a ladies’ man!”

“Not exactly,” I said. “Laura is someone I met on the Internet; she’s from New York but studying in Switzerland this year.” I conveniently left out the part where she was only seventeen. Even though that was only a three-year age difference between Laura and me, Shawn was turning twenty-three next month, so to him, she would seem significantly younger.

“And you got a letter from Hungary last week.”

“That’s Kelly Graham. You know Kelly. She was roommates with Haley Channing and Kristina Kasparian last year, on Baron Court. She’s studying abroad in Hungary this year.”

Shawn thought for a minute. “Kelly! Oh yeah. And don’t you have a girlfriend back home?”

“Wait, what?”

“Yeah. That girl from Gabilan who has written to you like four times already. That’s where you’re from, right? Plumdale is right near Gabilan?”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Cecilia, or something like that.”

Cecilia? From Gabilan? I laughed loudly as I figured out who Shawn was talking about. “That’s my grandma!” I said.

“Your grandma!” Shawn laughed. “This whole time, I thought you had a girlfriend back home.”

“I wish I had a girlfriend back home who wrote me as often as Grandma did.”

“She sure likes to write.”

“She does. And my cousin Rick, the second-oldest grandchild, went away to North Coast State this year, so he’s gonna get just as many letters from Grandma now too.”

“That’s nice of her, though.”

“Yeah, it is.” I walked upstairs to read Laura’s letter. Laura had very small handwriting; she sometimes wrote in cursive and sometimes printed, sometimes both in the same letter, and she often did not bother to separate her letters into paragraphs. This letter was handwritten on tan stationery, with a typed paper inside the envelope as well. The typed paper appeared to be a math assignment of some sort.

Greg,

Guten tag! Meine Deutsch ist besser. (My German is better.) I understand more than I did before at least. I’m doing well. The weather here is getting colder. I just spent 200 francs on sweaters and a long sleeve shirt. My mom would kill me if she found out how much money I spent. I’m supposed to be taking this test, but it’s a take home test so I’ll make a copy and send it to you. I’m so lost and I have told the teacher that I don’t understand any of this. He just told me to do my best but I just sat for half an hour debating if I did the problems correct but I left half of them blank because I don’t know what to do. Maybe you can help me. I’ll write what it means in English if I know it. I would really appreciate it if you could help explain these. I know it is really sad how lost I am. I told my mom about you and said that I was going to ask you for help with math, and she says thank you. I do too. So anyway, last weekend I went away on a trip with the other exchange students in my program and I got to talk in English all weekend. It was so good. We went to the mountains and in the morning we took a cable car to the top of a mountain and it snowed. I love it. And we had a big party that night. It was cold, but we had a snowball fight and took a lot of pictures. We have Herbstferien here, it’s a fall school holiday, I CAN’T WAIT! I’m going to go skiing, I’ve never been before. I hope you don’t think different of me after I tell you what happened with Adam because I know it was a mistake and I should have just been friends with him but I’m so stupid. Sometimes when I’m put in a pressure situation I don’t think straight. Only you and one of my friends back home know about this because I don’t want anyone to know. I was so stupid to let it happen but it’s too late to fix it now and I just want to forget about that.

I had a feeling I knew what was coming next. It was pretty obvious where she was going with this. I continued reading.

Well I kinda slept with him. Only once though but we also did some other stuff. I don’t want to say anything more, I’m so stupid to let it happen. But on a lighter note I got my ear pierced at the top. It didn’t hurt as bad as I thought it would but I couldn’t sleep on that side for a few days. One of my friends from school here and I got it done together. I like it. I’m not feeling homesick as often. I know how to prevent it now and I don’t think it will happen again. I know my writing is messy but I haven’t slept much. I hope you don’t think of me different because of all that. Oh yeah, you’ll be happy to know my butt doesn’t hurt as much when I ride my bike to school. I’m happy now but I can’t ride long distances like you do sometimes. How are you? Have you met anyone yet? It made me sad when you said you felt like giving up on girls. Just talk to someone. Ask her to coffee or ice cream or lunch or something. And tell me all about her. Any girl would be lucky to spend time with you. I hope to hear from you soon.

❤ Laura

I was not entirely sure how to react to what she said about Adam, although I had a feeling that was what she was going to say from the moment she told me in her last letter that she regretted what she did. Part of me was disappointed that this happened; Laura was not the kind of nice Christian girl I was hoping to meet. She had never claimed to be Christian, though, so that was just wishful thinking on my part.

But I also did not blame her or Adam one bit. If I had been Adam, I probably would have been having fantasies about going to bed with Laura the whole time I was visiting her, even though I knew it was wrong. I must admit, I had had those fantasies about her before, although I could not bring myself to tell her that, of course. This sounds paradoxical, but such are the trials of a lonely, girl-crazy Christian young adult like me.

I only had one class the next day, and one of my students for my tutoring job did not show up, so I had plenty of time to get homework done during the day. After dinner that night, I went upstairs to my room and began writing my next letter to Laura.

October 24, 1996

Dear Laura,

Thank you for your honesty. Don’t worry about me thinking differently of you. Everyone does things they wish they hadn’t afterward. And please don’t call yourself stupid. You aren’t. You said you regret what you did, so learn from this. You told me that you know you don’t think straight in pressure situations, so when you know you’re going to be in a pressure situation, set boundaries in advance. If there’s a guy who likes you, for example, don’t be alone with him if you don’t want to feel pressured.

I wish I got a fall break. That sounds like it’ll be fun. I’ve never been skiing either. I don’t know if I want to try it. I’m not usually good at things like that where I have to keep my balance by going fast, and I would probably just get frustrated. But tell me how it goes. Your ear piercing sounds cute.

I started going to a new church a couple weeks ago. I really like it. A lot of my friends from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship go to that church. But I don’t want to start going there just because I have friends there. That shouldn’t be what church is about. So I decided for the rest of October to go to both churches every Sunday and pray about it. So far I like the new church. People there seem more serious about following God and reading the Bible.

Things are going well at the apartment. I’m adjusting well to having roommates. Four of us share a three bedroom apartment; Shawn and I share the big bedroom. It hasn’t been a problem so far. We both get up early for class, so I don’t have to worry about waking him up or him waking me up. Brian is really nice too. The fourth guy, Josh, he works weird hours, and I don’t see him very often.

I don’t have a girlfriend. I’m not good at meeting girls. I feel like I have a lot of acquaintances these days, but I’m kind of on the outside of a lot of my friends’ social groups. There’s this one girl I know from JCF who I would love to get to know better and spend more time with. She’s really sweet and she has beautiful blue eyes. I just don’t know what to do, though. I don’t get to talk to her very often, and lately she’s been acting a little different. I’m not sure why. Last week at JCF she was talking a lot with this other guy, but I couldn’t tell if they were together or anything. I met her in January when I was having a really hard day, and this guy invited me to hang out with some of his friends, and we hung out at her house. A couple months ago, around the time all the year leases run out, I rode my bike past their house and everything was dark, and that inspired me to write a poem. I’ll send it to you. It’s a Shakespearean sonnet; I’ve always liked that format for poems.

I continued writing, telling her all about trigonometric ratios on the next page, which apparently her mom wanted to thank me for. I wondered exactly how much Laura’s mom knew about me. I told my mom very little about all the girls I had met on the Internet, although she knew about one, Molly from Pennsylvania, because Molly wrote me letters the summer after freshman year when I went home for the summer.

Next I opened a file on my computer called “2234.” This was the title of the poem I had mentioned in my letter to Laura, about a time when I rode my bike past the house where Haley and her roommates lived, but Haley was home for the summer and everyone else had moved out by then. I titled the poem 2234 after the address of the house, 2234 Baron Court. I printed the poem and put it on my desk with the rest of Laura’s letter, which I would mail in the morning.

“2234”
by Gregory J. Dennison, 1996

Inside your walls, that January night,
My life began again, in joy and love;
My brand new friends had shown to me the light;
Set free from gloom, I praise my Lord above!
Today your door is locked, your curtains drawn,
Along your quiet street you make no sound,
Your residents, and all their friends, are gone,
No sign left of the friendship I once found.
But though the cast has left, the show is done,
The drama rests forever in my heart;
This friendship still is shining like the sun,
We’re miles away, but not so far apart;
Though now, O house, you’re empty, cold, and dark,
My night in you forever left its mark.

I took a long time to fall asleep Thursday night. I kept thinking about Laura, having sex with Adam and partying with all of the other exchange students, probably getting drunk in the process. I wondered if she made any other decisions she regretted on her weekend with the other exchange students. I knew consciously that that line of thinking was horribly judgmental, and that I was being a bad friend by entertaining those thoughts, but I could not help it. I woke up tired Friday morning, still dwelling on these dark thoughts.

I was not feeling angry with Laura, though. My brooding was directed more toward myself, at my failures with girls, and at a society where fake people with loose morals always got the girl or guy they were after, and guys like me were ridiculed and made outcasts. I did not know how meeting girls and dating worked. Laura tried to encourage me, but her suggestions just were not easy for me. I did not know how to talk about things that girls would be interested in, and sometimes I felt like I was on the outside, or at best on the outer fringes, of cliques that seemed to spend a lot of time together.

During a break between classes, I went to the Post Office to mail Laura’s letter. There was a small Post Office in the Memorial Union building, around the corner from the campus store. Four people were in front of me in line, and with two friends in Europe that I was writing to that year, I had spent enough time in this line to know that I would be here for at least fifteen minutes. Usually only one employee worked at the desk, and whenever he had to get something behind the desk, or place a package where the outgoing packages went, he seemed to move so slowly that I wondered if he was exaggerating his slow movements on purpose. Did he have special training to learn how to work so slowly and inefficiently? If I had been working behind that desk, I would be moving a lot faster, just because it was in my nature to get things done. It probably would have saved time to buy stamps in the denomination of what it cost to send a letter to Europe, but sometimes I wrote long enough letters that it cost more, and I would have had to stand in line anyway to get the right postage.

I finally mailed my letter and walked toward the other end of the Memorial Union looking for a place to sit. I was thinking about Laura’s encouragement to talk to girls and not be afraid, and as if on cue, I saw Haley walking toward me. Before I could overthink myself out of it, I said, “Hey, Haley.”

Haley stopped and looked up at me with her bright blue eyes, smiling. “Hi,” she said. “What’s up?”

“Not much,” I said. “Glad it’s Friday.”

“I know! I had a big midterm yesterday. It was a long week.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Hey, what are you doing this weekend?” The words just came out; I was not sure where I was going with this line of conversation, but it felt right to ask.

“Not much. But I’m going to play games at the Albert Street house tonight. Did you hear about that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“After JCF tonight. Just hanging out and play games. I’m sure you’re invited.”

“Eddie and Raphael’s house? That Albert Street house?”

“Yeah. I have to get going, but will you be at JCF tonight?”

“I will. I’ll see you there?”

“Yeah! See you there!”

I did go to the game night after JCF that night, and it was a lot of fun. About ten of us were there, and we played Uno and Taboo until well after midnight. Nothing special happened between me and Haley, although we did get to talk a bit more. That felt like progress. Maybe next time I would ask her to do something specific, just me and her.

After the game night ended, I headed home on the nearly empty streets of Jeromeville under the dark night sky, driving over the overpass with trees on it and flipping around the stations on the car radio. As I heard Alanis Morissette singing about how “you live, you learn, you love, you learn” in her pain-inducing voice that sounded like the sound some sort of bird would make as it was being stabbed, I instinctively reached over to change the station. But just before I pressed the button, I stopped. Maybe Alanis was right. I was living my life and learning from my missteps and mistakes. And so was Laura, on another continent. I was not doing myself any favors when I got down on myself because of my social and romantic failures, and neither was Laura when she called herself stupid because of what happened with Adam. Laura was my long-distance friend, and friends were there to encourage each other, and help each other learn and grow.

Dear readers: What are some experiences you’ve had with learning not to be so judgmental? Or learning from your mistakes?

Also, I know this is a day late. I might be taking an unplanned week off from writing here and there, because I’m behind on real life right now. Next time I skip a week, you can always read an episode from the archives.

February 29 – March 6, 1996. That time I thought it was a good idea to give my home address to some underage girl from the Internet whom I had only known for a couple hours. (#73)

December 5, 2020December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 9 Comments

Finished. Done. This English paper was due tomorrow, and I was expecting it to take all night to finish, because earlier in the week I just could not get myself motivated to write it. But I was finished now, and it was not even eight o’clock yet. I had a few good hours left before bedtime, and I planned on spending them not studying or doing homework.

I scrolled back up to the top of the document I had been typing in Microsoft Word, making sure my name was on the top of the paper. Gregory Dennison. English 101 – Dr. Paris. February 29, 1996. I always felt some odd fascination with writing the date February 29. I only got to write it once every four years, after all.

After my English paper finished printing, I connected to the Internet, listening to the familiar beeps and whistles and clicks as my computer dialed the number to connect. I hoped that those sounds would bring me a cute girl to talk to and flirt with on Internet Relay Chat. I went to my usual channel and looked at the list of names; no one I recognized was on there. There was someone in the room named “floridachick”; I assumed she was a girl, since she had “chick” in her name. I sent Floridachick a message, and she never replied. I said hi in the main chat, and a few other people greeted me back. Someone named Psychogirl, typed “hi how r u?”

“Psychogirl, good, how are you?” I typed back. As the messages scrolled past, I saw Psychogirl tell me that she was “not so good.” I switched to private messages to continue the conversation with Psychogirl.

gjd76: what’s wrong?
psychogirl: my mom and i got into a fight and i ran away
gjd76: oh wow. so where are you now? are you safe?
psychogirl: ya im at my dads
gjd76: what’s your asl?
psychogirl: 15/f/ok

Nowadays, with it being such a big deal to protect children from sexual predators on the Internet, it makes me uneasy to remember that sometimes I used to talk to and flirt with underage girls when I was in my late teens and early 20s. Granted, I was not that much older than Psychogirl, but by today’s standards a 19-year-old boy talking to a 15-year-old girl seemed inappropriate. None of that crossed my mind in 1996. I do not know if that was because it was not a big deal in 1996, or if online chat and messages were still far enough out of the mainstream that the general public did not realize that the problem existed. Or maybe I was just sheltered. Probably some combination of all of those. I replied to Psychogirl, telling her where I was from, and that I was a 19-year-old male.

psychogirl: whats ur name?
gjd76: greg. what about you?
psychogirl: stephanie
gjd76: hi stephanie, nice to meet you :)
psychogirl: u too
gjd76: i haven’t seen you in this chat before
psychogirl: i dont get on much. my mom doesnt have internet. i come on here sometimes when im at my dads but that isnt very often
gjd76: i see. what do you look like?
psychogirl: 5ft5, 130lbs, dyed black hair, kind of pale, green eyes. u?
gjd76: 6’4, dark brown hair, brown eyes, about 220lbs
psychogirl: oh ur tall, i like tall guys ;)
gjd76: aww thanks :) do you have a boyfriend?
psychogirl: no. i was with this guy for a while but we broke up. he said he didnt think we were right 4 each other but i think he was cheatin on me
gjd76: wow, i’m sorry. sounds like it was his loss
psychogirl: aww. what about u? gf?
gjd76: i don’t have a girlfriend
psychogirl: y not?
gjd76: i liked this girl last year but she was a lesbian and i never knew it
psychogirl: wow that sounds awkward
gjd76: it was kinda
psychogirl: what do u do? like do u have a job or r u in school
gjd76: i’m a math major at the university here, and i tutor math too
psychogirl: u can be my tutor, i failed math last semester. what university?
gjd76: jeromeville
psychogirl: i havent heard of that. what’s that by?
gjd76: just outside capital city. it isn’t very well known outside of the state

Maybe I was biased, but Jeromeville was a world class university, consistently one of the top-rated public universities in the United States. It was unfortunate that it was not more well known; I suspected that this was because of sports. The Jeromeville Colts were not a Division I athletic program, and football and basketball seem to be where the general public outside of academia hears about colleges and universities.

psychogirl: oic. have u ever been to oklahoma?
gjd76: i haven’t
psychogirl: ur not missin much. i cant wait 2 get out on my own
gjd76: haha. i know the feeling, that’s why i moved here as a freshman
psychogirl: my grades arent good enough to go away to college
gjd76: that’s a bummer… are there any classes in school that are your favorites?
psychogirl: english, i guess i hate english the least
gjd76: i was never good at english. in high school i got a b-minus in 10th grade english, that was the lowest grade i got in all of high school
psychogirl: ur crazy, a b minus was the highest grade i got last semester, u must be smart
gjd76: i don’t know, school was just always easy for me
psychogirl: i wish school was easy for me. im not good at anything
gjd76: that’s not true
psychogirl: im not. im a loser. i only have 1 friend at school
gjd76: well you seem nice to me, all the people who aren’t your friends are missing out
psychogirl: thanks
gjd76: so, if i may ask, why did you run away?
psychogirl: my mom hates me, she doesn’t understand me
gjd76: what do you mean?
psychogirl: like i like to wear black and im into really dark stuff and she just doesnt get it. she tells me to just be happy and go make friends but the kids at school dont want to be friends with me. i dont wanna be like the other kids, theyre dumb
gjd76: haha i get that
psychogirl: but yesterday my mom was cleaning and she found an empty bottle of whiskey in my room
gjd76: oh… do you drink a lot?
psychogirl: so now shes yellin at me saying im an alcoholic and an addict and she threatened to send me to rehab. i dont even drink, it was just that 1 time, my friend brought it over when she stayed the night and i didnt even like it that much
gjd76: i see
psychogirl: and i was crying and crying all day yesterday and she still came in just to yell at me. so i packed a bag and got on a bus and went to my dads house but i still cried a lot
gjd76: you live with your mom? any siblings?
psychogirl: i have a little sister. and moms bf is over all the time, he doesnt like kids
gjd76: that’s too bad :(
psychogirl: my dad wants custody of us, but my mom doesnt trust him because he hit her once
gjd76: oooh
psychogirl: he never hit me or my sis but i dunno if i wanna live with him. i dont really wanna live with mom either. i feel so alone. sometimes i wish i was dead
gjd76: please don’t say that
psychogirl: but whats the point, mom doesnt care about me, dad only wants custody because he hates mom, and kids at school dont like me

It hurt to read what Psychogirl was writing. I had felt alone before. I had been through times when I felt like no one was there for me. And I certainly knew how it felt for my parents to not understand me. I always felt like they spent a lot more time and money on my brother Mark’s hobbies and recreation than they did mine. That was probably because Mark was into things that my parents understood and enjoyed, like basketball and baseball, and I was into things that they did not understand, like math and computers and video games. But my parents were still together. I had no concept of being stuck in the middle of a contentious custody battle. And I had never been in trouble for hiding alcohol or drugs in my room. I believed Psychogirl that she was not an alcoholic, but I hated to think that all that was going on in her mind might drive her to more risky behavior in the future. I continued typing.

gjd76: i’m your friend. i know we just met, but i would miss you
psychogirl: aww thanks :) ur sweet
gjd76: so are you. the world needs people like you in it
psychogirl: but all i do is go to school and come home and cry, no one wants that
gjd76: it’s hard feeling alone. i’ve been there. i couldn’t find anyone to room with this year, my parents were willing to get me a small studio apartment by myself, but i get lonely. last year i was in a dorm so a lot of my friends were right there in the building, and now i hardly ever see them.
psychogirl: ya
gjd76: i sing at my church, and i started going to a bible study last week through a nondenominational christian club at school. i’ve made a lot of new friends there. i will pray for you.
psychogirl: im not really religious but thanks
gjd76: it’s ok. you’ll be ok.
psychogirl: i just feel like such a loser, no one wants me around and i hate it at home
gjd76: you’re not a loser. you’re a unique personality that some people don’t understand because they are too shallow to appreciate someone who doesn’t follow the crowd. i’d probably be friends with someone like you
psychogirl: really?
gjd76: yes… i’m glad we met tonight… i wish i could give you a big hug and just hold you and tell you everything was going to be ok
psychogirl: and i would hug u back so tight… ur such a great guy… i dont deserve this
gjd76: stop. you’re my friend, i’m here for you
psychogirl: thank u so much… this means a lot 2 me
gjd76: so will you be ok?
psychogirl: i guess. i still dunno what to do, mom is probably still mad at me
gjd76: here’s what i think you should do. it’s late. go to sleep. do you have school tomorrow?
psychogirl: ya but i dunno if im gonna go
gjd76: so in the morning, go back to your mom’s house. and calmly tell her what happened with the empty bottle, that you just tried it once and didn’t like it. tell her you understand why she’s upset, but you wish she would listen to your side of the story. and also listen to her side of the story
psychogirl: i guess
gjd76: maybe your mom will still be upset and yelling. if so, that’s her problem. but if she’s calm, maybe you can make some progress
psychogirl: maybe
gjd76: you’re going to be ok. really you are
psychogirl: :)
gjd76: i give you a big hug and little kiss on the cheek
psychogirl: thanks but my cheek has tears streaking down it, you dont wanna kiss it
gjd76: that’s ok. i kiss it anyway. we all have rough days
psychogirl: thank u so much :) ur so nice
gjd76: :) am i ever going to talk to you again?
psychogirl: i dunno, i dont get on here very often and i can only get on at my dads house
gjd76: i wish we could keep in touch
psychogirl: i know :( id get in so much trouble if i called u, phone calls are expensive
gjd76: do you have email?
psychogirl: no :(
gjd76: if i gave you my address, would you write to me? like in the mail?
psychogirl: sure!

I hesitated a little before I typed that last part. One can never tell who is on the other end of an Internet chat, and horror stories about personal information falling into the wrong hands were becoming more and more common as the Internet became more mainstream. But in the last year, I had already given out my address to girls I met on the Internet four times. Two of those were girls who wanted to stay in touch but would not have access to email for a while, and the others were to exchange pictures, since scanners and digital cameras were not yet things that everyone had. No one had broken into my house or stolen my identity yet, and Psychogirl really did not seem like a scammer to me. If she was, she would have offered promises of sex or money, not a story about a distraught teenage girl running away from home. I typed my address in the chat.

psychogirl: thank u so much :) :) :) ill write u for sure
gjd76: good, i look forward to hearing from you :) you’ll be ok, i care about you and so do other people.
psychogirl: so will u! i need to go to bed but i really liked talking 2 u tonight
gjd76: likewise :) take care… i tuck you into bed and kiss you on the forehead and smile
psychogirl: :) good night!

Life continued to move on for me, with classes, Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, and singing in the choir at church. I had two weeks left before winter quarter finals, and all my midterms had wrapped up. I still had physics labs, and I had one more paper for Dr. Paris’ English class due a couple days before finals.

On the following Wednesday, March 6, I got home from a long day of classes and checked the mail on the way from the bus stop to my apartment. Along with advertisements and coupon books, I saw a small envelope in my mailbox that looked like the kind of envelope my grandma would use to send a letter. Upon closer inspection, however, the handwriting was not my grandma’s. I noticed the postmark next: TULSA OK 741 – 2 MAR 1996. Tulsa, Oklahoma? I did not know anyone in Tulsa. Next I looked at the return address in the corner: it was from someone named Stephanie O’Connell, with an address at an apartment in Tulsa. Stephanie O’Connell, Tulsa, Oklahoma, I thought… Psychogirl! That is who this is!

I opened Psychogirl’s letter as soon as I got back to the apartment.

March 1, 1996

Greg-
Thank you for listening to me and especially for letting me have your address… that meant a lot to me, more than you’ll ever know.

After I got home, my mother talked with me about what she saw and how it made her feel when she saw it, and it went well, I thought – no yelling or screaming from her or from me. So I’m feeling happy about that today.

Daddy still wants to get custody of me and my sister and mom is really scared because of it. I don’t know who I want to live with, honestly I don’t, and my mother doesn’t understand. I feel terrible, and I feel like crying a lot. But you really did make me feel better last night.

Well, I have more things to do today, so I should get started on that now. Bye!

Thanks again!

Stephanie (Psychogirl)

Stephanie wrote her address again at the bottom of the page below her name. To me, that was an invitation to write back and stay in touch. I did just that a few days later, starting my letter between classes on Friday and finishing it over the weekend.

Unfortunately, I never heard from Stephanie again, and I do not know what happened to her. Hopefully things started to get better in her life. Did she stay with her mom, or did her dad get custody of her and her sister? Was there less yelling between her and her mom in the future? Did she stop writing because something bad happened to her, or did life just get in the way? Did she move on to something else like a typical whimsical teenager, or did she get in trouble for writing to me? Was she actually a 55-year-old man named Chuck? If not, she would be around 40 today… was she still into dark stuff and wearing black, or was that a phase she grew out of?

Sometimes people only cross paths for a brief time, but that brief moment can make a huge impact. I hope that I was like that for Stephanie. Maybe she just needed someone to talk to, someone to care for her and tell her that everything would be okay, so that she would make it through the night. Maybe God put me there to rescue her that night, because he was planting a seed for something that would come to her later. I would probably never know, but maybe, just maybe, Stephanie was still out there somewhere, with a memory of the night she made a new friend who helped her see life, and herself, from a new perspective.

December 10-13, 1995. None of this made any sense. (#63)

September 21, 2020December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 7 Comments

“Let us offer each other the sign of peace,” Father Bill said. Congregants turned to each other, saying “Peace be with you,” and shaking hands. I turned to Phil Gallo and shook his hand. “Peace be with you,” I said. Phil said the same to me. I turned around to Matt Jones and Ryan Gambrell with their guitars behind me and shook their hands. “Peace be with you,” I said.

I walked to my right. “Peace be with you, Greg,” Danielle Coronado said as she hugged me. Danielle had lived down the hall from me last year in the dorm, and she had encouraged me to be part of the church choir in the first place. Danielle’s younger sister, Carly, was also in the choir. “Peace be with you,” Carly told me, also giving me a hug.

I walked around making sure to wish everyone in the choir peace. Sabrina Murphy walked up to me and smiled. “Peace be with you,” she said, putting her arms around me. I hugged back and wished her peace in return. This was the first time Sabrina hugged me; before we always just shook hands. Maybe that meant something… hopefully.

Just before the final song, during announcements, Sister Mary Rose held up a small box about the size of a soup can. “We are taking up a collection for our sister parish in El Salvador,” she explained. “You can pick up one of these piggy banks, and over the holidays, when you have change in your pocket, remember our brothers and sisters who need to do some repairs to their chapel. We will be collecting the money you raise during the January 14 service.”

After the final song, everyone around me seemed to be engrossed in conversation, so I walked over to where Sister Mary Rose was handing out the piggy banks. About ten minutes later, I approached Heather Escamilla, because we were neighbors and we had carpooled that morning, and I wanted to ask when she would be ready to go back home. But she noticed me and began speaking first. “Greg! Do you need to go home now? Because some of us from choir were just talking about going to Bakers Square for lunch. You want to come?”

“Sure,” I said.

Bakers Square was a chain of restaurants that were essentially like Denny’s with pies. In the early 2000s, most of the Bakers Square locations in the western United States closed, leaving the chain with only a few locations far from here. But in 1995, Bakers Square restaurants were common in suburban neighborhoods around here. The one in Jeromeville was only a few blocks from the Newman Center, so those of us from the choir all walked over in a big group. When we arrived, they put a bunch of tables together in order to accommodate our group of twelve. I walked toward the nearest empty seat and was pleasantly surprised to see Sabrina taking the seat next to me a few seconds later. “Hi,” I said as Sabrina sat down.

“Hi, Greg,” Sabrina replied. “How are you?”

“Not bad. My physics final is tomorrow afternoon, so I’ll probably be studying for that. I’m not too worried about it.”

“Which class?”

“9B.”

“That wasn’t too hard. I took that last year.”

When Sabrina said that, I realized that I did not know what her major was, or what year she was. She was probably a junior if she had taken Physics 9B a year ago. “What’s your major?” I asked.

“Aerospace engineering.”

I was not expecting that. Sabrina did not at all look like an aerospace engineer to me. “That sounds interesting,” I said.

“It’s hard, but I really like it. And my boyfriend is an aerospace engineer too, so we get to take classes together sometimes.”

“That sounds nice.”

The server came to take our orders; she started at our side of the table. Sabrina ordered a chicken salad, and I ordered a cheeseburger. I was too disappointed at Sabrina’s mention of her boyfriend to rejoin the conversation for the next few minutes. It seemed like it always happened like this; I would meet a cute, friendly girl, and she would immediately bring up her boyfriend, almost as if she was telling me not to get interested in her.

“Greg,” Danielle said a few minutes later. I realized that I had not talked to anyone except Sabrina since I got here. “How are you? What’s your finals schedule like?”

“Physics tomorrow afternoon, math Wednesday morning, and chem Friday morning. Nice and spread out.”

“You only have three finals? That’s nice. I have four, and three of them are tomorrow and Tuesday.”

“Two of my classes don’t have finals. Your finals schedule sounds like mine was last spring quarter. Good luck.”

“What classes are you taking that don’t have finals?” Heather asked.

“Bowling, and math problem solving seminar. Bowling is half a unit, and the math class is 2.”

“Oh, ok. I was going to say, two classes without finals? How lucky!”

After we finished eating, I took Heather home and went back to my apartment. I spent the rest of the afternoon studying physics. I thought I understood it pretty well, but my first physics midterm in the spring had caught me off guard. I still ended up with an A in that class, though, after working extremely hard for the rest of the quarter, and I have made sure to study hard for every physics test since.

Around eight o’clock, I turned on the TV to watch The Simpsons, but it was a rerun, so I turned on the computer and went to an IRC chat channel, only half-paying attention to The Simpsons in the background. A few people whose names I recognized from having spent a lot of time in this channel said hello, and I said hi back. I watched the messages scroll by; someone was talking about getting stoned at a party over the weekend, someone was bragging about the size of his penis and got quickly banned by the channel administration, and someone was trying to start normal conversations and getting ignored. I replied to the person’s normal conversations, making small talk, but that lasted a few minutes before that person stopped replying. I looked through the list of people in the room and tried messaging someone who might have been a girl my age, and got no reply.

A few minutes later, someone named “musicgirl” entered the room and said hi to everyone. I sent her a private message.

gjd76: hi :) how are you?
musicgirl: hi! i’m doing ok! how was your weekend?
gjd76: good. studying for finals, taking a break for the rest of the night.
musicgirl: i have finals coming up too! but i’m graduating in the spring so i’m excited about that! one more semester after this one!
gjd76: i’m only in my second year. so why is your name music girl? is that what you’re studying?
musicgirl: i’m studying elementary education. i want to be a teacher. but i also play guitar in a band with two of my friends. we play shows at this coffee shop sometimes.
gjd76: that’s so cool! i’m studying math. and i don’t play an instrument, but i sing
musicgirl: math was never my best subject. i’d need you to tutor me ;)
gjd76: i could do that :) what do you look like?
musicgirl: 5’9”, brown hair, blue eyes, slim. what about you?
gjd76: cute :) brown hair and blue eyes, i like that combination… i’m 6’4” with dark brown hair, almost black, and brown eyes
musicgirl: nice! i love tall guys! a lot of guys think i’m too tall.
gjd76: good :) do you have a boyfriend?
musicgirl: no, i’m single. you?
gjd76: no girlfriend for me. and all the guys are missing out, you seem really nice
musicgirl: thanks! you do too… and tall, dark, and handsome :)
gjd76: if i were there, i’d probably want to get to know you better :)
musicgirl: i’d want to get to know you too!
gjd76: what’s your name?
musicgirl: Laura. you?
gjd76: greg. nice to meet you :)
musicgirl: nice to meet you too!
gjd76: laura, if i asked you to dinner, would you go out with me?
musicgirl: of course!
gjd76: then afterward we’d go for a walk… and i’d try to hold your hand… is that ok?
musicgirl! yes! i would love that! i love holding hands :)
gjd76: me too :) so when we got back to my apartment… would you like to come in?
musicgirl! yes… i look into your eyes and smile :)
gjd76: i put my arm around you and pull you close and kiss you
musicgirl: mmm… i kiss you back passionately
gjd76: i pull you closer and kiss you again… i take your hand and take you to my bed
musicgirl: i lie down and pull you close and kiss you again and pull my body close to yours

The rest of the conversation went… well. I don’t need to share the details. After we finished, Laura said it was late, and she needed to go to bed. I did too; I had a final in the morning. But I was so aroused after my dirty conversation with Laura that I needed to finish myself before bed. And when I did finally get to bed, I lay there awake for almost three hours, feeling guilty about what I had done. I liked it. Laura seemed nice, and it felt good. But afterward, it felt wrong. I was Catholic, and I was not supposed to be lusting after women like this.

By about 1:30 in the morning, I had to pee. On the way back to my bed, I saw the piggy bank for our sister church in El Salvador. I had a pile of change on my desk, close to two dollars. I put it all in the piggy bank, then turned out the light and went back to bed. If I was going to be misbehaving like this, I could at least do something to help out the less fortunate in El Salvador. Maybe that would make up for it.

My physics and math finals were pretty easy. Laura had emailed me back Monday night; I was afraid that she was going to say I was out of line for our sexually explicit conversation on Sunday, but instead she said I was a total sweetheart and she could not wait to hear back from me. I wrote back telling her about my finals, and she replied while I was at school today, saying that she would be on IRC tonight. But when I got there, in the late afternoon, she was not on. I checked again after dinner, but I never saw Laura in the chat. I wanted to talk to Laura and continue where we left off the other night. But she never got on. After about half an hour of frustration, I walked away from the computer and fantasized about Laura the same way I had Sunday night, leaving me burdened with guilt and a mess to clean up. After I was done, I put another handful of change in the piggy bank for the church in El Salvador.

What was I doing with my life? This could not possibly be healthy. It probably would not help me find a girlfriend in real life. I checked my email. I had two messages from Mindy Jo, my friend in Georgia whom I had met on this same IRC channel last year. Back in 1995, there were no hashtags and no social media, and viral posts spread through chain emails that people forwarded to all of their friends. Mindy Jo’s first message was one of these chain emails; I had to scroll down for a while, because these forwarded emails would start with pages and pages of headers, containing dates and recipients of the message as it had been sent from person to person. I scrolled down and saw light bulb jokes about different college majors.

How many psychology majors does it take to change a light bulb?
Only one, but the bulb has to want to change.

How many French majors does it take to change a light bulb?
Un.

How many philosophy majors does it take to change a light bulb?
What does it really mean to change a light bulb anyway?

How many aerospace engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
Only one. Come on, it’s not rocket science.

I laughed loudly at that one, thinking of Sabrina being an aerospace engineer. Maybe I could tell her that joke someday (I did), and she would think that it was so funny that she would leave her boyfriend and fall in love with me instead (she didn’t).

After I read the rest of the light bulb jokes, I read Mindy Jo’s other email. In the last email I sent to her, I mentioned the time we had spoken on the phone and asked if I could ever call her again sometime. She said in this reply that I could call tonight or tomorrow night, and that she would be up until at least midnight. I looked at the phone, and at the clock; it was still well before midnight in Georgia. I dialed Mindy Jo’s number and waited nervously as I heard ringing.

“Hello?” a tired voice said.

“Mindy Jo? It’s Greg.”

“Hey! How’re you doin’?”

“Not that great. I dope I dint’ wake you up; you said I could call until midnight.”

“You’re fine. I wasn’t sleepin’.”

“That’s good.”

“What’s wrong? Why aren’t you doin’ great?”

“I’ve just been discouraged and frustrated about being alone.”

“You haven’t met a nice girl yet?”

“Most of the girls I really like are taken. It happened again just the other day; I was talking to a cute girl I know from church, and she said something about her boyfriend.”

“I hate when that happens. I had a crush on this guy freshman year, and I was about to tell him that I liked him when he said he was going to go see his girlfriend.”

“Exactly. And I don’t really know how to ask a girl out.” I did not tell Mindy Jo anything about my shame I was feeling about masturbating; she did not need to hear that.

“Just relax and be yourself. Ask her to have lunch, or get a coffee, or something. Wait, you don’t drink coffee, right? You can get tea. Or hot chocolate.”

“I don’t know. It’s just all so confusing.”

“I wish you could just relax and not worry about this. You’re a really great guy.”

“Thanks,” I said. “It doesn’t always feel like it.”

“Promise me you’ll try to keep your chin up.”

“I’m trying,” I said. “How have you been?”

“Well… this week has been interestin’.”

“How so?”

“Well… I was at the bar on Saturday, and I ran into this guy that I had a class with sophomore year. We just got to talkin’ for awhile… and he said some nice things about me… and I don’t know if it was the alcohol or what, but he came over and… yeah.”

Came over and what? I was confused. I was missing something… Wait. Was Mindy Jo trying to tell me that they had sex? Would she do something like that, have sex with an acquaintance she picked up in a bar? “At least I used a condom,” Mindy Jo continued, which answered my question.

“Hmm,” I replied, not sure what else to say.

“I need to get another AIDS test,” Mindy Jo continued. “This is, umm, four guys now since last time. And I didn’t always use a condom.”

I was still not sure how to reply to any of this. “What do you have to do for that?”

“They just take blood. I don’t like needles, though.”

“Well, I hope you’re okay.”

“Thanks.”

Mindy Jo and I talked for about another twenty minutes, mostly about other things. We talked about our respective experiences with finals and our holiday plans. When we were done talking, I was still feeling ashamed of myself from earlier, so instead of getting back on IRC I studied for my chemistry final that was coming up Friday morning. This whole concept of having to get an AIDS test had never really intersected my reality at any point. I knew all about AIDS, of course; I had taken health class in high school. But I tended to associate it with lifestyles such as heavy drug use and extreme promiscuity, not the kinds of things I associated with my friends. I did not know that Mindy Jo had been with so many guys, and I was unsure of what to do with this information.

But I had no right to be so judgmental. My conversation with Laura on Sunday night proved that; I had slept with someone I barely knew, just like Mindy Jo had. Of course, Mindy Jo’s tryst had been in real life, whereas Laura and I were ultimately just fantasizing, talking in a chat room. And was that wrong? I was not sure. I felt conflicted, and I felt ashamed because of it.

A month later, when I turned in my piggy bank for the church in El Salvador, I handed it to Sister Mary Rose, and by then it had become heavy enough with coins representing my shame and penance that she had a visible reaction to its unexpected weight. “It’s mostly pennies,” I lied. If I was not already going to hell for my lustful behavior, certainly lying to a nun would not help my case any.

Mindy Jo told me a while later that her AIDS test came back negative, thankfully. I just did not understand the way that many young people lived these days. None of it made sense to me. By not doing drugs and not having sex, I never had to worry about things like getting AIDS, or using contraceptives, or getting someone pregnant with a child I was not ready to raise. Drugs had no appeal to me. But why did I feel like I wanted sex so much? Someday, hopefully, I would be married, and having sex with my wife would not feel shameful. None of this made any sense, and I wondered if the reason girls did not like me was because I did not understand how to live like a reckless college student. I eventually drifted off to sleep, my head full of some mix of shame and conflict.

October 31 – November 9, 1995. In a funk. (#58)

August 8, 2020December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 15 Comments

I was in a funk. I had been in a funk for a while by the time my physics lab got out. My funk had stretched into its fourth day, and one of those days was an hour longer because of the end of daylight saving time. One small consolation was that it was Halloween, and I had the pleasantly silly experience of seeing many full-grown college students come to campus in costume. Earlier I saw a guy walking across the Quad in a very accurate costume of Jack from the Jack in the Box restaurant commercials, with a perfectly round clown head as from a child’s jack-in-the-box toy over a business suit. I also saw at least three different Batmen walking around campus.

Batman… that reminded me of last Saturday, when this funk started. I still was unhappy with myself about Saturday.

Friday night went okay. I went to Jeromeville Christian Fellowship again, which was good, but I felt more like an outsider. I talked to all my friends who were there, but I did not talk to anyone else, and everyone was talking about the Fall Conference next weekend, which I was not going to. I woke up Saturday morning still feeling down, and that feeling worsened as the day dragged on. I got some homework done, but I also moped around the apartment doing nothing quite a bit.

Saturday evening, I decided to go to campus, where second-run movies play on weekends in 199 Stone, the largest lecture hall on campus at the time. Batman Forever was playing that night. I had seen the movie once, and honestly I did not like it that well. Jim Carrey, who at the time was building his career on annoying mindless movies where he made a lot of faces and funny loud noises, played the Riddler. He played the character like the annoying people in his other movies, and I did not like it. The movie did not help me get out of my funk, and I left about two-thirds of the way through. That was the first time I ever went to a movie alone, and to this day, it remains the only time I have ever walked out of a movie that I paid for. I went home, down two dollars and fifty cents and still in my funk.

Despite having won Best Costume my senior year at Plumdale High, I never got too excited about Halloween. I outgrew trick-or-treating around fourth grade and spent the rest of my childhood staying home handing out candy. The only reason I even dressed up at school that day two years ago was because Melissa asked me to. She dressed as Mona Lisa, with a drawn replica of the painting and her face sticking through a hole in it, and asked me to be Leonardo painting her. I had a big crush on Melissa at the time, so I probably would have dressed up as dog poop if she had asked me to. The problem was that, during the one period that we were not in the same class, her costume worked by itself, but no one could tell what I was without her. No, I am not Charlton Heston playing Moses. No, I am not Father Time. And during the costume contest at lunch, we were introduced as “Mona Lisa and Michelangelo,” which says something about the quality of education at Plumdale High School.

When I got home from my physics lab, I made sure the porch light was off. Mom taught me as a kid that this tells trick-or-treaters not to come to your house, although many do not seem to know that rule. I had no candy to give out tonight. I did not know whether the local children of Jeromeville even went trick-or-treating in apartment complexes full of students. (None did that night.)

I signed on to the university computer network after dinner that night, intending to get on Internet Relay Chat and find some girl to talk to. But before I did that, I checked to see who else was signed on to the exact same server, as I occasionally did back then out of curiosity. Every once in a while, I found someone I knew. I looked through the thirty or so names and account numbers that scrolled past, and my pulse briefly quickened when I saw this:

stu042537 Megan McCauley

I typed “talk” and sent “hello :)” to account stu042537. Megan replied about a minute later.

stu042537: Hi, Greg! How have you been? I haven’t seen you in a while!
stu049886: i’m doing ok, just busy with school. it’s a lot of work but i’m doing pretty well in my classes. what are you up to?
stu042537: Just the usual. This chem class is kicking my butt! But I knew chemical engineering would be a hard major. Didn’t you say you were a tutor for the Learning Skills Center this quarter?
stu049886: yes! that’s going well. i’m working 10 hours a week with small groups of calculus and precalculus students. i enjoy it.
stu042537: Good!
stu049886: how is your building this year?
stu042537: It’s definitely easier being an RA the second time around. I have more of an idea of what to expect. But, of course, my residents are full of surprises too. I like this group so far.
stu049886: that’s good
stu042537: How is it being in your own apartment?
stu049886: it’s nice and quiet. but i miss seeing my friends from last year. some of them are involved with jeromeville christian fellowship, i’ve started going to that sometimes with them
stu042537: It’s important to find things you can be involved with.
stu049886: definitely! any plans for halloween tonight?
stu042537: Not this year. What about you?
stu049886: nothing. halloween was never that big a deal to me. i thought it was funny, though, i saw three people on campus today dressed as batman
stu042537: That’s great! I should actually go in a few minutes. I need to pick up the person I’m dating from the airport. But it was good to hear from you!

I stared at that last message, heartbroken and crestfallen, typing my closing line in the conversation much more apathetically than I had typed earlier.

stu049886: you too, drive safely
stu042537: Bye!

I stared at those four words again before I closed the window… “the person I’m dating.” Nothing can drain the last bit of hope from a crush more quickly than that. I knew I probably had no shot with Megan anyway, but at least I could hope that maybe she liked me too. Not anymore. I could not compete with some cool guy who traveled on airplanes and knew how to talk to girls.

I turned on the television later that night. It was Tuesday, so Home Improvement was on. I liked that show, but Tim Allen’s stereotypical guy antics were not enough to lift me out of my funk. I returned to the computer and signed on to the IRC chat channel I had wanted to go to earlier when I messaged Megan instead. No one there was talking to me, and no one I knew I was on. I halfheartedly replied to an email, but I needed to talk to someone in real time, not by email. I could not get the image out of my head of Megan and some guy driving back from the airport in Capital City, across the Drawbridge and to his apartment, where he would probably invite her in and go to bed with her. I wanted to be doing that, not whoever this jerk was.

I was tired of this. I was tired of being alone, not knowing how to talk to girls. I hated being different and not having grown up with all the experiences that the people around me had, like having friends and taking trips on airplanes and doing fun things on Halloween. I wished I could quit life and start over again. Or maybe go back to high school for another few years; I was finally starting to have some of those experiences or having friends senior year, but then everything else ended too soon, and I lost touch with everyone except Renee Robertson, Melissa Holmes, and Rachel Copeland, none of whom lived in the same place as me or as each other now.

Around 10:30 that night, desperate and with nowhere else to turn, I picked up the phone. I had seen public service announcements for a suicide prevention hotline with a local phone number. I was not sure if I was actually feeling suicidal, but at least these people could talk to me. I dialed the number quickly.

“Suicide Prevention,” said the voice on the other end. “This is Anna. To whom am I speaking?”

“Greg,” I said.

“And how are you feeling tonight?” Anna asked.

“I need someone to talk to.”

“What’s going on? Why do you say that?”

I told Anna the abbreviated version of my thoughts on feeling different, being alone, and not knowing how to talk to girls. I explained that there was one girl I really liked who I did not have much of a chance with, and how I had found out tonight that she had a boyfriend (at the time, I did not understand that there was a distinction between the words “person I’m dating” and “boyfriend”).

“That is a lot weighing on your mind,” Anna said. “Are you taking any medication for depression or anxiety, or other mental health medications?”

“No.

“Are you in any sort of therapy or treatment?”

“No.”

“How often do you use alcohol or drugs?”

“Never.”

“Are you thinking about ending your life or harming yourself?”

“I don’t know. I know I shouldn’t give up like that, but I don’t want to go on like this either.”

“That is understandable. Is your life in danger right now?”

“I’m sitting at home in my apartment. So probably not.”

“Have these thoughts you’ve been having interfered with your day-to-day functioning? Like your ability to work or attend class?”

“Not really. I’m a student at UJ, and my grades are still good.”

“That’s good.”

“I guess.”

Anna asked me more questions about how I felt about things, as well as my day-to-day life and my history with mental health and medication. After talking for another ten minutes, she said, “We are meant to be a one-time service, so I can give you names and phone numbers of some mental health professionals in your area, so you can call someone to set up an appointment and meet more regularly? May I do that?”

“I guess.”

I got a pencil and paper and wrote down the names Anna gave me. “So tomorrow, give one of those people a call, and set up an appointment. Can you do that?”

“Maybe.”

“Are you going to be okay tonight?”

“I think so. Thank you.”

“Thank you for calling. I hope everything works out for you.”

“Thanks.”

“Good night!”

“Bye,” I said, hanging up the phone. I did not feel great about this. I was not looking forward to seeing a therapist, and I did not even know if that was what I wanted. But I had calmed down to the point that I might be able to sleep now.

I arrived about five minutes before my appointment. It had been a little more than a week since the night I called the Suicide Prevention number. It was a cool, cloudy, depressing Thursday afternoon. The address was in a small office building at the corner of Maple Lane and West Coventry Boulevard, less than half a mile from my apartment, behind a nondescript door with the names of two therapists on it. The waiting room was small, about the size of my tiny dorm room from last year. A few chairs were arranged around a table with outdated magazines on it, and two doors on the other side of the room led farther into the building. I picked up a Time magazine from July with former U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell on the cover. I started reading through the magazine in order until a man with graying brown hair, a mustache, glasses, and a button-up shirt emerged from one of the doors.

“Gregory?” he said.

“That’s me,” I replied. “You can call me Greg.”

“Hi, Greg. I’m Ron Kilbourne.” Ron extended his hand for me to shake it.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking his hand. I followed him into his office and sat down.

“So tell me again what brings you here.”

“I feel down a lot,” I said. “I feel alone, I don’t see my friends as often as I used to, I don’t have a girlfriend, and I don’t know how to talk to girls.”

“Okay,” Ron said, apparently waiting for me to say something.”

“I haven’t seen a therapist in a couple years. I was in and out of therapy all my life, going back to second grade. We saw a therapist as a family for a while, because I was getting teased a lot at school and having trouble behaving, and my dad was dealing with a lot being a newly recovering alcoholic.”

“And how old are you now?”

“19.”

“Okay.” Ron scribbled some notes on a clipboard, then looked at me.

“What?”

“I’m waiting for you to tell me more.”

“I told you. I don’t know what to do.”

“I can’t help you if you aren’t going to tell me anything.”

Who was this jerk? Why am I paying him all this money just to sit there? I did not know what to say to him. I told him more about not having friends in school growing up, about how being in the dorm was good for me but I lived alone now, about never having had a girlfriend, and about what happened with Megan.

Ron kept writing on his clipboard. “What else?” he said when he was done.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” I said angrily through clenched teeth.

“Then I guess we’ll just sit here until you’re ready to talk,” Ron replied calmly.

“Fine.” I sat in the chair and stared at Ron for almost ten minutes, saying nothing. He just sat looking at me, occasionally writing on his clipboard. “Why does anyone pay you all this money not to do anything?” I finally said.

“Why did you?” Ron asked. “Why are you here?”

“I’m here because I’m depressed and alone and I don’t know how to make friends or have a girlfriend.”

“What else?”

“I need to know what to do.”

“What are you doing now?” Ron asked.

I told him about my friends from the dorm last year, and tutoring, and singing at Mass, and Jeromeville Christian Fellowship. After he finished writing in his clipboard, Ron sat there looking at me, waiting for me to say more. “And I don’t know what else to do.” We stared at each other for another five minutes, saying nothing. I clenched my fists, fighting every urge to punch this man in the face.

About forty minutes into the appointment, before the end of the hour-long session, I pulled out my checkbook and paid him for the session. “This was a waste,” I said, walking toward the door.

“Greg,” Ron said in a flat tone. “I can’t help you if you’re going to walk out.”

“And you can’t help me if I’m here either. So what’s the point?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

I left the check on his desk and walked out of the office, slamming the door and throwing the stack of old magazines against the wall on my way out. I was still hot-headed and angry when I got back to the apartment. I lay on the bed for about an hour, at which time I did homework for a while, and then ate dinner. Was I really beyond help? Was I so messed up that even going to a therapist could not help me?

I never saw Ron Kilbourne again. I got a letter in the mail from him a few days later encouraging me to continue to seek therapy; I tore it into small pieces and threw it away. I never did call any of the other names that I had gotten from Anna at Suicide Prevention; after my experience with Ron Kilbourne, I was convinced that there was no point to seeking therapy.

After Ron Kilbourne, I did not attempt to seek therapy again until 2002; by that time, I had long since graduated and moved from Jeromeville to Pleasant Creek. I now know as an adult that I have had therapists who were good fits for me and others who were not; Ron Kilbourne was not, and I should have at least tried a different therapist at the time. Although I have grown, and life has changed, many of the issues for which I sought therapy in the past are still struggles for me. I have also learned that seeking therapy is far more complicated than just going through motions and having all of my problems fixed. Therapy only works when the patient wants help, and to this day I feel like in some ways I do not want help. I want the rest of the world to change around me, or to find a place where the world makes more sense than it does here. This remains an ongoing issue for me. On the day I walked out of Ron Kilbourne’s office, I knew that the only way I had left to deal with that funk was the way I have usually dealt with being in a funk all my adult life; just ride it out, put one foot in front of the other, and go through the motions, hoping that better days will come.

(Author’s note: I know that “talk” on a Unix-based system from 1995 did not format conversations the way my conversation with Megan was formatted in this story. I changed it to make it easier to read.)

September 9, 1995. The night I did something crazy and spontaneous. (#50)

June 1, 2020December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 32 Comments

In my life so far, I have had a long history of not being popular with the ladies. No one taught me anything about dating and relationships growing up, and my teen years were a string of awkward failed crushes. Rachelle Benedetti, whom I never understood why I liked her in the first place. Kim Jensen, an outgoing popular cheerleader in a few of my classes, but she dated older football players, not guys like me. Melissa Holmes, a good friend who did not like me back that way. Jennifer Henson, a popular girl who started treating me like a good friend when we were seniors, but then moved away without saying goodbye. Annie Gambrell, a younger girl I met through a class project we did together, but she had a boyfriend. And last year there was Megan McCauley, my first older friend in college; she was really nice, but I felt intimidated just by the fact that she was a year older, and currently I did not know how to interpret the fact that she had not emailed me back for the last three weeks.

After waking up and doing absolutely nothing productive for several hours, I walked to the mailboxes. Maybe I had a letter from a girl, I thought. And I did have a letter from a girl. I actually had gotten a letter from a girl yesterday, the first letter I received since moving into this apartment a week ago. It was from Sarah Winters, who lived downstairs from me in the dorm last year. I opened the mailbox and saw another letter from a girl… except today, the girl in question was my grandma. It was always nice to hear from her, but I wanted to interact with girls my age.

From the mailboxes, I could see the pool. A girl was lying face down on a pool chair. She had brown hair, put up in a bun, and perfectly shaped legs. She appeared to be wearing nothing but black bikini bottoms. I looked closer and noticed that she was wearing a bikini top, but she had untied it in the back, presumably to avoid having a tan line. The strings hung down over the side of the pool chair, exposing the side of a fairly large and round breast.

After staring for about thirty seconds, I walked back to my apartment, trying to think of a way I could look at the sexy girl by the pool and maybe get her to notice me. Back inside, I read Grandma’s letter, but I was only half paying attention because my mind was formulating a plan.

I picked up the book I had been reading, part 4 of Stephen King’s The Green Mile, and took it outside with me. The pool was open to everyone; why couldn’t I sit and read by the pool? I found an empty pool chair, on the other side of the pool from the girl, and began reading. Stephen King originally wrote this book as a serial, in six parts each around 100 pages long, published about a month apart. Mom had gotten me parts 1 through 5 for my birthday last month, before part 6 had been published. I would get part 6 at the campus bookstore when I finished part 5, or order it in advance if it had not been released yet.

It was a hot day, and after about ten minutes, I was sweating uncomfortably. Do people really sit by the pool like this? That can’t be right, I thought. I noticed a spot a few feet from me that was in the shadow of a nearby tree. I moved the chair into the shadow; it made noise as I moved it. I looked at the girl, hoping that what I was doing looked natural and ordinary and that the noise would not attract attention. She did not react, and I sat back down and continued reading.

After about another ten minutes, the girl reattached the string in the back of her bikini top. She put on shorts and a tank top over her bikini, slid her feet into flip-flops, gathered her belongings, and began walking toward me. I looked back down at my book, trying not to stare, then looked up as she walked past me. I smiled at her. “Hi,” I said.

“You know you’re lying in the shade,” she replied.

“Yeah,” I said as the weight of her words sank into my brain. She was right. Normal people do not lie in the shade. I was pretty sure I blew it with this girl, and just made myself look like a pervert, or at best a weirdo.

After the girl was gone, I took my book back to my apartment, leaving the pool chair in the shade. I was too embarrassed to move it back and make any more noise that might get me noticed. I lay on the bed, dejected and discouraged. I was bored. Moving back to Jeromeville early was not as exciting as it had been in my head all summer, mostly because most of my friends had not moved back yet. Since I had just gotten a letter from Sarah, I knew that she would be moving back on September 17, a week from tomorrow, but then leaving right away on a retreat with Jeromeville Christian Fellowship until Friday the 22nd. Several of my friends were involved with Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, so I suspected most of them would be back on the 22nd as well. The first day of class was Thursday the 28th.

I continued reading The Green Mile lying on my bed. When I finished part 4, I put a frozen pot pie in the oven and spent the rest of the night wasting time on the computer. I wrote emails, I played SimCity 2000, I checked my Usenet groups, and I got on IRC chat, in that order. I had been spending a lot of time on IRC lately, and I had even met two girls my age who lived nearby: Colleen, who attended University of the Bay, and Allison, who was a student right here at University of Jeromeville. Around quarter to nine, I saw Allison enter the channel I was already in, and I messaged her.

gjd76: hey
darksparkles: hi
gjd76: what’s up
darksparkles: not much
gjd76: me either. i’m bored. i got a letter from my grandma, that was the highlight of my day
darksparkles: aww how sweet

I decided not to tell her about making a fool of myself in front of the girl at the pool. No one needed to know about that.

gjd76: i moved back to jeromeville early because i was bored at my parents’ house. now i’m bored here, but at least i’m on my own
darksparkles: i know what you mean. my roommate isn’t moving in until right before fall quarter starts. so i have the place to myself until then. i like it though
gjd76: that’s good
darksparkles: i’m a little scared to have a roommate again. i hated my roommate in the dorm last year
gjd76: ugh, roommate drama
darksparkles: but she moved out at the end of winter quarter and i had the room to myself the rest of the year
gjd76: they can do that? and just leave the room empty?
darksparkles: i guess
gjd76: how do you know your roommate from this year?
darksparkles: she lived down the hall from me. she was one of the few people in my building that i talked to, although we weren’t really close friends
gjd76: aww… hopefully living together works out
darksparkles: i hope so too

An outlandishly spontaneous idea popped into my head. In real life, if I want to say something that makes me nervous, in which I am apprehensive about the other person’s possible reaction, I usually blurt it out loudly, so as not to hesitate or second-guess myself. I typed the next sentence very quickly and pressed Enter, the typing equivalent of blurting something out. It was a crazy idea, but boredom and loneliness can occasionally drive me to desperation.

gjd76: you want to meet in person?
darksparkles: huh? you mean like now?
gjd76: yeah. we can stay outside or in public if you’re worried about being alone with some guy from the internet
darksparkles: sure, there’s a picnic table by the pool in my apartment complex, i’ll meet you there
gjd76: where is that? we both live in north jeromeville, right?
darksparkles: yeah, redwood grove apartments on alvarez, there’s only one way into the parking lot, and the pool is right there, you’ll see it. you know where that is?
gjd76: yes i do. i’ll be there in about 10 minutes. i’m wearing jeans and a green shirt
darksparkles: i’m wearing a black shirt and jeans with holes in them
gjd76: ok, see you in a few minutes

Allison had told me the last time we talked that she lived in north Jeromeville. I did not realize until now that she was only a quarter mile away. I could have gotten there much faster than the 10 minutes I told her, but before I left I brushed my teeth and used the bathroom, and I changed out of my shorts into the jeans I told her I was wearing. It was not warm enough this late at night to be outside in shorts for a long time. I also scribbled a note on a sheet of paper and placed it on my desk:

9/9/95 9:28pm

In case I don’t come back alive, and the police need leads, I’m going to meet a girl from the Internet named Allison. We’re meeting by the pool at Redwood Square apartments; she told me she lives there. I don’t know her last name, but her IRC name is darksparkles and her account ID is stu050637@mail.jeromeville.edu

It was a nice night outside, not too warm but not cold either. My short-sleeve shirt and jeans felt physically comfortable as I started to feel nervous about this situation which I had suddenly put myself in. I had only talked to Allison two other times. I had a rough description of what she looked like, and I had the impression that she was quiet and kept to herself a lot, but other than that I had no idea who to expect. I was pretty sure from our previous conversations that we had never had a class together, and we would not have run into each other at the dining hall since she lived in a different dorm area with its own dining facilities.

I walked into the parking lot of the Redwood Grove Apartments. I could see the pool about a hundred feet back from the sidewalk, and as I approached the pool more closely, I noticed a girl sitting at a table inside the pool area. She turned her head and saw me, and she got up and opened the gate.

“Allison?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “Greg?”

“Yes. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too,” she said, smiling halfway and leading me back to the table where she had been sitting. She was shorter than me, about five foot five, and thin. Her black shirt had the name of something I had never heard of, maybe a band, maybe a brand of clothing, I did not know. It was a unisex shirt, fitting loosely on her body. Her skin was pale, and her hair appeared to be dyed black, although I could not tell for sure with the lack of natural light and the only illumination coming from a few outdoor light posts. I got the impression that she did not smile much in general, so the awkward half-smile with which she had greeted me was probably the best she could do.

“So what’s up?” she asked, speaking quietly.

“I’ve never done this before.”

“Done what?”

“Met someone off the Internet.”

“Oh. I did once last year.”

“Oh yeah? Was it also someone from Jeromeville?”

“No. He flew out here from Oklahoma.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. He said he really liked me and wanted to be with me. But when he got here, he wasn’t really the nice guy he acted like online. He was kind of a jerk.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah. He made me give him a blow job the first night he was here. I didn’t want to.”

“That’s messed up,” I said. I was not expecting such a graphic description.

“He tasted nasty,” Allison continued. I just nodded, not really sure how to reply to that. “So you’ve just been sitting around all day since you moved back here?”

“Mostly. I’ve been riding around on my bike, and reading a lot too.”

“You like riding your bike?”

“Yeah. I’m not really competitive or athletic or anything. I just like exploring.”

“I don’t even have a bike,” Allison explained. I thought that was unusual, with Jeromeville being a Bicycle Friendly City and having one of the highest rates of bicycle ownership in the United States. “I take the bus to campus.”

“I’ll probably do that on rainy days. You said you’re taking a class this summer session?”

“Yeah. An English class. One more week.”

“How is it so far?”

“It’s easy.”

“That’s good.” After a few seconds of silence, I asked, “So how has your weekend been?”

“Good. I didn’t really do much.”

“Me either,” I replied.

We made small talk for a while. She told me about this underground band she liked and something she had to read for class. I told her about the bookstore job and what my summer back home in Plumdale had been like. She told me that she liked to draw and paint, and I told her about Skeeter’s watercolor set and the paintings we made in the common room in the dorm last year.

After a while, Allison said, “I should probably go back inside. It’s getting late.”

“Okay,” I replied. “Thanks for hanging out. It was nice meeting you.”

“Yeah. You too.”

“I’ll talk to you soon?”

“Sure. Good night.”

“Good night,” I answered. I walked out of the gate, back toward the street. I had a feeling that I left a bad impression on Allison, and that we probably would not be seeing much of each other in the future. However, this did not feel like a blown opportunity, like sitting by the pool earlier today had been. Allison just was not my type. We were not interested in the same things, and with us both being so quiet, neither of us was able to get the other to open up much. I often pictured my ideal girlfriend being more talkative and outgoing than me, for that reason.

I got home a few minutes later; I had been gone for about an hour. I turned on the computer and thought about getting back on IRC chat, but something about that felt wrong, particularly if I were to see Allison online again so soon after seeing her in person. Instead, I played SimCity 2000, and went to bed around midnight.

I did talk to Allison a few more times on IRC. I did not want to be rude and stop talking to her altogether just because I did not think she was my type. But we never saw each other in person again, and I stopped seeing her on IRC around the time fall quarter started. As I drifted off to sleep that night, I kept replaying in my mind everything that had happened tonight. I felt sad that things had not gone better with Allison, but I had probably done nothing wrong. Maybe it was more of a feeling of disappointment, in the sense that I had wished Allison had been different and that we would have clicked better. But there was nothing I could do about that. It was perfectly normal for a guy and a girl not to click. At least I tried.

Mid-June 1995. The worst finals schedule ever and the last great adventure of freshman year. (#42)

February 8, 2020December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 23 Comments

Every college town is known for little hole-in-the-wall restaurants popular with students. Jeromeville had one called Redrum, but during the time I was there, it was called Murder Burger. The sign said their burgers were “so good, they’re to die for.” Murder Burger was just off Cornell Boulevard and Highway 100, across the train tracks from downtown. It was a greasy little nondescript building without enough seating, which meant the food had to be really good. Toward the end of the time I lived in Jeromeville, around 2001 or so, someone complained about the violent connotation of the name, and after taking suggestions from customers, the owners changed the name to “Redrum,” the nonsense word popularized in the book and movie The Shining which is actually “murder” spelled backward.

The last great adventure of my freshman year at the University of Jeromeville took place at Murder Burger. But before that happened, I had to get through the worst finals schedule ever. Finals week at UJ required six days, so there would always be one Saturday at the end of every quarter when some finals were held. And because of a quirk in the calendar, there was no dead time this quarter, no day to study without classes. My last class for Physics 9A was Friday at 11:00, and the final was less than 24 hours later, Saturday at 8:00.

On the last day of physics class, the instructor, Dr. Collins, was about a day behind where he had wanted to be. It seemed like he was going quickly through everything he had not had time for earlier in the quarter. I kept thinking, what if the entire final is about this stuff that he had not adequately prepared us for? But I kept reminding myself that I had 20 hours to do nothing but study physics. Hopefully I would sleep for part of that time, though; I was going to study my butt off for this final, but I was not planning to pull an all-nighter.

“Remember, the final is tomorrow at 8:00,” Dr. Collins said as his time ran out. Then, gesturing toward the back of the lecture hall where two graduate students stood with stacks of paper, he said, “The TAs here will be passing out instructor evaluations. Please leave them in the box in the lobby as you leave.”

Dr. Collins walked through the door behind the front of the lecture hall as I received my evaluation form. This had been a new concept to me when I started at UJ, giving instructors feedback at the end of the quarter. I gave Dr. Collins mostly positive ratings, but I did mention the section from early in the year when he did not follow the book. He asked a question about this on the midterm that I did poorly on, and since his teaching did not follow the book, I had no idea what to do.

As I had planned to, I spent the entire afternoon studying physics. I went through every problem set at the end of every chapter, making sure I knew how to do all the important things. I reread all the formulas and made sure I knew them from memory, including what all the letters stood for. I reread vocabulary, making sure I knew the definition of force and torque and momentum and energy. I did every problem from both midterms again.

Later that night, as I was attempting to reread my notes, I discovered that they took a long time to reread, mostly because of my messy handwriting. I turned on the computer and, after a quick break to check email, I began retyping my notes. This took longer than simply rereading, even with the messy handwriting, but it seemed to help since I had to think more about what I was reading and typing. Then, if I had time to reread it all again, it would be easier to read since it would no longer be in my messy handwriting.

When Saturday morning came, I still felt uneasy about the exam. I rode my bike from Building C to Ross Hall, already wearing shorts at 7:45 in the morning because it was warm and would probably only get hotter. I sat near the aisle on the left side of the lecture hall (my left, the instructor’s right). As the rest of the class arrived, I nervously reread the notes I had retyped and printed the night before, trying to glean one last bit of information in the few minutes that remained.

When the time came, Dr. Collins and his teacher assistants passed out the exam paper. I looked over it and read all of the questions first. As I read each successive question, my state of mind went from worried to calm to excited. This was easy. I had studied in detail every single thing that was being asked on this test, and I knew how to do every problem. I began working, writing, typing on my calculator, sketching diagrams of forces acting on objects. When I finished, I double-checked all the answers. I redid all of my calculator work. And I turned in my paper and walked out of 66 Ross with almost half of the allotted two hours remaining.

The finals for Chemistry 2B and Psychology and the Law were both on Monday. My next two days looked much as the previous one had. I spent most of my time studying. I reread and retyped notes, just as I had done for physics. I redid chemistry problems, calculating theoretical yields of chemical reactions and molarity of solutions. For Psych-Law, the test would include both a multiple choice section and an essay. Dr. Kemp had given us a choice of three topics so that we could prepare in advance, but the essay itself had to be handwritten on the day of the final. I made outlines for my chosen topic, so that I would be able to remember what I wanted to write about.

Dr. Kemp was the instructor for Psychology and the Law, or as the class was formally called, Integrated Honors Program 8B. It was a class open only to students in the IHP, one of three that we had to choose from each quarter which counted as general education requirements. Dr. Kemp was a gray-haired man in his 50s who wore a dress shirt and tie most days, not exactly someone I expected to have much of a sense of humor. He proved me wrong on the day of the final, when he announced, “I put some funny choices on the multiple choice part of the test.”

I began working on the test, wondering exactly what he meant by this. The fifth question said this:

5) The McNaughton Rule applies to criminal cases featuring which of the following:
A. Expert witnesses
B. A plea of not guilty by reason of insanity
C. Repressed memories
D. A hung jury
E. Aliens

I tried not to chuckle too loudly when I read “Aliens.” This was a test, after all.

A few minutes later, Dan Woodward quietly asked Dr. Kemp a question. Dr. Kemp looked at the test again, appeared to think for a minute, and then announced to the class, “Don’t mark the funny choice for your answer.” People softly laughed. I assumed that one of the questions had been worded in a misleading way so as to make the funny choice a possibly correct answer. I found the item in question at the bottom of the page I was on:

14) Which of the following IS NOT one of the Miranda rights?
A. Right to remain silent
B. Right to consult a lawyer
C. Right to bear arms
D. Right to a lawyer present during questioning
E. Right to eat donuts during the trial

I was right. Technically, according to the question, both choices C and E were correct. Dr. Kemp had probably needed another option, and had just made up something funny without realizing that it did not fit the wording of the question.

The rest of the multiple choice test was fairly straightforward. I thought I did okay on the essay section as well, even though I hated essay tests, but this time I had time to prepare. I remembered all the main points I had written on my outline the night before. I submitted my test at 9:50, toward the end of the two hour time slot.

The chemistry final was at 4:00 that afternoon, so I spent the rest of the afternoon studying for that. I felt confident about that one, though, and it seemed easy while I was taking it. I got back to the South Residential Area just in time for dinner, relieved that this nightmare of three challenging finals at the beginning of finals week was over. It was a good feeling, and I was just going to relax for the rest of the night, chatting on IRC, reading my usual Usenet groups, and playing Tetris and SimCity 2000.

Tuesday and Wednesday were among the best days I had all quarter. I went on long bike rides both days, through the Greenbelts in north Jeromeville on Tuesday and through the Arboretum and the rural part of campus across from Highway 117 on Wednesday. I spent several hours chatting on IRC and made a new friend, a 19-year-old girl from Missouri named Stacey with blue eyes and a nice butt (at least that’s what she said about herself). I took naps. I organized my desk drawers and my clothes, so that packing on Friday would be easier. And, since I still had a math final coming up, I spent a few hours Wednesday evening studying.

I also spent most of Thursday morning studying for math, with a break in between to email Stacey. I probably had not needed to study that much, though, because I had no trouble with the math final. But as with all exams, there was a lingering feeling in the back of my mind that I did poorly and did not realize it. This feeling had been stronger in my mind for every exam since I failed the first physics midterm in April, although that time I knew I had done poorly before the exam was even over.

I spent most of Friday cleaning and packing. My things were organized enough that packing did not take long. The problem was that I did not have many boxes. I still had the two boxes my computer and monitor came in; I had been using them as a makeshift table. Instead of putting the computer and monitor back in the boxes, though, I put clothes in the boxes. I carried the boxes of clothes out to the car.

Next, I walked down to the Help Window and asked to borrow a socket wrench and screwdriver, so I could disassemble the bed loft and return the extra pieces. I checked my email one last time (Stacey had not written back yet; for that matter, we only stayed in touch for about a week total), then I disconnected all the cables and took the computer and monitor to the car, in two separate trips, leaving them without boxes since I was using the boxes for clothes. I wrapped the computer and monitor in the blanket and sheets from my bed; students purchased these from the Department of Student Housing and kept them at the end of the year. I used these sheets and blanket for the rest of the time I lived in Jeromeville, and today they are on the guest bed at my house.

When I got back to the room, it was finally beginning to sink in that this was my last day in Building C, and my last day in Jeromeville for this school year. Everyone had to be out of the dorms by noon tomorrow, but I was finished with finals and had no reason to stay. I had called Mom yesterday and said I would be home sometime tonight, although I did not say when because I did not know.

By late afternoon, I had finished carrying everything out to the car. I was sweeping the room with a borrowed broom, with the door open, when Liz walked by. “Hey, Greg?” she said, peeking her head in the door.

I stopped sweeping for a minute. “Yeah?” I replied.

“A bunch of us are going to Murder Burger tonight, and then bowling. Wanna come?”

“Definitely!” I said. “Sounds like a great way to celebrate the last day of school.”

“Meet in the common room at 6. We’re gonna walk. It’s not that far.”

“I’ll see you then! Sounds good!”

By the time we left for Murder Burger, I had turned in my keys. I had no way back into Room 221, although I could still get into the building with the magnetic stripe on my registration card. This was not just a small group of friends heading out to dinner; this was a massive caravan of almost half of the Interdisciplinary Honors Program. Liz and Ramon, Taylor, Pete, Charlie, and Jason. Sarah, Krista, Caroline, Danielle, and Theresa. Pat and Karen, and Pat’s twin brother who lived in the North Residential Area. Mike Adams and his roommate Ian. Gina Stalteri, Derek Olvera, Stephanie, and Schuyler. David, Keith, Mike Potts, Yu Cheng. Jonathan, Spencer, Jenn from the first floor, Cathy, and Phuong. Skeeter and Bok. Rebekah and Tracey. And I probably forgot a few others.

We walked the same route I usually took to get to chemistry class in 199 Stone. From there, we continued walking east on Davis Drive to the edge of campus at Old Jeromeville Road. We turned left and took the next right, First Street, walking four blocks along a vacant lot lined with old olive trees, across the street from a few fraternity houses and small hotels. We turned right on Cornell Boulevard and walked under the railroad tracks; Murder Burger was just on the other side, about a mile and a quarter from Building C.

“How’d you do on finals?” Taylor asked me as we were approaching Murder Burger.

“I think I did pretty well, actually,” I replied. “What about you?”

“Uhh… I took finals. I showed up.”

I chuckled. “That bad, huh?”

“It wasn’t great. Have you ever been to Murder Burger?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve driven past it many times, though.”

“I’ve been here once. The burgers are really good.”

We did not all fit inside the building. We made a long line extending out the door. I started thinking about what I wanted as soon as I got close enough to see the menu. I pointed to the part of the menu saying that they could add flavors to drinks for a small additional charge.

“Vanilla Coke? Chocolate Coke? Orange Coke?” I asked rhetorically. “What is that?”

“Flavored Coke is so good!” Sarah said from behind me in line. “There’s a place back home that has vanilla Coke. I love it!”

When it was finally my turn to order, I asked for a double cheeseburger with just ketchup, mayonnaise, lettuce, and cheese; a large French fry; and a vanilla Coke. I wanted to see if this was really as good as Sarah said it was. (Of course, now most grocery stores around here sell Vanilla Coke pre-made in cans, but this option did not exist in 1995.) The cashier gave me a stub with a number printed on it. I looked around for a place to sit. The kitchen was behind the cash registers, with the dining room to the right.

“We’ll be outside with Liz and Ramon,” Sarah told me as I started to walk away. “Come sit with us.”

“Okay,” I said. I walked out the back of the dining room, opening to a parking lot, and then back around to the opposite side of the building. Liz and Ramon were sitting on a picnic bench, along with Taylor and Pete.

“Come sit with us,” Liz said. “We saved you a seat.”

“Thanks,” I replied. “This is so cool. One last time hanging out together.”

“Looking forward to summer?” Ramon asked.

“Yeah. A friend of my mom’s works in a bookstore, and she got me a job there, so I’ll have a little bit of money coming in.”

“Are you going to see your high school friends this summer?” Sarah asked, arriving as I was talking to Ramon.

“I’m not sure. I didn’t usually see my friends when I wasn’t in school. And some of them haven’t stayed in touch.”

“Really. That’s kinda sad.”

“I hope I get to see some of them, though.”

About fifteen minutes later, someone called my number over a speaker next to the outdoor seating area. I got up and returned a minute later with my food, taking my first ever sip of vanilla Coke.

“You were right, Sarah,” I said as I swallowed. “Vanilla Coke is good.”

“I know! Isn’t it?”

After we finished eating, around eight o’clock, we cleaned up and walked back across the railroad track. About half of the group walked back toward Building C while the others walked toward the bowling alley; I told them goodbye and said that I would see them next year.

The bowling alley is on campus, in a secluded room called the Memorial Union Games Area. The part of the Memorial Union where the campus bookstore is located has a basement, with coin-operated video games, pinball machines, a pool table, and sixteen lanes of bowling. From Redrum, we walked back down First Street, turned right on A Street, and then left across from Second Street through the path that had been the main entrance to campus when it was built 90 years ago. I had been bowling once here earlier this year, with Liz and Ramon and Jason and Taylor and Danielle, all of whom were here tonight.

I bowled a strike on my first frame, and everyone on my lane (tonight it was Taylor, Pete, Sarah, Krista, and Charlie) cheered for me. I smiled. But that would be the only strike I would bowl that game. I finished with a score of 96, third place out of the six of us.

“Do you want to play another game?” Taylor asked.

“Sure. But I should go find a phone and call my mom to let her know when I’ll be home. She’s probably worried about me.”

“You’re driving home tonight? Doesn’t that mean you’ll get home really late?”

“Probably around midnight if we play one more game. I can do that.”

“Okay. Be safe.”

I found a pay phone and called home using my parents’ calling card number, so that they would be billed for the call. Calling outside of your local geographical area was expensive using 1995 technology, but with this PIN number that my parents told me to use, I could call them from any phone and it would go to their bill. “Hello?” Mom said, picking up on the third ring.

“Hi. It’s me.”

“Where are you?”

“Still in Jeromeville. A bunch of people went out to Murder Burger and then bowling.”

“Yummy! That sounds fun! So are you coming home in the morning instead?”

“I was still going to come tonight, after one more game of bowling.”

“So you won’t be home until really late.”

“Probably around midnight. Is that a problem?”

“No. Just call me again if anything changes.”

“Okay. I’ll see you in a few hours.”

“Drive safe. And have fun.”

“I will. Thanks.”

I bowled much better the second game. At one point, I had two strikes in a row. When I went back up to the lane with my ball, Charlie said, “Come on, Greg! You can do it!”

“No pressure,” Taylor added, laughing.

I carefully moved my hand back, then swung it forward, releasing the ball. The ball appeared to be going right where it needed to for me to get a third strike, but one of the pins remained standing. I hit the pin on my second roll for a spare, and I finished the game with a score of 127, one of the best games I had ever bowled at the time, and higher than anyone else on my lane.

“All right, guys,” I said after the second game. “It’s time for me to go. I’m driving home tonight.”

“Drive safely!” Sarah said, giving me a hug.

“You too, Have a great summer, everyone.”

“Bye, dude,” Taylor said, shaking my hand.

I spent about five minutes saying goodbye to everyone, with handshakes and hugs for some of them. I walked back to Building C alone, because some people seemed to want to bowl one more game, and they were all going home in the morning. It was a little after nine o’clock. The sun sets late enough this time of year that there was still a slight dusky glow to the west. I had enjoyed tonight, I had enjoyed the entire year in Building C and the IHP, but there came a time for everything to end, and it was time for me to go home. I was done with my freshman year.

I went back into Building C only to use the bathroom; I did not see anyone while I was there. I walked across the street to the car, where my stuff was still packed, and began driving. I put on a tape I had made of Bush’s Sixteen Stone album as I headed south, smiling, thinking about the great night I had.

Murder Burger felt to me like a major landmark and institution in Jeromeville, but I really did not eat there that often. That night at the end of my freshman year was the first of maybe no more than five times that I ever ate there. Despite this, I felt sad when I read in 2019 that Murder Burger, which by then was called Redrum Burger, was closing. A college town like Jeromeville needs a greasy, locally-owned burger place, and because of changing demographics and a changing economy, Jeromevillians do not have such a place anymore. I thought about making the trip across the Drawbridge last summer when I heard that it would be Redrum’s last weekend in operation, but I had a lot to do at the time, and I had heard that long lines of customers who had heard the news were already wrapped around the building, so I ended up not making the trip. I am not a big fan of crowds.

Some of the new friends I made freshman year I did not really see again after that year, or I saw them only occasionally around campus. Others I stayed in touch with for a long time, and a few of them I have been in touch with continuously since 1994. I have been to six weddings of people I met during my freshman year at UJ, and two of those weddings were two people who were in the IHP with me marrying each other. I was going to miss having a built in social group next year, but I had met enough people this year that I would probably be okay.

My freshman year at the University of Jeromeville had been life-changing. I made so many new friends. I discovered the Internet. I discovered the joy of a good bike ride. I was still getting straight As; I even got an A in physics after doing so poorly on that first midterm. (Technically, I did get an A-minus in Rise and Fall of Empires fall quarter, and at UJ, an A-minus counted as a slightly lower grade than an A in terms of calculating grade point average, but I was still doing pretty well.)

Of course, not everything was perfect. I spent a lot of nights sad and alone. I still had no girlfriend, but hopefully that would come soon. I would not see these people for three months, but I had ways to stay in touch with the ones I wanted to stay in touch with, and in September I would be right back in Jeromeville to pick up where I left off. Freshman year was pretty good overall, so hopefully sophomore year would be even better.

And, of course, as the case often is when looking back on the past, I can say that on that final day of freshman year, I never would have guessed what major life changes were coming my way sophomore year.

20190927 redrum 4
The old Redrum/Murder Burger building, now deserted, photographed in September 2019 about a month after the last business day.

May 26-28, 1995. Friends far away. (#40)

January 26, 2020December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 19 Comments

By the time Memorial Day weekend arrived in late May, the weather in Jeromeville had become quite summer-like. The bike ride from Wellington Hall to the South Residential Area only took five minutes, but I was doing that bike ride in 88-degree sunshine, so I was already starting to sweat by the time I got back to my dorm room. It was the Friday before a three-day weekend, and I was drained from a long week of classes. I unlocked my door and turned on the air conditioning. Cool air began blowing into the room. I took off my shoes and lay face down on the mattress, dozing off for about an hour.

I spent a couple hours writing emails and catching up on Usenet groups, and reading for fun. Shortly before six o’clock, I walked to the dining commons. I saw Taylor, Pete, Charlie, Ramon, Liz, Caroline, and Sarah at a table. Next to Charlie was an empty seat with a half-empty glass of water on the table next to it. I could not tell if anyone was sitting there.

“May I join you?” I asked. “Is that seat taken?”

“Go ahead,” Charlie replied. “There’s always room for hydrochloric acid.”

“Wait, what?” I asked. Charlie laughed. “That was random,” I said.

“I know.”

“How’s it goin’?” Taylor asked.

“I’m good,” I replied. “It’s a three-day weekend, and they turned the AC back on.”

“I know!” Sarah said. “It feels so nice!”

“So, Greg, what are you doing this summer?” Taylor continued. “Will you be back home in Plumdale?”

“Yeah,” I answered.

“Working? Doing anything like that?”

“My mom told me the other day she found a job for me. One of my brother’s friends, his mom works at this small bookstore. I guess it’s just her and the owner working there. She wants to cut her hours for the summer to be around more when her son isn’t in school. So Mom told her that I was going to be home for the summer, and I could use a part-time job.”

“And do you want to do this?”

“I wish Mom would have asked me first, although she did say I didn’t have to if I didn’t want to. But I’m not going to be doing anything else all summer, I’ll be getting paid for it, and it’s a job I don’t have to go find and interview for. So I’m ok with it.”

“Yeah,” Taylor replied.

“Good point,” Pete said.

I really would have preferred for Mom to have consulted me first before volunteering me to a commitment of several hours per day. However, the thought of having to go find a job was terrifying, and this way I had something lined up without having to look for it, as I had told Taylor and Pete. Besides, working in a bookstore sounded fun. Maybe I could sample the merchandise and read on slow days, and maybe I would get an employee discount.

We all went downstairs to check the mail after dinner. When I saw an envelope with handwriting on it, I felt my heart race. I had written that letter almost two weeks ago, not knowing what would happen, not even knowing for sure whom I was writing to. How long did it take for a letter to travel from one end of the USA to the other anyway? And after she got it, she would need time to reply, and then her letter would have to travel back across the country to Jeromeville. Would she write back right away? Maybe I sent it too early. She was still in the middle of finals when I wrote; she hadn’t moved home yet. Maybe her parents got it and interrogated her about why she was getting mail from this strange boy in another state. Maybe her parents threw it away.

I removed the letter from the mailbox and looked at the envelope. I breathed a sigh of relief when I read the return address. It was from Carol Allen in Plumdale. This was not the letter I was nervous about. This was from someone I had known for years, who had already written me once this year.

I noticed that my friends were moving toward the Help Window, which meant that someone had to pick up a package too big to fit in the mailbox. I walked over to where they were. “Someone got a package?” I asked.

“It’s for Caroline,” Sarah said. “You got a letter from someone?”

“It’s from Mrs. Allen. She was my English teacher in both 7th and 8th grade.”

“And she writes to you in college? That’s so sweet!”

“I know. This is the second time she has written. My mom ran into her somewhere back home a few months ago, and she told Mom to tell me to write to her.”

“She sounds nice.”

“She is. I was in her class when I was going through a really rough time. I was at a new school in the middle of 7th grade, and I had had a lot of problems at my other school before that. She really made me feel welcome and accepted. A lot of the teachers at my old school acted like they didn’t want to deal with me. And I know that ‘a lot’ is two words, because Mrs. Allen always made a big deal of it whenever someone would write ‘alot’ as one word.”

Sarah laughed. “That’s funny!”

“I knew ‘a lot’ was two words before Mrs. Allen’s class, but I still remember her making a big deal of it.”

“It’s funny how some teachers stay in your memory forever. Like I had this math teacher who would always make the dumbest jokes. He’d say, ‘What’s 4y minus 3y,’ and you’d answer ‘y,’ and he’d say ‘because I asked you.’”

I chuckled. “That’s great. And then there are some teachers who you remember for all the wrong reasons. Like Mr. Milton, my history teacher from junior year. He made fun of Catholics and Republicans all the time.”

“That’s not nice.”

“I still remember all these random things I learned about history from his class, though, so he did something well, but I didn’t think he was very nice.”

I opened the letter from Mrs. Allen when I got back to my room.

May 24, 1995

Dear Greg,

Sorry it has taken so long to write back, but I’ve been busy. You know how it is. I’m sure you’re busy too. Jeromeville is on trimesters, if I remember right, so you should still be in your dorm room. When is the school year over? Our last day is June 8.

I’m going to get a new computer and get online soon. Mr. Coburn got us America Online at school, and he has been showing me how it works. Once I figure out how to set it up, I’ll send you an e-mail. It looks like there are all kinds of interesting things you can do.

I went to the Titans game yesterday. I got a partial season package again, so I have a ticket to 20 games. I have a much better seat this year because a lot of people didn’t renew. I knew that would happen after the strike. I’m so happy the strike is over! I missed the Titans. I thought of you because the University of Jeromeville band played the pre-game show.

I hope everything is well with you. Take care of yourself and good luck with finals!

Love,
Carol

P.S. I think it will be OK for you to use my first name now.

The postscript at the end made me laugh. Everyone knows that one does not address a teacher by his or her first name. Mrs. Allen said it was okay to call her Carol, but I just would never be able to bring myself to do that. It was okay now, because I was an adult, but it still sounded wrong. Mrs. Allen would always be Mrs. Allen to me. That was just how things worked when addressing a teacher, even years or decades after being in that teacher’s class.

I did not know that the University of Jeromeville Band had played a pre-game show at a Titans game. I had grown up watching Bay City Titans baseball, traveling up there with my family about three or four times a year to attend games in person. But I had not been keeping up with the Titans, or baseball in general, this year. The end of the previous season had been canceled because of a players’ strike. There was no World Series that year. Furthermore, Matt Williams, the Titans’ third baseman, had hit 43 home runs by the time the strike began in early August, possibly putting him in position to set a new record for home runs in one season. The record at the time was 61. But the season was canceled, he had no chance to hit any more home runs, and in two more seasons with the Titans and seven with other teams, he never reached this level of power hitting prowess again. The strike had continued on into the 1995 season but was settled early in the season, and baseball had finally resumed at the end of April, a few weeks later than the usual start of the season. I did get interested in baseball again eventually… but that is another story for another time.

The next morning, I got out of bed around nine. That was sleeping in for me, the best I could do. I studied and did homework for about two hours, then decided to reward myself with a bike ride. I rode north to the Coventry Greenbelts, where I had ridden last week, and discovered a bike path skirting the northern edge of the city. Riding west, the path passed fenced backyards on the left and some kind of drainage or irrigation canal to the right, with open fields on the other side. The path turned south, with ends of culs-de-sac connecting to the path, before zigzagging west again and then south one more time. At this point, the drainage canal entered the Jeromeville city limits, with a neighborhood of large luxury homes visible on the other side of the canal. I was not sure where this neighborhood was or what it connected to. I saw a pedestrian and bicycle bridge cross the canal into that neighborhood, but I did not go that way.

The path turned south along a park with a playground, basketball courts, and an open grass area. I rode past a sculpture of dominoes. The park then narrowed, so that fences of backyards came close to the path on either side, much like the other paths I had discovered last week. After making several more turns, and not being sure of exactly which direction I was going now, the path narrowed to a small sidewalk, next to a parking lot. I appeared to be in the back of a large apartment complex. I wondered which one; I probably had heard of it, from when I was looking through that apartment guide trying to find a place to live next year.

Suddenly, as I got closer to the actual buildings, riding through the parking lot, I realized that I knew exactly where I was. Not only had I heard of this apartment complex, but I had looked at these apartments. I had even signed a lease here. This was Las Casas Apartments on Alvarez Avenue, and I was looking right at my home for next year, apartment 124. This was convenient; my apartment for next year was right next to the Greenbelts. I would have a lot of opportunities to explore Jeromeville on my bike from my new apartment.

When I got back to campus, I checked my mail before going back up to my room. All the anxious excitement I felt yesterday when I checked the mail came back when I saw the letter that I had been expecting the day before. The return address said “M. Boyle,” with a box number and rural route in a town I had never heard of, called Muncy, Pennsylvania. My name and address had been handwritten on the envelope, in black ballpoint pen.

I started to hide the letter under my shirt, but then I remembered that I was all sweaty from having ridden my bike in warm weather for an hour. I slid the letter in my front pocket and walked back to the building with half of the envelope sticking out. I made sure that no writing was showing on the part sticking out. Something still felt weird about having this letter, and I did not want to have to talk to anyone about it.

I made it back to my room without seeing anyone and began reading.

May 23, 1995

Dear Greg,

Hello! It’s nice to hear from you, and I hope this finds you well. I’m good, except there’s a storm here. It’s raining pretty hard, with lightning.

Good luck on finals! I got my grades a few days ago. I ended up with two Bs, two Cs, and a D. Not as good as I wanted. I’ll have to work harder next semester.

I’ve been bored and lonely much of the time since coming back home. When I was at school, I was used to having everything within walking distance, but we live out in the country so everything is a 15 minute drive away. And since I don’t have a car, I don’t get away from home that much. Most of my friends from college live far away, and my friends from home are either still in high school or have jobs. I looked for a job, but I haven’t found anything yet. The bookstore you told me about sounds like it’ll be fun for you. Mostly I just want to get a job so I can get out of the house. But I need the money too or else I might not be able to go back next semester. I know how you feel about not looking forward to summer, being away from your friends. I thought I would have a job by now, not stuck at home all the time.

I’ve pretty much given up on finding a boyfriend. The only place I go is church and the guys there are either not interested or too old for me. There are some dance clubs, but I don’t have a car so I can’t go to them.

Well, I hope I’m not some 37 yr. old pervert! Just the idea makes me sick. Would your mom like to see my drivers license or school ID? Anyway, write me back when you can I know you have finals coming up so I’ll wait until after that to expect something. I’ll write maybe another letter before then. ☺

Bye,
Molly

When I wrote to Molly, I said that I was a little nervous, because my mother was fond of reminding me that all these girls I was meeting online were probably 37-year-old perverts named Chuck. Molly was the first person I met on the Internet whom I had any sort of offline contact with. Apparently Molly did not find the image of Chuck as funny as I had.

Molly was my age, a freshman at Lock Haven University in central Pennsylvania. Molly had already finished the school year, because Lock Haven was on a semester schedule, both starting and ending earlier in the year than Jeromeville with its quarter schedule. (Jeromeville quarters were technically trimesters; Mrs. Allen had correctly called them trimesters in her letter). Molly moved back home, where she would not have access to email, so in her last email to me, she had given me her address.

And she actually wrote back. I now had proof that someone I met on the Internet actually existed in real life. Of course, technically she could have been lying about her age or gender or any number of things, but there was a real person behind those messages who took the time to write back. Hopefully this summer I would be able to look forward to getting letters in the mail. And hopefully she was not really Chuck.

I spent most of Sunday studying, although I did make it to church Sunday morning. In the late afternoon, when I finished everything I had hoped to get done, I got on my usual IRC chat channel. Kim, a girl from Florida I had been talking to for a few months, was online, so I messaged her.

gjd76: hi
Happygirlkim: Hi Greg! How are you?
gjd76: doing well, it’s been a good weekend. it’s been warm here, i like that
Happygirlkim: I bet! I’m done with the school year, back home in Ft Lauderdale, but I’ll be working at a summer camp for kids for six weeks, I leave on June 16
gjd76: that’ll be fun, that’s the weekend i’ll be moving home
Happygirlkim: Yay! Any big plans for the summer?
gjd76: moving back home and working in a bookstore. my mom knows someone there who got me the job
Happygirlkim: That’ll be fun! Will you be hanging out a lot with your friends back home?
gjd76: i’m not sure. i lost touch with a lot of them when i came here, and i didn’t see them often anyway when i was back home. i don’t even know for sure who will be around for the summer.
Happygirlkim: I wish I lived closer to you! I’d hang out with you! ;)
gjd76: that would be fun!
Happygirlkim: I think you’d like my friends! You could come to the beach with us, we’d build a bonfire and stay up late just talking…
gjd76: :)
Happygirlkim: Maybe someday!
gjd76: hey, random thought, can i call you?

I typed that last line quickly and pressed Enter before I could talk myself out of it. It was a sudden fleeting thought that passed through my mind, and it wouldn’t hurt to ask. Now that I had gotten a letter from Molly, it seemed less scary to try to communicate with these girls from the Internet in other ways.

Happygirlkim: Sure! Did you mean right now?
gjd76: sure, it’s sunday afternoon and long distance calls cost less on the weekend
Happygirlkim: 305-555-0115
gjd76: great! let me get off here, i’ll call you in just a minute

I logged out and disconnected. Back in 1995, people connected to the Internet through telephone lines, so being logged in meant that I could neither send nor receive calls. As soon as the computer was disconnected, I dialed Kim’s number, and just like when I had asked her if I could call, I pressed the buttons quickly, so I would not be able to talk myself out of completing the call.

“Hello?” a female-sounding voice said on the other end of the call.

“Is Kim there?” I asked.

“This is Kim.”

“Hi. It’s Greg.”

“Hi!” Kim paused. “It’s good to finally hear your voice.”

“I know.”

“So why don’t you see your friends back home very often?”

“Where I live, it’s kind of semi-rural and spread out. And I didn’t really do much except go to school. I didn’t really have friends at all until the middle of high school.”

“You didn’t have a best friend in childhood or anything?”

“Everyone was mean to me.”

“I’m sorry. And you said you didn’t have a girlfriend, right?”

“Right.”

“Have you ever had a girlfriend?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve had a lot of crushes on girls who were either out of my league or didn’t like me back. One of my crushes from high school was named Kim too.”

“Girls named Kim are the best!”

“I know.” I chuckled.

“You haven’t met anyone in college? Didn’t you tell me you were going to a movie with some girls recently?”

“One of them, we’ve had two classes together, I feel like we’re just going to be friends. The other one, she’s really cute, and she’s been nice to me all year, but she’s a sophomore, I don’t know if she’d be interested in a younger guy who doesn’t really know what he’s doing.”

“You never know. It wouldn’t hurt to ask. You’re such a sweetie. I bet all the girls like you, and you don’t even know it!”

“I don’t know how to ask a girl out.”

“You just go up to her and say, ‘Hey, do you want to go get something to eat?’ or ‘Hey, do you want to go see a movie?’ or whatever. You can do this. I believe in you.”

“I don’t know. What if she already has a boyfriend? Then I’ll look like an idiot.”

“But what if she doesn’t have a boyfriend, but you never ask her? You never know unless you try.”

“I don’t know,” I said. I really didn’t know. Kim made it sound so simple, but it was so confusing and scary. I had a sudden thought, something I had to know. I took a deep breath and asked, “If you lived nearby, and I asked you out, would you go out with me?”

“Yes, I would!”

“Thank you. I wish we could.”

Kim and I talked for about another 20 minutes, just about life in general. She told me more about her friends and about her summer job at the camp. I told her about my classes, exploring the greenbelts, and my upcoming finals. I hoped we would have more conversations like this.

I have had other female friends from the Internet besides Kim telling me that I should have no trouble meeting a girl. Things did not work that way in my world. It seemed like every girl I was ever interested in always seemed to have a boyfriend already, and without having ever had the experience of knowing that a girl liked me, I had no idea how to know if a girl liked me, and no reason to believe it would ever happen to me. It was so easy to talk to girls I met on the Internet. Maybe I would have to go to Fort Lauderdale to get a girlfriend. Or Muncy, Pennsylvania.

Today, when kids go away to college, they have a much easier time staying in touch with their friends back home. Today’s college students have text messages and social media and video chat and technologies that we only dreamed of twenty-five years ago. I have found that I tend to remember most of my friends back home not staying in touch once I moved away, but when I really think about it, that is not entirely true. Melissa and Renee and Rachel had been keeping in touch regularly. Janet Bordeaux, the girl whose mother and my mother often gossiped, had written me twice. Jessica Halloran had sent me a postcard from Guatemala. And now Mrs. Allen had written me twice. I did eventually lose touch with all of those people until social media came along, but it did not happen as suddenly as I tend to remember. I think I also remember people not writing me because I focus on the fact that I had two new female friends and crushes who did not keep in touch. Interestingly enough, I did not make much of an attempt to stay in touch with guys; I was just more comfortable communicating with girls, because boys were always so mean to me in elementary school.

Mrs. Allen and I have been in touch semi-regularly ever since then. She did eventually get her email set up. She is now in her early 70s, retired from teaching. A few years ago, the band AC/DC was touring, and she took her grandchildren to see them when they played Bay City. I can only hope to be that badass at that age.

I lost touch with Kim sometime during sophomore year. She just got busy with life, I guess; we never had any kind of falling out. But Molly and I stayed friends for a long time, well into our 30s. In my late 20s, I did a lot of traveling around the USA, and I saw Molly in person twice when my travels brought me to her part of the country. We also never had any kind of falling out; we just grew apart as life got in the way. The last time I heard from her was in 2009, and by then she was married and expecting her first child. Being a parent definitely changes one’s priorities.

Someone asked me once, as an icebreaker question, if I could have anything I wanted, without cost being an obstacle, what would it be? I said I wanted a private jet with an unlimited supply of fuel, because I had friends all over the world that I wished I could spend time with. It all started during that school year, my freshman year at UJ, meeting girls on the Internet. I still do have friends from all over the world. I don’t meet many people on the Internet anymore, because I gave up chat rooms in 2007, but I still have friends all over the world who I used to know in person that I wish I could visit, as well as chat room friends who I met before 2007 who stayed in touch. And in three weeks, I would be back home in Plumdale, away from all my new Jeromeville friends. Hopefully at least some of them would write to me. And I would not be gone forever; I still had at least three more years at UJ.

1995 molly's first letter

February 23-26, 1995. Shooting the moon and a penalty for talking. (#26)

August 12, 2019December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 4 Comments

One evening, I had been eating at the dining hall by myself. Two girls I didn’t know, one blonde and one with short red hair, were sitting at the table next to me, speaking loudly enough that it was impossible not to overhear their conversation.

“So how’s Justin?” Blondie asked.

“I don’t think he’s interested,” Red said. “Oh my god, we’ve been on three dates, and he hasn’t even made a move yet. All we did last night was make out.”

“How long have you known him?”

“Almost two weeks. When I was with Shane, we were already sleeping together at this point.”

“Hmm. I thought Justin seemed really into you.”

“I thought so too. I guess not. I don’t think I’m going to call him back. What about you? How’s What’s-his-face?”

“Ryan,” Blondie said. “I really like him, but he’s too clingy. He called me today.”

“Eww!”

“Like, we just went out yesterday. He didn’t even wait three days.”

“Who does that? Why is he calling you back the next day?”

“I know, right?”

None of that conversation made any sense to me. If Blondie really liked Ryan, why was it a problem that he called her the next day? Wouldn’t she want to talk to him? Is this waiting three days thing really a rule? And does anyone write these rules down? And sleeping with a guy you’ve only known two weeks is not normal to me. Sleeping together is for husbands and wives. I would have said that Justin moved too fast, making out on the third date, and apparently he moves too slowly for these girls. People are confusing. I wished I knew Justin and Ryan, so that I could tell them they dodged bullets.

I came back to my room and did homework for chemistry, even though it was Thursday night and the assignment wasn’t due until Monday. Homework wasn’t even graded for that class, but I always did it anyway. I liked chemistry, and I didn’t want to fail. After I finished, I checked email, and I didn’t have anything, probably because I had just checked it before dinner. Molly from Pennsylvania wrote me this morning, but I didn’t really feel like replying yet. I didn’t have much to say.

I walked down the hall. No one had their doors open, and I didn’t want to bother anyone. So I climbed to the third floor. I heard voices coming from Taylor Santiago’s room, and one of the voices was loud and enthusiastic enough that I recognized it as belonging to Mike Adams.

“Hey, guys,” I said, poking my head in the door. Taylor, his roommate David, Mike, and Gina Stalteri were sitting around a table playing some kind of card game, using an ordinary 52-card deck. “What are you playing?” I asked.

“Hearts,” Taylor replied. “If you want in, you can take my place after this game. I need a break.”

“I don’t know this game.”

“I’ll teach you after this round is over. It’s not hard to learn.”

I watched as the others played. Hearts appeared to be a trick-taking game, where each player plays a card, and one player takes the trick according to some rule about certain cards outranking others. I hadn’t played games like this often, but I knew of their existence. There appeared to be some special rules other than just the highest card winning, though. Twice during the game, the others seemed to react strongly: the first time a heart was played, and again when Mike played the queen of spades. David took that trick, and the others’ reaction made me think that this was a bad thing, although I was unsure why.

After the game, Taylor explained more about the game. He explained about following suit, and breaking hearts, and how the object was to avoid taking a trick with a heart or the queen of spades (“the bitch,” as Mike called it). Each heart was worth one point, and the queen of spades 13 points, and the object was to have a low score.

“You want to take a turn?” Taylor asked me.

“Jump in, Greg,” Gina said.

I took Taylor’s seat at the table; he got on his bed and watched us from there. After the first three rounds, I had no hearts, and I thought I was in good shape. I led the fourth hand with the ten of clubs; David played the nine of clubs, Mike played the five of clubs, and Gina played the jack of hearts. Gina apparently had no clubs left, which enabled her to play a different suit, and now that a heart had been played, players could lead the hand by playing hearts first. I played a diamond next, and apparently Mike had no diamonds, because he played the queen of spades. I was stuck with the worst card in the game, and I also ended the game with six hearts.

“Play again?” Mike asked.

“Sure,” I said. Now that I had played once, I was starting to think about strategy, although part of the game just depended on what cards you were dealt. In the second game, I finished with five hearts, but David got stuck with the queen of spades. The third time we played, I only got three hearts.

Gina took a break after that game, and Taylor took her spot at the table. We played for almost another hour before the others decided that they had things to do. I walked back to my room, hoping that more games of Hearts would happen soon. That was fun.

The next night, I saw Liz make eye contact with me at the dining commons. “Hey, Greg,” she said, smiling and gesturing to an empty seat next to her. “Come sit with us.”

I put my tray of food down at the empty seat next to Liz. Ramon, Caroline, Tabitha from Building B, Taylor, Pete, and Mike from Building J were all at the same table, and I had taken the last open seat.

“How’s it going?” Taylor asked.

“Pretty good,” I replied. “Glad it’s the weekend.”

“I think everyone is,” Ramon said.

“Did you have class today?” Liz asked.

“I did,” I replied. “Just math and chem today. So I spent the afternoon in the library, starting to work on my paper for Dr. Small’s class.”

“Why?” Pete asked. “That isn’t due for a long time.”

“Because it’s a six- to eight-page paper. I need time to do research and get my ideas organized.”

“When I have to do a six- to eight-page paper, I usually start around eight o’clock the night before,” Taylor said, chuckling.

“Me too,” Caroline agreed, “if not later. You don’t need to be stressing about that paper yet. Just relax and have a great weekend, and worry about the paper later.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, frustrated. “That’s just not the way my brain works. I can’t do a six- to eight-page paper at the last minute.”

“You don’t just BS your papers?” Tabitha asked.

“No. I can’t.”

“That’s too bad.”

I stopped talking for a while and listened to the others as the topic changed. I wished that I could BS my way through six- to eight-page papers like pretty much every other college student ever. Apparently that was some kind of unwritten rule of college. But I was honest when I told Caroline that my brain didn’t work that way. I couldn’t do a good job on a paper if I didn’t actually learn about the material. And even outside of school, I wasn’t good at faking things.

I started listening again when I heard my name. “Greg?” Liz asked. “What are you doing tonight?”

“Probably nothing. What about you guys? You have that Christian group tonight, right?”

“Yeah. JCF. You want to come with us?”

I paused. “I don’t know. Maybe another time.”

“That’s ok. You’re always welcome to come with us.”

Later that night, as I was sitting in front of the computer on an IRC chat trying to get girls to talk to me, I thought about that conversation with Liz. That group had invited me to come to the Jeromeville Christian Fellowship multiple times in the last few months, and I had always turned them down. Liz said I would always be welcome in that group, but I just wasn’t convinced. I was Catholic, and I knew that some Protestants and other Christians often said that Catholics were wrong and not real Christians. And were the JCF students the kind of Christians that were basically like Catholics but without recognizing the Papacy, or were they the kind who danced and clapped with the music, or did they all wear suits and ties and long skirts everywhere they went? I didn’t know. And I’d never really thought of myself as a church guy. Yes, I’ve been to Mass most Sundays since I’ve been in Jeromeville, but back home my church attendance was very sporadic. And church guys certainly didn’t spend their Friday nights sitting in front of an IRC chat hoping that some girl would come along and want to talk dirty.

The next morning, I woke up early but stayed in bed until almost nine o’clock. After I got back from using the bathroom, I replied to the email I got yesterday from Molly from Pennsylvania. I told her about playing Hearts and starting my paper, and asked her how her midterm went. My life wasn’t exactly very thrilling at the moment. After that, I spent at least an hour staring at the same IRC chat I was in last night, hoping that SweetGirl4 would get on and talk dirty to me like she did last night. She didn’t.

At one point in the middle of the afternoon, I went downstairs and heard voices in the common room. Pete, Taylor, Caroline, Liz, Ramon, Krista, and Charlie were playing some kind of card game, using what appeared to be three standard 52-card decks with different backs, shuffled together. “What are you playing?” I asked as I approached them. No one answered. Liz looked at me with her finger on her lips, motioning for me to be quiet. I sat quietly and watched their game.

The game play seemed to be similar to Uno and Crazy Eights, playing cards that matched the suit or rank of the previous one. But every once in a while, Taylor would say “Penalty!” and give the player an extra card. Sometimes Taylor would give back the card that was just played, and other times he would leave it on the top of the deck. At one point, Ramon placed a two of hearts on top of a six of hearts, and Krista, whose turn was next, played a three of hearts. But Taylor gave her a penalty and gave her the three of hearts back along with her penalty card. After about three more seconds, Taylor gave Krista another penalty, saying, “Penalty for not saying thank you.”

“Thank you,” Krista said indignantly.

Taylor then turned to Liz and gave her a card. “Penalty for delay of game,” he said.

“Wha–Thank you,” Liz said, interrupting her initial confusion over why she was being penalized.

“Point of order,” Krista said. Everyone put their cards face down on the table. “Ramon played last. So it’s my turn.”

“Ramon played this,” Pete explained, pointing at the two of hearts on the top of the stack. “Right?”

“Correct,” Taylor said, in an authoritative tone of voice. “So Krista played improperly, and Liz got a penalty for delay of game. No further discussion is necessary. End point–”

“Wait,” Liz interrupted, turning to me. “Greg, to answer your question from earlier, this game is called Mao.”

“Mao?” I asked. “Like the dictator?”

“Yes. I can’t tell you any more.”

“Watch and pay attention, and you’ll figure out what’s going on,” Taylor said. “End point of order.” Everyone picked up their cards. Liz played a nine of hearts, and then Caroline played a nine of spades, knocking on the table and saying “Nine of spades” without getting a penalty for talking. Taylor played a three of spades, saying, “Three of spades.”

Based on the assumption that Mao was derived from Uno or Crazy Eights, I had already discovered a few things. I thought I might had figured out why it was Liz’s turn and not Krista’s turn when that first point of order was called. Also, apparently, talking was not allowed, except in certain situations which I had yet to deduce.

The game I was watching ended when Pete played his last card and said, “Mao.” By that time, I had figured out a few more rules, specifically why the players sometimes would name the card they played, and that you have to say “thank you” after receiving a penalty card.

“You want in, Greg?” Taylor asked.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m not really sure what I’m doing.”

“That’s ok. But I can’t tell you the rules.”

“I kind of figured something like that, because of all the penalties, and the way your discussions were so vague.”

Taylor began dealing cards to all of us. I reached down to pick up my first card and look at it; Taylor interrupted me and said, “Penalty for touching the cards early.” He gave me an extra card, which I thanked him for. Apparently I’m not allowed to do that. After everyone had been dealt seven cards, or eight, in my case, we picked up the cards and began playing. I was between Charlie and Pete. Charlie played a four of diamonds and said, “George.” I thought I had this game figured out, but there was no one named George anywhere nearby, and I hadn’t yet figured out a rule involving saying George.

“Four of spades,” I said, playing on top of Charlie’s four of diamonds.

“Two penalties,” Taylor said, handing me two cards, which I thanked him for. He did not make me take my four of spades back, though, so the penalty apparently had to do with what I said, not with the card I played. Two things I said, specifically, or perhaps didn’t say. The turn order had reversed by the time of my next turn, so my turn came after Pete’s. He played a jack of clubs and said “Hearts.” I couldn’t remember what to do on a jack, but hearing what Pete said, and guessing because of similarities with Uno, I very hesitantly played a five of hearts, slowly placing it on the pile. I received no penalty, even though the card did not match the jack of clubs. This was the first time I had not been penalized.

Taylor won that game eventually. By the third game I had played that day, I had figured out quite a bit more. I knew what was going on with the jacks. I was pretty sure I knew which cards were like the Skip and Draw Two cards in Uno. I knew when to knock on the table. And I was starting to figure out what had gone wrong with my four of spades play from the first game. There was still something going on with playing a 10, and I hadn’t figured that one out yet, but in this particular game, I had not drawn a 10 yet. I was getting all the cards I needed, and playing by all the rules I understood by now. I had two cards left, a four of spades and a jack of hearts. The cards being played were neither spades nor hearts, but I got extraordinarily fortunate when Krista played a four of clubs, saying “Ringo,” and Charlie played a four of hearts, knocking on the table and saying “Paul.” I had finally figured out who these names were and which cards to play them on, and I knew when to knock. It was time to see if I had learned well enough to do this correctly.

“Four of spades, John,” I said, knocking and putting the four of spades on top of the deck. No penalty. On the next time around the board, Charlie played a jack of diamonds. “Hearts,” he said. It was my turn, and I had exactly one card, and it was a heart. I triumphantly placed my jack of hearts on top of the stack.

“NEVER EVER EVER PLAY A JACK ON TOP OF ANOTHER JACK!!!” all seven of the other players began chanting loudly in unison. Taylor gave me penalty cards continuously through the chant, ten cards in all.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Also, another penalty for not ending the game. And for something else.”

“Thank you, thank you,” I said, trying to organize my brand new hand of twelve cards. Caroline won that game a few rounds later, and I politely excused myself to go back to my room. I found that Mao was a fascinating concept for a game, but it was so frustrating, and I still didn’t understand parts of it.

Later that night, I was on an IRC chat. Internet Relay Chat was a very decentralized system with no one specifically enforcing rules or anything like that. Certain people would be designated as operators (“ops” for short) in a chat channel, and they had the power to kick people out who were being obnoxious or inappropriate. The first person to create a channel would be an op by default, and usually the major channels had a group of people who would automatically be made ops whenever they were in the channel. Op privileges could be given temporarily as well, as had been given to me for the first time a few weeks ago by a guy named “JimK” who would occasionally engage me in small talk in the channel.

Tonight, I was in my usual room, “#friendlychat,” asking SweetGirl4 in private messages about her day, and about what she was wearing. I was picturing her in the pajama top and panties that she had described when I noticed that JimK had made me an op again. I thanked him and started making more of an effort to talk to people in the chat channel. I was now officially an operator of the channel, and I should act like it instead of just lurking in private messages. I didn’t ignore SweetGirl4, though.

About fifteen minutes later, someone new entered the channel.

Todd3 has entered the room
<JimK> welcome todd3
<gregd94> hi todd
<cc> what’s up todd
<Todd3> can someone make me an op

JimK was nice enough to make me an op, so I figured I would extend the favor to someone else. I typed the command to make Todd3 an op, and half a second later, he removed everyone else’s op privileges and kicked all of us out. Oops. That was officially the dumbest thing I had ever done on the Internet so far, even dumber than the time I forwarded a bunch of chain letters, or the time I used a fake name to play a mean-spirited prank on Schuyler Jenkins upstairs.

While I looked for a new channel to join, I continued my private conversation.

gregd94: oooh i pull your body close to me and kiss your lips passionately
SweetGirl4: u stupid f***ing noob u got us all kicked out. dont ever talk to me again.

I noticed a new channel called “#friendlychat1” and joined it; it appeared to be all of the people whom Todd3 had kicked out of #friendlychat. I joined the chat and apologized to everyone; a few people ignored me, and the rest had mean replies, some of which made SweetGirl4’s reply sound nice by comparison.

I deserved it, though. I didn’t understand that being a channel operator is a responsibility, not just a status symbol. Operator privileges are not to be handed out lightly to one’s buddies, or even worse, to complete strangers. I didn’t fully understand my responsibilities as an operator, and I didn’t fully understand the kinds of jerks that trolled the Internet.

The next day was Sunday. After dinner, I was in Taylor’s room playing Hearts again. Taylor, Mike Adams, Keith, and I were playing, with David and Karen and Pat watching. Keith, who had not been there on Thursday when I first learned the game, had taken the first heart, and Taylor took the next trick with no hearts in it.

Taylor led the next hand with a five of diamonds. Mike played the four of diamonds, and Keith played the seven of diamonds. I had no diamonds, so I played the queen of spades.

“Oooooh!” the entire room shouted.

“Keith gets the Bitch!” Mike enthusiastically proclaimed.

As the game continued, I couldn’t believe my luck. I had not taken a single heart, and it seemed like poor Keith, who had been in last place going into this round, was getting all the hearts. The game would be over after this round with Keith getting all of those points, and while my total score wasn’t the best, it was a close second, the best I had done so far.

“What did we get?” I asked as the last trick was taken.

“Did he do it?” Mike wondered aloud.

“I think he did,” Taylor said, as Keith spread out the queen of spades and all thirteen hearts on the table.

“He shot the moon,” Mike said. I watched Mike write 26 points in Keith’s column on the score sheet… except he didn’t. He wrote 0 for Keith, and 26 for the rest of us.

“Good job,” Taylor said to Keith.

What was going on? Keith got 26 points, not the rest of us. Keith lost; he didn’t finish in first place with the lowest score. I didn’t understand. No one had ever told me about shooting the moon, that if a player finished the game with all thirteen hearts and the queen of spades, that player scores 0 and the other players all score 26 points. I was about to say something when I realized that apparently this was a rule that everyone else knew except for me. I was too embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know the rule, since I would have been able to stop him and at least take one heart had I known about this. I didn’t stick around for another game; I just made an excuse to get out of there as soon as possible.

I walked to the other end of the hall and into the stairwell to go downstairs to my room. I heard voices above me, and I looked up to investigate. This stairwell went up to a locked door leading to the roof; someone who lived here in the past had written “Stairway to Heaven” in chalk on the front of the steps. Danielle, Caroline, Pete, and Charlie were sitting on the Stairway to Heaven, just talking.

“Hey, Greg,” Danielle said, scooting over to make room for me. “Come join us.” I sat next to Danielle, and she leaned her curly-haired head on my shoulder, taking me by surprise. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I was just playing Hearts, and Keith shot the moon.”

“Shot the moon?”

“He took all of the hearts, and the other players get points instead of Keith,” Pete explained. “Points are bad in Hearts.”

“I could have stopped him,” I said. “But no one ever told me about that rule.”

“It’s just a game,” Danielle replied.

“I know. But I’m just frustrated. Like that Mao game you guys were playing yesterday, I still don’t get all of it. And I did something really stupid on the Internet that made a bunch of people mad.”

“What did you do?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Well, I’m sure it’s not a big deal. Just hang in there.”

“The whole point of Mao is to learn the rules as you go along,” Caroline added. “And sometimes that’s just how life is.”

“I guess you’re right. It’s just frustrating that I seem to know so much less about how life works in general.”

“Don’t get down about that,” Danielle said, smiling. “Everyone is still learning about life.”

“None of us were born knowing everything about life,” Caroline said. “I moved here from Australia when I was 12. I didn’t think it was going to be a big transition, because I spoke English, but it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.”

Pete looked at me. “You’re doing fine. Just don’t let this get you down.”

I stayed in that stairwell for about another half hour talking to them, then I went back to my room. Life seems to have so many unwritten rules, and even though Pete and Caroline were right that no one knows all the rules, they all seemed to know so much more than I did. I grew up so sheltered, and I don’t read unspoken communication very well. This world, where having sex with someone you just met, waiting three days to talk to someone you like, and writing a six- to eight-page paper at the last minute are considered normal, was very strange to me. For that matter, even Danielle putting her head on my shoulder was strange to me.

But I was learning, and I was finding my place. I had new friends here in Building C, and there was nothing to do at this point except start learning these things that everyone else seemed to know. And, much like with the game Mao, I would learn by watching what other people do, and there would be much trial and error involved, and probably a few hilariously awkward moments along the way.

Author’s note from 2019: I have an Instagram specifically for this site now, so go follow me! www.instagram.com/greg_dontletthedaysgoby/

January 28-29, 1995. Captains and Toros and resident advisors. (#22)

July 2, 2019December 19, 2021 ~ Greg Dennison ~ 14 Comments

Growing up, I watched a lot of sports with my family. We went to Bay City to watch professional baseball games a few times every year, and I had been to one basketball game and two hockey games as well. I had no athletic talent myself, and my list of athletics experience included one season of tee-ball the summer after kindergarten and one day of football practice in high school before I decided I couldn’t handle it. Mark got all the actual athletic talent in our family; he played baseball and basketball all of his life, and I worked the scoreboard and snack bar.

Surprisingly, considering that I had never been to a professional football game, football was the sport I followed the most closely during my first few years at Jeromeville. Baseball and hockey were simultaneously on strike during my freshman year. The entire baseball playoffs were canceled, as was half of the hockey season, with hockey games having just begun a few weeks earlier instead of in October. I liked basketball, but both of the nearby pro basketball teams were terrible, and going to basketball games wasn’t really something I was used to. But Bay City Captains football games were on TV every Sunday at home, and they had won four championships in my lifetime.

In 1995, the Captains were in the big championship game that would be watched by almost a hundred million people in the USA, and many more worldwide even though American football was not a major sport in other countries. The Captains would be playing the Texas Toros. These two teams had both been very successful in recent years, with each team having won two championships in the last six years. This year’s game was expected to be close, with both teams evenly matched.

I walked into the stairwell to go to dinner the night before the game. The two stairwells in Building C (and presumably the eleven other identical dorms in the South Residential Area) each had chalkboards where the RAs would write announcements, and I saw Gurpreet writing something on the chalkboard. I read the announcement that he had written so far:

Want to be an RA next year?
Meeting Wednesday 2/1 7:00
in t

“Hi, Greg,” he said. “Want to be an RA next year?”

I hadn’t thought about my plans for next year at all. Being a resident advisor could be interesting. I could continue living in a dorm and not have to make my own food, and other students could look to me, so that I could be helpful to someone else in the way that Gurpreet and Amy had been helpful to me. “I might,” I said. “Where’s the meeting?”

“DC downstairs study room. Seven o’clock.”

“Thanks.” I climbed down the stairs as Gurpreet finished writing on the board and walked outside. It was a damp Saturday night, and it was already dark, even though it was only six o’clock. It had been raining earlier in the day, and everything was still wet although the sky seemed dry for now.

In the dining commons, I saw Megan with three girls I didn’t know at a table with empty seats. As I was walking toward them, Megan said, “Hi, Greg! You want to sit with us?”

“Sure,” I replied. I set my dinner tray down at the table next to Megan and realized that I recognized one of the other three girls. She was plain looking and just a little on the heavy side, with straight light brown hair.

“Do any of you know Greg?” Megan asked the other three girls.

“You’re in Math 21C with me, aren’t you?” the one I recognized asked me.

“Yes,” I said, “but I don’t know your name. I’m Greg.”

“I’m Tiffany,” the girl said.

“Nice to meet you.”

“And this is Maria and Brandy,” Megan said, gesturing toward the other two girls. “They’re all on my floor.”

“Hi.”

“I was just telling them that I’m going to my friend’s place tonight because we’re going to do something crazy with my hair.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked. “What’s that?”

“I can’t tell you. It’s a surprise. But this,” Megan said gesturing toward her hair, “you won’t see for a while.”

“She’s been teasing us all week by not telling us,” Tiffany said.

A few minutes later, Maria said something about the upcoming meeting for prospective RAs for next year, expressing interest in going. Megan said that she would be good at it. “Hey, Greg?” Megan asked me. “Did you see that announcement about RAs for next year?”

“I did,” I said.

“Are you interested in being one?”

“I might be. I’m going to come to the meeting.”

“Good!”

“Are you going to be an RA again next year?”

“I’m planning on it.”

“Good.”

That night, I kept thinking about this idea of being an RA. It seemed perfect. I wouldn’t have to find a place to live next year. I could stay on campus and have all my meals provided. My building had become my community, and even though other buildings didn’t have the extent of community that Building C and the Interdisciplinary Honors Program had, my new building where I was in charge would become my new community. I would make new friends. Sure, there would be work involved, but the work would involve a position of leadership among my new friends and community, and this seemed like the kind of work I could get behind. Maybe I could even follow in Amy and Gurpreet’s footsteps and be the RA for next year’s IHP, since I had experience with the IHP program already. I knew that former IHP students were often chosen to be the RAs for the IHP building; Amy had been a student in the IHP last year. And, of course, being an RA meant I would probably be seeing Megan around a lot, especially if we ended up in the same one of the three campus residential areas.

The next morning, after I got up but before I showered, I checked my email. I had one message:

From: swimgirl17@aolnet.com
To: gjdennison@jeromeville.edu
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 1995 09:31 -0600
Subject: GO TOROS

How was your weekend? Mine was pretty good. I just hung out at my
best friend’s house last night after swim practice. I need to go
help my dad get set up for our football party.  We have about 10
other people coming over to watch the Toros win the championship!
Your Captains are going down because the Toros are the better team,
and you know it! GO TOROS!!!!!!!

-Brittany

Swimgirl17 was Brittany, whom I had met online shortly before I left for Jeromeville. She was a high school senior who lived in Texas, and that made her the enemy today because she was a Toros fan. Most people in this part of the state who followed football were Captains fans, since they were the closest team geographically, and some of the Toros fans I knew around here could be real jerks about this sometimes. I liked Brittany, she was nice, but I didn’t like the fact that she was a Toros fan. Of course, she had a reason to be a Toros fan since she actually lived in Texas. I decided to wait until the game was over before replying to that email.

Around the time the game was supposed to start, I wandered down to the common room, where there was a television with a rabbit-ear antenna. Nowadays, with cable and Netflix and all the other options out there, many people don’t seem to understand how antennas work, or that they can still be used to get local television channels. The way they work is that TV stations broadcast signals over radio waves that a TV can pick up and turn into moving pictures, much like how radio stations do the same thing and a radio turns them into sound. The TV in the common room could get all of the major networks on stations out of Capital City, although some of them came in a little fuzzy. For the game today, the picture was good enough to watch.

Mike Adams, Ian, Gina, Karen and Pat, Taylor, David, Pete, Mike Potts, Keith, and a guy from the third floor whom I didn’t know well named Yu Cheng were all watching the game. I took a seat on a couch next to Taylor. “I see you’re on the right side,” he said, noticing that I was wearing the one Captains shirt I had. “Yu and Ian are the only Toros fans.”

“It’s not my fault!” Yu said. “I lived in Texas until I was 8!”

“And my family has always been Toros fans,” Ian explained, much more quietly.

“Chips?” Taylor asked, passing me a bag of tortilla chips. “There’s guacamole and dip over there.”

I took a few chips, without dipping them in anything, and passed the bag to the next person, which was Pat in a chair to the left. Television talk show host Kathie Lee Gifford was singing the national anthem, which I tuned out, not out of disrespect for my country but out of dislike for Kathie Lee.

After that, the game began with the Captains kicking off to the Toros. The Toros scored on the first drive, after which Ian applauded and Yu screamed, “YEAH!” The Toros scored again midway through the first quarter.

“Damn,” I said

“It’s still early,” Taylor replied. “The Captains are playing pretty well. They just need to finish their drives. They could easily get back in this game. Of course, throwing that interception didn’t help either.”

“I know. It’s just that this girl I met online lives in Texas, and she was taunting me about the game in an email.”

“Who cares? It’s just a game. And if this girl really cares about you, that won’t matter.”

“I guess you’re right.”

The scoring slowed down in the second quarter, with both teams held to one field goal each. The Captains were down 17-3 at halftime. “I’m not enjoying this game,” I said.

“Remember the game against Philadelphia back in September or October or whenever that was?” Taylor asked. “The Caps lost that one so badly, but that lit a fire under them, and they haven’t lost a game since. The same thing could happen here.”

“Yeah, but that was a whole game they lost. We only have halftime to get that momentum back.”

A few people had left the common room during halftime, but everyone else had trickled back in by the middle of the third quarter. They got there in time to see a Captains defensive back intercept a pass and run all the way back for a touchdown. The Captains intercepted another pass late in the third quarter, leading to a field goal on that drive. Going into the fourth quarter, the Captains were still down, but the deficit had been cut to 17-13.

“See?” Mike Adams said. “Taylor was right! The Caps got the momentum back after halftime. This game could still go either way.”

“I know,” I replied. “But I’m nervous. This is for the championship.”

“I told you,” Taylor said. “It’s just a game.”

The Toros scored a field goal early in the fourth quarter, but their quarterback had lost the sharpness that he had played with before halftime. He threw another interception, and the Captains tied the score 20-20 with a touchdown a few minutes later.

“YES!” I shouted, along with similar reactions from the other Captains fans. I high-fived Taylor and Mike Adams and Gina. “WOOO!” I shouted. I nervously watched the Captains score again with just under two minutes left, leading to another round of cheering and high-fiving. Then, even more nervously, I watched the Captains’ defense trying to close out the game in the final minutes, which they did. I jumped up and shouted as the clock ticked down; the Captains had won, 27-20.

When I got back to my room, still grinning excitedly, I checked my email. At first I wasn’t planning on gloating in response to Brittany’s email. I wouldn’t want her to have acted like that had the proverbial shoe been on the other foot. I was going to reply and say something about the game, for sure, something to the extent that it was a good game, and that the Toros played well and made the game close and exciting. But when my new messages came up, I again had only one, and it was from Brittany. The date and time on the message showed that she had written it during halftime.

From: swimgirl17@aolnet.com
To: gjdennison@jeromeville.edu
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 1995 18:57 -0600
Subject: Re: GO TOROS

17-3 so far… the Toros are playing great!  I told you the Toros
were the better team! Have fun watching us win the championship!

She’s totally asking for this, I thought. I’m not being mean. I clicked Reply and typed one sentence:

So how’d that work out for you?

I went to dinner, still feeling excited about the Captains’ big win. Danielle from down the hall was there, sitting by herself, so I sat with her.

“Were you watching the game today?” she said. “I saw there was a big group down in the common room.”

“I was!” I said. “The Caps won!”

“I heard. I didn’t watch it. We never really followed football when I was growing up.”

“I’ve been a Captains fan as long as I can remember, but I didn’t follow football as closely as baseball growing up. I had friends encouraging me to play football when I was in high school. I quit after the first full day of practice, I was in way over my head, but that experience of learning more about the game really has helped me enjoy watching football more. I understand the game better than I did before.”

“That’s neat.”

I caught something out of the corner of my eye as Danielle said this. Someone with bright green hair, cut short like boys’ hair even though the person had boobs and a feminine figure, walked through the door and swiped her ID card. I turned to look more closely at this person with bright green hair, and realized with a shock that it was Megan. She made eye contact with me, and I waved, my mouth open in surprise. She walked over to me.

“So, what do you think?” she asked me, grinning.

“It stands out,” I said. “It’s unique. I like it.”

“Thanks! I was going for unique and standing out, so I guess it worked. I told some other RAs that I was going to sit with them, so I should go find them, but I’ll talk to you soon.”

“Yeah. See you later.”

“Who was that?” Danielle asked as Megan was walking away.

“Megan. She’s an RA in Building K. She said last night that she was going to do something different with her hair.”

“It certainly is different. How do you know her?”

“I’ve just seen her around here a lot. I think Amy introduced us earlier in the year.”

“I see.”

“Oh… so the funniest thing happened today. I know this girl online who lives in Texas, and she sent an email teasing me about the game, saying that Texas was going to win. After the game, I had another message from her that she sent at halftime. She was teasing me because Texas was winning, acting like they had already won… but that didn’t work out for her so well!”

“That’s great,” Danielle said. “You don’t ever want to count on something happening until you know it’s going to happen. Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched, they say.”

“Or don’t count your Toros before they’re… calved. Is that a word, calved?”

“I’m not sure.”

After I finished eating, I walked back to Building C and Room 221, thinking about today. Brittany apparently learned a valuable lesson about celebrating prematurely and counting on something uncertain. This was a lesson that I should also keep in mind. Sometimes life throws unexpected curveballs. Some of these are minor and insignificant in the long run, like when a team that is winning falls behind, or when a friend unexpectedly dyes her hair green. But sometimes these surprises can have major ramifications for the future.

A few weeks after this football game, I had an unexpected occurrence in my life that changed my plans for the future: I was not chosen to be an RA. I completely bombed the interview. The current RAs and housing department staff member who interviewed me asked a lot of questions about how I would handle certain situations, and my answers seemed shaky and uncertain. I had a very sheltered childhood, and many of the situations they asked about, such as dealing with students with substance abuse problems or gay and lesbian students being excluded by others, were not things that I had ever come across in my life. That which I had assumed my life would revolve around next year had not happened, just as Brittany’s assumption that the Toros would go on to win did not happen. I was going to need to make new plans, eventually.